That's how I became half Japanese, half Chilean, half Nigerian and half German.

When the 2nd World War started my grandfather left his homeland Japan (he worked in the Mitsubishi factories in Hiroshima, constructing and designing the big war vessels) and headed for Chile. Sailing over the Pacific Ocean he arrived there in 1942, being real young and married a Chilean girl named Maria de la Cruz. They lived in Santiago de Chile together, in the hot summer she worked in the Copper Mines up north and grandpa went sailing from time to time.

One day he got really drunk and decided to go for a walk in the Atacama desert - he never came back, but left his wife pregnant. The girl she received 9 months later got very active in the communist movement in Chile actually, but then came 1973, Allende was removed from his office and she had to leave the country fearing the era of the Desaparecidos in South America.

How she eventually came up with the idea to set sails for Nigeria - I don't know: she really never talks about it. Just thinking about which movement she was in and that even Che Guevara went to the bloody fights for setting up communism in Congo, I just got the mere idea that mum went into the Nigerian battlefield. So that's how this half Japanese, half Chilean girl finally ended up in a small town in Nigeria, later moved to Lagos and met her husband, a former dancer in the Nigerian film industry (today widely known as Nollywood). I still remember growing up in these dusty, ugly port districts of Lagos, waking up every morning by the neighbours shooting pigeons with their AK-47. We didnt spent many years in Lagos. Dad became a member of a gang, rised in the hierarchy, but died in a drive-by. Mum, hunted by the gangs as well, decided to move another time - maybe she met some German development aid volontary, fell in love and followed him. So this time our final destination was Germany. The communist part of the country still had a heart for Chilean refugees and so we could settle here for a while. Here she finally married again - some German guy eventually and I headed for Berlin as soon as I left school.

And that's how I became half Japanese, half Chilean, half Nigerian and half German.