Culture Shock 2: Electric Boogaloo

You know you’re a foreigner when the first local friend you make is a cat.

Between my terrible Japanese, the Japanese’s suspicion of foreigners, and their notorious social awkwardness, I had the damndest time trying to find anyone to talk to or who will even tolerate my presence. As I said, many people move away from me when I sit next to them, even if I’m just reading a book. Besides, animals are very often better than people anyhow.

About two weeks after coming here, as I was heading up the hill to my apartment, I heard an insistent meowing. I stopped, trying to pinpoint the sound, and finally found a kitty hiding under a parked car. This orange tabby had a chewed up ear and was missing most of her tail, but none of that is terribly uncommon among cats here. I am wary of strays as a rule, as anyone should be, but I was so starved for animal attention (or pretty much any companionable interactions) that I put on a glove, crouched down, and put out my hand, trying to coax her out.

It really didn’t take much coaxing. She got up and trundled over the moment I presented my hand. She stalked me a little, circling and investigating, but only for a few seconds before she rammed her cheek into my glove for scratches. When it became clear after a few minutes that she wouldn’t take any swipes at me, I pulled off my glove. Taking the time to do that much, though, set her to meowing again and she did not stop until I resumed lavishing attention on her. Any time I stopped petting or scratching her, she would start meowing and rolling around on the ground, turning herself inside out for belly rubs.

I must have spent a half hour messing with that cat.

Worth every minute.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen her since. I’m just going to assume that she’s moved on to another neighborhood or that a kind family has taken her in. Seriously, though, why are there so many stray cats in this country?! I see them everywhere!

Luckily, I found some good people to hang out with. They're not cats, but I'll take what I can get XP

Even more common than strays, though, are students in school uniforms. I knew before coming here that uniforms were often required for junior high and high school, but now that I’m here, I am noticing some rather unsettling things. The vast majority of uniforms are modeled after old British navy uniforms. Apparently this trend goes way back. By now, the outfits are just kind of cute. However, I wonder if the children or parents recognize that they are dressing up like soldiers. Again, that is not too alarming. However, every now and then, I see even elementary school children dressed in uniforms that are just a little too similar to officer uniforms from World War II. Just in case you need a refresher, that was a HORRIBLE time for Japan, both from how many of their people died and from how many they killed and brutalized. They didn’t exactly cultivate a positive image during that period.

From what I have read and seen, Japan seems to have a tendency to glorify its past and forget about the bad parts. I witnessed such just a few days ago when I spoke with a Japanese mother. She asked how I became interested in Japan and I mentioned a paper that I wrote in high school on the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Her face lit up.

“Oh! Suberashi!” she exclaimed. “I named my son after foreign diplomat of that time. His name is Kaoru! I want my son to work for global peace any happiness the way he did.” Now, I could not remember who Kaoru was at the time, but something did not sound quite right about that. Upon getting home, I looked up the name.

Inouye Kaoru was the Foreign Minister of the time and he publicly said that the people of China and Manchuria (northern China and the Korean Peninsula) had forfeited their rights to autonomy by failing to westernize. He was one of the politicians who helped to instigate the Sino-Japanese War (about as inhumane a war as you can get) and the Russo-Japanese War.

So he was working for global peace? Well, in some way, I suppose he was working for world peace, except that Japan’s version of peace at the time was terrible for its non-Japanese inhabitants.

Someone once said that each country has its own way of confronting the sordid parts of its past: Germany apologizes for it, America ignores it, and Japan pretends that it never happened.

I didn’t realize how true that was until I got here.

In the heart of Tokyo stands Yasakuni Shrine, which is largely dedicated to soldiers and animals that died during and before the World War II era. According to Ryan Muther, the shrine and the nearby Yūshūkan War Museum both portray Japan before the end of WWII as a reluctant combatant and something of a liberator for East Asia. In the museum’s catalogue, for example, Japanese historian Kobori Keiichiro says that “Japan had no way but to use force as a leader of East Asian civilization to confront Western civilization, whose true nature was to expand throughout the earth, and to fight for self-existence and self-defense.” Yes, the west was expansionist, but this was some time after Japan invaded China.

Within that same catalogue, Kobori calls the Nanjing Massacre the “Nanjing Incident” and portrays the imperial military as professional and organized. There is no mention of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese people that the Japanese killed, raped, tortured, and robbed over those months. There is even historical evidence from that time showing how several Japanese officers competed with each other to see how many Chinese they could each kill with a katana, after the Chinese military had been slaughtered. Yet even now, looking at the Yūshūkan Museum’s English translation of its brochure, the museum describes the soldiers they are portraying as “high-principled people… who devoted themselves to building a ‘peaceful nation.’” [page 1, panel 1, last paragraph]

Contemporary, mainstream Japanese historians reject such ideas publicly, but the shrine and museum still stand tall and its owners have done nothing to correct the image. Even though the government is not in direct control of the shrine, I question whether anything would change even if it was. Right now, for example, there is a movement in Japan to make its constitution more warlike again, as it was in the early 1900s.

So yeah. Denial isn’t just an American thing. It’s everywhere.

For a more detailed and eloquent analysis of this bizarre narrative, check out Chapter 3 of Muther’s paper, which you can find here! It’s a fairly quick read and rather enlightening.

