Worse Than Coleslaw

In homogeneous Japan, the specific details of your heritage or ethnicity or whatever are less significant than the fact that you are not Japanese. Thus, all people not from Japan, whether they be American, Philipino, Chinese, Korean, whatever, are all usually referred to using the word “gaijin” (or “gaikokujin” if the speaker is trying to be more polite), which simply means “foreigner.”

I live in Iwate prefecture, which can be thought of as kind of the Wisconsin of Japan—cold, rural, backwater-y, and not particularly exciting, the punchline to a million jokes that few people care enough to tell, but charming too, like most places can be especially when you can’t understand all the potentially hateful and base things the average John Q. Takahashi on the street is saying. Being such a backwater, Iwate prefecture—and specifically the town that I live in—does not have many English speakers, to the point where, since I am going for at least some vestige of anonymity with this thing, I am reluctant to even say exactly where it is that I live on my blog because doing so would instantly identify me as one of maybe three native English speakers in the whole place.

So I don’t have a lot of contact with other foreigners, and when I do see another person who looks like they might speak fluent English, I get kind of excited. I want to run up to them, give them a hug, and say, “Will you be my friend?” Living life without reliable avenues for communication is a lot more exhausting than people realize. And really, I don’t feel like this impulse is all that unusual. I mean, due to the homogeneous nature of Japan and the difficulties foreigners often face in adjusting to life in this country, it would make sense to assume a certain amount of camaraderie between non-Japanese living here, a badge we all wear with pride like veterans of some long-forgotten war. A secret handshake. A clubhouse in the woods. Midnight rituals. Fucking bylaws. I’d even be cool with just a wave or a thumbs-up as we walk by each other on the street, some simple gesture of acknowledgment between two human beings sharing a common bond as they pass each other all awash in a sea of Other-ness, as if to say, “Holy shit, dude, we’re in Japan!” It’s not much, but it’s a connection, something to keep the isolation at bay.

Operating under the assumption that other people in a situation similar to mine will share these sentiments, I try to smile and nod whenever I see a foreigner while I am out and about, especially in smaller towns where such a sight is a rare occurrence indeed. Back at the beginning of my stay this was to acknowledge a common bond, establish a dialog, maybe the occasional bit of small talk between comrades and arms in such. Initiating contact with strangers has never been my way, but the idea was that if I looked friendly and stuff that people would think it was okay to say “hello” to me. But I quickly discovered that most foreigners, when presented with this situation, will avert their eyes and pretend not to notice my doing this, as if I were their crazy ex-girlfriend or that irritating guy from work with with fifteen cats and a kee-razy story about each and every one of them. Since coming to this realization, I still make eye contact and nod “hello” to every foreigner I meet simply to make the statement that there has not been some sort of mutual decision on both of our parts to ignore the other’s existence. I passed one hipster-looking white dude in Sendai on a staircase, me coming up and him going down, and since casting his gaze down towards the ground as is normal would in this case have caused him to meet my eyes, he opted instead to turn his head so that he was looking at the blank wall next to him rather than, you know, the stairs.

I like to think that I would not have chuckled had he tripped because of this, nor would I have been doubled over with laughter had he broken his neck due to said tripping. But I can’t be sure. I’m working under the assumption that, since these encounters are so fleeting, these people do not yet have substantial reason to avoidme specifically, and so that their refusal to acknowledge my existence is illustrative of some larger reluctance to interact with other foreigners outside of controlled circumstances.

It still is not clear to me why exactly strangers in a strange land, when faced with the rare-ish opportunity to converse in their mother tongue, would choose to pretend like that opportunity does not exist. It probably has something to do with maintaining one’s sense of adventure or something. You make it to Japan, you go through the rigors of homesickness and culture shock and come out the other side reborn a semi-functional (if illiterate) member of Japanese society. You feel like a stupendous badass, a world-traveler, a self-reliant and dynamic personality. Even little things like being able to order at a restaurant or ask for things at the post office seem like feats of epic win. It feels good, like you’re capable of anything, and I guess some people either feel like it’s presumptuous to try to horn in on a random stranger’s nomad Bohemian fantasy or are living out said fantasy and are thus reluctant to have contact with foreigners for fear of upsetting the illusion.

