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.

Those who know me, and in addition to knowing me know at least the bare basics of what I like to write about, know I hate katakana. It is pretentious, ignorant, inaccurate, and a great hindrance to the efforts of most Japanese people to learn English. I disdain the great concern for marking out “foreign” words, and feel great contempt for the hypocritical state of mind that allows you to both consider a language that of outsiders, and decorate every available package, shirt, and advertisement with it. Katakana is how the Japanese language manages to both flood its native speakers’ vocabularies with imported words, while not allowing them to be considered part of its vocabulary. To make a comparison to English, imagine if all borrowed vocabulary (and there is a great lot of it) were always written ALL IN CAPS. Words like “tornado” or “spook” would still be ostentatious outsiders, incapable of being used without their non-native status known. Nowadays most English speakers have no idea of the difference in origin between words like “wordy” from “verbose”, nor should they. A language needs to keep its borders open, and not force all trespassers to wear visible proof of their origins.

I realized I wouldn’t mind Japan’s floodlike importation of vocabulary so much if its foreign origins were obfuscated a bit. If people weren’t always aware that a word like ノーハウ(noohau, know-how) came from English, they’d be less likely to wield it like an Louis Vuitton bag, ie an easily available and/but empty symbol of forward-thinkingness and modernity. I’d like these words to stop being written in katakana, to allow them to be assimilated normally where they’re necessary, and eliminate their usefulness for mean lexical pretentiousness. Those words from abroad that do become widespread should be written in a way that doesn’t make their foreignness immediately obvious. They should eventually be considered by those who care to dig up their origins as Japanese words of foreign origin, rather than simply known to everyone as foreign words. In fact it’d help a lot of my students clear up their misunderstandings of how words like リフォーム (rifoomu, renovation) relate to English if they considered them Japanese vocabulary rather than English.

The Mainichi Daily News reports that Japanese people take on average only 8 days of vacation a year. Yes, this is pretty miserable – and doesn’t even factor in the fact that Japanese people also work more PER day, making those vacations all the more necessary. That is, at least to me – I don’t take a masochistic pride in how much unnecessary overtime I do.

The part most depressing to me as someone who lives here and most interesting to me as a bored-certified armchair sociologist, though, is this:

When asked what countermeasures should be introduced to deal with the problem, most people said, “Managers should encourage workers to take more paid holidays.”

Way to display a fundamental grasp of the concept of rights, guys!

There’s been a bit of a hiccup in the world of English-language Japan blogging recently, with Debito Arudou’s twin columns in the Japan Times condemning the use of the word “gaijin”.  As I’ve written previously, it’s a word more condemned by casualness than by explicit offensiveness.  The worst thing about it is that the people who use it treat it as a natural type, like you might use the word “female”.

I thought I’d add to the list of words I’d like to forcefully extract from the Japanese vocabulary here.  Begging your indulgence for another linguistic omnipotence fantasy:

All non-technical, lexically redundant katakana, including sofuto, suroo, rifoomu, jasuto, and the rest of a list probably long enough to form a bridge all the way to the US, by which one might cross the Pacific and actually learn a thing or two about English beyond simple pretension.

目上 (meue) higher-ranking, superior.  Not because the concept existing hurts anyone necessarily – even “gaikokujin” has a role to play somewhere, at the airport for instance.  It just needs to loosen its bone-splintering grip on public Japanese social life.

純粋 (junsui) purity.  The most dangerous ideologies applied to human society are those which do accurately describe some physical phenomenon, and thus can be made into a very believable metaphor for some much more physically complicated political undertaking.

塾 (juku) cram school and intellectual curiosity death camp.  Put someone in one of these afternoons and evenings from ages 6 to 18 and you can virtually guarantee they’ll never be interested in anything academic ever again, including their time in college.

黒人 (kokujin) black person.  Again, not because the concept shouldn’t exist in the first place (although eventually it’ll have to fall to the historic scrapheap along with “Oriental” and “Westerner”), but because it’s hideously overused, and is the only 〜人 (-person) categorization/pigeonhole I’ve seen that trumps even 外国人 (foreigner) in precedence as a word of choice to sum up the relevant characteristics of various non-Japanese.  It too is laden with stereotypes, and not even the good kind White people here get stuck with.

If you haven’t read “The God Delusion” yet, read it, if only to understand this wondrous post.

