Adventures in Repatriation

On Dead Cats

2010-07-22T11:31:00.003+09:00

I wasn’t alive yet, but he had spent years killing snakes in Kansas fields, evading the deathjaws of coyotes, and he was sick. He had feline leukemia, already had two blood transfusions, a stent in his urethra. My mom and dad loved him like you love a cat when you don’t have children, and he was dying. My dad had this buffalo skin that he threw over a chair, furry and smelling of preserved hyde. Tom was sick and dying after years of snake-wrangling, and while he was sleeping on the buffalo chair he released his bladder. His urine burned acidic through the preserved skin and fur, and now the buffalo chair smells like preserved hyde and cat pee. The holes are still there from one time of many that Tom lost control of his bladder when he was very, very sick. His last night my parents put a towel on the bed for him to sleep on so the urine wouldn’t soak into the blankets. He could barely move by then, but he could still wail. My dad had a pistol, and this cat who he loved, he took him outside and shot him right through his kitty brain.

In my childhood home, the animals came to us. The cats came in waves, some of them starving, some lost, some covered in ticks with bellies full of parasites. Some chose us. Others we had dumped upon us by circumstance. We could never let a cat starve. When a new cat showed up, it was my dad’s job to insist that there’s no way we were keeping this one. As my sisters and I stretched out on the floor to rub the foundling’s belly, he would say things like, “Don’t get too comfortable. Your days here are numbered.” He would joke about throwing it out to the coyotes, though there were no coyotes in our part of Iowa. No coyotes, but a large house in the woods away from busy streets, which for a time was a domestic animal’s paradise.

Smokey

He was my first experience with death as something both permanent and unfair. Death was for ailing great-grandparents, incontinent dogs, and strangers on the news. Smokey had been a stray, and he was black. When giving children the privilege of naming an all-black cat, you can guarantee that they’ll end up naming it something stupid like Smokey. He was another who wasn’t supposed to stay, who my father threatened and rarely petted, but he was with us at least two years, virile and healthy and above all young when Mandi found his body frozen to the deck in the snow. When she told me he was dead, I went into my room and closed the door. I cried and realized that there was no possible way to make this situation better. He was dead forever, and that meant I would never ever see him again, and I couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t dead, because I’ll always know that he died suddenly and unfairly, frozen to the deck. After spending enough time alone, I joined the other mourners, my sisters, who were floating around the window watching my dad pick away at the ice and snow to disengage the corpse from the ground. His body was awry, twisted by sudden and mysterious death, and he didn’t seem like him anymore. We must have buried him. We probably even had a funeral. But all I remember is my dad putting his stiff body into a paper bag head first, and walking away with the cat’s hind legs and tail sticking out of the top. Though the body was obviously in the grips of rigor mortis, his slightly bent tail moved a bit at the tip with my father’s quick steps, and I wanted to stop him, to tell him to wait. Please check him again. He’s moving.

Halley

“What a happy cat,” people who didn’t know would say about her, and she was far from a happy cat. They thought she walked around purring all the time. How the constant rattling of her lungs, the choking and coughing and laboring to breathe could sound like happiness was beyond me. Halley was a purebred Siamese. She had come from a breeder who had a room of cages stacked high, wall-to-wall filled with wheezing cats. Later the vet would say that she had the worst case of asthma he had ever seen. He would say that he had never heard such terrible breathing when an animal wasn’t having an attack. We could hear her coming from anywhere in the house. Her crackling breaths announced her presence.

She wasn’t sociable. She didn’t like anyone but my mother, and my mother loved her. We thought it was weird—Halley looked like an alien, with giant eyes and an elongated face, her body scruffy and scrawny from a malnourished kittenhood. She didn’t care for being petted, would dip her back against your hand, but occasionally curl up and sleep in your crotch or on your butt while you were lying down. My mom and Halley had a bond, but for some reason, it fell on me to give her her daily asthma pill. And she was terrible at taking pills. When I became more experienced, I would hold her tightly under one arm with the corresponding hand around her chest, and with the other hand, shove the tiny pill to the back of her throat through the side of her mouth. When she gagged, I’d grab her muzzle and hold it shut while she pawed frantically at my hand, trying to slip away from my grasp. I’d pet her throat and say, “Swallow. Swallow. Swallow.” Eventually she did.

She was six years old, and she’d had two seizures in quick succession. Her breathing was worse than ever, and the vet said she wouldn’t last through Thanksgiving, when we were leaving town. So they shaved her dainty paw and held it as if she were some aristocratic lady about to dance. They offered the needle like a spray of perfume. As the needle slipped into her skin, she struggled, but with the expunging of the syringe’s contents, she went limp. I watched the transition in her eyes, one second wide open and scared, the next wide open and empty. The life had sunk out of her body, seemingly as soon as the syringe emptied. It was quick. The vet and the tech left the room while my mother cried and petted her dead body on the table. She tried to close Halley’s eyes, but they just snapped back open.

Mali

Mali was no accident. She was a deliberate acquisition, a purebred Abyssinian with almond eyes and sleek fur, her confirmation resembling a hieroglyph. Everyone liked her because she was beautiful, but I liked to think she didn’t like anyone the way she liked me. I was in middle school when we got her as a crazy kitten, and I made her like people by regularly forcing her to be held and petting her while informing her, “You’re a nice kitty.” As I grew into adolescence, Mali and I were similarly aloof and bitchy unless we were with our people, of course.

Interlude: When I talk to people who don’t like cats, they usually say something about how their dog loves them unconditionally, is at their beck and call, does what they want and will always be affectionate. I like dogs, and uncomplicated love has its perks. But I always say that when an animal has moods and feelings like you do, when they’re selective, it’s different when they choose to bond with you, when you know they wouldn’t just love any asshole on the street. And I think of Mali. She wasn’t terribly friendly, but she loved me. And for some reason, our Japanese exchange student, too.

I was in high school pulling an all-nighter when she came to me for help, but I didn’t realize what was going on. Her sleek fur was ruffled, and she was crying at me, but I was busy, I had college to get into, and I walked back and forth all night, between computer room and living room, my trifold presentation on starvation and drought in the Sahel taking shape with images of hollowed out eyes and alien limbs and floating bits of text. She followed after me meowing and I ignored her.

Within a couple days she wasn’t even moving. I placed her on my bed where she’d always slept, and overnight she expelled foul black liquid in two places on my comforter. I was seventeen and by that point scarcely believed in god, but I decided to use my last ounce of hope to pray that if she were going to die, let her die that night, with me. God said no. We took her to the vet the next day.

Back from school, I heard from my mom that it’s liver failure. We can either go to the vet to take her home, where she’ll likely die (but when?), or go to put her to sleep. I hadn’t made my decision in the car. The vet called my mother’s cell phone to tell us about the fluid collecting in her lungs. I made my decision, and I just wanted to be there so she didn’t die alone in a cage. When we arrived in the waiting room, populated with people and their pets on leashes, a tech sheltered us around the corner from the other patrons and told us quietly that she had just died. What followed was my first experience as a young adult falling apart completely in public. My entire upper body crumpled to my thighs, and I wailed, “no”, over and over again. The tech quickly ushered us into an exam room so we wouldn’t disturb the rest of the customers.

Inconsolable in my chair, they brought her in, wrapped in a blanket, appearing limp and asleep. The vet told us she had died in a tech’s arms, that the cat was so far gone she probably thought it was me. I said nothing, but I was sure it was a lie. She died in a cage, scared to death. The vet continued to talk. I wouldn’t think I’d want to hold her, but I did. The vet talked for what seemed like an hour, and toward the end, my attention was drawn to the cat’s eyelids. One lower lid was stuck overlapping an upper lid, and I noticed the traces of glue. Her jaw was going slack, and I could see that there was something inside, white and plastic, to keep it closed. I looked curiously at their presentation, and that’s when I gave up the cat’s body.

Sammy, Tiger, Luke (a dead dog)

Returning to Iowa after my first year of college, my home had become a different place. It was the first time my parents had lived without children, and the entire living room had been transformed to some kind of dog-sanctuary. The floor was strewn with new plush dog beds, bones, and toys. After plopping down in an overstuffed chair, I suddenly remarked, “Ugh, it’s dirty.”

“That’s Ivy’s chair,” my mom said, referring to our young English setter.

Meanwhile, the cats I grew up with were getting old and requiring increasing care. Sammy, the long-haired Birman, once handsome with a non-matting coat, had become grizzled and decrepit. He was only bones under the tangled fur that came out in clumps, and he spent most of his time hobbling around, bleating aimlessly. On my visit home, I watched as my mom hung a bag of fluids from the ceiling fan, then held Sammy on her lap and slipped the IV under his skin at the scruff of his neck as he squirmed in discomfort.

“We try to do this every day,” she told me.

Within a year, my dad had moved out and all the animal care fell on my mom. The old cats demanded to be fed high calorie wet catfood several times a day, and would only eat on the counter. Since they no longer had the physiques for jumping, they had to be lifted up to eat, then placed on the ground again once they were finished. Meanwhile, lacking the attention they were used to, the dogs were becoming increasingly protective. They travelled in a pack, roaming the grounds, barking and chasing at the slightest provocation. They blocked unknown cars from the driveway, their hackles raised, snarling. They chased bikers. They all took chase if one noticed a stranger too close to our property. They hunted in pack formation, listening for raccoons throughout the night. If one dog gave the signal, they would all clamor outside to surround their prey.

I was living in St. Paul and concentrating on school and my life away while my parents were divorcing and my mom was losing control of the house, the animals. Around the same time, my sister Natalie suffered a manic episode and spent a few days in the psych ward. I tried not to think about it too much in my daily life, catching only glimpses of despair in occasional e-mails and phone calls. That summer I came home for a week, my semiannual visit to face what I took refuge from the rest of the year. I came home to a household that was falling apart, while everyone seemed paralyzed in denial, inaction. The divorce was really happening, it was becoming increasingly obvious that we wouldn’t be able to afford to keep the house, and Natalie had come back from her stint in the psych ward crazier than ever. On top of that, our aging pets were facing a host of illnesses, tumors, weight loss, and when I asked if they’d been to the vet, my mom told me she hadn’t gotten around to it, she had a lot on her plate.

Maybe it was guilt. Maybe it was because at that point I was possibly the least damaged person in my family, but I was determined that I would fix as much as I could in that one week. I made vet appointments for all of the animals, the dogs on one day, the cats on another. Of the dogs, I was most concerned about Luke, the arthritic fourteen-year old English setter. Fatty tumors had been appearing all over his body, but the most troublesome was the one on top of his head. It was crusty, black, and growing, bubbling up pieces of diseased skin that periodically broke open and bled. The other dogs wouldn’t stop licking it, which made it bleed more. More dark, crusty tumors popped up over his eyelids, bleeding into his eyes and obscuring his vision.

My mom helped me the day we took the dogs to the vet. Sliding open the door of the minivan, I pulled Luke’s leash and called him out. He hesitated at the step down from the car, then tried to jump out and collapsed on the ground. I just stood there while my mom wordlessly lifted the eighty pound dog from the ground, as if she did that kind of thing every day.

I was assertive with the vet. I told her that these tumors were bothering him, that they needed to be removed, that we didn’t want to run tests, we just wanted to get rid of the tumors on his head. The vet was reluctant. “He’s very old, are you sure?”  

Yes, I’m sure. I didn’t know why him being old mattered. He may be old, but even if removing those tumors improved his quality of life a little, surely it was worth it. We scheduled the appointment for the surgery, which wouldn’t be for months.

Next were the cats.

 Let me tell you about Tiger. I found him in our garage on a very cold day after Christmas when I was seven. He was curled up on an old roll of carpet near the garbage bins, meowing a low, deep meow that I would never hear from him again. I picked him up and he instantly curled up in my arms. When I took him inside to show my dad, he gave me a look of disgust and said, “Is it alive?”

He was half-frozen and starving, but I was just a kid and didn’t realize how close to death he probably was. We nursed him back to health, and I named him Tiger because when you give a kid the privilege of naming an orange cat, you can guarantee they’ll name it something stupid like Tiger. He gradually became a robust, happy, affectionate cat who spent most of his time hunting or in the barn. He had a strange, staccato walk because of frostbite on his toes. We thought his scratchy, screen-door meow might have been because of damage the cold had done to his vocal cords. He was my cat, the first stray I had found and brought home.

When I was sixteen he was diagnosed with feline AIDS. The vet suggested we put him down then, but he seemed so happy and healthy. He remained healthy for years after that, even causing us to doubt the diagnosis. His health started failing around the same time as the other geriatric cats. He lost so much weight that when you petted him, you could feel every knob of his vertebrae, jutting hipbones, hollow at the flank. He began walking with his head tilted, his gait always a “pace” in horse terms; stepping simultaneously with both feet one side of his body, then both feet on the other side. I iterated all these details to the vet as Tiger sat on the exam table with his eyes half-closed.

“I can run some tests, but I won’t find out anything good.” She was perplexed that I would even bother to bring this cat in if not to put him to sleep. I petted his skeletal frame, my logic seeming weaker by the second as I said, “I just wanted to know if there was anything I could do to make him more comfortable.” She gave me more high-calorie wet catfood.

I gave my mom new instructions about the animals, made sure she remembered the date for Luke’s surgery, and went back to school. It was months later that I got the call--my birthday, actually. Not an unusual time to get a call from my mom. I just wanted to let you know that Luke died. He had the surgery, came home and just went to sleep. He couldn’t handle the anesthesia at his age.

That was why the vet had asked if I was sure I wanted him to get the surgery despite his old age. Because surgery might kill him. It hadn’t occurred to me. I was too busy on my weeklong kick of getting things done, fixing my family within a limited timeframe. Now Luke was dead as a result of my naive proactivity. I had killed my beloved childhood pet.

I got a few phone calls and e-mails throughout the year, my last year of college. Some of them delivering news. Sammy died. Tiger died. I didn’t press for details. I had failed spectacularly in the little action I had taken to help. Moreover, my parents were still divorcing, my mom still couldn’t afford the house, and Natalie was still crazy.

Patchy

For the first time, the dogs outnumbered the cats, and Patchy was the only first generation cat still living. Natalie had found her as a stray only weeks before I’d found Tiger. She was a muddy tortoiseshell with an overeating problem that stemmed from her days of starvation, and a meow that was both frequent and strident. She had spent all her life as the quintessential Omega cat. The other cats chased her, probably because as soon as she saw them she would hiss and growl, but she had nothing to back up her swagger and always ran. Sammy was the biggest wimp of a cat that we owned, and even he chased her. Even as a decrepit old cat, he hobbled after her with his ears back, meowing menacingly. She had outlived them all, and was becoming more at ease without so many other cats around.

It was Father’s Day, and since I was in town, my mom had invited my dad over to the old house that wouldn’t be ours for much longer. Natalie was pacing. We all pace in my family, but since Natalie got out of the psych ward it seemed she could never stop moving. I sat at the table writing in the card: Happy Father’s Day! I got you this BA in English, which is a pretty crappy present. Sorry about that! My mom was rushing around doing her hosting duties and trying to contain the bitterness that saturated her interactions whenever my dad was around. My dad had just arrived. Mandi wasn’t there.

Mid-pace, Natalie screamed and we looked to the window. I hung back, only catching a glimpse of tortoiseshell fur, mangled and lifeless on the deck. My dad went to her, then my mom. All three went outside and stood around the body. I couldn’t hear them, but I watched them, silent, Natalie’s face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. My dad took her and pressed her into his chest as she cried. The door slid open and my mom came back inside, sighing and muttering about getting the shovel. They stood like that for a few minutes. I could see my dad’s lips moving. After a little longer, my mom returned with a shovel and a cardboard box. She gingerly lifted the cat from the deck and placed her in the box. With a sympathetic pat on the back, she offered Natalie the box. She took it, Dad took the shovel, and they began the procession into the woods. They found a spot in the pet cemetery guarded by the sitting Buddha statue, and my dad began to dig. Natalie watched, holding the box, her shoulders shaking periodically. The hole had to be deep, deep enough that other animals wouldn’t dig it up. As he dug and dug, I could see the sweat pooling through the back of his shirt. Finally, he motioned to Natalie, and she knelt and lowered the box into the ground. He covered it with dirt with the same sweeping, laborious motions, packed it well, and placed a stone over the top. Then they stood, facing the grave, their backs to me. My dad put his arm around Natalie and she leaned her head against his shoulder. I could tell he was talking quietly. I could imagine what he was saying, in his low, soothing voice. She lived a good life. If you hadn’t rescued her from the cold those years ago she never would have made it, never would have gotten to live here with us. She was very old. It’s not your fault.

Inside, we were more shocked than devastated. We knew she was very old, but she didn’t seem to have any particular health problems other than the constant fatty tumors in her sides. She still ate and used her litter box and walked around a little slower than she used to. My mom had last seen her near the area where they found her. All of the dogs had chased her to the railing of the deck and were barking viciously at her. My mom yelled at the dogs but was distracted by something and went away.

We hadn’t known cats to just drop dead, but we hoped that maybe Patchy had been spared the deterioration, the fluids that begin to sludge out of orifices onto inappropriate surfaces, the vet visits with pricks and squeezes. The stains and smells and yowls of a cat that doesn’t understand why it’s hurting. The choice between waiting for nature and ending the pain. Maybe she really had beat it all and been given a quick, painless death.

But this idea never settled with me. We couldn’t say otherwise to Dad, and certainly not to Natalie, but my mom had a theory. “She looked messed up,” my mom said, twisting her face, “Like something had messed with her.” When I asked what she meant, she shook her head and refused to elaborate further. My mom had seen her on the railing with the dogs going crazy barking at her like she was a raccoon or something. She thought that after she left, they had pulled her from the railing and shook her to death.

Cats and dogs had coexisted peacefully in our household for over twenty years. The only time the dogs even got involved with the cats was when breaking up catfights. The Shitzu would yap after the perpetrators to scare them off each other, then choose one cat to chew and snort on the back of their neck as if in an attempt to irritate it to death. Never anything more. Never anything violent. The thought that our dogs had become so wild, so pack-like, that they could have done something like this made me nauseous.

Life had been happening to us all, and we’d been so wrapped up in it that we had neglected the danger that the dogs had become. You couldn’t even blame them, exactly. They had just resorted to their primal instincts, and we had lost control.

We had lost control.

Walking in Minneapolis

2010-01-28T09:28:00.001+09:00

The sidewalks aren’t even normal icy, but a thick, bumpy--surprise!--take your feet out from under you and kill you kind of icy. Every day, I walk on these sidewalks, looking down, stepping carefully, thinking, don’t slip, don’t slip, for the love of god, don’t slip. The anxiety goes beyond the natural instinct to avoid injury or humiliation. I don’t have insurance, and the fear always remains that I might slip and break my arm, which would completely ruin me, take every penny I have and leave me in debt to a hospital for who knows how long. But really, I’m one of the lucky uninsured. I’ve thought this through many times. If I break my arm, I can call my dad and see if he has any doctor friends who would set my broken arm pro bono. I bet he’d be able to find someone, but I’d have to go to Iowa to do it. Since I doubt I could drive five hours with a broken arm, Colin would have to take me, which means we’d have to wait until the weekend when he’s not working to go. With each mindful step, I think about this scenario, the phone call to my dad, the drive home with a broken arm, wondering how I would sleep or deal with the pain until the weekend. Halfway through crossing the street, I realize I hadn’t checked to see if there were any cars coming, and I defiantly think, Let the cars hit me, I don’t even care. Then I remember that getting hit by a car might not kill me, and I take it back. Especially if I’m hurt badly enough to be unconscious and unable to tell them not to call an ambulance. I have to stay alert, stay vigilant, keep walking with trepidation. Don’t slip, don’t slip.

On Giving up the Dream

2009-10-31T05:39:00.002+09:00

I wrote this about four years ago, when I was a senior in college. I found it today when I was looking through my old documents for papers to give my professor who's writing my recommendation to law school. I don't know how I feel about law school. I'm just trying to find a paying career, my niche, something that I'd be good at and would satisfy me. It often comes back to writing, which goes back to my lack of discipline, lack of talent, lack of propulsion. Then it cycles through again--teacher, lawyer, writer. Anyway, when I wrote this I had recently been destroyed by writer's workshops. Funny, because it still rings true today.

My father creates beautiful works of art. He’s done this since he was a small child. His mother, his classmates, teachers, everyone was enamored with his skill. They were in awe of the maturity of his eye, his attention to detail and precision in every deliberate stroke of the pencil or brush. He was a wonderful artist, and his own worst critic. This wasn’t difficult, considering he only received glowing praise from others. I sometimes wonder what his self-criticism sounded like. I now have little sympathy for exceedingly talented people who are harder on themselves than anyone else. Deep down they know they’re incredibly talented. They know they’re better than everyone around them, but are they better than everyone in the world? In history? Such thoughts are the source of torment for them. I used to be one of these people. Now I don’t have the liberty. Thinking back on the intense self-scrutiny I underwent, it all seems weak. It’s better to be the tormented genius than the hack who knows she’s got nothing to offer. My fragile ego relied on the fact that no one ever criticized my writing. When they started doing just this, I was crushed. I realized that my work is no more special than anyone else’s, that I would not have to worry about my legacy in history when I was inferior to half of my writing class.

My father never had anyone tell him that he was a bad artist. I asked him, and he said that people were always quite impressed with him, though he wished they would be more helpful. This infuriated me. It’s not fair that one can be in any sort of subjective, creative field and avoid the scathing, heart-wrenching criticism from peers and professors. I’ve had my share plus some. I’ve had others tear my writing apart just for fun. Perhaps if my father had remained in this subjective, creative field, he would have got his. But he didn’t. Vietnam came rolling by along with his lottery number, announcing his fate: if he chose to go to art school, he would go to war. Thus, he changed his path to medical school. He didn’t like the direction the art world was going, anyway.

My father creates beautiful incisions in people’s flesh. He sends balloons slithering gracefully through their arteries, pushing away blood clots that would cause ugly bouts of gangrene. My father is an amazing doctor. Everyone says so. But will the legacy of his art outlive him? No. He no longer produces art. Once, when I was in high school, I came home to my father and his friend standing in the kitchen, and a large sheet of paper that seemed to have been torn from some larger roll was taped to the microwave. It had a drawing on it, and my dad’s friend, Dennis, asked me what I thought of it. I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not very good.”

Dennis asked me to explain myself. It seemed a little haphazard and messy. It was a picture of the voluptuous body of a woman lying in a bed of plants, with a large sunflower sprouting from her neck in the place of a head. There was a sinister looking giant insect looking at it hungrily, attempting to drink the nectar from this flower. I explained that it was ripping off the style of Robert Crumb, what with replacing women’s heads with other objects, and that the artist obviously had issues with women. I saw my dad flinch at this, and I noticed his signature in lower right corner of the piece. I immediately felt embarrassed. I tried to explain that I thought this was a genuine piece of art that Dennis had purchased from an accredited artist, and it lacked professionalism, but I kept digging myself deeper into a hole. I didn’t know at the time that this was something he had drawn in five minutes with a set of crayons. I still become flushed with regret when I think about this incident, though logically I try to convince myself that I was in the right. I had given him the first criticism he had ever received, and he had it coming.

Not long ago my father entered a contest in which one painted anything they wanted on a two by two board. He hadn’t painted in thirty years, but he completed his work and brought it to the dining room to show me while I was visiting home. It depicted an Aztec warrior entangled in combat with a velociraptor. My throat tightened as I studied it. It was perfect. The colors, the shadow, the capturing of action. He hadn’t touched a paintbrush in three decades, and was still capable of creating something so flawless. I wanted to sob for two souls lost—his, such a great, inexhaustible talent that no one will ever know, and mine. My art was clouded with insecurity, rusty from lack of use, stunted in growth. I was a dodo compared to my father’s soaring eagle, but neither of us would live the dreams we had once been so sure would be our destiny.

Who needs balanced journalism? EVERYONE.

2009-10-18T07:55:00.002+09:00

This clip is the latest thing that’s tapped into the same rage I’ve been feeling ever since Fox started advertising its own tea-bagging protests.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Queer and Loathing in D.C.

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Ron Paul Interview

I know it's supposed to be funny, but it left me feeling infuriated. I have this crazy idea that news networks should report on news, not create it. It bothers me enough how much power mainstream media has to frame and oversimplify issues, but using a 24 hour “news” network as a platform to promote anti-government protests, or really protests of any kind, is reprehensible. Fox, please take “news” out of your title if you would rather be a 24 hour ideological network. Free speech allows you to have a network to promote your ideology, but masquerading under the guise of “fair and balanced” news is just downright deceptive.

I am so surprised by the even tone I’ve been able to adopt so far, because this is one of those issues that automatically makes my heart pound, my cheeks become hot, and I unleash the foulest combination of swears I can think of. Seventy-five thousand people showed up to the teabagger protests in DC on 9/12. I suppose that’s a lot, but I’m not terribly impressed. You see, on January 18, 2003, I went to an anti-war protest in DC which hardly anyone heard about, and we had 200,000 people. The same day, San Francisco had 150,000 people. Cities across the country participated with their own events, and I can’t find much information on it. This is just from my memory, but I believe the protest in Minneapolis had 50,000 people, and that’s in January when it is really fucking cold. That weekend there were coordinated protests in 25 countries across the world. And you know how all these people got together? E-mail campaigns and word of mouth. We didn’t have the country’s most-viewed 24 hour news network repeatedly telling us about these protests, hosting gatherings in cities across the country, singing the praises of being a good, patriotic American and protesting our administration. We just had e-mail, and in regards to turnout, we were a hell of a lot more successful. Not only that, but the crowd truly was a diverse representation of Americans of all ages, races, and backgrounds, from priests to anarchists, all marching together to oppose a pre-emptive strike against Iraq. Afterwards, I was eager to read all the coverage of the protests, but I was disappointed. The DC local news covered it the most, and after that I didn’t see a single mainstream network mention it. They must have at least a bit, but I never caught it, even though I was looking. There were a few blurbs online. If I had access to LexisNexis, I’m sure I could find more, but this is the most comprehensive article I could find. When I told people about what I’d been doing that weekend, aside from the people who were on the same mailing lists as me, nobody was even aware of the protests going on, not even the ones in their own cities. Not only that, but we failed. Despite the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans showing their opposition, the administration told us to fuck off and started the war in about three months.

I remember when I began my anti-war activity as a freshman in college, I was all fired up with civic dissidence. I eventually became jaded. I remember talking to my mom, who had gone to anti-war protests in the sixties. “They figured out how to handle us,” I said, “They just don’t report on us.” The time leading up to the Iraq war was a horrible period in journalism. The mainstream media constructed a false consensus, was too spineless to ask the tough questions, and we went to war. In a few years, things got a little better. I lived in Japan for the end of the Bush administration, and missed a lot of the changing political climate. When I see archival footage of O’Reilly calling anti-war protestors “loons” mashed up with him talking about how awesome and patriotic the teabaggers are, my first reaction isn’t so much “What hypocrisy!” as “They started covering the anti-war protests?” But Fox News providing extensive coverage to the measly protests that it organizes itself is one thing that really makes the bile rise in my throat. Perhaps because it reminds me of how dependent civic movements are on the media, and how the media can be really fucking dishonest about it.

I'm disturbed.

2009-10-10T11:10:00.005+09:00

After following one of those search engine rabbit tunnels, I ended up inadvertently discovering Japanese Gravure idols (グラビアアイドル). The term "Gravure Idol" refers to young female models from particular talent agencies who generally appear in men's magazines and "Idol" DVDs that feature them being pretty and sexy in various situations and outfits. The term "gravure" comes from "rotogravure", the printing press used to develop glossy magazines. While the work may be risque or suggestive, (common costumes are swimwear, lingerie, and school uniforms) there is no nudity involved for a gravure idol, though this type of modeling is often viewed as a stepping stone. It could potentially lead to mainstream work as a TV presenter, singer, or actress, or it could lead to work as a nude model or porn actress. There's a pretty high turnover rate, though, with many models lasting less than a year when their demand wanes. While the function of a regular model is to anonymously sell a product, the image of a gravure idol is connected to her identity--her name, her age, and often her hobbies and skills. Basically, she is the product, tied up in a marketable, sexy package. I think it's comparable to swimsuit or lingerie models of the nineties, whose posters were commonplace in frat-house bathrooms in the US.

The idea of a Gravure Idol is nothing too special--just young women capitalizing on their sexuality as a means to success. Lots of singers and actresses start out as models. It wasn't until I found out the age range of these models, whose main purpose is to market themselves in men's magazines, that I worked up my ire. The youngest working Gravure Idol was nine years old in 2006. NINE. From what I'd seen of the work of other Gravure Idols, this didn't even seem imaginable. Gravure Idols clutch their naked breasts in bubble baths, or stroke themselves in non-nude erotica videos. Even though a strong facet of mainstream sexuality in Japan is that of the infantilized female, surely there would be public outcry if a nine-year-old was doing this. So I looked her up.

I was a little nervous about what I might find through my internet search, and if it would draw the FBI to my computer. Interestingly, before I found little Mizuki, I found another pre-teen idol, eleven-year-old Saaya. The images of Saaya I saw were gratuitous. She had the fresh young face of a pre-teen and huge breasts. She was in a bikini, often leaning over. The source websites made mention of how the pictures, taken in 2005, were of an eleven-year-old, but that didn't stop the user comments of "OMG she is SO HAWT i would totes do her". She was a pretty child in possession of an early (and in Japan, somewhat rare) endowment, and so her parents chose to capitalize on her in this way. That is fucked up. If you're interested, here's an article about how we can all find common ground in agreeing about the hotness of a busty eleven-year-old.

What I had seen of Saaya made me more nervous of what I might see of nine-year-old Mizuki. But when I did find her, she was the opposite of what Saaya had led me to expect. She looked like a completely normal third-grader, with a striking resemblance to one of the third graders I used to teach. In most of her pictures she looked like a regular kid having fun, and in general, a lot of the photos didn't look too different from what you see of child models anywhere. At first I was relieved, then I descended into a sort of contemplative melancholy. The difference between Mizuki and other child models is that Mizuki's photos are intended to sell herself, and in a medium that has been previously devoted to wank-material, no less. Her photo books were selling well (in 2006, the time of all the MIzuki press) and the description on the website talks about her sweet look and tells a story about her auditioning for the school swim team, as it shows a picture of her in her school swimming suit. It tells about the other outfits she appears in: her school uniform, her gym clothes, her street clothes, a bikini, a maid uniform, a nurse uniform. I didn't see any of the maid or nurse pictures, but the ones I see tend to be the epitome of a regular little girl doing regular little girl things, which pretty much translates to pedophile fodder. The few instances where her poses appear suggestive, it's clearly unintentional on her part, as if the photographer caught her at an off-moment and used it. I don't know if this makes it better or worse than Saaya.

I think of Chinatsu, an eleven-year-old girl who I taught for just a few months. When she first joined my class, Sayaka basically threw her in against her will. She was new to our cram school, and Sayaka warned me about her. She is very, very low-level, she is shy, she has a bad attitude, and so on. When I met her, she was wearing fashionable street clothes while all the other kids were still in their uniforms, and she had a hardened, fuck-off look on her face. When Sayaka informed her she would be joining the English class, her hard expression gave way to a look of momentary panic as she tried to refuse, but Sayaka just led her to my table where she folded her arms and sat in silence. As per the warnings, I was gentle with her and heaped plenty of praise on her efforts in order to build her confidence. When I complimented her, told her she did a good job, that she was catching up quickly (which she was), she smiled and seemed genuinely delighted that she was doing well. Though she was reserved, I saw little of the girl Sayaka had warned me about, and one day I asked her about it. Sayaka told me that Chinatsu struggled in school, and compared her to two other students of her age, who always seemed to me to be not-terribly bright. "School is difficult, but they are good girls," she said. "Chinatsu is... sometimes she is late to class, she is rude to teacher."

Chinatsu seemed fairly bright to me, but she was "not a good girl". Here's the thing. She was very tall for her age, and in possession of a woman's body. At eleven years old, Colin saw her in her street clothes and asked me if she was a high school student. She was already troubled, and I worried about what might happen to her, what might have already happened. Just because she looked grown-up didn't mean she was prepared for everything that went along with it. I remember instances of her child-like delight--on Halloween, when we were trick-or-treating and she didn't have a costume so I gave her my extra cat-ears, and when I gave her my contact information my last day at the school and she gleefully added another entry into her cellphone. I heard from her once since coming back, a mass text from her cell-phone mail about a change of address, with lots of stars and emoticons.

I worried similarly about a ten-year-old girl I worked with this summer, in Minneapolis. She too was very tall for her age, pretty, and looked much older than a kid who had just finished the fourth grade. She was also troubled, and I was very acquainted with her stank attitude, which earned her the nickname "Miss Stankypants". She was already wrapped up in fashion and pop-culture, and swiped her mother's platforms to practice her strut. She play-acted the sex-kitten mannerisms she saw on TV, which isn't uncommon for girls that age, but she was still a kid. I don't think there's anything wrong with girls trying to figure out their sexuality or how they project it, because that's something we all do on the path to womanhood. It's the predators who need to change. Traditionally, the burden has fallen on women to take all the responsibility to prevent their victimization--watch the signals you're sending, watch your drink, stay with your girlfriends, and by all means do not be a slut. All the while, boys will be boys. Men need to be educated alongside women about combating this "boys will be boys" culture. One step might be to stop publicly sexualizing teens and pre-teens just because they look older than they are, because having boobs does not constitute an invitation. Miss Stankypants got far less stank by the end of the summer, and at times was a really sweet kid. I still worry about her, because so few of us make it to womanhood unscathed, especially those from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

As for our pre-teen idols, Saaya is fifteen now and continues to dabble in music and voiceover work, and I haven't found any new information about Mizuki. I would hope that would mean she was out of the business, but if her parents were willing to offer her up to a medium notorious for producing stroke material, I suspect it's not for lack of trying. Mizuki and Saaya represent two ends of the spectrum in terms of representing pre-teens, but it's adults who have perverted their images. When I was about four and my sisters were six, one of our favorite videotapes was Madonna's live concert in Tokyo. We watched it over and over again, and whenever "Material Girl" started playing, we put on our Easter dresses (because they looked the most like Madonna's poofy, lacy costume) and stood on stools dancing. My parents didn't stop us from singing along to the risque lyrics we didn't understand, didn't tell us to get off those stools and quit aping Madonna's sexy dance moves, didn't scold us for being dirty and wrong for enjoying the then-controversial singer. For that, I'm grateful. They also didn't videotape us on those stools and try to sell it. For that, I'm very grateful.

Fallback Female Labor: Childcare and Sex Work (Part 2)

2009-07-30T13:58:00.004+09:00

Note: Parts of this may look familiar. That's because parts of it have been lifted from this earlier post.

I had only been in Japan a few days and I was looking for work. I found myself for the first time at Suisho, a local bar that would become a regular haunt, sharing my apprehension over drinks with my boyfriend, Colin, and Mark, the longtime resident foreigner. The bar shared a kitchen with the next-door establishment called Pub Tiffany, a discreet, windowless building. Pub Tiffany was a hostess bar, a male-only club that charges an exorbitant cover charge for entry. In general, hostess bars are like this: upon entry, the men pick a girl from a lineup of hostesses to be their paid companionship for the evening. Hostesses sit with their patrons, pour them drinks, light their cigarettes, listen to their stories about their stupid wives and pretend like they’re the most interesting, charming men in the world. The girls push the drinks, the men pay for the girls’ drinks too and the bar makes money. After closing time, the girls often go out with their patrons, which may or may not involve sex. That’s their choice. One hopes.

Anyway, since Suisho and Pub Tiffany shared a kitchen, the proprietor of the hostess bar would periodically dart through to pick up orders. He was a middle-aged man who nearly always wore suitpants and vests, and looked exactly like the type of person to be running a hostess bar. I wish I had learned his name, but since I didn’t, I’ll refer to him as Suitpants-san. So Suitpants-san knew Mark, and stopped over to chat with all of us, speaking through Mark who at the time was far more fluent than Colin or myself. Through Mark, he casually offered me a job. At the time I laughed, but I briefly considered it, in my job-panicked mind. Within a couple weeks, I’d snatched up the first teaching job I could find, and didn’t think about anything else until it all started falling apart.

My boss always reminded me how lucky I was that she was sponsoring my visa, that there would have been no other place for me to teach English in such a rural area, that she was doing me a huge favor. I was paid cash under the table, far less than the going-rate for a native speaker, and I should have just been happy to be able to stay in the country, according to her. It’s true the company was struggling, but it was a sinking ship I probably never should have climbed aboard. I loved my students, but it only took a few weeks for me to begin feeling frustrated with my lack of knowledge and control over my schedule, the surprise classes, the office hierarchy. There was the manipulation, the guilt-trips, and the occasional devastating acts of kindness that made it all the more complicated to consider leaving. There was nowhere else that would sponsor my visa, Yoshiko would tell me, not in the inaka. Meanwhile, on cold nights out I walked down streets with friends and we would pass one hostess club after another—the larger places had girls standing just outside in shifts as a display of merchandise to lure men inside. They stood there with their usually dyed and inflated hair, shivering and dressed like they were attending a ghetto prom.

