Signing Off

After many years of posting with varying degrees of faithfulness, I've decided to move blog sites. This particular one won't allow me to update some things I would like to, and it also isn't very mobile-friendly, which is proving to be definite barrier in this day and age of the ubiquitous iPhone.

A big thank you to everyone who read and commented on this blog, and encouraged me to keep writing.

Please check out my new blog at: http://piecesofpapercranes.wordpress.com/

All my love,
Jessie

In Defense of Losing People

I read a sentence in an article the other day that has stuck with me. It said that if you (the reader) are under the age of 25, you don’t know what it’s like not to be able to find someone.

In general, this statement was referencing the 1995 movie, Before Sunrise, and its 2004 sequel, Before Sunset, the series of which was recently wrapped up in a third installment, Before Midnight. In the first movie (for those of who have been living under an Ethan Hawke-less rock), two strangers meet on a train, spend one fabulous, life-changing night together, talking and laughing and falling in love in an exotic city. When the sun comes up, however, they have to part ways, promising that at a later appointed time they will meet again on that same train platform, to see if their budding romance is meant to be. You have to wait till the second movie to find out what happened. It’s a bit like An Affair to Remember, but in real time.

The point the author of the article is trying to make is that before the advent and pervasive invasion of technology into every corner of our lives, situations occurred, like our star-crossed lovers, when people could be un-findable. You couldn’t just Facebook someone, or Google their name after the fact, or write down their email address. This was a time when you could lose someone – not lose them to death, necessarily, but to the voids that fill the spaces in between our communication. People could slip between the cracks. Now, however, our world, and we, have made it nearly impossible to allow ourselves to slip through the cracks. We’ve built up fiber optic retaining walls against being the-one-that-got-away. We can’t get away. We’ve plastered our profile pictures all over the Internet, and made it so anyone can find us. Now, we are completely non-slip.

Skyping across state and country lines

I’ve also been knee-deep, wading through Steinbeck’s East of Eden. For as much as I loathed the dust bowls and non-existent ending of The Grapes of Wrath, I’ve been nothing short of enchanted by his later, greater masterpiece, especially its commentaries on the nature of relationships between people.

One characters says a line that seems to speak directly to this issue of finding and losing other people. He says, “There’s nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can’t see or touch a man, it’s best to let him go.”

Written in 1952, this is clearly still within the context of a time when people-losing could and did happen. The characters in the books do just that, lose each other, both intentionally and not, and also in that kind of unintentionally that is the afterthought of an unfulfilled intentionally.

With these two quotes taken together, there emerge clear pros and cons to being perpetually findable.

We can connect. We connect to the Internet and then to each other through it, and it shows that if Jesse and Celine had met ten years later than they did, they could have swapped email addresses, and the next two movies about their happenstance meetings across the world wouldn’t have been necessary. They could have been happily ever after from the beginning.

I am someone who this kind of instant connect-ability benefits the most. I live far away from most of my friends and all of my family, and being able to Skype and send emails gives a sense of not being completely forgotten in this world that doesn’t really come any other way. The advent of these kind of technologies allow such moves across the globe to be easier to swallow.

The JET Program started in 1987, and being a participant in this program then, or even eighteen years ago, when Before Sunrise came out, would have been a much bigger commitment than it is a now – a commitment to loneliness, to isolation, to having to absorb yourself completely into your new culture because there would be no easy, cheap method of connecting you to your old one. Moving to a new country is not the same kind of decision that it used to be, and for that I am grateful and value my findable-ness for its ease and reliability.
The flip side of this is that it’s also much harder to lose the people you don’t want to find. Or whom you would rather couldn’t find you. A friend recently said that she had two levels of friends – those she is close to, which is about twenty people, and then everyone else she’s ever met. Because we keep everyone we’ve ever met plastered all over our lives, it can be like a giant vaudeville show of, Hello, Sweetheart, were you looking to forget about someone? Because you can’t. Not in this day and age. Exes, old enemies, annoying people, people we come to label as “not worth it.” The passive aggressive "Delete" button has replaced the closure encased in an actual Goodbye. And I don’t think that’s always good. It makes relationships too easy, and easy is exactly what they are not, no matter how close or far away you are.

By being so connected, we can also easily lose perspective on the fact that not everyone matters to us in the same amounts. Our cultural obsession with participation ribbons has ingrained in us a belief that all parts being unequal, everyone is still equal. Online, you are the same amount of “friend” with everyone. Re-finding someone means becoming his or her friend, we skip over the acquaintance stage, and I’m pretty sure a lot of people have no idea how to make an introduction. Sometimes, the people you meet are not worth your time and effort to re-meet.