Richard Dawkins asserts that it should offend our 21st-century senses to see children labeled with the religions of their parents – e.g. a Muslim child, and Mormon toddler, a Jain newborn – as they are yet unable to even understand the theological beliefs they’re being described as having. I forgot if Dawkins makes this next point or not, but it seems like something he might or the people around him might say – that children should form their own opinions and beliefs re the cosmos when they reach an age of a bit more intellectual maturity.

The same should be true of ethnicity. If children are too young to question that the age of the Earth is 6,000 years, they’re also too young to understand or contemplate critically ethnic origin myths or the supposed sublime beauty of the supposedly ancient rituals and symbols they’re expected to grow up to appreciate. Like Dawkins states that we should all make the switch from “a Protestant child” to “a child of Protestant parents”, I believe it’s time we switched from “a Korean child” to “a child in the process of learning to be Korean” or maybe “a child most likely to become Korean”. I sound glib here but it’s only my need for precision that’s making these descriptions sound utterly silly.

I don’t agree at all though that we ought to let people “come to their own conclusions”. Those of you who know me know I don’t believe in free will, and that the ability of people to make “their own decisions” is overestimated and overvalued. I don’t suggest that children not be indoctrinated into any ethnic group, but rather that children be indoctrinated into a worldwide non-racial, non-national, mostly pacifistic ethnic group. Otherwise they’ll just end up picking the ethnic group of their parents and most of their peers, and that would completely defeat the purpose of my pretending to be able to control what people in the world call each other.

We all know we call the country in which I live “Japan” because of a medieval game of Telephone that started with Marco Polo, right?  It’s a bit odd, but I think that word is almost as widely known here as the native one (Nihon or Nippon – just in case).  If that doesn’t strike you as odd, consider how many other world languages you can say the name of your country of residence in.  What is USA in Mandarin?  Hindu?  Russian?  I know how it’s written in the first, but probably wouldn’t recognize it if some random Chinese person said it in front of me.

Well, in Japanese it’s either アメリカ AMERIKA, アメリカ合衆国 AMERIKA GASSHUUKOKU, or 米国 BEIKOKU.  The second one includes the equivalent of “United States of”, and the third is their equivalent of us calling them Japan.  It’s a kanji compound formed of a phonetic approximant of the “ME” in “AMERICA” plus the kanji for country.  Literally, and also a bit ironically, it means “rice country”.  A lot of countries have these kind of phonetically formed and accidentally hilarious names, like 和蘭 (WARAN) for Holland, which means “harmonious orchid”, or 仏蘭西 (FURANSU) for France, which means “Buddha orchid West”.

Not many people use these names nowadays.  In more common use are katakana creations such as オランダ (ORANDA) or ポルトガル (PORUTOGARU).  What’s a bit odd though is how they’ve adopted something close to the country’s name in its own national language for some countries, like イタリア (ITARIA) or ドイツ (DOITSU) but for others chosen simply to adapt the English exonyms for others, like キューバ (KYUUBA) and スペイン (SUPEIN).  I’d guess it has something to do with the countries that first had contact with Japan getting to designate Japanese names of their liking to all the Perry-come-latelys, but that little theory does nothing to explain how England can end up as イギリス (IGIRISU).  Who calls England anything within the equivalent of 10 phonetic football stadiums of IGIRISU?

By the way, if you still harbor fears that this country may someday resume the role of fearsome death-cult eugenic empire of death, behold the state of popular Japanese nationalism:

(it includes the line “this country thought up karaoke!”, which should be all the translation you need)

I might be exaggerating a bit here but I believe upwards of 99.9% of Japanese last names are some combination of the following characters:

山(yama, mountain)  藤(fuji or to, wisteria)  本(moto, base)  野(no, field)  田(ta or da, paddy)  木(ki, tree)  中(naka, middle)  井(i, well)  川(kawa or gawa, river)  and 佐(sa, help).

All the classics, such as 山本(Yamamoto), 田中(Tanaka) and 佐藤(Sato) use these characters exclusively.  There are a few oddballs like Suzuki (鈴木, bell-tree) that refuse to conform, but by and large, they’re some description of unfortunately nearly ubiquitous geographical features.  Lord knows there were plenty of middles of fields lying around for people to name their families after around 1870, when common folks first got last names.  There aren’t many occupational last names, and those that do exist are famous families of craftsmen, kind of like being named “Baretta”.

