Sundry and miscellany

Welp, a lot of stuff has happened since Tokyo, most of it boring, so I will abandon the narrative approach and talk/think out loud for a bit about stuff I've been meaning to talk about. I'm feeling pretty good, I was talking with my host mother the other day about Thanksgiving and how I was really sad I couldn't be with my family or have apple pie, and I guess I looked pretty sad doing it because today my host mom made some apple pie to go after dinner! It was not.. exactly.. apple pie, but delicious nonetheless (she used a storebought square, flat pastry shell and filled it with sliced apples.. really more of a turnover but there was no way to communicate this and I felt it would be a tremendously dick move and really ungrateful to 'correct' her about it anyway). She seemed to think it was a failure but I did my best to assure her it was still delicious (it was) and that honestly pies are hard to make in a microwave (Japanese houses do not have ovens, there's a 2-inch high broiler for fish under the stovetop and that's it). Anyway, happiness! Cannot replace the folks at home, but it was incredibly nice of her and made me feel much better.

This segues awkwardly into something I realized poring over what pictures to upload this time around: racism and Japan. I've sort of skirted around it a few times, and I'm sure other people have said things about it much cleverer than I can say, but this is a blog not an academic article and I am entitled to shout my opinions into the void, so here we go. Poring over pictures triggered this because in one there's a white guy on a bike in Kyoto and I immediately went 'oh hey a tourist.' It did not cross my mind for the barest second that he lived here.

I would say that this is because I have internalized the values of what is perhaps one of the most racist societies in the developed world. They don't have genocides or anything (any more, see: colonization of Hokkaido), but legally, in the media, and in general, the Japanese are very seriously and very strongly of the opinion that only the Japanese belong in Japan, and that you will never be Japanese unless you are really (ethnically) Japanese. They are much to polite to say this straight out unless they're one of the right-wing crazies, but if you press the vast majority of Japanese people you will discover this conviction somewhere.

You will never see this on a vacation; when you are clearly a tourist with no aspirations beyond that you are a customer and will be shown as much courtesy as possible. There are places you Shouldn't Be, but still generally the Japanese have to problem with you. They aren't racist in the sense that "all non-Japanese are smelly and I hate being around them (many are racist in this sense against the Chinese)," but if you make any sign of trying to naturalize all that goodwill will dry up faster than spit in the Sahara. They make every attempt to keep you in the tourist sphere; even in conversations that I start in Japanese and that I would be perfectly capable of managing in Japanese, servicepeople will vastly prefer speaking horribly mangled english to having to respond to a gaijin in their own language. This is an experience that happens across everyone in our program, which is especially frustrating for the kids in the top levels of language class who are basically fluent.

One of the worst things is that I've been realizing that when my friends complain about this, I not only defend the Japanese people's attitude but accuse my friends of being unfair. "You're holding them to American standards" I say. I automatically assume that because it's part of their society to be one tribe-one country-one family-one in-group, that this is acceptable and how things should operate. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. It's even self-destructive; Japan is aging rapidly (to put it mildly), and there are literally millions of Chinese and Southeast Asians that would love nothing more than to move to Japan and work, but the Japanese will have a single 50 year old in the workforce paying for the healthcare of a billion over-80s before they allow that to happen.

In a way, though, I feel they've 'earned it.' They are perhaps the only real nation-state in the world that didn't have to invent itself out of a coalition of ethnic groups pretending they had been one people forever. Sure they fudge a bit to get it into the BCs, but it is pretty much accepted that the majority of the main three islands of Japan has been one gene pool and one system of society under varying levels of central control since the 800s AD. There is no other developed nation that can claim anything reasonably close; Britain was invaded over and over, mainland Europe, Asia, and the Middle East are a stewing pot of migration, invasion, and the Modern National Boundaries are fairly arbitrary (made in the 1800s for Europe, with ethnic identities largely constructed after the fact to explain why you should listen to the shmucks in the Capital, and a little after for the rest of the world with ethnic divisions wholly ignored by colonizing powers drawing boundaries), and America is entirely a nation of immigrants. Maaybe Norway? I don't know very much about Scandinavia, I'll admit. But yeah, Japan honestly hasn't had anyone who wasn't Japanese on the mainland for quite some time, right up until the postwar period when the constitution we wrote for them forced them to play nice.

So we have a what, a who, a why, and a how. But what to do about it? Should anything be done about it? I had some vague idea of this whole issue before coming to Japan, and one would think that living here has allowed me to solidify an opinion; it absolutely hasn't. Having the experience of being stared at, "you speakku engrishu?" when I can clearly sort the business at hand in Japanese, and the general cold knowledge that I would never want to (be allowed to) live here has certainly soured me on it. But on the other hand, as broken as it is in many, many other ways, Japanese society only really works the way it does because it's Japanese. Being as inside it as they'll let me, watching the news, and seeing what they consider problems compared to us in the States, they have a pretty sweet thing going that only works because they're all so damn Japanese about everything. Having never lived in another country, I'll admit I sometimes have the problem of assigning things that are just different from the US and that are done the world over as things unique to Japan, but careful assessment shows that even after knocking those out there are a tremendous number of things that really only go on in this crazy place. Introducing alternate viewpoints or an actual mixing of culture would break it all. Now, Japan has always, always imported culture (civ class was basically 'ok, there's this thing the Japanese do, this is when they got the idea from China') but they always, always make it Japanese in the process. Mickey Mouse becomes anime, architecture is adapted, televisions are made amazing. When I say mixing culture I mean a large number of people who legitimately have a different culture coming to and living in Japan (not in army bases) and the two actually having to work out their differences in society- it would be totally disastrous.

Many of my friends think this would be a good disaster, but I'm really not sure. If nothing else, living here has given me a lot more to think about.

For further reading, a noisy gaijin trying to change Japanese opinions about how gaijin are noisy (I'm not a fan, but he's the biggest guy in this 'scene' such as it is. His big international moment was when he compared the word gaijin to the n-word. Again, nooot a fan.): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debito_Arudou