Worse Than Coleslaw

So I was in India for a while doing an internship with a human rights advocacy group. A big project I was given at my internship had me researching the history of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 1985. As part of this research, I was required to look at the debates held in Lok Sabha upon the bill’s passage and subsequent renewal every two years until 1995. A quick glance at the Lok Sabha website revealed—well it revealed a few things, not the least of which that the government of India really, really likes scrolling marquee—but also that the website only hosts electronic copies of debates after about 1995.

I was told that I’d need to go to a law library to find the relevant debates in hard copy. My boss suggested the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in the Teen Murti House, saying that the Indian Law Institute was a terrible place that should be avoided at all costs.

Visit the first (Thursday)

The first thing most foreign visitors will notice about the Nehru Memorial Library is that it is small. The Hillsdale Library that I go to in Portland is bigger, and that is just a branch in a mid-sized city in the United States, not a memorial library named for the George Washington of India in the capital of the second-most populous country in the world. Being in Delhi for any length of time without going crazy requires you to give everything the benefit of the doubt, though, so I justified the disparity to myself by saying that the Nehru Library was geared more towards high-level academic research and rare books and things like that. The fact that they didn’t have a giant section devoted to manga shouldn’t be held against them.

Admission for me to the Nehru Memorial Library required a letter written by my employer explaining why I needed access to the library. I also paid a fee of 200 rupees (about $5 US), which got me access for about two weeks from the date of my initial admission. To put that fee in perspective, a three-course meal at a dhaba near my apartment cost about 30 rupees, and a tuk-tuk ride from my apartment in South Delhi to the other side of the city cost about 100 rupees. So for India, this was a non-trivial amount of money, especially since the word “library” in the West is traditionally associated with buildings full of books that anyone can look at for free. Whatever, stuff costs money to maintain, and it would totally have been worth the five bucks to find the information I needed for my project.

After getting all my documents in order, I was given a slip of paper with dates written on it. I was led by a librarian to the back of the library and through an imposing door marked “Employees Only.” We walked through a large, dimly-lit storage area stacked all around with cardboard boxes and arrived at a door that looked as though it should lead to a meat locker. The librarian opened that door, which turned out to lead to a pitch-black room. A short man emerged from the darkness and said something in Hindi. The librarian turned to me. “No power,” he said.1

“Do you have any idea when the power will come back on?” I asked, thinking that maybe this was a regular occurrence.

The librarian thought for a moment. “Come back at three o’clock,” he said. It was about 11 o’clock in the morning. I had enough work to do for my internship, and little enough time to do it in, that I was not thrilled about waiting around for four hours for something that might not ever actually happen, especially since I was fighting a case of the Delhi belly and was not happy about being so long away from a clean toilet. I left, defeated, and resolved to return the following day.

Visit the second (Saturday)

I called my boss and asked him to call the Nehru Library to check if the power was working. He told me that calling the number on the website wouldn’t accomplish anything, and that I would need to just go there and take my chances. I’d checked the hours of operation of the Nehru Memorial Library when I was there, as the library’s website does not contain that information. The sign out front said that the library opened at 9:00 AM and closed at 5:00 PM, Tuesday through Friday. The day after my first visit I had too much work to do to spend the time messing with what I knew would be a trying and time-consuming experience, so I ended up waiting until Saturday to make the trek out there.

I caught a tuk-tuk to Govind Puri Metro Station, then rode the Violet Line up to Central Secretariat, then another tuk-tuk over to the front gate of the Nehru Museum, and walked from there to the library. The trip took about an hour.

The librarian, a middle-aged woman who looked exactly like you’d expect a librarian to look, squinted at the sheet of paper, then looked up at me, then back at the paper. “Go inside there,” she barked, handing me back the paper and motioning at a closed office door. I went through the door and found myself staring face to face with a short, bespectacled man sitting at a desk covered in loose papers. His hair had been dyed with henna. It was orange.

I gave the orange-haired man a rundown of what I was looking for. I said that I needed to go into the Parliamentary debates section.

“That section is closed today,” he said, in a tone of voice like you’d use on a little kid who was asking why dogs sometimes sniff each others butts.

“Closed? Why is it closed?” I asked. The question apparently struck him as being unreasonable.

“You need an escort to take you back to the room where the debates are held, and we do not have enough staff members to take you back there today.” This statement was problematic for at least two reasons. First, as far as I knew, I was not asking to view the original Constitution of India or some other sensitive or valuable materials. The debate volumes were just books. Second, there were at least three employees working at the library that day—none of whom seemed to be doing anything particularly important—and no library patrons that I could see.

The situation escalated. I handled it poorly. I may or may not have offered him a bribe to let me into the room with the debate volumes.

