Yosenkai

Ere long it is seen
Where in the snow an ox's
Path comes to its end.

---

Fast fact, Nick: did you know that the days after snow falls are actually colder than the day of snowfall? You see, while incidental factors (like heat-reflecting cloud cover and storm-related winds) may seem to suggest otherwise, the process of melting requires snow to absorb ambient heat-energy out of the atmosphere.

But that's nonsense. Of course you already knew that!


Also nonsense was that it’s already been one week since the first snowfall of the year... well, for Tokyo, at least, and, as everyone knows, it only counts if it happens in Tokyo. Ken and I celebrated

¹because Japanese people always celebrate the firsts of everything: 初詣 (The First Visit to the Temple), 初日の出 (The First Sunrise), and 初夢 (The First Dream). Heck, they even have a thing for the "First Strong Breeze of Summer."

¹ by meeting up with his Sig.Oth for a Fleet Foxes' concert at Studio Coast in Shin-Kiba, Tokyo. And because I am loathe to not celebrate absolutely anything ad infinitum, we went out again on Monday for some impromptu yakiniku, only mildly perturbed by the nipping cold and slight, though constant, rain. Ken was close to begging out, but I would not be put off Discount-Steak-Monday (certainly an event worthy of its own celebration).

Anyway, so Ken was right, in that by the time we were walking home, the cold, heavy rain had turned to cold, heavy snow. But I've always been of the mind that snow is much better than rain. At least snowfall is better than rainfall

²In as much as snow has a "Magicalness" half-life best counted in minutes rather than days

². Anyway, after being reassured that it never "really" snows all that much in Kashiwa, Mother Nature went on to say "oh yeah?" and dumped around three inches.

Three inches may not sound like a lot both to people who have and have no sense of how much snow "three inches” is, but all we need to know is that “three inches” is enough to blow everyones' minds. I mean, they went crazy. It was such a big deal that, not only did the Tokyo Fire Department report 53 instances of snow-related injury by 10 a.m. the next morning, but it literally blew thoughts of Friday's "first" snow storm out of the social consciousness.

Nonplussed, both Ken and Karl were ripe to mention that we should try to catch the earlier bus to accommodate the more sensible Chiba-ians who'd decide to take the bus rather than venture cars and bikes on the narrow, unsalted roads of Japan.


We adjusted accordingly and planned to be at the bus stop by 7:10 for the "7:21" bus. Verily

³I do not lie.

³, I gave away what very well was the "last spot" on the "early" bus to some old woman. Did it make me feel good about myself? A little. But not as much as I regretted not Heisman-ing her out of the way up the steps. But that is, as they say, neither here nor there. Certainly two more busses passed by the stop within the hour (no more than 20 or 30 minutes late), with neither stopping for passengers. At around 8:15, Ken suggested we skip the whole "bus" thing, catch a couple of trains that would find us slightly more north of our present location, and then proceed to walk the rest of the way.

And that is what we did.

It was a little past 10 by the time we walked into the office, which, to our surprise, was full for the postponed teachers' morning meeting.

It has been a couple days since the Great Snowfall of 2012, and our schedule has just gotten over reeling from the White Menace

⁴Snow, not Sperry

⁴, especially as this week was supposed to be Finals Week for the 三年生, who, inexplicably, get two months off to "prepare" for college entrance exams.

Anyway, what blew my mind was not the paltry amount of snow that danced across the streets in wisps like children, or how it put a stranglehold on normalcy in the Kanto region for days on end, but rather the hour I spent standing at the bus stop at 北柏駅.

Our stop is on a modest hill, one much steeper than I would like to walk on a daily basis, but no more steep than any random hill you could force any cross-country team to run in West or South Torrance. Then again, any hill of any size is steep enough for cars to lose traction when icy.

People do strange things when things don't go the way they expect them to. I could not tell you the number of cars that would slow to an eventual stall at the very foot of the hill thinking that gunning the accelerator would resolve the whole lack-of-traction problem

⁵"Constant thrust = constant speed!"

