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.

There's a Lot of Paperwork Involved with Intruding

I don’t think there are very many places on the planet where putting in eye drops during class is considered acceptable behavior, but drinking water is not. Where sixteen year old boys have stuffed bear pencil cases and folders with pictures of their favorite members of J-idol boy bands printed on them. Where ping-pong is a legitimate sport, even for those cool enough to be on the rugby team.

But that, friends, is high school in Japan.

Every day I see these kids, and although many of the things that initially struck me as very odd I can gloss over without noticing now, there are still moments when I think, How has your society led you to this and you think it’s normal?

Students at a tea festival

 Take the very structure of students’ world. They come to school in the morning, by themselves and sometimes traveling great distances. They have been doing this since elementary school, where they are taught how to come and go from school alone and be safe. Although at first this might seem to encourage a level of independence largely missing from American schools, it is immediately tempered by other aspects, like the hour-by-hour record of how they spent their time they are required to turn in to their homeroom teachers every day. In high school. The homeroom teacher is then supposed to evaluate these forms and determine if each individual student is studying enough and sleeping enough in a day. Every moment is accounted for and judged for its prescription to the sanctioned standards.

When I learned of this, I was immediately shocked at the intrusiveness of it, and was further shocked that my supervisor was shocked that American schools did not require students to do likewise.

“So, you know how many hours a day a student studies?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “We are supposed to tell them if it’s not enough.”

She admits that, mostly, it’s just annoying busywork for the teachers, but in their roles as moral guides for students’ wellbeing, they are culturally obligated to both know and care about literally every minute of their charges’ time.

“Why don’t students just lie?” I continue.

“What?” she exclaims, now the one shocked.

“Yeah, I mean, they can just say they are studying for three hours, but really they study for one and watch TV for the other two. Who’s going to know? They could just lie,” I tell her. “If we had to do this in America…well, first, no one would, but if we did…students would just lie.”

“I suppose they could lie,” she ponders, like the idea has never occurred to her before, that one of her brood could have been untruthful on official paperwork.

Before class

The idea, to them, really is that shocking.

Later, I brought the idea up with students, to see how they would react. We were discussing admission to Tokyo University, Japan’s version of Harvard. Commonly known as Toudai, the university recently started allowing September enrollment as an alternative to April enrollment, in order to encourage more foreign students to come and to make it easier for Japanese students to study abroad. When Japanese students apply, they came opt to begin school in September, but a condition of this is that they provide an account of how they plan to spend the summer in between finishing high school and starting college. What they plan to do – travel, work, study independently, etc. – is a factor in whether they are accepted to the university at all.

“You tell the university what you want to do, and that can affect if you get in, but do they check?” I ask.

“Check what?” students ask.

“Check if you did what you said you were going to do. Do they talk to your boss or your parents about what you did over the summer?”

“Maybe they don’t check,” they say.

“So, you could lie.”

“Lie?” they ask.

“Yes, you could say you were going to do something, get in to the school, and then not do it. If they don’t check, then it doesn’t matter, right?”

They all look at me like they don’t understand. Lie?, their faces puzzle over the word, again like it’s something that has never occurred to them. It’s shocking, even the suggestion of it. Mostly because it’s really not something they’ve ever thought about doing before.

The rugby team making lunch

I don’t think there are very many places on the planet where people have their lives so closely monitored, and yet have never considered the possibility of being untruthful about any of it. That’s an aspect of life here that I both admire and which concerns me. At its most basic level, it’s the result of people who don’t think outside the box that has been prescribed to them, and that, I think, inherently limits Japan. Although their honesty is honorable, I think the extreme to which it is carried out here results in naiveté and lack of imagination in problem-solving. They do precisely as they are told. Never will it occur to one of them to drink water in class – though all of them will put in eye drops.

Originally published at akitaculture.wordpress.com

My Other Blog

Recently, I started blogging with some fellow ALTs in Akita-ken about our beloved prefecture. Our goal is compile not only information, but mainly the cultural activites and oppurtunites that are available here by looking at musuems, restaurants, books, movies, festivals, exhibitions, and culture more generally.

We'd love it if you could check it out, or contribute, if there's something about Akita you'd like other people to know about. Here's the link:

http://akitaculture.wordpress.com/

どうもありがとう!