What tends to be more interesting is given names.  The well-known Yokos and Taros are a bit antiquated – not so many girls are being named -ko anymore, which is just fine with me, since the character for that, 子 means “child”, making it not exactly a 21st century raised-consciousness type of name.  Any male name with the character 郎 (ro, boy) sounds like the equivalent of “John” to me, either deliberately traditional or just lazy.  Males of my generation seem to have a lot of 4-syllable, 2-character names like Yukinobu or Hirofumi.  Kind of self-important-sounding but it’s not like they chose it.

Kids less than 6 years old have names seeming to comprise any random 2 syllables the dart happened to strike.  I suppose this represents a growing dissatisfaction with the limits of traditionalism, but in my mind no amount of throwing off the chains of a culture past its time is worth being named Raku or Era.  I’ve actually heard tales of kids being named “Komugi” and “Kokoa”, which mean “wheat” and “cocoa” (pronounced coco-ah) respectively, or maybe unselfrespectively.  It all comes back to my feelings on katakana in general – either find a way to say it with dignity within one language, or switch languages.  Stop trying to escape Japanese via uglier Japanese.

Recently, the Mainichi Daily News cancelled a column called Waiwai, whose concept was more or less “republish Japanese tabloids in English with additional, heretofore undiscovered levels of entendre”. I read it off and on myself, oddly without a single instance of disillusionment since I live here and know already that, for example, a lot of anime is less an expression of yearning for childlike innocence but an expression of the desire to have sex with childlike innocents. I like to think I don’t harbor enough residual Orientalism for such stories as this one to register as either worldview-threateningly scandalous or another example of Those Wacky Japanese And Their Wackiness.

Unfortunately, a lot of people in the Great Wild West (by which I mean Americans, the only people I feel remotely qualified to comment on) don’t seem capable of feeling normal about Japan – it’s either got to be completely misunderstood victim, mischaracterized by mispeople unable to think outside their mistaken Western misparadigms, which as a political stance is the worldly camouflage of ignorant people; or it’s just a sea of soiled panty-vending machines dotted with occasional Imperial cults and long-haired ghosts – all exceptions with no rules. In the end, all these things exist, but among millions of people going to quite understandable-at-face-value jobs, buying possibly different but not exotic groceries, and having unscandalous sex with their spouses. In my opinion, Waiwai’s not dressing itself up as legitimate news – and its tone immediately made apparent what it was “all about” – probably humanized Japan a lot more than it pigeonholed it as sick. After all, most Americans are more familiar with tabloid-style writing than the tea ceremony. It’s something they can see in their own backyards and feel they share, although that’s probably not what the right-wingers who threatened the newspaper and its writers want people to feel. In certain people’s minds, in America and in Japan, green tea is the opposite of Lipton, rice is the opposite of bread, and the stoic, noble Japanese are the opposite of the free-wheeling and lackadaisical West. Challenging this raison d’etre of the nation Japan is akin to suggesting in the US that the military be disbanded.

I had the mixed fortune of watching the The Fast And the Furious – Tokyo Drift some time last year and was struck by something I for some reason didn’t think to talk about till now – that whoever wrote the script had probably never experienced the use of the word “gaijin” firsthand. Now many Americans have some sense of the word as discriminatory, which is generally correct, but also apply to it the assumptions that they’ve accumulated in a lifetime of hearing American discriminatory language, which is not the same, at least in the modern era, as “gaijin”.

The character in the movie uses it as an explicit putdown, as some Americans might use “Jap” or “Gook”. In my experience “gaijin” is never used that way. Precisely what makes it so troubling is that it’s exchanged and accepted by level-headed people in polite discussion as an accurate description of 99% of the subject’s relevant character attributes. It’s more like calling someone an “urban” musician or calling a dish “ethnic” in character. It’s a term that trivializes, ostracizes, pigeonholes, and invokes a host of unwarranted assumptions – but it’s not understood as inherently insulting. The irony therein is actually stronger testament to the deep-seededness of racism (which also isn’t close to being consistently recognized as negative) here than the widespread use of a known ethnic slur would be.

I do know one interesting ethnic slur in Japanese though – バカチョン, or “stupid Korean”. The phrase itself is rather lacking in lyric inspiration, but when you consider that 20 years ago products were described in phrases such as バカチョンカメラ (stupid Korean camera, as in so easy even a Korean could use it) it makes a little more sense, maybe in the vein of “Dutch courage” but far less charming.