⁵. Granted, this would occasionally work and they would lurch ahead at a painstaking rate of inefficiency, only to return from their crawl to immobility inches later. I, literally, watched a delivery truck do this for an hour, deciding halfway up the hill to pull over to the curb and wait it out. What exactly he was waiting for is still unclear, but he waited.

Also astounding were the number of idle pedestrians who went out of their way to help push these cars stuck in ice patches. If I were a better man, I would have stepped out of the bus line to help. After all, a car in the way is one more car blocking my bus. But, then again, if I were an even better man, I would have fired up the ol' Google Translate and translated me up some "Please stop. Please put your car in reverse and turn around. Go a different way. This is not the only road through Kitakashiwa. Thank you"

⁶Incidentally, GT suggests "中止してください。逆に車を置いて、向きを変えてください。別の道を行く。これは、北柏で唯一の道ではない。あなたに感謝。" Not coincidentally, this is not correct.

⁶.

Whether it was obstinate pride or panic induced un-thought, both being double-plus un-good by the way, pretty much everyone would spend at least 10 minutes trying to gun it up the hill. And while that provided us all with an excellent visual demonstration of independent-wheel, anti-slip traction technology, people would try, try, try again, only to put their car in park and quit where they stood. I would like to think that it just didn't occur to them that turning around and going back down the hill was a perfectly viable option.

Certainly, this isn't unique to Japan: I've survived far too many rainy days on the 405 to know that Californians, too, can lose their minds when things don't go the way they're supposed to.


So, if I consider that most people responded the way they did because they had not considered that going back was an option (even to most of the helpful pedestrians, "forward" was the only way), I need to ask myself how long it would have taken me to finally get around to considering turning around as the best course of action.

I'd like to say that it would have come to me in a timely manner, but I can make no presumptions to think that I would have at all, were I ever to find myself in a similar situation. And I should not necessarily be ashamed of that. What I should be ashamed of would be, having watched this pattern of events for almost 90 minutes, not reassessing my own emergency-response methods to be sure that it includes a "backwards" option.

Actually, now that I think about it…

A few weeks ago I was in a classroom, as teachers are wont to do. I'm not quite sure when it was, except that I know that I was done with my instruction and was sitting down after doing a preliminary walk-through to make sure that everyone had understood and gotten started on the assignment.

So, anyway, I was sitting at my tiny teacher's desk, which is this tiny white-laminate TV tray of a table, when the whole building started to shake. Now having grown up in California and, thusly, a party to my fair share

⁷That's an American share, not a Japanese share.

⁷ of earthquakes, I quickly ascertained that we were in the midst of a mild 'shaker, which was fine. You know, besides the normal thoughts of "whoa" and "whoa-whoa," I realized that the students were looking to me and that I had no idea what I was supposed to do

⁸Our earthquake preparedness drill was cancelled due to rain in October, to which the students were instead treated to an instructional video that the ALTs weren't privy to.

⁸.

My initial play was to cool-hand it. After all, if I couldn't offer practical advice, I should at least provide emotional stability. The rumbling continued for a good 60 seconds and we rode it out in good spirits. Mid-way in one of them asked me if they should open the door and the window, to which I affected knowing and nodded my assent.

Before long, class was over, assignments were handed in and I was walking back into the office, off-handedly commenting how it was a real shame that the earthquake drill had been cancelled because I had no clue what I was supposed to do.

Come to think of it, I still don't. Well, at the very least I know that if there's an earthquake I should open the doors and windows.

That being said, after 90 minutes and still no bus, Ken suggested that we, ourselves, backtrack a little and take the train to 柏田中駅. So we did. And along the way found a French bakery.

So that was delicious.

Shin Nen Kai

Though often late, or
Rarely on-time, a bus should
Never be early.

---

Nick,

There is no doubt that you know that Japan's two most important holidays are 1) 正月, and 2) 大晦日, which happen to be "New Years Day" and "New Years Eve," respectively.

