A few years ago, while cleaning out my grandma’s home, I found a diary she kept in 1957. She was seventeen when her mother sent her to Japan for a year to study dance and shamisen, and she wrote in that diary almost every day because her mother expected a record of everything she did. Some entries are short, some entries are long. But the entire diary felt so big, at least to me. It captures her last year of adolescence before she became an adult, and I found myself reading between the lines of everything she wrote. What stayed with me most was how clearly she felt like a foreigner in the country she was supposed to belong to.

As someone who is half Japanese and half Italian, I’ve always felt torn between two identities, never fully fitting into either side. Reading her diary felt like stepping into her mind at an age when she was scared, isolated, watched, and also discovering pieces of herself for the first time. She had to learn another country on her own while still feeling her mother’s presence and control from across the ocean.

This story is my way of honoring my grandma, the origins of her dance career, and her experience as a teenage girl navigating expectations, culture, and the quiet process of becoming her own person.