Once There Was a Way

Can you be homesick for a place that was not your home?  What does it mean, exactly, for some place to be your home? 

To a person who has always lived in the same place, maybe the first question seems nonsensical and the second one seems obvious.  But I am not one of those people.  I have lived a lot of very different places, and I don't always know what it means to be "home."  I didn't, for example, feel like Missoula, Montana, was home until after I had left it; going back there after a three-year absence made it suddenly feel as though it had once been home.  At least, I still did know many of the local bands (rock on, Volumen!).

The two places I really get homesick for, though, are (perhaps appropriately) two of the places I lived the least long.  One is Arkansas.  I lived there every summer when I was growing up, because that is where my father lived after he left us.  The other is Japan.  I lived in Japan (two different cities) for three years.  I married a Japanese fellow.  He is not homesick for Japan, but I find myself spending much of my downtime at work searching for blogs of Japanese people and expats, looking to get a sweet nostalgic taste of cherry blossom.

What do I miss, exactly?  Obviously, the ramen, but besides that... I think Japan was one of the first places I felt at home because it was one of the first places I felt that it was obvious why I didn't fit in, so I didn't feel so bothered by not fitting in.  Everything about Japanese culture says, "Hey, white girl, you don't belong here," so I never felt like I had to.  It just was, and I just was.  I made my own life there exactly how I wanted it without worrying so much.  I didn't care about the fucked up political situation like I always do here in my "home" country.  I didn't care that people watched so much TV and did so much shopping and hair-and-nail maintenance that they were left with little brain space for anything interesting.  I just didn't care.  That was so freeing.  I try to carry that over into life back in the states, but I can't quite pull it off here.  Something about speaking the same language and nominally coming from the same culture makes me feel as though I ought to have something in common with other Americans, and yet...I have trouble there. 

Anyway, probably what I'm missing is the sheer freedom that I felt in both Japan and Arkansas.  Being in Arkansas in my youth meant a very severe lack of parental control; it meant summer and Johnny Cash and hitting the open road and spending all day swimming in the river (watch out for snakes!).  It meant drinking nothing but Dr. Pepper for months on end (and so, sadly, Arkansas also meant severe bladder infection).  Japan meant being fully and completely myself because I could.  In Arkansas, there were no rules.  In Japan, most of the rules did not apply to me since I was foreign.  Is this what I am calling homesickness?  Probably.   That and missing the food in both places.  But is this what homesickness actually is--a longing for a return to youth and/or freedom?

That could explain why my Japanese husband has a distinct lack of homesickness for Japan.  He was markedly less free there than he is here, particularly because he does not fit in in Japanese society.  At all.  I do know that a lot of my Japanese friends feel homesick for Japan, though, even when they do fit in, so I think homesickness may also have a component of missing knowing things.  Shit.  That was awkwardly phrased.  What I mean is that I think to miss home is to miss the place where you knew how everything worked, where you knew what was expected and what your role was.  Even if you only use the rules to subvert them, there is a home-like comfort in knowing them, isn't there?  Well, if that is what homesickness is, then I suppose that is not what I feel for Arkansas and Japan.  Having spent the least amounts of life-time in those two places, they are the two places where I am in most respects not in that comfort zone of knowing all the rules and roles and cultural workings.  Yet they are the two places I feel most comfortable.  A trip to Oil Trough (Arkansas--yes, we're damned hillbillies) or Osaka...it always cures what ails me.

reposted, with slight editing, from GinBaby (which was also me)

Night Train

The very best things happen in Japan when you are waiting for something else to happen.  I suppose that it's really only because so much time in Japan is spent waiting, or maybe it was because in my monolingual foreign-ness, I was so inept at, for example, catching trains on time.  But if I had it all to do over again, I would miss all those trains again because a lot of life happens when you don't know what the hell you're doing.

It was an epic case of missing a train that created the opportunity to meet the group of men who became my best friends for a while.  I decided one Friday night--a very cold night in early January--to take a train to Tokyo after I got off work.  The school I was teaching at had evening lessons, so that meant leaving late.  I guess I assumed, to the extent that I thought of it at all, that trains ran more or less all night.  I remembered reading something in the Lonely Planet guide about a night train, but with my usual fecklessness, I didn't get details or anything.

