With a bowl of hot ramen beside her, Mami is deftly moving her mouse over a page of YouTube videos, trying to find another episode of the American teen drama, “One Tree Hill.” The videos she hunts for are uploaded by viewers in the US who have recorded the shows and then converted them into compressed digital files small enough to stream smoothly across the Internet. The videos are suspended in the grey zone of international copyright, and so often disappear soon after they appear even though they frequently have a mixture of letters, numbers and symbols in their titles to foil the bot crawlers looking for titles signaling potential legal infringement.

Mami spends some portion of her day putting in various combinations of search terms to find these videos. She types in “1 tree hi11 s03e04” and squeals when it yields a hit. Her browser is thick with open pages—various broadcast television shows and some music videos on YouTube, online catalogs for home furnishings, some fashion sites. Only two or three pages are in Japanese. The rest are in English. The many open pages reveal the range and particularity of Mami’s interests but also the sheer amount of time she spends online, immersed in English-language worlds of media and style. Together they create a composite of Mami’s orientation outwards, away from the immediate clutter of the living room and towards an elsewhere. This elsewhere is much like the grey zone the illicit YouTube uploads live in: taken from a lived experience of broadcast and gathered into a drifting, interrupted reservoir of data, information, signs, traces, potentials, fantasies organized endlessly by users into a present neither firmly anchored in local space and its demands nor completely afloat in the disembodied real of cyberspace. Mami has a comprehensive fluency with American pop culture. Atop the small kotatsu table in the living room are stacks of DVDs, many of them bootlegs her father brings back from business trips to China, all of them within the same broad categories—American romance, comedies, and teen dramas.

Bored with my questions about her day at school and my exuberant interest in her web habits, she wanders over to the couch. “What do you wanna watch? “Friends Season 3 or Season 2? I recommend Season 2,” she says with the weary patience of someone accustomed to dispensing expert advice to tourists and novice travelers who’ve bumbled into her world. She has an easy Cali girl cadence and an banal, sunbleached accent partly remembered, partly borrowed from multiple viewings of “The O.C.” As I ponder my choices, she pushes her stained sleeves up her arms with exaggerated impatience and saunters into the kitchen to get a bottle of tea from the fridge.

A brief conversation in Japanese ensues about her homework and whether she finished her ramen with the older, local woman who tidies up and cooks a simple dinner for Mami a few times a week. Apart from this occasional extra presence, Mami spends most of her time out of school alone in the house, peripatetic between three screens: cell phone, television, and computer. At eleven she is largely self-sufficient. She walks to elementary school every day, often stopping for a solo snack at McDonalds on the way home. Among her fellow fifth graders she has “zero friends that are interesting.” At school she is seen as incurably different and is left out of everyday conversations because of her lack of knowledge and interest in the things her classmates find so central—gossip, TV programs, and video games. Academically she is also peculiar with her limited abilities in tasks counted as normal by her classmates long socialized into the education regime of the ordinary classroom. She struggles to decipher and write kanji, the ideographs that comprise the core of the Japanese writing system and is often teased about this, though she shrugs it off. She tells me she is mostly pretty shy at school, a version of her I find hard to reconcile with the vivacious, savvy, quick-witted and hyper girl I interact with so regularly. She is not entirely without friends but finds herself embroiled in petty but prolonged dramas where she is left on the edge of cliques of girls because she is too direct and too disinterested to invest in the detailed intrigues, betrayals, and high-stakes emotional barter of belonging that occupy them.

Mami was one of my fifth grade students in the “Oates” class (christened after Joyce Carol in honor of her overlooked teen fiction—all the classes at K.A. have a name related in some way to a broad canon of English literature). She was truculent and stubborn when I first started began working with her on Saturday mornings and her attitude stood in stark relief against her other kikokushijo classmates who were far more easy-going or simply shy. With recalcitrance she’d do assignments, complaining of being too tired, too bored, too anything but what the class was doing and then she’d abruptly veer into asking a non sequitur about my feelings regarding Gossip Girl or Jennifer Lopez or any other random piece of American pop culture trivia she was currently obsessed with. She single-handedly brought teaching to a standstill through whining work-stoppage or just as easily unzipped focus with a sudden outburst. “Oh. My. God! I watched “Zoolander” last night and it made no sense but was soooooo funny!” These attempts to derail the class were a strategy composed partly of raw attrition and partly of an insistence to bend the class as a structuring of her English-language identity toward a social imaginary of her own choosing and thus naturalizing English as a component in a world where she lived beyond Tokyo.