I met this girl in Ireland. We spent a few days traveling together, not likely to meet again.

Granted…sometimes they are, but those are the people you should probably have coffee with, not just send a friend request to. My point is that people who matter to you in significant amounts should be findable to you outside of a strictly technological medium.

However, there’s also a third view. Like Steinbeck says, it can be the saddest practice to keep connections with people out of habit, not because it’s convenient or you want to or even because it’s good for you. I think we’ve become so accustomed to not deleting anyone that we reinforce bad habits, like spending time on people who aren’t relevant to our lives anymore, or whom have stopped being good for us. We don’t glue postage stamps on letters anymore, which at least took thought and a little money, but we click “like” and make comments and generally keep up, even with people who bring us down. Sometimes it is better that when we can no longer look or touch someone, we do let them go.

So that’s two potential negatives to the connectivity of technology. Two and a half if you count the first point as also something of negative, because if Jesse and Celine had provided each other with their contact information, we would have had a much less interesting story. They could have been happily ever after from the beginning, but what would that have done to their story as a whole? Even if it wouldn’t have ruined it, it would have changed the nature of the development of their love and just plain would have been less romantic. It’s a lot less sexy to say, I’ll Google you when I get home, than, Let’s meet in this same exact spot six months from now and see if we’re meant to be. Our lives are, essentially, stories, and it’s clear that one of these stories is much more compelling than the other. At the price of convenience, and because we are scared of being alone, we’ve killed the value of effort in relationships, and the romance of them.

I don’t really remember a time when it was possible to lose someone. I do remember physical address books and learning how to make real phone calls and choosing my first email address. Sometimes, the way connections are done today can seem so artless. However, at the same time, looking back with the fondness of nostalgia isn’t accurate either. Just because you could lose someone back then, doesn’t mean you should, and there’s something perhaps equally romantic about remembering and re-finding the people we meet in our daily lives out in cyber-space. It’s the give and take of how the world develops, oftentimes so quickly, and perhaps it’s chiefly our job to make sure we are giving back to people and not taking, no matter how we connect with them.

Snow Country, and the Wildness of Words

Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, mostly as a result of his novel, Snow Country. Called Yukiguni in Japanese, it is the subtly portrayed account of a businessman who visits a hot spring town in winter and his relationships with a popular geisha there and a girl he sees on a train. Although the specific place is unnamed, it is suspected to be Yuzawa, Niigata Prefecture – it really could be any place in Tokoku, however, as “snow country” in Japanese likewise refers to areas of Japan that receive heavy snowfall. The book reads like an extended haiku, and in this fashion, its sentences are stark and poignant, loaded with imagery of nature. The climax of the book, for example, builds so softly and occurs so innocently that if you aren’t paying attention, you’ll miss it altogether. Snow Country is thus an excellent example of all that is great about Japanese literary traditions – its subtlety and slow build, its concept of the fated-ness of things – and indeed deserves the acclaim and prestigious position it has among Japanese people.

A snowy morning in Tohoku

A favorite question used by students and also in introductory conversations I have with Japanese people is “What is your hobby?” In response, I usually say reading. This answer is fine, except when their follow-up question is “Who is your favorite author,” a much more difficult query since I can bet they have never heard of any of my favorite authors. I’ve gotten around the problem by explaining my interest in Japanese literature, and then listing famous Japanese books I’ve read. The first, most famous of these is Snow Country.

Knowledge of the book runs deeply in the cultural psyche. I have a group of ninensei (second-year) boys at one of my schools that I spent a lot of time with. They all speak and understand English quite well and often drop by the teacher’s room after class to talk to me (the other English teachers call them my “fan club”). Recently, the topic of Japanese literature came up, and I told them that I had really enjoyed Snow Country. Almost in unison, the four of them quoted the opening line of the book to me in Japanese – 国境の長いトンネルを抜けると、雪国であった. They told me it was very famous, and that most Japanese know it by heart, as they did, even though they hadn’t ever read the book, much like we would know “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” even though not everyone who can recite the line has read A Tale of Two Cities.

I asked my students to translate the words into English for me, which they did, and that alone was impressive, to have four 17-year old instantaneous literary translators standing in front of me. What I found most interesting, though, was their interpretation was not exactly as I had remembered the opening line sounding. When I got home, I looked it up in my copy of the book.

In a translation by Seidensticker, the opening line reads :

The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

The boys’ version, however, had been something more like :

I went through the long tunnel and on the other side saw the snow country.

