Who designed the “standard” cruise control interface? It’s a horrible overcomplicated mishmash of awkward abbreviations and mysteriously organized functions. I can’t decide if it was put together by an over-precise engineering team or a feature-obsessed middle manager.

Consider:

• Why is the on/off switch separate from the others?¹ Setting the speed requires two button presses when it should only take one.
• What on earth is the practical difference between “off” and “cancel”?²
• Do we really need two extra buttons to make the car go faster or slower? Cars, after all, are already graced with eminently effective and much-used speed controls. Having “accel” and “coast” buttons is like adding a joystick down on the floor so that you can steer using the feet that are left sadly idle by the operation of the cruise control.

Imagine what the cruise control UI would look like as implemented by Apple. It would be like the iPhone without the fancy screen: one button labeled ON. You hit the button, the car keeps going the current speed. Hit it again and it turns off. I can’t believe nobody has done this yet.

Cancel rant. Rant off.

—
¹As a computer guy, I can kind of see the logic in having a separate on/off control. After all, the system is managed by a computer that needs to know whether it should be listening for commands at any given moment. Maybe, back in the dark ages of computers when cruise control was first implemented, the system may have had significant startup time, requiring a few seconds of warning to get everything in order for the “set” command. But that’s certainly not necessary today — the whole car is essentially managed by computers nowadays.

²I understand the technical difference, but it’s a stupid thing to bother the user with.

Have I been changed in any permanent, meaningful way by my 3 years abroad? Probably, but whatever. It’s the little things I’m confronted with on a day-to-day basis that fascinate me now. Firstly, you’ll have to forgive me: I am slightly disoriented because the air doesn’t smell like fish. I am embarrassed by the degree to which I am in awe of raspberries. Portion sizes seemed to have quintupled overnight (look, a salad twice as big as your head! Good luck, friend!) Also? Flushing a public toilet by hand seems unspeakably vulgar, now that I’ve become accustomed to flushing squatters by foot.

We’re only here in the US for 3 days before we leave the country again, so I feel little need to acclimate to my homeland. Instead, I spend my time obsessing over every odd little detail. Everyone gets a menu when eating in restaurants, revolutionary! Soap and paper towels in public restrooms, brilliant! I can explain nuances clearly and competently to my doctor, fantastic!

But a more sinister side of America has started to manifest. Isn’t it unsanitary to wear one’s shoes into the bathroom? Why are you prescribing me medicine I can totally do without for $400 that I clearly can’t afford? Why, in a country fighting an epic battle with obesity, does it cost $15 to go to the gym for the day? And when I arrived in LA, I witnessed a street so clogged with traffic that a fire engine literally could not get through to its destination. How is that a workable plan? Why has this city not yet burnt down to the ground in a puff of smoke? And why does the main topic of conversation seem to be about all the stuff people have bought and how they can buy more?

It’s a novelty to be able to buy nearly anything I need with a credit card, but living in a country with tips means I can’t get rid of the spare change which increasingly weighs down my wallet. The frenzied rush of the LA freeway system, which functions on a totally different level from the equally crazy landscape of Japanese driving, also takes some getting used to.

The California public schools, I am surprised to note, are gorgeous! No prison block educational facilities here to insult the eye. Small community parks are green and luscious instead of bare patches of dirt. The backwardness of this confuses me though: it is a desert here in LA. Shouldn’t we have the parks made of dirt, and Japan have the lush green grassy expanses for kids to play on…?

And then there’s that weird SoCal phenomenon: the perfect 72-degree day with cloudless skies that stretch blue and flawless to the horizon. The first day of this weather was glorious, but after 3 days I began to get twitchy; it seemed unnatural after coming from Japan where I felt I’d been living under a little grey raincloud for 3 years. It only adds insult to injury to Noshiro, which was still probably drying out from the flood less than a week before (the second flood to hit that tiny town in two years).

Where, may I ask, are the cats on leashes? The onsens to soothe the aches and pains from lugging 80kg of luggage by hand across the Pacific? Where are the grannies bent over nearly in half with their pushcarts, elbowing people in the ribs as they plow through a crowd or brazenly stopping traffic as they meander out into the road? Where are the ubiquitous vending machines (they seem to have been replaced with an ample sprinkling of trash cans, a fair trade in my mind). And then of course, there is the soul-crushing smog, which brings us to the Californian existential question: Is it possible to fully enjoy perfect weather if you can’t see the horizon?

And not to belabor the point, but where’s my cashmoney, America? My bank seems to have vaporized sometime in the last year when I wasn’t looking. Washington Mutual, where are you? I thought you were going to meet me with flowers at the airport? I can only hope that the remnants of my life savings are floating around in the aether somewhere waiting for me to reclaim them when I return home this winter, ready to exchange cash for goods and services for my loved ones this holiday season.

A few more words on:

CELL PHONES
When I arrived in Japan, I grudgingly got the cheapest cell phone and payment plan possible. I’d never had a cell phone before, but I quickly grew to love it (you most of all, emoji!). Sadly, J-phones aren’t really designed to outlast the attention span of the average consumer (which is like 3 days), and at the end of my 3-year tenure, my phone was rebelling. The battery refused to remain charged. It also developed a rather suspicious-looking bulge which was getting bigger by the day, leaving me to nervously wonder when it was going to burst in a shower of battery acid.

Now that I’ve canceled my phone service abroad and gone through this exact process again in the states and I have to say, my new American cell phone… it sucks beans. Like an old friend I just can’t say goodbye to, my old J-phone is tucked away safely in storage. In the ruckus of repatriation however, I forgot to remove and dispose of the suspect battery. The worrisome bulge is probably still growing in my absence like some kind of space alien baby.

FOOD
In Japan, there were some hoops to jump through regarding food, for sure. Everyone deals with the scarcity of non-processed cheese, for one. And zucchini can only be procured during an obscenely short interval at the end of summer (pumpkin and daikon are, of course, available at any time). Some foreign foods, like Thai and Mexican are pretty much non-existent. So when I stepped into a Trader Joe’s a few days ago, I nearly wept with joy at the diversity I saw on the shelves. However, trolling the supermarket aisles later I was overwhelmed by the mind-numbing variety: do we really need Flamin’ Hot Cheetos con Limon and Cheddar Jalapeno Cheetos? Would America be any less complete if we did away with the whole aisle in the grocery store dedicated to Oreos and perhaps replaced it with only a pack or two? The variety of edible products really seems to have proliferated to an absurd degree in our absence.