While there’s nothing illegal about working as a hostess, it still falls under the category of mizushobai, literally “water trade”, or sex work. Of course there’s a stigma attached to it. These joints are known for some shifty business, and it’s not uncommon for the hostesses to be Filipino girls or Eastern Europeans working illegally. In bigger cities, there are international hostess clubs that feature predominantly white or Filipino women. I remember passing by one in Fukuoka that had a group photo out front of a mixture of Southeast Asian women in traditional clothing and what appeared to be average to vaguely attractive Eastern European women dressed in the usual tacky prom dress fare, many with dirty-blond hair, large noses and wide-set eyes. Must have been exotic to the Japanese guys.

When we started experiencing white girl sightings in our own middle-of-nowhere, wasteland of rice paddies and onions town, I became extraordinarily curious about Pub Tiffany. Mark had only been in once, and said that it wasn’t worth it. There was a 4,000 yen cover charge (about forty bucks), plus you have to pay for all the drinks after that. At one point we heard from Suitpants-san that there were four Romanian girls working there. Colin and Mark had met one of them at Suisho after hours, when I wasn’t with them. That girl didn’t last long. Apparently, she called Mark not long after that because she needed help finding somewhere to buy a cheap alarm clock. Mark drove her to Trial, a Wal-mart type store in a nearby town, then returned her home. After a few hours, he received a call from Suitpants-san, delicately explaining that the girls cannot be seen out in public with him, because it’s intimidating to the customers and affects the girl’s reputation. Spending time outside of work with customers is a major part of being a hostess, so I wonder if it was more objectionable that Mark wasn’t a customer, or that he was a large, foreign guy.

Still, I was determined to get in somehow. Whenever we were at Suisho and saw Suitpants-san pass through, Mark would drop hints in Japanese, gesturing to me, “[She’s very interested in seeing the club.]” But the answer was always the same, delivered with a raised eyebrow: “[Hmm, she should work there.]”

Things continued to deteriorate at work, and it was only the students that kept me from losing it completely. Yoshiko had put me in a position where I felt constantly indebted to her, thus I could never refuse anything she asked of me. I had no personal space, no contract, no boundaries—I was on call at all times, and in a constant state of anxiety. I usually worked at night, but my sleep could be cut four hours short if she decided to call me in for any reason. She insisted that there was nowhere else I could find visa sponsorship, but what about those girls at Pub Tiffany? It was harder to get away with working illegally in the countryside due to increased visibility. My own visa listed me not as an instructor, but as an “international specialist in humanities”. Maybe they had strange visas as well, like entertainer’s visas or working holiday visas.

I was frustrated with my company, but the hostess club was always there. It was mysterious though, open to us only if we wanted to pay or work. Talking to Mark, Suitpants-san once said tantalizingly, “[You should come in. We’ve got Filipinas,]” The Japanese view of Filipino people is comparable to the American view of Mexicans, so I asked Mark why this would be a selling point. He told me that while Japanese hostesses are more likely to have a strict view of their working hours, Filipinas tend to foster relationships outside of work, exchanging texts and keeping up a rapport.

I straddled a strange position, wondering who I was in relation to the foreign hostesses in my town. We all worked nights, and we worked under perhaps less than legal circumstances. We didn’t have the benefit of a contract or a larger built-in network to assist in our transition to life in Japan or mediate any grievances. As sex workers, hostesses are more vulnerable to assault. When she is also a foreigner working illegally, she has no legal recourse. I began reading stories on the internet about hostesses being turned away by the police, about non-Japanese Asian women disappearing as if they had never existed. At the same time I was contemplating the dangers of being a hostess, a young British teacher in Tokyo was murdered while giving a private lesson at a student’s home. Most of my job involved giving private lessons at students’ homes.

I wasn’t actually too worried about getting raped or murdered, as a hostess or a teacher. It was rather the implications of these crimes that worried me—that as foreign women, regardless of our profession, we were being fetishized the same way, we were feeding the same unseemly pathology. It’s undeniable that the function of some foreign teachers is just a step above eye candy. Maybe we weren’t so different after all.

In times of increasing frustration, I began weighing the pros and cons of taking Suitpants-san up on his offer.

Pro: I’d be paid to drink and flirt. I like drinking and hanging out with old guys, I think. I’d just had a very nice conversation with an old man about Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. I’d probably make more money than as a teacher, anyway.

Pro: I’d get to practice my Japanese. As an English teacher living with my American boyfriend, I didn’t get much chance to learn Japanese beyond the basic communication I used in my daily life.

Pro: Great source of material for later writing.

Con: Expectations to meet with clients outside of work. One major way that these places make money is that they arrange “dates” between the clients and girls before work. The clients pay a fee and are allowed to take the girls out to dinner, then drop them off at the club before their shift. Girls are pressured to pick up as many of these “dates” as possible, and could be let go for failing to do so.

Con: I’d already had negative experiences with Japanese work-hierarchy and arbitrary rules, and I certainly didn’t want to experience what that might look like in mizushobai. Also, I had a hard enough time making friends with Japanese girls, and I didn’t want to see what ugliness could potentially emerge if I were actually competing with them.

Con: I didn’t even like being a cocktail waitress! What made me think I’d be that much more comfortable pretending to like and stroking the egos of old men who could potentially be gross, disrespectful, or racist?

Con: Probably not a good idea for my burgeoning alcohol problem. The excessive consumption of alcohol is actually a common job hazard for hostesses. Since it’s their job to push drinks, they don’t exactly have the agency to say no when drinks are offered to them.

Con: I’m living with my American boyfriend and he won’t let me.

I had to respect Colin’s wishes. That was the right thing to do, and that should have been the end of it. Still, I found myself resenting the fact that I was unable to go objectify myself if I felt like it. What if I wanted to debase myself, have a horrible, traumatic experience, make some money and fuck myself up? Maybe I wanted to disengage further from my body, and put a price tag on my smiles and conversation along with it.

I didn’t become a hostess, and had no choice but to avert disaster. Though I’d already made my decision, in actuality, the idea didn’t die in my mind until I realized that I didn’t own any nice dresses, and there was nowhere I could buy any that would fit. My resolution didn’t, however, kill my curiosity, and one night I finally did see the inside of Pub Tiffany.

My friend Grace was visiting from Chicago, and we’d spent the week doing the standard Kyushu tour. We were finally finishing things off with a local bar crawl of sorts, and we found ourselves highly intoxicated at Suisho. I had already gotten Grace interested in hostesses, and she was eager for a way into Pub Tiffany as well. As soon as we saw Suitpants-san pop in from his club to use the kitchen, we flagged him down: “[She’s interested in being a hostess! Can she look around your club?]” Suitpants-san agreed, but told us we had to wait until the customers left. We continued to drink, and in time Suitpants-san led myself, Mark, and Grace through the back entrance of Pub Tiffany. We expected the customers to be gone, but the place was devoid of any indication that people had just been drinking and carousing there. It was spotless, with low lights and plush seating, carpeting, far more luxurious than the gritty bar next door. It was completely vacant besides Suitpants-san and the middle-aged woman at the bar, who was the resident Mama-san. No hostess bar is complete without a Mama-san, an older woman who wrangles the girls and keeps up a platonic rapport with the clientele. Suitpants introduced the Mama-san, who seemed less than thrilled to see us. What came next was essentially a job interview. They would ask questions, and we would either answer for Grace or translate them for her. I remember Mark asking if they had any foreigners working at the bar. “Ima, imasen,” Mama-san replied. There aren’t any now. Mark chatted with them about the Romanian girls, sympathizing with them about how the situation had been taihen (difficult). Suitpants was friendly and talkative, but Mama-san seemed reticent, cautious. At one point she emphasized that the girls must do things like sing karaoke with the customers. She said it as if it were something she expected to be a problem for foreigners, as if she’d experienced issues with it before. I translated this to Grace, and she slurred, “I love to sing karaoke. Tell them that.” I did. Grace added, “Tell them I have a bar in Chicago, too.” When they asked what kind of visa she had, we told them it was a tourist visa. They exchanged a look of ambiguous meaning. Before we left, they told Grace to come back tomorrow, during business hours. It wasn’t until we were walking home that I realized Grace had no idea what had just happened. Through all of the arrangements Mark and I had made in Japanese, we neglected to tell her that we had offered her up for employment.

When I returned from Japan, I applied for a number of jobs, but the one that panned out was as a children’s literacy instructor at a social services agency. I enjoyed my work there for a year, but felt the need to move on, to move away from elementary education and childcare before it was too late to try anything else. Professionally, all I’ve been able to experience is elementary education, and it’s never been what I’ve intended to do. In some ways, I feel like it’s been forced on me, but after three years, it’s becoming me too. I would say that I’m versatile, but maybe I’m malleable; professionally, morally, in my personality, my selfhood. I came back from Japan a teacher. I can rattle off lesson plans, I can manage a classroom, I use a particular voice and have specific systems for dealing with behavior issues. After a year at the social services agency, I discovered that I’m actually a literacy instructor too, able to effortlessly follow a set curriculum and make adjustments when necessary, chart progress, speak cogently about LDs and IEPs. It’s shocking that after three years, I essentially became something that I thought I wasn’t. I’ve discovered that I’m actually very good with children, and not everybody who works with them is. Although I feel like I’ve fallen into this line of work somewhat against my will, it’s quite lucky that I’m really, really good at it. But just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean I’m satisfied with it, and I desperately feel like I need a change, since teaching is practically all I’ve known. Maybe I’m better suited for something else and I don’t even know it, but the universe never gives me the chance to find out. I’ve been trying to find work in non-elementary education jobs in social services and nonprofits, only to get shut down every single time. And every new opportunity to appear is further down the path of educating children.

This brings me to my final point: that a young woman with little more to show than a BA in English is essentially worthless, except in the areas of childcare and sex work. Working with children is incredibly important, but it isn’t for everyone, and it certainly shouldn’t be the default job for people who can’t do anything else. And sex work—well, I once read something about sex work, and I wish I could cite the source, but for the life of me I can’t remember where it’s from. Anyway, I read that the increasing problem of sex work is not that it’s victimizing poor and disenfranchised women, but that it’s increasingly attracting educated, middle class women. The reason that’s a problem is that it’s not sustainable work—a woman can spend her youth as a sex worker, but there’s a shelf life, and once it’s up, she’s in her mid-thirties with no career experience, and it’s incredibly difficult to start on a new path. Thus, the world misses out on many potential non-sex-work-related contributions of educated women. Women, as a population, are proportionately far more educated than men, but that isn’t reflected in their income or career advancement. I don’t hold it against a woman with an advanced degree who chooses a career in sex work. I do, however, hold it against society when sex work is the most viable option for a woman with an advanced degree.

Fallback Female Labor: Childcare and Sex Work (Part 1)

2009-07-25T06:09:00.003+09:00

It’s never been easy for me to find a job. Not even as a teenager, not even when I’ve sought work far below my qualifications. This has always been a combination of circumstance—a particular economic climate, for example—and the fact that while I’m polite and force myself to smile and make eye contact, I’m actually extremely shy and inept at schmoozing and making potential employers like me. I’d love a job that involved me using my brain and talent toward something I’m passionate about, but at every turn, the universe has told me no. I remember there was a time that I was resistant to anything that involved working with children, and yet here I am, having spent the past three years working in some form of elementary education. How did I get here? Desperate circumstances.

It was the summer after my senior year of high school, and I needed work badly. I had tried the regular route of countless restaurants, bookstores, and retail chains to no avail, and a break suddenly came when a family friend told me about an opening at the daycare facility for which she worked. Spending a summer changing diapers was far from the glamorous summer I had imagined wearing an OfficeMax polo, but it was a last resort. And contrary to all those waitressing and cashier jobs, this job in which I was responsible for the wellbeing of young children was easy to get. I remember filling out the emergency contact info and W2s alongside the middle-aged woman who had been hired at the same time as me. I saw the woman struggling to fill out her forms, then suddenly her pencil stopped and her hand went to her pained forehead. Our employer asked her what was wrong, and she explained she was having trouble answering the question about her preferred hospital of care: “I wrote ‘I prefer St. Luke’s but’ and I just don’t know how to finish it. Mostly I don’t talk in nothing bigger than three letter words.”

“Three letters?” I remember thinking. With the exception of a few college girls who went to the U of I, the entire place was a ghetto of uneducated, low-skilled female workers. I avoided mentioning the selective liberal arts college I was attending in the fall, and simply said that I was going to school in Minnesota. That was enough for my privilege to stand out. One of my co-workers was a girl my age who hated my guts. She was regularly chatty and deferential to the two older women in our room of one to two year olds, but spoke to me almost exclusively in cold stares and curt admonishments since she was slightly senior. Early in my employment, I was trying to be nice and get to know her, and I asked her the default question I had learned to ask people my age: “Are you going to school somewhere?” She quickly snapped, “I’m taking a break.” I later learned that she worked fulltime at the daycare five days a week, and spent the weekend working at a grocery store. I was temporary, coasting along on 3/4 time before going on to college where I’d receive much more financial support than she ever did, and this must have been infuriating to her. I’ve since learned that it’s a luxury of a privileged existence to assume that being polite and always fulfilling your responsibilities in the workplace will prevent people from hating you just for being who you are.

At the daycare, we spent most of the day sitting on the floor, but left completely exhausted. At night I worried myself sick about what would become of the kids, and was glad to see them in the morning. At the time, those kids were the most important, most stimulating thing in my life—as a result, I was lonely, sad, and under-stimulated. I felt trapped by this traditional feminine role that had consumed so much of me. In my job, I was little more than a body. The way they hired at that daycare, it was a job almost anyone could do. You only needed to fill the correct ratio of adult bodies to children. Suddenly, my body became a jungle gym for toddlers. I was eighteen years old, had never had a boyfriend, and came from a family and circle of friends that wasn’t much for physical contact. Sure, we’d hug on special occasions, but I had never experienced close and persistent physical contact until I worked at the daycare. Without hesitation, toddlers were climbing into my lap, they were asking to be carried around, they were sneezing on my face, I was wiping up vomit and blood, and several times a day up to my elbows in shit. For a period of time, it was overwhelming, this lack of boundaries for my body. Ultimately, I know it was good for me, because bodies are not sacred, and the experience certainly helped demystify them.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I found myself in another difficult situation when seeking employment. I would only be in Iowa for four months before returning to Minnesota, and no one wants to hire anyone just for the summer. By the time I interviewed to be a cocktail waitress at that cheesy dive, I had already been rejected a few times and had gotten lazy with my interview prep. I’d left my hair down, put on a shirt that I wasn’t entirely sure was work appropriate, and decided not to tone down my winged eyeliner. I was interviewed by a man in a string tie who barely glanced at my application before telling me I was “just right for the job, kiddo.” When I met the other cocktails, I found myself the sole brunette in a group of bubbly girls who spoke in countrified accents and called everyone “hun”.

Cocktailing wasn’t sex work, but it was a job that I had gotten entirely on the basis of being young, female, and in possession of T and A. I was little more than a body that brought drinks and flirted, a shell that said “y’all” and “hun” and giggled at sexual harassment by customers because the harassers were always the best tippers. When I passed by mirrors I didn’t recognize myself. In time I discovered that at this place, the supervisors and clientele were equally abusive, but I sucked it up for the paycheck and tips, keeping a grim smile fixed on my face and saving my tears for the drive home. I had lowered the boundaries of my body, what it was used for, what it had meant to me, and it became little more than an ornamental vehicle for cash-money.

A few years later, when I was looking for teaching jobs in Japan, I remember feeling a deep resistance to teaching any age group younger than high school. When I was filling out my JET application, I even considered only selecting that I was interested in a high school placement. But beggars can’t be choosers, and I was rejected from JET anyway. Once I was in Japan, I discovered that the English market was getting younger and younger, with the main needs being for children’s teachers. When I did find a job with a small, private cram school, the ages of my students ranged from babies in diapers to seventy-year-olds, with the vast majority being elementary school students. Once again, through no intention of my own, I’d become mother goose, diligently teaching English while averting tantrums and dealing with bathroom emergencies.

Here’s the thing about teaching English in Japan: if you’re a native speaker with a BA, you can do it. You’re not hired for any special talents beyond what you were born into. Never mind that teaching in itself is a talent, chances are you won’t be doing a whole lot of that anyway. The main position for foreigners is as an ALT, or Assistant Language Teacher, which means that you work in a school do whatever the real Japanese English teacher tells you to. You likely have little input on the English curriculum, and won’t even necessarily make your own lesson plans. Often, the main function of the ALT is outside of the classroom, hanging out with the kids and being foreign to “promote intercultural exchange”. Within the school, your position is somewhere between a teacher and a student. Part of the reason why JET consistently hires kids fresh out of college with no experience is that they’re easier to control, and generally don’t challenge the authority of the “real” teachers.

The other common route for teaching in Japan is through conversation schools. Children through adults can pay money for a set number of classes with a native speaker, who teaches from the uniform curriculum and lesson plans set up by corporate headquarters or whatever. There’s also a fair amount of sales involved for said native speaker, who tries to get the students to pay for as many textbooks and CDs as possible, while simultaneously convincing them to sign up for more classes. My job was a little different than either of those in that I was given free rein over my small classes and devised my own lesson plans, mostly without the aid of a textbook. With only a TEFL certificate under my belt, I was hardly qualified to do this, but I ended up learning quite a bit on the job. My boss didn’t seem to understand or appreciate the amount of work that went into it, and frequently threw surprise classes at me at the last minute (bikkuri jugyo, I called them). She seemed to believe that English lessons just flew out of my butt, since I’m a native speaker.

These two and a half avenues of teaching English have one thing in common: you aren’t hired for what you can do, but for who you are. You’re hired because you’re foreign, hopefully with stereotypically foreign features, hopefully attractive and a certain kind of outgoing that allows you to set your pride aside and make a fool out of yourself on a regular basis. Some foreign teachers are amazing at their jobs, and some should probably never be allowed near children, but for the most part, to their employers, they’re equally interchangeable. I know that in my company, the fact that there was a single foreigner on staff was flaunted in newsletters and advertisements as if it granted them that much more credibility.

Once a week, I spent the mornings teaching classes at a daycare, or hoikuen. I knew that the position of teachers is perhaps the most exalted and highly regarded profession in Japan. I know we say this in America too, but in Japan children are regarded as incredibly precious, and childhood is widely celebrated. We may have these theories in America, but it’s really in practice in Japan. Until a child hits junior high school, often their entire household revolves around them. These different views of childhood and teachers was evidenced in the stark contrast between my experiences at an American daycare and a Japanese daycare. During their time at the daycare, from early in the morning until late in the evening, the kids, who were all between infants and six years of age, followed a strict regime comprised of academics, social development, and playing. The staff was certainly no ghetto of uneducated females. All of them had at least a two year postsecondary degree or trade school, and at least a third of the staff was male. It’s weird that I, as a progressive individual, found myself so shocked at the sight of men in the caregiver position, lovingly changing diapers and feeding infants who weren’t their own. In elementary schools, male teachers are just as common as females. Japan definitely has a ways to go in regards to gender equality, but the position of men in early childhood education is commendable. Unfortunately, this participation often doesn’t extend to their homes and fathers. I suspect the reasoning behind the strong male presence in elementary education may actually be quite conservative: educating children is too important for it to be left up to women.

All of the children at this daycare had two parents who worked fulltime, with a wide variety of incomes. My boss’s youngest daughter had graduated from this daycare, and I remember her complaining to me about the daycare system in Japan. She told me of the bureaucracy behind it, that families are required to fill out an application and prove their employment and income to city hall before qualifying. She made it sound complicated, but when I asked her how much it costs, she was confused. Once you qualify, daycare is virtually free, of course.

Not all Japanese daycares are the same, and I’ve heard that mine was definitely on the high end of the spectrum. I know the one my boyfriend taught at monthly was less academically focused, and more about babysitting. I don’t know why, and I don’t have the answers for everything. My daycare was in a city, while Colin’s was in the tiny farming town in which we lived, but there’s variety in cities too. Regardless, I think even the low end daycares have a male presence and a quality that likely exceeds the American one at which I had worked.

In Japan, childcare isn’t regarded as unskilled female labor at all. Just because I was a native speaker with a BA, I could work as an English teacher, but there was little else for me in that market. Immigration laws are incredibly strict, and it’s illegal to hire a foreigner to do a job that a Japanese person can do. Other than teaching, there’s one more job available to foreign women in Japan, and it doesn’t even require English skills.

To be continued in part two, in which I discuss sex work and being really good at caring for children.

Twin Cities: Cool as Hell (seriously, it gets cold here)

2009-05-30T13:13:00.004+09:00

Mary Tyler Moore throws her hat in the air on Nicollet Mall; bystanders look on perplexed because they know she’ll need that hat.

There’s nothing that irks me more than people associating this iconic moment with New York City. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Mary Richards abandoned New York for the snowy tundra of Minneapolis. She left her handsome, charming, yet suffocating doctor fiancé to pursue a career with a local television station. In 1970 (and even now), sticking with the doctor husband was the safe option, the beaten path, but Mary was a frontierswoman. Hence Minneapolis. It’s not about a girl making it in the big city. It’s about a woman making it her own way, counter to the norms.

Maybe I lived in rural Japan for way too long, but especially when I first moved here, I was bursting with appreciation for this city. I was in awe of all the food—international food, available everywhere! International food, international people, evidence of individuality: all things I’d been missing while in Japan. It was a good transitional city in that people here are extraordinarily polite. Polite in the Midwest looks different than in Japan—it’s warmer, friendlier, more communal. People seem to care about helping out random strangers, but still value personal space.

I’ve never been one to follow the mainstream, sometimes to the point of obstinacy. It seems like everyone goes to New York, and I noticed the same thing in Japan with kids wanting to move to Tokyo when they graduate. I can appreciate those places, but they’re for the masses (who like having an exorbitantly high cost of living), and I prefer the hidden gems. Minneapolis is a small city, but with a lot of per capita awesome.

I’ve lived here for about eight months now, and for some reason feel the need to share why I love this city to the people who know nothing about it. Really, I just like the feeling of being here, being able to walk down leafy streets and get to interesting places, because everything is so close. Not that I can ever afford to go, but I just realized there are at least four Japanese restaurants within a mile radius of my apartment. If I were regular-poor, then I’d probably take advantage of the sushi happy hours. But if you want evidence of some of Minneapolis’ per capita awesome:

Along with Seattle, it’s the most literate city in the country, and has a proportionately high amount of young people and educated people. And there’s culture, too. Minneapolis is only behind New York in per capita live theater seats, and follows Washington DC and Chicago in number of museums. We’re unpretentious urban cool mixed with farmy progressiveness. We have big city amenities but manage to be environmentally conscious, and have something like four farmers markets throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul (EDIT: Boy, was I wrong there. There are like sixteen farmer's markets). I personally don’t get that into the nature, but a lot of people dig the fact that we’re surrounded by lakes and parks. It’s just generally an attractive place to be. Did I mention that we have not one, but two roller derby leagues? Not only that, we have a thriving music scene, particularly indie and hip hop, partially thanks to being home to the best radio station ever (seriously, you should stream that shit). Oh, and fucking Prince lives here.

I’m sure life will take me to many other cities, but for now, I’ve got one I really appreciate. If only it didn’t get so unbearably cold.

The Lost Repatriation Diaries: Three Words

2009-04-01T03:24:00.004+09:00

Note: This is from October 2008, when I was just starting my job. I don't have any new stuff, so I thought I would share it.

Sitting in a chair too small at the orientation for my new job, I was struggling to think of three words to describe myself. My supervisor had just proposed this task for each of us as an icebreaker, something she’d undoubtedly pulled from some pocket management guide. I was in awe of these people who, rather than thinking of this as an absurd request, easily came up with adjectives, labeling themselves as caring, thoughtful, hard-working, intelligent, optimistic, creative. Thank god I was one of the last to go, because digging through my brain, I could only think of words like, young, caucasian, and female.

Is this what people do in America, think about their internal attributes and keep them readily available when called upon to give them? Why would I tell others what I supposedly am? Isn’t that rather presumptuous, as if they’re too stupid to figure it out for themselves? And isn’t it a little self-centered to sit around thinking about your own internal attributes rather than getting to know others? And aren’t people often wrong with their self-assessments? I remembered a study from a class I took in college, how when asking sample groups of American and Japanese people to give words to describe themselves, the Americans almost unanimously listed internal attributes, while the Japanese almost unanimously listed words that referenced their social context—housewife, lawyer, member of the school tennis club, student.

In Japan, I don’t recall any of these types of icebreakers. We just had jikoshokai: self-introductions. Mine was brief. Just my name, my country, my job. Really, it depended on the situation, but it might as well be brief, because hardly anyone listened, they were too busy grinning and clapping, so impressed that I could speak simple Japanese.

Back in America, at the social services agency where we’re sitting in child-sized chairs, I start to think of self-deprecating descriptions of myself. I don’t want to sound too conceited or intimidating. Maybe something about how I’m lazy in my house, and don’t do my dishes enough? Sometimes I’m too shy? I’m overwrought with guilt and self-criticism? Those are incredibly stupid ideas.

I’m reminded of the time my company in Japan, in an attempt to advertise for our summer school, gave a big informational presentation in a reception room at a wedding hall. I was half-listening to my co-workers as they gave their speeches at the miked podium, their voices dropping out of audibility as they bowed when they spoke. At my side table, I was diligently studying my notecards, whispering the Japanese script that my tongue kept tripping over. In between presentations, Yoshiko, my boss, touched my shoulder. “First, please in English, ‘My name is Kyashi. I am teacher. I come from Shiroishi. I live in America. Nice to meet you.’ Jikoshokai, ne?” Self-introduction. In English. Before my Japanese self-introduction. Okay, if she says so. Whatever I thought wasn’t important, I just had to honor what she wanted.

At the podium, I smiled and slowly said, “Good evening. My name is Cassie,” I could sense the crowd tighten in a collective discomfort, and I continued, “I am from America. I live in Shiroishi. Nice to meet you.” All eyes were stunned and bewildered. I could feel the crowd’s silent panic about the prospect of an English presentation, and their utter embarrassment, for themselves and for me. Like watching a comedian bomb on stage. I switched into Japanese, and I could feel the crowd’s collective relief. Those five sentences had been an eternity for all of us.

Back in America, there are only a couple more people to go before I would have to stand up and give my three words. I’m at my last resort, which before Japan was often my first resort: the flippant response. Sarcasm, irony, acerbic wit—all things I realized while in Japan that I relied on as a crutch, that most people in my generation use too readily. Colin often uses the word “Hilarious”, but can’t do so without sounding sarcastic. When asked for clarification, he doesn’t know if he’s being sincere or not. Sincerity is uncool. The word uncool is uncool. Shhh. Stop talking now. If you want to get bad reactions from people in Japan, I recommend trying out your sarcasm. It doesn’t really exist in Japan, and irony does to a much lesser degree. It seems everybody there is so damned earnest. Sincerity is the cornerstone of their functioning society where everybody can do the daily cram-school chant about doing their best and loving every subject in school without snickering.

It’s my turn, and I stand up, dusting off my improv skills. “Hi, I’m Cassandra. I’m going to be the literacy coordinator. As for three words to describe myself, I think I’ll borrow some that have been used already and go with patient, thoughtful, and oh, let’s say creative.”

Watchmen: Who cares about female characters, anyway?

2009-03-17T14:20:00.017+09:00

What does it mean that this woman is able to convey a hundred times more depth, emotional expression, and humanity…

….than this woman?

It means Hollywood can suck it.

By the way, in the above image, Laurie is pleading with Dr. Manhattan to save the world from nuclear annihilation. Can’t you just feel the urgency? Granted, it’s probably hard for her to act without eyebrows.

I finished reading Watchmen a few days before seeing the movie. I don’t recommend doing this, unless you want to be able to recognize where they take dialogue word for word from the book, and wonder why they changed a specific word/setting/conversational participant. The film tries very hard to be faithful to the book, even leaving little visual homages to portions left out of the adaptation. It’s conscious of the enormity of the original work, and that it will have rabid fans to answer to. The casting is so focused on physical resemblance that they did this to some guy’s ears:

I wasn’t a huge fan of the character of Laurie Juspeczyk aka Silk Spectre II in the comic, but Malin Akerman, her screen counterpart was a travesty. Even though in the comic book she was a somewhat archetypal female character, she was real and she was relate-able. Her mother began grooming her at a young age to become a superhero so that she could live vicariously through her. However, Laurie hated all the training, hated her costume, hated being a superhero, and felt like a total idiot most of the time running around in a yellow latex costume. She began dating Dr. Manhattan at sixteen, and when we meet her in the book, she’s living with him at the military base on the government’s dime. She’s lonely, she’s isolated, she’s a kept woman. She has no idea who she is.

Laurie’s character gets a ton of screen time for being nothing more than foil to the other characters. We know nothing of her attitudes about being a superhero, how she hates her costume (god knows I hate her costume), and it’s not important. She looks pretty and moves the plot along. The only thing in her past that’s even brought up as being of any relevance is her parentage. She exists completely in relation to others, with barely any thoughts or feelings of her own. Maybe they didn’t have time to go into her back-story (though I managed to in about three sentences), but a good actress would have been able to convey Laurie’s confusion, dissonance, and vulnerability with the timbre of her voice. Akerman delivers every line with the same flatness, whether she’s leaving her boyfriend (and source of home and income) of fifteen years or asking him to save the world.

The thing that really pisses me off about this is that had I not read the book, I wouldn’t have even noticed anything wrong with this character. My mind probably would have just glossed over her and paid attention to the men—the characters that mattered—just like I was supposed to. Except when Silk Spectre’s wearing her latex leotard, then I would think about her nice ass and all the crotch wedgies that thing must give her when she does a high kick. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the shitty position of women in comics, but apparently, it gets a lot worse in Hollywood. And let’s face it. Hollywood reaches a wider audience. So Hollywood’s cast its vote, and Laurie is reduced to nothing more than a sexy, high-kicking babe, and probably no one cares but me. But I think reducing Laurie’s humanity reflects on a failing of the movie in general—it makes her too much like the one-dimensional superhero figure that the book tries to challenge. Each character must have complexity that makes them human, things that illuminate the absurdity of the superhero genre in general. Without that element, it’s just superhero allstars to the rescue.

More lies my students tell me

2009-03-15T12:35:00.003+09:00

1.
Hayley: Do you want to hear something weird?

Me: Okay.

Hayley: This boy at my school, as soon as he goes into the bathroom, he takes off his shoe and starts eating his toenails!

Me: Ewwww! Wait, you can’t go into the boy’s bathroom. How do you know he does that?

Hayley: He’s not a boy. He’s a girl.

Me: He’s a girl?

Hayley: Yeah, he’s a girl.

Me: He’s a girl?

Hayley: Okay, I was just playing with you that time. But here’s something really weird…

2.
Safiyyah: When my mother gets sick, she screams so loud, she goes, “Eyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhhh” and everybody in the whole building hears it and they are scared, and then she goes to the park and she kills everyone.

Me: Hold on. Did you just say your mom goes to the park and kills everyone?

Safiyyah: No, but she goes to the park, and she sees the people there, and she kills them.

Me: So your mom goes to the park and kills people?

Safiyyah: No, she only kills the Somali people. She doesn't kill the white people like you.

Me: Okay, but you’re saying that your mom goes to the park and kills people.

Safiyyah: No, I said that she goes to the park and she is nice to people.

3.
The following was said to me in all honesty, but I'll just throw it in there.

Kadijah: I like you the best. You have pretty hair.

2009-03-11T13:27:00.002+09:00

On a holiday from school, Halima came to program without her headscarf. She seemed to be in a bad mood when her mother dropped her off, her eyes shifting around as she gave her a somewhat squirmy and resistant hug. Before going to join the other kids, she flipped up the hood of her baby blue Hannah Montana sweatshirt, consciously tucking her stray hair back away from her face.

As she was sitting with the kids, one of the staff members, Shaun, remarked brightly, “Halima, why don’t you got your hijab on?”

She glowered at him, then looked back down. Shaun is well-meaning, but sometimes has trouble reading the kids.

“Whoa-hoa, don’t talk to me, then.” Throughout the day, he periodically enthused, “Halima, you’ve got such pretty hair!” and was met with a cold reception. Once, as he was walking behind her, he flipped down the hood of her sweatshirt.

“Don’t!” She screeched, yanking the hood back up.

Shaun sat down near the cluster of kids. “I’m not trying to play with you. I’m just wondering how come you here every day with your hijab, but today you don’t gotta wear it.”

“Because she’s little, it’s okay,” some of the other kids piped in.

“She used to come here without a hijab a lot before you started here,” I added.

“Did she?”

“Mmhm,” I turned to Halima and said gently, “But you don’t like not wearing it now, do you?” She shook her head sullenly.

Halima is in first grade, and I remember when she started wearing her hijab. At first it was infrequent, then she started wearing one nearly every day. The day after Eid, she was without her hijab, the hair around her crown braided into cornrows, with the rest was loose, thick dark curls to her back. She was in bright spirits all day, and when I asked her how her Eid was, she excitedly told me, “I got new clothes, and these new shoes, and my hair was out, and we went to the Mall of America, and it was so fun!” When she first started wearing her the hijab regularly, like many little girls, she frequently adjusted it in public. Once she asked me if her hair was showing, and since then helping little girls tuck stray hairs under their scarves became a regular occurrence for me, like fixing uneven buttons or watching for untied shoes.

“Oh, so the hijab is optional until you’re what, fifteen?” Shaun tried.

The kids snorted. “No! Until you’re ten!”

Shaun looked at one of the girls. “How old are you, Farhia?”

“I’m nine.”

“But you’re always wearing your hijab. Couldn’t you just skip it sometimes?”

“Yeah, but I pray a lot,” she replied.

Farhia not only always wore her hijab, but she also wore billowy shirts and long skirts, like all of the other girls in the program but Halima, who was usually dressed to the nines of little-girl fashion, often in nice jeans and tall boots. Their mothers tend to adhere to the standards of modesty to different degrees, some always wearing loose, one-piece, monochromatic garb, others mixing and matching loose tops and skirts. Halima’s mother is my age, and she’s beautiful. I saw her once in jeans and a non-traditional scarf twisted around her head, rather than draping over the shoulders like a hijab, once without her scarf when I was dropping Halima off at her apartment, and once in full, conservative garb. Children are usually dressed less conservatively than their mothers, but I’ve seen some three year olds who are never without their hijab.

There’s so much variation, even among the Somali community. I wonder about the pressure about whether to wear or not wear hijab, because I know it goes both ways. I wonder how religious Muslim women come to a point where they don’t wear hijab anymore, and how secular Muslim women decide to continue to wear theirs.

Gradually throughout the day, Halima let her hood occasionally fall back to her shoulders. When Shaun made some remark about her pretty black hair, she turned to him and smiled, grabbing her ponytail, “My hair’s not black, it’s brown.”

As I saw Halima warming up to Shaun’s constant comments, I thought about myself as a little girl, how I would have been absolutely mortified by some man making comments like that about me. I was scared of men, didn’t want to sit on their laps, didn’t want them to wink at me, didn’t want them to call me “little lady” or pretend to flirt like so many older men think is appropriate to do with little girls. Halima was starting to enjoy the attention, but I couldn’t help but think that Shaun’s behavior was in a way reinforcing the belief in Islam that when a woman exposes her hair, she runs the risk of objectification. When she’s old enough to really understand, I’m curious about what choice Halima will make.

Lost Girls: my (textually NSFW) review

2009-02-22T12:20:00.004+09:00

To my parents: NSFW means not safe for work. It also means I'm uncomfortable with you reading it. Just throwing that out there.

I’m pretty sure that something can be considered both art and pornography, but I also tend to think those works end up doing at least one of those things poorly. When I picked up Lost Girls, I was told that it was Alan Moore’s graphic novel in which three iconic heroines of children’s literature, Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy, repeatedly get it on. For some reason, from that description, it still didn’t occur to me that this might be porn. I read it as a real graphic novel that seemed to have some major pacing flaws because nothing much was happening besides these broads going down on each other in various settings and contortions. Only after reading it did I discover that Alan Moore and artist-cum-wife Melinda Gebbie had always identified this project as pornography. That makes more sense, but it also brings up some complicated issues.

I was prepared to argue about its artistic merit, but after reading Moore’s remarks I thought, well, that settles that. Many of my complaints with it as a work of art seemed pointless when looking at it as a work of pornography. In Lost Girls, Wendy, Alice, and Dorothy meet by chance as adults staying in the same hotel in Austria on the eve of WWI. They bond over what is presented as their shared uniqueness, a mystery that needs to be unraveled: each had strange experiences as a child, strange dreams associated with sex. They work toward piecing together this mystery by sharing their stories and fucking each other a lot.

