The Desire of the Other

John and I went to a small café in Meguro. Cafés in Japan are generally quiet, so I felt a bit self-conscious. However, I reassured myself that our conversation wouldn’t bother too many people since most of them likely didn’t speak English.

John is my counterpart in Japan—he left the US and never looked back. The last time he was back in the States, he said, was at least a decade ago.

While plenty of people immigrate to other countries, I rarely encounter those who abandon their native cultures. Most people continue to evaluate their lives based on the value systems of their home countries.

Foreign currency traders offer an apt metaphor: they realize their “profits” in terms of the currency they designate as their home. For example, American traders buy yen but still assess its worth in dollars. Even if the yen appreciates after the sale of the yen, they wouldn’t count it as a loss within their chosen framework.

Similarly, typical Japanese immigrants to the US often measure their self-worth through the lens of how they’d be perceived back home. For instance, ordinary Japanese people do not know how to evaluate a degree from Harvard, so a degree from Tokyo University still reigns supreme despite it being practically meaningless to average Americans and its global ranking being 30th or below.

This phenomenon also appears in more subtle ways. For Japanese people—and many other Asians—a brand-new home is a status symbol. They often view older buildings in the same way we perceive used cars. In contrast, pre-war buildings are highly coveted by New Yorkers. Yet, Asians living in New York frequently gravitate toward new buildings, still influenced by how they believe other Asians would perceive them.

It’s a reminder of one of Lacan’s well-known maxims: “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” Without an awareness of how the Other evaluates us, we struggle to define ourselves. Abandoning our home currencies, then, feels akin to a type of suicide or self-destruction.

I’m not entirely sure what compelled John and me to choose this path. It’s not as though John hates America or I hate Japan. It certainly was not desire but some inner drive.