I suppose I’m an exile. A dramatic word, I know, but this is how it seems to me.

I was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and British father, raised close to my Japanese grandmother, uncles, aunts and cousins. I am an Edokko, a child of Edo. My mother’s family has sold umami-rich, salty-sweet tsukudani, a traditional Tokyo delicacy, out of a shop on the ground floor of the family home in central Tokyo for six generations. They are food people.

Those of us with half-Japanese ethnicity are known as ‘hafu’, a Japanification of the English word ‘half ’. Most of my fellow Hafu Japanese Facebook group members – 7200 half-Japanese people around the world – are happy with this label, though some argue that ‘half ’ suggests a diminished identity. Some of us look entirely Japanese; others resemble their non-Japanese parent. Some, like me, look more ambiguous. Growing up in Tokyo, I’d startle if I caught my reflection in a shop window, so different did I look from everyone around me and from how I felt inside. I didn’t learn English properly until I went to kindergarten and it took another year or so for me to learn western ways of thinking, behaving and being.

Tokyo, the people I loved, the language I spoke, the memories I made there and the food I grew up eating formed the scaffolding for the human I became…

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