ほかの日本人：Different Japanese People

Being new to this land of apparent oddities has lead me to make hasty inferences about the world and people around me. Without a doubt, much of what I think I know is accurate enough, but the permeating nature of the differences between Japanese and American society has caused my mind to desperately seek out consistencies at my own expense. I have been searching for truths in a land I have lived in for about three and a half weeks if I include my vacation over Christmas break 2009. Slowly but surely my network of Japanese natives is growing, and in this expansion, I have begun to understand again how miniscule my knowledge of this place really is. It has been very difficult to separate what Japanese people do from the more specific family practices of my girlfriend’s home specifically.

Antis

More accurately, while there are endless cultural tendencies of Japanese families, each family or individual places more or less stake in traditions they deem to be more or less integral in daily life. Moé’s family represents that first wave of culture shock that pummeled me going on ten months ago. With them, I learned to slurp my noodles, use a Japanese bath and to never, under any circumstances allow dirty feet or shoes to invade more than the customary five feet or so into the home. I have even wiped the paws of their black lab, Antis, after his walks. I experienced first hand the extent of Japanese hospitality, where every cup of water or portion of food is poured or served by the women of the household, and was forced to demand that I not be treated as something more than the guest I was. That was a very American mistake of me to force the culture around me to change to fit my view of the world.

Host Dad (お父さん) and Moé

I thought the tendencies of her family were the norm, but now that I am no longer overwhelmed by the assault of new sights and sounds, seeking a common ground between all the people of this new society is looking to be more and more possible. I owe this refinement in my observational capacity to the husband and wife I am now living with, my family for the next eleven months. In their old age, both of them seventy, I see the cultural traditions they hold on to the most. The renowned Japanese cleanliness is still integral in the home, but I am not berated for absentmindedly not washing my hands every time I come home. Table manners remain important, but the necessity of getting sustenance from plate to palate takes precedence. Where in Moé’s home the moment a chopstick falls to the ground it becomes dirty and must be washed, my host father has no qualms against retrieving a fallen bit of yakitori from the tatami mat and popping it not so discretely into his mouth. Their floor is clean and food is expensive so down his gullet it goes. Shoes are always left downstairs though, and the bathing room works exactly the same as every other family’s.

Takachan In the Kitchen

Not being treated as a guest but as a family member has been interesting as well. I wash my own plates, and Takachan, my host mom, has been explicitly clear on the self service nature of plate cleaning after she has taken the time to cook a meal for my host father and I. The most noticeable difference between the two families however, is the Ito’s allowing me to make my own mistakes and seemingly deliberate dropping of me into situations where I will get lost and have trouble finding my way home. They do not lose sleep over my absence late into the evening as many host families apparently do, but perhaps this is due to their inability to keep their eyes open once they have had their late night two sips of tea. Every time I have awoken in the past few days, a neglected cup shrugs a good morning to me, half-full from the night before.

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古い、新しい：Old and New

Well, the first thing I have to get off my chest is…

He Lives

Now we may proceed amicably. I am overwhelmed by the number of topics I can cover having made my return to Tokyo and shocked that I managed to let so much slip my mind in the past eight months. There is no grace period for foreigners to adjust to the workings of Japan. The moment your foot falls in immigration, all customs and traditions that may comfort you on your own soil vanish without so much as a puff of smoke. Each following step is a learning experience true, but what is revealed is the lack of knowledge one has about what the next pace will bring. This being my second time in Tokyo, I am lucky enough to side-step the shock and awe that may leave a less experienced traveler standing, mouth agape in front of something as simple as a pachinko slot casino. That being said, I most definitely remain susceptible to the endless number of convenience stores that populate almost every street corner in the city. There is something about the glow of Family Mart or the slurpyless 7/11’s signage that is so alluring that I just have to take a look to see whether there may be something else new and unbelievable available.

