As far as I know, there has been not a single confirmed case of swine flu in Japan, and yet if you've been following this blog, it should probably come as no surprise to you that the country is flipping out. I'm sick of every Japanese person asking me if I have swine flu, and I'm sick of them asking if my family and friends have it.
One of the mothers at the temple told me this week that her sister and nephew recently returned from a 10-day California vacation. Apparently all passengers at Narita had to submit to a 3-hour medical exam--perhaps understandable. But the clincher: the nine year-old nephew is, by government decree, under quarantine in his house for ten full days and is not allowed to return to his public school until the government approves it.
The final straw may have come yesterday on the train when I had a conversation with a man sitting across from me that went like this: "Are you a foreigner?" "Ummmmmm, yes." "Where are you from?" [I'm so sick of hearing this anytime I'm anywhere in public.] "America." "Do you have swine flu?" "Ummmmmm, no." "I'm not so sure about that."
And with that, he got up and walked away from me, to the opposite end of the train. I wish I would have told him I did have swine flu. Or at least sneezed on the bastard.
I wrote last time about recent visitors I’ve had here. Aside from being thrilled to have visitors for the obvious reasons, I enjoy my friends’ visits because they are able to see all the thousands of eccentricities about Japan that my eyes have long since adjusted to.
One such eccentricity concerns the fruit in this country. Japanese fruit is freakishly large. Consequently, perhaps, it is laughably expensive, and so fruit—or, at least what Americans think of as fruit: apples, strawberries, grapes, melons—is not a part of the daily diet. As I noted in my September 19 posting, apples and oranges are replaced in the food pyramid by things like persimmons and Japanese plums (which, I should say, are pretty unlike non-Japanese plums). Strawberries and melons and what not can be found in the grocery store, but they are luxury items. They are given as gifts frequently, just as flowers are often given in the U.S.
These fruits, as I mentioned, are abnormally large in size. I haven’t read anything on this topic, so I don’t know for sure that the fruit is genetically-modified, but I think it’s a safe assumption. I can think of no other explanation for softball-sized apples. I’ve tried discussing this theory with a few Japanese friends, but they have all unequivocally insisted that Japanese fruit is entirely natural. I’ve filed this claim away with the other myths about Japan that I’ve debunked since being here, like “Lots of people in Tokyo speak English,” and “It doesn’t really matter whether you throw your wasabi wrapper into the burnable or non-burnable trash can.”
Generally, the bigger and redder a piece of fruit appears, the more expensive it is. I noticed a while ago that there are specialty fruit stores around Tokyo that sell nothing but watermelons priced seemingly on the value of their weight in gold. I was a bit surprised recently, however, to come across an entire upscale restaurant in Shinjuku that has nothing on its menu but dishes made from fruit. A friend and I decided to give it a try. I figured the restaurant, located inside a Gucci store, had to be good because it took 45 minutes to get a table. You could actually order an entire full-course meal with each dish made from fresh fruit. I ordered some kind of special strawberry dish, though it was a little bit of a hit on the wallet. I even took a picture of it. I’ve since learned that taking pictures of your food is a very Japanese thing to do.
P.S. If you don’t believe me about how expensive the fruit is in Tokyo, try googling around for a bit, or watch this YouTube video.
If you haven’t noticed, the blog is badly in need of updating. The last 6 weeks have been a bit crazy—but mostly in a good way. I’m going to try to make a good-faith effort to start updating the blog again. Major events of the last 6 weeks include:
• Sam’s visit, which included my first major visit to a museum in Tokyo, the Yebisu Beer Museum.
The museum was a bit light on English signage, but beer tasting transcends the language barrier, so all was not lost. The museum also had some really weird exhibits, including what my English-language pamphlet describes as a “magic vision theater.” Here’s the blurb right from the pamphlet: “Here, a wondrous 3D ‘Magic Vision’ cut will tell of the mysteries of the good taste of beer in an interesting manner. In this allegorical fantasy, Gambrinus, the king of beer, engages in a desperate contest of wits over the good taste of beer with The Evil One of the forest. To the victor goes to the hear of the beautiful Beer Fairy.” It was sorta like A Midsummer Night’s Dream meets The Big Lebowski. This is one weird country.
• Some personal traveling, which was a much-needed break from temple life.
• My family’s visit to Japan, which included lots of temples, shrines, and amazing cherry blossoms.
• Ellen’s visit, which included one of the best nights out in Tokyo I’ve had.
I’m just going to go ahead and say it: Japan can be a racist place. I like it, however, when the racism works to my advantage. The particular nightclub we decided to go to in Shibuya was charging as a cover the equivalent of $35 for guys, $25 for girls, and $10 for foreigners. This seemed outrageous, and I couldn’t believe such a practice could be legal, but who was I to complain? The thinking goes, apparently, that Westerners are really fun, know a lot about hip-hop and dance music, and are excellent dancers. The irony was not lost on me. Living here can really feel like one giant, very weird Twilight Zone episode. The club was awesome, with one hip-hop floor and one techno floor. The only downside of the night, thanks to the lack of public transportation between 12:30-5:30 a.m., was not getting home until 6:30 in the morning. Big props to Ellen for managing to go out hard right after a 14-hour flight from New York.
A scene from the "magic vision theater" at the beer museum.
In additionto witnessing my first attempts at skiing, this last month has also been an interesting one musically.
Jessica and I saw Coldplay in concert a few weeks ago at this massive arena in Saitama, the prefecture north of Tokyo, and last week I saw Jason Mraz perform in Shibuya. I had a great time at both shows, even if neither got really rowdy. Chris Martin is great, but he’s just not good for rocking out to. (The great Coldplay pics are courtesy of Jessica).