WORDS
When I first moved to Japan, I found the new language overwhelming. My brain overloaded as it tried to sift through all the text seen and sentences heard and come out with something sensical. And it would grind to a screeching halt every time. After 3 years in northern Tohoku, I’ve learned to filter efficiently: focus on the pertinent, and ignore the rest. But upon arriving in LA, I find that I’m experiencing the same phenomenon all over again, only in reverse. I’m compelled to read everything, listen to everything just because I can. Advertisements for real estate. Strangers’ conversations. Sensationalist TV shows on FOX. And this effortless and immediate ability to comprehend everything is, frankly, wearing me out.

ALCOHOL
I felt the old puritanical attitudes toward alcohol come flooding back as I sat in my favorite brewery, void of ID. Imagine my embarrassment when at 32, I had to ask my dad to order beer for me. I then covertly sipped said beer from a straw because I know how fierce California establishments are about monitoring underage drinking. I’d grown complacent after all those izakaya visits and forgotten to bring either my passport or my drivers’ license. At 32, why can I not just order beer in this country? You’d think the grey hairs on my head would be proof enough (although now that I think about it, some of my 12-year-old students in Japan sport more grey than I).

RELATIVE SIZE
For the first time in my life, I felt average-sized in Japan, as I’m only slightly below average in height and slightly above average in other bodily dimensions there. In America, I feel categorically small again. I’m not sure how to feel about this. I can easily find clothes that fit me again (yay!) but I am no longer the bustiest girl in the room by default (boo). I’m no longer comparing myself to the stick-thin girls I was surrounded by in Japan (yay!) but I have zero visibility now when in a crowd (boo).

You may be tempted at this point to ask: Where next? All of this culture-comparing is nice and all, but where are you going to live, girl? To which my response is: Run away! Yes, I’m avoiding such weighty questions by going on the gap year adventure that I was too serious and focused to take when I was actually 22. We’ll be gone for 4-5 months (I promised the fam I’d be home this Christmas) while we visit our friends living far and wide. Hopefully, whatever comes next in life will sort itself out in the meantime.

Wish us luck, stay in touch, and see you on the other side!

So here’s the stuff I’ll miss when I go.

Shinto

Shinto is Japan’s home-grown polytheistic/animist belief system, which I would loosely describe as a cosmology representing nature and our place in it. In day-to-day life, Shinto manifests itself by marking places of beauty, celebrating life events, and throwing really cool festivals.

The iconic red Shinto gate is one of Japan’s best-known symbols. These shrines are so pervasive in Japanese culture that their bright red-orange color has its own kanji, 朱, translated as “vermillion” in English. Indeed, the ubiquitous presence of Shinto shrines fully makes up for the country’s otherwise ugly construction practices. Nothing spruces up a wall of concrete like a bright and cheery shrine where you least expect it. The arches themselves aren’t always beautiful — sometimes they’re made out of concrete or even metal tubes — but the very fact that they’re there means someone thought this place deserved to be commemorated, and that makes life just a little bit brighter. And shrines only get better with age: a shabby arch is just as cheering as one meticulously maintained.

And Shinto festivals are simply fabulous. The priestly costumes are out of this world. The festivals themselves usually consist of huge groups of people getting together to do something useless but entertaining, like carrying heavy shrines across town and back, or into a waterfall. Followed, of course, by drinking (see Non-Puritanism below).

Some (probably not many) may wonder why I haven’t mentioned Buddhism along with Shinto. Indeed, the boundaries between the two are essentially indistinguishable in Japan — many Buddhist temple complexes contain Shinto shrines and vice versa. But as it was wonderfully described to us by Johnnie Hillwalker in Kyoto, Buddhism deals with death, while Shinto deals with life. Buddhism is much more of an organized religion: centralized temples, cemeteries, services, chants; whereas Shinto is more about appreciating nature and and our place in it. And while I love Buddhist temples too, it’s the Shinto shrines I’m going to miss when we leave.

Effortlessly Healthy Food

Japanese people live forever, and they always seem to look about ¾ their actual age. Some of that is genetic, but it doesn’t hurt that it’s extremely easy to get good, healthy, locally-grown food in this country.

Traditional Japanese food is known for its tiny portions and intricate preparation. Just the other day, in fact, Steph’s adult English class threw a going-away party for us, which involved of one of these 和風 meals. It consisted mainly of small bits of fresh, mostly unprocessed ingredients — by which I mean not fried, or sweetened, or greased. There was raw fish and shrimp, broiled salted fish, delightfully presented veggies, a squid stuffed with rice. (I have to admit, the latter tasted alarmingly like cat food.) With this as a traditional meal, you can see how modern Japanese cuisine would still tend toward the small and simple.

We’ve got it doubly good where we are, because the food only has to travel a couple of miles from farm to plate. Every supermarket has a section devoted to local produce: mushrooms, carrots, corn, eggplants, onions, potatoes, and various leafy things. If you go to a local restaurant, your meal is likely to be made by hand from fresh ingredients (seasonal, of course), not from a package. Even Mos Burger, Japan’s home-grown McDonald’s equivalent, exhaustively lists the farms where all its vegetables are sourced.

When we moved to Japan, I immediately lost 15 pounds — 10 of them in the first month. And my weight has remained around the same since then (ignoring the spike caused by going back to America for three weeks!) with no particular effort. So while I don’t always like Japanese food, I will definitely miss the effortless healthfulness of it.

Non-Puritanism

It’s a cliché that living in a foreign country teaches you things about yourself that you never knew. We all grow up immersed in our native cultures, not noticing all the biases and assumptions that surround us every day. Viewing America from the other side of the world has really brought home the degree to which the country’s social mores are descended from the Puritanism of the original settlers. Even after the astonishing social progress of the 20th century, American values still show their conservative roots, which I would describe roughly as: the body is sinful (so nudity and various bodily functions are considered embarrassing or obscene), and anything pleasurable (sex, alcohol, drugs) should be banned whenever possible… or at least done behind closed doors and never mentioned in public. I’m a pretty socially liberal guy, but even so, these priorities always seemed “natural” to me, though of course I was always aware of other cultures who weren’t as uptight about certain things — for example France with sex, or Amsterdam with drugs.

