Essay :The Joy of Having Neighbours from Different Races

 

“Look, Mummy, a Chinaman!”

“And a child.”

“I didn’t know that a Chinaman has a child.”

“I’m going to write an essay about it.”

These words were spoken by a young white girl about my father.

It was the most overtly racist remark I had encountered at that point in my life.

Our family had moved to the outskirts of London from Japan, due to my father’s work transfer. It was the late 1980s, and I must have been around 16 years old.

One day, while waiting with my father at a tube station, a white British mother and her daughter were nearby. Suddenly, the young girl began calling my father a "Chinaman."

Her mother looked on with pride, as if her daughter had made some insightful observation, beaming at her with a face full of approval.

I immediately approached the mother.

“My father isn’t Chinese,” I said. “And it’s perfectly normal for any human being to have children. If your daughter can make such blatantly racist remarks, it’s your duty as her parent to correct her. Instead, you’re smiling at her as though she’s said something brilliant. This makes it hard to see you as anything other than a family that condones racism.”

At this point, a tube station staff member, who happened to be Black person, came over and asked what had happened.

I explained the situation. “The daughter just said, ‘Look, Mummy, a Chinaman! And he has a child! I’m going to write an essay about it.’ Imagine if she’d said, ‘Look, Mummy, a Black man! I didn’t know that a Black man has a child. I’m going to write an essay about it.’ How would you feel if you heard that?”

The station worker immediately said, “That’s racism!”

The mother began to stammer, “Look...” as if she were about to defend herself.

I cut her off.

“Are you unaware that your daughter’s remarks were racist? My father is a respectable Japanese man. Are you not embarrassed that your daughter said, ‘I didn’t know he had a child’ and followed it up with ‘I’ll write an essay about it’? Shouldn’t you have explained to her, right then and there, that what she said was unacceptable and taught her why racism is wrong? Instead, you’re trying to argue with me? Let me make myself clear: If I hear your daughter say anything like that again, I’ll smack her gob toothless. Do you understand?”

The woman hurriedly grabbed her daughter and walked away from the station entrance.

In hindsight, my choice of words may not have been ideal. But seeing their behaviour—both the mother’s and the daughter’s—I wasn’t angry so much as stunned. Their ignorance left me speechless.

A few days later, I saw the same mother and daughter at the tube station again. As soon as the mother spotted me, she covered her daughter’s mouth with her hand. I could only assume the girl was making yet another racist remarks about me.

The girl couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old.

It was shocking to see a family, even in a suburban area like ours, that could live in such close proximity to people of diverse races—Indians, Japanese, and others—yet still exhibit such blatant racism. What’s more, the mother seemed to encourage it.

I firmly believe that growing up around people of different races is a good thing. It’s likely that this family had either never encountered someone of another race or had never been corrected when they exhibited racist behaviour. I hadn’t expected such a lack of awareness about racism, even in the suburbs of London.

This experience stayed with me as a painful reminder that ignorance, left unchecked, can lead to attitudes and actions that harm others. It reinforced my belief in the importance of confronting prejudice, even when it is uncomfortable to do so.

Looking back, I realise that even after moving to London and encountering people of various races beyond East Asians, I was never particularly surprised or unsettled. I attribute this to the experiences I had with my neighbours during my childhood in Japan.

When I was five years old, my family moved to a small town slightly far from Tokyo. I developed a habit of going out for afternoon walks by myself. Around that time, I noticed that a few of our neighbours were foreigners. On my strolls, I would often encounter these foreign neighbours walking their dogs.

One man walked a large Borzoi dog.

As a child who loved animals, I was enchanted by the sight of the Borzoi. Running up to it, I cried out, “Wanchan!” – a doggy, in Japanese - and hugged the dog. Its owner, a man with hair that was neither quite blond nor brown, gently corrected me, saying, “It’s a doggy.”

I also encountered people with auburn hair, and others with blond hair streaked with grey. Each time, they were walking their dogs. I couldn’t help myself running toe the doggies to say hellow.

At five years old, I had not yet started kindergarten after moving to this small town. These afternoon walks became a part of my daily routine, and meeting these foreign neighbours and their dogs was a regular occurrence. The dogs were adorable, and the owners were always kind, never discouraging me from hugging or petting their dogs.

Years later, when I moved to London at the age of 14, I found that seeing people with hair colours other than black did not astonish me. Television had also familiarised me with Black people, so encountering them in real life felt not so suprising. If anything, the only groups that struck me as unusual at first were individuals from the Middle East or Southern Europe with dark or brunette hair. However, even that sense of novelty faded after a few encounters.

After a long while, I had a chance to meet my old classmate from an International school in London, and had an enlightening conversation with him. He remarked that he had seen so many East Asians in London that he no longer found them unusual. He was from Scandinavia and back then, had likely lived in London for only a year or two, yet he had already become accustomed to the city's diversity.

I believe that exposure to different races at a young age—or even in one’s youth—is profoundly beneficial. Talking to people of other races or sharing experiences with them can dismantle racial barriers and stereotypes. By becoming familiar with individuals of all skin tones and hair colours, we learn to respect them as fellow human beings.

When my family first travelled to Italy, we encountered a family with a young boy in Rome. Upon seeing us, the boy exclaimed, “Cinese!” Assuming we were Chinese, he had likely concluded that all East Asians were the same. My sister and I immediately corrected him by shouting back, “No, Japanese!” His mother chimed in, saying, “Giapponese.” The boy could only gape at us, astonished. Before leaving, we greeted him with a cheerful “Ciao, ciao!”

I don’t know if this encounter left an impression on the boy. But I hope that it at least planted the idea in his mind that East Asians are not all Chinese. Meeting people from different races as a child can prevent the kind of ignorance that leads to remarks like, “Chinaman! I didn’t know that a Chinaman has a child!” And it might stop parents from viewing such remarks with pride rather than concern.

In contemporary Japan, especially in major cities like Tokyo, it’s common to see people from all over the world, whether tourists or residents. Children in these areas are likely to be familiar with people of different races. Even in smaller cities, diverse populations include foreigners who have married Japanese citizens. Japan can no longer be called a homogenous nation, a term that now seems a relic of the previous century. In my small town near Tokyo, a growing number of mixed-race families are sending their children to local schools. The claim that Japan is a monoethnic society, often touted by far-right voices, is both outdated and inaccurate.

I wonder if there are still little Londoners today who would say, “Mummy, look! A Chinaman! I didn’t know that a Chinaman has a child.” London is now widely recognised as a multicultural city, and I hope that the little girl who once made that remark has grown into an adult who understands the harm of racial prejudice.