At work, I’ve spent a lot of time this last month shaking, dancing, wiggling, jumping, hopping, flying, eating, and running my sillies out [Raffi, my apologies for bastardizing your song]. I also taught my older classes the Cookie Jar song, which I didn’t think they’d like, but it’s about the only thing they want to do now. I added an extra dimension to the song by having all the kids close their eyes and put their heads down on their desks before the song; then, I hide a cardboard cookie on one of their desks. After the moment in the song when the alleged cookie heister is accused “Yes, you!” that person checks inside his/her desk, and if no cookie is found, the person responds with the traditional “Couldn’t be!” and the song continues until the perpetrator is correctly identified; if a cookie is discovered in the desk, the student screams “Yea, me!” and the song ends. I continue to be shocked by how long this is able to entertain a group of 10 year-olds.
The Cookie Jar song has actually proven to be a welcome respite from the endless playing of this one boy-band song that seems to have put on repeat by every radio station in Japan over the last few months. I hear it at every bar, in the ramen shop, and on the sumo wrestlers’ iPods. I can even hear it when I’m teaching in class—one of the mothers has it as her cell phone ring, and her phone seems to go off every five minutes. I’m so tempted to do as I used to do with my Sunday School 7th graders—take away her phone and make her parents get it back from me, but I’m sure there’s a rule against that in Japan.
Enjoy扉 ("Tobira") by GReeeN. That's actually the name of the band, and this is actually the music video. And no, despite what's in the video, the band members are not 4 white guys. For reasons I don't entirely understand, the band members have never shown their faces and refuse to reveal their true identities—something about not wanting to get distracted while studying for dental school exams. Oh, Japan...
I'm not sure if I was the only one who noticed, but hearing Chris Martin belt out "you were all yellow!" in a crowded arena in Japan just didn't seem very p.c.
It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve had an exasperating get-me-out-of-here-now experience in Japan, so I suppose I was overdue.
I figured this would be a good time to transfer some of the money I’ve made from my Japanese bank to my American bank because 1) it’d be harder for me to spend the money if it weren’t sitting in my Japanese account and 2) more importantly, the Japanese yen is way strong right now. I actually made my first attempt at making the wire last week on a day when I had a lot of time off from work. I was proud that I thought to look up and write down key phrases like “foreign remittance” before going to the bank. I showed up at the bank and was directed to the second floor, where a sign an English told me that this was the place to do a “foreign exchange.” I took my seat in line next to a sumo wrestler, trying to ignore the now-familiar overpowering smell of talcum powder and baby oils used by the stable managers to dress the wrestlers. After waiting twenty minutes, I was called to a window, where a woman explained what I needed to do to wire money. She began asking what I thought were strange questions, so I thought I had to have been misunderstanding. I asked her to write down the instructions in Japanese, and I said I’d return on Monday after having a friend translate them for me.
I was feeling even more confident when I decided to return to the bank on my lunch break this afternoon. I made sure I had all the right forms, my official Japanese seal, my passbook (like a Japanese checkbook), and my dictionary. A friend had responded to the banker’s note and written exactly what I wanted to have done. The friend also told me that the banker wrote that my transfer had already been approved and that I just needed to return to the bank to complete the transaction. I made my way back to the second floor (no sumo wrestlers this time), where I found myself sitting across from a different woman, one who looked, I thought, even more annoyed to get stuck dealing with the foreigner.
“Rob-san?” she asked, before I could say anything. Apparently the woman from last week had left a note explaining what I was trying to do. This would be painless, I thought! My first order of business was to retrieve the dry cleaning that I had, embarrassingly, left at the bank the prior week. I knew they had it because they had left a message on my cell phone saying so. The woman asked me to identify my lost items, so I told her I had a shirt and a pair of pants. “What color is the shirt?” she asked. “You mean, the one you’re holding right in front of me?!” I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “It’s blue,” feeling pretty confident that my Japanese was correct. “And what size are the pants?” she asked. For a second, I thought she might have been making fun of me, but then I remembered that by Japanese standards, I’m not as skinny. The woman disappeared for a moment, and I saw her confer with an older gentleman in the back of the bank floor. I had apparently identified my own clothing to the bank manager’s satisfaction, for when she returned, she handed me my dry cleaning. I should’ve called it a day and stopped there, but I pressed on.
Pretty quickly, I reached the point I had gotten to the previous week. I had all the forms filled out, and I was ready to stamp my katakana name and get out of there. Then, the interrogation began. “What is your purpose?” she asked. Summoning my best Japanese and utilizing the vocabulary that I had studied prior to undertaking this endeavor, I replied: “I am a customer of this bank, and I would like to transfer money from my personal Japanese account to my personal account in America. Here is all the information you need.” She looked puzzled, as if I didn’t understand her question, so she pointed to the word purpose written in English and even added a little question mark next to it for emphasis. I responded in kind by showing her the note my friend had written. She read it a few times and then the questioning began again. “Are you sending money to your children?” “No.” “Do you have children?” “No.” “Are your children dead?” “No.” “So, you have children?” “No, I do not have children, and I have never had children.” “So you are sending money to your parents?” “No.” “You do not have parents?” “No, I have parents, but I am not sending money to them.” “Where do they live?” “Huh? What?” Again: “Where do they live?”
I managed to steer the conversation away from my parents and back to me. She asked me again what my purpose was. I tried to tell her again, this time slower and more emphatically, “This is MY money, and I WANT to transfer it.” “Why?” she asked. I typed the word savings into my dictionary and pointed at the screen. She asked again what my purpose was, and this time, I was about to reach across the table and punch her in the face. “Savings,” I said. “Why?” “Savings.” “Why?” “Savings!” “And then?” “More savings.” “And then?” “More savings!” At that moment, I had a sudden flashback to my fifth grade teacher explaining conversation patterns to the class, and I could hear him saying that conversations between adults and toddlers usually take the form of question-statement-question-statement-question-statement.