In an uncanny mirroring of her regular school classmates, the kids in Oates were more content in the small sociality of the class itself. They were left befuddled by Mami’s intense channeling of detailed Hollywood gossip into our conversation—a cold rush of mediated air drawn down from globalized heights, chilling in its strangeness. Largely unable to connect with her regular school peers, Mami was adrift and frustrated among the Oates children too and she wasn’t happy about it. As out-of-bounds as her interruptions may have appeared, Mami’s penchant for disrupting the interior of the classroom with the far removed happenings of Tinsletown revealed the fiction of the very space we shared. Why wouldn’t "Gossip Girl" be as relevant as any celebrated folk tale or the novel we were currently working through together? And more than that, why weren’t the everyday theatrics of celebrity life such as Paris Hilton’s any different from the bizarre exceptionalism of K.A. with its own repository of strangeness?

We were reading Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning. Its gothic veneer lent a stylish if caricatured darkness to a story the kids found engrossing, but particularly Mami. Orphaned when their parents are killed in a mysterious fire, the three child protagonists are shipped off to live with their greedy and conniving Uncle Olaf. The adults around them do nothing to alter the legal and familial structures that place them into Olaf’s clutches, despite their repeated attempts to communicate their absolute misery and instinctive impulses that something is not right. Being repeatedly abandoned, ignored or reprimanded by adults oblivious to their plight, the children fend for themselves. The children in Oates were riveted by the story. But Mami particularly focused on them getting away and was infuriated by the complicity of the grown-ups and the circular nature of the young, hapless protagonists’ relapse into near-captivity.

The Series of Unfortunate Events books are enormously popular and it is no surprise that they would also enrapture these particular children. However the story deeply unsettled Mami. The fiction appeared to come close to home, all the more so with its gothic flourishes and melodramatic curlicues imparting a realism of the fantastic. Slowly, over the course of two months as we labored over the book, Mami revealed her own uneasy feelings about lost families in abrupt, often cryptic declarations.

Her parents separated around the time her father was transferred back to Tokyo from LA where they had lived for several years. Her father cares deeply about Mami but struggles to keep their relationship open and warm as she continues to grapple with their return to Tokyo and her own changing relation to the city, herself, and her identities. The difficulties of being a single parent are compounded by the long hours he works as an executive for a paper company. Mami inhabits a split sense of in-betweeness living physically in Japan but emotionally and imaginatively on the West Coast. This sense is exacerbated by the confounding absence of her mother who lives in Hawaii with her boyfriend. The family’s own split and dispersal is a convoluted history Mami is at a loss to unravel. She rarely communicates with her mom. Her father is her primary companion and she accompanies him often on business trips to China, Europe, and the U.S. and returns laden down with gifts and trinkets from her travels.

The living room is awash in talismans and keepsakes. A pair of Mickey ears, maybe from a trip to Florida or perhaps from a recent visit to the Tokyo version of Disneyland. There’s stuffed animals, cute backpacks, figurines. Unlike Akemi’s room filled with the detritus of her intense enclosure, Mami has colonized the living room with the material remainders/reminders of her journeys outwards while she stages multiple embarkations nightly along the cyber-pathways leading to her dramas and music videos and shopping sites.

Alana is my L.A. Name

Mami’s daily perambulation along the many fingered paths of the internet does not sync with the conventional narratives of Japanese youth sociality through screens, most incisively analyzed by Mizuko Ito. Mami scarcely texts or communicates with her peers. She only occasionally spends time with two other girls from K.A. who live nearby. Otherwise she enters into a digital, global sociality, one that is unstable, complex and eerie. In an email Mami recounts to me a particularly unsettling and uncanny event:

well this weird thing happened on myspace its so weird, people i dont know are saying they know me and let me make it clear! i do not know a girl names emmy, caitlin, and yukari and they keep on giving me it and its so weird.... and i get these random calls from America directly to my cell phone its creepy! and it totally scared me! i need to get like a phone service thing, i think

She continues with a characteristically casual but jarring segue, “well anyways today was the first eiken pre-1 class and like i said on my text it was very awkward…” From the disembodied assertions pinging her from across the web about who she is and her social world Mami veers into the mundane specificity of going to K.A. to begin preparation for the English proficiency exam taken by kikokushijo students for admission to English only programs at elite schools. What transpired online was cryptic and became stranger and more threatening when the Myspace world leapt across platforms and seemed to become more localized and specific through the strange phone calls. Mami is conjured into a risky social visibility by people she doesn’t know and then, in what seems to Mami to be a causal chain of increasing intimacy, she begins receiving phone calls from the U.S.  The entire tangle of transmissions remains intact as a technical mystery, one I chose not to attempt to decipher along the circuits of its “real” locations—Myspace avatars, ISP addresses, service providers, phone registries and trackbacks. Solving the snarl of communicative and identificatory networks wasn’t the object. What is significant is the deterritorialized magic of Mami’s immaterial and fantastic labors.

