I should open the story of this journey by answering the question nearly everyone has asked me about it. How did I—an American Jewish college student—become interested in the Jewish community of Japan?
I grew up racing my siblings in MarioKart and trying to push my friends’ characters off bridges in Super Smash Brothers. As I grew older, I spent more solitary time catching digital Pokémon creatures and failing to coax a pixelated ‘Nintendog’ to go on a walk.
I eventually realized that many of those games came out first in Japan, where Nintendo is based, and I found the games’ Japanese-language trailers on YouTube. I couldn’t understand what the commercials’ narrators were saying, but at least I was learning about the next Pokémon game before any of my friends. Soon I began picking up some spoken Japanese words—with a very vanilla American accent—if I was watching a trailer with subtitles, and I decided to learn more about Japan beyond its animated and pixelated depictions.
I found myself particularly fixated on the megacity of Tokyo. Its endless rows of skyscrapers, neon lights, blaring advertisements, and seemingly endless energy—with people and trains and cars and lights blurring all around the metropolis. It was a place I wanted to get endlessly lost in.
But it wasn’t just video games drawing me to Japan–particularly as I thought about what it could be like to live there.
As a practicing Modern Orthodox Jew, I keep a whole plethora of rules from the Torah. Those include praying three times a day, checking everything I eat to make sure it’s in line with Kosher dietary laws, and refraining from work or travel from sundown on Friday until Saturday night, in honor of the Shabbat . How could I visit or live in Japan, which seemed to have no Jews or synagogues at all?
As my research—read: occasional Google searches—continued, I found out that I was wrong: Japan does have Jews and a small Jewish community. If I ever managed to get there, I could probably keep Kosher and Shabbat. I could visit without compromising on my religion.
On some subconscious level, I was drawn to Japan because I wanted the experience of understanding Judaism through being an exile, a stranger in a strange land. To be part of building a Jewish community in an unexpected place. Living there would be a challenge for me as a religious Jew, as if I was among the exiles of old finding their place in the diaspora after leaving the Holy Land. But it was a uniquely Jewish challenge, enmeshed within the long Jewish history of exile, migration, and belonging.
During my senior year of college, I began speaking with some of the Jews of Japan, particularly members of the Tokyo-based “Jewish Community of Japan” (JCJ), a synagogue in Tokyo’s Shibuya district with egalitarian seating and one of the country’s few formal Jewish institutions. I’ve learned from my conversations that being Jewish in Japan epitomizes the experiences of living in the Jewish diaspora. It means being part of, yet simultaneously isolated from, the broader community; having a complex identity mediated through both religious practice and national identity; and the need for tenacity, chutzpah, to make things work—even across religious and cultural fault lines. As a religious Jew living in the Jewish diaspora, I’m still grappling with what that all means for me, and my previous failures to bridge those fault lines in my own life.
***
In 1953, around the time that the post-World War II American occupation of Japan withdrew, a new Jewish community blossomed in the capital of Tokyo and became the JCJ. It was helmed mostly by newer Russian Jewish immigrants who left their wartime residences in the Chinese cities of Harbin and Shanghai after the Chinese Communist Party came to power.
What was the JCJ like when it first opened? Its beginnings are described by Rabbi Arnold Wolf, a progressive rabbi who led the KAM Isaiah Israel congregation in Chicago. He wrote the following in 1953 in the magazine Commentary:
In Tokyo [the Jewish expatriates] are a community apart, withdrawing from the native Oriental simplicity, barred from the company of the snobbish European colonials. They are showy, unlettered, clannish, and insecure. They are also kind to a stranger (a Jewish one, of course; any other would not be close enough even to be confronted as a stranger), loyal to what they conceive of as appropriate Judaism, and sophisticated beyond imagination.
Their new community building, formerly an American general’s home, will be as much used for bridge and business as for the ministrations of their modest Orthodox rabbi. But it will be closer to the heart of these people than most American community centers or synagogues. It is already a kind of gilded shtibl [community prayer space] housing the memories of their dead and the cheder [children’s school] of their fugitive offspring.
