| Sunday, September 16, 2007 1:15AM | | | | The Great Japan Debate | Posted By: Tony Dsouza
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The following is part of an exchange I had with my friend Matt Walsh, an instructor at Massachusetts Bay Community College. We went to graduate school at Hollins University, which by the way is an all-women’s college, another usual experience come to think of it. After earning our M.A.s, Matt followed a route that led him to two years in Niigata, Japan, as a JET teacher, while I joined the Peace Corps and taught AIDS awareness in Ivory Coast. We’d exchanged snail mail letters between those two countries talking about our experiences back then. Now we talk about Japan on email. There’s a little Japanese here for the non-Japanese reader, but it goes by quick. It’s the usual blather between old buddies trying out their Japanese, of which Matt’s is lightyears more accomplished. For the non-English reader, well, you don’t even know what I’m saying right now anyway, Haha. Notice that I’ve left in Matt’s compliments about my blog, which I didn’t edit out purely for the sake of factual integrity. I also didn’t edit out the Japanese language bits for that same reason, and not at all to show off. We talk books a minute, but then it turns to Japan.
Tony DSouza
Matt-san,
Ohayogozaimas. Boston wa ogenkidesuka? Boku wa Sapporo a ima desu. Boku wa zutsuu ga suru. Hontoo totemo. Zenzen daijobu desnai!!! Demo, sakuya wa takusan ichiban ban deshta. Nazay nada watashi no Nihon onnanokotachi ni-nin deshta, tanzen!!!!! Kanojora no okane desu. Utsukusshi, kanemochi, to nijusan-sai!!!! Anata wa netande imaska? Anata wa 'Becky' ga o shitte imasuka? Terebi tarento desu. Boku wa kanojo ga totemo diskidesu.
Matthew Walsh wrote:
Tony-san!
Omedeto gozaimasu. Ni-nin no onnanoko wa, iiiii naaaaa. Tanishosooo. Mitai, mitai.
Sono shumatsu wa, Niigato no tomodachi kita. Honto ni, hisashiburii deshita. Takusan Nihon no ryori narrata. Daikichi shiteru? Yakitori ya desu. Yakitori daisuki. Kino, umeshiso to torinegi tsukuta. Nasu denkaku mo tsukuta. Oishikatta yo!
Nihongo ga jozu yo. Hayai narrata.
I asked my friend about obon, which is generally celebrated in August, about why they'd celebrated in July in Nemuro. She says Nemuro must follow the old calendar. I wonder how different things are there than Niigata was.
We did lots of reminiscing over the weekend. I can't wait to be back in Japan.
Let me know when you make your next PEN post. That's good stuff.
--Matt
Tony DSouza
Hi Matt.
I've sent you some books. I put up a couple new posts on the PEN blog, it should take a couple days for them to show.
I really liked that collection of stories by the woman who teaches in California. The cover was beautiful. My only gripe was that every story was almost exactly the same. Dead children/parents/siblings, disconnetedness from both Japan and humanity. The details were wonderful.
Nemuro is very different from Niigata. Our experiences here are as different as we are.
Sorosoro ikimasu,
Tony
Matthew Walsh
Hey Tony, I got the books--and I'm psyched. How great would it be to live in one of those traditional houses? That's a beautiful book.
Tony DSouza wrote:
I'm reading a collection of stories from the Showa period. I think it's a well-known anthology. Have you read it? I'll send it to you.
Matthew Walsh wrote:
Hey Tony,
I think the only anthology I've read is the one Goosen edited, a collection of short fiction. That's not true, actually. I've read some newer thematic anthologies...like Inside and Other Short Fiction, which is just more of the same zany, fucked up, incestuous lit. Some of them I liked, but I have to wonder ...is this what gets translated because this is what Vertical and Kodansha and all the other publishing houses think Western audiences want? What else is being written these days?
I read your latest post on PEN, and it got me thinking about our different experiences with Japanese xenophobia. I got to experience it as an insider, though of course I'd never be a real insider. I'd be gaijin if I married Japanese and lived there for 50 years. Just like 3rd generation Koreans in Japan. What I mean, though, is that I had a recognized affiliation...as an employee of the board of education, I was a government worker...as a teacher at the junior high, there was that affiliation, and the PTA and all those associations.
Meanwhile, in my town, there was a Russian Village, like a little Epcot Center. it was a circus. There was a robot woolly mammoth, and russian dancing. lots of outfits, and young Russian girls who moonlighted in snack bars. Many tourists who visited made it a day and stopped into the Dog Park up the road, where they could pick their favorite breed from the kennel and play frisbee in an astroturf pen. Anyway, the Russians' experience of Suibara was so different than mine. And then there all the Japanese ojiisans who got drunk on sake and told me about their experiences in the war. They still hated the Russians. That's why I have to write that chapter about the prison camp.
