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.

Much like Japan and English, the problem with Japan and “foreigners” isn’t just that there’s a dearth of real education about them, but that people are educated incorrectly about them.

“Foreigner” here is not a blank waiting to be written on with information about someone’s background, interests, language, etc. unknown and somewhat apprehensively and slowly being filled in. It’s a vast swath of misunderstandings and misapprehensions about what everyone outside Japan is and does which are roughly equal in consistency and unity to what everyone inside Japan is and does.

Japanese people eat fish, while foreigners eat meat. Japanese people speak Japanese, while foreigners speak English. Japanese people are shy and reserved, while foreigners are rude and bombastic. There is very little of the idea that the 98% of the world that is not Japanese might actually have 98% of its diversity as well. Actually, probably more than that, since Japan has a particularly strong sense of ethnic identity (and hence unity and uniformity) for a nation its size.

Educating people about anything outside Japan, at least once they get past 2nd grade and have been more or less officially inducted into the Japan Club, is as much erasing false information as it is imparting true information. This would be less frustrating if the TV didn’t so reliably act like a massive misinformation coordinating machine, giving everyone identical and identically wrong ideas about how the rest of the world is.

You all know my last name – as Japanese as sweet red bean stuffed into glutinous rice cake.  What you may not know is that because of my non-Japanese nationality, all official documents have my name written in katakana, the official script of foreign objects/people.  Some people here are actually a bit surprised by this as well, so don’t feel too bad for being taken aback, assuming you have any idea what I’m talking about here.

After I learned this, it took a bit of time for me to realize this didn’t need to bother me – I realized it’s not preferable to be arbitrarily a member of an unfairly exclusive and discriminatory system than not to.  I now balk at comments put forth by well-meaning but anachronistically racially-minded Japanese people that I have a clearer understanding of Japan because of my family’s ethnic background or that I seem sympathetic because I “have a Japanese face”.  Understanding my familiarity and comfort level with Japan is not helped at all either by the blanket categories “foreigner” (I’ve been here almost 5 years, making me neither Lafcadio Hearn nor Harrison Ford in terms of acclimatization) or “haafu” (I never learned Japanese at home or had any Jero-style firsthand experience with Japanese music, art, or popular culture).  I’d actually rather people ask me questions not simply to direct me to one or another pigeonhole.

But back to names – the fact that my Japanese name, though it is written as far as I know only one specific way, is written in katakana due to my non-Japanese nationality, I am free to choose the kanji (pictographs, which almost everyone’s name is written with) to write it should I ever take Japanese citizenship and escape the katakana catacombs.  This is obviously also true of my first name as well, but not nearly as ironic.

Some people upon naturalization simply choose vernacular Japanese names for themselves – Lafcadio Hearn became 小泉八雲　Koizumi Yakumo (little spring eight clouds), and Kim Sin Rak became 百田光浩　Momota Mitsuhiro, aka 力道山　Rikidozan.  I don’t think I’ll do this – the emperor knows there are already way too many Hiroyukis crowding up these isles.  Other people, like David Aldwinckle, adopt sound-sorta-alike names composed of well-known kanji, like his new name of 出人有道　Debito Arudou (exit person existing road, with the first and last names given in English order).  I don’t have to worry about limited Japanese phonology shredding my last name like it did to his – but I am going to have to make some sacrifices with Mark.  Mark in katakana is マーク　Maaku, which sucks but is pretty much as close as you can get in a language where consonants can never be neighbors and every syllable must end in a vowel (n is the only exception; tsu is considered one syllable).  I’ve thought about this a fair bit and so far the only semi-graceful kanjification I’ve come up with is  魔悪　(demon evil).  I like it but I’m afraid it wouldn’t go over well at any future PTA meetings I might need to attend.

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.

There’s a little behavior that you see here, particularly in women and girls starting around 10, that really irks me.  It’s basically a plain-view disappearing act, trying to erase your presence from the social landscape so as to avoid unwanted attention.  The person using it usually sits upright, with their eyes open and either looking at one spot on the floor or shifting between two or them.  They don’t look deep in thought, more like fortified deep within layers of tempered unresponsiveness.  I’ve never seen this in the US.  I’ve seen American kids go off into their own little worlds, but the spark of consciousness is still on their faces and indicates potential, if temporarily back-burnered, socialization ability.  The defining trait and the purpose of this Japanese behavior is to blunt and deflect all attempts at interaction.  Hence, while American kids lost in thought can be recalled simply by doing anything that would attract the attention of a conscious higher primate, Japanese people doing this little trick might keep it up for several minutes of being addressed directly by name by the only other person in earshot.

I first encountered this while teaching out in western Japan – in a class of 3 high school girls, two were quite chatty and eager to speak while the third sat in the position described above for at least a minute while I asked her over and over again, “How are you?  Good?  Fine?  Not bad?” until the other two informed me that she “doesn’t talk”.  I guess they meant “to you, at least directly”, since she actually would translate everything I said line-by-line into Japanese on other occasions.

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)

People are quite keen on penmanship here. I suppose it’s because “calligraphy” here as an art form is almost what “writing” is in the US in terms of what it can say about a person’s breeding and taste, but you can feel free to also chalk it up to a general hatred of anything deemed “dirty” or showing a lack of due deference to prevailing standards. I have a lot of students, of varying skill levels, but nearly all of them put Americans their age to shame in terms of legibility. Kids invariably bring both a pencil AND a small rubber eraser to class, so if perchance they make an R whose top half is incongruously thin compared to the reach of its long bottom stroke, they can obligingly erase the entire letter, if not the entire word, if not the entire sentence, and start again from scratch. This means I almost never have to struggle to read what they’ve written, though sadly it takes them the length of time of a few Diet terms to actually write it.

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.