This difference in subject makes more sense in terms of how the Japanese language is structured. Often omitting subjects, the doers of actions, Japanese tends towards passive structures and blameless events without agency. Things just happen. This obviously differs in English, which needs a subject and prefers structures that identify the subject. It is one of the (many) reasons it can be difficult to put Japanese and English in terms of the other. Whole ways of expressing action and agency change, and the implications of meaning change in tandem.

These two versions evoke very different images of the scene. Since I had this conversation with my students, a friend sent me the link to a forum discussing this very issue, since, apparently, the perhaps “faulty” translation of the first line of Snow Country is a bit of a controversy. And this isn’t the first time this kind of discrepancy between expert translators and what Japanese people themselves tell me has come up. My supervisor gave me an English copy of the short story “The Salamander,” by Masuji Ibuse, but she told me that the final lines in Japanese read very differently than the translation – to such a degree that it altered the way the entire story could be interpreted.

This leaves me wondering if such as a thing as a non-faulty translation (of anything) is possible. I’ve been reading translations of famous books for years, but this is the first time I’ve been able to experience “real-time” translators, so to speak, and the differences have been more pronounced than I would have expected. With my own nearly daily attempts at translating my thoughts into Japanese, these experiences have done much to show me the elusive nature of language, of the nuances of changing between languages, how far it can be from a point-by-point transformation, and how there is vast grey area in any such endeavor. I’d never given much thought to how my beloved books went from being in one language to being in another, but in light of the sophisticated attempts of high schoolers to do what I am not able to do myself, but need experts to do for me, I can appreciate more the subtlety of it all, and, by their very nature, the wildness of words.

Spending Easter Away

The first Easter I spent away from my family was during college, while on exchange in England. It was the first major holiday (of many to come) that I spent apart from my parents, brother, aunts, uncles and cousins, and although we tried to skype on the day to make up for my felt absence, the effect remained nowhere near the same. It seemed a bit of a waste, in a way, to even try.

England, as a country, is perhaps even more Easter-obsessed than America, so as a whole, my experience away was not lacking in Easter-related paraphernalia – Cadbury eggs and communion and bunny decorations – but in family. However, my first Easter in Japan, devoid of a fancy dinner with rosemary rolls as well as familial company, proved to be the most foreign-feeling version of a Western holiday away I have yet experienced.

Last year, as Easter morning dawned mere hours after the conclusion of a typical all-you-can-drink binge at a beloved local bar, it felt wrong not to go to church. Even in England, I had easily managed to find a service to attend, and not going seemed even more untraditional than my lack of chocolate rabbit and egg hunt did. With a small group of similarly-minded Westerners, whose cultural clock sounded “time for church” on Easter day, I headed off to find something resembling what we were used to, only in Japan. We had given up the idea of a service in English. We settled for an atmosphere that felt familiar.

We decided upon a small church in Yokote. Its membership came out to around eight, almost all sixty years old or older, with our one-time group of six ragtag foreigners in search of some Easter love nearly doubling the congregation’s size. The parishioners read their Bibles and prayed and sang hymns, sitting on hard wooden pews, just as we may have back home, except it was all conducted in Japanese. It felt surreal to witness the motions and sentiments that were so familiar sounding so foreign on their earnest tongues.

They invited us to stay after the service for tea and snacks, and we spent the next two hours attempting to communicate and to explain about Easter in the West to them, natives of a country that does not celebrate the holiday and whose only personal connection to it was purely religious. It had no commercialism for them; it was only a celebration of their faith, the roots of which the West has lost to the ubiquity of paper chicks and hollow candy eggs.

There is no Easter in Japan – cultural knowledge about it is limited at best, and it is not celebrated with family or as any special Sunday. I’ve asked my students what they know about Easter, and they never get further than a few whispers of the word “eggs.” Thus, the simplicity of the event for the church-goers we met that day was refreshing – as well as harrowing. What is something when it is returned to its roots by a country that did not birth it, but adopted it only in part and without the frivolity? They gave us hardboiled eggs wrapped in plastic sleeves of green Easter scenes as we left, images the most like what we were used to Easter being and given to us because they thought that’s what we would want.

That Japanese Easter wasn’t the family-centered event I was used to, but it wasn’t the most unlike Easter it could have been. No, I didn’t understand the words spoken during the service, and no, the snacks served to us by kindly old folks were not traditional Easter fare, but there was an innocence to their interpretation of the holiday that I’m not sure has existed for me within my lifetime. I think we, as the collective West, lost that vantage point on the holiday a long time ago – for me, the day has always had as much Chocolate about it as Cross. However, having stripped away the sales pitches, Japan has left Easter a cleaner and more earnest day of celebration, one of refreshing cultural obscurity and convicting simple belief.

