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.