Recently, I saw a post from a fellow American living in Japan where she said she had no desire to assimilate into Japanese society.

At first, I was confused.

I had always believed that when you choose to live in another country, you should make an effort to assimilate. You should learn the language, understand the culture, respect local customs, and adapt to the society around you. Especially in Japan, I have sometimes felt frustrated when people move here but make very little effort to understand how things work, or expect the country and everyone around them to accommodate them completely.

The word “assimilate” also felt natural to me because it was the word I had heard so often growing up in the United States. Whenever people talked about immigration, you would often hear that immigrants needed to assimilate into American society.

I understood that to mean that people moving to the United States should learn how American society works. They should make an effort to communicate, understand the laws and social expectations, and participate in the country where they had chosen to build a life.

Because that was the word I had always heard, I used it in the same way when talking about foreigners living in Japan. I thought assimilation was simply the correct word for adapting to another country.

But as I kept reading her post, she used a different word: integration.

That was when I realized she was right, and that I had been using the wrong word all along.

What I had been describing was not really assimilation. It was integration.

Integration means learning how to participate in the society where you live. It means making an effort to communicate, understanding social expectations, following the laws, respecting the culture, and contributing to the community around you.

Assimilation goes a step further. It suggests that, in order to truly belong, an immigrant should slowly become indistinguishable from the majority population. It can come with the expectation that you should leave behind parts of your language, culture, identity, or perspective in order to fit in.

That was never what I meant when I said immigrants should “assimilate,” whether I was talking about people moving to the United States or foreigners moving to Japan.

I still believe that when you choose to build a life in another country, you have a responsibility to learn how to live within that society. You cannot expect everyone around you to accommodate you while refusing to learn the language, understand cultural expectations, or follow the systems that make daily life work.

But adapting to a society is not the same as erasing yourself.

After almost 14 years in Japan, I speak Japanese fluently, have worked in Japanese companies, attended graduate school here, obtained permanent residency, and built a family and career here. I pay taxes, national health insurance, and pension like other residents. Japan has influenced how I communicate, work, think, and move through the world.

I have integrated into Japanese society in ways that have shaped almost every part of my adult life.

But I am still American.

I do not want to become Japanese, and I know that I never will be Japanese. That does not mean I reject Japan or that I have failed to belong here. It simply means that building a life in another country does not require replacing one identity with another.

I can adapt without disappearing.

I can respect Japanese culture without pretending that I never see things differently. I can participate in society without giving up the experiences and perspectives that came from growing up somewhere else. I can appreciate Japan while still recognizing its problems, just as Japanese people can criticize their own country without having their belonging questioned.

That is the difference I had been missing.

Integration creates space for immigrants to become part of a society while still being themselves. Assimilation can make it sound like acceptance depends on how successfully they minimize the things that make them different.

I had always believed in integration.

I just thought it was called assimilation.