Pretty Technological

A Torii

While there is an endless amount of modernity within Tokyo, the swirl of past, present and future is so astounding that to my outside eye, the city itself is a kaleidoscope. With that in mind, everything that remains from dated Japanese culture is so ingrained within the society that it will never disappear and due to Tokyo’s endless march into modernity, forever continue to be assimilated into more advanced technological creations. Since my flight landed, I have been staying with my girlfriend and her family in Higashimurayama-shi. Their home is a healthy ten minute walk from the nearest train station which is, in turn, approximately twenty minutes from the first portions of the actual metropolis. Along that ten minute walk I see three red painted or stone Torii (traditional temple gates), several aromatic ramen shops, a hospital that always seems to be closed and fifty-odd Japanese men, women and children either spinning away on their cycles or plodding along one slow step at a time. Tokorozawa station may be the only station I have been to where all the tracks are located on one floor and manages to give off as much of a countryside appearance as one can expect this close to Japan’s capitol.

The noticeable breaking of the past onto the present becomes much more pronounced once one arrives at Ikebukuro station. Synonymously seeing men dressed in western suits and others dressed in traditional hakama or the occasional kimono evokes the same nonplussed response as vendors hawking mochi balls next to the internationally recognizable, corporate Starbucks. The buck does not stop there evidenced by the microphone wielding man against a backdrop of neon skyscrapers.  The right wing advocates for the reinstating of the fundamentalist Japanese empire did not seem like people to be trifled with. Getting directions to Kabuki that include the landmarks of MacDonald’s, the temple, and fish market is something else.

One more thing…

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飛行機で On The Flight

The lights are dim, but the soothing glow of Air Canada’s hundreds of video screens illuminate the faces of the weary travelers all around me.  Instructions are relayed over the loud speaker in languages reflecting the current occupancy.  A female voice first reminds the passengers to strictly adhere to the laws of the buckle seatbelt and no smoking glyphs immortalized in a sunset of orange and red.  The familiar English message comes to an end before a string of French floats along putting a romantic sheen on what must be the same demand.  The wholly unrecognizable sing song of Japanese syllables that follows and finishes the crew’s announcements coerces a recollection of another fashion; we have just glided past Palin’s coast and are now a speck in the sky over international waters.  The darkness of the cabin envelopes me in a cocoon where my thoughts are free to wander wherever they may.  I have tried over and again to explain the manner in which my brain has been flipping and careening between past, present and future but to no avail.  My mind is inebriated with possibility.

Every decision I make in the next eleven months will have far reaching, unforeseen consequences all coming with their positives and negatives.  Last night, I pulled on my football cleats for the first time since our senior season was cut short.  Clods of turf were still molded onto the heels and I was taken with the crazy notion that I would walk on at Waseda to wreck house with a bunch of Japanese guys. Now however, my sights are set on the more realistic venture of dabbling in some Far East rugby… more on that later.  Only God knows where the decision to actually pack the things will lead me in the next couple months.  Each choice has been and will continue to be a pebble falling into the pool that is my life.  Rewind a few months to the dropping of the stone that was my application for home stay while studying abroad.  I watched with bated breath as time passed and my application slowly tumbled and rotated until I was evaluated, given a family and sent the email containing everything Waseda deemed necessary for me to know.  That rock has finally hit the water and the first ripples of location and family information have already been utterly unexpected.  I live a paltry twenty minute walk from campus with two seventy year old Japanese seniors who do not speak English.  Talk about waves.

Back up a little further to my decision to take Japanese.  The majority of American students take mandatory language classes for at least some of their high school careers.  To those of you that muddled through or were even exceptionally talented in Spanish or French, how often do you take a retrospective look and find that new languages impacted your lives?  I’m not talking about the stunning realization that street names mean something (Las Gallinas, The Embarcadero, Nova Albion Way) that I came to as well in my learning Spanish.  Rather were you clipped by a blow so hard that your life came off of its tracks as mine did?  Perhaps that is the wrong phrasing.  Life is not on tracks, there is no plan.  Let me try again, please.  Have you ever been blindsided by something, anything to the point where that smack across your face freed you from where you thought you were going?  That is what my choice to learn Japanese did for and to me. I am in this winged contraption with a beautiful woman beside me, leaving my homeland for a year and completely unsure of my future simply because when I was accepted to Boston College the thought struck me: “I like anime, I should take Japanese.”