After about the tenth time she asked why, I cracked under the Japanese torture tactics and gave her an answer that I thought would satisfy her: “Maybe I’ll use the money to pay for law school,” I said. This was a terrible mistake on my part because it set her off on a whole new line of sadistic questioning. “How much does law school cost?” she asked. I told her. “How will you pay for law school with this little money?” she asked suspiciously. Then: “And how many years is law school?” I told her. “And why do you want to go to law school?” she asked. “To become a lawyer.” “What kind of lawyer?” I was, by this time, more than a little angry, but I tried to reassure myself that I was probably just caught in the middle of some cultural misunderstanding. I resolved to stay calm and answer her questions one at a time. “What is the name of your law school?” she asked. I told her I hadn’t even applied yet. “So you don’t have any acceptance letter?” “No.” “So, then, you don’t know that you will attend law school?” She had me cornered. Then, she asked me to provide the bank with copies of pamphlets of law schools I would like to attend. I would have done anything at that moment to have gotten the hell out of out of Japan.
Her interest in my post-graduate plans waned, and she began asking about my undergraduate university and what I had studied. The word Princeton seemed to register with her, but she immediately asked for proof. I was feeling more and more like a criminal and began to realize that there’s no way this could be standard procedure for wiring money. I produced my Princeton ID from my wallet, and she seemed genuinely surprised. Score one point for the foreigner! At this point, the following items were all displayed on the table before Satan: my passport, my Japanese bank card, my alien registration card, my Princeton ID, my American ATM card, my credit card, my passbook, and my Japanese seal. She began asking more questions about my American bank account, so I pulled out what I thought would be my final trump card: a blank check. She picked it up with two fingers, like a child holding a dirty diaper. “What’s this?” she asked. “In America, we use these to make payments. Here is my account information. Your bank may keep it for security reasons.” She pointed to the large letters V-O-I-D I had written over the check. “And what’s this?” she asked. I took a deep breath and explained. “Well,” the woman said, “if the check is ‘void,’ then why would we want to keep it? Here, you can have it back.”
Over the next half-hour, the woman and I stared each other down from across the table, like two generals engaged in an intense game of Battleship. We came to a few more impasses. If I remember correctly, she was puzzled by why some forms of identification had my last-name first and some forms had it last. I also found myself explaining at length what a middle name is, why it only sometimes appeared on my identification, and how it can be shortened using a single alphabet letter. Our last melee was over the branch name of my American bank; I explained over and over and over that the bank did not have a branch name but could simply be identified by its address (Japanese banks, if you can’t guess, all have special branch names). “Sir, there must be a branch name!” she insisted. “There isn’t one.” “But that doesn’t make sense!” “It also doesn’t make sense that your bank doesn’t have an address!” is what I wanted to say, but I took another breath and began explaining again.
At last, her questions came to an end. She took my identification, told me to wait, and disappeared. After fifteen minutes, I told the closest person that I needed to leave because I was going to be late getting back to work. I was told to be patient. Ten minutes later, I again said I needed to leave immediately, and I asked for my ID back. I was told to wait a little bit longer. A few minutes later, the woman reappeared and handed me a transaction receipt. We exchanged some (insincere?) bows, and two hours after entering the bank, I left, racing back to work.
***
As much as I try to laugh at these sorts of experiences, there’s a dark element to them that I, like many foreigners, I believe, try to ignore, and that’s xenophobia. Xenophobia, I think, is just a more syllabic, more Hellenic way of saying racism. It does not manifest itself, as it does elsewhere in the world, as outright contempt or (heaven forbid!) disrespect toward foreigners; rather, in Japan I found that it asserts itself as a passive mistrust and suspicion of foreigners. All individuals not holding Japanese passports are required to submit to fingerprints before entering Japan. Personally, I think this seems like a smart idea, but I know many foreign nationals in Japan resent the fingerprinting.
I can’t say I blame Japan for what I perceive as its xenophobia. Along with North and South Korea, Japan is one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in the world. Different figures estimate that the population is either 98 or 99 percent ethnically Japanese. The remaining portion is almost entirely ethnically Chinese and Korean. Foreigners here tend to remark that part of being a Westerner (of European ethnic origin) in Japan means never fitting in anywhere, no matter how good your Japanese or how many years you’ve lived in Japan. Japanese people, no matter how kind, will always regard you with the same social expectations they have for 5 year-old children. Therein arises part of the xenophobia, I think. Because most Japanese people have very little interaction with foreigners, they have a hard time differentiating between what foreigners can’t be expected to know and what they can be expected to know. For example, I appreciate it when people take the time to explain to me how to sit seiza style; I don’t appreciate it when salesclerks explain to me that I’m not supposed to take the tags off of clothes I try on.
I suppose I take for granted the knowledge that people who do not look like me know how to try on clothing and how to use a knife-and-fork. It makes me wonder about whether growing up in a multi-ethnic country is a blessing.
I don’t entertain the idea that people, on an individual level, are xenophobic. I’m convinced that the woman at the bank harbored absolutely no ill-will against me. The xenophobia, rather, is more cultural and institutional. I imagine that the bank simply has special procedures in place for working with alien residents and that that particular branch doesn’t often work with foreigners. For a while in the afternoon, I tried hard to justify the banker’s behavior and her questioning. Then, I relayed the incident—without opining—to a coworker in an attempt to understand the cultural barrier that perhaps I had not seen at the bank. I was surprised by her reaction. She averted her gaze. “I’m so ashamed sometimes,” she said, “by the way Japanese people treat foreigners.” She told me that she had never heard of a Japanese person being asked such invasive questions and that she found the questions obnoxious and rude. I was glad to receive the clarification, but I regretted broaching the subject with her.
Following through with a new year’s resolution to get out of Tokyo more, I’ve started taking some weekend trips, which is why the blogging has been a bit slow. Earlier this month, I spent a long weekend in a tiny Bavarian ski village in the northeastern corner of the Japanese Alps in Nagano Prefecture.
I had heard that Japan had amazing skiing, and while I’m not skier, I thought I should at least check it out. I made arrangements pretty much over night to travel to Nozawa Onsen; travel in Japan is incredibly easy thanks to the shinkansen. Nagano, if you’re unaware, hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics, and Nozawa in particular hosted the biathlon event, which, I learned, combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting.