If I had to distill all of America’s social norms into one basic pattern, it would be that everything is treated as a moral issue. If you offend me, you are a Bad Person. In Japan, on the other hand, things tend to be treated as issues of etiquette. If you offend me, you’re a Bad Public Citizen. Most cultural norms here seem to come down to how your actions affect the group: If you’re not hurting anybody, usually you won’t be bothered about it.

And I love it that way.

Take alcohol. Japan is just as buttoned down as America when it comes to drugs like marijuana or anything “harder,” but alcohol is a completely different story. By American standards, most Japanese men would be considered raging alcoholics. (In my experience, women tend to drink much less than their male counterparts.) But whereas in America drinking a lot would be considered a sign of moral depravity, or at least weak will, here it seems to function mostly as a tool for relaxation — a temporary release from the more formal day-to-day strictures of Japanese society. The lack of moral judgmentalism really hits home when you see how casually alcohol is discussed in the public sphere. A few weeks ago we were doing a taiko performance at a retirement home, when our good friend Mr. Bean, who was serving as MC of the event, happily announced to the crowd of wheelchair-bound octogenarians, “Sorry I’m a bit spacey today… I drank way too much last night!” And Steph regularly encounters elementary school classes where “Do you like beer?” is one of the lesson-plan dialogs for practicing English.

Then there’s nudity. Showing body parts is just not a particularly big deal. Public baths are a societal fixture; everyone has seen a million naked strangers by the time they’re old enough to even think about it. Parents bathe with their children at home. Japanese sporting events don’t have streakers, because nobody would care.

If anything, Japan goes a bit off the deep end when it comes to their love of one piece of anatomy: the rear end. Indeed, Japan’s “butt culture” is a head-scratcher. Store windows will have cartoon blobs of poo advertising products. NHK (that’s right, the PBS of Japan) created a cartoon character called oshiri kajiri mushi (”butt-biting bug”) who has his own catchy song. One of our friends in Noshiro has a plush poo-doll sitting on her living room bookshelf. Steph’s theory on the fascination with poo is that it comes from the traditional squat toilets — in which your poo greets you, up close and personal, when you’re done.

When I set out to write this, I didn’t intend to pen a big meandering philosophical treatise on Japanese vs. American culture! And poo. Nor do I mean to imply that America is repressive or not a good place to live. Every country has its hangups, and America and Japan certainly both have them in spades. But I have found Japan’s general lack of holier-than-thou moralizing to be refreshing. I’ll remember the feeling fondly.

In the spirit of leaving the best for last, I’m going to start with the negative stuff. Some of this may come across as a snarky self-superior bitchfest; if so, that’s certainly not my intent! Indeed, my aim is to attain an Obama-like state, wherein I float serenely above mere human opinion and see all sides of an issue. Only funnier.

And so, these are the things I won’t miss about Japan, in no particular order.

Bureaucratic Culture

Imagine the most formal, structured kind of event that you possibly can. Graduation, wedding, funeral… that kind of thing. Every Japanese event is like that. Public events of any kind are invariably kicked off and concluded with interminable strings of boring, monotonic, content-free speeches. God help you if there’s a politician present.

And that’s just day to day events. Doing anything that you’d actually expect to require bureaucracy, like getting a driver’s license, is taken to an absurd degree. I was going to go into great detail here, but I can’t do it justice compared to the actual getting-a-license document prepared by and for Akita JETs, which is actually pretty entertaining reading in its absurdity — especially if you don’t have to go through the process yourself.

There’s not much more to say about this topic. It’s one of those paradoxical experiences that’s endless and annoying to live through but quick and easy to explain.

Loudspeakers

What’s that sound I hear outside? Window repairman? Fruit hawker? Opera singer? Electronics recycler? Politician running for office? All these and more have shouted at me from their cars as I try to get work done in my house during the day.

Election season is easily the worst, because every candidate will have cars out yelling his name and thank you! at top volume, all day, every day. Japanese elections are notorious for being completely content-free. You think American elections are nothing but meaningless sound bites? Japanese political campaigns usually consist of – literally – nothing more than “vote for me!” (On this subject, I’ve been wanting to watch the Japanese documentary Campaign, about a no-name guy running for office in Japan based purely on the party name, as filmed by his friend.)

And it’s not just the mobile speakermobiles. Any remotely popular destination will be thoroughly laced with loudspeakers: tourist attractions, parking lots, gas stations, stores, sometimes entire towns. It’s common, especially in small towns, for important hours (typically 9am, noon, and 5pm) to be marked by playing horribly creepy and depressing synthesized jingles throughout the town. I am extremely glad that Noshiro doesn’t do this (we just have noon air-raid-style sirens!); if they did, I don’t think we could have lasted three years.

What is it with all the public announcements? In America, we tend to view these pervasive public-announcement regimes as a distopic totalitarian-state mind-control kind of thing (e.g., Big Brother addressing the people of 1984), whereas it seems to be pretty normal for Asian cultures. Japan is as TV-addicted as any upstanding Western nation; I’m surprised they still go for the old-fashioned loudspeaker-in-the-street approach when just about every establishment you visit will have a TV on in the corner anyway.

Ugly Urbanity

Japan exports an image of ancient temples, flashy neon Tokyo skyscrapers, fast trains and Mount Fuji. While all these things do exist, the vast majority of Japanese construction consists of ugly piles of concrete held together with an unbelievable tangle of aerial wires. When they try to imitate other cultures’ architecture, it’s often an exercise in painfully cheap-looking mockery. Home interior lighting more often than not consists of a single fluorescent light hanging in the middle of each room. I’m not the only person who has noticed this. This Japan Times article from last year laments the same phenomenon.