It wasn’t until the second year of my friendship with Mami that she confided in me that she had an “L.A. name.” “It’s Alana,” she told me matter-of-factly, “so you should call me that whenever you text me or something.” Her alternative name was hardly a pathology and while it may be easy to reduce it to the familiar terms of a coping strategy, its form and effect was to suture together Mami with her past life in Los Angeles and her desired, fantastic future in which she returned to the physical city but continued to cavort with mediated celebrity in the unreal spaces of the internet. Her mediated energies on the internet were expended unreservedly in collecting stories, managing her virtual friendships on Myspace, and picking out the furniture, carpets, curtains, paint colors, and assorted furnishings for the imaginary L.A. house under perpetual construction in the liminal, evolving space between her mind and the web’s endless representational plenty.

Mami’s imagination was her greatest resource and provided a kind of safe haven K.A. could not, with its own imperative to discipline and prepare for a hoped-for future within legitimated social and institutional spaces. Through the web Mami drifted along estuaries of gauzy fame and shiny surfaces, an intensified version of crafted fantasy worlds both in the content (Hollywood fairytales and fights) and in the very form of the internet where information appeared and faded rapidly, never quite becoming stable. More often the computer interface seemed to be a surface of enchantment and conjuring. Hence the uncanny contact with the fantasy world in the Myspace event and then the eerie phone calls originating exactly from her site of desire. L.A. was at the center of all of Mami’s fantasies and sense of self. The city existed as an interlaced object of media texts and physical memory. Weighted so powerfully in Mami’s orientation of self, the city became the axis around which a global youth imaginary turned, albeit a Southern California imaginary far different from the one that mesmerized the skaters.

But her imagination was equally attuned to the immediate world around her. On a walk to the small market for some blueberries to bake into a pie, Mami played a game, asking me to deduce the way different cars along our route were feeling based on their “expressions.” The emotional disposition of each vehicle was plain to Mami as she analyzed the grills and headlights of their front ends for signs of sentience. Meanings and emotive power animated the surfaces around her but not to the extent that they overrode the social signs of her embodied present. As much her desires and interests extended outwards, the fantasy/memory of Alana did not supplant or distort her engagements with the present. Tensions existed—the future would be better in L.A., she would be more herself than in Tokyo—but the two cities coincided and folded into one another rather than serving as schizoid (metro)poles.

Together we’d browse local shops she’d previously scouted as sufficiently full of “cute things but also quality,” contemplating and debating the aesthetic and comfort of throw pillows, trinket boxes, couches, and linens. Mami’s interaction with the abundance of stylish and well-designed household commodities was predicated on their relevance and suitability for her residence elsewhere, in imaginary L.A. This enactment of taste and rehearsal of actual consumption placed Mami into physical circulation in the dense shopping districts between her train stop and her neighborhood, moving in a solitary pattern, discerning potential connections and meanings in the consumer bazaar to be noted and placed within her detailed mental blueprint of the house Alana inhabited. Her practice was indistinguishable from other ambling through the close aisles and cramped show spaces of the Tokyo furniture boutiques. Everyone’s imaginations were hard at work. For Mami, however, there was no desire to own the things now or put incorporate them into her physical space here. They were already transported to an elsewhere as ghost objects populating a imaginary habitation erected upon the topology of future desire and constructed from pieces of memory and excised media narratives.  

Like Benjamin wandering the arcades of Paris, Mami was a flâneur of the possible, searching out relations between her imaginary and the material world. The assemblage of time and spaces overlaid into a peculiar kind of drift, moving from MacDonald’s to a new shop she needed to inspect and then to a familiar second floor store full of distinctively patterned tableware, fabrics, and carpets. Her improbable temporal-spatial dislocation crossed over to a carefully calibrated presence smoothly skimming surfaces and corners where locations and time signatures drifted into a thickening composition of internet salvage, schoolday exhaustion, texts from her father, impulsive turn down a shopping alley. Her life in Tokyo oscillated between temporal registers of intense demands to insufferable, interminable boredom and exclusion.

Unfolding

Her experience of these folding-unfolding media-city-self-scapes describes Deleuze and Guattari’s deployment of the concept of the haeccity—the specific aspects that create the thisness of an object:

It should not be thought that a haeccity consists simply of a décor of backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haeccity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. (D&G 1987, 262)

Her becomingness marks her out as a risky subject—on the internet where porn spam litter her browser after a session and unsolicited voices call out to her from decorporealized social gyres—and also in her everyday spaces of school and street. Her very presence congeals so many lines of flight, so many formidable components of what it is to live as a young person in the urbanized spaces of the Pacific Rim right now. Sliding desires for autonomy and belonging. Dispersal of family across the globe. The dispersal of the self across the virtual world. Lost homes. The recovery of lost homes through their demolition by the renovating energy of the imaginary equipped with a long and flexible shopping list. The walk from school to house as an endless negotiation with the city’s textures and one’s own layered sense of self and the perceptions of others. The corporation that once relocated their family to L.A. and constantly sends her father on his own long journeys through the shopping arcades of global trade: this force so invisible but so central to producing Mami as appendage to Japan’s own international desires and a component in her own assemblage of a global identity.