I stayed at an Austrian-themed guesthouse called Haus St. Anton. It was a serious place, with every room named after a ski village in Austria or Switzerland. I got to stay in room Wengen. Some of the staff even spoke German, though I’ve learned over the last few weeks that seemingly 99% of the foreign skiers in Japan are Australians. The only other American in town also seemed to be staying at the St. Anton, so we spent a lot of the weekend together. Everyone at the inn ate breakfast and dinner together in a small downstairs room.
I did go skiing for the first time, though my attempts were mostly unsuccessful, so I don’t want to dwell there, but the town was beautiful, and the views from the mountains were spectacular. It definitely motivated me to try to do some more traveling, and I may even give skiing another try before the season’s over.
Room Wengen was clearly intended to be proportional to the size of its Swiss ski village namesake.
This is the Austrian-themed dining room where I ate German food in Japan surrounded by Australians.
The Haus St. Anton
This is the central shrine in town where you're supposed to pray for safe and dignified skiing. I guess I needed to pray some more, but at least I was safe.
I attended the sumo tournament once again this last week. I’m a bit amazed by how much I’ve learned about sumo over the last six months, but I suppose that’s what happens when you count sumo wrestlers as your neighbors.
For two and a half weeks this month, my little neighborhood felt pretty trendy, with huge crowds around the sumo stadium everyday. Now, though, the January basho has come and gone, and life in Ryogoku is returning to normal.
Even cooler than the sumo tournament was an opportunity that came along a few weeks ago to attend early morning sumo practice at one of the many neighborhood stables, where the wrestlers live and train. Way back in September, I mentioned that I had met an elderly British woman at the bon dance in the local park. She’s been living in my neighborhood for something like thirty years. I’m not exactly sure what she does, but she once mentioned something about “correcting the English of Japanese bureaucrats.” She also moonlights as a Sumo commentator. Being friends with a sumo commentator is quite the hook-up in Ryogoku, and the woman was kind enough to take a friend and me to see sumo practice at the crack of dawn.
We walked only about two short blocks from the temple before coming to an altogether unassuming-looking building; it looked, in fact, just like every other building on the block except it had vertical bars covering the windows (which I assume are intended to keep intruders out rather than to keep the wrestlers in, since the sumo guys wouldn’t be able to fit through the windows to begin with). The interior was what I expected: a small genkan and a low wooden platform covered in zabuton where sat the stable master. Most of the room was taken up by the dohyo, the sumo ring where the wrestlers were standing around.
As we took our seats on our zabuton, the lower-ranked deshi wrestlers were in the middle of practice. Two guys would wrestle, and the winner would pick his partner for the next bout, and the winner would stay in until he lost a bout, at which point the new winner would pick his preferred partner. The consequence of using this system of practice was that after every bout all of the wrestlers would run into the ring hollering, “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!” In this respect, the practice resembled middle school dodge ball team selections, and I might have chuckled had each one of them not been able to crush me with his big toe.
Eventually, the deshi wrestlers finished, and the higher-ranked sekitori guys took the ring. My sumo commentator friend was scribbling notes (no whispering allowed at practice!) trying to explain what was going, but I can’t say I quite followed everything. Fortunately, sumo is, at essence, relatively simple: the first person to step outside of the ring or to make contact with the ring with any part of the body other than the feet loses. The stable slowly became more and more crowded with visitors sporting cameras, whom I later realized were journalists. The air was heavy with gossip—though, of course, I had no idea what was up. Then, in walked Asashōryū, and even I knew who he was. Asashōryū is sumo’s yokozuna—its grand champion—and he’s by far the most famous sumo wrestler in Japan (in the world, even!) and is one of the country’s most recognizable faces. Unbeknown to my sumo commentator friend, Asashōryū just so happened to choose the particular stable we were at for his morning practice. Practice wasn't quite the same from that point on; it was as if there were an elephant in the room. Word of Asashōryū’s whereabouts seemed to get around, and the place became packed with journalists. All eyes were on Asashōryū and his (comparatively) little sumo sidekick/servant, who was preoccupied scrubbing his boss’ (master’s?) arms and legs. Asashōryū sumoed it up a bit with his fellow sekitori, and I even saw him lose two bouts. He came, he fought, and he left. The wrestlers stretched, and practice wrapped up.
I got to see Asashōryū a couple weeks later at the sumo tournament. I’m pretty sure he didn’t recognize me, but I recognized him. It had been a year since he had won a tournament, and there was speculation that his career was finished. I saw him take a win, though, in the final bout, and the following day, he won the tournament, making him one of the winningest sumo wrestlers ever. Read about it here, if you want.
Not all sumo wrestlers are Japanese. Lots come from eastern Europe, Russia, and Mongolia. Asashōryū (and the other current yokozuna!) are Mongolian, which is a bit of a rumpus in the sumo world (get it?). This guy on the left is Georgian.
On my way to waku-waku class today, I passed one of my 5 year-olds, and (in Japanese) I asked, "Are you ready for class?" He stopped, closed his eyes real tight, thought for a while, and then belted out, "Yes, we can!" I sorta died.
The incident, though, reminded me of something I saw in a shop window when I was traveling through Kansai in December:
Taking out the trash here is pretty complicated. Though I’m biased, I’d say it’s significantly more complicated than taking out the trash in the U.S. It’s completed enough, at least, to merit its own blog posting. There are just so many variables to keep track of.
The first obstacle is deciding what goes in which can. At home, I currently have six different kinds of receptacles, but it’s time to revise my system. At the most basic level, the Japanese gomi deities differentiate between trash that is burnable and is not. This may not sound too daunting, but let’s try a thought experiment: you’re getting up from your seat at a Starbucks-life café, holding a tray with your empty coffee cap and food wrappings. As you approach the trash, you notice several bins and chutes, maybe with some Japanese kanji on them to provide clues—if you’re lucky. A dozen pairs of Japanese eyes are on you, watching to see what the foreigner is going to do. What do you do?
