Undercover Miguk

미국 (miguk, pronounced mee-gook) is the Korean word for the United States.

I’m a fourth-generation Japanese American. Growing up, I wanted to be fully American, whatever that meant. There was a period when I wanted very little to do with the Japanese side of myself. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand how much I valued it.

There were moments in my youth when I felt different from the people around me and wondered how fully I belonged in American culture.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve also come to appreciate something about America that I didn’t understand as well when I was younger. Despite all of the country’s problems with race, immigration, and belonging, there is still an idea at the center of American identity that people from very different backgrounds can become American.

Going to Japan showed me a different way of looking at national identity. 

I had spent parts of my childhood wondering whether I was fully American, only to arrive in the country of my ancestors and realize that I certainly wasn’t Japanese either.

I don’t mean that negatively. I absolutely love Japan. It’s just that being Japanese American and being Japanese are very different things.

My ancestry gives me a connection to Japan, but it doesn’t give me the language, upbringing, or shared experience of someone who grew up there. There are things about Japanese culture that feel familiar to me, sometimes in ways I struggle to articulate, but there are also things I know I will never fully understand.

I realized that my Japanese ancestry doesn’t make me less American. If anything, it is part of what makes my American experience what it is.

I love my Japanese side, and I’m thankful it gives me a window into a different world, even if I can never fully inhabit that world.

More recently, after meeting my wife Sara, who is Korean, Korea has become another part of my life. I want to learn the language, understand the culture, and communicate more deeply with her family. In many ways, I feel closer to Korean culture today than I ever felt to Japanese culture growing up.

And yet, whether I’m in Korea, Japan, America, or somewhere completely different, people rarely realize I’m American.

Sometimes they try to figure out what I am. Japanese? Korean? Chinese? Mixed?

My appearance seems to provide just enough information to create a guess, but rarely enough to provide an answer.

Then I open my mouth.

And there it is.

American.

I’ve been thinking a lot about culture, identity, and how we develop a sense of belonging. About the assumptions we make about each other and the strange ways a person can simultaneously belong to several worlds without fitting neatly into any of them.

Maybe that’s part of why this name feels right.

Wherever I go, there seems to be some part of me hiding in plain sight.

Undercover Miguk.