Life, Presently

When I was in America over Christmas break, it was brought to my attention several times that I don’t blog often enough and that people don’t know what’s going on in my life. My deepest apologies. In light of this, giving the people what they want and what not, I’ve been trying to blog more often and with greater regularity. I hope to continue this. However, I’ve noticed my blogs don’t often focus on my life and instead highlight specific topics or incidents that occur, which I hope isn’t bad, but with this particular post, I’d like to catch everyone up on what’s been happening and what will be happening in the near future.

Here’s a handy list to follow.

1) Graduation just happened at school. This means saying goodbye to some of my favorite students who have been very influential in making me feel at home in Japan and in my classrooms. This makes me sad, but also happy, because several of them will be starting at AIU (the English-speaking international university in Akita) in April, so they will be in the area still and will be studying English rigorously. I am very excited and proud of them and look forward to being able to have coffee with them still and stay a part of their lives and educations.

2) Consequently, the new school year starts in April, so that means whole new classes of first years and a potentially complete reshuffling of staff. This can be either good or bad, depending on if I get teachers who are good, and lose teachers who are not so good (although I don’t really have teachers like that this year, so who knows). However, it could just as easily go the other way. Russian roulette : Japanese teachers edition. Everyone gets really stressed out this time of year.

3) The snow still hasn’t melted – which is extremely unusual for the area, since it’s usually gone by now. Winter needs to be over, because bullet trains are derailing and people are falling off their roofs and dying, and nothing looks pretty anymore, it just looks dirty.

4) In April I will be going to Hawaii for a week and will be visiting two graduate schools in Honolulu. They both offer teaching second language programs, in differing incarnations, and I have been corresponding with gradate chairs and financial aid departments at both campuses to set up meetings and find out more about my options and the programs themselves. Stay tuned.

5) Later on in April, during what is fondly referred to as Golden Week (a week when public holidays tend to stack up and give you many free days off in a row), I will be going on a trip by myself to Vietnam and Cambodia. It’s been awhile since I’ve vacationed alone (the last time was Ireland, spring 2010), and I’m pretty excited about it, since this is really the last international trip I plan on taking before I leave Japan. I haven’t really started planning this yet, other than getting visas sorted and booking flights, so if you have suggestions of places to see or things to do, please let me know!

6) Speaking of leaving Japan, I won’t be doing so this year. I decided to re-contract once again and, thus, will be staying on until 2014. This year’s decision was much more difficult to make than last year’s, but I’m excited to stay, and the main reason for that is I will be able to see my current second-years graduate. I have been really close with this class of students, and I would love to stay around and see their entire high school careers from beginning to end (they started when I started). Since high school is three years, there’s a nice symmetry in also staying three years. So, I will be.

That’s the big news! Thanks for being along for the ride, everyone.

Also, yesterday was the two year anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake that wrecked the area, particularly eastern Japan. Many cities and towns are still recovering, and many people still live in temporary shelters. There remains a long way to go before life returns to normal for many people, so let us not forget those who suffer daily, even so close to (my) home.

Humorous KitKat wrapper

To Read or Not to Read (the Ex-Pat Memoir)?

Recently, I’ve been in a stalemate with a friend over a book. Since I was an English major and so was she, locking eyes and refusing to budge about literary topics isn’t something that is unfamiliar to either one of us – especially with each other. However, this book, and the root of its controversy, comes out of a slightly different place than my usual discrepancies about literature do.

The book is Hokkaido Highway Blues, by Will Ferguson, published in 2003. Although I’ve never read it, I know roughly that it’s about a guy who starts south in Japan and works his way north, following the cherry blossoms as they open up across the landscape of the whole country. As a premise, this sounds interesting enough – hanami is, after all, one of the most magical times in Japan, a time which makes you pause and think, Hey, this weird country might not just be a bizarre, time-warped Saturday-Morning-cartoon-gone-wrong and might actually have some cool things going for it, a time which makes you forgive all the mind-boggling stuff that happens to you in a day because every crosswalk and too-tiny side street looks so damn pretty. The concept of taking a trip across Japan with hanami in mind, maintaining that lovin’ feeling for longer than the short week it lasts in any one place, seems like it would portray Japan at its most lovely and appreciated and impressive, and would probably leave the writer with an indelible sense of the beauty of the country, making the aspects that don’t make sense easier to swallow, and the inevitably interspersed, monologued musings on the differences in culture, and the nature of the Japanese, and the pros and cons of each, and blah blah blah, shimmer a bit more in the springtime sunlight than in the dead of snow-soaked winter.

But like I said, I haven’t read it. Maybe my prediction is all wrong. That’s exactly the controversy. Basically, I’m convinced that all ex-pat memoirs about Japan are essentially the same. My friend says this one is somehow set apart from the others, and from my own experience, and is worth the read. I say I can’t be bothered, now or probably ever, to read it.