All in all, the Jews of Tokyo incarnate the wanderings, the perils, and occasionally the dignity of the Jew in an alien world. They are exiles even from themselves.
Current members of the JCJ corroborated Wolf’s account, telling me that these early members established the JCJ primarily as a Russian-style social club—not quite a synagogue yet, even though it hosted religious events. Some of those migrants also felt that Japan was just a stopping point during their efforts to find a better home. To them, the JCJ was a temporary tabernacle in Shiloh, not a Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
Without ignoring some of the stereotypes that Wolf uses here—such as “native Oriental simplicity”—I also wonder what Wolf meant when he called the Jews of Japan “exiles even from themselves.”
***
We can start taking apart what Rabbi Wolf said by looking at one of his blind spots: he does not reflect on if there were any Japanese converts to Judaism in the community. Today, those congregants are also very much part of the mosaic of people keeping the JCJ together.
“I used to love reading spy novels and got interested in [the] Mossad,” Tomoko Rosenfeld, the head of the JCJ’s Jewish Japanese Women’s group, told me when I asked if she could tell me about her experience converting to Judaism. “Then I started reading more books about Judaism.”
I don’t usually think about the Mossad when I think about Judaism, but the connection makes sense. The Mossad is the most well-known Israeli intelligence agency, its agents protagonists in countless novels and movies—and in real life as in fiction, the Mossad has a predominantly Jewish staff. “So, when Philip,” her spouse and a former JCJ president, “suggested to me to think about conversion when we got engaged, it wasn’t difficult,” she said.
Tomoko Rosenfeld’s memories remind me to not paint the JCJ community, or the broader Jewish community of Japan, with too broad of a brush. The Jews of Tokyo are not all foreigners, and so they’re not all as isolated from broader Japanese society as Wolf might have thought.
But did converting to Judaism change her relationship to that broader Japanese society? I would guess that different people would have different answers, but Rosenfeld said it did not for her. “As you know, most Japanese are raised in the value of Buddhism and Shintoism but very few claim themselves as Buddhist or Shintoist,” she said. “Nothing changed in my position in Japanese society at all.”
Rosenfeld also told me that her relationship with the JCJ synagogue has shifted over the years. “While our children were studying at Sunday School, I was more active attending service and events. After they moved out for college in the US, [her husband] Philip [Rosenfeld] became the President,” she said, “so I tried to be active.” But the makeup of the community has shifted.“[There are] less active American moms and more Japanese wives who aren’t so enthusiastic for the community. It’s been quiet.” COVID-19 has not helped matters, as fewer people have attended synagogue services, she added, but the synagogue is trying to reach out to people as much as possible.
Looking inward, I realize that it’s been easy for me to paint whole groups of others in Judaism with a broad brush—the “Orthodox community at the University of Chicago,” or “the members of the Reform temple in the neighborhood.” But since this conversation, I’ve been trying to look beyond those siloes by reading the stories of and hearing out the experiences of Jews of Color and Jews by choice, including from friends from high school and college.
***
In 2020, I hoped to finally visit Tokyo with university research funding, planning to write about the community for my undergraduate thesis. After years of reading, I wanted to see the JCJ Shul for myself. But the coronavirus pandemic thwarted my plans: Japan shut its borders to most foreigners; the University of Chicago suspended its research grants; and I couldn’t leave my family’s side during the first COVID wave. Yet I had already committed to my thesis topic. So I began to research the community and to speak to its members remotely, and soon learned about the synagogue’s rabbi, who started as the JCJ’s new Rabbi in fall 2020. (Note: the article has been updated since publication to grant the rabbi anonymity to protect his safety.)
The rabbi received rabbinic ordination at a Modern Orthodox seminary in New York. That’s my own denomination of Judaism, and one that usually prohibits egalitarian mixed seating during prayer services. How would a Modern Orthodox rabbi lead a synagogue with egalitarian seating, I wondered? Or was I just applying my own views of Jewish divisions onto a synagogue I hadn’t ever visited?