I don't know what this email is about, other than, I want you to look up a local JET. Someone who works at one of the local schools. See what Nemuro looks like to them. Maybe you have no interest in this. Their Nemuro is not your Nemuro. But it may be a way for you to see some things that you can't as a visitor, even a long-term visitor, without any ties. You're about as "gai" as any gai-jin can be, without the connection of a group. Anyway, I think it's something worthwhile for you to do--and at worst it'll be the waste of an afternoon and a couple phone calls.
How long are you still? Konkans releases in October, right?
Be well. Keep posting--I really look forward to them.
Tony DSouza wrote:
Yeah, you're right on all counts. I feel like I've failed over here.
When the police arrested me that first day, that just set a tempo. It kind of scared me. I was getting the xenophobia feel everywhere which is always a part of settling in, but that just wasn't what I'd been expecting. I've been stopped 4 other times and questioned by the police, twice in one day when I was on a bicycle ride. The people at the internet cafe make a big show of photocopying my passport before they let me use a computer. It just adds up. Other times people are really nice to me. When I go to Sapporo and go out drinking, there are always Japanese who want to talk to me and talk about the US.
I met a JET guy in a neighboring town. He told me there were two JETs here in Nemuro, but they left last month. I was amazed. I had never seen them anywhere. He'd been to Nemuro and he knew a lot of places that I didn't. I do go into places just to explore, but it's hard a lot to just walk into a place. You can't look in through the window first to see what's going on because there are no windows, and sometimes I walk into an empty restaurant and sometimes I walk into a smoky place filled with yakuza-type guys all looking at me so I know I definitely don't belong there. It's like buying fried food at the supermarket. Sometimes I bite into it and it's really good, like chicken or red beans, and sometimes it's half-raw oysters. People talk to me in the shops and things. I'm just not in any groups, like you say, & haven't met anyone who speaks English enough to have friends. I enjoy biking to Ainu sites and just being a part of the landscape. It took me awhile to 'see' Japan, like my first time through Sapporo, I hated it because it was all industrial and new, but now I like it a lot because I understand that that's how Japan is. I really like the party zone there and the university. I of course love the food. I've got six more weeks that includes another trip around Hokkaido, trips to Hiroshima and Kyoto, and I'm giving a reading at the International House of Japan on the 26th of October. I got to do a long distance bicycle trip up the coast of Hokkaido that has always been a dream of mine, and I've learned more about the Ainu that I can ever use really. But I have felt very isolated and alone and haven't fallen in love with Japan the way I wanted to. I think I could have if the circumstances had been right. But I came up here completely alone, and experiences I had here early on made me withdraw into myself. I didn't have the energy I usually have coming out of that Volz story and right into this. Everyday I'm like "Go out and force yourself on somebody." But then the park is so beautiful to walk in, and easier to do, and I'm like "Fuck it."
Can I put your letter on my blog??
Matthew Walsh wrote:
Hey Tony, it's good to hear back from you so soon. I'm glad you have 6 weeks left. I'd love to have 6 weeks anywhere right about now, looking down a long calendar of classes and night classes, committees and meetings. Most of it I'm really digging--again I've got students I love working with and projects I like doing--but it's a bit tiring. It felt good, earlier, to take a break from papers and read your blog, think about Japan for a while. Of course you can add my thoughts to your blog. But you surely haven't failed over there. I remember talking to you before you went--I know what you wanted Japan to be for you. I'm sorry that's not what it's been, but that's not failure, it's what you've found.
When I took a bunch of high schoolers to Komatsu three summers ago, I lived with a homestay family. They'd been a homestay family for years, had a guest bedroom and knew all the other homestay families. I wrote them a letter before I got there, and I worked forever on it--looking up the kanji, checking it over with a few Japanese students at MassBay. When I got there, they seemed pretty disappointed with my Japanese. Usually, when you say, "gomen nasai, watashi no Nihongo amari...." the other person says, "Iieee, ieee. Anata no nihongo wa jouzu, jouzu desu!" and I say, "Sono koto nai, kedo...." Anyway, this guy would just say, yes, you’re right, your Japanese is terrible. (not that he'd picked up a word of English from his ten years of hosting.) Anyway, they were both good people, very good people...it's just that I felt like another homestay guy in a long line of homestay guys. I liked them, despite a coolness between us. But their son was an absolute asshole. He'd sit at the breakfast table in his blue construction worker jumpsuit, white towel wrapped around his head, chewing on some plastic wrapped bakery good and smoking a cigarette between bites...and he NEVER, EVER looked at me. He didn't talk to me. He didn't answer my questions, which I knew were in good Japanese, except in straight one-word answers, never looking at me. One night his mother made him take me with him to the high school, where he played soccer with his friends, and he resented me for it. He introduced me to nobody, made jokes I didn't understand about gai-jin, and I hated him. After that, I started asking him why he didn't have a girlfriend. I was a dick about it I guess. I asked him in front of his parents, at the breakfast table, and later his father told me that his son would be working for the next four to five years, and when he had enough money, then he'd be suitable for a wife. One day when I was home alone I went into his room, full of musty laundry and porn and plastic bags of seven-eleven food. I don't know why I did that. It didn't explain why he hated me.