I’m not a keen enough student of history to know exactly when Japan started to slide from traditional beauty to unfortunate modernity. But I’m guessing it was around the time the new parliamentary government was established after the war. The Japanese government often appears to exist for no other reason than to hand out useless projects to the construction industry. They’re particularly good at expressways and airports. Our nearest airport, Odate-Noshiro, built just a few years before we arrived, handles a load of — wait for it — two round-trip flights a day. One to Tokyo, one to Osaka. We like this airport because it has free parking and is so empty that you can get from your car to the gate in about 10 minutes. But it certainly doesn’t make any economic sense. But that’s still better than the new Ibaraki airport which is scheduled to open next year. No airlines will agree to fly to it.

So, I blame Japan’s “constructionocracy” for the ugly predominance of concrete throughout the country. We are fortunate to live in a sparsely populated corner of the country, an area filled mostly with rice fields. But I’m happy to say that beautiful scenery is never far away, even in the extremely densely-populated southern half of the country. This spring we took the train from Hiroshima to Tokyo, a four-hour ride through a region that is home to 50 million people — almost twice the population of California! And throughout that ride, I was repeatedly amazed at the procession of lovely little fields and valleys going by the window. People will plant rice fields absolutely anywhere they will fit. You can find them if you step around the cinder-block walls and the tobacco vending machines, and follow those little back alleys toward the flashes of green glimpsed between buildings.

There’s No “No” There

This is one of those common stereotypes about Japanese etiquette that happens to be completely true: they won’t say “no.”

In many instances, there’s no real harm in this. You’ll ask a question, and instead of receiving “no” as an answer, you’ll get the famous “teeth-sucking” reaction, which consists of:

1. Grit teeth
2. Cast eyes downward
3. Incline head slightly downward and to the side
4. Inhale slowly through your teeth so as to make a hissing sound

You can’t go through a day in Japan without getting this a few times. It’s never a reaction you want to see, but you can just translate it to “sorry, no” in your head and get on with life.

Where the no-”no” phenomenon really gets evil in the service sector. It’s a bit of a paradox, because Japanese service is rightfully renowned the world over for its obsequious treatment of the customer. (We’ve certainly missed that kind of customer service when visiting other countries on holidays these last few years.) But the great service has a sinister side, which comes out in certain not-uncommon situations: when you’re the customer who wants something, and the service-person doesn’t have it. The cynical translation of the resulting process is: “We know we can’t help you, but we have to pretend to try for as long as possible, so that you can see we did our absolute best to help you, the customer, who is most important.”

This was more of a problem in the beginning, before we figured out the pattern. Our first real experience with this issue was trying to get cell phones a few days after arriving in Noshiro. We went to the phone shop and started the ball rolling, merrily filling out forms and all that other stuff you have to do to get a phone contract. We were helped by an absolutely delightful young woman who assured us that we’d be out of there in no time.

Three hours later, we left the store tired, annoyed, and phoneless. You see, you can’t get a phone contract unless you have a foreigner-ID card. And we didn’t have those yet, since they take a few weeks to be issued. The shop clerks probably knew this the second we walked in the door. And if they didn’t (which is possible, because there’s a decent chance they’d never signed up a foreigner before), then the two or three different English-speaking national reps they put me on the phone with most certainly did. But to simply state that fact up front, when it became clear we didn’t have the necessary documents, would have been too direct.

That was certainly the most time-wasting incidence of the “pretend to help” pattern. But it can rear its head even in situations so simple that you’d never expect there could be any confusion. Like when we were grocery shopping and asked a clerk if they had salsa. He ended up leading us around the store for 10 minutes, going up and down every aisle with us before sadly declaring that apparently they don’t have salsa.

This pattern can get almost farcical when combined with Japan’s extreme commercial seasonality. Japanese products are insanely seasonal, often only being on shelves for a number of weeks before being retired to make way for the next big temporary thing. The trouble is, you never know if the wonderful morsel you’ve just discovered is one of these seasonal products, or if it’s a mainstay you’d just never noticed before. This kind of quick product turnover happens even in restaurants, where we’re occasionally hit by a favorite item disappearing off the menu without warning. Invariably this happens right when we’ve gotten comfortable enough at the restaurant to stop looking at the menu, leading to the slightly embarrassing (for all sides) situation:

1. Customer: I’ll have X
2. Waiter: Certainly! I’ll just write that down here.
3. C: That’s all, thanks!
4. W: Oh wait! I’ve just realized I don’t know what you ordered.
5. C: It’s the same thing I’ve been ordering for months!
6. W: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
7. C: It’s right here in the menu… <flip flip flip>
8. C: Expletive deleted, it’s gone.
9. W: Oh, that! Yeah, we stopped selling that yesterday.
10. C: <grumble>

(I must admit the exchange above was influenced by this piece by Thomas Dillon in the Japan Times.)

Experiences like these have essentially taught us never to ask for help from anyone who looks like their job is to be able to help you, unless we know for 110% sure that they know the answer to our question.

Of course, me being a stereotypical guy, I almost never ask for help or directions anyway, so the whole thing is really just reinforcing my existing instincts.

End of Rant

Stay tuned for a high-sucrose summary of more pleasant things in the next few weeks!

This year, however, I was relocated to a bunch of new schools, and I now no longer teach any of my taiko kids. This has had some unexpectedly delightful side effects, as I’m now free to act more like a sister and less like an authority figure.

Last weekend we all attended a 2-day taiko workshop. At the evening’s enkai,  I finally felt the taiko kids fully embrace the title of おねえさん and all of the responsibilities that it entails. All you older siblings out there know the drill, but I’ll break down my role for the rest of you.

Being おねえさん means:

• issuing orders and having them carried out. In this case it meant getting an unusually bossy 10-year old to go and fetch a rag to clean up my drink, which she spilled while exhibiting excessive exuberance. The miracle is that she complied immediately and without complaint.
• allowing fingers to be dipped in beer foam. Foam swiping is all good fun (who doesn’t like a finger or two in their drink?), but the problem was that this then escalated to whining and pleading for beer. When I looked to their usually no-nonsense mother for help, we found her curled up in a corner next to a friend giving us a hopeful and encouraging “thumbs up” sign.
• making sure that one of the kids keeps my glass full of beer at all times during the enkai. I left this somber and sacred duty to the 14-year old to my left.
• wiping up spilled alcohol with the children’s socks that litter the floor. This is an excellent alternative which is readily at hand, in case those rags are just too far away.

and, of course, just generally inciting them to silliness.