The concept itself is fascinating, and I was interested in the idea of expanding on these stories as allegories for the exploration of female sexuality, which I think is complex, wonderful, and scary. In the second book, the women each tell their origin stories—the stories of their first sexual experiences that occurred when they were between fourteen and sixteen years old. Dorothy jacks off during a tornado. Wendy fools around with Peter, a homeless kid she and her brothers had seen in a park. Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole involves following her father’s friend into her house, where he gets her drunk and molests her. So their introductions to sexuality are either through masturbation, fooling around, or forcible. Okay, that sounds like a pretty representative sample. But Moore’s portrayal troubled me. I didn’t trust a man to write the story I hoped to read, one that would explore the intricacies of female sexuality without completely fetishizing it. Despite their young ages, the characters are unanimously busty. They are drawn in form of the sexy-girl trifecta—the blonde, the black-haired girl, the redhead. Beyond this, I found myself objecting to Moore’s character choices. Dorothy is portrayed as a ridiculous hick in her dialect and mannerisms, which could be attributed to Moore’s Britishness. And Alice’s origin story didn’t sit well with me. I always thought of Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole as her own choice, due to her own inquisitiveness. Sure, Wonderland could be a disorienting and terrifying place, but I always imagined her with some agency in the situation that got her there. Regardless, the origin stories showed enough promise to keep me interested, and I couldn’t wait until the girls actually went to Wonderland/Neverland/Oz. At this point, I thought that the biggest problem with this portrayal would be equating these crazy fantasy lands with female sexuality. That’s a little extreme, because while sexuality is neat, it’s no psychedelic acid-trip crazy-world. Instead, one of my big problems with the portrayal is that within it, those faraway lands do not exist. It vaguely attempts to convey a metaphorical existence, but that doesn’t quite work. If Dorothy goes to “Oz” upon her first orgasm, when does it ever stop being Oz? Why focus on these three women at all? All they do in these stories they have to unravel is fuck a bunch of people in incidents that have parallels to those of their classical stories.

In light of the authors’ intent for this to be a work of pornography, my objections to its portrayal of female sexuality are pretty much moot. It is intended to be fetishized, not accurate or overly insightful. It makes more sense as porn than art, because it takes three fascinating stories and re-imagines them to allow for the maximum degree of erotic possibilities. For me, this was particularly stark with Dorothy’s story. What I loved about these three stories as a kid was that these girls traveled to magical, faraway places. In Moore’s re-working, these girls literally don’t go anywhere. Dorothy whacks off and has her first orgasm during the tornado (which leaves her house where it was) and proceeds to stay on her boring-ass Kansas farm and fuck three boring-ass farmhands that were sort of like the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion. You want to know how they got their brain, heart, and nerve? Dorothy fucked one guy, and he wrote her a stupid poem (brain). She fucked another guy, broke up with him, and he was sad (heart). She fucked another guy, and gave him the confidence to fuck other girls (nerve). These women had some sexy adventures, but Moore seems to rob them of everything that was special about them. It never addresses the “dreams,” which I thought was going to be their time in their respective faraway lands. For all I know, my mail carrier has had just as crazy, sexy times as these women. I don’t consider these characters sacred, and their likenesses have been co-opted for all kinds of pornography throughout the years. It’s just that reducing these fantastical stories to some girls who pretty much stay in their hometown and fuck a bunch of people is profoundly disappointing.

Now let’s transition to examine the pornography label. Moore was quoted as saying something along the lines of how he wanted to raise the standard of pornography, show that pornography could be intellectual and interesting rather than just seedy and covert. That’s something I can get behind, I guess. I haven’t eliminated that Moore’s identification of his work as strictly pornography is a sort of ruse. Had he called it erotic fiction, for instance, there would be a great deal of outcry about it actually being pornography, and devoid of artistic merit. In calling it pornography, its artistic reception can only go up. But acknowledging it as porn, something intended for people to get off to, creates problems of its own.

There’s an advantage to creating something that technically isn’t porn, but people get off to nonetheless. I think of it as the National Geographic effect. By identifying it as porn, you lose the discreetness and acceptability of having some art that you just happen to privately wank to. However, Lost Girls isn’t something you would be ashamed to have on your bookshelf (unless someone opened it), which is exactly where my friend was keeping the copy I borrowed. In that case, it’s legitimizing porn, which seems to at least partially be Moore’s intent.

I will say that I thought Gebbie’s illustration was beautiful and thoughtful. However, to identify this as porn, rather than art, the authors have dug themselves into a hole with the depiction of child sexuality and incest, and it really is extensive and detailed. There are special protections for art, but if this is for the purpose of high-brow wanking, is it even legal to include children? And if it’s pornography for pornography’s sake, wouldn’t that kind of be, um, embarrassing for the consumers to acknowledge they’re whacking off to extensive incest? The book even contains a discussion of pornography that’s somewhat inconclusive. During an orgy including hotel staff and the three women, the owner of the hotel reads an erotic story about two children being seduced by their mother and father. Wendy objects to the story because she has a young son, and the hotel owner explains that the story is fine because the children are fictional. If it were real, it would be horrifying, but they don’t live beyond this story, and will never have to deal with the physical and emotional repercussions of their actions. The hotel owner is actually supposed to be the author of the story, along with several other erotic pastiches that appear throughout the book. He later reveals that he began these stories when he was living in Paris, fucking two children who may have been his. This casts doubt on his assertion that the story is harmless fantasy, as if the book is asking, “What about YOU, reader?” But it’s true that porn is the single remaining medium that openly embraces stereotypes in the form of fantasy, and continues to accept blatant sexism and racism. After all, you can’t help what gets you off. This is why I think art and porn will always, to some degree, be at odds. They can’t be judged by the same standards. If I saw a ridiculous caricature of a Hispanic maid in a movie, I would be outraged, but if I saw it in porn, I would just shrug and shake my head. I can’t really attest to its effectiveness as pornography, but reading Lost Girls as a work of literature, I became easily bored and disappointed.

Japan Week: GET

2009-02-15T14:43:00.006+09:00

It’s finally over, and boy do I deserve a heartfelt “Otsukaresama”. It went really well, thanks to the many helpful ideas I received. I was surprised to learn that these kids are actually really, really interested in Japan. It kind of reminded me of being back in Japan in that they were completely rapt in my every word, and would be fascinated by any piece of information I gave them.

Between the preparations, the language lessons, and shopping at Asian markets, the whole week was a nostalgia trip. As I was going through all of my photos from the past two years in order to put together a brief but informative slideshow, I could feel the nostalgia tugging at me, this time notably devoid of bitterness. I’ve missed my friends from Japan like hell, but for the first time, looking through these photos, I missed the feeling of being in Japan. No one can manicure nature like Japan, that’s for sure. While I maintain that Shi-town sucks pretty hard, it’s startling how much beauty exists even in backwoods Saga prefecture.

Anyway, when I started the slideshow, which was broken up generally into festivals, homes, schools, and food, I ended up spending five minutes on just the first picture because the kids had so many questions. I continued through the slideshow, and the kids had so many questions that half-way through I told them to remember their questions and I would try to answer them at the end. At that point they started shouting out questions instead. Some samples:

“Do they have buildings in Japan?”

“Are there stores?”

“What’s that building behind you? I hope it’s a Red Lobster!”

“What’s difference between Japan and China?”

Even at the end of the week, the kids were still using Japan and China almost interchangeably. I had to repeatedly correct them, “No, ‘arigato gozaimasu’ means thank you in Japanese, not Chinese.” Before I cut the questions off, there were more hands in the air than I could deal with. As soon as I answered a kid’s question, his or her hand would shoot right back up again. Some of the kids didn’t actually have a question in mind when I called on them, and some just wanted to share something they saw on Inuyasha.

After the slideshow, I did the language lesson, which I hoped included a good balance of vocabulary and sociolinguistics. I taught them greetings, bowing, thank you, and how to say “My name is…”, which of course is super easy, because it’s just “(your name) desu.” It reminded me of how good kids are at languages. All of these kids are bilingual except Hayley, so that might have contributed to their ease with Japanese. I really should have taught “yoroshiku onegaishimasu.”

The next day I showed them the two manga Colin happened to have, which was One Piece and Doraemon. The kids knew all about One Piece already, which was good, because I didn’t. The activity where I gave them photocopies of pages with the Japanese dialogue whited out for them to write their own story was too advanced for the little kids, but went awesomely with the older ones. I pretty much took Brett’s advice exactly regarding Pokemon. They did not, in fact, know that Pokemon meant pocket monster, and after I taught them jankenpon, we played the gokiburi game in the gym with the three incarnations of Pikachu. That game was just madness, because it was like live-action Pokemon for them, which was almost too much for their brains to handle. I couldn’t think of a gesture for Raichu, the highest level, so one girl suggested that if you’re Raichu, you jump everywhere. Once you win as Raichu, you’re supposed to battle the teacher (me), but I kept forgetting that I’d told them to jump everywhere. A kid would bound toward me, out of breath, then stand in front of me jumping in place, and I would just say, “Can I help you?” before remembering that I was probably supposed to battle with them.

At the end of every day, I had them stand up, bow, and say “arigato gozaimasu” (fuck past tense) to the teachers. I noticed that when we were bowing throughout the day, there would always be a few kids who just didn’t bow. As they were doing a final thank you bow to the teachers, I noticed a few kids saying to each other, “Don’t bow,” and once they had finished, arguing with a girl over the fact that she had curtsied.

“I didn’t bow!” She said.

“A curtsy is a girl bow!” one kid shot back.

I interrupted to explain to them in Japan that everybody bows the same, but one of the non-bowing kids, a fifth-grade boy named Samatar, said, “But we can’t bow at all. In Somalia, it’s haraam.”

“It’s what?”

“Haraam. It’s forbidden, like how we can’t eat pork.”

A lot of the kids tend to mix things up about their culture, attributing things to Somalia that should be attributed to Islam, and vice versa. Regardless, I was shocked. It was a combination of discomfort at teaching them something that was against their religion, and a sort of defensiveness of a practice of another culture. My sense of cultural relativism was trapped between two cultures that weren’t mine, and the resulting feeling was all-around embarrassment. I stammered, “But if you were in Japan, you’d have to bow,” and Samatar replied, “It doesn’t count if you’re in another country.” A little girl who had been one of the ones to abstain from bowing said, “I’ll do it!” and stood up and bowed like a proper Japanese person. I let out a small gasp. Suddenly, I remembered what another staff member had said about his home country, Liberia, and how you always bowed to your elders. I said that there are other parts of Africa where they practice Islam, but bowing is part of their culture. I wasn’t trying to argue, just trying to figure it out. Samatar shrugged and said, “It’s kind of a stupid haraam. We bow when we pray all the time.” Suddenly I understood this haraam, apparently better than these kids did. You bow to god, not to other people. I said to him, “I think it’s okay if you bow here, because we’re just practicing for Japan,” then quickly added, “But you don’t have to, if you’re uncomfortable.” I was shocked because all week, all the kids but one were Somali, and all but a handful had practiced bowing with me.

On the last day, I made nikujaga for them, which they loved, and since we only had a little time before the licensed teacher was supposed to arrive for academic time, I opened the floor for questions. Once again, I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm. They even followed my long tangents, like when one of the teachers asked me what was the most different thing about Japan. My answer, by the way, was about there being a stock phrase for nearly every situation that doesn’t translate well and isn’t something we’d say in English. They followed me even when I gave examples of the situations, the phrases, and their meanings. More questions and answers:

“Did your back hurt from bowing so much?”

“No, it was usually just a little bow.”

“Will you teach me to write in Chinese?”

“First, it’s Japanese, and second, you already asked me that and I told you if we have some free time, I’ll teach you.”

“What kind of water did you drink?”

“I drank normal water from the sink, but actually, Japanese people thought I was kind of weird for carrying around a bottle of water, because they always drank tea.”

“What kind of tea?”

Before long, the other teacher was waiting at the sidelines, and I told them we had to move on, and they could ask me their questions at the end of the day. As I walked back to my office, the kids continued to shout questions at me.

“Wait! Why do they call it green tea when it’s not green!”

“It is green,” I said.

“Does it turn you green?”

“No.”

“Even your tongue?!”

“No.”

“Do they have red tea?”

“No. Now listen to Ms. Kelly!”

Anyway, now that Japan week is over, I’m exhausted. There was other stuff we did too, but it wasn’t quite as interesting to write about. Now that that’s over, I have to focus on getting the kids to learn to read again. Yay!

Holy shit.

2009-02-05T12:28:00.002+09:00

I was going through my old Word documents, trying to see if any of my fragments were worth salvaging, and I found this:

I just need to write something now to prove that I exist. I wanted to write something that people would respond to, not because it’s the next great work of literary journalism, but because it’s something, because it resonated, because it was what it was. I’ve long given up the notion that I could produce the next great anything. But if some people read it and like it, maybe that’s enough. I’m in a state now that I hate everything I try to put to words, even when I toy with a few different subjects that are on the list of fragments going stale. All day, I’ve thought, I take so much, I consume so much, I need to produce something. And nothing came out. So I write about how nothing came out, because if I don’t, it will be another day I may as well not have existed, another day of an empty inbox and an internet that updates too slowly. At least I’m leaving this one footprint. I was alive on February 13, 2008, and I couldn’t write anything at all.

Almost a year ago today, and I felt exactly the way I feel at this moment. I've come a long way, baby.

Japan People: Give me your ideas (BRAAAAAAAAIIINS)

2009-02-03T14:45:00.003+09:00

So at the after-school program I work at, we have themed weeks, and since I have expertise, next week is JAPAN WEEK! But that means I need to think of actual things to do, which is why I need your suggestions. The kids are really into pokemon, manga, and anime, but I know NOTHING about any of that stuff. Colin has a couple manga in Japanese I can bring in, and I was thinking about scanning a couple pages and photoshopping the lettering out of the speech bubbles and having them write their own stories in groups. I'm making nikujaga one day, and we always have snack so I was thinking about teaching them "itadakimasu" and "gochisousamadeshita". Maybe some really simple language things like numbers and hello and goodbye. I can't do origami worth shit, but I bet the other teachers would be able to learn to make those cranes if we made that an activity.

Basically, what I still need ideas on is how to involve pokemon/manga/anime, and also games. I can't really remember any games that kids played besides jyankenpon, which I could totally do (I tried it once to kill time, to interesting results), and gyutan game, which I can just imagine not working at all. So yeah, feedback, anyone? Also, ninety percent of my kids are Somali, with varying degrees of ESL-ness, so anything with subtitles would probably not work out.

Input would be appreciated.

2009-01-02T16:03:00.002+09:00

As I think about my options for what to do with my life, I keep ruling out more and more careers. They always say that if there's something you can do besides writing, you probably should. Now I'm starting to think that I may actually be unsuitable for everything, so I'm thinking about writing a book about my time in Japan based off of a lot of the material here, but building on it. Is that crazy? I also thought about revising a couple entries and submitting them places, but I could only think of a couple places to submit (which would be total longshots anyway) and the ones I like I think are way too long to submit anywhere.

Still Japan-Awkward

2008-12-22T08:21:00.001+09:00

It’s been five months since I’ve been back, and I still have weird mannerisms left over from Japan. When I gesture to my kids, I still unconsciously use the palm-down “come here”, and the Japanese way of showing numbers with my fingers. I bow slightly to people I pass in the halls at work. I say “I’m sorry” all the time, which has a very different meaning than “sumimasen” in Japanese. “Sumimasen”, which I think literally means “It is not finished”, meaning “I am indebted to you”, is used for “excuse me”, “I’m sorry”, and sometimes “thank you”. For instance, I got in the habit of saying “sumimasen” to servers at restaurants if it seemed to me like they’d gone out of their way to give me something. In English, I translate all these unique situations as “I’m sorry”, and now I’m apologizing for everything. When I want to get someone’s attention, I apologize. If someone does something nice for me, I apologize. It’s really awkward, and it probably just comes off like I have no self-esteem. You’re supposed to be confident in America, if someone does you a favor, you don’t have to be embarrassed, you’re supposed to just smile and say thank you like you deserved it. These are things I still have problems with.

Another thing I struggle with is interacting with parents/guardians of my students. For a long time, I was overly smiley and deferential, and I noticed that other staff-members were casual and not terribly smiley, and the parents responded better to that. In actuality, we’re providing them with a service, and most of them don’t pay for it, so it’s not like we need to kiss their ass or anything. Still, just a couple days ago I was meeting the parents of a registering student, and the giant smile and slight, spasmodic bows took over. They were Somali, so maybe they didn’t notice too much. Maybe they thought I was foreign too.

Despite this lingering impact Japan still has on me, when I think about my life there, I’m filled with different conflicting emotions ranging from relief to anger to regret. My work-life here isn’t filled with the constant guilt and torment, I don’t have to plan for a spectacular presentation for the parents that will have no relevance on anything, and I don’t have to look so BUSY BUSY OMG I’M SO BUSY all the time. I think about how about this time of year people would be having their bonenkai, or end-of-the-year parties, for their work. And then I remember how I never got to go to a single enkai, how I wasn’t even invited to my company’s first bonenkai because my boss wanted me to cover a class for her because canceling for the company party would be so out of the question, and I get fucking pissed. I can’t let go of the idea that because I put up with a shitty work situation for so long, I missed out. I missed out on regular work and hours, a living wage, on actually becoming more fluent in Japanese. By staying in the countryside, I missed out on an urban Japanese life. But it’s all old news, it’s in the past, it’s water under the fucking bridge, so why can’t I let go? A while ago, I thought it was forgotten, but in some ways Japan just clings to me.

Lies my students tell me

2008-12-20T14:51:00.002+09:00

Lying was one of those behaviors related to poverty that was discussed in the orientation months ago. The kids make stuff up constantly, ranging from little things to inventing elaborate tall tales. There’s a lot of chicanery surrounding snack time, because the kids are always trying to figure out how to get more food. I spend a good portion of my time at the program sounding out phonetically spelled words on flashcards, but I also hear some stories.

NOTE: As a Japan blogger, I was a little lax with pseudonyms, because most Japanese people in my life hardly ever used the internet, and even if they found my blog, they wouldn’t understand it. I generally only had pseudonyms for people I talked a lot of shit about, and sometimes for kids. Now that I’m in America, I have to be a lot more careful, so if I’m talking about kids or anyone associated with my work, I’m definitely using pseudonyms. If there’s an issue that’s particularly sensitive, I won’t even identify the person with a pseudonym, lest that make them more identifiable. Anyway, let’s get to my lying kids.

I was going through flashcards with Yusuf, and we were sounding out the word “pet”. I asked him if he had any pets, even though I knew his family and was pretty sure he didn’t.

Yusuf: Yes, I just got a boy cat.

Me: Really? What’s his name?

Yusuf: (looking at his shirt) Uhhh, I call him Batman.

After reading a short passage about a lost cat with a red tag, I asked Halima if she had any pets.

Halima: I used to have a dog, her name was Oranges and we had to make a tag for her because she was on shows and sometimes she got lost, and she was the color orange, and now you can see her in shows, she’s on the TV, on shows, and no, I don’t have a dog. I hate dogs. They’re nasty.

Little girl: My mom’s taking me to the Mall of America this weekend.

This girl’s mom was in jail at the time, and had been for a while.

Haley and I came across the word “wept” in our flashcards, and she asked me what it meant. I explained to her what it meant to “weep”, and how “wept” is the past tense, but not in those words because she doesn’t know “past tense”.

Haley: So like I wept when my grandparents died?

Me: Yes! That’s exactly right. That’s a good example.

Haley: They both had guns, grandma had a gun and grandpa had a gun, and they were really mad, and they were shooting and shooting, and they ended up shooting each other and they both died!

Me: Wow. When did that happen?

Haley: Four-hundred-ninety-eight years ago.

Rambling about work-related things

2008-12-08T11:02:00.001+09:00

Twice a week I head downtown during the morning commute for my internship at a human rights nonprofit. Downtown at 9 AM is a completely different world than anything I'm used to. As I walk the few blocks from the bus stop to the high-rise where I work, I pass by people pulling their SUVs into parking garages that charge at least eleven bucks a day, and imagine how they must have commuted from Edina or St. Louis Park. So many people in suits and business attire, and I wonder, what the hell do these people do? They must be part of that miscellaneous business world I always hear about in my alumni newsletters that give me advice about career-building and reference things like company stock profiles, regional training sessions, and presenting projects to a board of directors, and it always sounds so mysterious to me. These suits walking around, are they lawyers? Are they marketing executives? Do they work for Target's corporate headquarters? I see groups of men not much older than me walking briskly down the street, looking all date-rapey with their gelled hair and fancy shoes, and I overhear bits of conversation about heading to some random Irish-themed yuppy bar on the corner for happy hour. It's a world that is totally alien to me.

Where I actually work, though, is different. Even though the staff is predominantly made up of lawyers, people wear whatever they feel like, which ranges from business casual to jeans and a sweater. My real, paying work place is similarly casual, and for a while I found this shocking, because Japan is so formal (remember, it's rude not to wear makeup). I worked with mostly kids, often little kids, often in their homes, but there was only one time I wore jeans to a class, totally by accident because I got almost the whole way to the class before realizing that I'd forgotten to change. When I looked down and noticed I was still wearing my jeans, it felt as if I'd forgotten to put on pants, and I was half naked. I even apologized to my student's mother and offered an explanation, which was totally not necessary. I started watching 30 Rock since I've been back, and I still can't get over how Liz Lemon works for NBC but can wear jeans and hoodies to her job.

By the way, I am so done with internships. They always look like they'll be really cool in the description, but it's just unpaid entry-level labor. If you have a personality like mine, which is to quietly and obediently do your assigned work rather than schmoozing and being a go-getter, internships of this sort do not lead to jobs. It possibly leads to references and definitely something to put on your resume, but I have a LOT of shit like this on my resume. If I wanted a job in this area, I'd either have to go to law school (PUKE) or get some other degree in something like nonprofit management so I can work in fundraising and PR (BOOOOOO).

Also, so much of the human rights community is based on pushing their respective nations to sign whatever human rights treaty put forth by the UN, but these treaties are largely symbolic. There are treaties that are legally binding and those that are nonbinding, but in their implementation, there's basically no difference. For example, the US hasn't signed onto the Convention on the Rights of Women, but places like Egypt have, and I don't think Egypt has such a good record with women's rights. I've been working on a disability rights toolkit here, and of course I'd like the government to sign onto the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. But really, it's just because it would be a nice idea, because even though the rights of PWD are universally way behind, the US has a comparatively good record, and the convention doesn't add much to US legislation on the issue, and the stuff that it does add, the US would basically ignore because it smells too much like socialism. So I don't know how I feel about the pushing legislation part of human rights work, but there's a lot of grassroots level work around the work that really helps. I just don't know how to get involved with that.

Briefly...

2008-11-24T15:00:00.002+09:00

I’ve been working for nearly two months now at the youth program of a social services agency on the northeast side. I’m the literacy tutor, teaching predominantly Somali kids to read at an afterschool program. I like it pretty well so far, but I still don’t think I want to work with kids as my career or anything. They can be fun and all, but it’s not exactly intellectually stimulating for me.

These kids, who are “disadvantaged youth”, are pretty different from my experiences with kids in the Japanese classroom. These kids don’t try to grab my boobs*, they raise their hands rather than shouting answers, and they aren’t paralyzed and rendered dumbstruck by the presentation of two choices. In Japan, we always tried to foster a fun and interactive classroom that’s main purpose was for the students to develop positive schema associated with English so they would be more open to learning it for real in the future. This had its benefits and drawbacks, among which was little discipline. Young kids were almost encouraged to be crazy, because at least they were having fun. Even though the kids in my current program come with their own set of challenges, behavioral problems, and variety of language backgrounds, the classroom is still comparatively orderly.

I’m continually faced with how poverty fucks you over on all kinds of fronts. During our training that included a bunch of new volunteers and staff members, our supervisor talked extensively about kids living in poverty almost like they were anthropological subjects. A lot of staff and volunteers are well-versed in the subject, and a surprising number grew up on the northeast side, but it was weird to hear it presented like poor kids were so different. We even got a handout:

BEHAVIOR RELATED TO POVERTY
Laugh when disciplined: A way to save face in matriarchal poverty.

Argue loudly with teacher: Poverty is participatory, and the culture has a distrust of authority. See the system as inherently dishonest and unfair.

Inappropriate or vulgar comments: Reliance on casual register; may not know formal register.

It’s an odd juxtaposition that I’m working with these kids who have so many challenges, and while I grew up privileged, I now have no money, probably even less than the refugee families I tutor. I’m constantly confronted with all the things I can’t afford, simple things like going to a coffee shop every once in a while, anything at the store that isn’t generic, food that I didn’t personally prepare, and it’s fucking oppressive. It’s on my mind constantly. It doesn’t help that everywhere people are freaking the fuck out about the recession, and those people have infinitely more money than me. I want to get out my frustrations about this, but complaining about having no money is a pretty bourgie thing to do. I think about class, about what it means to be poor, but not enough to form a post about it. I don’t have the energy.

*Sidenote: I talked to this girl who had taught English to elementary school kids in Bolivia for a summer, and I asked her if they ever tried to grab her boobs. Her response: WHAT?!

A Brief History of Democracy

2008-11-06T16:14:00.000+09:00

I began my adult political life with a blow to my faith in our system. I had thought that even if things didn’t swing your way, at least they were just. But the 2000 election not only introduced me to modern voter suppression, it showed political officials arguing to not count votes. Why wouldn’t you want to count people’s votes? Didn’t they trust Americans? By the end, all I wanted, for the sake of democracy, was for all the votes to be counted, even if it meant Bush won. Instead, I learned that the Supreme Court can decide not to count votes, and appoint a president.

Four years later, I would vote in my first presidential election for not-Bush, who would lose. After 2004, I was angry. I was angry that I had done all I could and it hadn’t worked, that Kerry had so readily gone belly up in his concession, that congress had soundly voted against even investigating the numerous voting irregularities in Ohio. It was just like 2000, I wanted them to count the votes, no matter who wins, the game should at least be fair. I was fucking pissed.

So I went to DC for the inauguration in January to do whatever I could to shit all over their celebration. I didn’t want them to be comfortable in their victory, I wanted them to know that nearly half of America still hated their guts. The morning of the inaugural parade, my friends and I rode the metro from the suburbs with our signs (no sticks, they could be used as weapons) and our anger. Our stop was the same as the many supporters who came from out of town for the revelries, and surrounded by them, with my scruffy denim and faux fur-trimmed jacket and liberal outrage, I was a little nervous. They looked like caricatures of the way I had imagined them; the men wore cowboy hats with suits, and the women wore long, fur coats and overly inflated hair. Many of them had the vaguely inbred look of aristocracy, with their close-set eyes and weak chins. The supporters were so far from who I was, who I knew and respected, that I caught myself pondering how they didn’t even seem like people to me. They didn’t seem like real people with real lives who just happened to have different views than my own. They were something different, something utterly unsympathetic.

Once through the security checkpoint and to the bleachers reserved for the ten thousand protesters, I felt emboldened by the security in numbers. As the rally proceeded, streams of unwitting Republicans trickled through the protest grounds, probably to get a better view. Now it was their turn to be nervous as they shuffled single file through the narrow path the protesters would allow. Protesters had lined up on both sides to watch the supporters coldly as they passed, in the mildest instances, but some protestors heckled the cowering mink-and-cowboy-hats, screamed in their faces, insulted them. I didn’t agree with this practice, but at the same time I secretly wanted these people to be scared.

During the parade, we snarled and cursed at the vehicles going by, which I could only see in a flurry of signs and fists and twisted faces. We didn’t even know who was in which car, but we hated them all the same. Our breath was hot on the coldest inauguration since Reagan’s, and we chanted “Fuck Bush!” over and over again. I looked around at the protestors who were as diverse as the supporters at the parade were homogenous, and I saw everyone’s face ugly with rage. Amidst my own rage, I wondered, do we still seem like people to them? Maybe we’ve actually become this different, that we can’t even relate to each other on a human level. I had dehumanized my opponents, and I knew this was very, very dangerous.

After the parade had passed and the protestors seeped out the exits, I saw a group of people who looked like they were younger than me with huge smiles on their faces, passing out blue rubber bracelets and shouting, “Let’s elect a Democrat in 2008!” My unvoiced reaction to these people: “Shut up.” At that point 2008 was so far away, and we had the next four years to worry about. Plus, we had failed this time, how do we know that our broken democratic system could yield any better results?

Not long after that, Colin said to me, “You know who there’s talk about running in ’08? Barack Obama.” My reaction to him was the same, but voiced: “Shut up.” It seemed like such a naïve impossibility like those college Democrats crashing the inaugural protest with their ridiculous optimism. I remembered hearing Obama’s keynote address at the DNC in 2004, and he was so refreshing, so moving, that I thought in a better world, this man could lead us.

It took eight years of the country going to shit to create the conditions that allowed Barack Obama to be elected president, and I’m finally so grateful that the historical pendulum of politics swings back here for a while. I’m still such a cynic, I know Obama’s going to break my heart somehow. I think he’ll at least be a good president, but I’ll still keep my eye on him, since it’s every patriotic American’s duty to check authority. Even through my cynicism, last night I held Colin’s hand and I couldn’t stop smiling. After Obama’s victory speech, we could hear cheering in the streets and cars honking. We walked down Lyndale, and saw that a crowd had formed on all sides of the intersection outside the C.C. Club, cheering and dancing while cars drove by honking in support and calling out of their windows. All these people from diverse backgrounds were just so fucking happy, and nobody could stop smiling. If you passed a person on the street, they would shout something like, “Whoo! Obama!” and we would “Whoo” back. Colin and I skipped home.

It still seems so surreal. I never thought I could feel this way about a political figure in my lifetime. I’m proud of us, and they’re proud of us abroad too. Finally.

Continental Drift

2008-09-26T13:38:00.001+09:00

Japan is getting farther and farther away from me. I see pictures, videos, read updates from my friends, and pieces come back to me. Like how the crowds always started clapping along the instant someone started performing music, no matter how good or bad. Or the way people slept on the train wearing business attire. How everyone was so kind and well-meaning, but as soon as you brought up discrimination or cultural differences or a similarly uncomfortable issue, they would turn stoic and voice opinions far more nationalistic and conservative than nice people like them should have. What’s happening in Japan now, it no longer directly pertains to me. Their issues aren’t my issues. I’m not on facebook much these days, but when I go on I see strangers mixed in with pictures of friends I haven’t spoken with since I left, doing all the early bonding that new teachers do at all the places I used to go to. I see their misspellings and misconceptions in the captions, and honestly, it makes me feel territorial, but I don’t have any claim anymore.

I thought that repatriation would be more of a process. And believe me, starting all over again in a new country is a fucking process, but it shocks me how quickly Japan slipped away. I don’t remember a whole lot about my time in Prague anymore, but that was two months. Japan was two years. I guess my last few months of Japan, I wasn’t that present. I taught classes, but didn’t report to an office, and spent most of my time at home, not studying. Plus, I was bitter and pretty isolated. I learned how one can live in a country and not learn the language beyond the communication level. You just have to stay alone in your safe space for most of the day, consuming things that are familiar to you.

Today the internet guy came into our apartment to set up our modem. Having a stranger here, I wondered what the décor said to him. I noticed our sake bottle on display, the Japanese wall hangings we’d either received as gifts or purchased at hyaku-en shops, the fans, the Chinese paper dragon. I noticed that my computer was open to an e-mail in Japanese from a friend who had finally checked her mail and replied to me. When he went to his van to get a longer cable and returned, he took off his shoes at the door. I didn’t realize we’d neatly lined up our shoes at the door, and would have never asked him to take his own off. It’s just habit for us. Perhaps Japan is still more ingrained in us than we realize.

I was disillusioned in Japan due to my abundance of free time, and now I’m disillusioned here for the same reason. But I’ve noticed that in America, alienation doesn’t feel quite as lonely. Probably because living in alienation is more of an accepted way of life here, like youthful rebellion. In Japan, you’re supposed to belong to a group, and if you don’t, well, you don’t really exist.

I dreamed about the Kita family last night. I was leaving Japan all over again, and all four of the kids and the parents were determined to see me one last time before I left. They all trickled in while I was trying to pack, but there were dozens of them, and they were basically bringing me a party, and giving me courses of food even though I was stuffed. I needed to leave, but first I needed to give them my e-mail address so we could stay in touch. I couldn’t find paper, then I could only find the kids who wouldn’t know what to do with my address, then I couldn’t get the dad’s attention because he was trying to make me eat. I don’t know if I succeeded in the dream, but the reality is that Japanese people don’t do that much e-mail. And I know that I gave them my e-mail in real life, months ago when they said they wouldn’t be taking classes with me anymore, and it hasn’t made any difference.

2008-09-24T13:27:00.003+09:00

I’m convinced it’s not healthy to be left alone with your mind for too long. A lack of an external life leads to an overly active internal life, which for me is just exhausting. Thoughts and wisps of potential writing are tumbling around my brain, yet everything I’d think to write is either far too personal, too embarrassing, or just off-topic. At the end of the day I can’t stop my thoughts, and I want a drink, and if I decide not to have a drink, then my thoughts don’t stop and continue along the vein of the drink I’m not having. I want to write about depression, or addiction, or anxiety, but that’s overshare, and this isn’t a diary. Plus, it couldn’t be very interesting to read.

I used to write fiction. I wonder if I’ve run out of stories, because I don’t even think of them anymore. I guess I gave up on it because the value judgment system got to me. Every story has been told, so you have to find a really unique way to tell it, but if it’s too unique it winds up seeming undergrad-writing-student-ish. I didn’t have anything significant to add, so I stopped. Even by the time I graduated high school, my writing was taking on a first person, confessional quality that I eventually tried to steer away from in the interest of diversity. But I only wrote about myself in my diary.

Now the only writing I do is about myself, and it just feeds into the whole living too much in my head thing. In the writing world, authorial identity can make all the difference as to whether a book is a bestseller or passed on for publication. I haven’t read a memoir that turned out to be fake, unless you count Go Ask Alice, but I wonder if they could have stood alone as works of fiction. Authorial identity is so important people want to pass off fiction as their own stories. They’re part of the narrative. They live as their own carefully constructed character.

Things are different now than they were five years ago. With the normalization of blogging and social networking sites, we’re selecting details to present our narrative, and in the case of social networking sites that narrative tends to be flattering. Through our photo albums, notes, and wall posts, we can inform all those people from high school, exes, and “friends” that we’re doing fabulously, thank you very much. It’s a new kind of narcissism, and if I were more into blogging it might cause me to explode into myself. In Japan, any detail I happened to mention about my personal life was met with an awe-struck, captive audience. “Your sisters are twins? Really?” “Your boyfriend plays guitar?” “You often make tuna sandwiches for lunch?” If I ever was unsure of what to do for a period of time in my adult conversation class, I knew all I had to do was give some details about my life for my students to be interested and wanting to ask questions. I got used to being interesting, and I know for some foreigners it gets to their heads. I still get some reinforcement here, in that whenever I mention to someone that I’ve spent the last two years living in Japan they’re generally impressed. But I guess I’m thinking about this blog, and how occupying the expat in Japan niche gives you a pool of people who will be interested in your writing. The repatriation niche isn’t so established, and I’m afraid by coming home I’ve lost a potential audience. I know that coming home was the right thing for me, but I wonder about my “authorial identity”. If only I were a little more interesting, this thing could keep going and people would read it. Now it’s just me, me, me, reflection without cross-cultural insight. I wonder about possible ramifications of seeing yourself as a sort of character in a life narrative, and I think the insufferable, tumbling thought cycles might have to do with it.

Speaking of narcissism, here’s a picture of my cat:

Weirdness

2008-09-17T12:03:00.002+09:00

One thing this country has given me besides huge, heaping plates of lettuce called “side salads” and all-you-can-eat chicken fingers is an unparalleled level of anonymity. In Japan, my foreignness infiltrated every aspect of my public existence. Every single interaction I had, whether it was with the people at the gas station, the clerks at the 7-11, or the landlord who wanted to explain why my garbage had been rejected, every interaction was pervaded by my otherness. I could go through the checkout lane at the grocery store with the same proficiency as a native, but it didn’t matter, I was different. It explained why I was always buying broccoli but rarely fish, and I insisted on putting small purchases in my purse rather than a plastic bag or a designated “reusable shopping bag.” It explained why I walked places within a few blocks of my apartment rather than riding a bike or driving. Sometimes I got so used to the foreigner way of thinking, it affected me in my own apartment. As in, “I can’t open this jar, I’m too foreign to figure it out.” It didn’t help that all the doorways there were half an inch shorter than me.