If you’re like me, you’d slowly begin dismantling your tray, dumping the ice into the ice chute, the wooden stirring stick into the burnable bin, the plastic coffee lid into the non-burnable bin. What about the Styrofoam cup, though? And the Cellophane muffin wrapper? Are they burnable or non-burnable? Does it matter which city ward you’re in at the time? Usually, I’ve just about formulated an answer to these questions when the café employee walks up and takes the tray from my hands to finish the task. I might try to feign a protest and put on a little show, but I know the employee will insist on throwing out my trash for me. It’s a bit infantilizing, to be honest, but deep-down, I’m happy I don’t have to worry about it.
(I’ve also felt really infantilized lately by how often I leave a restaurant and am told, “Oh, you use chopsticks so well!” This comment—and it happened as recently as last night—is all the more degrading because I know that, in fact, I do not hold my chopsticks in the proper Japanese fashion. I wonder how a Japanese woman would feel if she were leaving a restaurant in New York and were told, “Wow, you sure know how to use a knife and fork!”)
For a little while, I worried I was the only one who experienced this daily dilemma, but the more I began talking to foreigners, the more I realized that one must be ethnically Japanese in order to be able to understand the country’s waste disposal system. A few days ago, I came across this humor article in Tokyo’s popular English-language magazine. If you’re so inclined, you can read the whole thing, but otherwise, here’s the best part:
I know our ward means well by publishing a colorful how-to recycling guide, complete with overly chipper cartoon characters acting as environmental gurus. But if I beat my head against the wall for three solid minutes, I would get the same result as attempting to puzzle out their guidelines. Milk cartons are cut and flattened, cardboard and paper bundled, wire binding removed from notebooks, buttons cut off old clothes, and plastic bottles… well, they’re given the equivalent of a prison strip search. Caps come off, labels are removed, and the tiny plastic ring around the neck is wrestled into the bin. Same with glass bottles (peel the labels at least), but they get put in a different bin.
Anyway, so the situation with the trash at home is a bit easier. I have the luxury of taking my time without anyone watching when I decide into which can to throw away a broken pen. Still, though, I manage to screw things up, and I’ve been screwing it up continually since I got to Japan. The temple folks always seem to be giving me pointers about how to take out my trash properly. You know how in Office Space everyone keeps telling Peter about how he can’t attach the correct cover sheets? That’s sorta how my life has been for the last 5 months, except instead of having supervisors hassle me about TPS reports, I have monks hassling me about trash.
After months of trial-by-fire, I thought I had finally figured out the trash system. Then, about 10 days ago, I had about an hour-long chitchat with one of the temple administrators about my trash. It appears I was not only sorting improperly, I was also taking out my trash on the wrong days, putting it in the wrong place, and using unauthorized trash bags! I swear I’m not making this up. As I learned, burnable and non-burnable trash get taken out on different days, and cans, cardboard, and cartons get taken out on a different day still! Burnable trash is on Thursdays and sometimes Mondays, recycling is on Tuesdays, and non-burnable is on Saturdays—well, odd-numbered Saturdays. I graciously accepted the box of authorized trash bags I was given and vowed to do a better job taking out my trash.
In the days since then, I’ve learned that the laws concerning what is and isn’t burnable were recently changed. My Cellophane rice ball wrappings, which used to be non-burnable, are now burnable—at least in my city ward. I’ve been told this change should make things much simpler, but I’ve also been told Japanese isn’t such a difficult language to learn. Because of my Pavlovian-like fear of what happens when I try to take out the trash, I try not to do it too often. Last night, though, I summoned my Japanese domestic side and did it. This morning, when I went to work, I received the usual flurry of morning greetings—ohayyyyyyoooooou gozaimasu! And then this from the principal: “Rob-sensei, do you have a minute? I’d like to talk with you about your trash.”
Since I seemed to be making so many mistakes, the temple administrator finally gave me some fliers to hang up to explain trash procedures.
I spent New Year’s Eve at the headquarters of the Pure Land school of Buddhism, watching 17 monks cast away their sins by ringing the largest bell in Japan 108 times. It was different from my previous New Year’s experience, which involved getting trashed at a Princeton party in TriBeCa.
The tradition, known as joya-no-kane, takes place at temples across the country, where monks ring bells and sound gongs at midnight. Each sounding is meant to cleanse listeners of one of the 108 Buddhist temptations. This particular bell weighed 84 tons and was sounded by a large battering ram, from which hung 17 ropes. An old monk, in purple and gold kaftan-like robes, presided solemnly over the whole affair. The Jōdo shū temple, founded over 500 years before the United States, would have been impressive even without the massive bell. Approaching Chion-in, the first thing I saw was the temple’s colossal gate, which, I learned, is also the largest in Japan. Illuminated at night, the sight of the gate was pretty awe-inspiring.
From the temple, my friend and I walked downhill through the hundreds of colorful festival fast food rotensho stalls lining Maruyama Park. We passed Yasaka Shrine and saw thousands of people lined up behind police barricades, waiting for hatsumōde, their first shrine visit of the year. We decided to skip partaking in Japan’s version of Times Square and managed to catch a cab back to the hotel.
As I stood at Chion-in, one of Kyoto’s coolest temples in my opinion, in the cold at midnight, I really couldn’t stop thinking about how much has happened over the past year and—at risk of sounding old—how quickly the year flew by. As I mentioned, I spent the previous New Year’s surrounded by a lot of Cap friends in New York. I remember talking to a guy who was in Cap and graduated ’07; he was spending the year in China through PiA and was back just for his winter break; I remember him telling me about his experience in China, and I distinctly remember thinking that it sounded really cool but that there was no way I’d ever move to Asia after graduation. Life is funny that way, I guess.