Regardless of the reason, my existence was not acknowledged by a non-Japanese stranger in public until I visited Tokyo, a trip which took place after I had been in this country for almost four months. On Christmas Eve my friends and I took the train over to Akihabara, Tokyo’s legendary electronics district. There I was able to finally fulfill my long-time fantasy of playing a round of Dance Dance Revolution in an Akihabara arcade, and in that arcade we ran into a white dude with glasses and an “Arizona State University” sweatshirt who was waiting in line for some esoteric cube-based rhythm game. He turned to look at us.

“Do you guys speak English?” he asked.

“Yes we do,” I said.

“You can always tell here,” he said, motioning to the Japanese people all around us. “It’s convenient.”

“You have no idea how nice it is to hear you say that,” I said.

So I spent five days in Tokyo at the beginning of my Winter Vacation and have made a short detour to Miyagi prefecture with some friends before I head back to the frozen northlands from whence I came. Miyagi prefecture, with its milder climate and larger and more interesting capital city, is still a major improvement over the town in Iwate where I currently lay my head, but it seems like a major drag after the kidney punch to the senses that was Tokyo, the world’s largest metropolitan area. While this does mean that I have some time to breathe and do some writing, it wasn’t easy for me to get on that northbound bullet train, to leave behind what seemed like a great gig—all the glitz and glamour and energy from such an enormous population combined with a crime rate that would be phenomenally low for an American city a tiny tiny fraction of Tokyo’s size—for the promise of rice fields and sub-zero temperatures and poor cell phone reception. I’m not knocking rice fields, exactly, but they’re not really my thing.

As I rode the Shinkansen up to Miyagi, when I wasn’t sleeping or listening to the old man in the seat across from mine suck off a toothpick for what seemed like (and actually was) two hours, I spent some time reading a book about the ending of the world and allowed my mind to wander, entertaining visions of moving to Tokyo and doing the big-city thing after a lifetime spent in places where a bunch of my friends and I could get together and while away half the night standing in a circle asking each other a million permutations of the question, “So, what is there to do?” without ever coming up with an acceptable answer. Sure, the rent’s high and I’d continue to have trouble communicating with people due to my lack of Japanese ability for the foreseeable future and would still probably feel isolated and alone more often than not even amidst all those huddled millions…but my thinking is that if I can put myself in a place that has the best of everything to offer, I can at least be hopeful of eventually finding whatever it is that I am looking for—be it serenity, security, a decent cup of coffee, inspiration, motivation, and/or creepy anime memorabilia for me to browse through in back-alley storefronts and then not buy in quantities sufficient to last an Age. The seasons of my soul (or whatever) have often been characterized by unnamed longing, so a big city seems like it might be the right place to hang out in. It’s simple mathematics: even though I still don’t know what it is that I want out of life, it is statistically more likely that if I ever do figure that shit out, I will be in a better position to obtain whatever Thing it is in Tokyo than I would be in most other places. Unless that Thing I wanted out of life turned out to be snow, in which case my current place of residence would provide a pretty solid foundation on which to build my future.

In Iwate prefecture—a place that sucks even compared to the other sucky (and not-so-sucky-but-still-kind-of-meh) places I have spent significant amounts of time in, and sucks even more than a similarly proportioned American town would simply because of the language barrier—I often feel like I am drowning, so far removed from anything that moves me or even feels real that, for all my complaining, I don’t even know how to go about improving my life other than to wait for my current contract to expire in March and toss the dice again to see if the next place I end up will be an improvement. It’s hard for me to tell whether my current existential discomfort is due to my own bad attitude and inability to experience joy even while inhabiting a place that actually is beautiful and serene and magnificent, or whether I have 100% accurately described said place as being total ass and am thus justified in being a little disgruntled every now and then while I plan my escape. Am I making a Hell out of Heaven, or am I merely seeing Hell for what it is?