The more I reflect on the causes of the continuously shifting nature of my future the happier I become.  I am filled with joy that I finally do not know what lays two weeks down the road let alone two months or a year.  There is no fun in knowing exactly where your going.  Do not move, however, without purpose.  There is a staggeringly vast difference between having no idea where you will be in a little while and being lost now.

4 hours ‘till we land.

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彼女の写真。My Girlfriend’s Pictures.

The countdown clock on my widget dashboard caught my eye this morning as it reminded me that my flight back to Japan is a mere eight days away.  Recently, the thoughts that have been flowing through my mind have been centered around what I will be leaving behind once my plane pulls up from the tarmac.  Sure, there goes my Junior year at Boston College, friends, Mexican food (not that Chipotle garbage) and the language I’ve been speaking since before I can remember, but those are casualties with which I have already come to terms.   The fact of the matter is that I have unknowingly decided to sacrifice luxuries I have been taking for granted since I was greeted by the world with a spank in that hospital room twenty years ago.  I thought I knew what I was getting myself into only to be proven wrong by pictures of nothing.  For the past couple of weeks, my girlfriend, Moé, has been using my camera to capture snapshot souvenirs of the American way of life and country.  At first, I thought she was wasting the space on my miniscule memory card, but as she has continued to take photo after photo of open fields and thickets of trees the gravity of my situation has ever so slowly begun to dawn upon me.

This is not a picture of a boat

I’m a NorCal boy.  Vacationing in South Lake Tahoe, epic airsoft battles in the hills, going to schools where the classroom doors all open into sunlight, not the fluorescent glow of a hallway:  these have been the bread and butter of my formative years.  To finally come to the realization that the woods in which I have reclined and the stars upon which I’ve gazed will no longer be available to me is a load of bricks pressing down upon my shoulders.  I feel strange that there is no apprehension with regard to giving up English, soon I will be spitting out Japanese like nobody’s business, and although there is a pit of sadness in my stomach to know a full quarter of my time at BC will pass in my absence, I have never had trouble thoroughly enjoying the experience of moving to a new place (I moved from just north of San Francisco to Boston by myself… twice).  No, it is the vastness of my homeland that will be gone, the ability to walk five or ten minutes and have no buildings, roads or cars in sight.  In Japan, an hour walk from my host family’s home would leave me in another portion of the urban jungle, Tokyo.

This is not in Japan

To say I am being blindsided by this concept is incorrect, rather I voluntarily let slip the thought that the city would press in on me.  I visited Tokyo, lived there for over two weeks loving every minute of my stay, but it was the temporary quality of my journey that made it so easy to choose to be ignorant of my trade.  After eight days, I will not be visiting Japan but living there.  My home will no longer be this house surrounded by grassy hills but the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Ito of Shinjuku-ku.  But am I scaring myself unnecessarily is the question.  Is this cold feet?

This is

Moé just asked me what I was writing about, and explaining this blog post was so much more difficult than it should have been.  Searching for the right words to say that I sound sad without being sad and am scared without being scared is damn near impossible.  Her pictures, I explained, are all of nothing.  They are not empty but are of emptiness.  Every landscape or panorama she has taken is of the wide open space I wake up to each morning.  The backdrops of buildings and mountains are pretty, but those are not the subjects of each of her photographs.  Now, with Japan just a week away, the concept of living without all this space is causing just a bit of anxiety.  Am I ready for Japan, she asked… absolutely.  The question I ask myself however, am I ready for this space to disappear… we will see, but regardless of how I feel I am locked in.  I have made my decision and I know I will have the time of my life.  Really, my only fear in traveling to Japan is that I will be caged, but how could that happen in a city where every street is something new and a country overflowing with things and traditions I have never seen before.

I will arrive in Japan by this time next week.

