Free culture by the river

Yesterday (8/28 ) was one of my favorite summer events here, the Oregon Symphony’s annual Waterfront Park Concert. They do a preview of their season, along with selections from Oregon Ballet Theatre’s and the Portland Opera’s seasons as well.

Pictured is Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Yuka Iino (originally from Japan) and Ronnie Underwood, dancing a piece from Swan Lake.

Completely random picture

I work part-time at a box office and I saw this praying mantis there the other day! Just walked right on by my window. Isn’t it beautiful?

And no, this has nothing to do with anything. I just thought this is cool and wanted to share.

My complicated relationship with Japan, Part 3

As I’ve matured and grown up, of course, I don’t exactly go to Japan kicking and screaming anymore. I’m not constrained by parental supervision, and I know how to get around on my own. Going back to Japan as an adult has its own problems, however.

- I feel societal pressures to act Japanese. I don’t think this mattered so much as a kid. The problem is, I have very much an American personality. I like clear, brutal honesty, I can’t stand fake politeness, and I like people to take me seriously at face value. I get frustrated by the metaphorical acrobatics involved in Japanese social interactions. Yet, one thing I do have is respect for values and expectations that differ from my own, so I follow the rules anyway. The end result of that is that I feel that I’m surrounded by artifice and I can never be myself while I’m in Japan.

- I still don’t like being cut off from my life. Typically when I’m in Japan, I’m surrounded by people whose average age is about 55. I generally have nobody my own age to talk to. They don’t have computers (“We e-mail by phone; why would we need a computer?” say my aunt and uncle). The combination of cultural and generational gaps make it near impossible for relatives to even begin to understand what my life abroad is like. Needless to say, it makes me feel lonely and isolated.

Last time I was in Japan with my dad, he decided to take me away from my maternal uncle and aunt’s house where I normally stay to my great-aunt (dad’s aunt)’s place where he usually stays when he visits Japan. In a way, she’s pretty cool: 80 years old, and lives independently on the 5th story of an apartment building with no elevator. And maybe because of that, she’s still quite healthy in both mind and body. But in typical my-dad fashion, he left for a trip to Tokyo with no notice, leaving me alone with this old woman for several days. And honestly, there’s only so much I have to say to her, but just packing up and taking off didn’t seem like the right thing to do, either. So between meals and personal hygiene, I mostly sat and watched hours upon hours of TV, while my great-aunt asked me things like “Do they have commercials in America?” and “Aren’t you scared all by yourself?” (I live in Portland with no family here) and fussed over whether I’m too cold or if I’m getting enough to eat (and never believing me when I honestly tell her I’m full).

- Traveling with a friend or boyfriend can be helpful but has its own problems, as it saddles me with the twin, often competing responsibilities of spending time with relatives and making sure my tourist American companion is having a good time. And do you know how difficult it is to be having two conversations in two languages, at the same time? Not that I blame them, but I think people tend to ignore and not hear things they don’t understand. When I was there with my boyfriend at my aunt and uncle’s house, I don’t know how many times I found myself with my talkative boyfriend and my talkative aunt literally talking to me at the same time about different subjects while I struggled to keep up with the two conversations, the two of them completely oblivious to what was going on.

And of course, I have to budget my time, figuring out how much time to spend at “home” and how much time to spend tourist-ing with my American friends taking them to places. Traveling with someone that speaks zero Japanese and have never been to Japan adds extra stress as they’re essentially dependent on you. All the while, I worry if the time and money they’re spending to accompany me on this trip is worthwhile.

My complicated relationship with Japan, Part 2

I always thought of Japan as generally creepy.

- I read too many Japanese ghost stories. I’m sure this is a familiar thing to a lot of people: You read or watch some horror-genre movie/book/etc. out of morbid curiosity and feeling strangely drawn to it, only to regret it later when you’re lying awake at night. And my grandma’s house was creepy. Fairly large house (by Japanese standards), giant yard with gnarled pine trees and Japanese maple trees, tatami mats and shoji doors in the rooms, creaky wooden floors with dim lights in the hallways, and worst of all — traditional Japanese dolls. I have a terrible, irrational fear of dolls in general. And these dolls in one of the rooms we were staying in, in their glass cases, in nice traditional Japanese garb, with thin eyes but missing their pupils…really freaked me out. And the kids’ Japanese horror stories I’d read seemed to most often follow a formula of “If you do (this totally innocuous thing anyone can end up doing by accident), then (this terrible thing that involves scary visions, death, or being stuck in an alternate dimension) will happen to you.” So I’d lie in bed trying to stay perfectly still and attempt to not be in any positions that might lead me to certain doom, all the while trying to convince myself that no, the dolls are not looking at me, no, they’re not actually moving closer and I’m not going to find them right in front of me next time I open my eyes, and if I get up to go to the bathroom right now, I’m not going to run into any white figures in the hallway, and blood is not going to spurt out of the faucet….

Overactive imagination? Possibly.

I still refuse to watch the original Japanese version of リング(The Ring).

Why does Wikipedia have to have this creepy image under the “Shōji” page?