But one of the most exciting part about New Years in Japan is that television receives a much overdue production bump: a paint job for "Sweeps" season, if you will. This is when every game show and variety program gets a two hour special and every big televised anime debuts (or re-runs) a new "movie."

For a month, producers and writers pull out all the stops to catch the vacationing eye. Regardless of how vapid or interchangeable their preceding (and following) seasons have been (or will be), this is their opportunity to win over viewers and set their programming marks.


For all the chatter about how bad Japanese TV is--and it can be--the six-week period around New Years makes it all worth it. After all, this is the where we get amazing shows like the bunraku extravaganza 全日本仮大賞, or the reality show to top all reality shows, はじめてのおつかい

¹ Which is pretty much my new favorite TV show of all time.

¹. Pretty much any of those clips of Japanese shows venerated on YouTube comes from one "冬スペシャル" or another.

Yesterday, however, I came across a two-hour special that left me feeling slightly perturbed. The angle of this particular variety show special was more or less an "Extreme Makeover," where they would tell the woe-begotten tale of a person in need and reward their tenacity with a much needed makeover. Usually there is some medical impairment or requirement that renders the "makeover" justifiable and, therefore, palatable. At the very least, not quite as vapid.

This show, in particular, was the exploitation of a story of a rising Korean pop-artist who, early into her career, contracted a disease that attacked her face with some form of elephantiasis that was surgically reduced but left her severely disfigured.

I have been struggling to define what about this show bothered

² And, perhaps, "bother" is too strong of a word: maybe something more demure like "disquieted," or "unsettled."

² me. Now I have no problem with television "exploitation." I mean, I had publicly declared that my new favorite TV show of all time was はじめてのおつかい, which is basically a show that exploits four year old children by sending them out into the streets "alone" on their first errand. Ah the sweet, life-giving tears of innocent children!


In contemplating this the entire day, I think that what I had a problem with was that they picked a South Korean woman, focused on the depth of her despair and squalor (and near abject rejection) in Korea, and contrasted this with the open arms of Japan and its copious medical resources. From dank and gray with it's minor-chord soundtrack overlay, to bright and clean, endearing and hopeful.

Now, I don't mean to speak out of turn, in as much as I have no clue about this particular show's geopolitical perspective or its historiography. I don't know if they regularly travel throughout Japan offering medically necessary surgery to domestic economically underprivileged residents (unlikely) and happened upon a "great find" that--whoops!--just happened to be from Korea. What struck me as peculiar was that 1) there wasn't a viable Japanese candidate for this exploitation, and 2) the obvious deep seated tensions between Japan and Korea

³ This includes the lengthy and brutal occupation of Korea in the late 19th and early parts of the 20th century during the "日本統治時代の朝鮮" colonial period, which includes current conflicts over issues such as "comfort women" (forced prostitution) and political visits to the Yasukuni Shrine to honor/celebrate the soldiers who fought in WWII: both issues that remain hotly contested in contemporary Japan-Korea relations today and are especially relevant to the Zainichi (diasporic) Koreans who continue to live in Japan without political rights or representation. All the while there persists a grass-roots resentment over the growing prevalence of Korean presence in Japan, with minor "protests" as recent as August 2011 over the amount of Korean programming that was being broadcasted on Japanese television.

³.

Even still, I want to be very aware of my 外国人 sensibilities. That is, in addition to needing to take into account standard melodramatic TV tropes, I need to recognize my own geopolitical assumptions and avoid reading into what I think are inter-cultural necessities, especially as an "outsider," but even more so as an ignorant observer.