Unfortunately, I got to the next major town from where I lived (for geography buffs, I lived in Fujinomiya, at the base of Mt. Fuji, and the place where I ran out of train was Numazu, both in Shizuoka prefecture), I discovered that the next train that would get me as far as Tokyo wasn't until morning.

I didn't want to spend my little bit of money on a hotel, and I was trapped in this town where I didn't know anyone.  My Japanese was still below beginner, but I did at least have a phrasebook and dictionary on me. I spent most of the night wandering around watching people.   I was given a CD Walkman with a Dave Matthews band CD in it by a very drunk Australian who thought some Dave Matthews would somehow help me fight off hypothermia.  As the night was winding down and the streets were starting to clear, I settled myself on a bench near the train station to have a long, cold wait with bad music.

I had only been sitting there a few minutes when I spotted a beautiful young man walking down the street opposite where I was sitting.  He was watching me, so I gave him my very biggest and best smile, and he smiled back and our eyes locked.  And finally, the magic of the moment having apparently overcome his initial hesitation to talk to a strange foreigner in the cold, he crossed the street to talk to me.

We had halting conversation for a few minutes, relying heavily on my dictionary, until he understood my situation.  He had been on his way to meet a group of friends, so he called them to tell them where he was, and they all came to where we were sitting.  There were 3 or 4 girls and 7 or 8 men, and they were all very concerned for my well being.

I ended up going back to the apartment of one of the guys and his girlfriend to stay the night.  Then I returned nearly every weekend for over a year to give some of them private English lessons, lessons which always somehow involved alcohol.  As I kept going back, I got to know them pretty well.  They were all in their mid-20s, and they had all gone to high school together.  The men all worked construction, while the women mostly worked at secretarial type jobs.  In truth, I didn't see the women most weekends; usually when we went out drinking, I was the only woman in the group of 4-8 people.  But over the course of this year, these guys taught me a lot of Japanese, a lot about relationships between the sexes in Japan, the etiquette of drinking in a bar with friends, and that you can fish off the pier in Numazu.  They are the reason that one Japanese cop I met told me that my Japanese sounds like a young man's, not appropriate at all for a young woman or an English teacher.  They are the reason that at a certain bar in Numazu, there is a drink named after me (it's a gin, Campari, and tonic concoction).  Ultimately, they are (indirectly) the reason I had the chance to meet my husband.

Will Smile for Drinks

The first time I thought maybe life in Japan was going to be something unusual, I was standing in a train station in Kanagawa trying to figure out what to do.  I had lived in Japan less than a month, it was right before Christmas, I was broke, and I knew no one in the area except the guy who had just broken up with me.

Let me back up for a minute and tell you a little about him.  Not much, because he wasn't all that interesting, but there he is, a symbol of everything that was about to go wrong--or right, depending on how you look at it--for me.  He was a Japanese guy who lived in San Francisco, and I met him online.  We didn't confess our love for each other online or anything like that, but as I was flying out to Japan, I got myself a layover in San Francisco so we could meet, and we enjoyed each other's company enough that when he came to Japan a couple of weeks later on business, we met again as boyfriend and girlfriend.  He gave me some beautiful pearl earrings for a Christmas present.  But he was a very serious man, and I, alas, take few things very seriously at all.  When he told me that night in Kanagawa that he was breaking up with me because I just wasn't a serious enough person, my first thought was "WTF?  That's the stupidest reason anyone has ever broken up with me.  You cannot be serious about that."  But he was.  And so there I was, standing in a train station asking myself WTF.

I hadn't moved much beyond that train of thought when I felt a tap on my shoulder.  I only had been in Japan a couple of weeks, but I already expected it to be an old lady nagging me about something I, in my hideous foreign-ness, was doing wrong.  Instead, it was two salarymen, and they asked me as if it were the most normal thing in the world, "Nomi ni iku?"  I did not know what that meant, but I immediately recognized the gesture of sake drinking, and I was in.  There was nothing I needed more in my life right at that moment than a man making sake-drinking gestures at me.