The JCJ’s new Rabbi led the JCJ’s 2020 Yom Kippur services remotely on Zoom from New York—technically, before the holiday started in the US, so he wasn’t breaking any religious rules; but after it had begun in Tokyo, due to the 13-hour time difference. “But in Tokyo, [some members of the JCJ] said, ‘No, no, we have members who want to daven [pray] in person… We need to make the minyan [prayer quorum of ten people] because… if these families can’t have the minyan that they want, then we’re sort of failing as a JCC,” he said—failing as a Jewish community center. I eventually asked the rabbi directly about the JCJ’s egalitarian seating, and no, he doesn’t plan on uprooting the Shul’s seating arrangements. The synagogue’s chapel layout, he said, can actually accommodate areas with separate gendered seating and egalitarian seating at the same time. It makes me realize a broader point: the synagogue is not a denominational enclave, but a space for the whole Jewish community—especially as one of the lone Jewish outposts in Tokyo.
***
The new JCJ rabbi had previously taught English for a year in rural Japan and later attended some of the JCJ’s High Holidays services. Then a member there recruited him to teach in the synagogue’s Sunday School.
Teaching English had been one thing—but this was a whole new ballgame. When the rabbi began teaching the schoolchildren about the holiday of Passover, he started with the first thing he had learned while growing up: you can’t eat leavened bread on Passover. One eats Matzah instead—a crispy, flat bread that looks a bit like corrugated cardboard.
“You can’t eat leavened bread [on Passover]. I say that. Ten second graders look at me like I’m crazy. ‘What do you mean, I can’t eat bread? My family eats bread!’” He says. As he recalls that moment, I imagine the shock and horror on these children’s faces when they suddenly hear this stranger announce that—surprise—they’ve been doing it all wrong. “And I’m like, oy, this is a real problem,” He said. “So, I had to turn what I was framing in the negative into a positive.”
He then told the students, “Don’t forget what I just said.” After all, that’s what the Torah says. “But maybe we’ll think about it [like this:] on Pesach we eat Matzah because that’s a mitzvah too, right? And that seemed to resonate a little bit more… [a] parent said [to me later], ‘You know, I think it’s really nice. My daughter came home and she’s trying to keep it as much as she can. She’s not keeping it perfectly. But she’s really engaging with her neshama [soul] in a meaningful way.’”
Hearing about “Matzah-gate” and his other experiences in Japan reminded me of my own self-image. During high school, I began to think that I was one of the most religious people in my grade, even though I was ostensibly at a Modern Orthodox Jewish school. I thought I was keeping Shabbat and Kosher much more than many of my classmates. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was isolating me. I remember once, I went downtown in Manhattan with some friends who would eat non-Kosher food outside the house. Then we stumbled across a restaurant that said on its sign that it was Kosher. Yet when I checked the restaurant’s agency-issued Kosher certificate, I noticed that it showed a certifying agency my family didn’t trust. So, my friends got food there and I made do with leftovers from home. My personal orthodoxies alienated me—even when my friends had tried to make space for me.
Yet now I can’t shake the feeling that I was too rigid. Maybe too inflexible. Or too judgmental.
The JCJ Rabbi faced a similar situation, teaching students who did not practice Judaism as he did. Yet he managed to validate those students and bridge the gap between himself and them, while not compromising on his own practices. No one in the classroom became an exile. And he did so while living in a community that is itself isolated from broader Japanese society.
Could I take those ideas to heart too? Should I have instead tried to validate others, even when I felt exiled from them? I would just need some inner chutzpah that I didn’t have all those years ago.
***
As I learned more about their community, I discovered that Jews in Japan face challenges I’ve never had to deal with. One story I’ve heard about Jewish life in Japan is related to the Jewish legal precept where, in a Kosher kitchen, a Jewish person is supposed to have some involvement with the food preparation. Even if non-Jewish individuals are doing the bulk of the cooking, a Jew is supposed to do something small.
Eve Sneider, who grew up in Tokyo and is now a US-based journalist for WIRED, was once that Jew—very early on in her life. “I don’t actually remember this, but it’s sort of a family lore thing,” she told me during a Zoom call. Sneider and her sister were born in Japan to American expatriate parents. They grew up attending bilingual schools and spent most of their time in Japan until they came to the United States for college.
