| Sunday, September 2, 2007 10:56AM | | | | Dro, Which Is Just Chron | Posted By: Tony Dsouza
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So there’s something I didn’t tell you about that bike trip. Well there are a lot of things I didn’t tell you, and I think about that sometimes, well a lot, in regards to my fiction. Because all through my published career, which is ten years now though I only have the one novel to show for it and the second one coming out and I guess I qualify as a young writer because I’m only 33, and all those stories I published early in my career won’t be collected any time soon because though five of them won big awards my people tell me the market doesn’t want stories and I don’t argue with my people because everything has been going well and it keeps me working, the idea that I make a name for myself with new books so that they collect my stories whether the market wants them or not, which at that point it will. In any case, through ten years of stories and poems and recently novels, people who read my stuff, which was mostly my mom, teachers, and a couple friends until the first novel came out, they take all my work as thinly veiled autobiography. And my novel got that treatment too in a big way, and the new novel will get that, too. I don’t try to fight it because sure my fiction does indeed come from my life to a certain extent, just enough that I don’t think anyone but me gets how much imagination I build onto the bones of real things that happened. So the point of it is that I think people look at my work and think that’s me, and because I don’t fight that, the real me and the real things I did in this life will be lost in a constructed me. Not that any of it matters in the end. But I feel that the me-me will only ever belong only to me. Which confuses me in a way. But that’s the way of everything. We like to think we have a common language in history, but it’s all subjective. As the comedian Dave Chappelle pointed out, the same men who wrote “All men are created equal” were slave owners. He had a great skit on his show. He’s dressed as Jefferson and thinking aloud and about to write those very words, “All men are created equal, hmmm, that sounds right,” then he looks over his shoulder and barks at his house slave, “Make me a sandwich, nigger!”
Anyway, the photo shoots and even some of the essays I’ve been writing in the past year because I can and the magazines want them, it’s all part of a constructed me that makes me grin sometimes. I do it to myself. There’s a real message that I have that I think all these things are a vehicle for. But it’s made me understand even better that the only people who will ever know who we are are ourselves. If we’re even lucky enough to search for and have that. I had this big idea a couple years ago when I was smoking some dank fire dro with a couple friends in Nor Cal. “Be nice to your mom. She didn’t ask for you.” I have a good relationship with my mother, I think I know her and my sister well. But that night the idea just came to me. A friend of mine was about eight months and a half months pregnant and the baby was going to be here any day. And I was just thinking about that and about who I was and that though you have a kid, that kid is who he/she is from day one. So yes our mothers wanted us (we hope) and then we turn out to be these people that they have to deal with whether they like the people we turn out to be or not. So be nice to your mom, she didn’t ask for you. She asked for a baby, but she didn’t ask for you, and in my case, me, a novelist who in his second novel tells a story of his mother’s affair with his uncle, which didn’t happen, but which everyone is going to think really happened. Sorry, Ma! At the same time, for as much as our mothers didn’t ask for us, we also didn’t ask to be here. To live these mortal lives. To have to face death. Thanks, Ma!
What does any of this have to do with Japan? To quote Berryman, “Japan, friends, is boring. We must not say so.” Of course Berryman said “Life, friends, is boring.” But the point is I committed to writing about my life in Japan, and three months into that life, I don’t have much to say. I have a routine here that doesn’t offer me much that I think right now is worth writing about. Not that there isn’t plenty. I just came to this blog less as bursting with something to say than as ‘Shit I have to file something.’
You can’t smoke fire dro, which my lovely gaijin girlfriend so far away would happily explain to you (hi honey!) is just chron, in Japan because it’s really illegal here, or at least I haven’t met the people who know how to get around that. And I think that’s a good thing, because if you were able to get your hands on a nug of the sticky, you’d take a deep hit and exhale and let it settle in, and then when the lights were flashing in the corners of your eyes, you’d look around and realize that everybody here is Japanese! Whoa, man. What a way to make yourself freak out. So the Japanese have to make that stuff really illegal or everyone would go crazy.
All kidding aside, race is just one of the strangest things there is. The body itself is so very strange, and then we have race on top of that to make it all so much weirder. If I felt this way in Africa, I don’t remember it. But maybe that’s because I grew up in Chicago and there were plenty of black people around, and so going to Africa was like going down to the South Side…for three years. But there were not Asians in Chicago in that way, and sometimes when I am walking around Nemuro, or in the Post Office, or in the supermarket which I go to everyday and everyone around me is Japanese, I go ’whoa’ and have a little panic attack. Because I am the different one. Because everyone stares at me like I am Cheng with Eng stuck to my side.
