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.