I've found that there is a group in the U.S. who call themselves 'Global Nomads'. They are a group of people who have spent their earlier years abroad, and the kikokushijo in Japan may easily be considered a sub-category of Global Nomads. They and we have both in common, that we don't have a single homeland. I am now sure to say that we are not alone in this world, and the repatriate phenomena is NOT uniquely Japanese.

In your former letter, you wrote that even though we carry Japanese passports, we don't necessarily have to stick to a packaged set of traditional cultures and values labelled "Japanese". Yet I think that we need to have a certain culture within myself when I meet other people. I also think that I can't simply disregard the heritage that people have accumulated upon a local ground. But it is true that for any of the Global Nomads, our ground or a homeland does not always belong to a single geographical location nor an ethnic group. I agree with you that our home is geographically expanding while it culminates chronologically according to our life-history. Our home seems more time-related than space-related.

I myself have some of the cultural package labelled "Japanese". But just as well, I have bits of other packages whose labels tell of where I was raised, and what languages I understand. A wild wish I have is to have full packages of all the cultures. I'd like to understand how it feels when the temperature drops dramatically in a desert, and when I won't be able to recognize my own shadow in a deep mist. Speaking in English, I'd wish I can command the old cliches in its literal archives, and if I were able to speak in Chinese, I'd wish to know how a phrase was originally used three thousand years ago. Speaking to a person with Christian background, I would love to know about the deep-rooted sentiments that go back into the medieval days. And I'd also like to understand more about the so-called Japanese mysticism. What I'd like myself to be called would not be a multi-lingual nor a multi-cultural, but a MULTI-HERITAGE.

Still yet, I have to insist that to respect a heritage does not mean to accept it all-in-one. Swallowing it whole does not make a heir. A master-artist of a traditional theater in Japan once told me: To respect heritage is to respect the spirit in it, not the form. In order to do it, one must kill his father.

We Global Nomads can't stop collecting bits and pieces of different cultures, in order to create one's own unique culture. We have already lived in so wide a variety of locations, that to plot our past domiciles, we have to bring out a map of the world. We therefore need to create our history from various traditions. We need to combine various heritages to create our backgrounds. For this purpose, we cannot be required to be dyed with a single culture, but we need a freedom to critically adopt cultures. What I dream is for us to be able to add something new to each of the packages, or to create a new package of our own. Our home may only be found in the future.

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