All wars are ugly. But I think race wars are especially so. It’s because the enemy is so easy to see that the whole race becomes the enemy. Black slavery worked so well for that reason, even a few generations in, the mulattos it produced were still easy to see as not white. I was at Hokkaido University two weeks ago doing some research into the Ainu, and then into the Okhotsk people who predated the Ainu because I’ve gotten a bit Ainu-ed out, and I came across some photos from the 1904-05 Japanese-Russian War. Now I’ve always taken the Boer War to be the harbinger war of the industrialized wars of this century, but looking at those photos at the University, I think now that the Japanese-Russian War has been over-looked in its industrialization. And I think racism comes into play. Now the Russians and the newly industrialized Japanese were fighting over Korea and parts of Manchuria in their mutual quest for what Hitler called ‘lebensraum’--his lebensraum being Poland and France and other very crowded places--but the Russians and Japanese were looking for breathing space, too. And what shocked the world at that time, and I think still, was that the non-white Japanese beat the white Russians. This hasn’t happened often, if it wasn’t for Ghengis Khan, whites would not have lost to the other races in recorded history until the French and then the Americans lost in Vietnam. I also saw news clippings from US and European papers at the time which expressed surprise as well at this fact. But what moved me most were photos of Russians burying dead Japanese in a big open pit. There were literally hundreds of Japanese corpses piled in the pit and the white Russians were standing at the rim of the pit with their shovels and smoking and smiling. The Japanese were clearly Japanese and dead, the Russians were clearly white and smiling and alive. I wonder if the Russians took the Japanese seriously at all until their defeat. And even then I wonder if the Russians didn’t blame their defeat on the distance they had to fight the war from. The Pacific theater against the Japanese in WWII has always taken a backseat in cultural memory to the European theater. Did the Americans take the Japanese seriously then? I know my two friends who fought the Japanese during that war took it seriously to the point that they are still not comfortable around Japanese people. But how did the greater culture think of it?
What’s been hardest for me here is that the Japanese have no use for me, don’t afford me any special treatment. (It’s true all you two-week tourists: my neighbors in Nemuro don’t bow to me, they smoke and stare). That the Japanese think they are the bees’ knees and don’t put me on a cultural pedestal. Like it or not, the black Africans did that (except in South Africa), the Central Americans did that, the Indians did that, the North Africans did that. I very much, and very much non-politically correctly--got innately used to non-white people rolling out the red carpet for me when I showed up. Is it that Japan was not, or was very lightly, colonized? I’ve heard from white friends who have worked in the Middle East that they’ve been treated as second class citizens there, which is how I am treated here. I did not expect it. Not that I mind it, beyond the minor day-to-day racial humiliations. In fact, I think it’s important. Ugh. This has become so ugly. I’ll stop now.
But what I didn’t tell you about my bike trip was a huge piss up I had in Abashiri. That’s a big town on the Sea of Okhotsk. Anyway, it took about ten days of riding to get there, and what my map didn’t tell me was that the campground I would stay at was a seven kilometer ride out of town…straight up hill. Yes, after riding all day thinking I’d cruise into my campground and relax, the very hardest part was yet before me. My thigh muscles shook and I wanted to cry as I pushed the bike up all seven of those steep kilometers. Then I made my camp, spun down the hill on the bike in a blur, and settled in at the only bar in town that said ‘Bar’ above its door in English.
Well, I thought I was going to tell you a lot about that night. But reflecting on it, I’ve decided to keep it to myself. The one think I will say is that the proprietor spoke perfect English, and I had that night the only long and easy conversation I’ve had here in English in three months. And he was glad to speak English to me, too. He learned his English in Oregon, where he worked for seven years as a sushi chef. He lived in a two room apartment with six other Japanese guys, and they were hassled by the police all the time, and he suffered minor racial humiliations to the point that he doesn’t want to ever visit America again. But he made and saved money, enough to open a bar, and the few white friends he made redeemed that time for him in a way, enough so that he was glad I came in, and so that he wanted to take me out for my first snack-bar experience. Japan really is a mirror for the Caucasian world, as Donald Ritchie says. In meeting that guy, I met myself. He treated me as I’d have treated him had we met in the States. I woke up in my tent in the morning way up on that hill with a splitting headache and memories that came to me of laughing Japanese people who had question after question for me that he was glad to translate. Did I like Japan, they wanted to know. I did. Did I find it hard to live here? Yes.
“We will always live between the two places now,” my friend smiled and told me at some point in the night. “We will always know things that the others don’t.”
Japan redeems itself in small ways for me the way America did for him. An important thing to remember about race is that for how different we all are, we can all reproduce together still. As a half-breed myself, this seems like the most important thing. Half-breeds prove that we are all tied. We show the arrogant races that they can never be separate from the rest.
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