Soccer star Hidetoshi Nakata, a former member of Japan's national team, told the media in the weeks leading up to the World Cup: "Wārudo Kappu no koto wo kangaeru to Nihonjin de aru koto wo saininshi ki suru (ワールド・カップのことを考えると日本人であることを再認識する, When I think about the World Cup games, I reconnect with the fact that I'm Japanese)."
To most people, the comment seems a little strange. This guy has to be reminded to reconnect to something so obvious? But to many Japanese, it makes perfect sense. Many Japanese go through long periods of their lives preferring not to think about their nationality, or pretending to be anything but Japanese.
When one of my brothers was in his mid-teens, he went around saying he was adopted and was actually from the Dominican Republic. (He had a head full of naturally curly hair as evidence.) We siblings were annoyed out of our skulls, but in our hearts we understood. Who would actually want to own up to being Japanese? It was just too hopelessly dasai (lame) and too encumbered by historical baggage, not to mention the stigma of being good at boring stuff like making copy machines and bad at things that really matter, such as sex and soccer.