14.07.15

“I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls… but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…”  U2

Well, I guess this is it.  Exactly 36 hours remain before we board the big bird bound for NYC, taking us back to that continent that has seen explosions, political upheaval, and garbage strikes (Toronto news always so much tamer…) in our absence.

We’ve packed up a bag of Japanese junk for our loved ones.  Tonight it went from being scattered randomly in bits across one of our tatami room floors to being neatly and efficiently packed into our enormous, relocating your life or one damn heavy addiction to cosmetics, blowdryers and the like-type suitcase.

The Kanto region has been hitting degrees celsius just way too high to think about.  I have tried to adopt a zen-like attitude towards the heat, and so have had a silly half-smile affixed to my face while I drip and oil and stick…

Anyway, retrospective on the year, eh?  (by the way “eh” in Japanese is “ne” and it’s used all the time!)  I did have something brutally cynical all printed up ready to go, but in the eleventh hour I’m feeling a little wistful towards the place.  I am coming back also.

Maybe I’ll do it this way:  What Sucks About Japan.  What Rocks About Japan.  Maybe ten points each.  Yeah, I’ve been writing a lot of lists lately trying to get my act together for my “kikoku” (literal translation “return to my country”)… so lists are a good thing…

OK, first the bad news.

What Sucks About Japan:

1. monoculturalism
2. really small pizzas
3. not saying what you mean and meaning what you say
4. smelling the raw fish department at EVERY supermarket
5. Tokyo rush-hour subway when non-aggressive people suddenly start stampeding
6. attitude towards other Asian countries and Asian people (see monoculturalism)
7. the impenetrability of Nihongo
8. extreme conservatism on most issues (except viewing porn on public transit)
9. kiddie porn (junior high school girls as prime sexual object)
10. adoration of white people
 

Now the good news.

What Rocks About Japan:

1. low-fat food and lots of funky teas
2. vast availability of sea food
3. withholding on aggressive behaviour (not seeing aggression as a means to elevate oneself)
4. people go out of their way to help each other out (drives home, making phone calls for you, …)
5. the steadily strong Yen (a personal favourite of ours in light of our pathetic financial situation back home)
6. onsen (vestiges remaining of a time when the body wasn’t something lewd in need of covering)
7. conbini bento (many people live off the reasonably healthy food sold in 7-11—not just chips and pop, my friends)
8. making any headway in Nihongo makes you feel marvelously special
9. bicycles (ridden by everyone from 2-92)
10. public washrooms are actually clean
Yeah, so there’s the lists, but it just wouldn’t be me without the passionate, bellowing cynicism, so here goes…

Truthfully the first 3 and a half months in this country felt like a tour of duty in some modern-day war where our weapons were nice English pronunciation, LOGICAL fucking ideas and simple Canadian bodies made of pure Northern stock (although one is coursing with blood from the deep, Eastern south); the resistance to our carefully prepared battle strategy:  Katakana, eggs with ORANGE yolks and gooey thick white bread, cicadas as a symbol of weather from hell, a supervisor talking in endless circles of decent-- but somehow senseless-- English (later attributed to a definite personality disorder having nothing to do with linguistic competence), the 1980s that never left Japanese high schools—leg warmers, orange hair that does not look good on Asian people, fake eyelashes, white eyeshadow, deep tans…

Honestly, if someone had told me: “you can snap your fingers and Japan will never have occurred to you as a brilliant way to spend a couple years of your life.  You will return to the comfort of your living room and your cat.”  I would have done it in a split second.  But there was the issue of pride and so I opted instead to start ticking off the days the way prisoners do, barring the lines once I got to ten or some such thing.

So what turned me on to Japan?  In a word: Thailand.  I had to leave in order to reclaim some part of myself I had seen immediately obliterated when I stepped off the plane in Nihon.  Somehow leaving Japan made me “remember” the world outside of its borders, including my own plans and viewpoints.  Completely innocente in the department of living in foreign countries, I basically overreacted to culture shock big time.  Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t fall off the deep end or anything (at least I don’t think I did ;), but the first few months here weren’t as enjoyable as they should have been.  Of course Thailand wasn’t the only factor that helped us settle in.  Japanese class at Bunkyo U introduced us to a bunch of gaijin who seemed just as lost as we were.  Hanging with Scott and Adrianne, the other Canuck couple, over Korean BBQ, cheap chilled red wine helped us feel closer to the lives we’d left behind.  And of course we received invites to spend enkais, days at the museum, etc. with our Japanese colleagues.

Before we knew it, we were sucked into a mad whirlwind of a life (speaking of which, we’re expecting our second typhoon of the summer tonight) consisting of art shows, travelling to Korea, performing poetry readings, planning this famous NYC/CDN return, studying Japanese, getting the hang of teaching Eigo, drinking/dancing/dining in Tokyo one too many times…

So the first three months of being here felt like taking the local train to Hokkaido, but now we are on some wild Shinkansen ride that isn’t due to stop any time soon.  Japan, with all its quirky bits actually seems normal.  Not home, because we have vowed to save that one for a later date, some other place that will merit our settling into.  Home is not where the heart is.  Because we are definitely ticking along here, with full beating fervour, but I do not think this is home.  Having a home means closeting our oversized luggage to pull it out for mini-breaks once a year at best, not zealously booking trip-after-trip through budget travel agents set up expressly for expatriates.  Having a home means you can’t be an expatriate.  Having a home invariably means thinking your geographical situation is the centre of the universe.

Anyway, I’d better wrap this up, because the hour is getting late.  In short, Japan’s awright, it works for us now—a strategic base for creation, saving cash and travelling through Asia.  We aren’t Japanophiles by any means, but we have taken in and taken on the realities of Nihon in ways big and small.  A forewarning.

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