Creating a School for Okinawa’s Biracial Children

Tired of seeing their children bullied or put in classes for the learning-impaired, Japanese mothers of children fathered by U.S. servicemen on Okinawa have taken their children’s education into their own hands.

With about $6,000 scraped together two years ago, five mothers converted a small house into a makeshift school, designed as an oasis amid the discrimination that biracial children often face in the relatively homogenous culture of this island, where the Group of 8 summit meeting is taking place this weekend.

Forty children--about 70% of whose parents were divorced or never married--now attend the Amerasian School, says Mimi Thayer, its director and co-founder. Just three of the children receive child support from their fathers.

These biracial children are the legacy of the longtime U.S. military presence on Okinawa. Many such children suffer identity crises that begin at a very early age, says Yasutaka Oshiro, who for nearly three decades counseled and ran social welfare programs for biracial children on the island before becoming a sociology professor at Okinawa International University.

The children of the servicemen, who usually live with their Japanese mothers, don’t feel like they belong in Japan, Oshiro says.

Okinawa’s traditions exacerbate the alienation: Male children, for example, are buried in the tombs of their father’s clan--leaving no place for the child if he has no father. If the child doesn’t speak English fluently, as is often the case, it’s a dead giveaway that he or she has been abandoned, another stigma.

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Yet the children aren’t really American, either, because they live in Japan with their Japanese mothers, and many don’t hold U.S. passports. Some are obsessed with finding the fathers they have never known, and many suffer brutal humiliation. Oshiro recounts the ordeal of a woman now in her 40s whose father was African American. When she was a child, her Japanese relatives forced her to live in a backyard barn until she was adopted by a couple in the U.S., Oshiro says.

Alisa Garrison, 12, says she hated Japanese school so much, she stopped going. Her schoolmates picked on her and would leave thumbtacks in her shoes--which are removed before entering school. Why? “I guess because we’re halves,” she says, easily slipping between English and Japanese.

Aoi Miyaki, 13, whose middle name is Nicolette, says she was called “Chocolate.”

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The girls say they feel far more comfortable in the Amerasian School.

The students are different hues: Some look very Asian, some not at all Asian, and some African American. The children with brown skin have it particularly tough, because they stand out even more, Thayer says: Some have been told by Japanese children that their skin is “dirty.”

In history classes at traditional Japanese schools, when children are taught about the massive casualties in World War II’s Battle of Okinawa, they learn that about 150,000 Okinawans died.

“They tell them that Americans killed Okinawan people, and they don’t say anything about the Japanese,” who islanders say also killed some Okinawans and used them as a “sacrificial fortress” to protect mainland Japan, Thayer says. “So already they have a bad image of America. At the end of class, they say [to the biracial children], ‘You should go back to America.’ ”

More than half of the Japan-based U.S. troops are based in Okinawa, and nowhere else in Japan is the issue of the biracial children as politically volatile.

Few statistics are available, but some estimates suggest that there are about 20,000 offspring of U.S. soldiers living on Okinawa--many of them now adults. The Japanese government gave welfare subsidies to 84 dependent children of soldiers in 1997, the latest year for which such statistics are available.

(The latest prefectural data from 1997 show 206 weddings between Japanese and Americans that year and 61 divorces, although it’s unclear how many of the Americans were soldiers.)

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The luckier biracial children are those with fathers who are still in the military and still in Japan. As long as paternity can be proven, the children are permitted to attend private schools on the island funded by the U.S. Defense Department for free.

But once the father moves out of Japan and leaves the child behind, the child’s family must pay the $12,000 tuition--too steep for most single mothers to afford. The U.S. and Japan have no reciprocal agreement in which servicemen’s wages can be garnished for child support.

The only other international alternative is a Christian school where the tuition, at $450 a month, is also too hefty for most parents.

Even the Amerasian School’s $250 monthly tuition is steep for single mothers, particularly those with more than one child. Still, it doesn’t cover the school’s monthly overhead for rent and salaries of the five full-time teachers. Some of the shortfall is made up by donations from women’s volunteer groups at the bases, Rotary Clubs and local businesses.

The U.S. Defense Department and the prefectural government have donated surplus textbooks, but no financial aid.

The prefectural government tolerates the school but hasn’t approved it. Because the students who attend the Amerasian School might otherwise be truant from the Japanese schools, “we regard it as a kind of practice training school,” says Mitsukazu Kinjo, section chief of Okinawa’s Compulsory Education division. (He says there are 700 biracial elementary and high school students in the district, although not all are children of Americans.)

Kinjo says he doesn’t entirely buy into the theory that the children are bullied because they are half American. “They might have a problem functioning in Japan,” he says, because of not being able to read and write the language completely. “They should learn Japanese language and culture first.”

Sociology professor Oshiro also worries about the future of the children at the Amerasian School, wondering if it will teach them to survive in either culture.

“They can speak English and Japanese, but their ability in either is not that proficient,” he says. “And the school’s environment is not really a school--there’s no difference between playing and studying.”

But Thayer, the school’s director, who is divorced and has three children who attend the school, says the biracial children need to be able to function in both Japanese and English, especially those who retain contact with their fathers or have U.S. passports and dual citizenship.

Moreover, Japanese schools teach little about diversity or accepting people who are different. Okinawans’ discrimination against biracial people is particularly ironic, because Okinawans have long complained of discrimination at the hands of Japanese “mainlanders.”

The school is doing its best to boost the morale of the children.

On a classroom door are the children’s hand-colored pictures of the Japanese and American flags, with a sign that says in English, “We are special.”

Says sociologist Oshiro, who for years counseled the children of the soldiers: “I say you are the treasure of Okinawa. You will help Okinawans to deal with other races and cultures. Your presence will help Okinawa.”