Since I am an ex-pat currently living in Japan, I can’t really imagine someone else in my position saying something truly unique that hasn’t been said before, or that I myself haven’t thought or said before, or that my friends and colleagues and I haven’t discussed before, albeit they may be able to say it more eloquently than I have. The idea of reading an ex-pat memoir, even one that is “hilarious,” according to my friend, seems much too much like preaching to the choir, which I do not view as the point of literature (except for possibly satires, but since the book in question is not a satire, nor was it intended to be one, this point does not apply). I read to experience new things, or things from a new perspective, not to read about what I am already experiencing, stylistically expressed. My life, right now and for the last two years, has been Japan and the Japanese, and this is my home (at least for now, it feels like home). I have no desire to have that acute of a degree of form-equaling-content in my reading material and my real world. Why be that meta, I ask? Reading an ex-pat memoir will only confirm what I already know to be true, while simplifying some things (as is inevitable in expressing experiences) and expanding on others. I don’t care to have my own perspective thus affirmed – I would rather have it broadened by perspectives that are not so closely aligned with my own, and I do not think ex-pat memoirs can be anything but so closely aligned with my own. What quotes my friend has chosen to send me from the book have only confirmed this bias to be true.

I’m not anti-ex-pat memoir. If we were somehow talking about the ex-pat memoir of a Japanese in the West, or a Westerner teaching in Venezuela, those I would read, given they are insider’s viewpoints I don’t already understand. The Western ex-pat in Japan, however – I already understand all too well. There isn’t anything new to be said, just the same sentiments said in different ways.


The book in question

I hadn’t realized the depth of my distaste for this idea of reading such a book until its pages were being pushed on me by my well-meaning friend (whose recommendations, it should be noted, I am usually interested in). The idea is almost repulsive to me and seems an absurd waste of time. Granted, I am willing to admit to a certain level of arrogance on this point, seeing as how the idea is so repugnant that I haven’t read even one complete specimen from the genre I am denouncing, outside of essay-type writing and blog writing, my short forays into which have done nothing but confirm my pre-held bias against them. I don’t read them for the same reason I didn’t read them before I came here, and I doubt I will read them after I leave – I want my experience in Japan to be as untainted by the experiences of others, unknown to me, as possible. Although I know this isn’t entirely achievable – as with anything, we all come into adventures with ideas about how they’re going to go – I wanted (and want, and will want) my time here to be as uniquely my own as it can be, with me finding my own way to express my views about culture and thought. Even if they are not the most stylistic, they will be mine, the aggregate of my experiences, and I’d rather have my Japan be thus my own, not an amalgamation made up of the views of many others before me.

Making Up Names for Ourselves in Sapporo

Recently, I visited Sapporo for its famous Yuki Matsuri (snow festival). This extravaganza of snow involves block after block of the city’s main drag sculpted with icy precision into giant tableaus that included a scene of a beautiful woman and a farm, a Thai palace, happy cartoons in a Hawaiian raft, and a ski jump featuring impressive shows of talent by skiers and snowboarders. Mixed in with the larger attractions were smaller snow creations of popular characters, friendly animals, dedications to various institutions. This artwork was surrounded by food stalls peddling local Sapporo specialties and the ubiquitous hordes of amateur photographers, all simultaneously blocking each other’s perfect shots.

A giant advertistment for Hawai'i. As if the freezing temperatures weren't enough.

For us, there was also a class of local sixth grade students.

The first group that approached us, three foreigners snapping pictures like everyone else, consisted of four bright-eyed and nervously giggling children holding pre-written questions in English so cute we couldn’t help but give them our time when they shyly asked if they “could have a moment.” The yellow vests they wore and the signs around their necks proclaiming “English activity” signaled to us just the kind of communication it is our job to encourage : Japanese going out of their comfort zones in attempts to communicate with people they don’t usually and to take part in the larger, global world.

The leader of the group, the one with the lamented card of questions in hand, asked our names and had us write them down in a little notebook. How charming! They then asked what country we were from, our favorite sport (this was my question, and I answered soccer, even though I don’t give two figs about any sport), and our favorite food. A different question of each of us – further charming. The interview took less than two minutes, and as the children thanked us, still giggling, we felt as though we had contributed just a little bit to their larger global education. Gaijin for the win.

Then, a second group approached us and asked the same questions. This was fine, because they were still cute and giggling and nervous, and I decided that since I had already committed to the soccer response, I would stick with it. They also thanked us and left.