Komatsu was so much different for me than Niigata had been. The best part was when Niigata came to Komatsu. I'd emailed some teachers I'd really missed from Sasakami, and they all met me in Kanazawa. It was most of a day's drive to meet me, and one of the teachers came all the way up from Osaka, where he'd moved after I left. My kocho-sensei came down, too, the guy who'd taught me judo between classes, and Ben, the paralympic skier, and Hara and Ichi, friends from the village office. They meant for me all that was good about my time in Japan. I still get emails once in awhile from them, and I know I'll go back. But I was lonely in Japan, too. Lonelier than I'd ever been. My first winter, I'd drink tall Asahis and eat conbeni food and crawl under my kotatsu to keep warm, and watch tv I couldn't understand. The only English show they had on tv was Full House. Can you believe that? On the weekends, I'd get the hell out of there and drive my little white Daihatsu Topaz to the nearest gai-jin gathering. I think the JETs for me must've been like the PeaceCorps workers were for you. People we could relate to, people who were also outsiders.
Those people at the bars who stare at you, who laugh at you for being gaijin, sometimes I think they're laughing at themselves, for how little they know the outside world, and sometimes, for how little they care to know it. It's the only place I've ever felt like a second class citizen, not even, a second-rate person. But I guess it's like here, in the U.S., right? In so many ways. There are fuckers and there are the rest.
I don't know what this email is about. But I want to write more of it. It's amazing how much I remember so clearly.
Have you had ume shiso before? I'm growing shiso in my yard, and inside in my window. It's the perilla plant. One of my favorite yakitoris is chicken wrapped in a shiso leaf, with ume paste, plum, spread on top. If you get a chance, go to a Daikichi, or some yakitoriya, and order some ume shiso yakitori.
I love you, brother. Can't wait to get together with you when you get back, and really talk about all this.
Be well.
--Matt
Tony DSouza
Yes, that JET stuff sounds like how we were in the Peace Corps. Months in the bush and then a weekend of R&R where you just spoke English, ate hamburgers, closed the door on Africa.
But the Africans, at least the people I lived with, they were eager and up in your face about meeting you and getting to know you. That was hard as well. But it was impossible to be isolated in the village. You were going to talk to fifty people everyday whether you wanted to or not. Some days here, I don't get more than my extra formal bow--which is also kind of embarrassing--from the check-out girl at the supermarket. Life really is about each other, getting to know each other. I know how they have that agoraphobia thing here where people lock themselves in a room and their parents leave food outside the door for them and they stay in there for weeks or months. Japan will let you do that if you want to, and the States does, too. Africa didn't. No way. Being here has really given me a lot of sympathy for Japanese tour groups in the States. How awkward they look, how they stick together and take pictures of everything. I know now that those trips are very expensive for them and once in a lifetime kinds of things for many, and so of course they take a lot of pictures. And for as out of place and overwhelmed I feel here, they feel that there. I really thought I knew something about Japan before I came here. But even after reading all those books and watching all those movies, I still didn’t. Even on that drive through Central America last year, I was shocked at how different, and indigenous, Central America was compared to my assumptions about it. People who talk with authority about cultures and places they haven’t experienced first-hand…well, even having been born in the States and living there most of my life, I still can’t say I ‘know’ it. I know as little about the real psychology of my neighbors at home as I do about the hopes and desires of the check-out girl here.
Thanks for pep-talk. I’ve never really heard from you before that you had a hard time at all while you were in Niigata. You always light up when you talk about Japan. But that makes sense to me, too. Being in the ‘fish-bowl’ in Africa drove me mad at times, but it’s the good experiences that come first to mind after the fact, and being with friends and food are always the first of those. I’ll eat some ume on something today somewhere, Haha. And maybe a nice fresh Hanasaki crab. Domo arigato gazaimasu, Matt-sama. Watashi wa ganabarimasu!
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