Perhaps now you understand my more than mild alarm at such militaristically attired kids.
That alarm escalated on my first day of school, when the students were required to stand in orderly lines outside. Throughout the announcements and introductions, the vice-principal and other faculty barked such intense orders that even I jumped, though I was not on the receiving end.

Once in the halls, though, everyone became much like any other child or teacher. If anything, the students are far more rowdy in the halls than we were at my own school, a millennia and a half ago. These kids run, scream, and get to do as they please for the most part during their break periods… It’s pandemonium, but compared to the martial atmosphere I had experienced just an hour before, this was a major relief.

The school I attended just had a bunch of hard-asses, but we had to be silent in the hallways and walk single-file or else. Here? Just don’t run in the halls. Every day, I hear screaming, laughing, shouting… sounds normally reserved for once the final bell rings in America. Personally, I see little harm in it, so long as everyone is orderly during drills and emergencies which, guess what?, they are. So why not just let them be kids?

In addition, at least at the school where I teach, the teachers and students have SUCH a long time for lunch! Between lunch and recess, we have an hour and fifteen minutes! In my own elementary school, we were given twenty-five minutes, but a lot of that time went into getting into neat lines, waiting for the teacher to bring us to the cafeteria, and waiting to buy lunch. That often meant only fifteen minutes to eat. Oh, and remember those orderly lines? If we did not form them to our teachers’ satisfaction or were not quiet enough, the teacher would stop the line in the hall and make us stand there or even usher us back into the classroom to start from square one, all of which cut into our limited eating time. When junior high came around, it just got worse. If I did not bring my own lunch and I had to thus wait and buy one, I would be lucky if I had eight minutes to cram it all down my gullet.

Going to substitute teach at another school today, though, the students only got about fifteen minutes to eat, once everything was served and they were given permission to begin. I hear wildly different lunch schedules from my coworkers at other schools, so perhaps there is no set rule like there is in American cafeterias.

This is strange, since Japan seems to revolve around rules and uniformity. It is as though the schools (and those bizarre festivals I have mentioned before) are exceptions.

Speaking of exceptions and rules, there are no weapons to be seen anywhere in this country, which is a major relief. The only people I have seen armed with more than a stick are police officers in the most high-profile Tokyo neighborhoods. I’m not even allowed to carry my pocket knife, which I have done nearly every day since starting high school. It’s a Boy Scout thing. Even a month later, I still find myself reaching into my pocket for any number of tasks. It is such a useful tool and I miss having it on hand. It’s also not exactly a practical weapon, but when in Rome, right?

One of the benefits to being here, and I mean a MAJOR benefit, is the nationalized health care system. Even before I was fully employed, I was enrolled in the program. One of my coworkers got horrific food poisoning three days after arriving and had to go to the hospital for two days. After insurance coverage, though, she only had to pay about $65. That is INSANELY cheap compared to America!

Heck, one night, I had one of my frequent restless (often nightmarish) dreams and I savagely kicked the apartment wall. Being asleep, I had no technique and smashed my toe. THAT woke me up and I seriously wondered if I had broken it. However, instead of thinking “Oh god, how am I going to get to a hospital?,” I thought “Well, it’s a good thing I’ve got my national health insurance card now!
THAT’S how much of a difference the healthcare makes, just in my mindset!

On the other hand, there were some other troubles in adjusting, as always. For one, my bank at home could not get its act together and I was broke for about two weeks while I waited for them to transfer money to my checking account. Toward the end, I had only two cups of instant ramen and three oranges to eat for about four days. One day, I found myself wandering through the nearby convenience store, trying to find some food I could buy with the 88 yen I had left.

That’s right, I only had 88 yen left. That’s 81 cents in American dollars.

I started salivating when I found a fish cake for 80. Mind you, I don’t like fish cakes. Hell, I hate the vast majority of fish, except for sushi! But I was famished. Literally. I found out when I got home, though, that it wasn’t even a fish cake, but rather something akin to a giant hash brown! Potatoes through and through. I was craving protein, but that just had to do for the moment. Can’t buy much with 8 yen. The next night, the bank came through with my money and I cooked myself a veritable stir-fry feast that I had a week’s worth of leftovers for! I have been eating like a king at home ever since, largely because groceries are so cheap here! That part of the culture I could easily get used to.

What I quickly decided to not get used to was airing my futon the Japanese way. Pretty much every apartment and house has at least a small veranda attached where people can hang their laundry to dry on a washing pole. Here, people hang their futons over the balcony railings just about every day. I thought it seemed a reasonable idea, so I cleaned the dust off the railing and followed suit with the locals!

I came back that afternoon to find that a bird had shat on it. Yup. Good system.

Maybe I just have bad luck with birds. I mean, another one managed to drop a bomb into my hair while I was in Kyoto last week, so maybe there’s a theme?

Oh yeah! I was in Kyoto last week! However, I have rambled on for long enough, so here’s the Song of the Week and a picture of my school lunch last Friday!

This is a full fish, deep fried all at once. I am holding it's head/mouth in this picture.

Song of the Week: The weather is taking a turn for the warmer, so “When The Seasons Change” by Five Finger Death Punch has been running through my head for the last couple of days. I know, way too literal reading of the song and they've got a crappy band name, but they’ve got some good music too! Anyhow, enjoy!