And then a third group came up. And then a fourth.We tried to explain to them in Japanese that we had already answered two and three times before, but they didn’t seem to mind that this persistence would completely skew their results when they all compared notes later, so by the fourth group, I had changed my name to Abby, and then Mary for the fifth group, and answered pizza when they asked what my favorite food was (although this is definitely not a lie of the same caliber as telling them my name was something other than what my name actually is). With the fifth group, we tried to explain to the teacher accompanying them how many times we had answered these questions, but she tartly retorted, “Please use English!!” and we were again answering the same monotonous questions, and the giggling had ceased to be charming about two groups before.

We started employing evasive maneuvers to avoid them. We moved on to the next block of snow art, but they were everywhere, little clumps of four to five children eagerly scanning the crowds for anyone who didn’t look Japanese. This had definitively become racial profiling and was no longer charming. We avoided eye contact. We stared at the ground. We saw other foreigners being questioned and rejoiced that it was a) not us, or b) a group we’d already talked to.

When a sixth group approached, we told them we spoke German.

Snow owls

Now, I didn’t feel good about this, because the ALT inside me wanted to help them out, but my inner human being could not take one more round of asinine questions, the answers to which I was making up anyway. My name is not Mary. I’m not from the U.K. I don’t actually like soccer. I definitely don’t speak German.

However, there were interesting things about how the students responded to our answers. There being three of us and three questions, usually a group would ask each of us one question. To the students, if one of us was from the U.K., we all were. If one of us liked soccer or unagi-don, we all did. All but one of the five groups we talked to us assumed that the answers one of us provided applied to the whole group.

This was especially true of the question, “where are you from.” Because Japan is such a homogeny, the sixth graders did not think about the possibility that three people together could all be from different countries, which we all were. Although they could imagine that we could all like different food or sports, since they all liked different food or sports, they didn’t think that we could be from different places, because they are all from the same place. Only one group asked each of us each question and noted our different responses to each of those questions.

There are Japanese; there are foreigners. There are not really different kinds of foreigners, and especially not foreigners-hanging-together-but-from-different-countries.This perhaps illustrates their embedded view about the world as well as anything – namely, that there isn’t a lot of grey area in it. Although I applaud the students’ attempts at communicating, and especially the school for arranging such an activity for them to experience, I’m not sure how much they could really learn from Abby and Mary, who both like soccer and are from New Zealand. On the other hand, maybe just meeting Abby and Mary is enough.

Asking Dirty Questions - A Compare and Contrast

Obama was recently re-elected for his second term as president of the United States. In his sweeping acceptance speech, he makes a remark about how citizens of America can make their own futures happen if they work hard, no matter if they are black or white, gay or straight, abled or disabled (fast forward to around 21:20 for the quote).

With one statement, Obama banks on the underlying assumptions of the country that Americans are a) diverse, and b) capable of creating opportunities for themselves where there may not otherwise be any. I think most Americans would agree that these two ideas are, at their core, true – at least idealistically if not also practically. We want to, and do, believe in our iconic melting-pot-ness, and we further believe in our pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps-ness. We like to believe that these ideas can work together for the creativity and innovation we value so highly in an economy that is continually being shaped by new ideas and the new-thinking people who have the ideas and the gumption to realize them. We like to believe these two things together are the best system.

In a country like Japan, however, these fundamental “truths” remain not so self-evident. I really do appreciate when my JTEs ask me questions, and although most often these questions are about whether or not a particular grammatical structure works in a particular sentence, sometimes, the more interesting times, they genuinely ask me a question about where I’m from, about the kind of world I’m used to and they aren’t, about things they don’t understand. Like about a society seemingly preoccupied with diversity, and moreover, the labeling of that diversity.

My JTE had watched Obama’s speech and had latched onto that first truth – he quoted Obama’s line with the parallel stereotypes and then asked me, “Is there really so much discrimination in America?” Is there really so much disunity between groups that such delineation, opposing pairs of words positioned together suggesting the desire for greater unity between them, even becomes necessary, especially at a time of celebration, like the election of a national leader?

I immediately answered yes.

In such positioning of words, although a rhetorical device intended to be emotional and inclusive, I think there is a further assumption that Americans don’t want to think about. We prefer to focus on the feel-good intensity of the reconciliation of differences, but when confronted with the same rhetoric, my JTE saw the emphasis not on hoped-for future cooperation, but on the existing differences themselves.