I seem to have blacked out the next few months, the period in which I spent every waking hour slaving away at my thesis on the A-floor of Firestone and in the basement of Dod. My memory kicks back in, though, around mid-April, when I turned in my thesis, went crazy for a couple weeks, and attended my final classes as an undergraduate. Then, it was Houseparties—everyone’s favorite unnecessarily decadent 3 days of formals, semiformals, and lawnparties. Then, Dead Week in (North) Myrtle Beach (which, coincidentally, coincided with Black Biker Week). Then, I graduated, and Princeton was snatched from me in three short days. From there, I had an incredible, carefree summer in New York followed by a (surprisingly?) really fun family vacation in Hawaii. In mid-August, I relocated 7,000 miles to Japan, moved into a Buddhist temple, learned to bow, and began saying things like “Forgive me, for I am committing a rudeness.” And then my Tokyo adventures got underway. It was definitely the most momentous year of my life.
***
I’ve been a bit MIA from the blog over the last few weeks because I’ve been traveling. I spent a week in Arizona with my family and then two weeks sight-seeing in Japan with a friend. It was by far the best time I’ve had in Japan so far, and maybe I’ll try to post some highlights from the trip. A current resolution, though, is at least to post photos from the trip online—lots of really spectacular pictures (not taken by me). For now, here are some photos from New Year’s (all taken by a friend).
Chion-in's San-mon gate is the largest in Japan.
The bell is 11 feet in height and 9 feet in diameter. Intense.
The important-looking guy in the middle on the right seemed to be in charge.
It took 17 monks to ring the 84-ton bell.
After the bell was rung 108 times, the monks gathered around in a circle and prayed.
A huge crowd waits to enter Kyoto's Yasaka Shrine for hatsumode on New Year's. Thousands and thousands more people were lined up as far as I could see down the street.
Spending my birthday in Tokyo has not been a highlight of my time in Japan. The day started off pretty great, but by lunchtime the loneliness had set in.
Ordinarily, I suppose I would have tried to celebrate somehow, but I was feeling exhausted from a couple weeks of awesome traveling, and I start back at work tomorrow, so I didn’t have the energy. I spent most the day at the temple, taking care of old e-mail and doing laundry.
I thought about the samplers I’d be doing if I were at Triumph in Princeton, but I realized that even if I weren’t in Japan, I probably wouldn’t be spending my birthday at Triumph. I also thought about my other international birthday—my 20th, spent drinking heavily and heartily in the bomb shelter of Ramat Rachel in Jerusalem. My Japan birthday was far less exciting. I was planning on just going out for sushi alone and then coming home and doing more laundry, but I received a surprising midday phone call from Keiko-sensei, the temple matriarch, to wish me a happy new year. As it turned out, she was calling not to wish me a happy new year but a happy birthday (the two sound very alike in Japanese). I was a bit taken back, as I had no idea how she knew it was my birthday. I was even more touched, though, when I realized she was inviting me out to dinner for my birthday. It was a good birthday moment.
I met Keiko-sensei in the evening in front of the temple, and we walked together to a yakiniku restaurant nearby (this reastaurant), where a party was waiting for me. The “party” consisted of the school principal and Keiko-sensei’s 30 year-old son, one of the monks at the temple. It was modest, but I was, again, touched by the thoughtfulness. The yakiniku was oishii and a welcome change from what has seemed like weeks of fish. Dinner consisted of varying parts of cow in varying degreed of cooked-ness, ranging from somewhat cooked to raw. It was also pretty filling, especially compared to most Japanese food. It wasn’t the most traditional birthday food, but neither was the conversation, all of which was in Japanese. I was able to partake in conversation for about the first 10 minutes, in which time I informed them that I visited many beautiful shrines and temples in Kyoto but that they were crowded. The three of them nodded along understandingly. Then, I reached the limits of my Japanese, and I spent the rest of the meal quietly eating my yakiniku, smiling occasionally.
It would have been nice to have some Anglophone company over dinner, but I was mainly appreciative of Keiko-sensei’s efforts for me not to spend the evening alone. For a variety of reasons, this will be a birthday I’ll remember.
Santa Clause seems to have taken his revenge for all the times I bitched as a kid about having to sing "Silent Night" in school. (And no, throwing "Dreidle, Dreidle" into the mix along with fifteen Christmas songs does not make it OK.)
At the beginning of the month, the temple asked me to begin teaching the kids about Christmas. As you might expect, this caught me by surprise. What, exactly, did they want me to be teaching? I do think I have a pretty decent, above-average knowledge of the Synoptic Gospels (especially for a Jew), whence the Christmas story is derived. As it turns out, though, what I was supposed to be teaching about was Santa and gift-giving and reindeer and Christmas trees (they love their Christmas trees in Japan!). Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m certainly no ACLU member, but I’ve never really been one to be comfortable with Christmas in the classroom. I’m probably one of those "secular progressives" [read: Jews] that Bill O’Reilly has in mind when he gets prissy about the so-called War on Christmas.
I didn’t really think this was the appropriate opportunity to deliver a lecture on plurality and diversity in the U.S., so I bit my lip and agreed to teach about Christmas. It wasn’t really as bad as I was expecting. I had to read some Christmas books, and I found myself rewriting a few popular Christmas songs to make the lyrics easier for the kids to sing, but other than that, it was pretty easy.I confess that I really enjoyed the Christmas parties Takahashi-sensei and I had in the waku-waku classes on Thursday and Friday; I think I may have finally found a little Christmas spirit. Takahashi-sensei engineered a pretty impressive-looking Christmas tree out of construction paper, and all the kids made origami ornaments to put on the tree. I was certainly kvelling watching my little five year-olds make origami flowers and boats and samurai helmets; they all looked really cute and really… Japanese. I even learned how to make a crane! I’m actually looking forward to the coming week of Christmas parties with my elementary school classes.
