Tweet07-05-2010 om 09:19 by Sueli Brodin

Every time my parents see my children, it is not my Japanese-Brazilian mother but my French father who advises me: “Kyomi, make sure to tell them about their Japanese origins. It’s very important for their identity.”

My parents still call me by my Japanese name Kyomi. When I was born, my father insisted on giving me a Japanese name besides my Brazilian name Sueli. “But I made a mistake when I wrote it down at the Registry Office,” he says laughing. “The correct spelling should have been Kiyomi instead of Kyomi. But I forgot the letter i between the k and the y!”



Walking on the dike in Bunde

My parents are spending the week with us and as usual, my father has brought a portable hard disk along, full of mostly Japanese films and dramas series. He is currently following two long historical (or taiga) NHK productions called Komyo ga tsuji and Ryomaden .



Japanese historical drama Ryomaden

“They’re high quality dramas,” he says, “with very good actors such as Nakama Yukie and Masaharu Fukuyama. I spend a lot of time on the internet studying the events and the characters that are portrayed in the various story lines.”

My father also brought a French translation of Yasushi Inoue’s historical novel “The diary of Lady Yodo” set in the Sengoku period of Japan (1570-1615). “The main character is a woman of intense emotions,” he says, reading out loud for me the passage in the book where Lady Yodo, also known as Chacha, cold bloodedly advises the ruler of Japan to eliminate his political enemies, including their concubines if necessary.

My father’s interest in Japanese culture started when he was still a teenager, after his mother and her second husband, the French mathematician Claude Chevalley returned from a year long resident professorship in Nagoya with a stack of books and other souvenirs. “Until then, I had a distorted image of Japan, based on the ugly caricatures of Japanese soldiers I had seen as a child in New York during WWII,” he says.



WWII caricature

“The Japan that I discovered in those books was a complete revelation. The stories behind the Noh theatre plays were captivating... They made me dream of visiting Japan.”

This happened ten years later when he was awarded a scholarship to study Japanese in Tokyo. After two months into the programme however, he decided that he was going to learn Japanese on his own terms. He bought a motorbike and spent the rest of the year travelling throughout the country, from the southern islands of Kyushu and Shikoku to the northern tip of Hokkaido, and spent a lot of time every day deciphering his Japanese travel guide.



My father with three English literature students of Doshisha University, Mount Hiei, near Kyoto, 1964

He said that he often ventured to remote places where few people spoke English. By the end of the year he could hold a conversation in Japanese and mastered a few hundred Kanjis.

“I don’t think I would have reached the same level if I had stayed in Tokyo,” he laughs, “and above all, this trip made me experience the many facets of Japan.”



My father about to board a ship in the Inland Sea, 1964

When he was appointed director of one of the Alliances Françaises in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, my father was determined not to forget his Japanese. Needless to say, the young Japanese Nisei secretary who welcomed him at the Brazil-Japanese cultural institute was taken completely by surprise when he asked her directly in Japanese about advanced language classes. We often joke that he impressed her so much that she agreed to marry him only five months later.



My mother working at the Brazil-Japan cultural institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,1965

The four years that we spent in Tokyo as a family, from 1972 till 1976, further deepened my father’s bond with Japan. He loved watching Japanese drama series and Sumo games on television. Every weekend we travelled to the city of Gotemba at the foot of Mount Fuji where we rented a small holiday house and I remember him sitting outside, gazing at the majestic volcano.



(from left to right) Me, my best friend (Japanese mother, Dutch father) and my sister, Gotemba, 1975

The fascination continued, even after we moved to France. My father kept up his study of Japanese, never missed a Japanese film on television or at the cinema, often played Japanese music on the stereo and unceasingly encouraged my sister, brother and me to nurture our Japanese roots.

This morning, my daughter Sacha noticed him watching a new episode of the samurai series Ryomaden.Without saying a word, she disappeared into her room. When she came back, she took up a seat next to him, wearing her Japanese yukata.



My father and my daughter Sacha watching a Japanese drama

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