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My Children are Japanese Mutts

by BBelew57 on April 7th, 2006

I had to deal with this more times than I care to remember.

The Japanese call children with one parent who is Japanese and the other anything else a ‘half’. Half of what? I don’t know. Half a Japanese, I presume. Actually, that is what they meant. They call my children Mutts!

I had a preacher, of all people, look me in the eyes once and tell me very matter of factly that my children were not ‘pure’. And, he wasn’t talking about their soul. He said, "We don’t know what kind of blood they have in them."

Uh…I do know. Mine and their mother’s. She is Japanese and I my mother’s ancestors were Irish, and my father’s French, before that English and before that Scottish.

"Where did the Japanese come from?" I asked him.

He didn’t know.

Well, that’s the answer - the Japanese don’t know where they came from. Isn’t that interesting?

My kids can function in two cultures and two languages while most Japanese don’t know where they came from and speak only one language.  Hmm…

Who is half of whom?

Call my kids "Doubles" please.

Oh, and it seems the Japanese are a mix of an ethnic group from South-east Asia that crossed over from the Japan Sea and another group that came over from the Korean peninsula + some native Ainu thrown in to boot. 

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POSTED IN: japan