Joel Reese

They’ve lived in the suburbs much of their lives, but the Utzinger girls have been raised to think of Japan as ‘home.’ Still, being tugged two ways can take its toll

Daily Herald
December 16, 2003

by Joel Reese
As she navigates her way through the packed hallway of Lincolnshire’s Stevenson High School, Mari Utzinger could be any other teenage girl on her way to lunch.

She wears trendy shoes and an oversized Stevenson tennis sweatshirt and carries a massive backpack slung over her shoulder.

Beneath this conventional exterior, though, 16-year-old Utzinger is riddled with nervousness and uncertainty. She feels like she doesn’t belong; like a stranger in a strange land.

“When I walk through the hallways, I really feel lost,” she says. “It’s really hard for me to be here.”

Utzinger’s trepidation isn’t just high-school angst about prom dates or who’s going to drive to the mall.

Utzinger is half-Japanese, half-American, and her family has lived in the Chicago suburbs since 1990. But her father’s job could send the family from its Buffalo Grove home back to Japan on just a few weeks’ notice.

Because of this unsettled situation, Mark Utzinger and his wife, Naoko Tanioka, essentially have raised Mari and her sisters Anne and Kaye as Japanese: The girls attended the tiny all-Japanese Futabakai School in Arlington Heights, where Japanese is the primary language. The family also speaks Japanese at home.

At the same time, the Utzingers don’t want to shut themselves off from their English-speaking surroundings.

So the girls walk a fine line between the wildly disparate cultures. They’re living in an awkward netherworld between America and Japan.

All of Mari’s Stevenson classes are in English, and almost all of her nearly 4,500 schoolmates speak a slangy lingo she constantly struggles to understand.

“The language is so different, so I’m not used to the words,” Mari says. “People come up to me and say something like, ‘Hey! Yo!’ and I have no idea what to say to them.”

Even the smaller elements of American culture - from earrings to the school cafeteria’s greasy food - represent daunting challenges.

Oldest sister Kaye, a sophomore at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., says she’s finally comfortable with the two identities.

But Anne and Mari don’t have her confidence.

“I’m not a real Japanese, not for real,” says Anne, an eighth-grader at Futabakai. “But I’m not American, either, and I’m in America. So it’s really hard for me.”

‘24/7? What is that?’

Anne and Mari say learning English is a never-ending struggle, which comes as a surprise to anyone who hears their nearly flawless speech.

Only barely discernable slip-ups give away the girls’ discomfort with the language, such as when Anne says Futabakai “only has two or three times of English during the week.”

When she is told her English is excellent, she shakes her head ruefully.

“Maybe it sounds OK outside, but inside it’s really hard,” Anne says.

Mari says she often stays up until past 2 a.m., slogging through her English homework.

“I’m a really slow reader, that’s my problem,” she says.

Anne says her sisters’ high-school difficulties make her “really nervous” about eventually going to Stevenson.

“My sisters would be crying when they were doing their homework, so that makes a lot of pressure on me,” she says.

Worse, Anne is worried that she won’t know the popular slang, so she’ll immediately be branded an outsider.

“We do simple grammar here, and it doesn’t really work when you’re talking English the way people really speak,” she says.

Older sister Kaye, who came home for Thanksgiving, says she faced the same predicament when she made the quantum leap from Futabakai to Stevenson. She finally became much more comfortable with English at college.

“That’s where you really pick stuff up,” she says. “In the dorm, I’m around my friends 24/7, so that helps.”

“I know that one; I know ‘24/7,’” Mari says proudly. “I learned it in high school. But I didn’t know what that meant until recently.”

Anne looks at them, confused.

“What is that? ‘24/7?’ What does that mean?” she asks.

“It means all the time, like 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Kaye explains patiently.

“Ohhh, I get it,” Anne says. “I never knew that one.”

Between two worlds

The Utzingers’ American/Japanese conundrum all began when father Mark headed to Japan to teach English in 1981.

At a co-worker’s going away party in Japan, he was introduced to Tanioka, the woman he eventually married.

More than two decades and several thousand miles later, Utzinger realizes it’s not easy for his daughters to navigate between the two worlds. Yet he remains certain they’ll eventually be grateful for their cross-cultural knowledge.

“It’s difficult, but it’s also a wonderful opportunity they have,” Utzinger says. “Sometimes I feel so sorry for them. But if they had a nice, simple childhood like I did in Minnesota, it would be really difficult when they went to other countries. Now, they’re going to have opportunities they can’t even imagine.”

Tanioka says she wants her daughters to retain a strong command of their native tongue: “That’s the main reason we sent them to the Japanese school, because Japanese is such a hard language to learn,” she says.

