No One Believes That I’m Japanese

Mixed race people don’t often get the acceptance that everyone else takes for granted

Tom Matsuda
Human Parts
Published in
5 min readOct 31, 2019

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Photo: Rika Hayashi/Getty Images

II knew when I started my degree in Japanese and International Relations that I would spend a year in Japan. Although I didn’t grow up speaking my father’s native tongue, I still imagined that as soon as I landed, fluent Japanese would flow from my mouth. Sadly…

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Tom Matsuda
Human Parts

Writer from London. Words in OneZero, Human Parts, Al Jazeera.