Growing up in Southern California, where everyone has a car, you wouldn’t really come across the scene above. Things might just have been easier if they’d bought a smaller tree.

Indeed, they’re just conducting research out there – research in both the fields of deliciousology and deliciousonomy.  Feast your mammalian eyes on this!

By the way, I do think the beef-snarfers from the outside world are hypocritical to be all up in arms about this – but yes none of Japan’s arguments for this practice stand up to scrutiny.  Yes, it’s part of Japanese food culture – and it was the culture of many other places too before they stopped doing it for many of the same reasons they’re trying to stop you from doing it now.  Yes, it can be hunted sustainably – but only if you are the only ones doing it, and why do you get to be the exception?  I can understand the “screw the rest of the world, we know we’re right” attitude… but you’re wrong.  You can still eat all the daikon you want.

We’ve got a few younger women in our classes, singles who are getting the most out of their non-married years before some man comes along and not so much sweeps them off their feet as takes away their one leg to stand on. Most of them are pretty bright. Some are just educated and good test takers. There’s one whom I thought was just a pretty good test taker who’s slowly revealed herself to have a genuinely keen and curious mind but whose intellectual interests heretofore were limited to the highlighted portions of her textbooks. It’s a sadly common pattern amongst even very young kids here, but it seems that her curiosity never had a chance to develop because there was always an authority on whatever she was studying nearby to “guide” and “instruct” and thus remove any need for initiative.
Well, I had thought her mind was more or less dead, as are a lot of college kids who no longer have to study for entrance exams and thus see no reason ever to crack a book ever again, but it was not so. She still had some mind yet to be killed off, and started doing very well at English for about a year. Then came the final nail in the coffin for the intellectual life of young women – domesticity.
I don’t mean to deny her or any other people the happiness that finding a partner and fulfilling a perceived social imperative can bring, but hearing someone who ought to be wanting to travel, solve world problems, attend symposia and consider going for a master’s suddenly realigning herself to purely servile household duties is beyond disappointing. One week it’s “the Dalai Lama’s followers are fanatical and resist modernization”, the next it’s “I made a cake for my boyfriend. I need to attend cooking classes to learn new recipes.” Sad, and such a waste. People ought to have partners in life, but the domestic arrangements that bind them ought not to completely stymie any potential either had in any area besides housekeeping. And yes, I sympathize with the men too, but it’s quite a bit less of an insult to go from learner to earner than to go from learner to squeakily subservient maid/patisier.
In case you think I still need to justify that overly dramatic thread title, consider that this is just the latest case – we’ve had several women quit before just because their husbands didn’t want them out late, or didn’t think they’d need the job skills, or they themselves didn’t have time to both train for a job and take care of her kid or her husband’s mother while her husband was attending semi-obligatory drinking parties with coworkers after working 11 hours 6 days a week. I actually regard each step of female socialization here as more and more bad news – as steps further and further from any chance of having an active, human mind beyond the age of 30. Marriage is the last of these – and when I hear of it I know I have to more or less say goodbye to that person’s potential as an active, curious student.
By the way, none of this applies to my own partnership – I cook and my woman works. We both see gender roles, particularly the chain gangs they are here, as an abomination of wasted humanity and lost self-respect.

Or more so than I am, at least?  I know I’ve got him beat on these things:

-Time spent living here

-Language

-Cultural fluency

-Interest in Japan

And maybe a few more I haven’t the sociological state of mind to come up with.  On any criterion besides the one with immutable physical manifestations, I win the Japaneseness race with my dad and probably any of my other “pure-blooded” relatives under the age of 60.  I suppose I might lose on self-identification too, but of course my self-identification as an American, and theirs as Japanese, would probably change if we weren’t all living in the societies we’re living in now.

I know I say this a lot, but I don’t keep bringing this up because I want my legitimate membership in club Japan recognized by a greater percentage of the population here.  I rather want to use my family as an example of just how useless “race” is as a determiner of one’s personal characteristics.  It’s not true at all that I devalue my Japanese-American family – I just don’t value much at all the fact that they’re Japanese.  They’re my family in California, and have practically nothing to do with my connection to this place.

who comes in for a trial, or rather I should say every student’s mom, initially addresses me only in some variety of learner’s English. After they are informed, or simply observe, that I speak Japanese as well they adapt with varying degrees of success – some not addressing me in any language, some giving me salutation and valediction but not much else, and on the extreme end treat me more or less like their linguistic equal. The one constant is that they assume I don’t speak Japanese lacking any data to the contrary.

I’d be negligent not to include the obvious media-presented stereotypes of non-Japanese as illiterate but lovable dunces in the causes for this assumption, but many of these kids and their parents have been going to different English schools for years – plenty of time to meet a few other pasty faces who aren’t completely out to sea in the Japanese language. Am I wrong? Can the half dozen or so other native English speakers really have been so worthless at the language of the country they’re presumably living in? Or are they just hiding it, as unfortunately a lot of them and a lot of Japanese people believe is the only “professional” way to run an English class?

I prefer honesty here. I enjoy learning language and I want my students to feel the same. There is a lot of wisdom to be discovered in the gap between English and Japanese and I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by pretending they exist in entirely separate universes.

Business is good, what can I say? We’re the best place in town and everyone knows it. Evidently enough people know it to drive one of our competitors out of business. I love having new students, and hearing them say they wished they’d known about us years ago makes it all the sweeter.

I have to dig a little deeper to find things to complain about these days, that’s all. Once I settle into a routine again maybe I’ll post a bit more.