Throughout my life, I have kept encountering what it means to be unseen. In Kobe, Japan, people treated me differently for having an English name and a white father. For instance, a middle-school math teacher said she had to speak English to get my attention, even though Japanese was my native language. At seventeen, I withdrew from high school in Kobe and came to the United States alone. That same sense of invisibility followed me in various forms. I attended Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) as one of the poorest students. I remember an affluent student rebuking me for not having $25 to socialize. Queerness, or not being perceived as queer enough, has also been a source of alienation. One day, while visiting home, I overheard two longtime friends from Japan saying queer people can live, but should stay underground. The problems minorities and marginalized people face are attitudinal, structural, and interpersonal, which resist mere technological or economic resolution. To address these problems at their core, we need conceptual tools to study what belonging, care, respect, and self-respect mean. I have persisted in pursuing my academic interests to help others feel seen and find belonging without crossing boundaries, but also to convince myself that leaving Kobe at seventeen was worth the sacrifice. My experience with class, gender, and culture in relation to social recognition is one of the major justifications for pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy rather than in other fields; it is also why my interests are inherently social.