I find myself having to ask what my intercultural expectations are. What do I assume are normative and normal interactions between Japan and Korea on a macro- and micro- level? Then what sort of legitimate privileges do I have as an "outsider" to see these conflicts, condescensions and concessions, and then what are the inherent limitations that come with my American-level of sensitivity and sensibility? Am I, as a sensitized outsider, privileged to read of a situation cultural bias, or am I, as an over-sensitized outsider, privileged to read into a situation cultural bias based on my expectations of subtext? Granted, it's hard to think otherwise, with Japan's historically less-than-apologetic regard to normalizing relations, and persistence in believing everyone should just move past diversity issues

⁴ One only has to look either north or south to the way that Japan has dealt with either the Ryukyuan people of Okinawa or the Ainu people of Hokkaido. You know it's bad when there's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to the Ethnic Minority issues of Japan. Most relevant, however, are the Burakumin, who are ethnically identical to other "Japanese" people, but are discriminated against as a "social" minority group. Particularly telling is that the title "Buraku" was created because the government, in attempts to lessen the prejudice and stigma surrounding these so called "untouchable peoples," banned the use of the terms "Eta" and "Hinin." Generally, the approach is to discourage discourse and encourage the problem to disappear with time. Which, apparently, if you live outside of Kansai, is the case with the "Buraku problem" [especially as the problem is more or less left unaddressed by Japanese discrimination laws since the Burakumin are not a "specific race" (Degawa, Racism Without Race)]. Then again, apparently the Burakumin make up 70% of Japan's largest Yakuza syndicate, so "effectiveness" is up for debate.

⁴.

I suppose it's the general lack of social and societal institutions that exist to create dialog about the way Japan's history--based out of a strong sense of ethno-/national-centrism--lends itself to a persistent "othering" (or exo-grouping) which, in turn, affects the way the world responds to it. More often than not, when it comes to the topic of diversity (or the lack of integrative diversity), it's safer just not to talk about it, almost as if putting those words to air breathes life into the embers of crisis.

But I just don't know, Nick. I mean, on the one hand, the obviousness of the Korea-Japan contrast bothers me, which is a no-brainer. But that I lack the resources (culturally and linguistic) to even begin to ask the right questions confounds me. I mean, one of the things I loved most about Critical Theory was that "interpretation" was the belief that by figuring out the "right" questions to ask we could impose an organizing framework onto complex ideas.

In most cases the first step is "locating yourself in the ongoing dialog." Basically this means whipping open a text book or firing up Wikipedia, retracing what work has already been done over the last 50 or 50,000 years in the field, and then settling into a philosophical niche that works best for your mood. But this just seems to not be the case here: there's as little discussion about race and diversity in Japan as there possibly could be, so there's no real ideological springboard to work off or tap into. Even casual conversation about race and race relations is met with hesitance and embarrassment. Despite the historical presence of Japan internationally and the rapid growth of a foreign presence within Japan itself, there is very little discussion about the way the Japanese interact with exo-groups (even indigenous exo-groups), rather just a myriad of disparate questions floating around: is it possible to redefine "Japanese-ness" around it's core principles of homogeny and submissive/self-sacrificial unity without resorting to exclusion, or is it necessarily exclusive? Is "awareness" the first appropriate step? Should dialog be conducted at a grass-roots level or can questions be asked by "outsiders" through the educational system?


I realize that Japanese history is one of the more important subjects at Ichikashi and, seemingly, most high schools in Japan. The amount of historical facts our kids are required to learn--re: regurgitate--is staggering. Emperors, shogunates, wars, you name it. But it's all of a particular history. As late as 2007, the central government (which is in charge of pedagogical decisions) was found to be instructing high school textbooks to "downplay the military's role in ordering mass civilian suicides" of Okinawans during WWII. Julian Dierkes' 2010 expose on post-war history education in Japan pinpoints bureaucratic foot dragging as the key to maintaining this status-quo, preventing modern historical analysis and critiques, stunting critical thinking regarding Japan's jingoistic past.