Visit the third (Tuesday)

Visits out in Delhi were best done with others, if for no other reason than it was nice to have someone there to witness crazy stuff happening and confirm that it was, indeed, happening, and also crazy.2 To that end, on my third trip out to the Nehru Library I brought along a coworker of mine who had just been given a short research assignment to complete which also required the perusal of some Lok Sabha debate volumes.

My coworker’s name was Ryan. Ryan and I lived in the same building in Tughlakabad Extension, along with most of the other interns at our office. We took a tuk-tuk over to the Nehru Museum, skipping the metro. Ryan needed to register with the library office. I waited out in front of the office while he got that sorted. When he came out of the office with his own little slip of paper with dates written on it, he said, “That guy in there just told me they didn’t have any Parliamentary debates here.”

“The guy in there is full of shit, then,” I said. Keep in mind, this wasn’t a case of some underpaid teenager dragging his ass while he made my latte at Stabucks. This was a highly skilled librarian working at a respected academic institution who so could not be bothered to get out of his chair to look some crap up on a computer that he would lie straight to my coworker’s face to get rid of him.

We walked up to the circulation desk again and explained what we needed. The librarian working the desk could not think of any new reasons to deny our request, so she called over another library employee who took us back to the room with the meat locker door. The lights were on this time. The room was drab and musty, with shelves that could be moved right up against each other using a crank in order to preseve space. Librarian guy told us to let him know when we were done and left to go attend to his other responsibilities.

The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act was passed in 1985. After five minutes of browsing the debates, I discovered that the index volumes for 1985 were missing. The index volumes were what I needed, as they would allow me to look up the name of the law to figure out where the debates concerning that law were located. I went looking for a librarian who could tell me where the index volumes were.

As I exited the room, a library employee stopped me. He asked me what I was doing. I told him what I was doing.

“Who told you that you could go back there by yourself?” he asked.

“A library employee,” I said. “I asked them where the debates were, and she called up some guy to take me back there.”

“Which employee?” he said.

“I didn’t think to take down his personal information,” I said.3

He looked nonplussed. “Wait here,” he said. He went up to the circulation desk. A few moments later a woman walked up to me and told me she would take me back to the room with the debates to supervise me and help me find what I needed. Once we had passed through the meat locker door, I explained my situation to her.

After scanning the shelves to determine that, indeed, the index volumes were missing, she said, “The index volumes are missing.”

“Yes, I know that,” I said. “Where are they?”

“We don’t have them,” she said.

“So how am I supposed to find anything in these volumes?”

“Just flip through the books until you find what you need,” she said.

The volumes for 1985 occupied an entire library shelf, literally tens of thousands of pages of information organized by date of the debates rather than by topic, making them particularly unsuited for locating specific information without an index volume. “Is there not an easier way to find this information?” I said. She seemed confused at my question.

“All you have to do is look through the books.” She took down a volume and mimed flipping through it. There was a pause as she looked at her watch. “However, it is almost lunchtime, so you will need to leave and come back after lunch when someone can be here to monitor you while you are in this room.”

“What time will lunch be over?” I asked.

“Come back about two o’clock,” she said. It was 11:30 in the morning.

I called up my boss to tell him what had happened. “A librarian mentioned that there was actually a Parliamentary library that should have all the index volumes,” I said. “Maybe I should try there.”

“You don’t want to go there,” he said. “Access to it is very heavily restricted.”

Aftermath

I never did find the information I was looking for. The closest I ever came was a People’s Union for Democratic Rights report entitled “Lawless Roads,” which contained references to the debates I needed but which only cited the source of that information as “Lok Sabha debates, relevant volumes” and was, thus, not helpful. Why any professional organization would think it was acceptable to half-ass their citations like that is beyond me.

It is my sincere wish that this blog post obtain a higher search engine page rank than the actual Nehru Memorial Library website so that all potential visitors to the library have a better sense of what they are getting themselves into. This does not seem like that outlandish of a goal because, as of this writing, only 38,454 people have ever viewed the Nehru Memorial Library’s website according to the oh-so-1995 visitor counter contraption they have at the bottom of the front page. My guess is that almost all of those visitors left without the information they were looking for. Likewise, any person searching for “Nehru Memorial Library” and “hours of operation” will not find what he or she is looking for on the actual Nehru Memorial Library website, which, as I have already mentioned, is terrible and useless.

From what I recall, the hours of operation are 9:00 to 5:00, Tuesday through Saturday.

One thing I was told upon arriving in Japan was that Japanese toothpaste was no good and that I should have some good old fashioned American toothpaste shipped to my apartment as soon as possible if I hadn’t thought to bring any with me. Incidentally, I was told the same thing about deodorant, and condoms. Japanese dentistry as a whole did not garner rave reviews among the veteran teachers who were in charge of my training; I was told that dental procedures such as drilling for cavities are typically done over multiple visits, so you’d go in one day to get your tooth drilled and the hole covered with a temporary seal, and then make another appointment to have the cavity filled later. Not fun, and little in my experience has given me any reason to alter the dismal view of Japanese dentistry that I inherited from those that came before me. In my poor farming community I rarely encounter anyone over 30 who doesn’t have at least one gold tooth. I’ve met exactly one student with braces at either of the schools at which I teach.

