Guan Lingxiang first came to Japan nine years ago with his parents and sister after his maternal grandmother, a war-displaced Japanese left behind in China in the chaos after World War II, returned to her native country.
However, Guan, 22, repeatedly asks himself: "Why am I here? I'm neither Japanese nor Chinese."
Guan, who lives in the western Tokyo suburb of Kunitachi, has been struggling to find the answer and is instead suffering stress. He was brought up in Hunchun, a city in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin Province on the border between China and North Korea.