If I moved to Tokyo, though, maybe I’d finally be able to tell once and for all whether it’s me that’s crazy, or whether it’s everyone else.

I have a lot to say about Tokyo, although it might take me a while to get it all down. Stay tuned.

The pillows are a Japanese rock band whose sound is usually compared to that of the Pixies but without all the Spanglish and jokes about fucking. I was first exposed to their music, like most Americans, by watching Fooly Cooly (FLCL), which is an absurdist Bildungsroman Japanese cartoon about weapons-grade Gibson guitars being pulled out of transdimensional portals in people’s skulls and on whose soundtrack the music of the pillows is featured prominently to great effect.

So the pillows are a good band, and “Hybrid Rainbow” is perhaps their masterpiece, a song that I would say almost justifies humanity’s existence despite centuries of war and hatred and every kind of depravity imaginable. I can recall being nineteen years old, a recent high school graduate, watching FLCL for the first time just a couple of weeks before I headed off to college and my first real taste of the great unknown and thinking, man, it would be awesome to see these guys play live.

Imagine my surprise, then, that my arrival in Japan, already a fulfillment of my wildest outdated high school fantasies, coincided with the release of a new pillows album and a tour (codenamed the “Pied Piper Tour,” which I can’t turn into anything symbolic no matter how hard I try) to support said album. The pillows were playing in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture, easily within the range of a driven individual such as myself. Phone calls were made. Tickets were purchased. Travel arrangements were made. The thought rang clear in my mind: “I might get to see ‘Hybrid Rainbow’ performed live.” If that happened, I’d have another item to check off on my list of things I needed to do before I died.

The concert was to start at six o’clock on a Sunday evening in late September. The plan called for me to take the train to Sendai on Saturday morning—this was before I knew about the wonders of highway buses, which are cheaper and faster than trains when going between big cities—and stay with a friend of mine from back home who also does the teaching thing in Marumori, a small mountain town about an hour away from Sendai that feels a lot like what South Park would feel like if it was a real place and in Japan. We would check out Sendai on Sunday morning, and then hit up the concert, which started at six. Since it was a Sunday, I needed to be back in my own place for work the next morning, so I got a ticket for the 8:15 Shinkansen (bullet train) back to Morioka in time to catch the last train to my little podunk farming town. I figured the concert wouldn’t last much longer than two hours, if it even lasted that long, so not a huge loss. It was a perfect plan that failed in a spectacular(ly unspectacular) fashion.

The first stages of the plan went smoothly enough. I made it to Sendai without any problems, and Saturday night passed pleasantly, with much Melon Fanta consumed while complaining about the Japanese public school system and playing videogames. Sunday passed quickly as we explored the shopping arcade that Sendai is famous for, and soon enough it was time for our concert preparations to commence. We met up with another group of Americans, college exchange students or teachers all, and loitered in Sendai Station for a while swapping anecdotes and blocking pedestrian traffic. At about 5:30 I asked everyone assembled if maybe we shouldn’t head to the venue since the concert was going to start in a half hour.

“Doors open at six,” one among us said. “The concert doesn’t actually start till seven.” This was a serious problem.

My friend James, who had handled logistics, had misread (or not bothered to read) the kanji on the ticket, believing it to say “Starts – 6:00, Ends – 7:00” when it actually said “Doors open – 6:00, Concert Begins – 7:00.” Oddly enough, being illiterate does indeed suck as much as the public service announcements on teevee say that it does; that extra hour was kind of a big deal, upon which my entire plan for the evening hinged. In America it would only have taken me about 30 seconds to say “Well, I guess I’m calling in sick tomorrow” and enjoy the concert with no worries a’tall, but in Japan taking an unexpected day off from your job—even your stupid job where you spend the great majority of your time reading novels and and can’t even communicate with 90% of your coworkers—is a big deal that requires an excellent excuse and documentation. So that meant I had a ticket for an 8:20 train and a ticket for a 7:00 concert, which are good things to have by themselves but not such great things to have at the same time.