However, this should not be surprising from a country that, in 2005, erected a monument to Justice Radha Binod Pal for his dissenting view

⁵ And yet even this issue is not rife with complexities. Pal, a purported Japanophile who considered the Japanese defendants proponents of Asian liberation from Western influence (Bix, 2001), seemingly agreed to sit on the tribunal with the intent to decry the legitimacy of the trial, never once engaging with the reality of the war crimes charged. However, Pal was right to point out the hypocrisy of "victor's justice" in play, as the firebombing and nuclear attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki upon civilians would never be tried in court, arguing that the Japanese on trial should be declared innocent based on the injustice of the indictment. Though, on first blush, and in persistent cursory interpretation of his dissent, Pal will continue to be lionized as purporting complete Japanese innocence, Ushimura Kei (2007) argues that a finer reading of Pal's judgment is one of procedure not of morality.

⁵ in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, arguing that all military personnel should be cleared of all responsibility for Japanese war crimes committed during World War II (such as those committed at Nanking), dismissing the legitimacy of the IMTFE's claims to justice.

So, maybe, then asking these sorts of questions in public spaces is the place to start, especially at a progressive school like Ichikashi. As a 外国人, I am in a ironically privileged place, afforded copious amounts of grace for not being Japanese enough to know/understand the morays of polite Japanese customs of silence. Just as we use "外国人-ness" to intentionally "get away" with eating while walking and sneaking the last chocolate out of the お土産 box, I am in a unique position to ask those difficult questions because I just don't know enough to know not to ask those kinds of questions.

If only I knew the right questions to ask.

Seijin no Hi

Hey Nick, long time no see!

You may not know this but today is 成人の日 ("Seijin no Hi," or Coming of Age Day), which is meant to “congratulate and encourage” those who have reached the “age of majority” (which is 20 years old in Japan)

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_age_day

¹. 20 seems really “late” for a C-O-A celebration that dates back to the 8th century, but having seen the way high school kids—emphasis on “kids”—are treated it shouldn’t come as any real surprise.

In honor of this auspicious holiday, I have committed myself to a new day planner

² It’s a very adult thing, I assure you.

². Though, really, I had a very nice calendar that I bought when I first moved to Japan, that was inauspiciously thrown out with the gift-wrapping while I was in Torrance for Christmas last week.

Regardless, I found myself back at Tokyu Hands slogging through the mounds of day planner options: full spread monthlies, vertical weekles, horizontal dailies, calendars with hourly listings or to-do lists. The options were seemingly endless

³ And frivolous.

³.

Step #1 in picking the perfect personal calendar, according to About.com, was to "Pick the Right Planner." This would obviously be a crucial step.

For my purposes and sanity, I wanted a simple weekly layout, one that maximized efficiency by limiting memo space. I went back and forth about a vertical weekly and a horizontal weekly, between hourly or lined.

This time I settled for a Takahashi Shoten "Link Up Schedule." A quick scan of their webpage reveals that they have 171 distinct calendar designs. I think it took only 43 tries before they got it right, but I give them credit for trying: each page is broken up into four rows, one for every day of the week with the eighth row on the right hand page given over to extra notes and a monthly view. However, the daily rows are divided into two columns, the right half for memos while the other, a four-panel table.


There was an insert that explained a variety of ways that I could use this table (maybe one pane for AM, one for PM and one for expenses and details), but it was all in kanji. Regardless, it was the versatility of the vague space that captivated me. I am also not one to let the irony of finding blank space marred by two thin lines more versatile than actual "free" blank space, but that’s the way of things: it is the imposition of boundaries that make sports challenging and therefore more interesting.

Granted, I find it annoying that I am not quite sure how I want to use the table: it’s ambiguity laughs in the face of the feeble sense of control that a day-planner pretends to propose. But I love the idea that any unused days can become a CSI-Miami 4-pannel comic

⁴

⁴.

Step 2 of maintaining a successful day planner, again according to About.com, was to name my calendar. I’ll have to commit some thought to that. Though, really, I would have made Step 2 (shortly after the all important first step of actually acquiring a calendar) "be consistent" in application and methodology. Or maybe just "make up reasons to use your brand new archaic calendar to justify the cost."