"So, Where are You Born?"

It's rather odd for me to hear people question my Japanese-ness even implicitly in Japan. Granted, I am by no means Japanese by ethnicity or nationality, but speaking Japanese without much of a foreign accent while having the looks to fit straight into the mainstream, I am accustomed to people assuming that I am Japanese as long as they don't ask for my real name or a copy of my identity card.

Living in the more cosmopolitan parts of Tokyo, where the average resident has increasingly come in contact with foreigners of various kinds and thus gradually becoming well-versed in th bnuanced differences among people from different countries, I have come to assume that I look and act Japanese enough to camouflage my foreignness without anyone really noticing. That camouflage, I assumed, would function anywhere in Japan.

Perhaps I have been a little overconfident. Dining in a little family restaurant in the small coastal town of Katsuura in Chiba prefecture, the female owner was keen to call my bluff. Asking casually asking where I came from and receiving Tokyo as the answer, the lady was quick to rephrase the question, specifically asking where I was born. While I deflected the question by claiming to be from Ishikawa prefecture, where I grew up as a child, lady was not fully convinced, judging by her half-hearted attempt to dumb down her Japanese by slowing down her speaking speed and dropping all honorific languages.

In a way, the foreignness I displayed in the little restaurant may not have been due to the way I looked or spoke. I ordered up the eatery's "local specialty set meal," a menu item that, I later realized from scrolling through restaurant reviews, is a favorite of foreign tourists that drop into the town. From the lady's perspective, it probably made sense to assume I am foreign, given that I am eating something that few of her Japanese customers do.

Still, it always hurts a bit when I am made to feel out of place when I am not ready to feel that way. Whether traveling in Japan or elsewhere, I always strive to blend into the local scene, to observe and even participate in local life without looking out of place. That, I always thought, is the essence of traveling for the sake of cultural understanding. And often, as long as I keep my mouth shut, I felt the "low profile traveling" of this kind to be surprisingly possible even in places I speak no word of the local languages.

And given that I did grow up speaking Japanese, and as of now, lived in Japan more than any other single country in the world, I felt that for me to blend right in this country, of any country that I can travel to, would be much much easier. But it did not take more than an old lady asking a simple question out of pure curiosity to have me be snapped back to a harsher reality that I did not truly belong if scrutinized closely.

This is a feeling that most foreign migrants have on a daily basis, in Japan and anywhere where foreign residents stand out. Constantly identified by their foreign looks and accents, the migrants experience daily fatigue combatting the extra attention tehy command from locals. Explaining cultural differences to the curious locals, and fending off ignorant racism from the more hostile ones make it impossible to go about daily life just as a normal person that is not treated no different from a native-born.

Of course, the ability to blend in differs from place to place. But for every cosmopolitan city where socioculturally diverse residents do not bat an eye for every person who don't look or talk like them, there are dozens of small towns and villages, some mere hours away from the cosmopolitan entrepots, that can make outsiders, even with trivial differences, stand out from an essentially homogenous local population. True globalization, in which the difference between the local and the foreign completely disappears, will not arrive until these vast homogenous hinterlands disappear.