Rumor Has It You Ain't Got Her Love Anymore

I am sitting in the teacher’s room after school. A few students absently clean the area around me, occasionally exchanging solemn whispers. Everything is peaceful. Then, one of my favorite ninenseis boys comes bounding in and plops violently in the chair next me.


“Jeshii,” he says, “My girlfriend…Divorce!”

Divorce?

Through a series of questions, I learn that although he and his girlfriend had not broken up yet, there was a rumor going around school which he had heard from a few other people that his girlfriend intended to break up with him.

Do you want to break up?, I ask.

Well, I love her, buuuutttt....maybe she does not love me, he says.

Have you talked to her?

No.

Are you going to talk to her?

No, no, no…, and he looks at me like this is a ridiculous suggestion.

I laugh. So you are just going to wait and see?

Yes!

He then bounds out of the teacher’s room in the same manner in which he had entered, the sole purpose of his visit being to tell me about his love life, and I realize…that I am in the know, in the school gossip circle! They now tell me things, rumors, about their lives!

I also realize how much high school really is the same everywhere.



Author’s note: A few weeks later it was reported to me that they had in fact not broken up, and as far as I know, are still together. I asked him if he thought it was "rabu rabu" forever. He thinks maybe not. Ah well.

Korea and My Grandfather

I recently read an article, and it got me thinking. Here’s the link if you’re interested in where this all started:


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=157396344

I also, a little less recently, visited South Korea for the first time. I didn’t think about it much during my stay, but that trip was the first time anyone in my family has been to Korea since my grandfather was in the war there in the 50’s. Presumably, my trip was only the second time anyone in my immediate family has ever been to Korea.

Obviously, Seoul is a very different place now from when my grandfather drove ambulances during the war. Obviously, he wasn’t there as a tourist. I remember when my grandmother died, and as we were going through all the many, many things in her house, we found a trunk of souvenirs my grandfather had brought back from that tour – I want to say there was a jacket, but I could be remembering that part incorrectly. Mostly, I remember the silk scarves printed with famous Korean scenes on them. They seemed paralyzed into the creases and folds the years they had spent buried in that truck, with no one looking at them, had put them in. I was eleven when I saw them, and even then I realized how little I knew about the places my grandparents had seen on the trips their kids, my dad and aunt and uncles, hadn’t gone on and therefore couldn’t tell me about. I wanted to know about the Korea he had seen.

I also remember a photograph of my grandfather positioned in the front seat of one of those ambulances, knees drawn up because he was very tall, wearing his uniform. It was a beautiful picture, and I remember looking at the trees in the background behind the ambulance, visible through the windows of the drivers’ cockpit.

Thinking back on what I saw of Korea myself, I can imagine that photograph superimposed over the scenes I witnessed. Even in the city there are patches that seem quite rural, and there are such trees there even now. Did he visit the Secret Garden while he was there? I did – but I don’t know how much our experiences overlap, even sixty years apart, if they do at all. A soldier then and a teacher now, sharing even a little of the same experience. That I, eleven years after being eleven and looking at those old trifles in a chest, would go there myself. I wouldn’t have thought it. I would have liked to talk to him about it, to share.

So even though he wasn’t buried on Korean soil, his gravestone has the mark of his war – like all the gravestones in that cemetery do, a cemetery for veterans. I had never thought much of the fact my grandfather was a veteran. Because I hadn’t needed to. He died when I was eight, and his war experience was far removed by both time and space from when I was part of his experience, singing songs in a rocking chair, not thinking about death. But, now, having been there and having a better understanding of the nature of that war and the nature of war in general, I wish he and I could have talked about it – for him to see it then and me to see it now, and across all those years between our times and between the last time I saw him and now, he is still an intrinsic part of my experience – an experience I am only partly alone in.

In the article I link to above, families talk about going to a certain cemetery in Korea because their family members had died in the war. Mostly, these families are Chinese. In a way, I understand that sentiment – a connection to someone gone and far away, someone you still love and wish you knew more about, and their intrinsic connection to a place far away. So my Korea is just that, also my grandfather’s. My visit there was more than just a weekend – it was a red thread around a finger sixty years old, to always remember and to never forget.

Kids Say The Darndest Things : Part 2

These are more quotes from student essays that have come through my desk. Each quote is from a different essay by a different student, and original syntax and spelling have been maintained for the sake of authenticity.