Other pieces of information gleaned from the taiko workshop include:

• A time-tested method for finding an enkai’s after-party, which is this: Wander the halls of the hotel which houses all of you, listen for the loudest room, and burst in with a full bottle of JINRO to join the party. I know this because that’s how the TWO roving bands of drunken Japanese taiko players found my modest post-party. By the end of the night, my small two person room contained 9 drunken men (some of whom had to be extricated by force) and one set of bongo drums.
• How to drum for two days straight with a broken rib, as demonstrated by one participant from Kamikoani. Taiko people are hard core.
• The first hard evidence I’ve seen in Japan of the global meltdown: enrollment in the workshop was visibly down from last year.

And, lest you think that taiko workshops are all about drinking beer and mistreating children, here’s the new piece we learned in 8 hours:

I got this phone call a few weeks ago, just after Obama’s inauguration. Reporter Friend asked me for my opinions on Obama vs. Bush and the current political climate in the U.S. (a place I haven’t lived for 2+ years, may I remind you). While Reporter Friend has a commendable working knowledge of the English language, there is still an appreciable communication gap between my faulty Japanese and her decent 英語, especially when it comes to topics like anti-intellectualism, wire-tapping, and fear-mongering. When it comes down to it, anything with a hyphen is probably kind of off-limits.

Nevertheless, Reporter Friend made valiant efforts to break through the 言葉の壁 and was able to produce her article. I know this for a fact because one of my spastically-endearing 15 year-old students texted me the morning the article was published to tell me how famous and amazing I was for having opinions (?_?). This all made me a little self-conscious… who knows if anything vital was lost in translation. For all I know, the article says that I’m a hard-core supporter of Gitmo and that I hate babies.

The finished product is below, peruse if you like. If any of you Japanese-speaking superstars out there would like to translate, I’d love to know what I “said”.

Until then, I can neither confirm nor deny that I may or may not have opinions about stuff… and things.

It started with the bulletin board. I’ve worked here for over two years and haven’t put a damn thing up on that English corner bulletin board. I’m just not a cutesy cut-and-paste scrap-booking bulletin board type. But last month? I finally had something to say.

I usually don’t talk about America in the classroom. I figure the students get inundated with enough crap American culture, I’m not going to force more on them… but, inspired by receipt of my absentee ballot, last month I made an exception and posted some information about the upcoming election. Pictures of McCain and Obama went up, along with a rudimentary explanation of Democrat vs. Republican. High school students began to gather around the board, giggling and pointing, looking confused but interested. This could be good, I thought.

Then last week in the days leading up to the election, I had the good fortune of working with my favorite Japanese teacher of English. Let’s just call him Rockstar, for his stellar teaching talents. Rockstar and I started class like we always do, by asking the students how they’re doing, and they respond in kind. In lieu of my usual schtick however, I responded by physically jumping up and down. Why, you ask? On Wednesday morning, I told them, we’ll find out who the next American president is. Be excited.

We then asked our 13 and 14 year-old students (impartially, of course) who they would vote for, McCain or Obama. To my surprise, everyone had very passionate opinions, like, way more passionate than I would expect from an American teenager. As it turns out, 95% of my students are for Obama.

How to explain this overwhelming majority? Some cynics theorize that Obama is popular in Japan because his name fits nicely into the Japanese syllabary. There’s also the small matter of Obama, Japan, a little fishing village which existed long before Obama the politician burst onto the scene a few years ago. However, Obama’s popularity with the kids is really no surprise… if you’re not avidly watching the campaign unfold, with the policy debates and the supposed scandals, all you have to go on is looks. I mean, who would you vote for, if you were 14? The young, hip guy with a smile or the old codger with a grimace?

My students verified this suspicion when we asked them to explain their reasoning. Most said they would vote for Obama because “He is cool!” or “He is black!” (which seems to lend one a certain mystique in Japanese pop-culture). One student though, blew everyone away when he simply replied: “Because Obama will see everyone as equals.”

Amazingly enough, one girl supported McCain to the bitter end, even after seeing all her classmates go for Obama. In a country that is all about not sticking out, at an age when you are dying to be just like everyone else, I was incredibly impressed that she stuck to her guns. Why does she support McCain? Because “Obama is too popular”. I didn’t delve any deeper, so we can’t be sure if she’s rocking the pity vote, or making blithe commentary on Obama’s messiah-like status. All in all, I was impressed with the students’ ability to express their personal opinion, especially when you consider that they’ve studied English for a year and a half, tops.

As Wednesday morning rolled around and electoral votes trickled in, I was on some kind of giddy caffeine-induced news high, drunk on information overload. Simultaneously chatting with friends, family, and my husband, we made the play-by-play back and forth as results began to pop up (Look, quick! Before it flips! Texas is blue! Go Dallas!) News began to trickle in about the rest of you as well: driving voters to the polls in Miami, last minute campaigning in Seattle, working long shifts at the polls in Ohio, stuck in chem lab in Texas, on the edge of your seat, waiting breathlessly in Harlem. As Obama’s electoral votes continued to inch towards 270, I raced off to teach for two hours. As usual, Rockstar and I brought up the election in class, that it was happening RIGHT NOW people, THIS IS NOT A DRILL! and if students wanted to know the results, they could come and ask me in person around 2pm to find out.

Little did I know that the entire school had been working on a research project about their hometown, culminating in an all-afternoon presentation. While this was a pretty awesome project, it may have stolen a little thunder from my election-fever. No matter… I went around from poster to poster, listening to students give speeches about the elementary schools they all came from, or what kind of fish swim in the river, or the best season to enjoy the local park, and it was incredibly sweet, actually. What a lovely way to celebrate and take pride in small town life (you know, the REAL Japan where the hard-working people with values live… ).

Then 2 o’clock rolled around. We were still rotating around the gym from presentation to presentation. But during those in-between moments, students inexorably gravitated towards me from across the room in groups of 3 or 4. In hushed conspiratorial voices, they would ask me「オバマかマケンか誰勝ったの？」After making them ask in English, and making a big “O” sign with my arms (also the sign for “Yes! Correct!” here in Japan), they would jump up and down, giving me high fives and celebratory terrorist fist jabs, then rush off to tell another cluster of students, who would approach me to start the process all over again.

