Image in the original: Photo by Pema G. Lama (@peemaglama)
I am jogging along the Sumida River when it happens.
A fragment of language catches me mid-stride.
“…晴れてていいね.”
Sunny day, isn’t it.
Someone behind me, to someone else.
I slow down. I look around for the speaker, the way you look for the source of a sound you weren’t expecting. And then I catch myself.
Right. This is Japan.
I have lived here for years.
I hold a Japanese passport. My name is the only foreign thing about my paperwork. And yet something in me still registers Japanese as signal — still treats it the way my ears learned to treat it in Paris, in London, in the cities where hearing your own language was the surprise, the small gift of the familiar in an unfamiliar place.
The ears remember what the mind has moved on from.
I didn’t always understand what this meant.
When I was a graduate student in the UK, there was a period when I stopped noticing I was foreign. My English had reached the point where I wasn’t translating anymore — I was just thinking, speaking, laughing at the right moments. I belonged, or something close enough to it that I stopped checking.
Then two things happened, on different occasions, that brought me back.
The first: I was in the middle of a conversation with British friends, the kind of easy, animated exchange where you forget you’re speaking a second language, when someone turned to me and asked, almost as an aside — so what’s it like in Japan?
It was a friendly question.
There was nothing in it. But in that moment I felt the floor shift slightly. I had been standing on their side of something without realising it. The question put me back.
The second: a foreign student whose English was uncertain joined the group. I watched the dynamic change — the slight slowing down, the over-enunciation that native speakers do without knowing it. And I found myself between them, translating not just words but registers, carrying meaning across a gap I knew from both sides.
I remember feeling proud of that. Proud in a way I dressed up as confidence but was probably something closer to relief. Look, I can do this. I belong here too.
The cosmopolitan performing his cosmopolitanism for an audience of one.
I know that now. I didn’t know it then.
I am somewhere in my forties, living in Tokyo, and I have made my peace with the fact that I might never fully arrive anywhere.
Japanese passport. Name that raises eyebrows in both directions. A life that has moved through enough countries that no single one of them has a full claim on me.
For a long time I thought this was something to overcome, or at least something to manage.
Later I thought it was something to be proud of.
Now I think it is simply what I am — not a deficiency, not an achievement, just a condition, the way some people are left-handed or have perfect pitch.
The ears that still startle at Japanese on a Tokyo street are not a symptom of anything. They are just the record of a life lived across more than one place.
If you asked me whether I would choose this — the perpetual foreignness, the belonging-nowhere — I would say yes.
Not because it is romantic, and not because it made me better at anything in particular. But because the alternative, the life of arriving somewhere and staying, of the ears eventually going quiet — I am not sure I would recognise myself in it.
The Sumida River is still there. I pick up my pace.
Someone is talking behind me in Japanese, and for a half-second, my ears do what they always do.
I let them. ■
First published on Substack on Apr 1, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/i-never-stopped-being-a-foreigner
Cover image: View over the Sumida River, Tokyo (CC0, Wikimedia Commons — source)