Since I lived in a small town, I was sure that every time I went outside my appearance would be noted by anyone I happened to pass by, and likely by many of the people who drove by in cars, as well as some people completely hidden to me who were watching me from their windows. I knew this because people would report back to me. “[I know this is the first time we’ve met, but I saw you coming out of Marukyou the other day. You were wearing a brown skirt and carrying a green bag.]” Or better yet, “[I saw you on the train last month. You were writing in your notebook the whole time. Where were you going?]”

Living in an orthopraxical society, I was particularly conscious of publicly deviating from the norm, because I knew people I couldn’t even see would probably be watching me and maybe even discussing with their friends what that crazy foreigner was doing, and eventually run into me and ask me about it personally. When I was outside, I had the mentality that I had to go from point A to point B, no investigation of snakes I might see in the river, no lingering in certain areas or taking shortcuts that involved me climbing over something, because that was all too weird. Once, during the school day, I drove to a convenience store near Colin’s school to meet him and drop off something he needed for his class. After I gave him his item, he leaned against the car and started to chat about his day.

“Go back inside! Everyone’s a spy,” I told him. I didn’t think it was a big deal for him to be off school grounds during the day if he had nothing to do, but every person in town recognized him, and they all knew he was doing something wrong if he was talking to his equally conspicuous girlfriend during school hours, and some of them had connections with people in the school they might decide to inform. It seems really paranoid, but it’s true. People love talking about the activities of the resident foreigner, especially if they were doing things they weren’t supposed to.

Possibly the weirdest thing I regularly did in public was go to an abandoned house in the area to feed the stray cats that lived there. I tried to be sneaky about it at first, but pretty soon the entire neighborhood was aware of it, and I had the woman at the grocery checkout counter asking me how the cats were. Yeah, they probably thought I was some weird, infantile cat lady, but whatever. Recently I’ve been seized with sudden panic attacks thinking about those cats, and what happened to them after I left.

Anyway, in America, but particularly where I live, people are unafraid to be as weird as they want to be, loudly and in public, and no one thinks anything of it. I can walk down the street without anyone looking at me, and I can even lie down on a bench or feed some random cats if I want to, and it still feels like I belong. The other day I saw this guy standing on the street corner singing and all-out dancing to whatever was playing in his headphones, and he didn’t even seem mentally ill. It’s kind of comforting that America gives so many people permission to be freaks. But I’m still stuck in a Japanese mindset, because when I see random acts of weirdness, I catch myself thinking that those people are just selfish.

The last you will probably ever hear of the riots in St. Paul

2008-09-10T02:21:00.002+09:00

I know it's over, but it's not over for me, and for those of you who don't live here I'd hate for my lame account to be the only source of information you have about what happened here. So here's a link explosion.

A really good account from a photojournalist plus the best pictures I've seen

Video and appalling story of the arrest of three accredited Democracy Now! journalists

A protester minding his own business in a John McCain mask gets attacked by a Republican candidate for congress, arrested

Props to Zachary and Eileen for sharing these with me.

Our streets

2008-09-06T07:18:00.012+09:00

Our move-in day for our apartment in Minneapolis was September 1st, also Labor Day, also the first day of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. While we were sweating up two flights of stairs, thousands of people were taking to the streets in St. Paul, some of them peaceful, some of them not. One of them was our friend, Zachary, who at least helped us with a few boxes before marching. What followed were clashes with the riot police who used hoses, tear gas, rubber bullets, and sometimes smoke bombs to try to disperse the crowds, and hundreds of arrests. While I can't agree with the protesters who were violent, broke windows, and threw things, many of the people arrested were just standing there. Some of them even had press credentials. The damn local news crew even got arrested. Luckily, Zachary avoided the bad stuff.

The protests continued throughout the convention, and on the fourth, the last day, Colin and I went to a rally that convened at the capitol building, and was supposed to continue as a march to the Excel Center where McCain would be giving his speech. The city had given the protesters a permit for the rally from four to five, but after that any action would be illegal and punishable by arrest. The rallies are always the worst part of a protest too, in my opinion. Really good speakers are rare, and propaganda abounds. At the capitol building, the riot police were ready with their billy clubs and zip-ties, on bike, on horseback, and on foot.

The trends in signs seemed to show an exasperation with the high volume of arrests.

The number of ironic signs was interesting. One read, "9 out of 10 killer robots vote Republican", another read, "What would Big-foot do". It's so hard for people of my generation to be sincere about anything. I've noticed it about myself, I've noticed it about Colin. He can't say "hilarious" without sounding sarcastic, and when you ask if he was being sarcastic, often he can't answer.

At 4:50, some kind of tank-like police vehicle drove on the lawn, interrupting the speeches to warn everyone that their right to protest would expire at five PM, after which the city would be forced to take legal action if they didn't go home. I didn't see anyone who seemed to be deterred, and we all proceeded on the march. After all, I think the marching is the fun part. We got until a bridge over I-94 when the mounted officers blocked our way downtown.

There were even snowplows prepared at the top of the hill. I've thought about it a lot, and even though the bill of rights gives us the right to free speech and freedom of assembly, it doesn't really exist. We can only practice our free speech in the free speech zone, at the free speech time, and everything else that's unpleasant or challenging is illegal. The police were telling us that we couldn't walk on our own streets and voice our own opinions, because it wasn't the right time of day, or the right place.

That video doesn't really show the craziness, but whatever. Anyway, the police stood back for a while, blocking us but not hosing or gassing anyone. At the opposite end, a guy started skateboarding around the intersection that was being guarded by bike cops, then some protesting bikers joined him. Before long, the intersection was filled with bikers, and one guy dancing. Here's some video of the beginning of it all.

The police put on their gas masks and gave everyone a five minute warning to disperse or be tear-gassed. The group split, some staying at the bridge, while others went back to the capitol and more still went to random downtown intersections. Colin and I aren't hardcore at all, because we had a dinner date with Zachary's dad to get to downtown. On the way, we saw some contingents of protesters who seemed to be in a standoff with the riot police at one intersection. We ate, had a nice time in otherwise deserted St. Paul, and on the way home we couldn't get back on I-94 because the on-ramps were blocked by protesters and police. By the end of the night, we heard there were 396 people arrested. During the four days of the convention, we heard there were over 800 arrested, but official counts are still out.

Watching the news and seeing some protesters heckling the police, I shake my head. There were many different views represented at the march (that was supposed to be focused on an anti-war agenda), ranging from pacifists to democrats to anarchists to punks who want to break shit. I can't agree with everyone's methodologies or their rhetoric, but at least finally it seems like we're awake again.

A Different Animal

2008-08-19T08:23:00.005+09:00

It had been two days since I deplaned at the Eastern Iowa Airport, but it seemed longer. It had been a dizzying time spent doing errands in cars that drive on the opposite side of the street, make right turns on red, and don’t stop at railroad crossings unless the lights are flashing. My sister, Mandi, had been talking about a new karaoke bar she liked to go to that was small with few customers, so she and her friends could sing as much as they wanted. As we pulled up to the little bar by the carwash, Mandi assured me that the people were friendly and it wasn’t an intimidating environment at all. As soon as we walked through the door, my body tensed as the patrons (who were more numerous than I expected) turned to look at us. I felt immediately out of place, among these people who were so much bigger and louder than I was used to, many of them with tattoos and some even with mullets. This was no place to sing ABBA.

“I’m scared, Mandi, I’m scared, oh my god,” I said under my breath.

“Why?” she asked, and she genuinely didn’t know. I’d been away from Iowa bars for too long, I guess.

I insisted we go straight to the bar. Mandi ordered vodka cranberry, and I hesitated momentarily to stop myself from blurting out nama or the translation, raw beer. I found the right words and ordered an Amber Bock from the tap. Then the woman asked us, “Mug or shell?”

Mandi and I both looked at each other and repeated, “Shell?” The bartender looked at us suspiciously and showed us an example of a shell, which was just a regular glass as opposed to a frosty mug. I opted for the mug, and she asked to see our IDs. Mandi produced hers quickly and I fumbled through my wallet to find that only my Japanese driver’s license was immediately available. I searched through the different pockets and compartments of my wallet, thumbing through my expired Japanese insurance card, membership cards to various Japanese establishments, and more relevant cards I hadn’t thought of in years. My face became hot as the third full minute of me rooting around my purse and wallet passed, and I considered that I might not actually have my American driver’s license. I finally found it in a hidden pocket, and triumphantly showed the bartender. Who studied it for a really long time. Then showed it to another woman sitting at the bar to evaluate. Eventually, my perfectly normal ID passed the test, because they gave me my beer. Obviously, it had been a long time since I’d been carded.

My embarrassment over the ID incident quickly gave way to giddiness when I realized my beer only cost $2.25! In Japan, they always cost five dollars or more. Later I bought a PITCHER for five dollars and I nearly exploded. When even premium draught beer is so cheap, I don’t understand why literally everyone in the bar with beer was drinking bottles of Bud Light. Bottles are more expensive and not as good as from the tap. It must be an American example of groupthink.

Anyway, there were a few people singing, mostly the DJs, I learned. But we got a few drinks in us and looked for a karaoke book, which turned out to be the karaoke book, because there was only one for the entire bar. We retrieved it from a table of butch lesbians and flipped through. A couple of Mandi’s friends joined us, but they didn’t want to sing. I think karaoke in Japan is best done while drunk with a small to medium sized group of friends. They should be musically compatible with you—similar taste but not completely the same because you need diversity to keep things interesting. There are variables that can affect the experience. For example, someone who really likes Creed can set a strange vibe. Along similar lines, if I’m karaoke-ing with someone I just met or don’t know very well, I try to be supportive of their song choices and act like I’m listening and enjoying their turns even if I actually think they have horrible taste. If you’re with a group that’s too big, everyone fights over the limited remotes to enter their songs, you have to wait forever for your one song to come up, and generally everyone is either waiting for their song or focusing on entering one rather than listening to the people singing. Some people are karaoke selfish, and enter a ton of their own songs while less assertive members of the party barely get to sing at all. There are many things that can set a karaoke session on a good or bad course, but the thing about Japanese karaoke is that it’s hardly about performance. It’s more about nostalgia and identification, as everyone in the room may end up singing over the person with the mike if a good song comes up. Sure, people still judge you if you’re amazing or terrible, but when you’re with mostly friends, the stakes are pretty low. If the heart of karaoke is nostalgia, it’s important for the majority of the group to be nostalgic about the same songs.

Back at the American karaoke bar, people were singing mostly a mix of country and classic rock, and I found myself bobbing my head and pretending to listen in order to appear supportive of the singers. I often either didn’t like or didn’t know the songs (especially if it was country), but it was my Japanese karaoke etiquette taking over. Eventually I loosened up and stopped feeling the need to pay attention to strangers’ songs if more pressing things came up involving getting more drinks or talking to people at my own table. The fact that three people were completely monopolizing the queue was a big help, though. I leaned in and told Mandi that those people were singing way more than was good etiquette even for a medium karaoke room in Japan, let alone a whole bar. When she finally made it through the queue of song-hogs, Mandi sang some of her old standards, or number 18s if you want to be Japanese about it. I gave the DJ my fake name, Margot, and for some reason I chose the vocally challenging “Take on Me”. I didn’t totally bomb it, but apparently the crowd wasn’t that into ‘80s synthpop. Oh well.

At one point, a guy used the instrumental break of one of his songs as an opportunity to shout “Fuck Bush!” into the microphone, which was met with cheers and raised Bud Lights from the crowd. Things have really changed in America since I was here last. Anyway, one good thing about karaoke in America is that there’s a much better selection of English language songs, including Bizmarkie’s “Just a Friend”, which I sang after a lot of liquor. Even if American karaoke involves more performance and judgment, the nostalgia and identification element is still huge. The final song should be something that everyone can get into, so back in Japan we often chose something like “Come on Eileen” or “Bohemian Rhapsody”. The DJs chose the scream-rock song “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”. They got on top of the bar and made a big performance of it, while other bar-goers enthusiastically pumped their fists with them. And once again I felt so alienated.

Fuck yeah!

2008-08-04T15:26:00.002+09:00

My dad gave me this pen upon arriving in the airport in my hometown. Apparently, they sell them at his hospital. It features independently punching fists, and when you write lights sparkle at the base. As for the actual pen function of the pen, just like 5.7 percent of America, it doesn’t work. Welcome back.

On the way back from the airport, my mom took me on a brief flood tour. She mainly showed me the damage that was immediately visible on the way home, and took a side trip through Czech Village, driving ten miles an hour and drifting all over the road while she excitedly gestured toward the house that’s side had completely collapsed revealing the inside of the first and second floors. It was somewhat surreal seeing these houses and businesses I’d become used to with junk and damaged furniture piled out front, a brown line along the siding marking the river’s high point, and a colored sticker marking its level of inhabitability.

Now that it’s been two weeks, I’m getting better at the little instances of culture shock. At first I was always giggling at people around me being tall, or people in service positions being sassy. I was tripping over myself at simple social interactions, like when I entered someone’s house I had to remember not to translate “Ojamashimasu” and slip out of my shoes. Leave the bathroom door open. You don’t have to toast, you can just start drinking, and there’s no need to say anything before or after eating. There are lots of instances where these ritualistic expressions are not only useful, but reflexive for me, and I have to swallow them before they come out, replacing it with an awkward silence. A social hiccup. I’m so used to a single phrase, “otsukaresamadesu” being an appropriate conclusion to any evening, and instead I’ve replaced it with the always socially inappropriate nothing. I hope no one’s noticed too much. The first few days when I was driving around with my mom, I kept jumping whenever I saw a pedestrian or a person on a bicycle because they weren’t Asian. For a while, it seemed like people were yelling all the time, and every business establishment I went into was freezing. Central air is crazy, man. I used to wonder how America was the biggest consumer of energy by a million percent or whatever, but now I can see that it might be because everyone insists on keeping the malls air conditioned down to forty degrees during the hottest part of summer. When I was eating at an Asian fusion restaurant with some friends, they mentioned how the disposable chopsticks were wasteful. We talked about the concept of “my-hashi” (bringing your own non-disposable set of chopsticks) in Japan, and how it was most prevalent among foreigners. They were surprised that the Japanese would thoughtlessly waste so many sets of chopsticks. Mind you, we were sitting in a restaurant in which I was currently freezing my ass off. I explained that it was probably something they’d become so used to in their daily lives that they didn’t even think about it, just like America and it’s central air conditioning.

Oh, and Colin came back a couple days ago, and yesterday we both bowed to a car that slowed down for us to cross the street.

All the while, there’s the undertone of destruction that the flood brought. Strangers talk with each other about what they’ve lost, but we’ve been comparatively lucky. My mom owns a duplex downtown that was flooded—thankfully, my sister had moved out of the first floor before it happened. I went with her for just one day to help. Around the neighborhood, people were piling their debris on the curb and washing their siding. There were lots of notices that had been delivered to each individual house from the city about what they had to do to get their houses up to code. We had to wear special rubber boots and face masks to work there because apparently the mold was kind of dangerous. The first floor windows were broken, and I barely recognized the inside. We worked for a couple hours stripping the walls and hauling buckets of plaster chunks and nails to the curb.

The actual houses my family reside in were nowhere near the floodplain, but apparently my mom’s basement became immersed in about two feet of rain water. This is where we’d kept all the photographs and family keepsakes, not to mention everything I’d asked my mom to store while I was in Japan. They managed to salvage a lot, but it’s really strange. Walking around my mom’s house, I’ll suddenly see my diary from when I was a teenager spread open with paper towels between each crinkled leaf, my own tense cursive bleeding across the page, or water-damaged and thoroughly embarrassing personal letters from friends. Suddenly I turn into a petulant teenager again, snatching these things up and demanding to know, “Who read this?” I find warped pictures I never wanted parents to see. Off-colored birthday gifts that lived in my drawer until water expunged them from the basement.

It’s my embarrassing personal history laid out to dry, and I try to snatch up these pieces of evidence and hide them away, but find that there’s nowhere for me to put them. I don’t live here, never have, and there’s hardly even space for me among this life already partially made by others and filled with too many damn dogs. So I guess the new phase of this journal is finding some place to be. In September, we’re moving to Minneapolis, and tomorrow I’m off to Las Vegas, or as I like to call it “lost wages”. Next time I’ll tell you about my recent experience with karaoke in America. Just so you know, there were mullets.

See youuuuuu

2008-07-28T09:55:00.007+09:00

The weekend before I left was Shi-town’s natsu matsuri, or summer festival. It was a good send-off, since matsuri remind me of what’s really unique about Japan. It’s characteristic of pretty much every matsuri to have stalls upon stalls of fried food on sticks, music, chanting, and locals wandering the streets to watch or participate in the festivities, many in traditional kimono or yukata. There are decorations and rituals from hundreds of years ago that are based on animism or ancestor worship, but often adapted into a Buddhist framework. There’s nothing like it in America.

Anyway, I was particularly excited about this year’s matsuri because Hiromi offered to dress me in a yukata, which is a summer kimono. I used to be kind of disdainful of the foreign girls I saw wearing kimono, but as soon as my chance arose, I was ecstatic. Hiromi owns a salon, so she’s experienced in dressing women in kimono for weddings or coming of age ceremonies. It was a lot more complicated than I expected, with clips and straps and cinching and pads. She even provided me with the highest hair I’ve ever had. “Hajimete, konna takasa,” I marveled. As soon as she brought me in front of the other women in the salon, they all gave my bust disapproving looks and told Hiromi that she needed to do something about my large oppai. Hiromi explained that she’d already stuffed the obi extra, and she proceeded to loosen it and add more padding to detract from my rack. “[I have the same problem,]” one of the customers said, “[As soon as I wear a kimono, my boobs come out.]” She didn’t actually provide words, but sound effects to describe breasts bulging through a kimono.

Colin joined us wearing jimbei, which look like Japanese old man pajamas, and we all headed toward the float on the main street. It was two stories high and had two long, thick ropes stretched in front of it for when we would pull it through the streets. On the second story were two life-sized dolls of a man and a woman, and I never figured out what their deal was, besides that Hiromi’s dad painted their faces. It was nearly dusk, and a crowd had clustered by the float waiting for the events to begin. Soon, we heard chanting in the distance. We looked down the main street, as the chanting and footsteps in unison became louder. Then the rows of men appeared trotting down the street, and climbed on the float. They began pounding on the big taiko drum and a few men played flutes, while the rest lead the crowd in chants. One man offered ladles of sake to onlookers. I actually thought it was water before I put it in my mouth, but alcohol is always a pleasant surprise. Then everyone began to take up some rope.

One man gave the signal, and we started to pull, all the while chanting “Yoisa! Yoisa! Yoisa!” We jogged down the street to the tempo set by the drum with the rope in our hands, stopping at pre-designated areas where people would come out of their houses to revel with us, then take up their own bit of rope when pulling time came. People would send their sons up the ladder to the second story of the float where one of the float guys would take care of them. Honestly, the float looked really, really fun, but only men are allowed on it because women would probably have their period all over it or something. It’s funny, I’ve been exposed to a lot of different religions now, but the common denominator in most of them seems to be the belief that women are inherently tainted.

Eventually we got tired of pulling the float around and let others take our place on the rope. We had dinner and drinks at one of our main Shi-town haunts. I got a delightful cell phone call that was only delightful because I felt it vibrating against my abdomen from where I’d tucked it into my obi. (Sidenote: When you wear kimono, you can either keep things in your sleeves or tucked into your obi. The word for cell phone in Japanese is keitai denwa, which literally means “portable obi phone”.) We walked around a bit, Colin saw many of his students, and I saw only a few of mine. I ran into the Kita girls all looking older and wearing yukata. We took a picture together and I told them about how I was leaving in two days. Later that night I saw the Kita parents, and I didn’t make myself known. I looked at them and wondered if I should say something, then they dissipated into the crowd and out of my life forever.

At 10:30, they carried the dolls down to the street and acted out killing them in order to release their spirits.

Yeah, I don’t know.

By the end of the night, I’d said a few teary goodbyes, and the following forty-eight hours disappeared largely in reflective seclusion as I tried to fit my life into two suitcases. Then I was at the Saga bus terminal waiting for my ride to the airport, and Colin was walking away. The thing about those goodbyes you say before air travel is, at least for me, there’s always the secret fear that one of us will die before we meet again. That’s why that goodbye is always more than “See you in two weeks” or “See you next Christmas”. I try to push the thoughts out of my head that that could be the last goodbye.

I know it’s cliché to say so, but for the past few years life has been full of goodbyes, and they don’t get any easier. Maybe it’s better to regard everything as being more transient—people, homes, families. They all go away. I don’t know if I can take these kinds of goodbyes every couple years. They’re always filled with regrets and missed opportunities. I didn’t even finish everything I was going to write as an expat in Japan. I’m no longer an island of gaijin among rice paddies, and I no longer have the authority to advise the new-comers not to use the term “gaijin” around Japanese people. I guess I’ll just conclude this chapter with some randomness.

Some things I’ll miss:
Karaoke, impeccable service, secret shrines, matsuri, beautiful nature in bite-sized portions, ramen, daiko, being considered devastatingly interesting, vending machines every ten feet, 7-11 onigiri.

And a confession to every Japanese home and small office I set foot in (including my work place):

I never wore the toilet slippers. If your bathrooms hadn’t been so immaculately clean in the first place, I would have considered it. So for the past two years, I’ve been tracking my pee feet all over your floors. Sorry.

Misconceptions about Japan, in no particular order

2008-07-03T02:51:00.002+09:00

Japan is more technologically advanced than the rest of the world

Maybe fifteen years ago, there was some kind of renaissance in Akihabara and it was a really cool, futuristic place to be. These days, Japan is generally only more advanced in (1) cell phones, (2) cars, and (3) robots. When it comes to computers and the internet, the average person is incredibly incompetent, and harbors weird superstitions about how it all works. The single computer at my office was so slow it was literally a twenty minute process for me to open internet explorer, log into my gmail, download a text document, and print it. I usually spent those twenty minutes swearing. I couldn’t even imagine trying to do research on that computer. At my office, most tasks that a computer would have taken care of back in the U.S. were done by hand. No one knew how to fix the computer, and they rarely admitted anything was wrong. Even really simple “tech support” tasks are allocated to the computer guy, and everyone else has no idea how it works. Many ALTs are met with resistance when they try to bring their own laptops to school, even when there’s no chance of it being used for the internet, because it “compromises school safety” and could give their computers viruses. I even heard of a teacher insisting that you can’t enter students’ grades into a computer that’s connected to the internet, because the information could leak. It seems like people take impeccable care of their cars and buy new ones every couple years, but if they have a computer it’s usually about ten years old. People have cell phone mail addresses, but if they have an e-mail address they probably don’t check it regularly. Also, areas that the internet took over long ago in the West are still thriving and performed by human beings here. Like travel agencies. Instead of planning their vacation on Orbitz, people actually walk into a physical office and talk to a real person who is dressed in an impeccable uniform and speaks incredibly politely. They sign real physical papers and agree to contracts and receive paper receipts and periodic calls from their agents over bureaucratic matters and everything. Crazy, right?

Most Japanese people can speak at least some broken English

People who can communicate in English are in the minority here. When I say communicate, I mean make those broken sentences that Americans who have little to no overseas experience are so fond of mocking. The people who make those broken sentences have a particular interest in English, and have probably been studying it for years. The people who are fluent have usually studied abroad, since the educational system really doesn’t support language learning so much as test taking. Most Japanese people cannot speak English at all. A lot of tourists don’t understand that this means they can speak as slowly or as simply as they like, but the random person they’re trying to communicate with will probably not understand. Pretty much every adult knows “My name is…”, and numbers, and while most people can recall days of the week they often mix them up. If you can only speak English, you should feel lucky to have been born into the international lingua franca that will get you far in most other countries. But it won’t help you a lot here. Better try sign language, or Japanese.

Japanese people are very delicate and indirect

Cultures are weird, so what we consider taboo, the Japanese might find totally acceptable. They are often indirect communicators, but they also talk freely about their bad case of diarrhea with co-workers. Every time Colin saw his old supervisor, she used to comment that he’d gotten fat. I’ve heard of this happening to foreign women too, but it thankfully hasn’t happened to me, because I’d probably cry. I’ve only had people insist that I’ve lost weight when I probably hadn’t, which was just their way of expressing general concern for me. Then they’d talk about their kidney stones and someone would share information about a kind of sugar that cures constipation.

Before coming here, you should have your business cards ready

Yes, business cards are a big deal, and a lot of people will give you theirs. It’s useful to study what to do when you receive one (take it in both hands and look at it for a while, nodding approvingly while holding it awkwardly or setting on the table in front of you until the person leaves, at which point you can pocket it). However, unless you are coming to Japan for business reasons (business meaning selling things or dealing with clients) your cards are a waste. If you’re a coming as a teacher, a student, or a tourist, you do not need cards. You’d just end up giving a couple away for the novelty of it, and leaving the rest to gather dust. I’ll tell give you an example of how much business cards aren’t as big of deal as everyone says. My old company was failing, and it was obvious that I needed to recruit new students for my classes. When the company underwent a name change, they took down all the employees’ information to create new business cards. As I’d never received any business cards, I was excited. They took down my information, but the cards never came. I asked about them once, and Sayaka said, “Hmmm, I wonder where they are!” When Yoshiko told me that she needed me to pull in more students, I told her I could better do that if I had business cards to distribute, since I meet people all the time who are interested in learning English. I hinted at it a bit more over the months, but it didn’t get through to her until October, about eight months after they took my information, that I still didn’t have a card and it was pretty much impossible for me to recruit anyone without one. I reiterated during a meeting that I could better find students if I had a card, and Yoshiko acted surprised that I didn’t have one, as if she were hearing this for the first time. I got my cards the next day, and used them for business purposes twice before I was laid off in December. I burnt all the cards on Christmas. If you, for instance, have your own business where you need to gather clients and work with customers, then you need a card. I needed cards, but no one even bothered to give them to me. So that’s how important they think a foreigner with a business card is.

Japanese students are perfectly disciplined little machines

Hahahahahahaha. This stereotype must come from the fact that they take tests very seriously, and are indoctrinated to behave for ceremonies and rites of passage. All the times in between, however, anything goes. It’s all about appearances. They “do their best” when it matters, and it usually only matters when they’re taking an entrance exam, which they prepare for in cram school rather than regular school. When Yoshiko traveled to Washington DC and observed American public schools, she commented to me on two things: (1) some girls were pregnant and (2) the kids were really well behaved. This surprised me, because my first reaction when she said that she observed DC public schools was, “That sounds terrifying.”

For women, it’s rude to put on your makeup in public

Unless you’ve been reading up on what you should know before going to Japan, you probably haven’t heard this one. The thing is, I’ll buy that it’s rude, sure. But I’ve seen more Japanese women putting on their makeup in public than I’ve seen any women do in any other country by far. In America, we don’t have any rules that it’s rude to put on your makeup in public. I have the idea that you shouldn’t do it anyway because it destroys the “illusion”, plus it seems kind of self-absorbed. I read things about how you shouldn’t put on your makeup in public in Japan, but then when I came here I saw women doing it all the freaking time. Why did someone want to make it such a point to foreign women that it’s considered rude to do this when it’s fairly commonplace for Japanese women? Did they want to make sure foreigners understood that despite what they may see, this activity is rude, and all these Japanese women are horribly crass? I think this taboo is missing a part, which is that it’s generally considered rude for a woman NOT to wear makeup. Jewelry is mostly off-limits in a professional setting, but a woman should come to work in full face. So these busy women who are rudely putting on their makeup in front of others are perhaps just trying to avoid the rudeness of not wearing makeup in front of their clients. And their clients matter way more than the people on the train. So it’s kind of a matter of which is ruder, putting on makeup in public, or not putting on makeup at all. Luckily, that’s a rule foreigners are often exempt from. I’m not sure why. When I first heard of this from one of my Japanese friends, I told her, embarrassed, that I often went out without wearing makeup. She responded, “But you are foreigner.”

All this misinformation at least shows that there’s been an ongoing dialogue. There are a couple of reasons I think people in the West are so fascinated by Japan. One is that it’s basically the wealthy, first world country in Asia, yet it’s so different from all the other world powers. The other is that nobody can quite get it. We can visit, observe, ask questions and postulate, but in many ways it’s such a closed culture that we’re bound to get some things wrong. Even bilingual Japanese people can’t necessarily explain it, because it’s endlessly difficult to analyze your own culture to outsiders. Kind of like how I can’t explain the difference between “You fucked up” and “You have fucked up”. The spies like me can either be too much of an outsider or too much of an insider to provide proper insight. There will always be interest in people’s theories on Japan because nobody can quite get it right. I do what I can, but I’m definitely not an ultimate authority. So, fellow spies, what misconceptions would you add to this list?

Cute Hits the Fan

2008-06-18T00:52:00.009+09:00

If you live in Japan, especially if you’re a woman, you’ll quickly learn the word “Kawaiiii!” squealed in a rising intonation. It describes clothing, babies, puppies, kittens, cell phone baubles, erasers, fake food, small things, and you. It means cute, and it’s everywhere. It’s even in signs reminding you not to drive drunk, or to pick up your dog shit. Japan has mastered cuteness, there’s no denying that. But it also occupies such an exalted place linguistically. In America, “cute” is something you can safely call a chubby friend. Of course you use it for kids and fwuffy bunnies, but it can also be pretty demeaning (i.e. I think it’s cute you’re so concerned about global warming). I can’t recall ever being considered cute in America, not even as a kid. I’m too tall, too imposing. But here, I’m “kawaii”. It’s a very broad, yet valuable word. Women whose beauty might have been insulted by someone referring to them as “cute” in English can be perfectly satisfied with “kawaii”. In Japan, cuteness is a virtue, and it’s not just for kids. Instructional and warning signs are presented in cartoon form, and adorable characters are used as mascots for anything from cell phones to condoms. Depending on your bank, when you open your account your default bankcard will likely include illustrations of the Looney Toons. While young adults in America who are obsessed with Disney characters are considered a little strange, it’s perfectly normal here for a young woman to have a closet filled with clothing and accessories bearing the likeness of her favorite “character”, as well as matching “character” sheets and curtains, and a dashboard covered in fake flowers and stuffed animals.

Cuteness is held in such high esteem in Japan, but what is cuteness? Where does it come from, how do we identify it? James Kochalka might argue it comes from God, but the general scientific consensus is that cuteness is an abnormally large cranium with a high forehead, large, usually widely spaced eyes, small nose and mouth, and a narrow, often receding jaw. It’s infantile behaviors, such as playfulness, curiosity, or innocence.

In short, it’s appearance and behavior reminiscent of infants. If the looks and behavior of babies is so revered even among grown women, does that mean Japan is a society in a sort of arrested development? I couldn’t really answer that. But I will say that it’s hard to find clothing that doesn’t contain glitter, ruffles, or pink fuzz.

Cuteness usually falls into a few main categories: animals, babies, and cartoons featuring characters reminiscent of either animals or babies. An image of any of these things prompts a knee-jerk reaction, ranging from murmurs to emphatic exclamations of “kawaii!” It doesn’t matter how cute the animal or baby or in question is, you still have to say it’s cute. A while ago, I was watching this TV show where the theme of the day was hot women who were best friends with ugly women. Hilarious, right? Well, first they showed a slideshow of the hot girl in various stages of her life so the panel of talento (sort of celebrities who mainly just appear on TV shows) could ooh and ahh and “heeeeeee” about how gorgeous she was. Then they introduced the hot girl’s best friend, fat-ugly-funny girl, and went through a slideshow of her life. The entire purpose of that was so the talento could make jokes about how ugly she was. One guy said she looked like Asa Shouryuu, a famous sumo wrestler. But as soon as a baby picture came up, the entire panel melted into a gooey mush of “kawaiiiiiiiiii!” Never mind the general meanness of the show, there’s a baby on the screen! A baby who would before long turn into the hideous human being they were having so much fun ridiculing. Even little kids learn to recognize and respond to cuteness early. On Halloween last year, my school bused fifty kids to the American military base so they could go trick-or-treating. One of my students, a six-year-old girl who was one of about thirty Japanese girls dressed as a witch, caught sight of a blond boy about her age dressed as a clown. Along with the Japanese adults, she immediately marveled, “Chou kawaii!” The kid was her peer! I never called other kids cute when I was a kid. I kind of hated a lot of other kids, actually. I guess in this girl’s case, it is a bit different because she wasn’t used to seeing non-Japanese children. On the bus on the way home, Sayaka gave out awards for best costume. Obviously I wasn’t consulted, because every single winner was an adorable little girl dressed as a witch. I would have given an award to the kid who came as a cell phone.

During my first year planning the pre-school’s Christmas English program, I was frustrated by my co-workers’ fixation on what I thought were pointless details just for the sake of cuteness. The other teachers insisted on putting the youngest class in full costume—these hats with antennae and little underwear looking things with tails—that had nothing to do with singing “I’m a Little Teapot”. Honestly, that’s a pretty useless song for English language-learners, but it sure is precious to see babies doing that little dance. At the time, I thought these presentations for the parents were supposed to be demonstrations of actual learning. The other teachers just wanted the kids to parrot things they didn’t understand in a slick, professional-looking performance in order to impress the parents. We spent three months of the year preparing for this one performance, in my opinion wasting our one hour a week putting kids in ridiculous costumes and making them repeat the same thing over and over again when they could be learning English. My second year around, I’d wizened to the whole importance of presentation thing. It’s the same for Sports Days, or Culture Days, or anything that requires kids to work together and show the product. In all of these presentations, the parents probably understand that the kids can’t do the ultra-professional-looking things they perform in a normal situation, but here it’s the act of working together to create something that has value. I still don’t completely agree with it, but I understand. It’s the old honne and tatemae, projected appearance versus underlying reality dilemma. It’s a dilemma that I think relates closely to cuteness. Not only is a presentation a nice demonstration of everyone working together, it caters to the photo ops and good video as well.

In my emcee script, I was a little shocked that I was instructed to talk about how cute the kids were, at several different points in the program. In America, a teacher would never, in a school program, describe her students as cute. Children are sponges of knowledge and filled with endless potential, but a teacher would never reduce our future upstanding citizens to just cuteness. Sure, it’s not a crime to notice the cuteness, you can’t help it. But as an educator, to point it out and dwell on it as if it’s one of the merits you’re trying to present? It reminds me of my grandmother, who was a kindergarten teacher. Whenever she told people what she did and they responded, “Oh, that’s so cute,” she would cringe. She didn’t choose that level because they were cute, she chose it because she wanted to reach children at the beginning of their education and start them on the right path. She was intellectually interested in five-year-old brains.

All over Japanese TV, animals undergo similarly substance-free performance of cuteness. You watch for a while, but then you start to wonder, “But why are these baby pandas wearing colored bandanas and living in a special panda house with this guy?” Also, it seems like it’s impossible to show an animal on TV without adding an obnoxious animal voice-over for it, ala Bob Saget in America’s Funniest Home Videos. Everyone is quick to intone “kawaii”, but when it comes to the needs of real animals, as a society they seem kind of indifferent. At least in the country, the norm is dogs are kept outdoors on a short chain and ignored most of the time, while cats are kept half-feral and fed leftover rice. You can see them skulking around with crusty eyes and ribs showing. When Colin and I picked up four abandoned kittens last summer, we showed all our Japanese friends and acquaintances their pictures. No one could get over how devastatingly adorable they were, but despite the many places we posted ads, the only people who expressed any interest in caring for the kittens were foreigners.

Japan not only leads the world in cuteness technology, it has groundbreaking robot technology. Logically, what follows is cute robots. Meet Paro, the therapeutic robot seal.

It’s nice and soft with big round eyes that blink. It responds when you pet it, and makes little yelping noises. I remember the news reports extolling the amazing benefits of Paro for the elderly and the sick. They showed old women in wheelchairs kissing and petting the thing, while a little kid in a hospital bed cuddles it. You know what does the exact same thing and has the same benefits but often costs less than $3000? AN ANIMAL. Forgive me if I think that there are too many cats and dogs in this world that want and need love, and that empathy with a real, sentient being is more valuable than a fucking robot seal. But no, a real animal can piss and shit, and sometimes has health problems and loses its cuteness. This function of cuteness is in essence, superficial.

Suddenly the idea of kitsch feels relevant here. According to the discussion in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the word comes from German and literally means the absence of shit. Kundera discussed it largely in the context of the Communist restriction on the arts, which made social realism the only acceptable genre. Any art that had to do with rich people or imaginative scenarios was extravagant and bourgeois. Art needed a function to be patriotic, so it’s function was to laud Party interests and the State. Thus all the sculptures of happy workers struggling for the good of the people, and insipid poetry lavishing praise on the Communist way of life. In my opinion, social realism is responsible for the worst art in history. Not only was it one-note, it was fake. And ugly. Communist propaganda is delightful for connoisseurs of kitsch, who are almost always lovers of irony. However, kitsch, in itself, must lack all irony, mockery, snarkiness, and most importantly self-awareness. Kitsch is a relic of a beautiful and perfect world that doesn’t exist, thus it falls in the realm of absurdity.