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お相撲さんが来ている: The Sumo are Coming

I’d like you to pause now and take a moment to reflect on the fact that the amount of filtering that happens to the image of an actor who appears in commercials no one in his motherland will see works both ways. Jones-san is a character played by Tommy Lee Jones in a series of humorous advertisements. The character is just as fictitious as it would be in the states, but the actor’s ethos, all the notions and emotions conjured by the sight of him, is drastically reduced. As far as examples go, this is about as minute a difference that can happen as media passes through the cultural filter. So much of the Japanese mindset is lost upon the West, seeping through the cracks spreading under the weight of Western thought, but before anybody starts thinking that I’m railing against my own culture, let me be clear… This is not bad so much as it is sad. Sad because it is unavoidable; the tint applied in transition is a fact of life until the truth in action has been witnessed. No matter how hard anyone tries to explain, including myself, the world is full of different schools of thought that form as old ideologies meld into what is found at this very moment.

 With that in mind, I can now tackle the conflicting conceptions of Sumo wrestling. Sumo is not about who waddles about with the most colossal gut but leverage and techniques that are part of a cultural tradition wholly Japanese (hence the questionable circumstances surrounding the top Sumo wrestler, a Mongol, leaving Japan). Drawing upon my own memories of representations of the typical Sumo wrestler, I see a boulder of a man with eyes burning a hole into his opponent. I recall montages of schools of fat men gorging themselves upon bowl after bowl of white rice. Their chopsticks flinging the specks of white into their gullets, the only competition seemed to be who could eat more gooey mochi or fresh sashimi. The notion that there was something more tangible to the Japanese sport was easy to grasp, but the depth of a Sumo’s devotion and drive eluded me. The petite figure of an every day Japanese man does not lend itself to the explosion of force found between the masses of flesh hurtling towards each other during each Sumo bout. Japanese genes do not naturally produce Sumo on a regular basis, but Sumo exist nonetheless.

Consider the physical change a body must go through in order to become a top NFL superstar. Hours upon hours in gyms and on the practice field beget the giants of the gridiron. On the street, a college or even high school lineman is a sore thumb that draws the eyes of the crowd. Juxtapose this feeling of looking up at a mountain of humanity with your mental renditions of their Far East compatriots. Their biceps are just as strong in a sport requiring an equal amount of finesse and brute strength on par with the Sunday gladiators of the red, white and blue. Are the Sumo fat?... Yes, in the same way that an offensive lineman is fat. Both men’s lives, Eastern and Western, are poured into their sport until the sport itself becomes their lives. To belittle Sumo wrestling and training in the tatters of culture appearing on television screens on this side of the Pacific is to represent American football as nothing more than a glorified competition of shoving. The technique, cultural history and tradition are gone once the Japanese culture becomes entertainment for Americans. Everything that makes Sumo matter is gone.

今もっとジョンさんある！Now with more Tommy Lee Jones!

The images that have slowly meandered west from the Japanese islands are at once perfect representations of the Japanese people and utterly inadequate. My reunion with my girlfriend now just around the corner, various memories of my time in Japan have bubbled up to the surface of my mind. My recollections of Tokyo, however, are vying for prominence against the flood of media endured over the span of the previous seven months. Sifting through these thoughts feels as though I am peering through a tarnished lens. The truth of the matter is my memory is completely fine, but my freshest images of Japan are those found in American mainstream media. Currently, I am using two dependable news sources for accurate Japanese news coverage. The BBC and Japan Times provide reliable news flawed in their absence of a visual link. I am mired in the unfortunate situation of applying present day descriptions to the memory world that now constantly clashes against what is filtered through the television and internet. The issue does not lay in the glaring misconceptions commonly portrayed by these mediums but with their accuracies. American sentiments of Japan are skewed by the average individual being entertained by realities masquerading as fantasies.

Due to the genuinely impure and confusing nature of representations of Japanese people and culture in America, the only way to adequately enlighten you, dear reader, is to talk about Mr. Tommy Lee Jones. No doubt, you know Mr. Jones from various projects including the academy award winning No Country for Old Men, a visceral, gripping tale. Turning back the clock a few more years, aside from revealing that Mr. Jones has looked exactly the same age for over a decade, revisits the entertaining, science fiction-buddy cop mash-up that was the Men in Black series. The average U.S. movie buff knows Tommy Lee Jones’s acting portfolio well enough to, at the very least, recognize him and his previous escapades across the silver screen. Although I will not go so far as to call the man an icon of the American movie industry, the fact that he has starred in blockbusters taking place in every conceivable setting of every genre (Space Cowboys anybody?) should be enough to convince anyone that he is well known, respected and serious about his line of work.