The multiplicity I have described is a frustratingly limited one. The very richness, chaotic weirdness of Mami’s life is always in excess of my capacity to write it, to show it, to call it by its many names. Her life feels like Deleuze’s description of the haeccity without “beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle…It is not made of points, only of lines…It is a rhizome” (1987, 263).

It is critical to understand Mami as a contradictory but energetic figure pulsing brightly then fading within the different spaces she traverses and engages. Within this ethnography she serves as a crucible for thinking about becoming amidst scenes, sites, space, and moments replete with their own rich drifts of power, privilege, gender, age, institutional positioning, economic incorporation, labor, bodies, affect, emotion, and imagination. Like the other figures traversing the uncertainty of contemporary Japan and its fractal, global irruptions, Mami confounds any ability to define or thoroughly track her divergent imaginative proliferations as she traverses any number of brightly lit territories of identity—student, Japanese, daughter, YouTube keyword sleuth, home furnishings aesthete. Her sociality confuses her peers and worries adults around her, her academic position is perpetually at risk as it is so bound up with her variable relation to Japan and her own willingness to become socially legible as Japanese. These “panic sites” accrue around her much like they do around her other classmates at K.A. The panic sites are inflected in ways different for each in their details, familiar in their broader social outlines. The differences Mami and her classmates intersect with, fold open to become across the many surfaces of their lives—family, schools, anonymous public of shops, streets, and trains—always exceeds the categorical locations of difference attributed to their kikokushijo identity even as their particular mutation with a global and capitalist form of Japanese mobility articulates them to a privileged, international class of children.

While Mami’s online personae multiply and conjure unexpected affirmations of virtual sensibility from people she doesn’t even know, she simultaneously searches her own body for signs of multiple differences to confirm a suspicion that she doesn’t belong and Alana’s future is her indeed her own.

Fantasy Futures

She wants to be a super-star in Hollywood. Not an actress, just famous and hang out with Paris Hilton and have little dogs. “I know I’m not white and all the stars are white,” she breaks down the facts of American celebrity’s racial hierarchy. “But I might be Latin.” If she’s “Latin” then she might be able to pass, like Jennifer Lopez. She struck upon this idea of finding another point of racial entry into her Hollywood fantasy when she and her father took a trip to Mexico. “The passport checker” at immigration control in Mexico City mistook her dad, tanned and dark, for being Mexican. “He started asking my dad all these questions in Mexican, I mean, what do they speak? Spanish! Yeah, asking him stuff in Spanish. Like he had any idea what they were asking him!” Using this experience of misrecognition, she interpolates whole other racial possibilities for herself, an identity potentially remade by hints and accident and perhaps a bit of clever self-construction, both through demeanor and surgery. She pulls out a photo album from one of the tall cabinets in her living room. Sipping tea and eating snacks, we searched old photographs of her parents with Mami as a small child, looking for traces of "latin" or "thai" or maybe even "mayan possibly?” Repeatedly she asked me what I thought her face would look like when she was 18.  With her glasses in hand, she would ask, "And now? Do I look more Latin? or Thai?"

How things appear is a slippery game of position. As much as Mami hopes for a way to stabilize the possibilities of misrecognition that she imagine are immanent in her own body, she is conscious of how she is observed and interpreted out in the world of Tokyo. “You read Japanese books, right?” She asks matter-of-factly, but with a subtle note of petulance laced with concern. “Ok, so yeah, you don’t hide your book do you, like when you’re on the train?” She often interrogates me in this way to set up a norm against which she can understand her own experience. “No, I don’t. Why? Who cares if I’m reading in Japanese?”

“Exactly. So you know, I’m reading Harry Potter right now and I had it on the train and these people just kept staring and making me feel bad and weird! Why do they do that?! I just have to put my book away! And then the train stops and I just go over to another part of the train though I hurry because the train could leave without me!”

This sense of being surveilled for deviance is persistent aspect of an identity that manifests so clearly around language. Other students at K.A. also reported this same social policing of their identities. “A teenager at K.A. recounted his experience of speaking English on the subway with friends and being yelled at by an old Japanese man who called them a disgrace and told them they should switch to Japanese immediately” (Grigg-Saito 2008). Out in the city the kikokushijo are invisible. Their difference becomes apparent in flashing dissonant moments of failures to behave as they appear. If speech and books give them away as different, their bodies betray a different set of antagonisms.

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