I was not very talkative as we made out way to the venue and stood waiting in line for the doors to open. Even when the show started I kept vacillating between “To hell with it, I’m just going to stay and figure out what to do afterward,” and “Well, I guess I’ll just try to enjoy the hour that I have.” This process preoccupied me, but I tried to enjoy the show as best I could. The pillows put on a good show, although I was mostly interested in hearing them play a handful of songs that I knew from FLCL, which was older material that they were less inclined to dip into. I was not pleased.

About 30 minutes in, during a pause between songs, someone in the audience shouted ”Hybrid Rainbow!“ and I held my breath.

The lead singer chuckled. “Too fast,” he said, in English. “Too early.”

Fuck, I thought, they’re saving it for the encore or something.

The band played a couple more songs that I was not familiar with and which were hard to enjoy given the circumstances, and during another pause someone else shouted, “Hybrid Rainbow!” At this point I had maybe 15 minutes to get to my train, enough time for maybe one more song before I absolutely had to leave.

“Too fast. Too early,” the lead singer said again. The members of the band began whispering among themselves.

I turned to leave, defeated, as more banter ensued.

I was just reaching for the door to the lobby when the band seemed to reverse their previous decision and started to play “Hybrid Rainbow.”

During those four perfect minutes, I was truly, unabashedly happy. Between the beginning and the ending of that one song, I was exactly where I wanted to be in the world, doing exactly what I wanted to do, and had no reservations or regrets. Just then It did not matter that I had to leave the concert early to go catch a train so I could be on time for a job that I did not enjoy, nor did it matter that I was aimless and unmotivated, that I had so far been too lazy to create anything that felt meaningful out of my time on earth, that I was weird and awkward and unsure of my place in the world; whatever choices I had made in my life up until that point, at that moment they were all the right choices because they had led me to that venue next to the Sendai train station where I watched the pillows play “Hybrid Rainbow” in front of an enthusiastic crowd. My triumph was utter. It was transcendent.

And, like most transcendent moments, this one was not able to support itself for long under the weight of its own quality.

After the song was over there was a short period of silence, and the band started retuning their instruments and talking amongst themselves. I headed towards the door, but, feeling invincible and uninhibited in the afterglow, I turned and shouted “Linda Linda!” before finally making good my escape. I thought this was hilarious at the time, but, given how irritated I used to (and still do) get at those assholes who shout “Freebird!” at concerts by bands who are decidedly not Lynard Skynard, I at least had the decency to feel bad about it later. I stopped just long enough to make alast minute impulse purchase at the merch table in front of the venue to celebrate my newfound enthusiasm for life and love and all the rest, and then I was ready to bounce.

After hearing “Hybrid Rainbow,” the decision to try and catch my train was a much easier one, and the emotional high of that one perfect moment propelled me forward as I ran through the station, retrieved my bag from the storage locker, and hoofed it up to the Shinkansen platform. Hoisting a big backpack and carrying a demented teddy bear in one hand, I’m sure that I made a deeply troubling sight. People left my path well alone. I quickly inquired about what platform I should go to—the guy I asked was trying to convey something to me that I could not get, but he eventually pointed me in the direction I needed to go—and took the stairs up to the platform three at a time.

Panting from the run, I stood and waited, my thumbs looped under the shoulder straps of my backpack, underarms and back starting to feel maybe just a little bit moist from the weight of my load and the unfamiliar exertion, ready to slide into a Shinkansen’s spacious seat and think happy thoughts all the way to Morioka, where I’d catch another train over to my town of residence. I was about seven minutes early. It had taken me less time than I thought it would to get to where I needed to be.

I paced up and down the platform and noticed with some trepidation that there weren’t very many other people waiting for this train. My trepidation turned to panic as the time listed on my ticket came and went. I went back down to the ticket area and made an inquiry of an older gentleman in a station uniform. Unfortunately, his English was not up to snuff, and neither was my Japanese; I couldn’t even remember how to say “I do not speak Japanese” in Japanese, which is a problem that I had had before and have often had since. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable period of him repeating the same phrase I did not recognize really slowly and with different inflections and pointing to different places on the small train schedule in his hands in a coded sequence that I was not able to decipher, he motioned with his hands and said “Wait, please.” About ten minutes later, a young-ish woman dressed in civilian clothes walked up to where I was standing. After exchanging a few words with the station guy, she turned to ask me what I needed help with. I explained my situation to her again. “The train is late,” she said. “Instead please take the Shinkansen headed for Akita when it comes and get off at Morioka Station. The Akita Shinkansen is also late, but it is less late.”

