By Kate Norment, October 7, 2019 — Growing up I lived in many places to my father’s job. He was in the CIA which required him to relocate often. I was born in the United States, but shortly after, my family and I moved to Japan for about three years. I lived there between ages 3 and 6. I lived their with my mother, father, and 3 sisters. Liz and Sarah are older and Martha is younger. My brother Clarence was not born yet, but he was born 4 years later while we were living in Germany. My sisters and I all had bright blonde hair and blue eyes as children, which was something completely unheard of in Japan at the time. People would approach us to take photos and even touch us because they were so astounded by how we looked. In our classes, we were the only blonde children as well. I remember It was really strange to look so unlike every single person around us. As a kid it is really hard to make sense of those kind of things. I could speak fluent Japanese and developed the same habits and customs of Japanese people, so it was really hard to understand why people were so confused by us and it confused me as well to look so different from everyone else. We lived in a very small town on the Japanese coast so the people there were never greeted with tourism so they really never got used to it. When they used to tell us we were cute in Japanese and touch us, I eventually just started to do it right back to them which they thought was really funny. I don’t remember how to speak Japanese almost at all or really even remember my time there vividly, but I do remember the aspect of being a total and complete outsider there.