What a huge change and what an experience it was this evening being surrounded by tons of old Japanese people, considering I spent the first hour of my day drawing pictures of different kinds of transportation in the dirt with a 3 year-old. I served as an usher this evening at the temple’s annual charity concert for UNICEF. I sorta felt like I was back in the Sunbelt doing thesis research—except all the old people were Japanese, and it was 45 degrees. My first task as usher was working on an assembly line making origami goody-bags full of candy to be given out to the concert attendees. My origami skills apparently didn’t pass muster, for pretty quickly I was assigned strictly to putting the candy in the bags. Of course, no Japanese person would ever tell me my origami sucks; instead, one must say it indirectly, like this: “You’re so good at putting the candies in the bags! Why don’t you just focus all of your efforts on that?!”
The actual concert was held in this tiny theater next to the temple, the same place I saw the Japanese rendition of The Magic Flute back during my first week in Tokyo. At first, I stood by the entrance looking official, collecting tickets and distributing programs. Lots of deep, deep bowing was involved. Keiko-sensei tried to point out prominent professors and local politicians to me, but I couldn’t really understand. During the actual performance, I stood by the theater door and smiled obliquely as old people entered; I think I was supposed to help direct them to their seats or something, but no one ever explained the seating chart to me.
Like all the performances I’ve seen in Japan, the concert was realllllly long. The first act featured some famous traditional Japanese storyteller. Unlike, say, opera, however, Japanese storytelling cannot be appreciated on the basis of aesthetics alone. I stood in the back of the theater for a long, long time, listening to a man talk and chant in a language I couldn’t understand at all, and all I could think about was food. So, it actually felt a lot like that very last hour-long “please rise” part at the end of Yom Kippur, when everyone is woozy and tired and hungry! The concert picked up a little bit from there. There was a flutist and a pianist and a tenor, and they took turns performing solo and together.
After helping to clean up, I was exhausted and was looking forward to retiring back to my little temple apartment. In an eerie occurrence of déjà vu, however, I found myself corralled into a special, private room at the temple, where five dignified-looking individuals were sitting around a table. It took me a minute to realize that these were the flutist and the pianist and the tenor and the storyteller from the concert (I later learned the fifth individual was a famous composer who had debuted original work at the charity concert). Maybe I’ve taken too many LSATs in the last month, but I felt the situation would have been perfect as the prompt for one of the logic games: if a Japanese flutist, pianist, tenor, storyteller, and composer each occupy exactly one seat around a table… Anyway, I was introduced to these eminent individuals, and they were told I was supposed to entertain them. Then we were left alone. They stared at me, and I stared back at them. Awkward. Finally, one of them asked me to repeat my name; it took about five minutes to get them to pronounce "Rob" in a recognizable form. Then, they asked for my last name, so I told them—and they all died laughing. I was really embarrassed, and I couldn’t figure out what was so funny. Then I realized that they all thought I was joking about my last name; I suppose it would have been like telling a room full of painters that your last name was Mondrian. I managed to convince them that I wasn’t joking about my name, and there were all amazed. Things lightened up from there. The composer even gave me his card and invited me out drinking with him next week!
Oh, that’s true on so many levels. Thanksgiving in Japan was sorta a bummer for the obvious reasons, but it turned out to be surprisingly fun. It was in the low 40s today, the coldest it’s been since I got here.
In one of my mother classes this morning, we had a good time formulating a critical interpretation of Uptown Girl. It was really odd, but I found it to be strangely comforting on Thanksgiving. The mothers took fun in pointing out that the song was released before I was born. At the end of class, we jammed out to some Billy Joel, and I’m sure that the karaoke-aspect of it all really appealed to their inner-Japanese.
Thursdays are always my longest, roughest days at work, and today felt particularly long. I was definitely falling asleep by the time I got out of work at 7:15. Jess, Ami, and I had planned on doing a Thanksgiving dinner together, and Jess was able to get us reservations at this place near Shibuya. The restaurant was a colorful place, but all I cared about (in addition to giving thanks…) was the buffet. I gorged out on turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, pasta, sweet potato pie, rolls (!), steamed vegetables, roast beef, pumpkin pie, brownies… It was amazing, and I was in heaven to be able to digest carbs not in noodle-form.
The tryptophan (along with exhaustion from a day full of singing and dancing) is kicking in, so I’m off to bed, but I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving! Lots of love from Japan.
P.S. And here's my Charlie Brown-esque Thanksgiving story: there's a dog that lives at the temple named Ku-chan. Ku-chan is an old mutt, and she spends her days in a pen in the corner of the schoolyard. I think years of being surrounded by hundreds of Japanese children have driven Ku-chan into a state of permanment canine shell shock; she's not the friendliest dog. Every day when I got off work, I make an effort to spend about 10 minutes playing with Ku-chan, and every day, Ku-chan whimpers as I approach or cowers away or occasionally even growls at me. Today, just like always, I walked over to play with Ku-chan after work, and for the first time, she ran over to me with her tail wagging. I think we finally connected.
Ami, Jess, and I at our Thanksgiving dinner in Tokyo.
It is fall. The Japanese are really fond of beginning narrative proclamations with an invocation of the seasons. I’m serious—I haven’t quite put my finger on it yet, but this is a very seasonal place. People are constantly talking about the seasons.
Time has been flying by, and I’m enjoying life here at the temple. Jay, who went to school with me and who’s on a PiA fellowship in Singapore, visited Tokyo last weekend, and the temple folks were kind enough to let him stay in my apartment. It was a pretty awesome change-of-routine to have him around for a few days, and I ended up seeing a ton of places in the city that I had never been to before.