“The preschool that I went to was a one-room preschool that rented out a room in the JCJ. And the chef at the JCJ kitchen was Japanese, she wasn’t Jewish; and at one point the rabbi stipulated that a Jew had to light the oven… once, the rabbi [had] stepped out [of the synagogue]. The oven had to be lit. So, she came to this preschool classroom and was like: ‘You got any Jews?’” And that’s how Sneider became the designated Jew in the kitchen at three years old.
The Jewish community of Japan also faced more difficult challenges in 2011 after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated part of the country. That year, the JCJ’s now-current rabbi returned to Japan in 2011 on a “self-deployed” mission, after, in order to help bring supplies to the Jewish community and pitch in with relief efforts. But he was cautious. “I actually spoke with somebody who had gone to Haiti,” after the 2010 earthquake there, he said. “All these Westerners showed up—expecting Western-style accommodations.” That expectation took away precious beds from trained workers and forced local residents to focus on the ‘volun-tourists,’ instead of those most in need. He wanted to help out in Japan, not to get in the way of local relief efforts.
***
When I think about living a Jewish life anywhere, not just in Japan or the United States, something inevitably casts a shadow: the threat of antisemitism.
But when I asked him about antisemitism in Japan, former JCJ synagogue president Philip Rosenfeld said, “Let me answer the question this way: there is no antisemitism in Japan in the sense you would think of antisemitism in the United States or Europe.” There have been, in the past, “misguided individuals” who published books “[saying] that the best way to get rich is to follow Jewish business practices, and things like that… But the Japanese don’t distinguish [expatriate] Jews, [from] other Westerners.”
The JCJ members I’ve spoken to told me that the synagogue itself has only faced a few small, possibly antisemitic disturbances over the years, such as a stranger coming up and banging against the door, or a taxi driver once scratching the sign in the front.
That doesn’t mean that antisemitism does not exist at all in Japan. Scholars far more knowledgeable than I, including Masanori Miyazawa and David Goodman, have investigated how antisemitic attitudes spread to Japan even though the country has no indigenous Jewish population, and how those attitudes were sometimes combatted by scholars and officials. Some instances of antisemitism in the public sphere in Japan have also erupted in recent years. In February 2017, for instance, Toshio Motoya, the CEO of APA Hotels, wrote that Jews control the finances of world superpowers in an article in the hotel chain’s magazine. The JCJ’s rabbi at the time, Rabbi David Kunin, told the Japan Times: “It’s very disturbing to see this kind of antisemitic literature coming out of Japan. I know that Jews everywhere are concerned by these kinds of accusations.”
But just as antisemitic attitudes in Japan have occasionally surfaced, so too has the polar opposite: ‘philosemitic’ attitudes. Professor Ben Ami Shiloni of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that when a senior Japanese delegation once visited Hebrew University, the head of the delegation said that they knew little about Jews and Israel. “In preparation, they searched for a book on the subject… He then drew the book from his pocket and gave it to us as a gift—it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious antisemitic treatise dating back to the beginning of the 20th century that alleges the Jews control the world. And it was a gift!
Nevertheless, neither antisemitism nor philosemitism seems to significantly affect the day-to-day lives of expatriate Jews in Japan. However, Jewish expatriates who lived in Japan indicated to me that being a foreigner is more of a barrier than being Jewish.
Take Dr. Tracy Slater, who wrote about her experiences as a white Jewish American woman in Japan in a memoir published in 2015. She first moved to Japan in 2005 to marry Toru Hoshino, a man from Osaka. I asked Slater, who is currently living in Toronto with her spouse for his work, if she ever experienced any challenges there because she was Jewish. Her answer was not what I expected.
“Growing up Jewish in the US, particularly on the East Coast, I always had a sense of myself as somewhat different,” Slater told me, albeit also a sense of herself as white. “And in Japan, I think I was surprised at how much that just didn’t [matter]; it kind of disappeared in a way because what I was, was a foreigner.” Slater did emphasize that she “was a white foreigner, so I think it’s different for foreigners who are not white… I never felt outright hostility or humiliation, and I think that sometimes people who aren’t white do experience that.”