It turned out that “less late” meant “still more than an hour late,” which was especially galling after spending all that time being told at teacher training that the Japanese are shuffling automatons of soulless efficiency and woe be unto he who is even one minute late for anything. I was not happy about having to waste away in Sendai Station when there was still a perfectly good pillows concert going on literally next door. Eventually my consternation gave way to anxiety over whether or not I would make it to Morioka Station in time to catch the last train out to Ho-mu. Things did work themselves out, although I had to do some sprinting once I got to Morioka Station in order to facilitate this. I was told later that the show had gone on for about another 70 minutes after I left, but that only one other song I’d have recognized was played. And on Monday morning I was able to shuffle into work at my School of Suck, tired but on time, and totally tank my lessons for that day just like normal. God was in His heaven. All was right with the world.

So in the end I guess this concertgoing experience is a good representation of my time in Japan as a whole—a bunch of stupid bullshit punctuated by fleeting moments of blinding awesome-ness, a neverending footrace between elation in lane one and despair (or at least extreme irritation) in lane two. Additionally, in some kind of ridiculous Russian doll situation, maybe that is a pretty accurate description of life in general.

Supplemental:
Ride on Shooting Star (Ganbatte-Fest ‘08, Part 3) : Photos of the events described in this entry can be viewed on my Flickr page.

I don’t know exactly why I stay up so late every night. It’s almost like this rebellion against the working day, like I give myself over to the bosses when the sun is out but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let the considerations of the job alter my behavior outside of normal working hours anymore than it absolutely has to. Except that’s a really dumb way to act on such subversive feelings, because who besides me gives a shit whether I am tired or not? The job’s going to get done regardless, so the only decision I have to make is whether I’ll do it with a smile on my face and a song in my heart or with a head full of cotton balls and broken glass. After all, it’s not like I hate sleep—far from it! As someone who so dead tired all the time due to his own stupid decisions, adequate sleep has an almost mystical quality. I think about getting a good night’s sleep the way some people are constantly thinking about writing a novel or building a treehouse for their kid, something always in the back of one’s mind but so rarely acted upon.

Take, for example, right now. It’s almost 22:30! By the time I finish writing this and checking my e-mail and hitting refresh on Google Reader a couple of times, it might be 23:30 or later. I have to wake up at 6:50 tomorrow so I can make the hour-long drive to the school of rock and teach two 30-minute lessons on how to say “I feel sick” and one 70-minute lesson on “Conversational English,” whatever the hell that ends up meaning…and have this two hours’ worth of work somehow occupy a full eight-and-a-half hours through the space-time distorting effects of the Japanese work ethic. Also, it turns out that the School of Rock is so far away from where I live that it actually has different weather, and that this school is in such a small town that Weather.com doesn’t have any listings for it. So I never have any idea what to expect or how much extra time to allow for icy roads and decreased visibility, except that said different weather is usually inclined towards more snow rather than less.

The impending morning commute is not stopping me from continuing to not go to bed, although this knowledge does weigh heavy in my mind like a prophetic vision of the future that I can’t shake and can’t change no matter how hard I try; I think there was a Greek play whose plot was along those lines. I don’t remember the name of it, probably because I slept through that day of class.

Jet lag actually did me a world of good back at the beginning of my tenure as an ALT, wherein my internal rhythm was so pulverized by a 20-hour journey and a 13 (now 14, thanks to Daylight Savings Time) hour time difference that it reset and I just naturally started going to bed at reasonable times and getting up at also-reasonable times. So there were two months there at the beginning where I really never felt sleepy during the day because I was, for the first time since middle school, maintaining a sane cycle of sleeping and waking. I remember thinking to myself one afternoon at work, upon realizing that it was already lunchtime and I still didn’t feel like murdering every of my coworkers, “Wow, this must be what normal people with better impulse control feel like every day!” I even thought about eating breakfast a few of those days, but in the end an extra twenty minutes of sleep won out like it always does.

