What! You're Japanese? | Naoyuki Agawa (Vice-President in charge of Shonan Fujisawa Campus)

2010.02.18

In early February, I went on a business trip to the East Coast of the United States. In Washington, we held a seminar on Japan-U.S. relations jointly with five universities, and then I traveled to New York to attend a board meeting at Keio Academy of New York. This winter, the East Coast had seen more snow than usual. As we landed at Dulles Airport in Washington, the clouds hung low, and the ground was not visible for a long time. The plane rattled as it steadily descended. We continued flying through the clouds, and just as the view finally cleared, the ground was already close. In an instant, we reached the end of the runway and touched down. Outside the window, snow was falling sideways. The landscape was a world of silver. After passing through customs and stepping outside the airport, the cold chilled me to the bone. The frozen air had a smell and a texture. It reminded me of the many harsh winters I had experienced in Washington. It is at times like these that I feel I have returned to a nostalgic America.

The next day, the snow let up for a while and a blue winter sky covered the city, but by the time I finished my work and was leaving Washington, the weather had turned dubious again, and snow began to fall. Nevertheless, I managed to fly to New York safely. As we began our landing approach to LaGuardia Airport, the skyscrapers of Manhattan Island were clearly visible from the left window. On the other side of the island, a large passenger ship was heading down the Hudson River. It had just left the passenger ship terminal and turned downstream. I wondered what ship it was and where it was sailing from in the middle of winter. It piqued my curiosity.

While I was working at the Academy in New York for two days, news arrived that a fierce blizzard was bearing down on the area from the Midwest to Washington. There was a chance that New York would also be in a blizzard on the morning of my departure, which meant the planes might not fly. Oh well. If that happened, I would just hole up in a snowy Manhattan. The night before my departure, I lay in bed in my hotel room, gazing at the illuminated Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, and fell into a peaceful sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, it had not yet started to snow. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were still standing quietly. I left the hotel early just in case. On a Saturday morning, a trip that would normally take an hour took only 20 minutes to get to Kennedy Airport. I still had more than two and a half hours until my departure time. On top of that, the flight from Tokyo was delayed, and my departure was ultimately postponed for another two hours. There was nothing to be done. I settled into a seat with a view outside the lounge and waited, working all the while. Eventually, it began to snow. It gradually turned into a sideways-blowing snow. I wondered if the plane would be able to take off safely. An English gentleman sat down next to me. He said he was scheduled to take an evening flight to London. Fearing he would not be able to get to the airport because of the snow, he had left his hotel early in the morning. He said he would be waiting for about ten hours. What an ordeal. He told me he lived on the banks of the River Thames, in the suburbs of Oxford. As we watched the snow fall heavily, we talked about the beauty of the Thames in early summer and the wonderfulness of boating on the river, all the while longing for spring to arrive.

All Nippon Airways Flight 009 to Tokyo, a Boeing 777-300, which had boarded and started moving, stopped midway on the taxiway for de-icing. If snow freezes on the wings or fuselage of an airplane, it can become too heavy to take off. There was a famous accident in 1981 when an Air Florida jet crashed into the Potomac River shortly after taking off from Washington National Airport for that very reason. Since then, when there is both snow and low temperatures, a special solvent is sprayed to melt the frozen snow before takeoff.

A truck carrying an extendable platform arrived immediately, and the platform rose up right in front of my eyes. A female worker turned toward me and was carefully inspecting the icing conditions. She was so close it felt like our eyes might meet. I wondered if I should greet her. As I was thinking this, she aimed a nozzle like a fire hose at the main wing and fired. The liquid shot out with tremendous force. The wing became clean in the blink of an eye. After spraying the solvent and inspecting the aircraft multiple times, she finally gave the OK sign.

The plane started moving again and reached the end of the runway. After receiving takeoff clearance from the control tower, it began to move with its engines at full throttle. It took off safely shortly thereafter and entered the clouds in an instant. It seemed the major blizzard had approached to within about 30 kilometers south of New York, but we had somehow managed to escape. I wondered if the English gentleman had been able to take off safely.

We flew from northern New York State over the Great Lakes, directly over Toronto and Sault Ste. Marie, and arrived at Narita thirteen and a half hours later. Along the way, I got enough sleep, worked, ate, and drank, and the time flew by. I quickly cleared customs, boarded a bus, arrived at the Yokohama City Air Terminal, switched to a taxi, and returned home safely. Thus ended my one-week business trip to America.

Up to this point, it had been a trip with no particular surprises other than the snow, but it was too early to feel relieved. When I got into a taxi at YCAT, the driver asked me for my destination.

"Yamashita-cho, please. I'll know it when we get close."

"Yes, sir."

After a brief silence, the driver spoke again.

"What do you do for a living, sir?"

"I'm a teacher."

"So, you teach abroad?"

"No, in Japan. I'm in charge of international relations at a university."

"Oh, I see."

Another short silence. Then the driver muttered again.

"Sir, your Japanese is very good."

What? What did he say? For a moment, I thought I had misheard him.

"Driver, what nationality do you think I am?"

This time, the driver was surprised. Despite driving, he turned around to look at me intently and said,

"What! You're Japanese?"

For the record, our entire conversation up to this point had been in Japanese. When I asked him why he thought I was a foreigner, the driver said that my Japanese pronunciation was a little different, and the way I projected my voice was distinct. It sounded like the Japanese he heard from the back seat when he had foreign passengers, so he had just assumed I was a foreigner. When I was getting out, I said I would tell my wife about this when I got home, and the driver replied, "I'll tell my wife about this, too."

It is true that when I was younger, I was often mistaken for a foreigner. I was particularly often mistaken for being Chinese or Chinese American. Once, at a shop in Chinatown where I often shopped, a woman suddenly asked me, "Are you from Shanghai? Guangdong?" Another time, I was greeted in Chinese the moment I entered a Chinese restaurant in Meguro. On the way back from my honeymoon, while I was speaking Japanese with my wife and reading the Asahi Shimbun on a Korean Air flight, a purser came up and asked in English if he could ask me a question. When I said yes, he asked, "Why are you reading a Japanese newspaper?"

Once, on the night I arrived in America for work, I was eating a sandwich alone at a deli while reading a novel when a stranger of East Asian descent approached me and asked in English, "Are you studying Japanese?" Another time, I was standing alone in front of a counter at Haneda Airport when a small woman came up to me and asked in English what time the flight to Taipei departed. When I replied, also in English, "I don't work here, so I'm afraid I don't know," the woman said, "Thank you," and briskly walked over to a female employee at the counter and asked in perfectly natural Japanese, "Excuse me, what time does the flight to Taipei leave?" I was stunned.

But these were all experiences from when I was either silent or speaking English. And many of them happened in foreign countries. When I was younger, it might have been that I started to seem more American after being in the United States for a while. I am aware of that. But to be told, "What! You're Japanese?" at my age, after living in Japan for so long, and after speaking with a Japanese person in Japanese for some time—that was a first.

Even my secretary, M-san, says I seem like a foreigner. Who on earth am I? Where did I come from, and where am I going? Why am I here? The word "the stranger" comes to mind. I felt the urge to go somewhere far away again.

(Date of publication: 2010/02/18)