I want to be very clear about this.  I did not think about the decision at all.  I did not consider that these two petite, middle-aged salarymen might be serial killers who preyed on lost blonde girls.  I did not consider whether they were actually asking me for sex, which I might or might not want to give.  I did briefly consider that I had no money to pay for drinks, really, but I had been in Japan just long enough to realize that a smiling blonde can get away with a lot, so I figured I could pretend to have lost my wallet if it turned into an issue. Or something.  I didn't think much about any of this, didn't want to think about any of it, just wanted to say yes and see where that path went.  So, that is what I did.

We went to a pub type of a place and drank.  Mostly they talked and I smiled.  I couldn't really understand enough Japanese to do more than that, and they spoke no English.  It was enough that I sat there and smiled and poured their drinks for them.  In that way, I earned a night of free drinking.  When they were tired and wanted to catch the last train home, we parted.  They didn't want my money or sex.  They just wanted a reasonably pretty girl to pretend for a while to enjoy their company and keep their cups full.  It was a pretty simple deal, and I was sold.

I had just enough money to get back to my house on the train that night, but I spent the whole ride plotting over how to spend my time in Japan never having to buy my own drinks.  It didn't quite work out that way, but close enough.

With my next paycheck, I bought myself some tools to teach myself Japanese on the reckoning that a pretty girl who could speak Japanese would get more free drinks than one who could merely smile dumbly.

Not Your Japan

I've been wanting to blog about what my life was like in Japan for a long time.  Most of the blogs about gaijin living in Japan are written by men, and many of them come from very specific points of view, like guys who love otaku culture or guys who are just really desperate to find a Japanese woman who will nag them for the rest of their lives.  I read these blogs from time to time when I find myself missing Japan, but I always come away dissatisfied because none of them really come at all close to the particular experiences I had while I was there.  No, Internets, I'm not saying that I'm some kind of special snowflake, because I know that that will get me immediately kicked off the World Wide Web, just that...I lived a life there that was perhaps a bit out of the ordinary for a gaijin.

I wasn't a hostess or a geisha or anything cool like that.  But I went to Japan pretty much tabula rasa.  I don't care about manga, I didn't know much at all about Japanese culture, and I didn't speak Japanese to any great extent.  We'll get into why I went there in another post.  I did have, as I suppose most Americans do to the extent that they have any ideas at all about Japanese culture, the idea that Japan was very unfree, very patriarchal, very unfriendly towards women (especially women who aren't looking to be housewives).

After spending three years almost entirely in the company of very ordinary Japanese men, I came to believe that, except for the "unfree" bit (and that is just complicated), those accepted ideas about Japanese society are wrong.  All wrong.  I know there are a lot of people, some of whom having lived there much longer than I did, who would disagree with me, but I don't care.  I think they would disagree because they would have had quite different experiences.  Being men (mostly--or Western women looking to get their biases confirmed) they would necessarily have had very different experiences.  Being men who are interested specifically in fetching a Japanese wife (which, sadly, describes a great number of the foreign men who go to Japan--or, worse, the fellows who just want an "Asian" wife and hop from country to country looking for one), whether explicitly or not, gives them another layer of bias.  They're sympathetic to the ladies from the get-go, and I am not particularly.  To be perfectly honest, most Japanese women bore the daylights out of me.  And I really have a hard time taking grown-ups who carry stuffed animals around with them very seriously.  Unless it's a gift for your kids and you're just on your way home to give it to them, it's not a healthy sign in my book.

So, welcome to a blog about Japan that is more focused on Japanese men than women, that says nothing about manga or anime (except Full Metal Panic, if that counts), and that seeks to undermine a lot of popular notions about the Japanese based totally on special-snowflake anecdotal evidence.  If you find another in a similar vein, let me know.

Eureka!

I have finally done it.  I have identified the most pathetic men on the Internet.  Before the Internet, it was the LARPers.  Then, in the early digital days, it used to be the guys who ran BBSs dedicated to ham radio, but no longer.  LARPers and ham-radio BBSers, at least, are endearingly committed to their passions, pretty honest about their geekery, and charmingly virginal.

No, today the most pathetic species on the Internet are the Alpha Game men.

