That's just a brief background to the following recent exchange on his blog. Momus has a Japanese fiancée. He'll be fifty next year and hasn't expressed a strong interest in having children but his fiancée, Hisae, is younger and so he was asked whether she might hope to have a baby. I've edited some ot the exchange which you can see in full here.
Anon: Momus, do you ever regret not being a parent? Is it a point of contention at all with Hisae, who is still of an age where she could be a mother?
Momus: I personally don't regret it at all. Hisae says "Not regrets... yet!" But if she wants a kid, she would like it to be 100% Japanese, not "western mixture". And I agree. So we talk about "scouting" -- getting some Japanese donor sperm.
Anon: I can't tell whether or not you're being flippant...but I'd genuinely be interested in hearing why both yourself and Hisae would prefer a '100%' Japanese child to a 'western mixture'.
Momus: We're half joking, half serious. It's all about the nature of Japan, a society which tends to make you feel like an outsider if you aren't 100% Japanese. A mixed-race kid would have a hard time growing up there, feeling s/he didn't belong properly to any nationality. Also, says Hisae, hafu kids -- part-Japanese, part-foreign -- are not trendy in Japan any more. The move, the mood in the last ten years has been away from multiculturalism. Giving birth to a hafu is creating a walking, talking nest of adjustment and identity problems. Sure, you can do it, but you need to be aware of this context.
Another commenter: Solution: raise your non-trendy, un-cool mongrel child in Berlin [where Momus currently lives] or some other catastrophically welcoming place.
Momus: Yes. But we want to live in Japan...A while ago we looked at the freakonomics of inter-racial dating in the US and put an actual dollar value on just how much more you have to earn per year to overcome the handicap of being an Asian male on the US dating scene (the figure is $247,000). In the same way, we could look at just how beautiful or famous you have to be (or your parents have to be) in Japan for the Japanese to overlook the fact of your hafu status, or see it as an advantage. And maybe the answer is "Your parents need to be Lennon and Ono".
Anon: I won't hide the fact that it upsets me that something so barren (so this-worldly!) as 'my kid will look slightly different' (plus ensuing ramifications) should have such profound significance that it might genuinely make one question their suitability to biologically parent a child.
Momus: Well, I think it would cruel to treat a kid as a sort of challenge to the culture s/he was going to grow up in, or have the sort of kid who'd fit into the kind of world you think ought to exist, rather than the sort that does exist. But also I think there are different interpretations of what multiculturalism might mean, and I personally skew towards the one that says that it's a lot more fun if we keep our flavours. The Japanese are "minor differences" racists -- in other words, they're not racist if you're clearly different, and they're not racist if you're clearly the same. It's when you're in between those that you risk getting bullied, especially in childhood. That has to be borne in mind.