But the most compelling moment was yet to come, when I returned to school on Thursday. Rockstar-sensei and I were on our way to class when he asked me to explain a little bit about Obama’s speech to the students. Unbeknownst to me, he had burned a copy of Obama’s acceptance speech to CD, and printed out hard copies for all of his students. I didn’t really have anything specific prepared. My impression was that he was planning on a 10 minute discussion, tops. To his credit, when I asked how much time I could use to discuss the speech, he replied “Take as much time as you want.” Anyone who has taught English in Japan while bound by protocol, anyone who has attempted to reach outside of the textbook, or tried to teach something which doesn’t fit neatly into the rigid government-determined English framework knows that setting aside agendas and schedules to learn from current events using real English is nothing short of miraculous.

We spent the entire hour going over the last 11 paragraphs of Obama’s acceptance speech, the part where the 106 year-old lady shows up to vote, and we stop for a moment to consider all she’s been through, to consider not only the hardships we’ve overcome in the last century, like war and inequality, but also all the progress society has made through technological breakthroughs.

To their credit, the junior high school students were familiar with just about every historical event mentioned in the speech (although it kind of blew their minds that this lady was born in a time without planes or cars). They nodded with hesitant familiarity as we went over (in English!) World War II, the first man on the moon, and even the Berlin wall coming down. They could understand how decades and decades ago, people were prevented from voting because of race, gender, or lack of money. What they hadn’t heard of and could barely comprehend was the Civil Rights Movement.

Using basic English we explained to our students about segregated buses and stores. We identified the “preacher from Alabama” as Martin Luther King (flashes of recognition here when Rockstar mentioned his name in Japanese) and that even though this man believed in protesting non-violently, he was still killed for his beliefs. When we stressed that all of this had happened less than 70 years ago, that was the kicker. That’s what they couldn’t believe. And that’s when it hit home, how this woman mentioned in the speech had been born some 40 years after the end of slavery, and had experienced the Civil Rights Movement and then lived long enough to witness the election of first African-American president. You could see the light go on, as students recognized the continuity and proximity of all these events, as they understood the context that makes this election’s results so extraordinary.

I am not a sentimental person. As such, I refuse to disclose the number of times that tears have come to my eyes since the election was called last Wednesday; frankly, it would be embarrassing. But I will tell you that each time we began this lesson, my tear ducts would ambush me. First it was discussing the Civil Rights Movement. When I got that under control, I then lost it when we got to WWII, which Obama describes as the time when “bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world”. Try translating that as an American standing in front of a class of Japanese school children. But the amazing thing was… we could all soberly acknowledge that this event happened, free of animosity on either side, knowing that even though our countries fought against each other in the past, we don’t have to be pigeon-holed by history. Tissue, please.

We wrapped up the lesson by discussing the “American Dream”, mentioned in the last paragraph of the speech. Until we began this conversation, I was unaware that many teachers and students alike in Japan have a very specific understanding of the American Dream. As it was explained to me, the Japanese interpretation has to do with the opportunity (possibly the right) to become rich and famous if you live in America. I explained my broader interpretation of the American Dream by making a list of some of the classifications that have divided our country in the past. Black and white. Rich and poor. Gender. Religion. And (in light of Prop. 8, thank you very much) gay and straight. And that no matter how you identify yourself, no matter what mix of all these things you are, you (should) have the same rights as anyone else. And (call me sentimental if you will) that if you work hard, you can achieve anything (even being rich and famous, if that’s your thing).

Now forget for a moment the larger-than-life oratory, the rhetoric, the poignant references to Lincoln and JFK and Martin Luther King. Forget the beautifully constructed arc of the speech, how Obama calls upon the citizenry for “service and responsibility,” the (dare I say it) historic drama of it all. Instead take in these words for a moment: “While the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility…” Humility. A word I’ve scarcely heard in the last 8 years, certainly not from anyone in the reigning administration, certainly not regarding current American policy.

While it remains to be seen if Obama will be an effective president, he is already having a profound effect in my small community here in Japan. Instead of asking in class “People who understand, raise your hands”, Rockstar-sensei now says “Yes We Can people…?” and arms shoot enthusiastically into the air. The English teachers aren’t the only ones who are jumping on the band-wagon. The Japanese teacher also took in a translation of Obama’s speech to study with his class this week.

As for the two of us? The night of Obama’s victory we went out to carouse, euphoric on an election high (just like the rest of y’all, apparently). I wanted to run like crazy through streets packed to the gills with humanity, but this being Tohoku, I had to settle for something a little more modest in scale. Eager to share our good cheer with someone, we headed to a familiar restaurant where we know the folks who run the joint. We shared the room with one other Japanese couple. The TV was on, rehashing election results, mostly just showing clips from Obama’s acceptance speech. As the Japanese translation scrolled by on the screen, we could hear the general consensus in the room: “Dude, I totally can’t understand him but he’s SO COOL!”

We knew, all of us, that despite the excitement, that despite all the hype, he’s not the ultimate solution to all things. He’s not our fairy godmother. Of course he’ll make mistakes. But for that moment, we allowed ourselves the luxury of basking happily and without reservation in the election afterglow, drinking beer, feeling that all was right with the world, even if it’s not. At the end of the night, making our way out the door, we congratulated the two lingering couples on Obama’s victory. In return, their cheers ushered us out into the night, all of us flushed with mutual good feeling (and, let’s be honest, alcohol).

I’m not sure how election night unfolded for you, where you were, what you felt, when you heard. But that’s how it all went down here, in the boondocks of Japan.

Take, for example, the main bridge in town, which crosses the Yoneshiro river. I bike over this guy all the time. I’ve watched sunsets and fireworks from this span. I drive over it on my way to onsens, to schools, to Aomori. But I’d never actually been under it before, until last week, when curiosity seized me, and I ducked under its low 4-foot clearance. Here, I found ample evidence that English is alive and well Noshiro, as well as graffiti, which has always been eerily absent in town, with the exception of this one scrawl by the river. Apparently high school students are incredibly motivated by the topic of sex (shocker!) and want nothing more than to tell you all about it in English. On the far side of the bridge, you can find a lovely “Welcome Motherfucker” salutation. This wasn’t the first thing I saw when I moved to Noshiro, but I kind of wish it had been.