In a homogeny like Japan, he said, such rhetoric wouldn’t be necessary, because people do not divide themselves into subgroups clamoring for individual recognition, for equal validation. There isn’t the truth of diversity, and further, there isn’t the truth of one’s own merit being able to change the course of the greater society. In Japan, people do not fight to change greater society – society conforms individuals to itself. For example. at one of the high schools I teach at, when first-grade students enter the school, they go on a weekend getaway that is designed to give them a crash course in “moral” education, just to make sure they are clear on what is expected of them for the rest of their lives, even though all of them have had such moral education classes since elementary school. It’s done so everyone enters on the same page, with the same barriers to free-thinking and innovation in place before they even start their regular schedules. Nipping any potential deviations in the bud, so to speak. It’s what my American fundamental truths want to call brainwashing.

Or it could just as easily be my American need for free speech, stemming from free thinking, talking.

2012 Ballot

Either way, it’s me recoiling from the ideas of not cherishing diversity and not encouraging individual effort in the belief that what I think matters and that I have the power to change a broken system. We do not view ourselves as the problems, but rather the solutions to the problems, perpetrated by society.

This is not the Japanese outlook. If society falters, it is the fault of certain individuals who have strayed from the course. Always this is viewed as negative. Because of this view, Japan has even more recently elected its eighth prime minister in seven years, the second elected in the year and a half I have been in Japan. There is some expectation that if society has a problem, it is the duty of the people to replace the figurehead. However, this does not actually address any of the real, underlying problems that led the previous leader, or the one before that, to his socially perceived failure. It merely shuffles around the cabinet, causing further confusion and a greater slowing down of possible solutions, a move which would seem to me counterintuitive to fixing what the problems actually are. There is too little focus given to the whole, which causes the people to lose sight of the forest for the guide who claims to know the best path out.

I’d like to believe that one or the other contrasting system could be objectively better, but that is not a luxury given to systems run by people who have flaws and who fail, which both systems inherently have. Which is better is not a question solved by the emphasis on – or lack of – diversity, or by individuals – or group – who believes they can better the system for everyone by addressing its perceived problems. It will never be as simple as choosing one over the other, but hopefully, by encouraging honest dialogue, like the one initiated by my JTE, we can find ways to better appreciate the strengths of both, especially the one other to us, and improve the world’s system for everyone.

My Broken Shower

A week and a half ago the hot water heater in my shower broke. I’ve previously outlined all the reasons why winter is so cold here, so I won’t go into it again, but even without all of those reasons, living sans hot showers in the middle of winter in any country is a pretty pitiable situation. Following an incident involving billowing, black smoke and the smell of burning plastic, I had three different men on two different days come to make sure that, yes indeed, the heater is broken and needs to be fixed (which is, obviously, the simple truth I had informed them of initially, but in typical Japanese style, half the time fixing something is spent confirming the fact that there really is a problem in the first place). It won’t be fixed till this next Saturday, which means that I will have been shower-less for over two weeks, and have been showering at a friend’s and using an alternative that is pretty unique to Japan.

Fortunately for my current situation and for others in similar situations (since I can only imagine there must be others), Japan likes public bathing facilities. Called onsens, these baths often feature special, magically scented/filtered/originated water that promises to not only clean you, but also relax you and your weary soul. The onsens I have visited have all been scenic and spa-like in both (my) purpose and (their) execution, but my present conundrum has shown me that the most likely reason Japan’s onsen culture has continued into the present age is because winter here sucks and their water heaters break because many of them are poorly designed and the people need a socially acceptable alternative to taking showers the same temperature as glaciers. Hence, the perpetuation of resort-like, elaborate public baths in the middle of cities that are generally not terribly expensive (maybe $7 for as long as you want, and there are usually sauna rooms, etc., and shampoo-type products provided) and are often quite beautiful.

One potential snag, however, for the modern Western in his/her enjoyment of relaxation in a cedar-scented hot tub with other people he/she doesn’t know is the fact that many of these onsens remain traditionally traditional and don’t allow tattoos. Tattoos are still social taboos in Japan, but they also aren’t difficult to cover up if you are wearing clothes, so they don’t have much effect on everyday life and work. At an onsen, however, where the point is to get clean, hiding the ink becomes near-impossible (I’ve heard of people covering them up with bandages, but that definitely seems not worth the effort. Especially if you have more than one). Up until this point, the tattoo/onsen non-allowance hasn’t been issue for me because it was either a) not a problem at the particular onsen, or b) I just didn’t ask. This is generally more of a problem at old-school onsens which keep stricter rules, and less of one at onsens in bigger cities with more younger (or foreign) clientele. So it surprised me when, at an onsen in a city which had plenty of younger people , I was interrupted while washing my hair by a woman telling me that I actually wasn’t allowed to enter the facilities with tattoos, but it was fine for that day, presumably because I’d already paid and, well, had already started my onsen-ing. Which is really too bad, because the particular place had a nice vibe and was only a fifteen-minute drive from my house. Not that I can now ever go back again. However, if you are ever in Akita City, I’d recommend it – as long as you are tattoo-less.