I met him out at the airport on Saturday afternoon. I guess I was feeling a little cocky in my comfort level with the Japanese transportation system, so I attempted to take a shortcut, which didn’t work out so hot. I was about 40 minutes late to the aiport consequently. Saturday night, Jay and I grabbed a sushi dinner and headed to Tokyo Tower, the Eiffel Tower’s lesser-known, quirkier cousin. In the years following the war, when much of Tokyo was flattened from bombs and fires, the city attempted quickly to rebrand itself in a Western fashion. It did this by—literally—imitating Western landmarks. Thus, in 1958 Tokyo Tower was born. The pamphlet I received informs me that the Tower, at 333 m, is 13 meters taller than its Parisian counterpart, while weighing 3,000 tons less. I do love the Eiffel Tower, but the Tokyo version, even if it is “the highest self-supporting steel tower in the world,” just doesn’t quite work. First, there’s the colors: the tower is painted bright orange and white “according to the Civil Aeronautic Law.” Again, I love orange—but not on an 1,000 foot steel edifice. Second, there’s the pointlessness: part of the charm of la Tour Eiffel is the engineering marvel that it presented in the nineteenth century. Replicating that 70 years later just seems much less impressive. Then, there’s the location: the Eiffel Tower is situated in the middle of a beautiful, European-style park, and it’s possible to run underneath the tower and look up into its steel filaments; Tokyo Tower, on the other hand, seems to have been plopped down in the middle of the city, and its underbelly (in typical Japanese fashion) contains a mall, complete with museums devoted to the history of statistics and “space wax.” Part of me feels bad for making fun of the Tower. I know the government in 1958 was desperate for an international landmark, but today, the Tower serves more as a favorite date location for Japanese teenagers than anything else. It’s also worth noting that there’s a skyscraper in the city with an uncanny resemblance to the Empire State Building and a suspension bridge that looks strikingly like the Golden Gate Bridge. Jay and I hit up a few bars in Roppongi before catching the last subway home.
Sunday was a pretty heavy sight-seeing day for us. First, we headed to Meiji Jingu, Tokyo’s largest and most famous shrine. Despite it being pretty overcast, I thought it was a beautiful day. It happened to be Shichigosan weekend, a national festival in honor of children ages 7, 5, and 3, so there were a ton of families out with little kids in full kimono and geta. During the festival, parents dress up their children in traditional garb and families take portraits together and then pray at shrines. This has been a favorite conversation topic in my advanced mothers’ class this last month, so I’ve learned a great deal about the holiday and seen a ton of photos. Jay and I got lucky and were able to see a traditional Japanese wedding procession. From the shrine, we walked around Harajuku (of “Harajuku girls” notoriety) and down Takeshita-dori, stopping for crepes along the way. We headed down Omotesando, the Champs Elysées of Tokyo. (I don’t mean to keep comparing everything to Paris—the Japanese do it intentionally; there are, literally, signs everywhere that say “Omotesando: the Champs Elysées of Tokyo.”) We veered south through classy Aoyama to Shibuya, where we walked around for a few hours. In the evening, we headed to Shinjuku for a tempura dinner and drinks. We had walked an insane amount and were exhausted by the end of the day. Still, I got up at 4:45 a.m. on Monday to show Jay the fish market; it was my second trip to Tsukiji, but if not for the time of day, I could go every week. I love it there—it’s always a near-death experience, and it’s the best sushi in the world. It did, however, make for a rough start to the work week. A few more fun photos of Meiji Shrine:
A girl and her father exit the outter shrine area after a Shichigosan visit.
Japanese wedding procession on a Sunday afternoon at Meiji Jingu.
Japanese family posing for a Shichigosan portrait. (They weren't posing for me.)
And on a slightly more epicurean note, welcome to Shibuya!
A typical store in Shibuya 109, the shopping complex at the heart of the Japanese teenage female fashion scene.
I won’t be putting my left leg in anytime soon. Nor will I be shaking it all about. There are a million rules at the temple that I’ve been trying to abide by—some explicit, many unspoken—but today I learned a new one: no Hokey Pokey-ing allowed.
Singing and dancing has become a central part of what I do in the classroom with the kids, and I admit that I never would have expected to be singing so much in my life. The kids love to sing though, and I’m always amazed by how quickly they learn new songs. I can’t believe how many different songs we’ve gone through since I’ve been here. In the last part of October, for example, we were working on the Pumpkin Song (to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb):
Pumpkin time is here again. Time to play “trick or treat.” Pumpkin time is here again. Our spooky friends we’ll meet!
See the costumes we have on— Monsters, ghosts, goblins, too! See the costumes we have on. Hear us all shout “boo!”
Takahashi-sensei and I even made up a little dance for the song, with separate gestures for each line. The waku-waku kids (i.e., the kindergarterns) learned the song in lighting speed, and we had a great time singing it for a few weeks. By the time of our Halloween party, they were really belting it out (especially the last part!). Nearly every day for several weeks, I was singing that song anywhere from 4-8 times a day. The current song is Old McDonald to coincide with my unit on farm animals, but today, Takahashi-sensei and I were thinking ahead to our future unit on body parts. Naturally, I suggested that we teach the kids how to do the Hokey Pokey. It seemed like a no-brainer to me: the song is cute, fun, and easy to learn, and it seems great for teaching body part words (not to mention right and left). I also thought the dancing aspect of it would be fun for the kids. Takahashi-sensei, though, jolted her head up from what she was doing at my suggestion. “No,” she said. “Not the Hokey Pokey! It’s not allowed.”
Quite puzzled, I asked her to explain what she meant, bracing myself for some odd answer about how the Japanese construe the song in a sexual light and how it wasn’t appropriate for children. That turned out to be way off base (oops, my bad). The actual rationale goes like this: it seems that several years ago, the temple employed an English teacher (not a PiA fellow) who had neither experience teaching nor experience with young children. The only children’s song—supposedly—that this woman knew was the Hokey Pokey, and she would sing it with the children every day. As the months dragged on, the school became more and more irritated with overhearing its students sing the Hokey Pokey daily, and by year’s end, the only thing the children had learned was how to turn themselves around (I mean, isn’t that what it’s all about?). So, that’s how the Hokey Pokey became indelibly associated in the temple’s opinion with shitty teaching and why it is no longer allowed to be taught in the classroom.
This explanation left me feeling a bit confounded, but I decided that it wasn’t a battle worth fighting. I can’t help but wonder, though, if the same people who passed the Hokey Pokey ban at my preschool are somehow in cahoots with the people who make the rules at that nightclub I was at Friday night.
Posts
