ABSTRACT
The author describes his journey of struggle and negotiation from Portuguese Trinidadian, to New Australian, and finally to gaikokujin (outsider) living in Japan. These struggles revolved around race and ethnicity, culture and community, religion and ideology, language, friendship, values, nationality, and belongingness. He describes his transition from a self-conscious, insecure, introverted, confused young boy, to a young adult searching for himself through education, social justice or citizenship exploration, and overseas adventure, emerging as a confident, competent, relatively agentic senior citizen with a strong sense of belongingness to a diverse group of communities, some geographically located, some imagined.