As time passed my proclivities for staying up late began to exert themselves more and more as I began to enjoy my teaching job less and less, and I find myself back in a familiar situation: chronically tired and pissed off, my lips chapped and the rings under my eyes resembling those of a raccoon, ready to compose great treatises on the subject of sleep deprivation but steadfastly unwilling to do anything drastic, like,logging off AIM an hour early or cutting back on my caffeine consumption. I guess, in the end, “I am my own worst enemy.” I think it was Kierkegaard who said that.

There are lots of ways to measure how “civilized” a particular country is. None of these methods are definitive, but when grouped together they give us a general idea of where are the nice places to live, and where are the places to be emigrated from with all possible haste. How a society treat its prisoners. How they treat their dead. How they treat the marginalized and less fortunate.

Gross domestic product.

Mean income.

Strength of currency.

Literacy rates.

Cultural exports.

After spending three months in Japan, I am inclined to also say that the widespread availability of pizza delivery is also an important factor to consider when evaluating a country’s quality of life.

I mean, sure, in many ways America is like a Third-World country with delusions of grandeur, what with its medieval healthcare system, its broke-ass public schools, and the rampant baseness of its national character, but in almost every city and town in the Land of the Free there is at least one establishment you can call to have delicious—or at least moderately tasty—pizza delivered to your home or office or arbitrarily designated dropoff point on a street corner or someplace like in the first “Ninja Turtles” movie. In Japan this service—and indeed, real pizza in general—is not available outside of major cities.

Now, I’m not saying that a country has to have pizza delivery in order to be civilized, or that pizza delivery automatically categorizes a society as somehow more evolved. All I’m saying is that pizza delivery certainly strengthens the case.

I have this idea in my head that people who are driven to come to Japan (or anywhere else, I guess) to teach English tend to be cut from a different cloth than the rest of humanity, and that I myself am not of the normal overseas teacher stock. I say this because my own interpretation of shared events differs wildly from that of the other ALTs I have spent time around.

I am testing this theory by giving the following quiz to as many foreigners living in Japan as I can find who will talk to me. I used everything I learned while sleeping through Statistics and Cultural Anthropology class to conform to the standards of scientific rigor, so hopefully the results will give me a clearer picture of the tendencies of the ALT mind. I would be interested to see what kind of answers the readers of this blog would give, so feel free to give a response in the comments section. This is based off of something that really happened to me and the wild variation in perception among a group of about five other English-speaking ALTs of what seemed to me like a fairly straightforward descent into madness.

So, here we go:

Say you’re in a restaurant with some other people. Since they are all fine upstanding bohemian types, said restaurant is a little hole-in-the-wall kind of place off of the main thoroughfare, a real “authentic experience.” You go to order food and the menu has no pictures and is written all in kanji, which no one in your group can read because it is obtuse by its very nature and was designed in ancient China to make learning it as difficult as possible in order to elevate the literate class. The proprietor of the establishment regards your inquiries about the food with a nervous smile and a shake of the head. So your order blind, just point at something that doesn’t cost too much and hope for the best. Maybe the food’s good, maybe it’s not. You have no way of knowing what it is until it arrives at your table–and even when it’s in front of you, you still might not know!

How awesome or not awesome would you rate this situation on a scale from one to five, where five is the most awesome and one is the least awesome?

This happened to me when I hung (hanged?) out with other teachers in my prefecture back at the beginning of my stay in Japan, and was in fact one of the early signs that I might have been in over my head. I would not consider this restaurant incident to be any fucking way to live at all, sort of a misguided attempt to expand one’s horizons that strays too far into the realm of lunacy to be a very valuable learning experience. But most of my contemporaries thought it was totally sweet, all “I can’t wait to tell the folks back home that I ordered some food without even knowing what it was!” whereas I was sort of inclined to keep that a secret from all but my very closest and most trusted friends.