On Love:

• “Love is danger word…”


On Staying Healthy:

• “[I do] Nothing. Is it about time I should worry about health? On the contrary, what about you?”


On Population Control:

• “In order to improve environment, I want to reduce number of people. If it falls down to half, we’ll use less electricity, fossil fuels, and so on. So I’m not going to get married in the future.”


On Forms of Words that Should Exist But Don’t:

• “No I amn’t.”

• “So it should be compulsory to learn English early…so we can learn it easilier.”

• “In terms of health, what importantest in food a day is breakfast.”


On Future Plans:

• “He wants to be farmer. His dream is to get married to a woman of matchless beauty.”

• “He has no hope for the future.”

• “She want to go to a college to learn education. She want to be a elementary school teacher because she likes children. Also, her dream is to marry. She will do her best.”

• “Her dream is an intercultural marriage.”


On How to Carry Large Pieces of Fruit:

• “A furoshiki is a one piece of square cloth. It’s very useful and environment-friendly. It’s up to your imagination how we use it. For example, we can wrap and bring a watermelon with it easier.”


On Hanafuda:

• “Hanafuda is one of Japanese game using cards with flower designs. There are twelve kinds of flowers that represent the twelve months of year. It’s like a nervous breakdown of cards in Europe.

The rule is very simple. So why don’t you play once?”


On False Impressions:

• “My brain works very actively. And my brain is very useful for studying. But I don’t use my perfect brain. So I am often said that Mr. Mizunoe is very fool. I think that I am a genius boy. So I want to say that I don’t use the all brain. I use a portion of my perfect brain. This is very mottainai. You had better not try to fool me.”


On Why You Might Bike Instead of Drive:

• “First, if he goes to his office slowly with a bike [instead of car], he can look around him. It makes him some exciting discoveries, so he likes it.

Second, he was swindled out of his money under a false promise of marriage. So he doesn’t have enough money.”


On Travel:

• “I want to go to Europe because rowing sports come from there…And also, I want to have real Italians.”

• “Reckless adventures ruin you.”

My Eco-Friendly Year : Trains

Last week marked the end of my nearly 400 days without a car. It was a day that should have come about 400 days earlier.

Before I came to Japan, I had visions of riding trains everywhere I needed to go, of the convenience of them all, of me with my nose buried in a book while scenic green rice fields rolled past in the background, surrounded by students and businessmen so plugged in they wouldn’t notice me stealing surreptitious glances in their respective directions.

But then I came to Japan.

And I realized that this romantic vision of train-as-primary-transportation really doesn’t work in reality, because the reality is that trains don’t drop you off in front of where you want to go. They take you to areas, towns, but not specific locations. Even if I took the train, I would still have to walk, bike, or bus to where I actually want to go, and, besides maybe a lovely ten-minute walk beside a river in the balmy autumn air, which never actually happened in reality either, these methods of completing journeys are not romantic and are not convenient and really just cancel out whatever enjoyment I may have gotten from the train ride itself. On which I never actually read a book anyway because there was too high a chance of me getting distracted and then missing my stop, and they don’t run often enough in my area of the middle-of-nowhere to make quick returns practical or timely options.

Akita is not Tokyo, and I don’t live in a movie.

I must always remind myself of these rudimentary facts.

Further, there’s the reality of not living all that close to the train station in my town, which requires a too-long walk or a bus ride to get to. And frankly, I really hate buses, I have always hated buses –  despite the zealous attempts of my grandmother during my childhood to convince me that, really, they are great places to meet new people – and I will continue to hate buses, and on trains I never know where to look. Out the window awkwardly behind me? At the people sitting on the bench across from me? Certainly not eye-level with the people standing up and facing me!…which leaves an uninteresting spot on the floor to study, and even then I usually can’t affect that practiced, glazed over, Japanese stare into nothingness, and it’s more like me, making everyone else on the train uncomfortable because the gaijin girl can’t keep her eyes to herself. It’s just unpleasant for everyone involved.

So, generally, the train situation could have been better, and again my naïve ideas about life in Japan shatter into a million pieces upon actual execution in real life. It wouldn’t be the first time, and even 400 days into my ex-pat existence here, I doubt it will be the last.