Snow Footprints

 

About Winter

I had forgotten for a moment it had snowed till I looked out the window. On the rooftops lay a white overcoat which wouldn’t melt until March, thick and looking not quite real. The tops of houses do not form the high peaked triangles of the West, but instead mostly are flat, allowing the snow to pile up and give a semi-accurate representation of how much had fallen since winter had begun over a month ago. The roofs indicate about eighteen inches. It only grows deeper.

In the distance at the top of the city’s central hill I could see Senshu Koen’s lookout tower, a building inclemently Japanese with its spiked turrets at either end and its curved sloping sides. It rose above the sleepy, snowy city by just a floor or so, its lookout deck level with the top of the tree line I could see from the big windows at school. No trees have leaves because they don’t grow evergreens here, just the kind that died in winter. Or hibernated. The trees never look like they have perished so much as they appear to be taking a nap. They make autumn a riot of pristine colors; they make winter look like it needs another blanket.

The snow lays on top of everything and makes it cold. It doesn’t act as insulation because Japan doesn’t have any, except in the chilliest reaches of Hokkaido prefecture where it is deemed cold enough to warrant protecting the inside from the outside – instead the snow is an everyday reminder that I will be cold from the moment I get out of bed to the moment my electric blanket kicks in again at night. The ironic thing about the blanket is that in between the off and high settings not much heat is produced, which often means I wake up sweating, and since the purpose of sweat is to cool a body down, I am usually colder than when I start, in addition to being sweaty. Still. In a country where the most common method of heating the everyday below-freezing temperatures is with either expensive electricity or open kerosene flames, with which carbon monoxide is a constant worry, one learns to wear light layers even inside, to minimize the amount of necessary living space, and to close the doors of all rooms not being utilized. For me, this means no spare bedroom except as a place to store coats and empty cardboard boxes, and heating the open bathroom area with a tiny halogen heater that accomplishes little unless left on for a full 24 hours.

We fill our rice paper houses with unabashed fire hazards.

To survive winter, one also buys a kotatsu, possibly a heated carpet, and numerous bottles of alcohol. Recently a flyer left on my desk at school featured clip art of a snuggly cat ready for winter in Japan. The cat was under a kotatsu and had a kerosene heater beside it. As I explained to my parents, the picture is essentially correct in representing actual Japanese winter survival methods, minus the fact that the cat doesn’t have any booze with it and isn’t wretchedly crying.

 

In this way, people seem simultaneously unfazed and defeated by winter. On any given day I see old women riding bicycles down frozen roadways in a blizzard, and heated highways, while I also see an inherent desperation on the part of everyone to hunker down and just survive, refusing to consider that maybe there exist in the world ways to make the cold more bearable.

School classrooms have radiators and sometimes become so warm with 30+ bodies the students open a window; in hallways you can see your breath. It seems apparent that a middle-ground between these two extremes should exist, and in fact it does exist. It’s called central heating, a concept Japan and all Japanese people would consider magical and well-worth their investment if not for its convenience and efficiency, but also for its pure joy in controlled-atmospheric form. However, despite such technologies being commonplace in countries Japanese consider their equals and quite possibly beneath them, we continue on with our archaic, third-world attempts at a manageable winter. It doesn’t make sense. And yet there you have it.

My life in winter looks little like that of the cat in the cartoon, as my life in Japan often looks little like the cartoons that seem to define, even dictate, the life of every Japanese person around me.  Everything, for them, has big eyes and makes sound effects when it moves, is covered in fur, or has its own theme song. Everything, for me, is trying to act like I still have a real life and a career and bills and haven’t been magically transported to the gaijin supporting character role of an anime episode. I will never wear a pleated skirt for this very reason – as a safety measure against being conformed too much to the fluffy, feel-good lives the high school students around me appear to occupy. I have to remind myself constantly that instances here are weird and would be mocked if they occurred anywhere but here.

The grown man beside me drinks tomato juice boxes. Case in point.

However, despite all the bizarre customs and, frankly, counterintuitive ones, Japan looks beautiful in its snowy overcoat, and I don’t really mind having a heated table to curl up under every night. When winter ends, we have hanami (cherry blossom viewing), and when hanami ends, we have summer festivals, and when summer festivals end, we have kouyo (autumn leaf viewing), and when kouyo ends, we have winter again, as though Japan just goes from wearing one gorgeous kimono to the next in succession with the seasons, like an ancient princess used to having her own theme song play all year long.