That said, I do have dental insurance here, after a fashion. More than I’ll have when I return to the land of the free and the home of the brave. A few weeks after arriving in Japan I noticed what looked like a hole on the front of one of my lower premolars, which was not so surprising considering I hadn’t been to a dentist in years. It didn’t hurt unless I just brushed the crap out of it, but several months later I decided I’d get it checked out while still residing in a country known for its low-cost dentists, if not for said dentists’ quality.

“Getting it checked out” in this case involved me phoning the company I work for and scheduling an appointment with my IC, or “Independent Contractor.” ICs are usually housewives who my company calls upon periodically to assist helpless baby birds like me with procedures that are still well outside my capabilities to navigate. My IC showed up at my apartment on a Saturday morning and had me drive the three blocks to the nearest dentist’s office.

Upon entering I was told to take off my shoes and put on a pair of indoor sandals in order to maintain the cleanliness of the floor, which is pretty normal here but which also is an example of irony since the dentist himself wore white slacks with grease stains all along the front of them, such that he looked more like a mechanic than a licensed medical professional getting ready to stick his hands in my mouth. I noticed that his own teeth were pretty whacked out, which did not fill me with confidence either. I was ushered into an examination room and sat down in one of the chairs there. One of the assistants held out a special stand for me to put my glasses in, which is so totally Japan. The dentist selected some prodding instruments from a tray to the right and began the examination, which lasted all of a minute. He started in with some kind of explanation, his gaze darting back between me and the IC like he wasn’t sure who he should be addressing in this situation.

“None of your teeth are bad,” my IC said. “Do you have a pain?”

“No pain,” I said. “But I thought I saw a hole in my tooth.”

“But no pain?” She seemed confused as to why we were there if I didn’t have a tooth that felt like it was already rotting out of my mouth.

“I have no pain now, but I may later, right?” It took me about three minutes to explain my thought process behind getting a hole in my tooth looked at before it started hurting, and I pointed to the tooth in question again to make sure she knew what I was talking about.

A few more words between her and the dentist. “It is not a cavity,” she said. At this point she pulled her electronic dictionary out of her purse and started tapping at its keys while muttering “nandake, nandake” under her breath. Eventually, she looked up. “Not cavity. It is a baby tooth.” More conferring with the dentist, and then she said “These three teeth”—I held my lips down and looked in the mirror, and the dentist pointed at one premolar on each side of my lower row, and one premolar on the upper row— “these three teeth are baby teeth.” Looking at them now, they do look much smaller compared to the rest of the teeth in my mouth, but since reality for me is a construct of my own consciousness, I just assumed that that’s how premolars were supposed to look.

“Are you sure it’s okay, though?” I asked. “I mean, that really does look like a hole in my tooth there.”

This question led to the quickest mouth x-ray I’ve ever had. The dentist spoke as he pointed to the developed x-ray film, which led to more discussion between him, my IC, and the female dental assistant. Finally, my IC said, “Your baby teeth are not supposed to stay in your mouth this long. So they are damaged because they are not so strong. But I’m sorry, there is nothing he can do about this problem.”

My question is, how was this not caught before? Like, I admittedly have not been to the dentist in five years, since before I started college, but even at 19 it would have been unusual for me to have three baby teeth sitting in my mouth, right? Why am I hearing this for the first time via some dude who I need a translator to communicate with?

Despite being a waste of time, this trip to the dentist—including an x-ray—only cost me 2500 yen, or about $25. And that’s without any insurance, since my dental coverage doesn’t kick in until the yen equivalent of $75. So it may have been an abortive attempt to receive treatment, but at least it was a cheap abortive attempt.

Another interesting thing I noticed was the imagery used in the posters hung up on the walls of the waiting room, which definitely demonstrated a difference of perception between the East and the West. Consider the following example of a poster I saw near the entrance to the office (I made up the title, but everything else was just illustrated with pictures):

The Wonders of Nitrous Oxide -or- My Trip to the Dentist
Panel 1: A woman drawn in an angular style sits in a dentist’s chair with a nitrous oxide mask over her nose. The dentist prepares the tools of his grim trade nearby.
Panel 2: The same woman is shown walking on a rainbow as clouds in the shapes of adorable woodland creatures float in the sky around her.
Panel 3: The woman dances on giant piano keys.
Panel 4: The woman slowly awakes from the dental procedure, her eyes half-open. Having holstered his various sharp objects, the dentist stands over her looking reassuring.
Fin.

Not sure that would fly back home.

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.