By Yuki Imoto and Tomoko Tokunaga
When we met in Tokyo in 2013, I (Tomoko) had just returned from the US as a postdoc, and I (Yuki) had started a faculty post in Japan. We connected through our common interests and shared backgrounds. We have been writing collaboratively since then.
It was rare to find a friend who shared similar experiences of crisscrossing linguistic, cultural, and geographic borders. Our disciplinary backgrounds included anthropology, sociology, and education with interest in multicultural identities. It was also a rare gift to find a fellow ‘hybrid’ – since our childhood, we have both traversed different cultural, linguistic and educational contexts. We also received our university and postgraduate education partly in Japan, the US, and the UK.
Before long after our first meeting, we discovered that we shared a dilemma of feeling in-between and neither here nor there. Since then, we have been discussing and writing about our shared sense of marginality and vulnerability as junior female transnational academics. Sharing our questioned senses of belonging with each other gave us the courage to bring forth our common issues in collaborative writing. Such writing has become a process of healing and nourishment for us. We share the process here so that readers may gain a glimpse of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of our identity negotiations and perhaps even some hints for cultivating their own collaborative acts of healing and nourishment.
Collaborations stemming from shared in-betweenness
The sense of in-betweenness and marginality is often hard to put into words. We feel it when we automatically and physically respond to advice and requests from seniors in meek ‘Japanese’ and ‘feminine’ ways. We encounter internal contradictions when we are assigned the ‘international’ or English-speaking role for our institutions’ globalization initiatives (often a marginalized position in Japanese academia). While feeling out of place, we also fit into the role that benefits us with conference opportunities and respected positions in larger communities. Over the years, as our burden of being ‘young’ eases, we continue to explore how to accept and feel whole while carrying on with our ambiguities and vulnerabilities.
We saw early on in our friendship that writing could be empowering and perhaps there might be others who were like us as ‘hybrids.’ We discussed how we could make small actions with students in the classroom and the field, towards making the university (and the society) a more open, fluid, inclusive and compassionate place. Putting these ideas into action and then into words felt liberating, but most of all, it was a way for us to heal from the identity contradiction that we both shared and to nourish our soul that tends to be overlooked in academia.
The first step towards self-development and healing we suggest is finding a like-minded writing/teaching partner. The steps are different for everyone. But doing something that seems ‘lazy’ or not directly related to academic credentialization with one’s partner is meaningful in itself. For example, we took time to plan and go on retreats together, go mountain hiking, meditate, play music, share dinners with mutual friends, co-teach and organize field trips together. This allows for communication at a level beyond the cognitive and the institutional, where most academic relationships in Japan tend to remain.
Our collaborative writing process
Writing is often a solitary process and has its own contemplative quality. Our academic field expects us to write with our ‘own individual voice’. Although developing our authentic voice is worthwhile, we also question, “what extent is it really an authentic voice?” Writing with others through dialogue is revealing and transformative for us in a whole different way from solitary writing. We can more easily let go of our sense of self, and alleviate the anxieties that come with the pursuit of individual self-development and creativity.
We have learned that finding time to be in the same space together, rather than discussing by e-mail or Skype, leads to a more concentrated flow of creativity. (This is certainly a privilege that we acknowledge and cherish; oftentimes one’s friends are in long distance or have difficulty finding time due to other demands in their lives.) In the shared space, we write in dialogue. But there are of course some tensions and compromises when negotiating who represents what voice and which idea. This became apparent when we were conscious of publishing our dialogic writing and presenting it at an academic conference. We continue to recognize and learn from our differences as well as our similarities.
Although most of our publications thus far have been in Japanese*, we have experimented writing in both languages, and have presented our reflective processes orally in English as well**. When we discuss informally, we mainly use Japanese interspersed with English terms and phrases.
The published dialogue is a tip of the iceberg of hours of conversation. And the written words never really belong to one or the other. We affect each other’s ideas and approaches in other areas of our separate lives. The result of the writing process is this growth, change, and entwinement. Our practice of collaborative writing might differ from most types of collaborative academic writing in that our emphasis is on this process rather than the outcome.
As junior scholars, we also face the practical issue of needing to publish. This sometimes makes us forget to be mindful of the writing process as an act to know ourselves – including the contexts and interconnections that make us and that we make through dialogue. Writing can sometimes feel like a competitive race. Scholars are pushed along by editors, referees, and the academic culture with the goal to add another line to their list of publications. Arguments have to be put ‘out there’ in a sea of words that eventually get forgotten. But each piece of writing that we created – even the words that don’t even make it into print, we can now look back and appreciate what it taught us about ourselves through self-reflection.
With the years passing, our career routes and interests intersect but also start to diverge and spread. With growth and partings, we wish to remain mindful of our own presence, rather than being confined by what we wrote and created in the past. We want our collaboration to be a springboard for the creative projects that we take on individually as well as collaboratively. This blog post is perhaps one outlet that helps us move on to our next stage of dialogue and inquiry.
* ことばでエスノグラフィーを書くこと，自己を振り返ること：越境する「私たち」と教育のフィールドワーク―対話的オートエスノグラフィーの試み in『かかわることば』
ことばにならない経験をことばにすること 多文化チーム・エスノグラフィーの実践をふりかえる in『人類学、社会学的視点からみた過去、現在、未来のことばの教育』
Featured Image by Osamu Niijima