Perhaps you have heard of this.  I guess my not having heard of it is another sign, if one was needed, that I am way out of touch with the zeitgeist.  But I guess Glenn Reynolds, whose Instapundit I check with some regularity, must be a fan, a fact I find rather difficult to reconcile with the manifest evidence that he is otherwise an intelligent man, because he has linked to a blog called Alpha Game (whose tagline should be "for men who can't get laid!") on several occasions, and that's how I found out about these men.  It didn't particularly strike me until today just how pathetic they really are.

When it did strike me, I was actually reading a post on Dr. Helen's blog.  Dr. Helen is married to the Instapundit.  Part of Dr. Helen's schtick--and one that I am not unsympathetic to, because I also think men get a horrible deal from society these days in many ways, including in family law--is that men don't have many good reasons to get married anymore.  I mean, women are harridans, amirite?

But the comments!  The entire comments thread could be summarized thusly, "Women are a thieving pack of liars and sluts who will marry you, then divorce you and take all your money and, if you have children, take even more of your money and never let you see the kids.  And since women are sluts, the kid is probably not even yours anyway."

I'm not even putting words into their mouths.  If you care to read through the comments, you will find "pack of liars" and so forth in there, verbatim, although I did amalgamate.  And at first blush, the problem here seems to be rampant misogyny of a sort not even a Don Draper would publicly engage in.  I mean, this is real misogyny.  This is like the KKK Grand Duke of misogyny.

But after I thought about it a bit more, I found that the comments did not make me feel angry or defensive; they made me feel sad. This isn't just misogyny, this is a profound lack of self-esteem on the part of these men.  None of the mentally stable married men that I know (my own husband included) spends a lot of time worrying that his kids are not really his and that his lying slut of a wife might leave him at any moment, through absolutely no fault of his own, and take his car, his dog, and his house.  If they are confident that their wives are good women and that they are being the best husbands they can be, then they don't really let this kind of thing keep them up at night.  If they have had past relationships in which the woman was a lying slut and/or harridan (and it happens), they've kind of moved on.

To be so utterly and helplessly focused on all the ways a woman might hurt you--and to believe that she will do this with no warning, no fault on your part, and with a total lack of regard for your feelings--indicates that you don't believe you are worth being married to.  Nothing more.  You believe a woman will necessarily cheat on you because--well, look, you probably have a small penis.  You believe a woman will divorce you because you are not worth loving.  You believe she will prevent you from seeing your children because you harbor a fear that you are a terrible father.

Look, I know, it does happen that women commit adultery for no good reason, that women suddenly for no apparent reason just up and want a divorce, that women sometimes do prevent good fathers from seeing their children very often.  I know all that. And as I said, I am sympathetic to the idea that men get a raw deal in today's society.  They are often assumed to be pedophiles when they have any interest in children; boys are not well suited on average to the life that the public school system provides and indoctrinates them in; some of the types of work that men especially enjoy and are well suited to are disparaged; family courts are often biased in favor of the mother in many ways.

But, sorry--obsessing over the possibility that some woman might do you wrong, and that you are powerless to prevent it (by, say, being careful about whom you marry), that's just totally emasculating.

Then, chagrinfully, I followed a series of links and ended up here.  And this is just sad.  See, the thing is:  Even if this Alpha thing is really a thing, you aren't an Alpha just by pretending to be.  Don't get me wrong--I'm sure there are many women who are attracted to men who behave this way (I am equally certain that these relationships are unstable at best, but long-term relationships do not seem to be the goal of the Alpha Game).  There are, for some reason, always women who love jerks.  But those of us women who have married men who are really self-confident, not just pretending to be, are not sure whether to laugh at you or weep for you and try to introduce you to some nice lady.

SIDE NOTE:  I almost had to stop reading Instapundit the day he posted a link to something (possibly on Alpha Game) about whether wives have a "responsbility" to "stay sexy" for their husbands.  Reynolds added something like, "No, honey, you don't have any responsibilities.  Just let yourself go."  Yep.  You're right--I have no responsibilities--not taking care of the children, or cleaning the house, or cooking, or paying the bills and keeping the budget.  I just sit around all day.  Frankly, all of those responsibilities--real responsibilities--is more important both to me and to the success of our family than "staying sexy" is, and several of them are totally antithetical to the goal of staying sexy in the way that the Alpha Game types mean.

Fortunately, I have a husband who thinks I am sexy when I'm cooking and shouting about the coming collapse of the dollar, so we're in business.