My complicated relationship with Japan, Part 1

I might as well just say this thing that might put this whole blog in an interesting context:
I don’t like going to Japan.

A typical conversation with a white American who might be, say, planning a trip to Japan for the first time:
“Have you been back to Japan?” they might ask.
“Ha ha. Lots. I last went last year.”
“How nice! Did you have fun?”
“Well, I guess it was okay. Saw some relatives.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic. I want to travel a lot when I’m there!”
“…”

At this point, I choose whether or not to explain that the narrow streets, tatami mats, shinkansen (“bullet trains”), Japanese schoolgirls, Buddhist temples, elaborate toilets, scores of people riding bicycles, Japanese words on neon signs – none of these are exotic when you’ve grown up with Japanese parents and Japanese TV and have taken frequent trips to Japan since you were young. I figure it’s not all that different from a typical American that might, say, have relatives in Ohio.

There’s some additional factors that never seem to occur to people:

- We didn’t take many family vacations. Aside from all those trips to Japan (about once a year), the only vacations we ever took was a 5-day trip to Disney World when I was 11, a similarly long trip to San Francisco/Yosemite when I was 13, and a few weekend visits to Las Vegas. I think all our vacation time & money went to Japan. Trust me, I’d love to just not go to Japan one time and go to Europe or New Orleans or even Canada (none of these I’ve ever been to yet) instead.

- These trips to Japan aren’t exactly vacations. Kids just want to spend summer hanging out with friends, but I was forcibly pulled away for a couple weeks in a place where I can’t even call them without costing my grandma a lot of money. My mom usually left me at my grandma’s or with my cousins while she sped around on a full schedule of seeing friends. My days were not full of sightseeing activities; they were mostly spent in front of the TV or in the park across the street with cousins.

- I made some bad associations early on. For a bunch of trips in a row, I went to Japan because someone was either dead or dying, or it was the anniversary of someone’s death (Buddhism involves quite a few observances around anniversaries of deaths). Both my grandfathers and my uncle died within a few years of each other between about when I was 9 to 11. And of course, a trip to the cemetery was a requirement. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in miserably hot Kyoto summer days cleaning headstones and pulling weeds. To this day, when I think Japan, I think of a morbid, depressing place full of death.

To be continued…

India Festival

One of my favorite things about summer is all the events that go on around town. I briefly dropped by the India Fest yesterday.

I mostly wanted to get food, so I got a masala dosa and split an order of samosas. I also finally tried a mango lassi, which I’ve often seen in Indian restaurants but have somehow never gotten. It was quite good, basically like a mango smoothie, a bit thicker than I’d imagined, but not overly sweet. I don’t generally drink anything other than water when I eat out (unless I’m at a bar), but I’ll have to keep mango lassi in mind next time I get Indian food.

I didn’t stay very long for the performances and such, but as you can tell from the picture, there were tons of people and it was all a very festive atmosphere. You can tell me if I’m being horribly stereotypical here, but I feel like Indian people have more fun compared to say, Japanese people, at least in their celebrations. Japan, particularly traditional Japan, seems to like things a bit more…restrained.

In my book at the very least, you can’t go wrong with a culture whose main contribution to world cinema is musicals!

Geeking out on Battlestar Galactica

Sorry I’ve slowed down on my posts a bit, but I really haven’t been feeling like writing when it’s triple-digit degree weather. So what I’ve been mostly doing when I haven’t been desperately seeking anywhere air conditioned (definitely not my house) is watching Battlestar Galactica.

I know I’m a bit late in the game — I’m halfway into season 2 — but now that I’m finally watching this show after years of everyone telling me to, I find that it’s just as compelling as people have been saying it is. Now the cool thing about having your own loosely-themed blog is you can basically write about anything and make it relate, so here I can talk about one of the stars of Battlestar Galactica…the Korean-Canadian Grace Park, who plays several versions of a Cylon often known as Sharon Valerii.

It’s really refreshing to see an Asian actress in a mainstream American(/Canadian) TV show where she doesn’t even play a character that is specifically supposed to be Asian. Not that I’m totally adverse to “Asian-specific” roles, but it’s nice to see an Asian woman playing a character that could just as well be a white character. Of course, this shouldn’t even be a big deal — especially for a show filmed in Vancouver, BC — and maybe the fact that I do think it’s worth pointing out says something about the industry.

Apparently it took some effort on Grace Park’s part to not get cast in stereotypical roles, too. She said at last year’s Asia Pacific Actor’s Network conference that she “had to really hold out.”

I hope she continues to pick good roles and showcase her considerable beauty and talent.

The cat food’s in the oven

I was watching the Today show this morning (yes, I know I’m completely the wrong demographic for this show, but I’m allowed a few guilty pleasures), and I saw a segment about “‘Chinese’ foods that aren’t”. There’s some things that are obvious to me of course, but though I knew that fortune cookies aren’t actually Chinese, I didn’t know that they were started by Japanese people. I’d somehow assumed that they were a completely American invention.

But more interesting to me was more of a throwaway comment Jennifer 8. Lee made about these not-quite-authentic turkey dumplings she had on the table. She explained that her mother would make these turkey dumplings for her school bake sales, since…Asian people don’t bake, and they in fact used the oven as extra dish racks.