In Japan, Tommy Lee Jones is famous, but not for his films. He has become extremely well known by the name Jones-san for his work in the employ of Suntory Boss Coffee, Red Bull’s Japanese equivalent in the canned coffee market. I have to take a moment here to convey a feeling of shock and awe at the population of vending machines loitering on every street corner and in every train station. There are full twenty four hour periods when those mechanical soft and sport drink peddlers are more numerous than foreigners so to say that their market is large would be an understatement of epic proportions. If one were to ask the prototypical Tokyo native, the name Tommy Lee Jones would evoke crickets while Jones-san would illicit a grin of recognition and a reserved chuckle at the very least. To the Japanese, our Tommy Lee, an alien in the land of the rising sun, is the silent alien spokesperson observing earthen culture for his home world. Tommy Lee Jones has been stripped of the vast majority of his reputation and become the humorous yet eerie face of a major native product:.. He drinks Boss Coffee, and you should too.






I don’t want my blogs to be full essays so the next installment will put all of this Tommy Lee Jones talk back into its proper context. As always, thank you for reading.

PS:  As a rule I will be avoiding posting images that do not belong to me.  These are my souvenirs that I am sharing, not those on Google Images.

じゃあ行くぞ！ Well, Let's Go!

The two week trip I made to Tokyo this passed winter break has allowed me what will prove to be a decidedly unique view of Japanese culture. I was lucky enough this evening to meet a friend from Boston College who had just returned from his year abroad in the far east.  After a brief ferry mixup, I picked him up from Sausalito before making the leisurely drive to one of the best restaurants California has to offer... In-N-Out.  After a delicious meal, we drove along the stretch of wealth known as Tiburon before beginning the more arduous journey to Pride Rock (Marin, you know what's up). The usual catching up done, our mountaintop conversation turned to the bond we share in Japanese.  Our discussion of the Japanese language, cities, people mingled with the wispy trails of smoke and  lead to a mutual realization of the difference between our initial study abroad starting points.  While the first day of his year abroad had coincided with his first steps on Japanese soil (and first sight of an in-airport zen garden), my feet first touched Tokyo pavement on the twenty seventh of December, 2009. 

My first experiencing of Japan and its capitol was rife with the shock and awe evoked by the sheer number of people crammed into such small spaces such as train cars and narrow sidewalks as well as the bedazzling array of cuteness assaulting the senses from every shop window and street corner, but that is not what this blog is about.  I stayed with my girlfriend and her family about an hour train ride from the glowing Tokyo metropolis where I was treated as family and met with customs I could not have anticipated.  In about a month, I will be returning to Japan, but unlike my returning friend from school, my eyes have already seen the initial flash of culture that casts the rest of what it means to be in Japan in shadow.  My year abroad will not start with eyes wide open in amazement and mouth agape, but with the focus that comes once the eyes have adjusted to the florescent bulb unexpectedly illuminating a dim room.  The Japanese are not defined by their ability to become sardines in a can or to conceive adorable anthropomorphic kittens.  Rather a Japanese person is everything they are not telling you or the media has thankfully missed.

The only proper way to begin this blog of mine is to apologize.  There will be things about the Japanese that I will not be able to adequately convey in English especially to those who have never had the opportunity to be among them in their homeland.  I've never written a blog before, and I hope whoever reads this will take away something useful and see the world as more than just U.S. and them, whoever they are.  This blog is about the differences in communication noticed by a Communication major that people have no idea exist.  No matter how much this blog ends up being personal opinion or random observation, You can count one thing as fact: Deciding to study Japanese changed my life far more than any other decision I have made so far.... and it was the right choice.

Godzilla's first trip to Japan