What's this about Aimi Yoshikawa growing up in an orphanage?
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Well, my first guess is that since family talk is probably the most common small talk, and considering how Japan can still be very conservative, possibly she wanted to get rid of all this superficial made-up "I have a regular happy family" layer that so many people create for others to feel "normal". What's interesting for me is that she has an older sister
Considering that she was sent to an institution when already in middle school, maybe something happened to her parents (and not that she was left "on the orphanage steps" when she was a baby... because then she would have been left there together with her... older sister... this just doesn't make sense). So, most likely, her parents died in a car accident or something. But then it's strange to phrase it so mechanically, "I don't have them", literally in Japanese, "they don't exist. If she had a long history with them, I would expect her to say something like, "they passed away" (なくなりました)
So, for me, upon this short analysis, there is a conflict: she seems to have known her parents (since she was sent to an institution at around 14 years old), but she speaks so mechanically about them. Maybe they didn't actually die but were deprived of parental rights towards her and her older sister. Maybe there was abuse. That would explain both why she was sent there when already a teenager and why she wants to distance herself from them. As well as why she wanted to share this: people usually assume that other people's families are more or less "normal", even if there are conflicts. But her family wasn't "normal", so it's understandable why she wanted to normalize not having a "normal" family, stop hiding it, stop conforming with the hypocritical society that just hides everything "unseemly" under a huge layer of lies hoping naively that if you pretend long and hard enough, it will all go away (hence the 家族の作り話 thing, literally "made-up talk about family"; that's the core of her message, I think)
The more I learn about Japan, the more I see the hypocrisy, the more I understand that it's very very far from the polished image that anime, dramas, pop music and game shows create. Japan is just like any other country: it has good people, but it also has awful people, and everything in between. Japan, being a collectivist society, is driven to show how it's a perfect country, prosperous, progressive, happy. But it has so many problems, just as any other country, and it also leads in some of those problems: overwork suicide rates, the ratio of old to young, the number of single people... It's OK to have all those, I don't criticize them for it per se: I criticize them for hiding it, lying about it, making believe that it's OK not to do anything about it "because these problem do not exist"
I've written a huge post again, but it's just that I keep getting this vibe from a lot of Japanese people when I speak to them: they are distant all the time, even if they call you "friend". They seem not to let anyone near them. They use this mask (建前), and the moment they let their guard down and share their true thoughts (本年), they quickly shut back down. This makes talking to them a game, sometimes interesting, sometimes really irritating... And this all comes from the same pillars of the Japanese society that create the motivation for posts like Yoshikawa's one
Basically, Japan has a huge huge problem with overemphasizing the importance of "what would other people think?!" And if even your family is "other people", not the inner circle (外 vs. 内), then... you cannot trust anyone. And you are utterly alone in the world. It's that simple, actually. But then you can just let go of all these constructs and become truly free. And that's what Aimi might be trying to do here. And if so, I think we should be happy for her
(And I am happy that we see messages like that from Japanese people. Whenever I try to speak with Japanese people on these topics, they shut down, as I mentioned, so Aimi might be a rare example, unfortunately. So, she's doing her society a favor, actually. Because you can't keep lying forever. Especially as a society.)
Considering that she was sent to an institution when already in middle school, maybe something happened to her parents (and not that she was left "on the orphanage steps" when she was a baby... because then she would have been left there together with her... older sister... this just doesn't make sense). So, most likely, her parents died in a car accident or something. But then it's strange to phrase it so mechanically, "I don't have them", literally in Japanese, "they don't exist. If she had a long history with them, I would expect her to say something like, "they passed away" (なくなりました)
So, for me, upon this short analysis, there is a conflict: she seems to have known her parents (since she was sent to an institution at around 14 years old), but she speaks so mechanically about them. Maybe they didn't actually die but were deprived of parental rights towards her and her older sister. Maybe there was abuse. That would explain both why she was sent there when already a teenager and why she wants to distance herself from them. As well as why she wanted to share this: people usually assume that other people's families are more or less "normal", even if there are conflicts. But her family wasn't "normal", so it's understandable why she wanted to normalize not having a "normal" family, stop hiding it, stop conforming with the hypocritical society that just hides everything "unseemly" under a huge layer of lies hoping naively that if you pretend long and hard enough, it will all go away (hence the 家族の作り話 thing, literally "made-up talk about family"; that's the core of her message, I think)
The more I learn about Japan, the more I see the hypocrisy, the more I understand that it's very very far from the polished image that anime, dramas, pop music and game shows create. Japan is just like any other country: it has good people, but it also has awful people, and everything in between. Japan, being a collectivist society, is driven to show how it's a perfect country, prosperous, progressive, happy. But it has so many problems, just as any other country, and it also leads in some of those problems: overwork suicide rates, the ratio of old to young, the number of single people... It's OK to have all those, I don't criticize them for it per se: I criticize them for hiding it, lying about it, making believe that it's OK not to do anything about it "because these problem do not exist"
I've written a huge post again, but it's just that I keep getting this vibe from a lot of Japanese people when I speak to them: they are distant all the time, even if they call you "friend". They seem not to let anyone near them. They use this mask (建前), and the moment they let their guard down and share their true thoughts (本年), they quickly shut back down. This makes talking to them a game, sometimes interesting, sometimes really irritating... And this all comes from the same pillars of the Japanese society that create the motivation for posts like Yoshikawa's one
Basically, Japan has a huge huge problem with overemphasizing the importance of "what would other people think?!" And if even your family is "other people", not the inner circle (外 vs. 内), then... you cannot trust anyone. And you are utterly alone in the world. It's that simple, actually. But then you can just let go of all these constructs and become truly free. And that's what Aimi might be trying to do here. And if so, I think we should be happy for her
(And I am happy that we see messages like that from Japanese people. Whenever I try to speak with Japanese people on these topics, they shut down, as I mentioned, so Aimi might be a rare example, unfortunately. So, she's doing her society a favor, actually. Because you can't keep lying forever. Especially as a society.)
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