Japan is certainly home to a lot of kitsch. But while kitsch was originally characterized by the absence of shit, Japan seems to have co-opted poop into its cuteness agenda. When it has eyes and a smile, shit certainly loses some of its foulness.

It’s pretty consistent with the features of kitsch that irony and sarcasm are nearly nonexistent here. Japan is so damn earnest, it makes me feel like a bad person that I’m so naturally inclined to scoff from the sidelines. I’ve talked before about the “Yareba dekiru” pep chant that my old school had. Well, the lead teacher would say variations of the chant that the students had to repeat in unison. Since the students were studying for tests on various subjects, sometimes they would repeat things like, “[I love English! I love math! I love everything!]” The first time I heard this, I made the mistake of giggling from my corner of the room. The teacher smiled politely at me, but what was I thinking? They took these chants very seriously, and I was supposed to play along with the image. Yes, they were making preposterous declarations of loving subjects so many of the students actually hated, and of course they don’t love everything. What about genocide? What about food shortages? See, the “[I love everything]” only holds in that nonexistent perfect and beautiful world, where Kitty-chan and all her friends at Sanrio live.

While on the surface Japan may project a lot of sunshine, rainbows, and robots, what about the rest? It goes without saying that no society is monolithic. Japan may be expert in cuteness, but it’s also responsible for some really nasty shit (link not safe for work and possibly not safe for your stomach). Japan’s expertise in horror and in cute things both have very visceral appeal (Get it? Viscera. Hahaha). Do they complement each other? And what’s the deal with this bear?

His name is Gloomy and he kills people. Maybe he’s the result of a cuteness hangover. I wonder if this qualifies as irony.

My hometown, underwater 2

2008-06-15T13:11:00.003+09:00

I found this photo on flickr. See how the water is moving? It shows how downtown has become part of the river. Damn you, nature!

My hometown, underwater

2008-06-15T12:39:00.006+09:00

My sister sent me some pictures of the flood, and it's pretty amazing. Luckily, my family is safe and for the most part lived away from the floodplain. Unless you count Mandi's old house, which is submerged past the first floor. It's too bad, though, because it looks like a lot will be lost. Stay dry, everyone.

Japan broke my heart.

2008-06-06T00:31:00.001+09:00

Something is tightening my chest now, squeezing the blood from the overworked muscle until it tingles in my fingertips. I wonder if it’s the feeling of a reopened wound, of leftover doubt and bitterness. It’s been seven months since my company let me go, and for the most part, I think I’m okay. There was a time, though, that every class I did reminded me of the classes I wasn’t doing, and I walked through my boss’ old apartment building (where I still have classes) in fear that I would accidentally run into someone from my old life. Even the elevator ride to the fourteenth floor where I still had students was painful and nostalgic, because I knew I would never stop at the seventh floor again. Back then I couldn’t imagine a time that I would be over it, but now, I’m mostly over it, as long as I try not to think about it.

My relationship with Japan has been a lot like, well, a relationship. Mostly it was my job it seemed like I was in a relationship with, but the fallout became not only between me and my company, but all the Japanese people I liked and thought I could trust who turned on me, and the cultural standards that deemed my treatment in the company acceptable. For a while, I couldn’t meet a Japanese person without wondering if they would have sided with Yoshiko against me. But let’s begin with the stormy love affair with my work.

At first I was reticent and confused, but when I allowed myself to be vulnerable, I fell in love. This was the brief period of time I felt like I belonged, in my company and in Japan. I overlooked the major flaws, and assumed my boss and co-workers had the best intentions. It was the honeymoon phase, the elated stupidness of new love. After a period of time, I began to really notice the flaws and quirks of my job and the people around me, and they became annoying as hell. It’s forgivable if it happens once or twice, but I started to wonder if it was too much to ask for them to actually tell me about important schedule changes, cancellations, or surprise classes. The list of really irritating things just kept getting longer and longer, but I worked through it, like you work through complaints and differences with someone you love. Eventually, I realized that I was never happy, but I’d become used to my crappy life, and thought maybe it was just easier to suffer through the problems. After the breakup, I was devastated and terrified, but at the same time liberated, and left wondering why I put up with all the shit that I did.

When I returned to Japan in January, I was seized with waves of bitterness every time I was reminded of my life before. And everything reminded me of my life before. Wednesday mornings. Lesson plans. Payment envelopes. I avoided certain restaurants and parts of town to reduce the chances of bumping into someone unexpectedly. Going to my boss’ apartment building every Tuesday hurt. To those who would listen, I was capable of scathing contempt toward my former company and employers, but if they joined in, I would sometimes be defensive of the situation. I was that messed up.

Sometime during this period, I was having lunch with a few of the foreign teachers in Kashima. One of them, Annick, had a few days previously given me the business card of a woman who had approached her looking for an English teacher. I held onto the card, thought about this Misako Katafuchi from somewhere that was only known as a swimming school, and couldn’t imagine anything good. At lunch that day, Annick asked me if I’d followed up, and was rightfully chagrined at my answer.

“I know I should call her,” I explained, “But I just don’t know if I can go through it again. Even if they did for some reason decide to sponsor my visa, they’re a small company, and it would probably be a situation just like my last workplace, if not worse. After what I’ve been through, I can’t trust people like that. I don’t even want to get involved with them.”

John, another ALT, piped in, “She’s been burned, and she’s not ready to love again.”

Back before I was “burned”, I was like one of those annoying friends who always bitched about her horrible, mistreating boyfriend but never did anything about it. After a few days I would report false improvement, but usually nothing changed. I either thought it did because I was in denial, or they had somehow convinced me that everything was my fault. They did that a lot. I remember telling a friend about the wrongdoing of the moment, and he said, “Just quit. Nothing’ s keeping you there.”

“Maybe I will this time,” I replied with defiance.

But Yoshiko had a way of talking her way out of things, of manipulating and flipping issues and making it seem like everything she does is in your best interest, that she is making sacrifices for you. She was impossible to speak to without a swirl of emotions, a mist of confusion, and a mindfuck. After six months in my job, I described it to someone as a love/hate thing, like I had an alcoholic co-dependent relationship with my work. It was quite perceptive of me at the time, because the ambivalence, co-dependency, and even alcoholism would get worse.

But there’s another dimension to it all. I spend at least as much time avoiding people as I do hoping that my former students will turn up unexpectedly. When I go out in Saga City I see so many people with kids, and hope that one of them will be from my preschool. I take the elevator in my boss’ old building, and try to will the doors opening to Saya and Haruko. The Kita family lives only a few blocks from me, and I used to run into them frequently at the grocery store, the post office, town events. Since the breakup, it hasn’t happened once. This kind of disappearing can only be willful, since Shi-town is so small and I’m so visible. That one tears me up. That family had been so good to me, and I hoped they would understand. Whenever I see a flock of kids in Shi-town elementary school uniforms, I always check to see if one has Haruna’s mischievous dimples or Yuka’s big eyes. I must look really creepy. But I miss the hell out of them, all of them. I wish we could have said goodbye on better terms.

Six weeks.

2008-05-31T23:49:00.002+09:00

I wasn't in good form today. Who knows why. I didn't even want to hang out with myself. Maybe it's all part of the existential nausea that comes from the consciousness of my life changing completely in six weeks. People ask me what I'm going to do next. If I'm going to get married. I tell them I'm going back to Minneapolis and looking for a job, and that's really all I know.

What kind of job?

I don't know.

About one year and seven months ago, I felt like I was somewhere. I enjoyed my job, and felt like had a place within my company, within this culture. Colin longed for the Twin Cities, but I said that there was nothing there for me anymore. I had already experienced being jobless there, feeling useless and unlikeable. Here, at least there was one thing I was definitely qualified to do. Colin wasn't sure about re-contracting for another year, but I was. By the time he began feeling better about his situation, I was feeling worse. It's unsettling how greatly I can misjudge a situation.

I don't really want to go, because I'm used to it here, and change is terrifying. But I know, just like I knew about the Twin Cities before, that there is nothing here for me anymore. Not even money. Maybe if things were different, maybe if I lived in a city and had a different job, but that's not the case. The universe said no. So I'm going back to the place where I'm a useless college graduate with experience only in an area that requires a graduate degree in the US. All possibilities are open, but for some reason every time I look into that "anything is possible" logic, I just find closing doors. You can't do this because you have to have graduated within the past year. You can't do this because you need to have majored in this. You can't do this because you need two years experience in this.

Anyway.

Since I only have six weeks, I have to hurry up with posting. I have a few fragments I never finished, and once I leave Japan they're not relevant anymore. Expect some anachronism.

Cambodia

2008-05-10T02:37:00.001+09:00

Note: This post hasn't been edited. Read at your own risk of potential crappiness.

The guidebooks told me Cambodia was a land of light and dark. Riding from the airport in Siem Reap, the landscape was at times barren and sad, dotted with skinny cows and brokedown huts, patches of dry yellow grass. These stretches were interrupted by imposing, colonial-style luxury hotels with beautiful gardens, lush fauna as an exotic reminder that we are in the jungle. The green would end abruptly with the hotels. A flat dirt stretch would follow, where the locals have set up their fruit stands. They would laze about in the shade or share hammocks, talking and laughing, half naked children and dogs at their feet. The Cambodians are the poorest people I’ve seen in Southeast Asia, but seemingly the happiest, the friendliest.

We paid a steep forty dollars for the three day pass to the sprawling Angkor Wat complex. Wandering around the temples, we’re confronted everywhere with the former majesty and genius of the Khmer empire of over a thousand years ago. I ask Colin if he thinks there will be similar tours for the vestiges of the American empire. Leaving behind the towering spires, light-dappled passageways, and intricately carved deities, we’re intercepted on the way to our driver by half a dozen Khmer children. Wearing clothes torn and too big, they shove bracelets, guidebooks, and postcards in our faces: “Please buy, three for one dollar!” They follow us all the way to our tuk-tuk, exchanging clever banter with us in English. They won’t take no for an answer. It’s their livelihood. As we drove away, Colin said to the group of little girls who never gave up but didn’t make a sale, “Have a nice day.” One girl retorted, “I have a nice day already.”

The contrast is stark when you walk through the few square blocks of the growing tourist center of downtown Siem Reap. Warm lights, welcoming shops, backpackers reading and sipping coffee on restaurant patios. Signs in English advertise Khmer food (cheap!) and various kinds of Western food (also cheap!), and women on the sidewalk hand out fliers for their massage parlors. Tuk-tuk drivers ask if you need a ride, but politely retreat when you say no thank you. Loud music, internet cafes, paper lanterns strung through trees. But a block in the wrong direction and you’re literally stepping into darkness. The lights and sidewalks disappear with the tourists, and you walk along the side of the road, stepping over piles of debris, navigating around construction spilled onto the street until arriving at your high-class eighteen dollar hotel.

We had weighed the ethical pros and cons before signing up for the “Day in the Life” tour that involved going as a tourist to a poor village and helping a family with their daily tasks. We set out in the van at eight in the morning, the group consisting of us, two Dutch girls and a lone Canadian girl. Our guide, Lin, told us he was also from a village, and had gone to school until he was thirteen, when he started learning English from monks. He moved to the city where his English allowed him a job in tourism, one of the most lucrative industries for locals. The village we were headed to was called “Lady Bug” in Khmer, and it was home to 162 families, most of them poor. We drove slowly over the rough terrain of the villages single dirt road. Children walking along the road recognized the van and waved at us as we passed. Our first stop was the mayor’s house, which was a thatch hut. We greeted the mayor, who was a shirtless, shoeless old man, and then we bought some fish for lunch.

Our assignment was to weave thatch panels from palm leaves to help rebuild the one room house of a single, elderly nun whose son was grown and gone. For the home of a lone nun, the place was far from lonely. We sat on mats in the back yard that was shared by several houses, as well as dogs and chickens. Three little boys playing in the yard cackled at us as we fumbled with the tough stem we were using as thread. Neighbor women with their babies swung listlessly in hammocks watching us. Sure, they were amused by a bunch of tourists struggling to do their chores, but it wasn’t mean-spirited. A little shirtless girl floated nearby, holding a mango and gazing at us. The kids always liked having their pictures taken and delighted in seeing it come up on the digital screen. One of the Dutch girls panicked when she thought she was sitting near red ants, and changed places. Lin told us these ants were edible, and we’d have some for lunch. He was trying to gross us out, but after two years in Japan, it takes a lot to gross me out. He was the one who was disgusted when we suggested eating them raw: “You have to cook them first!” When the time came, the Dutch girls helped prepare lunch, mashing the ants that had been collected and drowned in a bucket of water into a fermented fish paste. The rest of the lunch was a local soup consisting of pieces of fish, eggplants, and some other vegetables, fruit, a standard curry that Lin had brought with him in case we couldn’t take the soup and fishpaste, and of course, rice. We sat in the nun’s hut, talking and eating. One of the Dutch girls was a bit squeamish about the ants, but overall we ate most of our portions without much objection. The paste, by the way, was totally gross, but it wasn’t because of the ants, which were supposed to neutralize some of the flavor or something. The ants didn’t have any taste, but the fermented fishpaste literally tasted like salty garbage. Something about fermentation, I guess. Natto is fermented soybeans, and it tastes like vomit. When I casually remarked, “Oh, I still have to finish my ant paste,” Lin marveled at how well we were dealing with the food, since most tourists freak out and won’t even help prepare it. Especially after being in Japan, I think there’s no point in being turned off by food just for psychological reasons. If something tastes okay, don’t worry about what it is, and there’s not much that’s so disgusting that you can’t just stop whining and eat it. I guess moral issues are different, though. Colin and I tried horse in Japan for the first time, and it’s really, really delicious. But we decided to refrain from eating it because it just seems wrong to go out of my way to eat a companion animal from my childhood. However, a while after making this decision, we were presented with raw horse meat (a Kumamoto specialty) at a set dinner. Since it was already prepared and in front of us and it would be wasteful and a little offensive to not eat it, we just shrugged, I said, “Neiiiiighhhh” and we dug in.

While Lin had worked so hard to gross us out, Colin and I were the ones to succeed in even grossing him out by talking about eating raw everything, live squid, and chicken knee-caps. The Dutch girls talked about their local specialty, which was really salty raw fish served on a big chunk of onion and eaten whole. I responded, “That’s kinda gross. I don’t like onions.”

We passed around fruit for dessert, and Lin asked if we thought it gave us good skin and laughed. We looked confused, so he told us he was referencing a Cambodian joke: “A man and his new wife are sitting under a tree in a temple, and they are in love. The man says, ‘Darling, have some fruit. It will give you good skin.’ When the man said this, a monkey came down from the tree and said to the woman, ‘He’s lying to you! I eat fruit all the time! Look at my buttocks!’” Lin laughed at his own joke, and we still looked a little confused. “Because a monkey’s buttocks are not smooth at all,” he elaborated.

While we ate inside the house, the nun and her extended family were chatting on the porch. Lin’s place was in the doorway, partway between us and the family. He chatted with them with amazing ease and familiarity, considering he didn’t really know them before that day. After exchanging a few words with the people on the porch, he said to us, “They are saying you have to be careful of red and blue numbers. There are three people in the village who have died recently because of red and blue numbers.” Of course something so cryptic prompted automatic demands of explanation. He told us the locals were saying that a call from outside the village will appear on the caller ID of a cell phone in red or blue. If you answer the call, some kind of X-ray waves or something will come through the phone and into your brain and kill you. The other girls immediately called bullshit, saying, “But doesn’t the color of the numbers just depend on your phone?” Lin looked at his own phone, laughing, and said, “My numbers are only white. I hope my supervisor doesn’t call.” He went on to say that the funeral of one of the men was going on now. “How old was he? Did he have any prior medical conditions?” the Canadian girl said. The man was only twenty-eight, but we mentioned how sudden heart attacks could kill even young people. Lin wasn’t defending their beliefs, but he wasn’t making fun of them as being stupid and provincial either. Once I understood the theory, I mostly stayed out of it. I don’t know if it’s because I avoid confrontation, or I try to stick with cultural relativism at least for a while, or what. But for the record, I did think the red and blue numbers were bullshit. I just didn’t see the point in arguing about it, since people believe what they want, and they certainly aren’t going to listen to a bunch of tourists.

Someone brought up the war.

Lin shifted his body and launched calmly into a history of the Khmer political situation beginning with the Vietnam war. He told of leaders who were mostly good but human, leaders who were mostly bad, leaders overthrown, leaders propped up by the U.S. government but wrong, foreign deals and betrayals, exile, and the rise of Pol Pot. He squirmed and grimaced when he mentioned the Americans bombing Cambodia, as if we would be offended, and added, “But you can’t really blame them. They were trying to bomb the North Vietnamese.” As if that’s so much better. One of the girls prodded for his personal experiences, a little crass, I thought, but he didn’t mind talking about it, and explained that he hadn’t been born yet, but his father told him stories. As he talked, shadows and sparks flitted behind his eyes, betraying the continuing impact of a genocide that he hadn’t even been alive to witness.

As the nun passed through to offer us pillows, Lin casually asked her about the war. She responded in a few words and slipped out. He told us that she said her husband had died during the Pol Pot regime, not in the genocide, but because he had been worked to death. The Canadian girl asked Lin what he thought about the fact that no one had been prosecuted for this, did he think there should be a trial now, or is it too late. “I think it’s too late.” He said, then seemed to look far-off. We looked down, because we were in the midst of an awkward silence with no foreseeable way out.

Then the little mango girl was peering at us through the doorway. We all said hello, and she smiled bashfully. The Canadian girl asked her to join us. Mango girl didn’t understand, so the Canadian girl asked Lin if she could come inside, and he posed the question to her family. He relayed to us that the family said she had lice, and they didn’t want her spreading it. Without hesitation, he started combing through the girl’s hair with his fingers, using great focus to extract the bugs burrowed into her scalp. The women snickered outside, and he told us, “They are laughing at me because they’ve never seen a man do this.” With surprising venom, one of the Dutch girls said, “It is only because they are lazy. If they sat down one day and picked out all the lice, it wouldn’t be a problem.” The Canadian girl and I simultaneously did a sharp intake of breath, and I thought about the two weeks I spent out of school in fourth grade, sitting in my pajamas and watching movies while my mother combed nits out of my hair.

After lunch, we returned out back to continue our thatch panels. A neighbor woman sat down, picked up some thatch, and started chatting with us, with Lin as our interpreter. According to Lin, she said, “You have tongues and lips just like Khmer, I don’t understand why you can’t speak Khmer, too.” In Japan, I’m constantly being reminded of how different I am. It was refreshing to experience otherwise.

After finishing the thatch, we visited the local pagoda. Lin picked plantains from the trees and gave them to us to eat as he explained the Buddhist murals on the wall. He showed us another building in the monastery complex, and told us that during the war it had been used as a prison, torture chamber, and killing room. He said that there was a similar pagoda in the village where he grew up, and you could still see the blood on the walls. We took a trip to the market where we were promptly rushed by little girls selling bracelets, and I got the idea to buy a few for some of my students, and then tell them that I had gotten them from little girls the same age as them who only go to school four hours a day, if at all, and then work to make money for their families. Yeah, if I had kids, I would lay all kinds of guilt on them.

Colin and I spent the next day exploring the temples of Angkor Thom, and tragically, the camera ran out of batteries at the beginning of the day. At Bayon, the structure with the giant faces carved into the spires, we could barely move because of the amount of tourists, monks, and religious pilgrims from all over the world who came to see a wonder on par with the pyramids. These staggering temples, tucked into the humming jungle, seemed so brilliant, yet like they should be serene and peaceful. Somehow, despite the volume of tourists with stupid hats and cameras, and the locals shoving the exact same merchandise in your face, there was always room for the occasional secret corner, and a bit of the serenity was preserved. We had been turning down magnets and postcards from kids all day when we encountered the modern pagoda on a lesser-traveled path. As we passed, three small children suddenly appeared from behind a column and lined up according to size, shouting, “Hello!” We returned the greeting, and they began chirping, “Picture? Picture?” “Please take a picture!” Colin stopped and said, “I would if I could, but my camera is out of batteries.” They didn’t understand, so I shrugged and said, “No camera.” The kids looked disappointed. They seemed more unkempt than the kids with merchandise, and unlike most of the other kids we’d seen around, there didn’t seem to be a relative or authority figure anywhere near. Then one girl saw the bag of pineapple I was holding that Colin had bought not long before. “Can we have pineapple?” she said, and the other kids echoed her. I handed her the bag, and they all clustered around it. From the distance, we saw a group of three tourists passing the same area, and the kids once again emerged asking for a picture. At first the tourists ignored them, but then they stopped. We were glad when the tourists finally did take their picture, and then showed it to them on their camera. We wondered who were these kids with no merchandise who want nothing more than to have their pictures taken by anyone who happens to pass.

Every day flickered between lightness and darkness, a sort of dual consciousness. Constant juxtapositions of a glorious past and a destitute present, a destitute present yet a sense of optimism, the hope and the ugliness that tourism brings. Cambodia bears the markings of somewhere that has been completely and thoroughly devastated by war, but is trying to pull together its pieces. Confronted with a modern world of progress, development, and tourism, it has a window to try to move forward but it’s still haunted by the past. It’s hard to forget a war when members of the offending regime are still serving in your government, and it’s hard to forget a war when its mines are still taking your limbs. It felt like a place that was stretching and straining through its chrysalis, but with crackling bones and growing pains. I don’t know where Cambodia is headed, but I know it’s going somewhere. I have a feeling that when I return it won’t even be the same place anymore. That makes me feel a bit wistful.

Ittekimasu!

2008-04-23T23:56:00.002+09:00

I'm off to Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos for the next twelve days. I'm totally not going to step on any landmines.

Crime in Japan!

2008-04-17T00:29:00.003+09:00

Last night someone tried to rob the Hokka Hokka tei in A-town. For those of you not in Japan, Hokka Hokka tei is a popular chain bento shop. Anyway, when my friend Hiromi picked me up for our yoga class last night, she couldn’t wait to tell me the news, because it had happened near her house. The area was crawling with police—it seemed like they’d sent out SWAT teams—so she had wandered around the street watching everything go down and gathering information. Apparently someone had tried to rob the place when it was filled with customers, and everyone working there ran away, leaving just the robber and the customers. The robber tried to open the safe but couldn’t, so he ran away.

“[Did he have a weapon?]” I asked Hiromi.
“[He had a knife, I think. Not a gun.]”
“[A knife? That’s not scary.]”

Hiromi was very amused by my response. When we met with the yoga class of middle-aged women from various nearby towns, they were all marveling at the details of the very frightening attempted robbery, and Hiromi was sure to quote me: “Sore amari kowaikunai.” I explained a little that if I were in the cashier’s position, and the place was filled with customers, it wouldn’t be hard for someone to get the knife away or call the cops. They thought I was really tough, and probably stupid. I didn’t share with them the rest of my thoughts on the matter, because they revealed that as a result of my experience with crime in America, my way of thinking was pretty dark. At Hokka Hokka tei, there’s an entire long counter between the customers and the workers. If someone pulled out a knife and said give me all your money, what if you just said no? What could they do with a counter between you? Throw the knife at you? Are they some kind of deadly, circus-trained knife-throwers? In America, for such a robbery to work, they’d need a hostage to begin with. In that situation (a crowded shop, a counter between you and danger), to be that intimidated by someone with a knife the robber would need to already have it to someone’s throat so they could say, “Give me all your money or I’ll slice this guy’s neck open.”

Colin was driving to Saga City not long after this happened, and when I told him about it he said, “So that’s why there were cops everywhere.” And Saga City is pretty far away from A-town. Colin told me that today his school had a staff meeting about safety concerns in regards to the attempted robbery. They made a really big deal out of it, and announced to the students to return straight home from school, and to take special caution. I wonder if these cautionary school announcements were limited to the Shi-town tri-city area. Several months ago there was actually a murder with a gun in Takeo, a city about half an hour’s drive from here. It was a yakuza hit gone wrong. Apparently, the guy was supposed to whack another yakuza who had been in the hospital recovering from a heart attack, but he had already checked out and the hitman ended up offing an innocent guy who was in the same bed for a bike accident. Of course it’s really sad and kind of scary, especially if you were going into the hospital anytime soon, but the fallout was amazing. All over the prefecture, places nowhere near Takeo, people were freaking the hell out. Some schools were let out early, after-school clubs were canceled, and parents were encouraged pick up their children rather than let them walk home. Did they really think that this gunman was going to come out of hiding just to nab elementary school kids? I was reminded of the kind of incidents that inspired such caution in the school systems back when I was a kid. For a while there was some kind of gang warfare going on in the area around my middle school. It was those drug-runners from Chicago, they said. Someone got shot one night a block away from the school, so the next day it went on lockdown. That meant that we were only permitted to use the front entrance, and the side entrances were guarded during the day by police officers. I can’t really remember, but I think this went on for a week or two. But this didn’t change anything at any of the other schools in the city. There were no announcements to take extra caution or to hurry straight home after school, and certainly no one in the surrounding cities knew anything about it.

When Colin’s grandparents visited Saga about six months ago, they stayed at the Saga City home of a colleague’s widow, a Japanese woman who had traveled all over the world. When we were taking his grandparents to the Shi-town area for the day, and mentioned to the woman that we were making a stop in Kouhoku, she balked at the idea. She exclaimed that Kouhoku was dangerous, that there used to be a mine there that closed down so there are many low class people, and a few years ago there was a murder. Kouhoku is one town over from us, and we stop there often to go to the video store or the Jusco (a big shopping center). Did she actually think that we were in danger of being murdered by out of work miners?

When I was growing up in Iowa, there was a murder in my neighborhood. That place was predominantly rich and white, too. It was drug-related—a dealer and his girlfriend just wanted a dark street where they could shoot this poor crackhead, and 42nd street was nice and dark. They didn’t even live there. I remember my friends and I playing near the spot where the kid was killed. It was under a weeping willow, and there was a big, human-sized bloodstain that just wouldn’t wash away, with rusty-colored bars running off the shoulder of the road. Maybe it was kind of a big deal then, but we knew that those people had little to do with us or our neighborhood, just like whatever out-of-work-miner murder that might have happened in Kouhoku a few years ago is no point of concern when I’m stopping there to rent a DVD.

It all makes me wonder a couple things. First, what’s wrong with me that violent crime is so banal? And second, how do Japanese people manage to travel the world without being paralyzed by fear everywhere they go? Young Japanese women in particular have a fascination with Europe, mainly France and Italy. Western or European restaurants and clubs are supposed to be hip and sophisticated, while Japanese style things are provincial and silly. But all European-style food or drink or club is sent through the Japanese filter, which generally makes it either really strange and cheesy (not literally, though. That would be great, I love cheese) or just a weak imitation. Though it’s far from stylish according to hip, young Japanese kids, I prefer Japanese style pubs, sake and beer. Apparently there’s been a wave of young Japanese women traveling to places like Paris or Rome going through shock upon discovering that it’s not like the romantic nights and gondolas of their imaginations and whatever mini-replication they experienced at Tokyo Disney. Sometimes those places are dirty, or rude, and sometimes there are pickpockets and sometimes people take advantage of you. It’s not like Paris is particularly dangerous, it’s just not Japan.

When I was discussing this with one of my housewife friends, she told me a news story she had heard a few years ago, that I have yet to have confirmed over the internet, so I can’t attest to its validity. She told me that several years ago, six young Japanese women were traveling together in Italy, and they were all abducted by one crazy Italian guy with a sword. According to my friend, he held them hostage in his apartment for days, just him and his sword, and he raped all of them. He had samurai delusions. Eventually they escaped, but when my friend heard the story, she was angry. There were six of them, and just one of him and a sword. Young women are raised to be so naïve, she said. They should have done something. I found myself thinking the same thing, but remembered the first tenet of good feminism, NEVER BLAME THE VICTIM. There’s no denying that Japan is a bit of a follow-the-leader, groupthink kind of place. Maybe they just believe in obeying the guy with the blade. But it’s not like weird issues with obedience is strictly a Japanese problem.

My friend also told me about going to Singapore for a week, and being pick-pocketed twice, both times for just being unaware and having her bag slung behind her. So maybe it is hard for Japanese people to travel and learn to not trust everyone. But it makes me wonder what’s wrong with us? I’m from Iowa, and Iowa is supposed to be safe, but I know to always watch my possessions and not listen to the people on the street who ask you for money or other favors. A lot of these places are developed nations, yet we still can’t trust each other. What’s the deal?

Shanghai: Part II

2008-04-12T21:02:00.003+09:00

In the morning we step out of our hotel and onto Nanjing road, where we notice a thin fog of persistent rain, and us with no umbrellas. As soon as we step onto the street, a woman comes up to us trying to sell us bags and watches. Although we’ve only been in China for about fourteen hours, this woman is something like the fiftieth person who’s tried to sell us the same stuff. Having lost my Midwest super-politeness, I said, more to Colin than her, “If you were selling umbrellas, then we could talk.” But since I had said anything at all, she decided to follow us for half a block. If I ever go back to Shanghai, I’ll stay away from Nanjing road. It’s stressful having someone aggressively trying to sell you something every twenty seconds. And sometimes they even look like completely normal people who suddenly emerge from the crowd of all the other normal Chinese people going about their business to try to sell you things. It’s a little unnerving.

Within a minute we see someone selling umbrellas, interestingly, just sitting out of the rain with her merchandise in a Tupperware container, not pursuing anyone, and we buy two, then head to the Shanghai Museum. Hardened from our fourteen hours, Colin and I were wearing our “leave me alone” faces. Anyone who greeted us, asked us where we were from, or tried to tell me how beautiful I was, we had to ignore completely, because we knew the next thing to happen would be them trying to sell us something. It was hard, because that’s kind of the opposite of my role as a good Samaritan in Japan. I’m always answering questions from strangers, and trying to smile and be warm, but in Shanghai, you just can’t. Anyway, when we reached the museum, we saw that the line to get in wrapped all the way around the building. Apparently, museum admission had just become free, which is great, but as a result it was crazy packed. Since the museum was one of the main sights we came to see, we decided to wait. We were comfortable with our umbrellas protecting us not only from the light spray of rain, but from the attention of the umbrella-hawkers walking the length of the line.

We had been waiting for about fifteen minutes when the woman in front of us in line turned around to say hello in English and started trying to coerce her young daughter to talk to us. We were guarded at first, but since they were fellow line-waiters we decided they really were just practicing their English. So I transitioned back into friendly foreigner mode as the little girl hid behind her hands and squealed in embarrassment while her mother suggested things to ask us. Even though she was mostly too embarrassed to say anything directly to us, from the phrases she ran by her mother, we were pretty impressed with her English. It was definitely better than most Japanese adults. When she asked us where we were from and we told her America, she exclaimed “Oh my goh!” That’s one phrase she has in common with Japanese kids. Then she started pointing to a phrase in her English book that translated as “In China, we believe in communism.” During the wait, the girl spelled the word “museum” for us, then asked Colin to sing, but was very displeased by his singing. Then he asked her to sing, and she did, nervously and in Chinese. It was a good time.

I’m getting bored writing this. I get the feeling no one will read it or care anyway. So I’ll end it quickly. The museum was excellent. We walked to the French quarter afterwards, which was very interesting, and Colin bought a cell phone strap that was a panda eating a piece of bamboo. The bamboo broke off within a week. We had a delicious lunch consisting of those steamed, meat-filled buns. I can’t remember what they’re called. At night faced my big fear and took the subway again during rush hour to get to the Shanghai circus. It wasn’t nearly as bad as before. And the circus was fantastic, like Cirque du Soleil only Chinese and awesome. For our late dinner, we ended up at Pizza Hut, and I would feel guilty but oh my god it was so amazing. I didn’t even like Pizza Hut in the States, and thought I wasn’t so big on pizza in general before I came here, but once it’s gone completely for so long, the taste of actual pizza without mayonnaise or seafood or corn or anything can give you such a mouth-gasm. The next morning we walked to Yuyuan Gardens, which was beautiful and pretty different from Japanese gardens, and we also petted a really nice garden kitty. Colin bought a pocket watch that had Chairman Mao shaking his fist on the face. He argued the price down quite a bit, but the watch still stopped within a couple days. By the time I left, I felt good about China as a vibrant, interesting and historically rich place. I’d definitely go back. I hate ending a post so stupidly, but nobody will read it, so who cares.

Shanghai: Part I

2008-04-02T01:06:00.005+09:00

There are plenty of downsides to being severely underworked, but at least I have time to travel. Back when I was at the cram school, I was overworked and underpaid, and there was no such thing as vacation or sick days. Half the time I was there, I had classes six days a week, so I had to look on with puppy-dog eyes as the JET ALTs went on their weekend excursions to totally fun places I would love to go to if I only had the time. But asking for days off to travel anywhere was always out of the question, because I had completely fallen for the Japanese company loyalty thing. Everyone else was working hard, harder than me, and they never got to travel. Yoshiko and Sayaka always told me that they were so unimaginably busy now and didn’t even have time to eat or sleep because it was time for midterm exams/entrance exams/post-entrance exams/graduations/preparation for the new school year/summer school/English programs/winter study-camp and so on until eternity. After having been there for a full year, I realized that these times that everyone was so busy their heads would explode could actually just be described as spring, summer, fall, and winter. It was all the time, just different reasons, and as soon as entrance exam season was over, something new would come up. So now I’m underworked and underpaid, and not only do I have time to travel, but because of my sketchy visa situation, I have to. Lucky for me, Colin is underworked and overpaid.

For my most recent pond-jumping adventure, we wanted to go somewhere that was cheap, close, but interesting. We’d already been to Korea, so we decided on Shanghai, the next closest metropolis. We had a full two days there, so we planned on making a mini-vacation out of it. I was really excited about going to China, and had learned some Mandarin on the awesome language-learning game on the plane. I annoyed the shit out of Colin as we were waiting for the Maglev by repeating “Wan an. Wan an. Tsao an.” Oh, and let me tell you about the Maglev. It’s a train, and the name stands for magnetic levitation, which is exactly what it sounds like. It doesn’t actually touch the tracks, but hovers smoothly above them—magnetically. It’s one of the fastest trains in the world, with speeds up to 430 kilometers an hour. We took it from the airport to the subway station, where we were to get on the train toward Nanjing Road, where our hotel was located.

Just from being in the airport and train stations, I was able to gather a number of first impressions about China. People spoke loudly and expressively, and favored rushing ahead of people over the line, which is Japan’s best friend. Maybe it’s just me, but I found it fascinating that the women weren’t clompy and stumbly in their high-heeled shoes, and the only knock-knees I saw the entire time were on a Japanese girl. Grace noted in her blog that many women in Japan seem to walk like they’re mildly disabled, and I often wonder why that is. I also saw hardly any short-shorts, and some women didn’t wear makeup.

I was still happy and eager to experience Shanghai when we got on the subway with our backpacks and one piece of checked luggage. At each stop, more people poured through the doors, and we found ourselves being pushed further away from the exit. More people came aboard, and I was pressed uncomfortably against an old man. I had told Colin to hold his backpack in front of him for the train ride, because China wasn’t safe like Japan, and I was glad because soon a group of shady-looking guys had flooded aboard and took their place directly behind Colin and at a vantage point where they could gawk at me. I reminded Colin to watch his stuff, and tried not to look worried, which I definitely was. They were staring hard, at me, then at our duffle bag, then at me some more. I became even more conscious of the fact that we were the only white people in sight, and as such, clearly looked like money. Moreover, as the train became more packed, we wondered how we could get to the door in time to get off when we kept getting further away from it.

In a state of fret over reaching the door through the crowd and avoiding getting robbed by the sketchy guys behind us, we decided to exit through the doors of the next car, which we had practically been pushed into anyway. After observing the natives wordlessly shoving their way through the crowd of people in the course of getting on or off the train, we made a plan to get to the door by any means necessary. Once our stop came, I plowed through the crowd, repeating “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” as I pushed through the wall of standing humans with literally all my strength. I would have knocked people flat to the ground had they had any room to fall. But it wasn’t enough, as the doors closed while we were just feet away “Shit!” I said loudly.

We were stuck in the new car, several feet from the door, unable to move, and we had just made a huge scene. We were waiting uncomfortably in the midst of a sea of people we had just attempted to knock into oblivion. Then it happened.

I got molested on the subway.

My line of work really lowers the boundaries you have with your body. I have kids climbing on me all the time, sometimes, as I've frequently discussed, grabbing some private areas. I don't necessarily notice anything out of the ordinary if a hand is resting on my butt on a train so crowded that everyone is touching everyone. When I sense fingers applying rhythmic pressure to my ass-cheek, I think it might be the vibrations of the train. I announce to Colin, “I’m possibly being molested,” and turn my body away from the offending hand. But the hand finds me again. I look at the guy next to me. I become fully aware of what’s happening to me, but I wonder if it might just be easier to let some perv fondle my ass until our next stop. Maybe just stay in a state of denial.

Our stop is the People’s Square, and it’s a popular one. There’s one last definitive squeeze before everyone begins flooding out the doors, and I elbow the guy standing next to me hard in the sternum.