There just isn’t really any Asian food that involves baking, and most Asian people don’t seem to be into making homemade cookies and desserts and such either. My own mother experimented with a little bit of baking, but after she passed away, my dad just used the oven as extra storage for things like documents and cat food. (And the extra dish racks were the dishwasher that never got run.)

Hmm, I might have to check out Jennifer 8. Lee’s book & blog, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. Seems like something up my alley.

White people don’t have a monopoly on racism

This piece titled “Once a ‘gaijin,’ always a ‘gaijin’” makes for an interesting read. I can just see the bitterness dripping off my computer screen, and equating gaijin to the n-word is overdoing it, but he does make some good points.

Technically, 外人 (gaijin) just means “outsider.” Those 2 characters literally spell out “outside person.” So in a way, it really does just mean “foreigner.” Here in the U.S., we might talk about “foreigners,” “foreign countries,” or “foreign languages” (except for the PC way in which my high school had the “world languages” department) and it’s generally not considered discriminatory.

The problem with gaijin arises in its actual usage. It’s bothered me since I was a small child. I’ve definitely had the occasion to cringe when Japanese people would blanketly refer to the Americans as gaijin while here in the United States. It’s just patently ethnocentric to call everyone else a “foreigner” while you are in their country.

Something the “Once a ‘gaijin,’ always a ‘gaijin’” column also touches on is this binary view of the world. When my Japanese relatives would ask me questions about my life in the U.S., they would often ask me about what gaijin are like, as if I was the ambassador in this amorphous non-Japan world and I could shed light on how “they” (everybody not Japanese) are different from “us” (Japanese). I know that what they were really asking me was what Americans are like and not what, say, French people or Russian people are like, but they’re all gaijin anyway, right? (Similarly, my grandmother referred to the U.S. as 向こうの国(the country over there)).

Of course in most any case, they don’t “mean anything by it.” Gaijin isn’t used as an insult so much as a casual way to refer to people who are “not Japanese.” But this casual, implicit racism is perhaps even more dangerous, as it means its usage is more widespread and any criticisms to it can be easily dismissed.

I wonder what exactly my own status is in Japan. As I’ve been alerting family to my new U.S. citizenship, I’ve jokingly been saying that I’ll now be a gaijin next time I go to Japan. Of course, I’ve essentially been one this whole time. Or does the fact that I can look and talk Japanese and I’m familiar with the country enough mean that I can still pass as a nihonjin(Japanese)?

Well, if the state of Japanese-Brazilians that have returned to Japan is any indication (or is it?), it doesn’t look so good for me. But that’s a separate post.

I talk funny in Japanese

Namba district, Osaka, 2006

Actually, I speak fluent, unaccented…Kansai-ben. Reading about the Olympics this morning, I eventually came to this rather detailed Wikipedia page on the Kansai dialect (I’m sure you know how it is when you’re on Wikipedia).

Through most of my childhood, I actually spoke standard Japanese. My Japanese friends at school as well as my classmates at the Japanese saturday school I attended for 8 years proved to have more of an influence on my language than my parents.

Interestingly enough, I did temporarily “catch” a bit of Kansai-ben every time I visited Japan. After weeks of spending a lot of time with my grandparents, uncle, aunts, and cousins, all of whom are from Osaka, I’d return home to the U.S. referring to myself uchi instead of watashi.

I’m not exactly sure when — maybe around the time I went off to college — I started to really revert back to my Kansai-ben on a permanent basis. These days, I have little occasion to speak Japanese to anyone except family, so I’m a hopeless Kansai-ben speaker at this point.

The bad thing is, I tend to be self-conscious of my dialect from a subconscious level. Whenever I do meet a new Japanese person, I find myself forcing myself to speak in standard Japanese. This just makes me feel even more self-conscious as my speech just feels unnatural and forced, since this isn’t “what I really sound like.” My brain also has to work to remember how to speak in a way I’m no longer accustomed to, particularly concerning the ends of sentences. I suspect I have strange pauses mid-sentence as I figure out how to end sentences without -de, -yaro, -nen, -hen or -yan. And my inflections feel all wrong (or do they just feel wrong to me?), and I’m wondering if all this just makes me sound like I don’t really speak Japanese as well as I do, and — and –… And all of this going on in my head while I’m trying to carry on a conversation doesn’t help the issue.

Looking at the “Well-known Kansai-ben vocabulary and phrases” on the Wikipedia page is really interesting. I wasn’t even aware some of these things were Kansai dialect-specific, like donkusai, nukui, and ōki ni. I say ōki ni all the time when I’m traveling outside the Kansai region in Japan. Oops.

Another one of my dad’s bizarre observations to describe Osaka vs. Tokyo differences (look towards the end of my Asian Food post for one too) is “Coming onto a train station, France is like Tokyo and Italy is like Osaka” (and he’s been to Europe so he sort-of knows what he’s talking about). Maybe I should just embrace my Kansai-ben…I’d rather be Italy than France anyway.