Another recent eye-opener involves these discrete black, white and yellow signs that are posted throughout the countryside. They’re so discrete, in fact, that I didn’t really even notice them until a few months ago. Then I began to see them everywhere… the distinctive color scheme and the concise, clean design kept catching my eye. Last weekend, I went on a quest to photograph as many of these signs as I could find, and translate them when I had some free time. On a 20 km bike ride between Noshiro and the neighboring town of Futatsui, I found 11 specimens, often on old neglected buildings covered with corrugated metal, or next to these red and white “Orion*” signs which advertise the availability of “life loans”. What did it all mean?

Herein lies the beauty of the foreign language: when you first see signs in a language you don’t know, everything looks romantic and foreign and lovely. When I moved to Japan two years ago, I was thrilled to ride my bike down streets chock-full of atmospheric signs declaring: タバコ、お酒、おもしろ館. Now that I’ve become more proficient in Japanese, I know better: these signs are just hawking cigarettes, alcohol, and porn, just like everywhere else in the world. Comprehension is great, but sometimes, you lose a little innocence when you translate.

Such is the case with my mystery signs, because I found to my surprise when I translated them that they were advocating Christianity. Which is fine in and of itself, but some of the messages were a little pointed for my taste, including “Sin’s reward is death” and “Make up for adultery. Jesus Christ“. Before, these signs were just part of the scenery in the Japanese countryside, but now every time I see one, I feel like I’m being asked to consider my status as a sinner. It’s a little unnerving.

So, yes, there’s a slight loss of innocence there. But being able to understand these signs brings up a whole new intriguing set of questions. Christianity was banned in Japan until the Meiji era, and Christians (according to Wikipedia ;) ) make up about 1% of the population here today. Consider for a moment that the average frequency of these signs in my neighborhood is 1 every 2 kilometers. Where do they all come from? A little internet research reveals that these signs are not just in Akita, or even Tohoku, but that they can be found all over Japan.

As an outside observer with little emotional investment in the signs’ message itself, I’m fascinated by this phenomenon. Who put these signs here? Are the owners of all these buildings Christian? Or are they indicative of a vigorous canvassing campaign? Why do I see these signs mostly in the countryside, but not so much in big cities? Discuss potential scenarios amongst yourselves, and let me know what you come up with… in the meantime, I’ll be out cruising the country roads, looking for another sign from (or at least about) God.

*FYI, while this company’s name originally appeared to be “Orion” in a funky English font, upon closer inspection it is actually “マルフク” in a funky Japanese font. Go figure.

Don’t be so goal-oriented that you neglect to stop and explore the Shinto shrines tucked away by the side of the road. Do imitate superheros at every available opportunity. Do accept the vacuum sealed cobs of cooked corn from the nice man at the restaurant who just took an hour and a half to make you 4 pizzas. Don’t attempt to eat them, however, (the corn, not the pizza) as mold has infiltrated the packages and is inching its way between the starchy kernels.

When you realize that you have two more hours of biking to reach your hotel and only half an hour before check-in, do ditch your bikes in the boiler room behind the local temple gift shop and hoof it by car to your destination. Don’t feel guilty; it’s not cheating, you’re on vacation.

If at all possible, do reserve a room in a swanky onsen hotel for one night. Do take full advantage of the private onsen on your porch overlooking the Japanese-style garden as the sun sets. Do try to eat everything that is brought to your room for dinner, though this will take a good part of the night, as you wade through a cornucopia of sashimi, sea urchin, grilled fish, savory custards, abalone, pickles, rice and hotpot soups.

When you resume biking, and you pass a bus full of Japanese children on the road, DO make sure you ham it up by mimicking the one physical punch-line of every Japanese comedian you’ve never seen. This will bring you good karma with the transportation gods.

Do visit Goshogawara for their Tachineputa festival. Do arrive before dark so you can stroll down the street where festival floats are lined up and float pullers are diligently preparing for the night ahead. Do get a good look at the crazy vertical hair that the good people of Goshogawara force upon their children. Don’t expect to find much in the way of dinner. And for god’s sake, DON’T mess with the policemen. They are cranky and not happy to be working crowd control. Also… don’t idly stand in front of any food stalls while watching the festival or you will be soundly bitch-slapped by the authorities.

Do reserve a room in Aomori City for the Nebuta festival, and do it as soon as possible, say, early April. Do take advantage of the bleachers that hotels have set out just for their hotel guests. Do catch bells thrown by members of the parade for good luck. Don’t miss the ample product placement by convenience stores and beer companies. Do feel free to laugh at the effeminate gymnasts in full body unitards who want you to buy their particular brand of sports drink. Don’t spend too much time wondering how someone snuck an Egyptian pharaoh into the parade.

Do have more than a passing understanding of the festival schedule. Don’t assume that all parades are at night, and don’t park underground only to find when you’re ready to leave town that the exits have been closed off for a mid-afternoon parade for the next two hours. Don’t get grumpy when this happens to you. Hug a traffic cone instead. It understands your plight. Do understand that most of these week long nebuta festivals will probably culminate with an afternoon (not evening) parade. Corollary: Don’t be surprised when you drive to Hirosaki on the last day of Neputa only to find a ghost town when you arrive at night.

Do go into the Spanish restaurant you find while looking for okonomiyaki. Do eat the entire two baskets of bread and fresh butter that miraculously appear at your table. You’ve lived in Japan for two years. You’re worth it. Do order copious amounts of the lovely cinnamony sangria that is beckoning to you from the menu. It is just as good as you imagine.

Do go to as many onsens as possible while you’re in Aomori, but DON’T expect them to have soap and shampoo. This, apparently, is a quaint Akitan custom. Don’t pick your onsens indiscriminately or you may find yourself in the Onsen Of Death, where the air is saturated with steam hotter than hell itself.

Do take a ferry to tiny fishing villages in the middle of nowhere. Don’t listen to the guy at the dock who claims that you have no time to stop and pet dogs before the ferry returns to pick you up. Do find a tiny shack of a lunch place to order and conquer the uni-don. Do listen to the cute old lady who’s serving you lunch when she tells you that you’re about to miss the one and only ferry back the mainland. Don’t forget to buy a few kakigori on the way out the door to thank her for her kindness and attention to detail.