When we get above ground, we’re encountered with futuristic scenery straight out of Blade Runner. I’ve been to Tokyo, but Shibuya Crossing’s got nothing on Shanghai. We rolled our heads back in a daze as we saw buildings crawling with lights and advertisements (so much for communism) and skyscrapers that literally disappeared into the fog. As soon as we stepped foot on Nanjing road, the pedestrian shopping street where our hotel was located, we started being accosted by touts trying to sell us watches and bags. I’m usually unnecessarily nice, and smile and say no thank you, but I was so traumatized from the subway ride that I just looked at them blankly and shook my head.

When we finally found our hotel, we were checked in by the front desk staff of harried Chinese women. There aren’t the same trends of service people being nauseatingly polite to customers as in Japan, but I don’t mind. Actually, the Chinese don’t even bow very much. Between this, the ease with which the Chinese have conversations that other people might be able to hear, and a few other things, I realize that Japan really does have a stick up its ass. I’ve been to a few other Asian countries now, and none of them are as weirdly rigid as Japan. I love Japan, but right now it’s sort of like a love you have for a family member that annoys the hell out of you.

Even though I’d rather curl up in the room and hide for the rest of the night, we set out looking for food and to see the famous view of the river at night. I felt numb and in a fog. I’m too sensitive. But it wasn’t just being groped, it was the cumulative experience on the subway that had affected me so much. First worrying about those shady guys who were staring at me, then having to shove all those people only to fail and be forced to stand with them until the next station. It was against all of my Midwestern sensibilities; we don’t push, we say please and thank you and excuse me, and we’re uncomfortable in conversations where people interrupt each other. Plus, I was beating myself up about elbowing that guy, when there was no way to tell who was actually groping me. Sure, it probably was him, but I may have assaulted some random guy, who had just seen me violently shove through all those people like some crazed white barbarian. Really, getting molested was just the icing on the pile of shit.

After wandering a bit we settle on a restaurant with an English menu, which turns out to be pretty high end. But high end in Shanghai means a meal costs about twelve bucks, so it wasn’t a big deal. It was one of those set-ups where you order a lot of dishes and share them, and since I was confused, we took the waitress’s recommendation, which looked like some kind of shrimp or fish in the picture. The food was pretty decent, except the waitress’s recommendation turned out to be fish eye-sockets. You're supposed to eat around the ring of bone and savor the soft, fatty area, which I guess is a delicacy. It was gross.

We walked to the Bund, and saw the view over the river. More people aggressively tried to sell us things. We met our first child-beggars. There’s a picture of me that night, looking lost and despondent against the dark city backdrop. After that night, I didn’t know if I could get past the experience and enjoy China. But over the next day and a half, miraculously, China redeems itself.

Shi-town Introduction

2008-03-16T00:15:00.002+09:00

Courtesy of one of Colin's junior high school students:

There is a lot of rice field. Ariake sea and Mt. Utagaki. All people is kind. But don't enjoy.

Take a break. Eat a cookie.

2008-02-26T00:21:00.003+09:00

Ah, it’s been a while since I wrote a totally immature post about breasts. In the midst of all of my angst, why not write about something light for a moment, then go back to all the hating. Ideas surrounding breasts are different here, and sometimes they make me feel like a bit of a prude. It’s not unusual to see an exposed nipple in magazines or on movie covers in the video store. The context is almost always nonsexual, but I’m always a little surprised when I see it. In America, finding an illustrated home breast examination pamphlet would delight any ten-year-old. I knew this lax breast censorship was true for most of Europe, but I didn’t expect it in Japan, a country that’s animated pornography industry is booming because real human pornography legally requires a mosaic over pubic hair. But enough about pornography, let’s make an uneasy transition to my work with small children.

I used to work mostly with little kids, often in their homes. That means that I often spent time drinking tea and chatting with their mothers who usually had other young children toddling about. Not long after experiencing the grabby-hands pre-school for the first time, I was having tea with a mother of some of my students. We were sitting on the floor, and her two-year-old daughter was being particularly fussy. The little girl threw herself on her mother’s lap and began grabbing at her shirt, whimpering, “[Breast! Breast!]” At the time, I nearly choked on my tea. The mother just laughed and repeated to the girl, “[Yes, breast, breast.]” She turned her attention to me and said, “[Do you know what breast means?]” I informed her that I did. As I write this now, it seems so obvious what was happening, and anyone who has raised children will probably think I’m an idiot. Her daughter still nurses. Since then I’ve seen her nursing. She’s pretty old, so that’s probably why I didn’t immediately assume that. No evidence yet on whether kids breastfeed longer in general in Japan, but that would explain a lot.

I feel the need to confess my translation methods. They may be a little misleading. I have been, and will continue to translate the same word in different ways. The word is “oppai”. It means breast/s. Unlike English, Japanese doesn’t have a lot of different words for mammaries. There are a few, but by far the most common one is oppai. It’s used by doctors and perverted little kids alike. It’s probably even used by lovers. It dominates all the other words referring to fun bags. One thing about English is that it has endless words to describe teeters, trouser snakes, quims, and making the beast with two backs. I thought about using a different English word for tittays with each invocation in this entry, but it didn’t pan out since each word has a different connotation, many of them crass, and many referring to a specific variety of blouse bunny. People call them euphemisms, but how is calling breasts “rib balloons” covering for an unpleasant reality?

Back when I was a starry-eyed idealist who thought teacher’s lady lumps should be off-limits, I was mortified by being groped by pre-schoolers. I thought it must have been because I have freakishly huge cans by Japanese standards, and they just couldn’t help but cop a feel on the elephants in the room. In time the boob-grabbing died down a bit. One day we had a guest teacher, one of Sayaka’s friends filling in for the third teacher. She was a normal Japanese girl with a normal Japanese physique. It wasn’t long before of a flock of kids was chasing her around the room gleefully jumping up and grabbing her boobs. She crossed her arms over her chest and tried to avoid them, but she mostly just laughed, like “Oh you pesky kids”. So apparently checking out the teacher’s rack is just part of their getting to know you process. While it isn’t exactly sanctioned, it’s viewed more as mischief or a mild annoyance than with the severity of the American school system (*gasp* That is a very private place and you need to keep your hands to yourself! Do you need to sit in timeout?).

I was a longtime veteran to perverted little kids when Akari and Kristina came to class. Akari was a Japanese college student who was working for us part-time in the summer, and Kristina was her American exchange student who had only been in Saga for about a month. Before class, I deadpanned to them, “Just so you know, the kids will probably grab your boobs. That’s what they do to new people.” Akari laughed, with an “Oh, great,” kind of attitude, but Kristina was aghast and turned bright red. I had forgotten that there was a time that I too was so shocked by the notion of being violated by four-year-olds. Kristina had time to prepare mentally, so when the groping came she handled it pretty well. I remember I had initially been so embarrassed about getting groped in front of my boss, but a few months later, while we were standing outside her condo having a serious conversation, her six-year-old daughter jumped up and grabbed Yoshiko’s breasts, exclaiming, “[Boobies!]” Yoshiko gave her a stern look and continued the conversation.

So that’s kids. But more than once I’ve been asked by adults why all foreign women have large breasts. I’m more likely to entertain an answer about the variety of body types in different parts of the world if it’s a woman asking. Before coming here, I was warned that kids might ask you your size, meaning your bra size. The first person to ask me this was someone who should know better. He was an English teacher, and had spent time in Australia. He was also very drunk.

“What size? A, B, C?”

My response was something drunk and flippant. Whenever the question has come up since then, I’ve just said that I don’t know because the Japanese sizing system is different. This kind of casualness suggests that breasts are viewed as being more medical than sexual, but then how would you explain all the hentai art of women with ridiculously huge boobs straining through a shred of fabric? Of course Japanese people always apply different rules when dealing with foreigners that may tend towards the skeezy/molesty, but maybe Americans are just prudes. We don’t get naked with our co-workers either, and little boy penis is too hot for TV. It’s been a while since I’ve had one of my classes interrupted by an old lady suddenly popping her head through the sliding door and calling “[Breast!]” (She was telling the mother that her baby needed to nurse.) But I think if that happened now, I wouldn’t choke on my tea or anything.

Japan is hard.

2008-02-21T14:56:00.002+09:00

Occasionally when I’m chatting with the locals, I hear the question, “Nihon ga sumiyasui desuka?” “[Is it easy to live in Japan?]”

I hear this from well-meaning, yet provincial strangers, usually following a short conversation and an exclamation of how good my Japanese is. I have the same conversation over and over again:

Where are you from? Are you an English teacher? Where? How long have you lived here? Do you like Saga? Wow, your Japanese is good!

The same conversation. With some optional elements here and there. Sometimes they linger on food and skip on weather, sometimes they cover both. Usually there’s some comment on how tall I am.

Then comes that loaded question: Is it easy to live in Japan?

I never know how to respond. If I were to answer honestly, I would say no, it’s not easy to live in Japan, but not for the reasons that you would expect. It’s not because I can’t eat fish or use chopsticks. It’s not because I’ve never seen this curious thing you call rice and don’t understand how one can eat it every day. Nor do I have a problem with tatami or futon, or taking off my shoes when entering a house or office or hospital. It’s not even because I can’t understand enough of the language or writing. I get by.

Truth be told, gentle shopkeeper/farmer/housewife/random old person, Japan is fucking difficult. Pumping gas is difficult. Buying envelopes is difficult. Taking out the trash is difficult. Sometimes, every simple action becomes an impossible task, just because of some specific knowledge you don’t possess. Even small errands can be intimidating if it’s something you’ve never done in Japan before, because there’s likely an elaborate process behind it. But you get used to those kinds of things. There’s something else that can’t be easily articulated. Culture shock doesn’t come right away. It sneaks up on you after months of constantly relying on the kindness of your employers or co-workers, who really are oh so nice, and never knowing what the hell is happening. At first you thank god for those people who can help you through this confusing world, then you wonder if it wouldn’t be more convenient for everyone if they just took a minute to explain a few things to you. The tenth time you go to work and discover that there’s no place for you to plan your lessons because there’s some weird presentation going on that’s being videotaped and taken very seriously and everyone looks at you like you’re interrupting, it gets to you. Or when you go to work and discover everyone is celebrating a big going-away party for one of the teachers getting married, but you were never invited. Or when you drive all the way to your class in a town hall in a different city only to find the doors locked and no one there because of some reason everyone understood, but no one decided to inform the teacher about. Small reminders that you will never, ever be one of them.

But then there are the people who assume that the Japanese language and culture are a completely indecipherable enigma to someone foreign. This includes the service people who refuse to speak to you and only point at things or use some kind of primitive sign language, even when you try to confirm or respond to their gestures in Japanese. It also includes those closer colleagues or associates who are an endless source of obvious information that they think will be helpful to you because you must know nothing. Every time you meet them, they’re surprised that you can speak Japanese, despite that being the only way you’ve ever communicated with them. They know so little about anything outside of Japan that they have no idea what might be confusing for someone foreign. While you try to educate those people, they quickly discard any new information you tell them and cling to the exact stereotypes and expectations they had of you before. You are not here to educate people. You are here to give a foreign, one-dimensional happy face to the system that is still thoroughly entrenched in Japaneseness. You are there to dance, monkey, but do not provide any input, because you couldn’t possibly contribute to this intricate Japanese system. People may like you, may think that you’re good-looking and lots of fun, but do they think of you as human? Not really.

Japan is such a nice place, so safe, so clean, and most people are outwardly kind to you, yet there’s this slow feeling of suffocation. Another arbitrary rule, another suspicion that a person you considered a friend was just being polite and doesn’t actually give a shit about you, and it becomes harder to breathe. It’s hard to breathe, and it’s hard to live, and meanwhile you have to smile at every gawking child you see and appear warm and welcoming because you are an ambassador.

So no, stranger, it is not easy to live in Japan.

But I never say that. I always just smile, and say, “[There are difficult things, but overall, it’s all right.]”

2008-02-13T23:53:00.001+09:00

I just need to write something now to prove that I exist. I wanted to write something that people would respond to, not because it’s the next great work of literary journalism, but because it’s something, because it resonated, because it was what it was. I’ve long given up the notion that I could produce the next great anything. But if some people read it and like it, maybe that’s enough. I’m in a state now that I hate everything I try to put to words, even when I toy with a few different subjects that are on the list of fragments going stale. All day, I’ve thought, I take so much, I consume so much, I need to produce something. And nothing came out. So I write about how nothing came out, because if I don’t, it will be another day I may as well not have existed, another day of an empty inbox and an internet that updates too slowly. At least I’m leaving this one footprint. I was alive on February 13, 2008, and I couldn’t write anything at all.

Naki Naki Sensei

2008-01-28T22:48:00.000+09:00

Sometime I’ll do an entry about dispelling the top misconceptions about Japan. In this entry, I’ll just dispel one; that it is shameful to publicly express any sort of emotion. This idea has its basis in some reality, but the old notion needs a little revision. It’s fine to express emotion, as long as you’re expressing it as a group, at an appropriate time. The Japanese are actually huge fans of group crying. My first experience with large group crying in my life was in the Cedar Rapids airport, saying goodbye to the group of exchange students from Okinawa when I was a sophomore in high school. My school had a sister school in Okinawa, and every year they sent students to do a three-week-long homestay, and every other year my school sent students to do two weeks of homestay plus one week of Japan travel. I had never experienced that, as if on cue, a group of people could simultaneously start sobbing hysterically. But I guess it seemed appropriate, since we never knew if we would meet again.

I would meet them again though, when I did my homestay in Okinawa the following year. There, I witnessed the phenomena again. My high level high school was regularly the home of student teachers doing two week practicums. I was witness to the last day of one of those student English teachers, a small college student who fumbled through flashcards and said all her Rs as Ws. Ryoichi and I quietly scoffed at her incompetence from the back of the room, but as the class was drawing to a close, the main teacher made an announcement, and the girl was called upon to make a speech. She stood in front of the class, her stereotypically feminine voice quavering. She managed to utter only a few words before breaking down in hiccupping tears, covering her mouth with her hands. At the time I couldn’t understand what she said, but within seconds every girl in the class and some of the boys were crying along with her. We took an emotional, red-eyed group picture, and I felt a little embarrassed to witness such a display as an objective outsider. Then I remembered even these students had only known her for two weeks. When our homestay was over, our Okinawan host students accompanied us to the airport, and before parting ways, of course everyone cried and hugged.

At that time I chocked it up to Okinawans being culturally more open than mainlanders. Upon moving here, I found that group crying is an institution at ceremonies of transition or the final anything. And Japan really loves ceremonies. Entrance and graduation ceremonies are revered beginning in pre-school, and while the kids may be too young to be fully indoctrinated, at least the mothers can be counted on to wail hysterically. Even a child going from the three year old class in pre-school to the four year old class is made into a big, symbolic gesture. By the time they’re third years in junior high school, the students know what they’re supposed to do. At Colin’s graduation ceremony, the students were so choked up they were barely able to complete the scripted portion of the program. By the end, men and boys dabbed their damp eyes, the women in kimono had buried their faces in tissues, the female students were completely incapacitated by their weeping. I remember at my middle school graduation, the only person who cried was my friend, Susie. And like the assholes we were, we made fun of her. That’s why we were glad to be getting out of there. Because middle schoolers are assholes.

This institutional permission to completely break down publicly at appropriate times has contributed to a distinctive brand of tear-jerkers in film. I never watch these movies, but I see their trailers. The score usually involves quivering strings or something equally sad, and the climax of the trailer features a montage of a variety of characters, both men and women, in varying stages of anguish, with tears pouring down their faces. They’re always called something like “Naki Naki Namida”, ([“Cry Cry Tears”]) or “The Tears of Spring”, or something similarly obvious. I’m annoyed by films that so bluntly tell me how I’m supposed to feel. It’s manipulative, and it takes away from my agency as a viewer. Generally such films in America are mocked by any moderately discriminating viewer. But here, they have a function. They allow you to cry for all the sadness of the world, but at a socially appropriate time. It’s as if the montage of crying people is part of the advertisement. Look how many times you’ll get to cry.

My last day at the pre-school was wrenching. It was the day of the Christmas English presentation, and I was not only stressed out in the way that you get when you’re organizing an event involving dozens of small children, I knew it was the last time I would see any of these kids. I was acting as the emcee, dressed up in a Christmas tree costume, complete with a giant, ridiculous star bonnet. Yoshiko informed me that after the main program, she would announce that this would be my last day, and I was to make a speech. I was well aware of the convention of people, particularly women, bursting into tears on such occasions. I knew that they did this by habit or ritual, or because it was socially expected. This didn’t comfort me.

What happened with my job was sudden and devastating, and the worst thing about it was that I was losing my students, without the benefit of warning or closure. Of course as the emcee, I had to be incredibly silly and energetic. Occasionally during the downtime of my gaijin minstrel show, I would be seized by emotion, and my eyes would begin to well up. A couple times a kid or parent caught me doing this, and looked perplexed. I was a mess. If I could barely keep up my composure to do my job, I knew I was going to completely lose it during the speech.

When the presentations were over and the kids had all received their gifts from Santa, Yoshiko announced the “unfortunate news”. She handed me the microphone, and I said, in a far more somber tone than I had been using as the emcee, “Gomennasai. Nihongo ga amari shaberemasen kedo, kodomo-tachi ni, hoikuen-tachi ni, [I’m sorry. I can’t really speak Japanese but, to the students, to the people of the pre-school,] thank you very much,” I was already choking up majorly. “I don’t want to go.” I turned the mike off and practically threw it back at Yoshiko and turned around, hiding my face that was beginning to gush with tears, supporting myself on the cubby holes as my entire body racked with the sobs I didn’t want to release. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t control myself, that they had to see that. The combination of being shocked and angry about my job, uncertain about my future, and losing one of the few things I enjoy in life led to me being completely distraught in front of the kids and their parents. The younger ones didn’t know what was going on, but I could see the older ones understood. Before the parents left, I sat on the floor, hugged kids, and took teary pictures and it was obvious to everyone that I was coming apart at the seams, that it took everything I had to hold myself in the barely presentable state that I was in.

As we were packing up all our materials to go home, Yoshiko approached me with tears in her eyes, and said, “Your speech, very nice.” I didn’t give a speech so much as I gave a spectacle. And apparently it was a very satisfying one to the parents. On their surveys, parents wrote things like, “[Cassie-sensei’s tears show that she holds the children precious.]” I do, but there was a lot more behind my embarrassing display than that. I wanted to rip those tears out of Yoshiko’s eyes. She thought she was sharing in some nice, emotional moment, but she was the one who did this to me, and I hated her for it. She was part of the bundle of hurt that led me to break down like that. I wasn’t crying just to satisfy her stupid social conventions. I guess that makes me a relentless individualist, convinced that my feelings are somehow special and different. Maybe I should have thought of that time as an opportunity to cry for all the sadness of the world.

The Iowa Caucus (I was there)

2008-01-05T02:37:00.001+09:00

Let's take a little break from the despair of my Japan situation and talk about something the whole world is watching. Or at least the American expats of the world. Or just America. Okay, Iowa. Colin and I have been visiting for the holidays, and honestly, America has felt really nice. I'm such a real, bona fide human being here that I can even participate in the democratic process. Since I've been back, Iowa has been alive with caucus fever. We're just stupid little Iowa, but all the candidates were here paying attention to us, speaking directly to us, needing us, and the national media was covering it. I could actually be part of something significant.

I can't imagine anything like a caucus in Japan. It's hard to believe that it's still around in America. It involves publicly declaring your political opinion, counting bodies, not ballots, and having an open discourse to try to get people to come to your side. That is some crazy, old-fashioned democracy, but I kind of like it. The address on my U.S. driver's license is just outside of city limits, so my caucus location was a little town hall way out in the boonies. The building capacity was around forty-five people, but 270 showed up. You could barely move in the place, it was so packed with farmers and small-town Iowans. An old lady fainted. There was also a big stripey caucus cat wandering around, and I carried it to the Obama corner when it was time to pick sides. The first body count showed Obama in a definite lead, followed by Edwards and Clinton. Since the Kucinich, Richardson, and Biden groups had less than forty-one people each (15%), they either had to join a viable group or merge together under one previously nonviable candidate to make it over forty-one. The Kucinich supporters were almost immediately absorbed into Obama, and a couple Biden and Richardson people tried to rally the others to pick one and form a group. One man explained to the room that they were aware that neither of these candidates would win, but it would just be a nice statement to show that they had some support in Iowa. The man was immediately met by booing and jeering from mainly the Edwards and Clinton groups. An Edwards supporter shouted, "Are you here to vote, or to make a philosophical statement?" After the nonviable people either chose groups or stayed undecided, we worked on the final count. There were sixty-six for Clinton, eighty-eight for Edwards, and 112 for Obama. Here's where it gets a little complicated. The votes are actually determined by a ratio of bodies to delegates. In other words, 112 people is not 112 votes. It's rounded down to three delegates (chosen from that body) who can go on to vote for Obama at the convention in Des Moines. Edwards was rounded up to three delegates, and Clinton got two.

It was interesting to recognize people at my caucus location. I saw my high school humanities teacher with Edwards, the boy who was my main tormenter in middle school looking tall and skeezy in the Clinton corner. I caught a glimpse of a high school friend, just back from Iraq and in the Obama group. Most of the people I recognized from high school were with Obama. My sister's caucus location was a different story. She lives downtown, with bad neighborhoods about a block away in any direction from her house. Her turnout was about half the amount of my small-town, farmy location. She said the Clinton group was really obnoxious, and as soon as the undecideds/nonviables were identified, the other groups swarmed them, trying to scream at them and insult them into their group. One woman, who was a caucus observer, not a participant, began shouting, "Look! Someone in the Obama group just gave that woman fudge! They're trying to bribe her! That's illegal!" In the end, Clinton had the most people, followed by Obama and Edwards, but because of the ratio the delegate distribution was two to Clinton, two to Obama, and one to Edwards. A woman who volunteered to be a delegate to Obama explained her position by saying, "I'm a woman, so I could just as easily go for Hillary, but my kid's half black, so I think I'll go for Obama." Luckily, she wasn't chosen. But let that be a warning to all of you. If you don't vote, people like that woman are deciding for you.

Since being back, I've been getting back in touch with the climate and the sense of need here. There are a lot of things that are really fucked up. Honestly, I'm scared to move back because of the costs of healthcare. I had my blood drawn today, and after giving the nurse my information, she sent a paper across the counter:
"We need you to sign this release. Wellmark will only pay for this test if it turns out you have cancer, so if it comes up negative you have to cover the costs."
I read over the paper and said, "Um, I don't think I have cancer. Do I really need this?"
"Yeah, but your doctor thinks you should do this test."
I asked her the cost, and reluctantly signed the release. So if I don't have cancer, I get an eighty dollar bill. If I do have cancer, I have to pay for CANCER. Isn't American healthcare fun?

Anyway, I'm an activist, and America has a lot of room for improvement. Japan doesn't need me. It doesn't really even want me. I loved teaching, and I loved my students, but now I'm just one person with no Japanese institution to back me up, and the people I thought I could trust have turned on me. If Japan is based on your context within society, your social connections, then Japan can be a really, really nasty place. The nail that sticks out gets pounded down. I thought maybe that adage was out of date, but once I've become the nail, I think I get it. I'm stubborn, I'm a fighter, and I have a strong sense of justice. I didn't want to leave Japan defeated and with such bitterness in my heart. But Yoshiko's network of influence is much stronger than I can ever be. Maybe Japan is just telling me to get the fuck out. I want to resolve this. I don't want to leave hating Japan. Hopefully I can eventually work things out and find a place again in a country that needs me.

Merry Fucking Christmas

2007-12-17T22:38:00.000+09:00

I’m about to take this opportunity to ruminate on some things I hate about Japan. If you can’t handle some intense negativity, I suggest you skip this one because I’m in a really negative place right now, and even things that didn’t used to bother me much are becoming really grating. For example, I’m so fucking sick of seeing dorky white guys with cute Japanese girlfriends. I hate the smug sense of self-satisfaction on their faces as they chatter in some kind of pidgin English-Japanese with their terrible accents learned solely from anime and making out: “Tabenai, Yuko? Pizza ga suki?”

And those girls wearing giant puffy coats with shorts up to their asscheeks. It’s freaking cold, man. Put on some pants. I get it, though, they don’t have boobs and they have to show something, and they also have nerve damage from years of wearing school uniforms that expose their bare legs to the elements. But they should at least have the good sense to not look amazed and ask me if I’m cold if I happen to be wearing something short-sleeved under my coat.

At the moment, my major point of irritation is the fact that I live in a society that works six days a week and shops on the seventh. On Sunday, traffic is impossible anywhere near a shopping center. And it’s especially bad now because it’s Christmas, and television tells them they should be buying stuff for some reason. Not gifts for your family or anything, just general consumerism. I don’t get Christmas here. Everywhere you go, there are Christmas lights and creepy Santa dolls, Christmas carols playing on the radio, employees wearing Santa hats, but it’s completely meaningless. I’m not a religious person, and I don’t mind that they don’t know that the day is supposed to commemorate the birth of Christ. Honestly, I’m a cynical piece of shit, and I kind of dislike Christmas. I can’t get into the cheesy songs, the rampant clichés, the terrible television. So much about Christmas inspires so much crap. Of course, there’s the BUY THINGS! BUY THINGS NOW! spirit that’s also kind of sickening. But all of the Christmas stuff that goes on in America at least is in anticipation of the one day that we spend with our families, and exchange hopefully thoughtful gifts. In Japan, it’s not in anticipation of anything. Most people aren’t even sure what day it is, but when it happens, they may or may not eat cake. I’ve also heard it’s a popular date holiday, like Valentine’s Day, but I’ve never met anyone around here who observes it like that, and some of them aren’t even familiar with that way of celebrating it at all. They’re obsessed with Christmas around here, with no substance to back it up, just because they think all the things I find cheesy and obnoxious are fun.

Before you peg me as a total hater, I should tell you that I love Thanksgiving. I like the idea of being with your family and eating good food. I’m also a firm believer in being good to people, no matter what time of year it is. That’s why it kind of bugs me that people think they need Christmas as an excuse to be nice. Just be nice. I know the stress and the consumer frenzy often bring out the worst in people, but at least there’s the idea that you should be nice. In Japan, I don’t think that idea is there. You should buy things, because there’s a sale, but I don’t think you give them to people. I never thought I would find myself actually missing the spirit behind Christmas, but damn. They take all the shit and garbage of Christmas, puke it out over the shopping centers, and ignore the nice bits like not laying people off right before the holidays. Happy Santa Tree to you too, assholes.

Before, During, After: Part Two, now with a surprise ending

2007-12-09T17:40:00.001+09:00

During:
In light of recent events having nothing to do with my family, this is section that I have the least tolerance for writing at the moment. I could go on and on about the events of my family visiting if I were in a more neutral state, and hopefully when there’s a bit of time between me and these events, I will. But now, this section with all the cute cultural mishaps, the whole, “Oh, Japan is so crazy and lovable” shtick that’s been beaten to death since the late eighties, this is what I can't I bring myself to write.

It has the family reacting to me having Japanified myself without realizing it:

“Why are you always covering your mouth and giggling now?”

“I do not!”

“And you apologize all the time.”

It has me realizing how weird common things in my daily life are, like people wearing surgical masks on the street, the occasional woman walking around in kimono, teams of employees shouting “Irasshaimase!” at you as soon as you walk into their business establishment, and removing or changing your footwear multiple times a day in front of seemingly arbitrary thresholds. Also inviting people you just met to hang out bare-ass naked with you in a hot spring.

It has adorable experiences of my family visiting my pre-school classes. The one to two year old class, as soon as they saw three extra foreigners in the room, backed against the wall and stared in silent horror, and not even a round of the Hokey Pokey could bring them out of their shell. I advised my mom and sisters to take off their large coats to demonstrate they weren’t concealing tentacles or extra legs. The kids were probably intimidated by the number of them, because my family managed to leave relatively unmolested. Except Shunsuke grabbed my mom’s crotch.

It has everyone we randomly encountered being so delighted to see us. The little pottery village woman explained the designs of her plates with the few English words she knew: “Rabbit. Moon.” Then she sent us away with a ton of free stuff. Generally we went away from every local shop or stall we visited with free things, tea, our pockets filled with sweets and mikan. And my co-workers, my Japanese friends, my clients were so fucking kind. There were gifts and favors and flattery, and invitations to children’s weddings that were still at least ten years away. It was the kind of warm, fuzzy experience that reminded me why I loved Japan.

But it all quickly came to an end.

After:
My action-packed week left me exhausted, and the night they left I came down with something bad. I don’t know what it was exactly. Cold-like symptoms. Nausea. Dizziness. Fever. But it was so bad I spent all of the next day in bed shivering and sweating and crying. In Japan, if you have any kind of ailment, it usually gets prompt and obsessive attention from your co-workers, who will likely call it a cold and ask if you’ve been to the hospital yet.

Colin told me that at his school, there’s a chart of all the absences due to illness for each day. Every absence is either categorized as cold or influenza, as if no other conditions existed. His theory was that any mild illness is considered a cold, while a more severe illness is considered influenza.

What I had certainly wasn’t a cold, so I made the mistake of calling it influenza when I mailed my Japanese tutor that morning to cancel our lesson. I hoped by the beginning of classes at five, I would be able to teach, but at around one I decided that was probably impossible and explained the situation to Yoshiko in a mail, once again foolishly invoking the “I” word.

A sidenote: I’ve had to call in sick three times in the past year and a half that I worked here. For a normal job, that sounds like a lot, I suppose. But each time was an extreme circumstance, and when you keep in mind that I teach different people every day of the week, it means I’ve never canceled on any class more than once. And one of those times, Sayaka reduced me to tears as I was calling in and I had to beg her to let me go home. She called me back a few minutes later to tell me that the mothers of my students were angry with me. Lots of crying in this entry. But lots of crying in this job, I guess.

Anyway. By the next day, I was feeling significantly better but still crappy. That’s when the calls started. Everyone was freaking out about my condition and wondering if I was still able to work, asking, “But how do you really feel?” I foolishly thought that this was because they were actually concerned about my health, and eventually admitted that I still felt pretty bad. Sayaka talked me out of doing my four o’clock, and told me that with influenza, you have to take three days to a week off. I sighed and rued the moment of cloudy judgment that I typed those words.

When she asked if the doctor had given me medicine, I responded, “I didn’t go to the hospital.”

“You didn’t go to the hospital!?!” She gasped at the other end of the line. My heart jumped a little at the angered incredulity in her voice.

“No.”

“Then how do you know you have influenza!”

“Because of the symptoms.” My voice was losing strength, and I knew I was in trouble.

“The what?”

“The symptoms, um, the way I feel, the um,” I struggled to try to explain the word, but she interrupted me.

“Please go to hospital. If the doctor say you have influenza, you can’t work tomorrow.”

So I went to the stupid country hospital in my town, paid a thousand yen to have the doctor take my temperature and tell me that I don’t have influenza. I mailed Sayaka the news, and told her that I thought I felt strong enough to do my last class, which was an adult class and didn’t involve any singing or dancing or dealing with unruly fourth graders, but what will we do about the other two classes? I asked this thinking that we could reschedule them or just skip them since they’re my boss’s kids and their friends, so they don’t bring in any money anyway. Her response was, “Since you’re fine, please come.” That left me little choice.

A few days later, after Colin’s constant insistence I mailed Yoshiko to check up on the renewal of my visa, since it expires in early January and we suspected she had done nothing to move the process forward. In the past, she had given me plenty of guilt trips about how much money I’m costing them and how we all have to make sacrifices. But when I met her in September or October to discuss the status of the visa next year, expecting another guilt trip or reluctance, she instead acted like there was no issue at all and we would start the renewal process around November. Anyway, I got no response to my very polite mail inquiring about my visa renewal. A few days later I mailed her again, asking the same thing, still with no response. Then about a week ago, a Monday, she called me, asking if we could have a meeting at 2:00 the next day. I told her I had a class at 2:40, but she said that it was fine, it would only take thirty minutes.

At that time, Yoshiko and Sayaka told me that immigration had become strict, and you had to prove that you’re paying your foreign worker a living wage, so they can’t afford to sponsor me, or any other foreign worker.

“Until the end of December you’re still an Educo employee, so please do your best!” Sayaka said.

I listened to them being awkward for a while, and when Yoshiko asked if I had anything to say, I told her, “I wish you would have told me this two months ago so I would have had time to find another job.”

To which she told me there are no other jobs, which is a complete lie. There would have been other jobs a few months ago, when I still had a year to commit to one. They’ve completely screwed me over, and I’m angry with myself for trusting them. Yoshiko always showed an almost overbearing maternal concern for her employees’ well-being, so I didn’t expect their assholishness to reach this level. She’s left me without a visa, without a job, and with no chance to find one before my current visa expires. I should have known that with the many creative and passive-aggressive ways they’ve managed to mistreat me over the past year and a half, that they would have no problem doing this to me. I ended up tolerating it because of my students, and now I’m losing them too.

My plan is to try to stay in the country until August, and take as many students as I can with me when I leave Educo. I know for a few of my classes, it’s very important to the students to be taught by a native speaker. The ones who don’t have a long relationship with Yoshiko will continue with me. But I expect to lose at least half of my classes, if not more. The same students and families who readily took me in and made me feel welcome and valued and stuffed me with candy and gifts every week will readily cast me aside. Because how could they side with a temporary foreigner over their prolonged business relationship? After all, it’s just common procedure to treat your foreign teacher in such a way. It doesn’t mean anything.

I realize that this entry has completely devolved into an artless, semi-informative realm. It’s probably too confusing to even be informative. I wanted to write about the juxtaposition between bad Japan, good Japan, and bad Japan again once my family was gone. But that was before I realized how bad it would actually get. I can’t write what I was going to write before. It would be fake and forced. I wanted to mention something about how I found myself doing the exact same annoying things that people had done to me when I first came here. I found it hard to explain what we were doing to my family, why we were driving somewhere then leaving the car at an arbitrary location, taking trains, changing cars, or what was next on the agenda because everything is so fucking complicated. Back in the day, I would have given anything for my boss or co-workers to give a single sentence of explanation of these elaborate processes so every little thing wouldn’t be completely shrouded in mystery. Like my hosts when I was new here, I stressed out, I concealed the unpleasant bits, and I did whatever I could just so my family would leave loving Japan. I had willingly participated in the façade.

And now I’m wondering where that nice Japan went.

Before, During, After: My family comes to Japan, fails to see how Japan comes on me

2007-11-29T15:58:00.000+09:00

I’m not the best at traveling, and I don’t think Colin is either. We show up somewhere last minute, without a plan, and because we don’t get our act together in time, we end up only being able to see or do about two things before it’s time to move on. We’re not usually the lucky people who happen to stumble upon something amazing. We’re more likely to narrowly miss something amazing because we’re too busy occupying ourselves with something not amazing, like getting out the door or learning the public transportation system. So when my mom and sisters said they would visit me in Japan, I vowed to get my shit together and show them a good time, so they could love Japan as much as I sort of do. Minus the complicated relationship, of course.

Before: For weeks the ideas were floating in my head at all times. Where I would take them. Where we would eat. What they could eat. What classes I could take them to. Where they could go while I worked and who would take care of them. And where they would stay.

Itineraries were beginning to solidify in my mind, but key factors were missing. If we would stay around the Saga-Fukuoka area, or try to go somewhere more relevant. The exact days we would return from our excursions. How I could work out meeting with all the friends and co-workers they needed to meet. And once again, where they would stay.

I’ll spare you the details and say that coordinating sightseeing in various parts of the prefecture with everyone else’s schedules was fucking difficult. One thing I didn’t expect to be so fucking difficult was accommodation. Two different nights spent in Fukuoka city, which has hundreds of cheap hotels, and about five or six nights in the Shi-town area. Luckily, Shi-town has one ryokan, or Japanese-style inn. It seemed relatively clean, in need of business, and was within walking distance.

There ended up being problems with both of these places. A huge sumo competition in Fukuoka city left only a scattered few rooms throughout the city unbooked. And I’ll tell you about the ryokan.

Weeks before, everyone was interested in where my family would stay. My boss suggested cities that are forty-five minutes from where I live and not on a train-line. When I told her I’d like them to stay in Shi-town, she said, “There is nowhere.” The one family I teach for in Shi-town mentioned the two ryokan in the area when I told them proximity was the most important thing, but also suggested places that were forty-five minutes from where I live and longer from where I work. When I eventually told the mother of that family I had pretty much decided on the one Shi-town ryokan if it all turned out okay, she said, “[But it is very old. There are Japanese style rooms and futon.]”