Her memories line up with what expatriate JCJ members told me as well: being Jewish in Japan isn’t in and of itself a challenge. But being an expatriate, a foreigner, is.
Abigail Sneider, a medical student at the University of Chicago (and Eve’s sister), told me that she was once traveling in southern Japan with friends during her college years. “We were checking into our hostel for the night and the people who are checking in, in front of us, were also foreigners, and they were speaking English,” she said. “And the guy who was checking everyone in clearly wasn’t super comfortable speaking English and was struggling to communicate with the people in front of us. So, when it was our turn, I just started speaking Japanese to him. And he literally leapt back, a meter and a half, he was so surprised!”
Perhaps his surprise is evidence of how little effort many Japanophile Westerners put into communicating with Japanese people themselves. But Abigail had lived in Japan her whole life and knew the language fluently. Wouldn’t that mean that she would be fully integrated into the country?
Apparently not. Jewish expatriates in Japan face the broader social dynamic of being labeled 外人, ‘gaijin’. That translates directly to “foreigner,” but a 2005 article in the Japan Times illustrates the idea of gaijin like this:
From the Japanese end, gaijin can be bullish, insensitive louts, often well-meaning, sometimes funny, but usually with their mouths open and at least one foot lodged firmly inside. Yet at the very same time, gaijin can also serve as symbols of freedom and beauty… [they] can offer the teasing promise of an escape from a plodding existence of groups, symmetry, and overtime.
This appraisal of foreigners is, certainly, more charitable than the average white American’s attitudes. It also cannot speak to what everyone in Japan thinks of foreigners. But at the least, this idea of gaijin seems to reflect the cultural divide I came across when speaking to expatriate members of the JCJ. Even if they know the Japanese language and have lived in Japan for a long time, they are still gaijin. They are never fully integrated.
While thinking about this divide, I began to understand Rabbi Arnold Wolf’s idea of the “exiles even from themselves,” and how it differs from my own experience growing up Jewish in America. That experience included having to explain Shabbat and Kashrut over and over again to people, or seeing the way I practice Judaism either maligned or invisible in too many television shows. And of course, there was that alienation I felt in high school from my fellow Jewish students—even if I now regret being so judgmental. But I’ve always felt American. My experience of being a Jew in America has never been tied up in the experience of being a foreigner. Of being a gaijin.
But in Japan, Jewish expatriates are not only far from the worldwide epicenters of Jewish life, but they are building Jewish communities on their own in a country with no longtime Jewish presence, while swept up in the larger societal tides of being a gaijin in Japan. Two layers of exile. Maybe that’s what Wolf meant when he called the JCJ members “exiles even from themselves”, or at least, how I can understand him.
***
As the members of the JCJ look forward to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m looking back at the Jewish communities of plenty that I was educated in, and at the times where I thought I was more religious than others. I can see some of my own experiences in those of the Jews of Tokyo I spoke to—of growing up Jewish, of interacting across religious fault lines, of being a foreigner—and yet I also see a place where even within exile, they’ve fostered a Jewish institution built on working together across cultural and religious differences.
I’m going to let my imagination run wild for a moment. What if I actually moved to Tokyo and joined the JCJ congregation, after the COVID-19 pandemic? On Friday nights, I’d dress up in a white shirt and suit—just like I do for Shabbat in the US. I’d slip my keys onto a “Shabbat belt” so that I could carry them without violating Shabbat law, and then would head out through the winding streets near my apartment to the JCJ. Once there, I’d walk slowly into the sanctuary and find a seat, shaking hands with people I knew already, and hopefully whispering the ‘Good Shabbos’ greeting to some people I didn’t. And then, in this dream, everything collapses into a series of paradoxes. I’d be a stranger. I’d be welcome. I’d be a gaijin. I’d be a community member. I’d be in exile. I’d be home. I’d be out of my comfort zone. I’d be able to sing along.
