“The wonderful complexity of home": Our Journey Here. TAP student Takaaki Higa reflects on their time at Migration Matters Festival.

In this post, TAP student Takaaki describes how they developed a new perspective on what home means to them, through leading workshops with Migration Matters Festival.

Our Journey Here, by TAP student Takaaki Higa

As an international student from Okinawa, Japan, I'm sometimes asked the question: "where are you from?". Typically, I reply "Japan" as it is the easiest answer to avoid having to explain further. But at the same time, I feel like I am oversimplifying my home and the stories interwoven with it. 

Okinawa is the southernmost prefecture in Japan, of which Japan has 47. It used to be under the control of the US from after WWII until 1972, so even though I was born in the late 1990s, the stories I heard from my parents and grandparents were totally different from what I learned at school about "Japanese history". This is because textbooks speak of Japan in the 1950s to 70s as going through a great ‘Economic Miracle’ but Okinawa was almost wholly separate from Japan and experienced a much slower economic recovery. Furthermore, I didn't grow up with the stereotypical Japanese culture that people outside of Japan might expect me to have. The beautiful four seasons, Kabuki, and Japanese food (Soba and Templa) are the things I learned to mention when answering questions from those who see me as Japanese. However, the extreme subtropical humidity, the requiem dance for the annual local ritual, and salty and fatty food are what I really experienced as "home culture". This highlights the complexity of describing where I am from, as my experience of Japan is different to others' perceptions of it.

In my application to TAP, I wrote “I strongly believe that stories have the power to make, develop, remake connections between people and place”. During my internship, I wanted to explore place in relation to identity and consider different answers to the question “where are you from?” 

I developed this intention during my internship with Migration Matters Festival 2022, and it finally turned into a story-collecting project called "Our Journey Here".

 

Migration Matters Festival is an annual cultural festival founded in 2016.

The festival's official webpage says that "The festival’s central aim is to bring together all the people of the city, all Sheffielders to recognise each other, and to see people not for the labels that divide us, but for the unique talents and skills that make us who we are." 

 

As part of the festival in June, Mya, another TAP student, and I opened a small 'Henna Cafe' in the Montgomery Theatre. We wanted to make a comfortable place for people to share their stories of migration and/or home, and we recorded their stories to make an archive of them. The place was decorated with Indian scarves and a large world map. People enjoyed samosas and Henna painting for free and, while they relaxed with these refreshments, we asked them the following questions. The people who came to our session were from immensely diverse backgrounds and different cultures, and were all different ages. Some were from Sheffield and others had come to the city for the festival.  

The first question I asked was:

“What do you associate with your home?” 

Some of the responses we received were:

“Nice warm weather, all my family, and the smell of pancakes”

“My youth memory”

“My home is...very tropical, we have the trees, the palm trees, the huge mango trees, very tropical…coconuts and walnuts”

“You were thinking of this term a lot when you feel particularly vulnerable, and you kind of realise that you are here in this foreign country alone”

“Oh, I don't really have a concept of home. I've been travelling lots, so I don't feel anymore that thing of ‘home is home’”

I continued with:

“Could you describe your home with any of the five senses? Like, scenery….sounds...”

They answered:

“Okay, samosas, loads of samosas back home. Jalebies...Jalebi is like…a sweet. I can't describe it. It's difficult. So maybe it's the smell. Yeah, the smell of the food.”

“The waves, the sound of the waves breaking”

“Home will be somewhere warm and somewhere…I think maybe like the colour, it's like a warm colour, like yellow orange?”

“Sounds, I would love the music, the British music I mean, because I grew up in the 80s, and whole the music culture. Love the pubs”

This is just a snapshot of our interviews. Conservations continued with further questions and many answers. Although I only shared a few of them above, you can see how each interviewee answered differently to the same questions. Our aim was not to seek a fixed definition of home but to embrace the diversity of each narrative. We wanted to understand what makes one’s connection (or disconnection) with home, so we chose to focus on how people described their homes. 

The result went beyond our expectations. Some interviewees even questioned the concept of home, and this made me find new meaning in the title of our project, "Our Journey Here". Because if one's life is a migratory journey, one's home is changing throughout life. In that case, the questions "where are you from?" and "where's your home?" are less important. Instead, we can focus on stories that let us keep the diversity and the fluidity of “home”. 

After the interview, I took a polaroid portrait of each interviewee and asked him/her to put it on the map in a place of their choosing. One interviewee put the photo in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean and said her home was somewhere between the two continents.

At the end of the day, our world map was decorated with 21 portraits from  21 interviews. Now, we're working on making a digital archive of this project because we believe hearing various kinds of stories will allow people to speak more freely and find their own narratives of home.

Through this internship, I learned, discussed, and worked with the Migration Matters Festival to explore the concept of home by collecting stories. I deeply appreciate the team and hope our project will allow people to step beyond the question of "where are you from?" and realise the wonderful complexity of “home”. 

No matter how far we have come and how far we will go, we have our stories, and I hope we can all find “our journey here”.