For the girls, though, things feel complicated and impermanent. Even their names change: At Futabakai, the three girls go by their mother’s Japanese name, Tanioka. At Stevenson, they go by their father’s name, Utzinger.

“It felt funny when my name changed, because I had been using ‘Tanioka’ for nine years,” Mari says.

The most noticeable differences stem from the vastly divergent cultures of Futabakai and Stevenson.

The Futabakai school has a mere 192 students, according to the school’s administrator, Noboru Hayakawa. But Stevenson has nearly 4,500 students.

“I’m not used to walking around in such a big hallway,” Mari says. “At Futabakai, it’s really small and easy to get around.”

On a typical school day, Stevenson’s teeming hallways are like a suburban Grand Central Station. Students march elbow-to-elbow between classes, exchanging high-fives, trading gossip and holding hands.

One girl sports massive slippers in the shape of Goofy the cartoon dog. Another girl has hair streaked blue and purple. Boys wear irreverent baseball hats backward, forward and sideways.

Then there are the clothes - or lack thereof: The plethora of hip-hugging jeans and exposed bellies would make Britney Spears blush.

Such individuality isn’t exactly embraced in Japan and provides a bewildering contrast to the comparatively staid Futabakai environment.

“I think these clothes are kind of flashy,” Mari says, wrinkling her nose.

Anne, however, doesn’t have such a problem with the American fashion.

“You’re not supposed to show very much skin at the Japanese school,” she says. “In junior high, there’s no makeup, no pierced ears. It’s really boring.”

‘A little special’

Mari feels like she sticks out because of her difficulty with the language. But her older sister Kaye says she assimilated into the high-school environs by subtly showing off her Japanese roots.

She brought elaborate Japanese lunches to Stevenson, such as soup, seasoned spinach, a bowl of rice and a rolled egg. The unusual food and presentation attracted people, and soon she had made new American friends.

“People came up and started asking me questions about my lunch, and that’s where the communication started,” Kaye says. “The lunch made me a little special. It brought me some attention - the good kind of attention.”

Mari has a few similar stories - sometimes classmates will ask her to say their names in Japanese, or write them in Japanese characters. And the recent release of “The Last Samurai” has spurred her classmates’ interest in Japanese culture.

“I like that, because I can’t go up to the other students and just talk to them,” she says.

Why not?

“I don’t want them to know I’m weird and my pronunciation is all off,” she says.

All friends are gone

The three Utzinger girls were in the minority at Futabakai, because all of their friends only attended the school for a few years. (Most Futabakai parents only stay in the Chicago area for three to seven years, administrator Hayakawa says.)

Mark Utzinger says he’s never considered leaving his job of 18 years with a Japanese boiler company in order to find a U.S. job.

“The company has been really nice to me, and I feel very loyal to them,” he says. “We’ve always thought that, eventually, we would make our way to Japan. And when we go back there, we want our kids to be able to live the life, too.”

So unlike their other Futabakai friends, the family’s stay in the United States has stretched into a 13-year residence.

“I’m the only one who went to the Japanese school first grade through eighth grade,” Anne says. “It makes me sad, because my friends keep leaving.”

Both Anne and Mari relish their trips to Japan, such as the family’s annual visits to Tanioka’s parents in Matsuyama.

“I really like it, because I just like Japan so much,” Mari says. “I really feel so comfortable there.”

The two girls would be ecstatic if the family moved to Japan.

“I would love it,” Anne says.

“I will be really happy - I think I will be jumping up and down,” Mari says, beaming.

But what about their friends here?

“I really would miss them, but I think I will meet them in the future,” Mari says. “I say to them, I’ll take you to Japan in the future.”

If the family did move to Japan, the transition might not be as easy as they think, says Cliff Darnall, a Japanese/ESL teacher and Japanese exchange program coordinator at Elk Grove High School in Elk Grove Village.

“Students face a lot of issues when they go back to Japan,” Darnall says, noting the culture is strict about everything from minute nuances within the language to the way girls sit on the floor.

“A lot of kids who go back try to get into a program for returnees, because it’s just too hard to fit into the regular curriculum,” he says.

Asuka Tsuchiya, an intern at the Japan America Society of Chicago, moved back to Japan after spending several years in Jakarta.

“It was really hard because the school system was very different,” she says. “In Japan, they have uniforms and very strict rules, and I wasn’t used to that.”

For now, Anne and Mari are trying to emulate their older sister Kaye, who feels like she’s finally amalgamated both nationalities into her personality.

“I think both cultures are fitting together pretty well for me,” says Kaye, who plans to head to Japan after she graduates in 2006. “Now, I’m fluent in two languages, and I can go anywhere in the world and feel comfortable.”

Mari says she doesn’t think she’ll ever achieve that level of comfort here.

“I just want to go back to Japan,” she says. “I think things would be better for me there.”