skip to main |
skip to sidebar
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.
Happy Holidays!
P.S. In case you have 3.5 minutes to kill, here’s another fun clip of ol’ Bill. Enjoy!
My waku-waku kids hard at work on their origami ornaments.
Reaching to hang an ornament at the top of the tree.
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.
Autumn at Meiji Shrine. Happy Thanksgiving!
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.
I know the title of this posting is a little cheesy, but I’ll hope you’ll excuse it—if only for the sake of alliteration. Honestly though, spending a night out in the city here with a group of recent Princeton graduates was pretty great. I’ve been working to adjust to the challenges of post-Princeton life, and I feel fortunate that my social life over the last 3 months has not been quite as vacuous as I had imagined it would be. I’ve had some exciting, impromptu dinners with lots of random people, Japanese and foreigners alike, since I’ve been here, but there was something about hanging out with recent college graduates—from Princeton, nonetheless—that was really comforting.
The credit for planning last Friday evening goes to Ami, who managed to pull together a group of five Princetonians. Jess, of course, is also on a PiA fellowship nearby me. Dan graduated in ’07 and is currently in the middle of a masters program in robotics in Japan through an Ito Scholarship. Lear, also ’07, works for a bank in New York and is in Tokyo for the month on business. I didn't know any of them at Princeton, but it felt like we were all good friends. We met up at the giant spider in Roppongi Hills and headed to dinner at a pretty nice restaurant Ami had chosen. Gonpachi, the restaurant, I learned, is well-known for two reasons: 1) President Bush once ate at it, and 2) it served as the model for the Japanese restaurant scene in Kill Bill.
The food was amazing, and it was fun to swap stories about Princeton over dinner—it sorta made me feel old, though. We discovered that we have a lot in common, aside from sharing our alma mater. 
Of the five of us, four were in orchestra (not me), three are Jewish, two are half-Japanese, four were in Tower (not me), etc, etc. We were all expecting to call it an early night, but it was Jessica’s birthday, and we were having a good time, so we decided to make a night out of it. We found our way to a pretty-classy looking club in Roppongi. I was a bit skeptical at first, given the prohibition posted prominently at the entrance. I kept expecting to see a sign that said “no fun allowed!” The club was actually really swanky though—lots of banker types and such. It also seemed to be quite the hangout for foreign models. People were, in fact, dancing, so it was a great time. Jess and Ami even managed to sneak into the V.I.P. model section.
We left around 3:30 and rounded out the night with some döner, which is quickly becoming my favorite post-drinking munchy. Jess was planning on spending the night at Ami’s apartment, and Lear invited Dan and me to crash at his massive corporate-housing apartment in Roppongi Hills, so I was pretty excited about not having to stay out until 6 a.m. to wait for the subway to open. The apartment that Lear’s company gave him was probably the largest and nicest place I will ever see in Tokyo. The three of us slept until 1 p.m., and then Lear took us out for a late lunch, and I had some New York City cuisine that I haven’t seen in months. It was the perfect end to a great night out in Tokyo:
Voting early in Pima County was, in fact, rather difficult. Unlike my friends (you know who you are!), I’m not going to use my blog as a forum in which to pontificate on the election. That’s what Facebook is for. This post will remain nonpartisan in tone, though I do want to share some election-related thoughts.
***
It’s hard to know where to begin. As someone who spent nearly twelve weeks working at campaign headquarters, I would’ve expected it to be a little difficult to watch the election insanity unfold from the sidelines, 6,781 miles removed from the Beltway (wow, I love the internet). On the contrary, it’s actually been somewhat nice to be away from the endless chatter. I’ve almost forgotten just how damn annoying Chris Matthews can be (Wes, if you ever read this, no offense). The television news here doesn’t cover the U.S. election much, and even if it did, I suppose I wouldn’t actually know. My only info on the election, then, has come from my periodic browsings of Politico. I also confess that I’ve started reading the New York Times more than I ever have before.
Nonetheless, I never had any doubt that I was going to vote. Since registering to vote on my 18th birthday, I’ve never missed voting in an election, and I wasn’t about to let something like the Pacific Ocean get in the way of me and the ballot box. So, in September, I called up the Pima County Recorder’s Office over Skype and, not entirely trusting F. Ann Rodriguez to figure out overseas postage (what does a county recorder do all day anyway?), I requested that my absentee ballot be sent to my parents’ place in Tucson. I then had my mother, more competent in my opinion, than Pima County burreacrats, Fedex me my ballot.