With the unhelpful suggestions everyone was giving me, I had the idea that if this place didn’t work out, there was NOWHERE. I planned for a long time to go there myself, learn the rates and details, and if it all worked out, make a reservation. I kept putting off doing this, because it was, after all, someone’s private residence and I had no idea when it would be okay for me to just show up. I started thinking about how shocking it might be for the people living there to unexpectedly encounter an enormous foreigner so deep in the country whose honorific speech isn’t so great. I started thinking about how when I asked a Japanese friend of mine to make a dinner reservation at a Shi-town restaurant for Colin’s family, they required quite a bit of convincing because “they can’t speak English.” I thought about how I really needed this ryokan.

So I found the number and asked my lovely Japanese housewife friend to call for me. She could explain my situation with minimal shock to the country ryokan people, and use all the correct honorifics and social graces. I explained to her that they might be nervous or surprised and need convincing (“[Really?]”), but if my family couldn’t stay there, I wasn’t sure where they could. I was assured that she would give it her all.

She did. The next day, she produced a paper of what appeared to be notes and bulleted points she had made during the phone conversation, and told me with a casual tone, “[As we suspected, only Japanese people can stay there.]” Before I could react, she began reading her bulleted points, “[The landlady said that there are many differences from American hotels. There are Japanese style rooms with tatami, there is one entrance, and there are shared bathrooms.]” I stared at her, perplexed, as she was just describing common features of ryokan, which I’ve stayed in on several occasions. I expected these ryokan people to be naïve or confused, but I was shocked that they would actually turn down my business. I muttered some things in English about the same discrimination being illegal in the U.S., to which my friend replied, stone-faced, “Yes.”

Basically, I was appalled and saddened, and it probably showed all over my face. I felt like my friend didn’t realize what a big deal this was, but later she revealed the details of the conversation and said that she too was very uneasy. In America, the proper way of sharing such bad news among friends is to approach it like, “You wouldn’t believe what this bitch said!” Perhaps stony neutrality is more of the norm here.

She told me the landlady’s exact words were, “Koko wa genzokuteki ni gaikoku no hou ga kotowatte imasu.” (Generally, we decline foreigners here.)
When my friend said, “Nihonjin shika tomenai to iu koto desuka?” (Are you saying that only Japanese people can stay there?), the landlady’s answer was “Hai, soudesu.” (yes, that’s right.)

I’ve lived here for nearly a year and a half, and I should have been prepared. I’ve heard of these things happening, but I didn’t suspect it would happen in my own little town. It affected me more than I thought it would. Maybe it’s my American sense of entitlement. Maybe I could have brushed it off had I grown up a minority in America, knowing that even though illegal or unethical, such injustices do just happen.

My plan was to tell everyone I knew to try and ostracize them within my small town (I’m friends with a Shi-town hairdresser), and to open up dialogue with all the Japanese people who think it’s perfectly okay to reject people on the basis of their race or nationality because they aren’t used to sleeping on futon. However, my plans were thwarted. After hearing the news, I spent the next few hours with the internet trying desperately to find somewhere else my family could stay before returning to work. As soon as I entered the office before my class, my boss said to me, “The Kita mother called to me. She say ryokan is not bad. They have guest now, so your family cannot stay.”

The Kita mother she was speaking of was the mother of my Shi-town family. A family that was always so incredibly kind and hospitable and genuinely excited to meet my mother and sisters. A family I had looked forward to telling about the awful ryokan woman and have them be on my side. So I got angry with this obvious lie, that my boss was participating in. My emotion wasn’t as controlled as it should have been when I replied to her bad English with my bad Japanese.

“[If that’s true, why did lady say only Japanese people can stay there? Guests are already inside, that is easier.]”

My student waiting for class to begin looked up. Yoshiko continued in English, “There is construction. It is dirty. Construction peoples are stay now in house.”

And I continued in Japanese: “[Lady said ‘no foreigners can stay here.’ That is difficult to say, I think. Probably, when she realized her mistake, she make a new story.]”

I can’t remember how this ended. I’m sure it was with one of Yoshiko’s attempts at non-confrontation, and her private chagrin that half of that conversation was in words my student could understand. To her credit and to that of my housewife friend, that day they got very involved in looking for other places for my family to stay. And I’m sure it involved a whole lot of secret conversations about me between god knows how many parties.

I had wanted at least those close to me to sympathize with me, but instead it seemed like they were being conspiratorial, covering for inexcusable behavior. I remembered them suggesting the most touristy, western places for my family to stay, that would have been inconvenient for me. It felt like they were trying to decide for us what parts of Japan westerners could or couldn’t have access to. What needed to be protected from us. It gnawed at me at all times. I felt betrayed, I was irritable and wary of every supposedly friendly person I saw. I was feeling so negative about the place I lived, I was in no condition to try and sell its finer points to my family.

On top of that, I still had a lot of shit to do, related to work and other preparation for the impending arrival. I was so busy, I wasn’t going into the office as much as I should have been to clean and appear busy in front of people. So I felt incredibly guilty, then angry with my guilt, then guilty again. And I made a decision. So as not to color their opinion of Japan, I wouldn’t tell my family about this until after they had left.

To be continued next time: During and After

Clumsy, or There are two and a half stories in every one story I try to tell, or Another crappy, rambling, unpolished thought abortion

2007-10-15T00:39:00.000+09:00

The manager of my company is a twenty-three year old girl. She’s the second in command, next to Yoshiko. We’re the same age. We both like pretty dresses and eyeliner, but she’s much better dressed than I am, since I’m kind of lazy. We don’t really get along. When I first met her, I thought we were going to be friends. For the first couple of weeks before I started driving, she was picking me up at the train station and driving me to the various confusing places I needed to be. During our long car rides together, I spoke to her in casual Japanese or English, and found that despite being an English teacher, she was remarkably difficult to communicate with. It’s not that she couldn’t understand my words, but there was some unspoken cultural thing happening to which I was still oblivious. She often seemed silent or aloof, despite the fact that (as I would later learn) she’s someone who prides herself on her incredibly bubbly personality. Any question I asked her, she would usually return with a high-pitched, overly enthusiastic response and crisp head movements, then resume her silence. Contrary to the reciprocal necessity of conversation, she rarely had any questions for me. In fact, the first time I remember her willingly offering me any information without prompt was when she was explaining to me why my lesson failed. It was in English, shocking, and without the benefits that hedging and modals give criticism.

A couple months after I began working for the company, I learned that she was not just a fellow teacher who I had been regarding as my equal, but a manager. Was she offended that I had automatically presumed a sort of camaraderie with her, was she resentful and jealous of the attention a native-speaker receives, or perhaps just too self-conscious about her English or my Japanese to try to communicate with me? In Japanese, with other Japanese people, she’s very chatty and friendly. “Friendly” maybe isn’t the right word, but I already used “bubbly”. She’s high energy, and one thing I’ve learned about American culture since being here is that we don’t necessarily like people who come off as overly cheerful, who put on the biggest smile possible when they see you, and whose contributions to even the most banal conversations involve speaking in high pitched squeals. To us, it comes off as fake. In Japan, this kind of behavior is commonplace among women talking to a client, a customer, anyone they’re expected to be polite to. Culturally, she’s incredibly Japanese, and it doesn’t translate well into English. I think to some degree she knows this, which is why she doesn't seem to have a lot of interest in befriending foreigners.

As our relationship grew more tense, and I became aware of the authority this ditzy twenty-three year old had over me, I reacted like the catty woman I am. I passive-aggressively challenged her authority whenever I saw fit.

One afternoon, I was planning lessons in the staff room when she appeared at the door and said, “Please clean your eikaiwa room,” and dropped a dustmop at my feet. I responded with an enthusiastic “Okay!” and a crisp head movement, not because I was mocking her, but that’s just what you do here. When she disappeared into another room, I continued doing exactly what I had been doing before, deciding that I would sweep the eikaiwa room when I felt like it, since there were no lessons there for another two and a half hours, and it was my lesson, anyway, and the damn room was already clean since I cleaned it yesterday and nobody has freaking used it since then. Perhaps Japanese office hierarchy would have required I drop everything I was doing at that moment to sweep an already clean room that is none of her business, anyway, but I chose to ignore it. When I heard her rapidly sob-talking to our boss in the other room a while later, I have to assume it was about something else, but my natural instinct was to feel guilty. Occasional teary break-downs are the consequence of a highly stressful, estrogen-dominated work environment. We’ve all adapted to each other’s cycles, and there’s a certain time of the month you never want to be around the office. I always thought pre-menstrual bitchiness was a myth until I came to Japan. Maybe it’s because Japanese women need to take advantage of the one time of the month they’re allowed to go completely bat-shit. Not that pms was the issue at the time.

Obviously, hierarchy is still a big deal here, and it’s maybe part of the reason why Sayaka and I can never be friends. I get along great with the others, who tend to be part-time workers; housewives in their thirties with babies in tow, and college students. Most don’t speak English. Only two are men, both college students, both remarkably easy to deal with. However, the office pecking order can even appear in the smallest of gestures. Even though it’s subtle, it still kind of gets to me. For example, at the pre-school, we use laminated name-plates that we put on strings around each kid’s neck, because even Japanese people have a hard time telling each other apart sometimes. Anyway, at the end of each class, we sing the goodbye song and the kids return their nameplates randomly to any of the three teachers. My first day at the pre-school, when I was still trying to understand the elaborate system of rituals of the classroom, everything came to me as a disorienting surprise: Okay, we’re chanting now. Now we’re bowing, now they’re giving me things. Now the kids are grabbing my boobs. On that first day, I also experienced the subtleties of being the newest teacher, therefore the lowest ranking. After some of the kids handed me their nameplates, the other two teachers (Yoshiko and Sayaka), without saying a word, dropped the nameplates they had been given into my lap. It was my job to disentangle them, tie them neatly, and put them away, but at the time all I thought was, “What am I supposed to do with these?” It was a simple task, but one the more senior teachers never bother themselves with because there’s someone lower who can do it. Within a couple months, we got a new teacher to help with the pre-school, and Sayaka began wordlessly dropping the nameplates into her lap instead of mine. I give the new teacher the nameplates too, but I’m more tentative about it. I always hand them to her and say thank you.

As soon as I became full-time, it became my job to clean the office daily. Now it’s changed, and I view my role in cleaning more as pitching in than as being solely my responsibility. But at first I took this task very seriously, sweeping, scrubbing, and disinfecting to the best of my ability. A few months later, the company hired a new tutor, a male college student. One day, when I came to work he was already sitting at the table planning lessons. We exchanged greetings, and I went straight to get the dustmop and began sweeping, as I always had. When he saw what I was doing, he leapt out of his seat and took the mop from my hands, saying in English, “It is my duty,” and finished the rest of the floor himself. I was stunned, but also relieved to have the sole responsibility of cleaning taken off my shoulders. I learned from others that it was a bit unfair that I had been working so hard cleaning the entire office since I didn’t even teach many classes there, and it’s more common that everybody just helps when they have time. Still, if I come to work and find Yoshiko or Sayaka cleaning, my heart still jumps a little from sudden pangs of guilt. I try to ignore it.

Unlike me, Colin works within the public school system. Apparently, every year during late March, the end of the school year, the local board of education (by a mysterious and perhaps arbitrary process), rearranges the staff of all the area schools. Anyone from the school nurse to the principal has the risk of being transferred to a different school regardless of their desires. They can request transfers or petition to stay, but whether that happens is up to the board of education. The transfers are announced on a specific day, approximately two weeks before the end of the school year, and for days before the staff is abuzz with speculation, gathering in small groups to have hushed conversations. The principal reads the transfers at a staff meeting, everyone reacts with absolute stoicism, and every school is re-shuffled to some degree. No staff member is allowed to stay at any school for more than six consecutive years without transfer, anyway. When Colin told me about this, we discussed how needlessly dramatic and political it seemed, and Japan is all about community so how can you foster a community when everyone is at risk of leaving any year? To me it sounded like a nerve-racking, cruel process.

Then Colin pried his co-workers for more information about why the board of education does this annual shuffling: “So they told me that it’s for the sake of the newer teachers that they do it. If any teacher is at one school too long, they become wagamama (spoiled), and the newer teachers are doomed to do bitch work forever.”

“Oh, my god,” I gasp, “That’s really, really smart!” Spoken by someone who knows bitch work.

Living in a society with such a deeply ingrained system of hierarchy is bound to effect you eventually. In April, after I had been teaching only children for months, I began an adult class with two middle-aged, well-established aestheticians, one of whom is a renowned kimono expert in the prefecture. When they met me, the first thing they asked me was how old I was, then they joked to each other about my answer, about how old that made them feel. Their immediate and continuing consciousness of our age difference, along with the supposed absurdity of a twenty-three-year-old teaching successful, middle-aged women, knocked the confidence right out of me. I could no longer speak with authority as a teacher. I giggled and said um a lot, and any directives I spoke were weak with rising intonations like a question. My lessons wandered, I was clumsy in my transitions. My lack of ability to speak with authority had actually made me a worse teacher.

This wasn't such a problem in America. When I took the TEFL certification course, part of it was a teaching practicum, which involved teaching English to a class of adults. I didn’t have a problem speaking articulately and with authority then, even though I was just fresh out of college, and they were all adults with far more life experience. My mindset at the time was that regardless of my age, I had a skill they didn’t, and I had something to offer them. Now I’m getting back on my feet with these two women, and I’m getting better, but I still have internal conflict sometimes.

It would be wrong to say this struggle to speak with authority is strictly a Japan-related issue. I myself have struggled with it in different situations since hitting puberty. Maybe by being so hard on Japan’s stance on gender and hierarchy, I’m letting America off way too easy.

I’m reminded of a class I took in college that centered around activist literature. We had just read a book that concerned the social construction of gender (wow, it’s been a while since I’ve typed those words. How nostalgic), so the professor decided to do a little experiment. When we entered the classroom, we saw two rows of chairs facing each other a few feet apart. We were instructed to leave our backpacks behind the chairs and sit down. When everyone was seated, the professor told us to freeze and look at everyone else’s body language. The configuration of the two lines of chairs facing each other was supposed to simulate a situation we might encounter in public transportation. We observed, in the class of fourteen people, how many of the women had their legs crossed (all but one), and how many of the men were sitting in open positions (all but one, who had his lower-leg resting on his knee in the masculine cross). I was, by far, the most closed person in the group; legs crossed, back hunched over arms folded over my chest. Suddenly the professor points to me and says, “What about you? What would you do if someone attacked you right now?” My instinct was to say that I would curl up in a protective ball, but I wasn’t sure if it was a rhetorical question, so I just shrunk further into my chair and became more the protective ball I had imagined. We shared an awkward classroom moment that occurs when you realize a question wasn’t rhetorical, but it’s too late to answer, anyway.

In that class’s discussion about gender, I listened to other girls voice their frustrations with the concerns they heard over and over again growing up; that girls didn’t speak up in class and didn’t excel in science, when this wasn’t a problem at their school and they were just as openly gifted as they wanted to be. In fact, they were bothered by the media telling them about the struggles they were supposed to be having. I wanted to speak up right then. I wanted to say that some of us went to public school, and I’m not talking about magnet schools. Some of us went to real, salt-of-the-earth public school where as soon as you hit middle school, if you have two x chromosomes speaking with authority leads to all kinds of grief. I came from a system in which it’s okay for girls to be smart, but they can’t quite show it, can’t seem confident in it. If you happen upon a correct answer or a clever observation in class, it has to seem like luck. Maybe you can show sexy-smart, but smart won’t be sexy for many years. If you speak with confidence in your voice, articulate your sentences and thoughts eloquently, you’re intimidating, you’re abrasive, you’re a bitch. And no one specifically says that you can’t express your intelligence this way because you’re a girl. If you asked them, they might even disagree, but if you’ve ever been a girl in public school who has tried to speak intelligently and asserted your opinions, you know what I’m talking about. It was simple cause and effect. Enjoy class, enjoy speaking and thinking, and face the rolling eyes, the “accidental” bumps in the hallway, and from the bolder kids, the names, shouted in passing, for no reason other than to take you down a notch. I was aware of this reality as I saw “the smartest boy in school” argue relentlessly about one of the themes of a short story in our advanced reading class while going on to have friends at his locker in the hall. I knew it was a bullshit double standard that the boys could speak up and argue and be assertive in their intellect, but I just wanted to make my life easier. I learned ways to make the words come out of my mouth seem less threatening. I began to mumble, avoid eye contact, slouch, and after I’d just made a cogent point, add “or something”, or “I don’t know”, or anything else to similarly discredit what I had just said. Maybe irrelevant tangents for humor at my own expense. I developed these defensive tactics myself, and when I got to college, I couldn’t keep up with all the talented, beautiful, intelligent women who spoke in paragraphs with thesis sentences and wrote poetry and quoted obscure bands. I had sabotaged myself, and that was what killed me. What this system took from me, that I had willingly participated in, was my voice. I had sabotaged my own ability to speak, just to keep some sebaceous high school kids off my back, and it wasn’t worth it. I wanted to say all of this, and I would ramble, and I would be disorganized, and my cadence would be halting, coming in sputters and bursts, occasionally interjecting “or somethings” and “I don’t knows” as an unconscious example of exactly how deeply I had fucked myself over. But I didn’t say anything. Even though that was what we were discussing at the time, I decided it wasn’t relevant enough, and I hated it when people weren’t relevant. We weren’t in a women’s studies class, or even a sociology class. We were in a cross-listed English and Environmental Studies class. Before long the topic changed to something else. I didn’t say a word for the rest of the class, anyway.

How does this relate to my problems with Sayaka? I’m not sure. She’s not even the first slightly-senior girl my age who I’ve had problems with in the workplace. Perhaps she’s just reacting to her unlikely position of authority in an ultra-hierarchical society. Maybe she struggles reconciling being a twenty-three-year-old girl who manages a staff of many older, more experienced people. Maybe whenever she has to give instructions to a thirty-four year old former career teacher, the discord tears at her guts as she has to in an instant decide what level of politeness to use. For her, maybe I’m just a big question mark. I’m a foreigner, an English teacher, and a contemporary. Perhaps she doesn’t know what to do with me just like the rest of Japan doesn’t, what with my position in this society falling into some combination of retarded child and rock star. I might be the one who experiences the brunt of her wild mood swings from cheerleader to dictator, since everybody else’s social position is far clearer than mine. In different circumstances, we might have been friends.

I recall a time when I was still new to the company, when Sayaka and I were leaving the pre-school with our arms overflowing with baggage and teaching materials. I was carrying the CD player, and as we passed through one of the two gates, I accidentally stepped on the errant cord, tripped, and flung myself and the CD player loudly into the fence, uttering a small, strange scream before regaining my balance. Having witnessed the entire thing, Sayaka’s knees buckled as she hiccupped in girlish laughter. Her body spasming, she struggled to keep hold of all her various oversized teaching materials. “Omoshiroi, Kyashi wa. Itsumo ‘Wah! Wah!’ iuteru.”

Over lunch, I explained to her that I was generally very clumsy. “What is clumsy?” she asked. I didn’t know the word in Japanese, so I looked it up in the pocket dictionary I carried around at that time. “Bukiyou,” I told her. She repeated it, looking a little confused. So I told her about how I spend a good portion of my daily life anticipating accidents that might happen to me. I fall down easily. I trip up stairs. A rainy day leads to me tiptoeing gingerly about every damp surface, gripping the ground with my feet. I see the long flight of stairs from the platform of Saga Station, and I move as far as I can to the railing, freeing the closest hand because in event that I should slip and fall, I’d be able to grab something in time. I imagine accidents where it would be particularly strange or public, or even injurious. I drop things. Appliances and electronics break around me at an alarming rate. I avoid sports, because in gym class, there seemed to be a magnetic pull between balls and my head. I’m too big, and I try to be small. I’m encumbered by my own form. Someone told me that renaissance comedy was based on the awkwardness of embodiment, of being aware of your own body and of others as a thing that is a process, that takes in food and digests and excretes and fucks and ejaculates and becomes diseased and occasionally falls down the stairs. Someone else told me that the main difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that in the tragedy, there are bunch of corpses on stage in the end. But the bit about Renaissance drama would have been lost on Sayaka, so I stopped at telling her that I regularly humiliate myself.

“I see, but I think the word you mean is ‘tsutanai.’ ‘Bukiyou’ is more like you try to pick something up and you drop it.’

That seemed about right, but I took her word for it. Soon we were talking about different things. We were still in a pretty expository phase of our relationship, so we talked about food and traveling. I asked her if she had a good time when she studied in Canada. She flatly replied, “Not really.”

“Why not?”

She smiled a little. In time I would learn that Sayaka smiles to express a wide range of emotions, but this smile clearly had a sadder story behind it. “Because I’m so clumsy.”

One of the best things I have seen ever

2007-09-20T15:19:00.001+09:00

Ramble, ramble, ramble, oh look a pebble, ramble, ramble

2007-08-10T01:48:00.000+09:00

Even though I announced that I was looking for a new job, maybe I’m once again backpedaling. For the most part, I don’t like the situation with my two superiors, and I don’t like the stranglehold they have on me, which generally revolves around “Trust us, we’re Japanese”, and “But we sponsored your work visa”, used respectively for when I request an explanation for some ridiculous work practice and when I ask for any sort of lenience. There are things I hate, hate, hate about my job. But, as a wise man once said, “Everything seems bad if you remember it.”

Basically, I’m not ready because goddamn, I love my students. There’s probably no other job that I would get to know such bright, interesting students on a personal level. If I worked in a school (which in many ways would be lovely), I would probably see them mainly as a big uniformed mass, with faces and names occasionally poking through when they run up to me to tell me how tall I am or grab my boobs. I would have much less control over the classes, and would likely have to bite my tongue while a Japanese English teacher butchers the language. I would witness firsthand how the educational system doesn’t teach these kids a lick of English. Now, at least I’m part of an institution that helps kids learn English, since the only way they learn is by studying abroad or taking eikaiwa classes (like mine). Too bad I’m not a very good teacher. Maybe they’d do better with someone who’s actually qualified to be a teacher. Ugh.

Speaking of students I love, I recently helped my ninensei junior high student pass a test she was completely unqualified for, which made me elated and filled with pride. I always have to take a step back and remember she was the one who actually did it, not me. We had about two months, or eight classes, to prepare for sankyuu eiken, which is a national English test that people take to prove their level of English ability to employers or study abroad organizations. Sankyuu is third level, with first being the highest and extremely difficult. Basically, for two months we plowed through the study book, and I attempted to teach her dozens of grammar forms she’d never seen before, quiz her every week, and chastise her when she didn’t finish her homework. I was inaugurated into a level of Japaneseness. Maybe I’m now yonkyuu in Japanese culture. I experienced the stress, pressure, and responsibility that the cram school teachers have regarding their students’ entrance exams. It’s not like in America, where the teacher does everything they can but knows it’s ultimately up to the student whether they will succeed or not. I knew that if she failed, it was going to be on me, too. I remember giving her a lesson on “should”, “have to”, and “don’t have to”, maybe a month before the exam. “For example, you don’t have to study for the English exam tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“But really, please do.”

She passed, we were all ecstatic, and now we’ve returned to our regular eikaiwa classes, in which she’s learning incredibly simple grammar compared to the stuff that was on that test. Man, Japan loves tests. And for some reason, they don’t seem to make any difference on actual knowledge. Take the driving test. It’s insanely difficult. It’s ridiculously difficult about arbitrary things. Nobody passes it their first time. Japan perhaps has the most difficult system in the world to acquire a driver’s license, but as soon as they get on the road, they’re idiots just like the drivers in the rest of the world.

Complete change of subject: Yesterday (for us) was the anniversary of dropping the A-bomb on Nagasaki, which is kind of a big deal, since we’re like an hour train ride from Nagasaki. With all the time I’ve spent in Japan, over the past year and back in high school, I’ve kind of expected that I would be called upon to discuss world war two and the bomb. I’ve been to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I’ve been on a trail of tears WWII museum tour in Okinawa, and have strong opinions formed on the issues. However, in my experience, Japanese people seem to have little interest in discussing the war. It’s not even like they’re repressing or being silent about it, they just seem kind of indifferent or something. A good example of the attitudes I’ve encountered comes from when I was talking to Sayaka after my first time in Nagasaki:
“[What did you do in Nagasaki?]” she asked.
“[We walked around, went to Chinatown and had some chanpon].”
“[That sounds fun.]”
I added, “[We went to the Peace Park and A-bomb museum.]”
“[Oh, really?]”
“[It was sad.]”
“[Yeah, I bet.]”
End of discussion.

Finally, it happened. It was Wednesday night, after the festival in Kashima, and Colin and I were sitting and chatting with another American teacher we don’t know very well on what we call Izakaya Row, which is an alley-like road lined with bars and a couple hostess joints. A drunk thirty-something Japanese guy stumbles toward us and starts talking about all the usual things, I want to learn English, I love American rock n’roll, do you know Aerosmith, when BAM! “[So tomorrow is the anniversary of the bomb dropping on Nagasaki. You’re Americans. What do YOU think of the bomb?]” I was pretty shocked and trying to form sentences in Japanese in my head when, oh, let’s call him Steve, launches into a long, complex speech. Colin and I both thought about adding our two cents, but we mostly sat back and thought, “Wow, Steve’s really good at Japanese,” and nodded occasionally. But then he kept going. I felt a little bad about my most obvious nodding being to the Japanese guy saying, “[But Japan was bad, too.]” Maybe I just wanted to support him since that was one of about four sentences he managed to say the whole time. Steve continued his rant. The drunk guy started wandering away occasionally to look at text messages on his phone. You know you’ve done something wrong when the random Japanese person on the street gets tired of you first. It only ended when Colin and I got up to leave.

To conclude in keeping with the scattered nature of the rest of this post, I’ll inform you that I decided to make pet rocks at my America camp. I found a bunch of rocks, and the kids painted them to look like bunnies or aliens or fish and glued eyes and pipe cleaners on them. And we sang Kumbaya. And we tried to play Big Booty. It was pretty successful, but four hours of it left me crazy plastered to the floor tired when I got home. I don’t know how art teachers do it. Nonstop throughout the entire session, the kids would practically simultaneously be saying to me, “[Cassie, I need another toothpick,]”. “[Cassie, I need more glue],” “[Cassie, we’re out of yellow]”, “[Cassie, what do I do with my brush]”, “[Cassie, I’m done]”. Colin was indispensable. I couldn’t as easily rapidly communicate orders with the Japanese helpers.

By the way, maybe I’m even sankyuu in Japanese culture. I’m starting to do that arbitrary ignoring and enforcing of rules thing. The same day as the camp, we moved all the tables and chairs out of the office and in front of the building so we could put down the tarp for painting. I was in the process of moving a table out the door along with one of the Japanese employees when I realized I wasn’t wearing shoes and quickly slipped on the slippers that were nearby. (Quick culture refresher for some of you: schools, offices, and hospitals require you to take off your outdoor shoes at the door and put on slippers, or indoor shoes)
“You’re going to wear those outside?” Colin said, astonished.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I replied. The Japanese employees did the same thing.
Later that day when I was looking for Colin during the hectic camp session, I opened the door and saw him returning from the vending machine across the street with a coffee while wearing slippers.
“What are you doing? You can’t wear those in the street!”
How very Japanese of me.

Announcement

2007-07-29T01:26:00.000+09:00

I think I need a new job. I'm sick of being unsure of my work duties, and when I ask what I can do to help, I'm sent on a guilt trip because everyone is so very busy, but they never fucking tell me what to do. This isn't going to get better.

Hos in Blogland

2007-07-08T17:08:00.000+09:00

Recently, quite by accident, I discovered a whole network of female bloggers who are either sex workers or just major sluts, but are also educated, intelligent, and really good writers. They write about anything ranging from their sexy encounters, reviews of porn or sex toys, to feminist issues. Of course, they all have a huge readership. A significant portion of their writing, though deep and interesting, is simply stroke material for a lot of their readers. Their comments pages look sort of like:

de beauvoir at 02:31
your post really highlights the dilemma of feminism in its current manifestation, and how it’s troubled by its roots in the seventies as essentially a white movement and in the eighties as being prudish and unrelateable. the question of the day is how explicit female sexuality is reconciled within feminism’s ungainly legacy.

HuNg guY at 02:33
I bet ur HAWT if ur in jersey lets meet so u can get a taste of sum reel fucking u kno wut Im talkin bout.

I doubt it bothers the bloggers too much, either. They are the ones putting themselves forth as a sexual commodity, and when it comes to sluts, they just want to feel like they are loved and appreciated, no matter how briefly or, um, disgustingly. The problem is, these bloggers can analyze all kinds of intellectual merits for their promiscuity, but most of the people they’re fucking don’t really appreciate their bright theories. The writing itself usually shows confused sympathies toward the subject, with the subject being themselves. Sort of like a movie that shows a rape scene in which you’re supposed to sympathize with the victim, but the camera shows lingering, sexualized shots of the person’s naked body. Often, they’re not sure if they want to be admired or exploited, and even when they write about their own tragic rape scenes, someone’s getting off on it.

It kind of reminds me of how Colin subscribes to a feed of highest rated YouTube and Google videos, and how a good portion of them are utterly boring clips of average to attractive teenage girls talking into cameras about their guinea pigs or bouncing around lip-synching to their favorite Gwen Stefani song. Basically, YouTube is a place for the saddest masturbators in the world. I’m sure it wasn’t the intention of these teenagers to become masturbation fodder for lonely, overweight men in their thirties. But hey, any love is better than no love at all, right?

Alternate Realities

2007-07-01T00:22:00.000+09:00

So I watched Back to the Future II tonight. I think I only saw it once as a kid and I remembered absolutely nothing about it. As an adult, I was struck by how cartoonish and obnoxious the acting could be, as well as the many flaws in the time travel system, but it was okay I guess. Anyway, it just occurred to me that when I return to America it’s like I’ll be stepping into my life in an alternate reality in which somebody else lives in my house, my dad is married to a stranger, and who knows what will happen to my mom and sisters in that period of time. My mom in particular will have to construct a completely new, unfamiliar life. When I get back, I’ll have nowhere to go, and all the possessions from my old life will have been scattered or lost in the move. I’ll be in a transformed, alien place with no real past or future. Also, everyone will probably be using iPhones.

The Creative Nonfiction Dilemma

2007-06-23T18:53:00.000+09:00

Whenever I publish something here that may be perceived as slightly embarrassing, that may make Colin wince or my parents shake their heads, I’m reminded of the same things. First, of how much farther I could go, and how much farther real writers go all the time. The second thing requires a reference. In the final issue of The Sandman series, Morpheus encounters William Shakespeare toward the end of his life, while he’s writing The Tempest. When we’re first introduced to Shakespeare in an early issue, he’s a bumbling wordsmith who would give anything to be talented. So he makes a deal with Morpheus, who gives him his ability, and sets out on becoming the Shakespeare we all know and love. Toward the end of his life, he questions the choice he made, and wonders if the writer’s brain Morpheus gave him wasn’t a curse. Every time something tragic happened to him, there was secret delight in how he would be able to write about it. His life was filled with suffering, and because his instinct was first as a writer, he wasn’t even completely able to feel his grief since it was partitioned off as potential material. As we suffer, we compose in our heads new inventions. When I first read this, it struck me in such an uncomfortable place. It struck me as something that rang so true, but I hoped wasn’t. I hoped it was one of those terrible ways of describing something that’s not actually that bad. I don’t really delight in my own suffering, do I?

One thing I know is true: writers are traitors and spies and thieves. We betray the secrets of our family, our friends, our own lives for the sake of some sort of testament. When I say “we”, I mean the writers and wannabe writers alike. It includes posers like me who are still haunted by visions of their own potential creations despite not having written in months. Even though I’m not a real writer, I still examine my life for lines or characters or situations I could lift and put into a story. Especially since I’ve been veering more towards creative non-fiction, the way I write is almost destined to hurt or betray someone. I’ve always had reservations.

I’ve thought about this dilemma since I was a little girl. I wanted to write what was honestly in my soul, but that might get me in trouble, that might make my parents or my religious relatives ashamed of me. I’ve had a story in my mind since I was seventeen years old. It has a central metaphor and everything:
He looks at the table, defeated and suddenly somber, “You know, I don’t even like it.”
“Then why do you do it?” I ask.
“Because the ghost of my father makes me.”

I can never write this story. Publishing those few lines for my select blog audience was agonizing for me. It reveals nothing, not the people involved or the situation, or anything to the general public. But the person involved will know. A few people close to me will know. And I don’t want the person to know what kind of profound effect these words had on me, and now he does. The rest of the story is humiliating, not only to people involved, but to myself as well. And people not involved, who are close to me, would be humiliated by what I’ve revealed about myself. But it might make a good story for a stranger.

When I was a creative writing preceptor, I taught a class on creative nonfiction. I warned the students, “You will have to write things that will make your mother cry.” I was astonished by the results. The students lay themselves out bare, revealing stories about abortions and drug use and AIDS tests and infidelity and molestation. All things I could never do. And these stories were far more embarrassing than anything I have. In fact, in my own intro to creative writing class when I was a freshman in college, I read aloud a fictional story I had written, sick to my stomach with my voice choking my throat. The reason? It was about sex and death and violence, and it was hard to reveal that something so twisted had come from me. At the time I wrote it, it was my complete, uncensored ideas, which I had never shown to an audience before. I censored only one line in my reading, because I couldn’t read it aloud.

I was praised for my writing starting in grade school. And I always censored what I really wanted to write. I pushed the envelope a little more in high school, but I was still cautious. As I became more willing to reveal my darkness, or things closer to my true self, my writing didn’t get as good of reactions. People preferred it when I was funny. So it goes.

I’m sick of that whole martyrdom for art thing. It’s easy to lead a tragic, thankless life without writing. And I know a few writers who seem to live normal lives. Art is cool and everything, but ultimately it’s frivolous. So why do I have this brain that combs through reality and composes and wants everyone to know it and love it? I don’t have anything to show for it. Maybe I’m too spineless, too eager to please to ever realize those masturbatory fantasies about putting art into the world. I’m pretty sure that with my slow rate of output, I’m not even fit to be a writer. I don’t necessarily want to be one, either. I’m just a quiet person who never really wanted to live quietly.

The Caucasian Invasion

2007-06-08T01:21:00.000+09:00

We were driving down the 207 in Shi-town when suddenly Colin gasped. “Oh, my god, white girls!” He had told me before of rumored white girls in our tiny town. He had caught a glimpse of frizzy hair and sweatpants outside the local supermarket, but he couldn’t be sure. Japanese people can really fool you sometimes, especially middle-aged women who are still into red hair-dye and perms (which are generally detested by the orange bouffant-wearing fashionistas). But these were undeniably white girls, in almost the exact location he had seen them before. Like some kind of caucasian haunting. Just as the locals had done to us on many occasions, we rubbernecked to get a better look. They were young, in their late teens or early twenties, with generic, frizzy brownish white-girl hair. They were wearing matching sea-foam green windbreakers and walking hand in hand, which told us they were Eastern European. Really, being white and not an English teacher in such a rural area should be enough to tell us they’re Eastern European. As far as I know, there’s only one job in the countryside for non-English-speaking white girls.

Japan is small, and Saga is smaller, connected by the same trains that span across the entire prefecture, leading everyone, together, to similar places at the same time. We’re so close to each other, it’s not uncommon to bump into someone you know from a distant city. If I see someone who is obviously foreign in Saga, there’s at least a fifty percent chance that I know them personally. So if I’m traveling around the prefecture and happen to see a foreigner I don’t know, I react with just as much shock as the average Japanese person does. Believe me, when I was driving in Saga City and saw a blond girl wearing a school uniform, I nearly drove off the road. Seeing unfamiliar foreigners is a rare occurrence. I used to think seeing non-English-speaking white people was unfathomable. But I used to be much more naïve on the subject.

In the fall, Colin and I had attended what ended up being a large gathering of foreigners at a bar in Saga City. As the night went on, the familiar faces began to appear, like the non-JET foreign teachers and the Japanese xenophiles eager to practice their English, dragging along reluctant friends. Suddenly, two young women and a man appeared, all blond, all white, and all speaking a Slavic language. They suckled on their drinks and perused the room from a somewhat secluded corner not far from our table, while we tried to listen to them and discuss what they could be doing in Saga. They couldn’t be tourists and they couldn’t be English teachers, so what could they possibly be doing? By the time we left, they had not appeared to have spoken more than a few words to anyone besides one another.

We knew how tough immigration laws in Japan were. It’s illegal to hire a foreigner to do anything a Japanese person can do, which leaves little other than teaching English. And these Slavs were probably not teaching English.