Do set out on your return trip home on a bike with gears, if your return trip involves biking over the Shirakami mountains. Do be on your best behavior at all times when traveling, as you will inexplicably run into your landlord’s neighbor and several members of your taiko group, even though you are cycling far from home. Don’t pull into a rest stop swarming with cops if you are a foreigner driving without a license. Do lose your bike tire patching kit in lieu of actually popping a tire. Do make the slight detour to view fields of tri-tone rice that form a giant canvas upon which famous Japanese masterpieces are re-created.

Don’t hesitate to stop at a friend’s house to crash, covering his entire floor with futons for the night. Do recuperate from your travels at a local bar, sipping on beers from Belgium and Mexico while you watch the opening ceremonies of the Chinese Olympics, surrounded by friends from Canada, India, and Japan.

Do breathe in the intoxicating summer air, thick with the smell of greenery growing furiously under a bright blue sky as you return home. On your last day out, do find as many dead ends as you can, while you follow your river back home through the countryside, thus elongating your trip as much as possible. Don’t forget to look for herons tucked stealthily among the rice fields. Do stop for a moment to marvel at the din of chirping cicadas screaming over each other to be heard, their collective discord making the air shimmer in a tapestry of sound.

Do return home exhausted and collapse on your couch with schemes for future bike trips already taking shape in your head, the last thing you remember before sleep claims your weary limbs.

Cutie Honey – Koda Kumi
Ah, my very first JPop song. Cutie Honey is a character who appears in lots of manga and anime, and this is her theme song! Her prominent characteristic is that she gets “busty” whenever she’s in crime-fighting mode, and the lyrics to “Cutie Honey” describe the salient features of her body. This version is by Koda Kumi, who is, as far as I can tell, the Britney Spears of Japan: void of socially redeeming features and total eye candy. The video for this song actually grooves pretty effortlessly, and has an English translation of the lyrics as well as romaji.

Word to the wise: let it download completely before you start watching.

Cutie Honey’s contribution to my knowledge of Japanese includes:

• Verbs for sappy love songs
  傷つける (to wound, hurt someone’s feelings)
  見つめる (to stare intently)
  追いかける (to chase after/pursue someone)
  近寄よる(to approach/draw near)

• Japanese onomatopoeia:
  チュクチュク(beating heart)
  ヒクヒク (twitching nose)
  シクシク (sound of sobbing)

アゲ♂アゲ♂EVERY☆騎士 – DJ OZMA
Ok, I have no idea what is up with the title to this song, thus I always have to get my Japanese friends to reluctantly punch this one into the karaoke machine. For the sake of clarity, I’m just going to refer to this gem as “Every Night”, because that’s the phrase that’s going to be burned indelibly into your consciousness by the end of the song.

I’m a little ashamed to put DJ Ozma up here… he seems a little trashy, and I always get a few eye rolls when I queue this one up. But you can’t deny it… the song is catchy and mesmerizing. There’s a fair bit of English in this song (it even kind of makes sense!) which is balanced out by some ridiculously fast Japanese phrases.

The video is worth it just to see Ozma’s hair at the end, which is kind of like a blonde afro. Did I also mention that he’s wearing a white leisure suit? The mood in this video strikes a weird balance between raw sexuality and the kum-ba-ya-ishness of summer camp. Some of the dance moves are also ludicrously outdated, as are the women crawling earnestly all over Ozma

In addition to being endlessly amusing, DJ Ozma taught me some basic PG-13 vocabulary that has for some reason escaped me up to this point, such as:

唇 (lips)
狂う (to go crazy, ie. dancing like crazy)
出鱈目 (bullshit, nonsense)
裸 (naked)

Kiss and Cry -宇多田ヒカル
Utada Hikaru’s a pretty big name and has been for about 10 years now. I’m told by my Japanese friends that her lyrics are beautifully crafted and “read like poetry”. No music video for this one yet as far as I can tell, so you’re going to have to settle for this odd pairing with anime.

More good sappy love song vocab here, including:
近づく (to approach, get closer)
誘う (to lure, seduce)
共犯 (complicity)
and my personal favorite, 弱虫, which translates directly as “weak insect” and means “coward”.

The song also features fun Japanese-English phrases like “high tension” (said of a person), “critical hit” (to the heart), “resutora” (corporate restructuring), and “donto-uori-beibe” (Don’t worry baby), which is mysteriously inflected with katakana, even though the singer is fluent in English.

Extra points to Utada Hikaru for effortlessly working “Nisshin Cup O’Noodle” into her song.

Choo Choo Train – Exile
My students are all bugging me to learn a song by Exile. They’re kind of boy-band-ish for my tastes, and thus I’ve been resisting. But two weeks ago I started teaching American pop music to my English club at school, so in the name of reciprocity, I’m kind of at their mercy.

This particular song seems to have more English in it than 日本語. The lyrics don’t seem to make much sense in either language, which makes the song kind of useless for studying Japanese. But it’s fun, if formulaic. Choo Choo train is easy enough to learn, and if it gets me some cred with my students, it’s the least I can do. Literally.

Let’s just call this one a pop-culture lesson and leave it at that. I wish I could show you the breezy fun video of boy candy running along railroad tracks, but alas, the copyright watchdogs in Japan are FIERCE!

Anytime – Crystal Kay
Crystal Kay has this intoxicating cultural background that is rare in Japan. The upshot of this is that she is fluent in Japanese and English and is an excellent R&B singer to boot.

am 11:00 – HY
Should I ever master this song, I want a lifetime achievement award. This song lies right on the boundary of the possible for me and the Japanese skills I currently own. It’s full of crazy articulate vocabulary, but more intimidating than that is that the second half of the song is rap. However, am 11:00 has endeared itself to me, and I find myself oddly drawn to the whole Japanese rap thing. The music video is sweet and earnest and fun and isn’t trying too hard to be cool or foreign or sexy, which is saying a lot in the world of J-Pop. Plus I love that I get to sing the non-sequitur “Let’s go to hunny’s house” right smack dab in the middle of the song.

If anyone out there knows of more singable JPop, please pass it my way!
After all, I have a big test to study for.