This wasn’t quite as simple as I would’ve hoped. My mother, thoughtful person that she is, decided to toss in some contact lenses for me into the Fedex envelope. One week later, I still hadn't received my Fedex package, and I was beginning to get nervous. That same day, I received an interesting phone call from Japanese Customs. Apparently, they had intercepted a package addressed to me. “Was I Robert Bernstein?” they wanted to know. “Yes,” I replied, trying to sound solemn. And did I know that someone was trying to send me contact lenses? Wondering if this were an offense worthy of visa revocation, I innocently asked what the problem was. The customs officer proceeded to explain—patiently, of course—that customs law only permits eight contact lens to be sent from the U.S., and my package, you see, contained twelve contact lenses.
Hmm. I apologized and tried to explain that I learned my lesson, and I promised that it would never happen again, if only the woman could be so kind as to deliver the package with my ballot. This, she said, was impossible, for the package contained illegal contraband. Well, I suggested, how about she just open the package and remove four contact lenses and then deliver it? This too, she said, was impossible, for the package was addressed to me and only me, and so she could not open it. I offered to open the package myself in front of her and personally throw out the troublesome superfluous lenses, but the package, it seems, was not allowed to leave the customs center. The Japanese customs officer and I went around in circles for about 10 minutes; I wondered what the Japanese word for Catch-22 was.
Finally, I suggested that I could provide her with explicit, written authorization to remove four lenses, and she seemed OK with this. “Oh great!” she said. “Why didn’t you say so sooner!?” She faxed me a rather lengthy legal-looking document in Japanese, and ignoring the advice about never signing a document without reading it, I appended my signature and faxed it back. The only English on the document was a translation of the title: “Permission of Eradication.” That was good enough for me.
***
A few days later, my ballot (along with eight contact lenses) arrived. I actually didn’t vote right away. I brought it to school with me for a week to show to my adult students, who were pretty intrigued by it. “Can I touch it?” some of them asked. I figured they wouldn’t get many chances to see an American presidential election ballot. The students (well, the advanced ones) had many questions. Why were there so many questions on the ballot? What is a county constable? What was the difference between voting yes and no on Proposition 102 if both meant gay marriage would remain illegal in Arizona? Did I really care whether Pima County Superior Court Judge Jan E. Kearney was retained in office? Is it really correct English to write “vote for not more than one”? I tried to answer the questions the best I could: Arizona is obsessed with direct democracy; I think it’s kinda like a sheriff; no means illegal, and yes means super illegal; I have no beef with Kearney; it is in fact correct English.
Their most interesting questions, though, centered on the presence of Spanish on my ballot, which, to them, was unbelievable. Didn’t people in Arizona speak English? they asked. How could one intelligently make a decision about voting for the president of the United States without being able to read English? Finding myself stumbling into difficulty territory, I attempted to explain that English was in fact, technically, the official language of Arizona though not of the United States but that there are many people in Arizona for whom Spanish is a mother tongue and thus a more comfortable language. I pointed out that many signs in Japan appear in English, Chinese, and Korean, along with Japanese. Yes, my students conceded, but important documents would never appear in any language but Japanese. Were there no Japanese people in Arizona? they asked. “Well, I’ve never actually met any,” I explained. “But I’m sure there are some.” The students wanted to know if Japanese-Americans in Arizona could vote in Japanese; this seemed like an appropriate time to teach them what a “double standard” was. They said they thought it was unfair that Arizonans from almost all other countries invested years into learning English in order to vote while people from Mexico were able to vote in Spanish. I couldn’t really argue with that.
***
Last Monday, I finally filled out my ballot and took it to the American embassy, where the nice people in American Citizen Services agreed to Fedex it for free for me (sans contact lenses). As I approached the embassy, a Japanese guard stopped me and asked me—in Japanese—what I was doing. In English, I told him that I was an American citizen. Shockingly, he couldn’t understand; even the Japanese people who work at the American embassy don’t speak English, it seems, but that’s Japan! I repeated myself, this time in Japanese, and the guard wanted to know why. I thought this was a little ridiculous. Did he think he was my mother? Did I really need to give him an explanation? Shouldn’t showing him an American passport have been enough to gain entry into American Citizen Services? Apparently not. But after arguing with the guard for a few minutes, he let me pass. My actual experience in American Citizen Services reminded me a lot of the DMV, but by this point, a little unfriendliness was well worth the reward of voting.
So, I definitely experienced my fair share of difficulties trying to vote. I didn’t have to pay a poll tax, and I didn’t inadvertently vote for Pat Buchanan, but I did have to sacrifice four contact lenses and argue in a foreign language that I don’t speak with a man holding a gun. All this for what? I’ll be at work on Wednesday as the election results come through in the U.S., and I’m not expecting a happy outcome. I remember how much fun I had four years ago on election night in the basement suite of beautiful, Gothic Cuyler Hall, taking down blue jello shots and red wine coolers as CNN declared each state. This time, there won’t even be alcohol around to numb the pain. All of you watching back home, please have an extra jello shot for me.
My waku-waku kids hard at work on their origami ornaments.
Reaching to hang an ornament at the top of the tree.
Posts
