I am half-Japanese... growing up, a lot of my Korean friends had parents who had suffered terribly at the hands of the Japanese Occupation, and swore that they would never forgive the Japanese. So for example, they would not buy Japanese cars, they'd be rude to my mom (even though she speaks Korean), etc.

If the topic came up at some point, I would usually apologize on behalf of my people, even though my family didn't fight in the war and we lost everything during the Tokyo firebombing and the post-war poverty (I wouldn't mention this, of course). It was interesting, because it ended up being a intercultural healing of sorts for a number of my friends' parents.

It ended up being good practice, because when I met Mrs. Bee's dad... he had many similar feelings, By that point though, I had a lot of experience dealing with it. We were able to get past it all pretty quickly... and he even owns a Japanese car now.

Did your ethnicity ever cause tension with other races growing up? How did you deal with it?