gaijin to shite...

This isn't something I'm gonna go to great lengths to develop, but this morning, as I was making my rounds on the internets, I peeked at the english section of the yomiuri website. While I was there, I figured I'd take a glance at the serialized autobiography of donald keene, and then there was an interesting story on citizenship appropos the immigration dust-up in America. You know how it goes, you follow links, you drift around, ultimately you get kind of a big picture feel for the 10 or so articles you read and their connections to one another...

So reading all these tales of foreigners qua foreigners, I little lightbulb goes on over my head. I am going to have to be a "foreigner" again soon. I hadn't really been thinking of myself as belonging to the set "gaijin", even if I was never thinking I was Japanese.
But with visa concerns, and the citizenship restrictions on lawyers and a bunch of other kitzelkleinigkeiten on the horizon, it's being pushed right back in my face.

Until now, I thought of gaijinhood as some compensatory skill I used to make my livelihood, not some fixed aspect of my existence. I go to school, I teach them some things I know, the kids flip out over my appearance, and I go home. I come home, and I feel "at home". I've got no sense of being in a foreign land anymore.
I can read reasonably well, and watch TV without missing much. The culture doesn't deal out any surprises. I know more about the way the government runs, and current events relative to Japan than a lot of college educated adults. Other than the "in progress" language ability and a lack of encyclopedic knowledge of the progression of Japanese history from era to era, I don't feel out of my depth here.
The image that keeps popping into my head is of a feral child.

But now I've got to fess up to being an adult, and holding a passport from a hegemon, and start negotiations from there. Wish me luck.