They appeared again more than a month later, at the next major event, a Halloween party in a club hosting a throng of gaijin and xenophiles. By this time I was drunk and bold enough to talk to them. After discussing them on the dancefloor with another JET who had studied a tiny amount of Russian, I waited for the closest female to drift my way (so the man wouldn’t think I was hitting on him), and I asked where they were from. When she told me Russia, I gestured to my friend, “He speaks a little Russian! I speak Czech. Nazdravi!”
“Haha, ok.” An appropriate response to me being so obnoxious.
“We’re from America. We’re teachers.”
“You don’t look like teachers.”
Yeah, we didn't.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“What?”
“What’s your job?”
“Huh?”
Somehow in the ADD nature of parties, our conversation stopped there. I was pulled away somewhere, and left my friend to have a probably very awkward conversation in a language he hardly knew.
When we mentioned the three Russians to Mark, who’s lived here for seven years, he promptly responded, “He’s a student and the girls are hostesses.”
“You know them?”
“No.”
“So how do you know?”
“Two attractive girls in the inaka, they have to be. They’re not teachers.”
I watched one of the little Russians climb up on a platform and begin to gyrate and whip her long blond hair in circles.
“You think they’re attractive?”
“Sure.”

The term “hostess” will require some explanation for some of you. Essentially, hostesses work in hostess bars, or “snack bars”, and are paid to flirt, pour drinks, look hot and endure sexual harassment. The bars are often male-only establishments that have exorbitant cover charges for entry. After entry, the men pick their girls from a line-up of hostesses, and pay for the girl’s time as well as for his drinks. The girls push the drinks, the bar makes more money, the girls make barely a living rate, at least around here. After closing time, the girls often go out with their patrons, which may or may not involve sex. That’s their decision. We hope.

While there’s nothing illegal about it, it still falls under the category of mizushobai, literally “water trade”, or sex work. Of course there’s a stigma attached to it. These joints are known for some shifty business, and it’s not uncommon for the hostesses to be Filipino girls or Eastern Europeans working illegally. My brain sums up the whole hostess thing with a series of images. The larger places have girls take shifts standing just outside the club as a display of the merchandise to lure men inside. I think about them standing out front in the middle of winter, shivering and dressed like they’re attending a ghetto prom.

When Mark told me about the circumstances of foreign girls in rural Japan, immediately my thoughts went to my days in the summer walking the streets of Shi-town in skirts and sunglasses, stopping at convenience stores to buy the meals that I was unable to cook at that point. I was a traffic hazard, with all the people driving craning their necks to get a good look at me. Hardly anyone walks in this part of Japan. They drive or ride a bicycle. I was a spectacle, and I had shown myself to the entire town. And what had they thought of me? What do they think of me? I guess my business-casual attire may give it away, but hostesses and I are both ladies of the evening, after all.

Am I so different, anyway? When I first came to Japan and was still unemployed, I had been approached in a Shi-town bar by the owner of Pub Tiffany, the next door hostess bar. He’s a man who nearly always wears suitpants and vests, and looks exactly like the type of person to be running a hostess bar. Anyway, speaking through a more fluent friend of mine, he casually offered me a job. I laughed, but at the same time I was considering it. And then I wondered why I was inevitably so drawn to jobs that used me for my feminine attributes of T and A. Interestingly, quite a bit of my work history seems to fall somewhere between the T and A jobs I more actively pursued and the maternal jobs I somehow was saddled with. Generally speaking, in both I ended up being intensely unhappy. It's the sexless jobs I enjoyed the most. But I digress.

We’ve had a few more white people sightings, once more of the average-looking girls who must clean up well, and briefly of some of their Eastern European associates. We learned that there are actually four Romanian girls working at Pub Tiffany, which means that there are even more hidden white people in our little town that we were completely unaware of. There’s another reason I don’t want to be confused with a hostess besides the obvious stigma. Sometimes they’re raped, quietly, and no one ever knows about it. On rarer occasions they’re even murdered, so quietly that it’s like they never existed. In any society, sex workers are an easy target, and there’s little justice for them when they’re the victims of crimes. When the sex workers are foreigners working illegally in Japan (a society that’s so used to being safe that it simply trusts its people to not break the law rather than enforcing it) there’s no protection at all.

In 2003, a British hostess in Tokyo was drugged, raped, and killed by a millionaire client. There are a few lucky reasons that anyone knows about this at all. Her nationality, the coincidental timing of a Japan visit from Tony Blair, and the fact that her family had the financial means to go to Tokyo, plaster her face over the entire city and hassle the police daily about the progress of the case. The police dragged their feet every step of the way before jailing the man whose house was filled with videotapes of himself raping over two-hundred unconscious women. Evidence that for every middle class British woman who is a victim, there are even more poor non-Japanese Asian women who have zero legal options. Some owners of hostess clubs have even reported trying to help girls press charges after being assaulted, and having the police turn them away because “What can they expect if they’re working here illegally?”

I have to clarify that Japan actually is very safe. That’s not the problem. One problem is that since the legal system relies so much on trust in its people to be good, it has no idea what to do if they’re not. The other big one is that it’s so centered on its own people, and is very clear on who is Japanese and who isn’t. The protections for foreign residents, especially against institutional discrimination, are quite lacking.

So hostesses are in a stigmatized class and are even occasionally raped or murdered, but a few months ago in Tokyo the same thing happened to a young British teacher who was teaching a private lesson at a student’s house. Given certain circumstances, the worlds of average to attractive foreign girls can intersect in the same unseemly, fetishized way. There’s no denying that quite a few of the teachers hired through JET and conversation schools are simply eye candy.

So who am I in relation to these hidden Romanian hostesses in my town? Am I more of a member of “real Japanese society”, or less of one? Do they earn more money than me, or do we earn about the same? I don’t make much, so neither case would surprise me. I’m sure we all get paid in cash, and we’re all subject to cultural workplace customs we’re not familiar with. Japan is supposed to be homogenous, but if you aren’t part of that major lump, it can really get complicated. These questions can’t be answered in a blog entry, so I guess we’ll just live our separate, nocturnal existences that intersect occasionally at the local grocery store.

The Special People's Club

2007-04-23T21:20:00.000+09:00

The title has a double meaning, actually. I was trying to write a lengthy, serious post about sex-workers in Japan, but my words are tripping over themselves again, and my sentences are awkward and unwieldy. This has been a consistent problem since I started actually trying hard to be a good writer at some point during college. I can’t write, my brain isn’t functioning, and I kept trying to say things to Colin not long ago, but I was replacing key content words with nonsense. For example, “Did you cook it with movie?” or, “When is your notebook tonight?” I must have damaged my Brocha’s area somehow. I feel like a completely ineffectual human being right now.

The other meaning refers to who I am in this country regardless of my actual mental state. Once, ages ago, Colin and I were wandering the streets of Central Kashima looking for somewhere to eat, finding most places either closed because of a national holiday, or somewhat sketchy-looking. After bickering for a while, we finally settled on a place that was both open and looked promising in terms of ambience and potential deliciousness. A woman seated us at the bar and handed us a menu. As we opened it, we saw that it was written almost entirely in kanji (non-phonetic Chinese characters), which meant that we couldn’t read it. We picked up meanings here and there (this means fish, this means fried), but overall we couldn’t understand enough to order anything. After a few minutes, the waitress came over and asked if everything was okay.
“[We haven’t decided yet],” Colin said.
I butted it, “[We can’t really understand the menu].”
“[Ah, I see],” The waitress said, looking very concerned.
“[Do you have anything like katsudon, or curry, or champon?]” Colin tried.
The waitress latched onto katsudon, which is pork cutlet over rice, pretty much standard bar food. “[Katsudon? Hmmm…we don’t have any katsudon but, wait a moment, please!]”

Then she scurried off to the backroom where we saw her leafing through a phone book and making calls. We immediately thought, oh god, what have we gotten ourselves into? After a few minutes she came back out to tell us that the restaurant a little ways down the street has katsudon, and the woman there is waiting for us. She led us outside and pointed us to the left where we saw another woman waving at us a few doors down. Our initial reaction to this was that Japanese people are, overall, really excessively nice. After a while, I thought about the situation more, and came to a different conclusion. The reason the menu was written mostly in kanji is that the restaurant served almost exclusively fish, plus it was a medium-higher end seafood restaurant. We didn’t know these things when we walked in. We didn’t know these things when we requested standard bar food. Flip the situation to apply it to America. If you worked in a somewhat upscale seafood restaurant, and two mentally challenged people stomp in making a scene and demanding a hamburger, you might quietly make a few calls. You might even lead them to another restaurant. This is basically us. We are the equivalent to being mentally challenged, and we make a scene regardless of how much noise we make or how many things we knock over.

We’ve come a long way since asking for katsudon at medium-high end restaurants. But even as I become savvier, I’m still doomed to being culturally retarded.

If you are a parent, read at your own risk.

2007-03-29T00:10:00.000+09:00

EDIT: Colin informed me he was embarrassed by my post because not only do my parents read this (I asked them to stop, so if they got offended it's their own damn fault), but his parents read it too. Thinking of my boyfriend's parents reading about my rack embarrassed me as well. But somehow, I'm not ready to take this post down yet. I just wrote it, and I don't even know if it's ready to disappear so soon.

I'm putting up this temporary post to thank all the people who responded to my stupid, emo comment solicitation, convincing me not to give up on my art. Though I'm surprised the threat of giving up my art is what everyone took from that. Really, I've already kind of given up art. I'm writing a stupid blog about stupid things. And I'm a little drunk. But this post is for a limited time only, so get it before I take it down. For most of the people who commented, I decided to reward you by talking about tits. That's right, tits. But mom and dad, you can stop reading now. Not that any of this would surprise you too much. There's a picture of me as a three year old standing in front of a mirror with my hands on my hips, checking myself out with my top stuffed with socks to look like enormous breasts. Really, they were ridiculously, cartoonishly large breasts. I was wearing this pink cotton dress (I didn't wear pants for a while because I couldn't button them myself), and I'm pretty sure I had stuffed myself in an attempt to look like Barbie. With my stubby three year old body and short brown haircut, you could see the dissatisfaction in my face. I loved Barbie, who had all kinds of sexy adventures while I was stuck in the body of a child. I played with Barbie for far too long, and even though she had spurred my own (as well as millions of other little girls') fascination with breasts, I was a late developer. As I grew up, I stretched out, but not forward. In late middle school, I didn't care about having large breasts, I just wanted breasts, like all the other girls had. Then one day in early high school, I woke up no longer a skinny flat-chested kid, but a somewhat chubbier girl with an enormous rack. It happened so quickly and so late that I was unable to view them normally. I got distracted by them in class. They caught my glance as I walked by windows, and I thought, damn, what enormous tits I have. For a while I wore these tight sweaters, fascinated by the shape and weight of actual breasts on me. Of course, it was also a little strange because breasts meant that I might become an unwanted sexual object. I remembered that an English teacher on whom I had a crush off and on throughout my freshman year complimented me on a shirt I wore the first day of school. By the end of the year, I still wore the same shirt but couldn't button it anymore and wore a tank top underneath instead. Seeing me every day, I thought he must have noticed, and this both mortified and interested me. It was the age-old conflict of being a busty sex-kitten getting in the way of your desire to also be perceived as a bright young woman. Somehow you want to be both, but it doesn't work that way. Now the thoughts about my button-down shirt and English teacher only mortify me. My sisters developed early, and always seemed ashamed and awkward concerning their endowments, like they were weird, foreign flotation devices. Now that I'm in Japan, where breasts are rare, I work on hiding them more. I slouch, I wear baggier shirts, I cross my arms over my chest (a lot of this is to avoid groping from four-year-olds). I can't say that I love my breasts and we have a special bond like those women and their vaginas in the vagina monologues. But I've still got love for a nice pair.

MALAISE.

2007-03-19T23:43:00.000+09:00

It was only a matter of time before this was the title of one of my posts. For the past three days, I was sick with a deadly lung pox that’s severity actually convinced me to go to the hospital, as has been suggested many-a-time by my Japanese co-workers. Being bedridden for three days really rubbed it in my face that without teaching, I’ve got nothing to fill my hours but consumption of nostalgia or internet garbage or whatever else. Always consumption, though, never production. Colin creates all the time. He creates songs about cookies he just ate, and all the foreigners love them because they know exactly what kind of cookies he’s singing about. Identification. Fondness. Nostalgia. And so forth. He writes those songs because he has to, but with me and writing, we have a much more complicated relationship. Actually, we’re not really on speaking terms at the moment. But with a little time, things might heal themselves.

Sidenote: Right now, I’m at the office, and the place is filled with kids diligently washing the windows. Saori’s helping, too. Everybody’s washing the windows but me. It’s unlike me not to offer to help. But I’m not helping, because I don’t feel like exerting myself while I’m still recovering. I’m also bitter. I just realized that I’ve cleaned the office nearly every single day since January, and I teach ONE class a week here. That’s right, ONE. That essentially makes me a maid, cleaning up the messes of other teachers and their students.

Anyway, back to Colin and his song about cookies. Colin performed in a crowded bar, and for his forty-five minute set, he got to be loved by a whole room of people. I always wanted to be in a band, but it turns out the euphonium isn’t such a rockin’ instrument. My personal views toward art are more conducive to performance. I want everyone looking at me, I want them to respond as I perform, I want them to appreciate it and tell me so because I’m ever so self-conscious about my art. Look at me, no, don’t look at me. I’m hideous. But really, love me.

I used to be into theatre. I felt completely at ease on stage, being someone else, playing, so to speak, but I was always hoping that the audience would not just see the character but the process behind it, which was me, and be able to appreciate it. I quit theatre by the time I was in college because Grace saved me the pain by going through the Macalester Theatre Department herself. I realized recently that one of my life goals, to be in a Greek chorus, will probably never be accomplished. I’ve missed any Greek chorus chances I might have had. But I guess the fact that I wanted to be anonymous behind a mask with a large group of people saying the same lines as me shows that my ideas on performance aren’t entirely egocentric.

I’ve often wished that I could write poetry. Poetry can be performed, can be shared with others in an open forum, and everybody claps or snaps or whatever people do nowadays, and breathe their snide comments quietly to their friends. But if it were me reading, I wouldn’t want to read it unless everyone would love it. I would hope they love it. But I can’t write poetry. At least pithy, clever prose would be sufficient for performance, but I don’t do that either. I’ve got nothing but awkward, unwieldy prose, all somewhere between too long and seventy pages. What I’m getting at is that this stupid little blog is the closest thing I have to art as performance. I’m sharing it with you, my community, in hopes that you’ll approve and respond. But no one ever responds. Do you want to know how I know people have read my posts? Within the next day or two, several of my friends will follow suit and update their own blogs. I’m shouting into a black hole now, listening to my own egocentric echoes. I know I'm not interesting, I know I don't write what others want from me, but I have to know, can anybody hear me?

2007-03-14T23:23:00.000+09:00

One thing about living in rural Japan is most people have no idea about anything outside of, for the most part, rural Japan. The people who have been to Tokyo are considered worldly. I’m more well-traveled within Japan than a lot of Japanese people I encounter, because I’ve been to Tokyo and Kyoto and Okinawa. The most banal details about the world beyond tend to render many of my students and co-workers awestruck. Today in the office, I was talking with one of the teachers and Megumi, a recently graduated Junior High School third year. Megumi is a sweet, enthusiastic, and unfortunately not particularly bright girl. I explained to both of them the usual things, like how you can’t ask something like “How’s the weather in America?” because America is huge and there many different climates. The response is a wide-eyed, “Aa, sounanda.” (“[Ah, I see.]”) Also not all Americans are attractive (“Heeeee?”) and not all Americans are white (“Naruhodo!”). Anyway, as Saori entered the room, Megumi bounded toward her and exclaimed, “[I learned so many things about America! They drive on the right side of the road but the driver is on the left side, and most of the streets are straight and they all have names! And they have vending machines in America but not as many, and not everyone has pools, and they don’t eat horse in America but they think Japanese people eat dogs!]”
“[Maybe,]” I interjected.
“[And Cassie-sensei’s older sister kept two ferrets at her house, and after four years, they both ran away!]”
While I found Megu’s delight with these seemingly dull revelations to be charming, some days I just want Japan to have a little cultural awareness. On a more somber note, I’ll be seeing a lot more of Megumi because she failed her entrance exams to get into high school, so she’ll be working part time at the juku. The arrangement was probably some sort of compensation to her family since the juku failed to get her into high school. I hear that one can retake the high school exams the following year, but it’s not common (it is common for the college exams). I hope she does, mainly because coming from my own culturally unaware viewpoint I find it hard to accept that someone living in a wealthy, developed nation would actually be done with their education at fifteen.

By the way, Colin is famous on the internet. Only because Clay is famous on the internet. But they're both nerds. Oh, and in case you get your scruffy white guys confused, Colin is not the one in the hat doing the vlog.

Yareba dekiru

2007-03-01T23:36:00.000+09:00

I’ve been inexplicably tired, both physically and mentally. It prevents me from being the person I want to be, which is someone who spends more time on her lesson plans and always cleans her house and washes her dishes and does her laundry, and perhaps most importantly, writes about the absurd things she encounters every day. I turn sentences over and over in my mind with plans to turn them into something. I compose in my mind but it stays fragmented in my Word document. I have a file filled with fragments that may never become anything. I have a nearly finished entry about the Japanese social attitudes toward breasts, that I’m sure would delight a good portion of my readership if I could just piece it together. I don’t work nearly as long of hours as Yoshiko or Sayaka, but my average of three classes every day leaves me psychologically exhausted. Furthermore, I’m feeling very conflicted about my work.

I work at a juku, also known as a cram school, also known as the place kids go after their nine hours of school are finished to prepare for entrance exams and other important tests. Usually I work at the English conversation section of the school, which just means I teach functional English for speaking and writing, almost entirely in English. Recently, all the teachers have been completely swamped due to entrance exams, so I’ve taken on extra work as well. I’ve been helping third years in junior high school prepare for the English listening and grammar portions of the high school entrance exams. Things are done quite differently in the genuinely juku part of the juku. I was vaguely aware of it before, as I sometimes taught in the same room as some of these classes. I knew about the academy chant, but never used it because we don’t do that shit in Amurrca. At the beginning and end of every class, the students put on these ninja headbands, stand at attention and repeat, “Yareba dekiru! Zettai dekiru! Kanarazu dekiru! Dekinai koto wa nai!” This translates approximately to “Once I’ve done it, I can do it! (not actually so weird-sounding in Japanese) I can absolutely do it! Without fail, I can do it! There is nothing I can’t do!” Since entrance exam season began, they’ve added a new portion to the chant: “Koukou gokaku! Zettai gokaku! Gokaku, gokaku, gokaku!” That means, “High school, success/pass! Absolute success/pass! Success, success, success!” Then all the students bow and sit down. After that, the teacher covers his or her content along with a healthy mixture of encouragement, threats of failure, and even bullying. You know, enough to make them emotionally confused and terrified of failing.

I’ve been experiencing some cognitive dissonance about being involved in this world. On one hand, I have to do my job. On the other, my job is being part of a system I completely disagree with. I have various reasons that I’ll try to break down into points.

1) The tests are stupid and inaccurate measures of ability.
These kids cannot speak a lick of English. Seriously, they can barely tell me their names, yet somehow, they are able to take these tests that use fairly complex grammar and vocabulary. The reason is, you don’t need to know English to take these tests. You just need to know how to take a test. What keywords to listen or look for, things like that. You never need to form any sort of original sentence. Furthermore, the tests, and probably English education in general, fail to present English as having any functional value. The English dialogues and reading samples are obsessed with Japanese culture. Often, they involve explaining Japanese words or customs in English. Why the hell would Toshio and Haruki be speaking English to each other in the first place? A common motif is a Japanese student explaining something to an ignorant foreign ALT, who concludes the conversation by exclaiming that Japan sure is great. Japan is completely obsessed with itself. I thought my boss was being absurd when she asked me to have an English conversation class while translating a tea ceremony, the most Japanese thing possible. Teachers wonder why their students don’t care about learning English. Could it be because they’re teaching them things like how to understand Shinkansen announcements in English? Um, the Japanese announcements come on first. If that’s the only way they know how to make English useful and relatable, it’s no wonder they don’t care.

Remember how when we were young, we found out that standardized tests have a racial and regional bias? Hey, native speakers, check out these real test questions from last year. You’re supposed to choose the picture of the thing they’re talking about.

No. 1
John: Kayoko, it's cute. Did you make it?
Kayoko: Yes, John. We're going on a school trip tomorrow.
John: I hope it will make tomorrow's weather good.
Question: What did Kayoko make?

No. 2
Judy: Akio, what does this kanji mean?
Akio: It means "rice", Judy.
Judy: Oh, does it? That's strange. I thought it was the name of the country.
Akio: Oh, yes. It also means your country.
Question: Which country does the kanji mean?

How did you do? I knew the second one from studying Japanese, but I had no idea about the first one. I still don't know the explanation behind it. The answers are c and a, by the way. Still, these sorts of questions pretty much make it impossible for many immigrants and children of migrant workers to succeed in school. Which relates to my next point of objection.

2) The tests help to keep the rich rich and the poor in their place.

It sounds like a leap, but if one can only do well on these tests by paying a juku, then the kids who get the best educations are limited to the ones who can afford to pay a juku. Thus, those who can’t are screwed.

3) The fact that kids have to take these tests is stupid and pointless.

I can’t speak for the other subjects, but I know the tests do not help them learn English. They do help them lose sleep and occasionally throw themselves off bridges. One reason this system is still holding on is that it’s great for indoctrination. These kids have to spend all their time together studying. During test season, the third years go to the juku from 9-5 every Saturday. But I have to clarify something. While the kids take tests very seriously, they’re still little bastards in the classroom. That stereotype about the disciplined little machines that are Japanese students is really not the case. If anything, the constant studying at cram schools makes their behavior even worse.

Anyway, in January, the kids went for a three day retreat at a mountain lodge… to study from 8 AM to 9 PM. My Japanese tutor was one of the teachers who attended the retreat. When she described it to me, adding that they occasionally took breaks to do arts and crafts, she said, “[It was very fun.]”
“[I see,]” I began in my halting Japanese, “[The kids, did they have fun?]”
“[It was VERY fun]” she reiterated.
At the time, we were looking at the memory board with the blown up group picture from the excursion. The kids were all wearing their ninja headbands and making “yareba dekiru” fists. Each had written a note on the memory board, thanking the teachers for the experience and repeating stock phrases about how they know they can do it if they put their mind to it. Some of those kids will fail. Some of them have already. Not long ago, I had to console two sobbing twelve-year-old girls. My students, the only two taking the entrance exams for junior high school found out they both failed their first exam moments before taking my class. Granted, one of the sobbing girls was not one who had taken the exam. One of the girls, Tomoka, started crying, then another girl in the class began crying hysterically in sympathy. That day when I asked them “How are you,” I taught them, “Not so good.” Twelve-year-olds already have plenty of reasons to cry. They don’t need any more help from these idiotic tests.

Loosely Based on Gender

2007-02-02T23:43:00.000+09:00

Every day I drive to work while putting on makeup, balancing a coffee in between my legs. It makes me feel like a real working Japanese woman, except then I’d probably have green tea between my legs and I’d also be wielding eyelash curlers. I work almost exclusively with other women, and honestly it’s kind of a weird environment. They’re career women, among the most independent and progressive you could find. That doesn’t stop them from perfecting the shrink and giggle, and speaking in almost incomprehensibly humble Japanese from time to time.

I can understand people when they talk to me. However, I spend most of my days surrounded by women talking to each other. The feminine speech register in Japanese, I’ve discovered, is difficult to understand. And it has nothing to do with those “sentence final particles” all those linguistic articles obsess about. It’s the amount of words they use. They’re just so much more verbose and polite in their speech, always taking the indirect route to saying anything. One who studies Japanese knows that the more polite your speech gets, the lengthier and more complex the verbs become. I often have to settle for not really knowing what’s going on.

So this leads into a big metaphorical experience I had that reflects my feelings as a foreigner trying to work in Japan. I was at work, sweeping the floor with a dust mop, when a woman dressed in a flight attendant-like uniform entered the office (the flight attendant get-up isn’t uncommon for women in service positions), and Sayaka rushed over. The following is a rough translation of the exchange that followed:

Flight attendant: [I’m being rude!]

Sayaka: [No, no, no, I’m sorry! Please.]

Flight attendant: [I’m sorry, would you be so kind as to, um…]

Sayaka: [Of course, you must be tired!]

Flight attendant: [You must be tired!]

They exchanged some more chatty, feminine pleasantries that were largely apologetic in tone, when suddenly, Sayaka turned to me and said, “Give her your mop.”

“What?” The words she was saying just didn’t make any sense to me in the context. She repeated what she said, sounding a little irritated as if I should know exactly what to do. I tentatively handed the woman my mop, and she quickly turned it upside-down, detached the mop head and extracted a new one wrapped in plastic from her flight attendant bag. She unwrapped it and re-attached the head to the handle, and gave the mop back to me. She then inched toward Sayaka to sign some paperwork, the two exchanged a few more exclamations of “[You must be tired]”, and she scurried out to her official-looking company van, old mop head in tow.
The absurdity of this situation, and the expectation of others that I would understand it is my main existential dilemma at the moment. That and some education things I’ll talk about soon. But let’s talk about feminine speech some more!

While studying Japanese, I learned that the most feminine mark of speech is adding the particle “wa” to the end of a sentence. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just softening and beautifying. I expected to hear prissy, make-up J-girls say it from time to time, but either I’m missing it somehow, or it’s so feminine it’s almost taboo. In fact, I’ve only heard it twice since I’ve been here. Once was from the seventy-year-old tea ceremony woman who was in full kimono. It would make sense that she would be all about traditional, feminine, florid language. The other time I heard it was on TV, used by one of the Morning Musume. The sentence was “Hazukashiiwa”, which is “[I’m so embarrassed] wa.” If that doesn’t properly reflect her douche-iness, her appearance did. She literally looked like a five year-old playing dress-up. She was wearing a giant striped t-shirt thing down to her thighs, leggings, long, chunky beads around her neck, awkward low heels and a ponytail coming out of the top of her head. If you don’t know the Morning Musume, they’re a bunch of obnoxious young girls who look anywhere from 16-25, but are probably around the 20 range, and they’re pop singers or something. However, I know them only for their television appearances, in which they are put in sadistic situations that lead to them screaming and crying. Watch:

Kimodo dragon attack

Polar bear attack

Sadako attack

I wanted to have an additional link entitled “Giant black man attack”, but I couldn’t find it on youtube. I swear, though, it’s real and I’ve seen it. So there’s my disjointed blog-like post, complete with links. I wanted to only post somewhat polished, chronological essay-type things, but as I’m discovering again, it’s better to post crap than nothing at all.

One-Eyed Daruma, or a story from early fall

2006-12-17T22:11:00.000+09:00

Over the past months, I’ve been getting used to the place I live. By that, I mean I rarely find things particularly exotic or fascinating anymore. It’s just life. I got over the exotic, fascinating aspect of Shi-town within a week of arriving, and saw it for what it really is; a flat, broke-down farming town. Just vast expanses of rice paddies strung together by the occasional narrow, sidewalk-free streets that are lined with dilapidated snack shops or rarely-open knick-knack stores. Anyway, as much as I get used to things as being business as usual, the mountains continue to hold onto their mystique. Somehow, they surround us in every direction, and on a clear day, the view is still snap-you-out-of-any-stupor gorgeous. When we were newer to Japan, we used to go on adventures exploring the little, winding mountain roads.

We wanted to find this mountain temple. We could see its white dome jutting over the trees from the train. We could see it from the main road through tacky, commercial central Kouhoku (which is basically just like Collins Road in Cedar Rapids, but Japanese). We could see it, but it was still so out of reach, with no easy way to get there. There are plenty of ways to enter the mountains. There are lots of tiny dirt roads, often partially concealed by brush, even more often in someone’s back yard. You can enter, but there’s no telling where the road will take you. And it does take you. Once you start driving on one of these roads, you have no choice but to continue forward, no matter how far it carries you from your intended destination. Any attempt to turn around could cause your vehicle to slip over the edge of the path, thus sending you careening to your fiery death a hundred feet below. So you follow it further and further from any sign of civilization. There’s always a slight feeling of panic on these drives lingering in your chest. As you get deeper, the path narrows even more, and low-hanging tree branches scrape against the windows of your already diminutive car, as if the mountain plans to eat you. But it’s worth it in the end.

In the mountains, I ultimately encounter the Japan of my wishful imagination. Quiet, beautiful, and full of secrets. Hidden treasures or even “easter eggs” (to unfortunately use gamer terminology) would be a more apt description, but for some reason, saying “secrets” feels the best to me. Despite the state of mild panic (being lost + danger of fiery death), there are always amazing things you sort of stumble upon. Suddenly you encounter an ancient-looking shrine, or rows of torii (Shinto gateway things), or a moss-covered stairway that looks as if it could lead to another dimension. But you’re already sort of in another dimension. Your cellphone doesn’t get reception, the silence of nature is actually constantly humming with insects, and said insects look like fantasy creatures from Alice in Wonderland. When trying to describe things like this, it agonizes me that I’m not a better writer.

Somehow, following those strange and dangerous roads, we find the temple. We follow a driveway on foot and encounter the temple’s imposing, white dome-iness, wide white stairs leading to the main floor. A young Japanese couple is coming down the stairs as we’re going up. It’s almost shocking to see other humans. They put their shoes back on and return the rubber slippers to a dirty crate. We take our shoes off but pass on the dirty slippers. There is no indoors to this temple, as far as we can tell. It also has the feeling of being fairly new, as if it were constructed in the fifties out of cheap plaster-like material. We walk along the main floor (really, the only floor) and admire the view outward. Turning toward the actual temple, there are giant golden statues in cages, a rotted wooden box with a coin slot in front of each. Since Colin is still new to the Japan Temple/Shrine experience at this point, I decide to give him a tutorial: “This is what you do. First, you drop a coin into the box.” I drop a one yen coin. “Then you clap.” I clap twice. “Then you pray.” I bow my head and press my hands together, and squeezing my eyes shut, I think, pleasepleasepleasepleasehelpmepleasepleasehelp. I go to each statue and find another reason to pray to that one, dropping the coin, clapping twice to get god’s attention, bowing my head and thinking pleasepleasepleasehelpplease. This one is Buddha sleeping, this one looks like a mother, this one is a child. The whole time I was doing this, I never once thought that I was praying to an actual god. It was lip service, going through the motions, play-religion. I was pretending, much like I pretend to be a writer or a good singer or a good person. In this case I performed the actions, with none of my intellectual mind actually behind them, in hopes that by some superstition I don’t even believe in, something would come and help me. Without realizing it, maybe I would realign the universe, and contrary to my expectations, I could be saved.

Religious rituals can have a lot of beauty in them. I was fascinated with them as a kid. I wanted to feel that objects could be sacred like a picture or a book or a cross. Religion was magic. But I couldn’t believe it, no matter how hard I tried. I knew my friends went to church, but I was shocked to find out that they actually believed in all the crazy stuff that went along with it. I thought people went to church just because they thought it was cool. I kind of wanted in on the fun. I wanted so badly to believe in something, as a kid and a young adult, and believe me I had plenty of chances. I picked a religion that’s aesthetic I liked, but I would always end up thinking it was made-up playtime bullshit. There would be some part of every religion’s tenants that would be utterly incompatible with my own values. It would be pretty cool to think that there are lots of crazy gods that you could appease by throwing pieces of bread on their alter and the world is carried on an elephant’s back and every year at the solstice you put on a pretty dress and do some traditional dance and burn incense for some reason. I appreciate good aesthetics in a religion. There are probably quite a few religious people who are really just worshipping aesthetics, anyway. Who knows where that tangent was supposed to go.

Anyway, Colin wouldn’t throw the coin, wouldn’t clap his hands, and definitely wouldn’t pray, wouldn’t even pretend to pray. I walked all around the outside of the temple, stopping at the statues, and he watched, refusing to play religion with me. Perhaps that’s less offensive, since some people really do take it seriously. But it’s no more offensive than the many Japanese people I’ve seen at shrines and temples since then, fumbling with their change, struggling to remember the order in which to ring the bell, clap, throw their coin, pray. You don't need to ring the bell and clap, people. It’s one or the other. You only need to get the god’s attention once.

We head back down the stairs and walk along the driveway, the air hissing and screaming with fantasy insects that hop/fly. Spiders with glistening green bodies spin webs within seconds. The trees are laced with these webs, and the spiders sit at the center and wait. Seeing the bugs everywhere is too much, and Colin goes yelping down the hill. Back in the car, I want to write about nature-like spiritual things that no one is interested in. I do. And I wonder how to end the entry.

National Day of Sports: Part 2

2006-11-19T19:10:00.000+09:00

When Sayaka, Colin, and I moved onto the elementary school, we encountered a field of thousands of kids in matching hats and armbands doing militaristic drills. Saga isn’t even that big, but this elementary school is enormous. It was also basically impossible for parents to have any idea where their kid was. We found Yoshiko, were followed around by some random kids, and pretty much all my students found me. I’m just realizing now that that’s not so hard, considering I’m white and enormous. Not long after arriving, we were informed that we would each have to pair up with one of Yoshiko's kids to do some choreographed dancing with them at eleven. My reaction to this was reluctance, mild irritation, then acceptance. Yoshiko's phone call the Saturday night a week before was finally making sense to me. She had called at eight o’clock, just as Colin and I were about to leave town to spend the night in a town an hour away, doing serious drinking at our friend’s birthday party and possibly going swimming the following day. Our weekend was totally booked. When Yoshiko called, she told me that her kids had a sports day the following day from 10-4, and she’d like Colin and I to come, but if we’re too busy it’s okay. I very apologetically told her we were probably too busy. The elementary school was about two hour’s drive from where we were staying. She explained that she really wanted us to come, but insisted that we didn’t have to if we were too busy. Being too spineless for America (but maybe not deferential enough to authority for Japan), I caved in and told her maybe we could stop in at one. That would mean leaving Matt’s at ten in the morning, seriously cutting into our Saturday fun and ruling out a Sunday trip to the waterhole with everyone else. Her reply was, “Can you come before? Dancing is at eleven. I need four adult. I am asking favor.” But that was as far as I was caving (if it was so important, why did she call so late?) and we agreed on one. But that sports day was cancelled due to rain. We were home when we found out, and still didn’t get to go to the waterhole. Whatever, Colin can’t swim, anyway.

Yoshiko's cryptic phone call finally made sense. The kids dancing with their parents was an important group activity. She couldn’t count on her ex-husband to show up, and her mother was too old. She really needed help. If I had understood the situation, I may have acted differently.

At eleven, parents and family members infiltrated the field’s organized little lines of children, relying entirely on the program map and numbers to locate them. I squatted in the dirt with my partner. “[I hate this dance]”, she informed me. The music started, and the field became a nearly uniform, dancing mass. Tamami and I were usually at least a step behind everyone else.

Afterward, it was lunchtime, and hundreds of families headed to the enormous gym to eat the obentos their matriarchs had prepared the night before. As we crowded onto our little plot of floor, Yoshiko said, “Obento are important of Japanese sports day. American sports day, too?” When I told them there weren’t really sports days in America, everyone gasped.

We watched more kids doing sporty things around the field, Colin and I got stared at a lot, and the event became more exhausting than interesting. However, the closing routine, which involved the entire school, was pretty amazing. It was a choreographed, musical thing that involved tumbling, kids climbing on top of each other and making human sculptures of various shapes, riding around on unicycles, and doing more incredibly complicated formations. It looked like the Cirque de Soleil. You would never see anything like that among American kids. It’s weird, these kids are still monsters in the classroom, but there’s so much importance placed on appearance and presentation. In recent weeks, I’ve been witness to such indoctrination when Sayaka explains our Christmas English Presentation to the kindergarteners. Although she usually speaks in English during the class, whenever she talks about the Christmas Happyokai, she speaks in semi-formal Japanese. The first time, she sat them all down, and said, “[In December, we’re having a Christmas presentation. You will perform on the stage, and everyone will be watching you. Your parents will be there, your brothers, your sisters, your grandmothers and grandfathers. Everyone will be there. If you don’t do a good job, everyone will laugh at you. So, let’s try as hard as we can!]”

The kindergarten Christmas Happyokai is on December 16th, but we’ve been preparing for it since early October. Now we’re doing almost nothing but practicing for it during class. I’ve decided I don’t really like this emphasis on presentation over all else. We could actually be teaching kids worthwhile English, instead of making them say, “Oomph-and-a-hoomph-and-a-double-de-oomph” over and over again while they mime pulling a gigantic turnip out of the ground. During the weeks before the sports festival, my students were terrible. They were exhausted, cranky, and could never focus. I learned later that it was because they were practicing for two hours a day to put on a kick-ass show for their parents, at the expense of their studies.

“Japan is really weird,” I remarked during a phone call to my grandmother.

“Well, they might think you’re weird, too,” She replied, as if I needed a lesson in cultural relativism.

“Of course I’m weird, I’m a foreigner.” The promptness and matter-of-factness of my response is only surprising in retrospect. I live and breathe cultural relativism, man, and every waking second and sometimes in my dreams I exist in constant awareness of just how weird I am in this country. But I’ll save the complexity of cultural relativism for another time. For now, I guess I’ll just apologize for chronological leaps in my narrative, and for the absence of breast-grabbing in this post, since I know that’s the only reason anybody reads this.