I’m a little late to the party but…

…with our new President Barack Obama becoming recently inaugurated, I just wanted to share more stories from my last trip to Japan.

My shiny new passport in hand, wherever I went, I proudly announced to friends and family that as of last summer, I am now an American citizen. And, invariably, one of the first things everyone said was:

“You got to vote for Obama?!”

It seems Obama Mania had caught hold in Japan as well. My new American citizenship might have further legitimized the Cool Relative From America status I frequently enjoy (and yes, I’m a fittingly arrogant American), but people seemed really, really excited that I was able to vote for Obama. Of course I was excited too, and I am excited that this is my first real President, but not being much in touch with the pulse of Japan these days, I was a bit surprised at the extent of the hoopla around him.

I’d heard about the city of Obama, Japan being into Barack Obama, but it seemed to be common knowledge in Japan that they sell Obama manjuu there. I love the pun on the bottom of that packaging, too — they combined “Obama” and “manjuu” to create…”おばまん” or “Obaman.” Haha! My dad and I wanted some of these novelty items, but apparently they only sell them in Obama.

One day in Japan, I was watching TV and I even heard about this book of Obama’s speeches printed in English as well as Japanese, with a CD included so readers can follow along. I just did a quick Google search and it looks like NPR has recently picked up on this. It’s a pretty cool idea.

On another side of things, maybe I just forget how much the U.S. is scrutinized by other countries. I talked a bit with some of my dad’s cousins, and one of them asked me if I ever engaged in protests in college (I’ve never been to a protest of any kind), and commented that student protests don’t seem to occur much anymore. Curious, I asked what she was protesting, and she answered, “the Vietnam War.” This prompted me to ask a rather dumb question: “With America?” I guess it never occurred to me that there were young people overseas protesting the Vietnam War. She laughingly exchanged stories with her sister about their eyes burning from tear gas and how nobody was probably paying attention, all the way in Japan. It was an enlightening conversation for me.

Two families

Like the one from last time I was in Japan about a year and a half ago, we went to a get-together dinner with my dad’s side of the family (mostly his cousins & their families).

The next day, I met my stepmother’s family for the first time since she and my dad got married last year.

My dad’s family, all from Osaka:

…and my stepmom’s family, in the small town of Shirakawa in Fukushima prefecture:

‘Nuff said?

Just too much seafood

I’ve been a pesco-vegetarian (eat fish/seafood, but no red meat or poultry) for about 8 or 9 years now, but I decided to go completely vegetarian for at least 2 weeks since I got back from Japan. For largely environmental reasons, I’ve been trying to be more of a conscious seafood eater, and I feel like I’ve done my share of raping the oceans in my mere 8 days in Japan.

Just a sampling of the crazy fancy food I was eating —

Before:

After:

15th trip to Japan

…and my first as a real American, standing in the non-Japanese nationals line at Narita Airport and all.

I’m running out of excuses to not post on here, seeing as I’m back with a lot to write about, but I do need to be getting to bed at the moment so I’ll just leave you with a little preview:

As seen from the shinkansen…

My complicated relationship with Japan, Part 4

I apologize for the lack of posts this week.

I’m back with the last part (for now?) of the “My complicated relationship with Japan” series, and I’m going to end on some positive notes.

First of all, two things of note that I like about going to Japan:

- Food. I love Japanese food. Ramen, udon, soba, takoyaki, okonomiyaki, sushi, donburi, tempura, sekihan, and Japanese curry, and snack food like dango and anpan. Even the “Western” food tastes better, like spaghetti and korokke (croquette), or desserts like cheesecake and crêpes. Everything in Japan is delicious. It seems that when I’m in Japan, I’m living for my next meal.

- Family. As much as it’s annoying to be with some of them sometimes, I’m no different than most other people that I enjoy spending time with relatives. In particular, I’ve always stayed in fairly good contact with my cousins on my mom’s side, and they both have two young kids. It’s been fun to see how they’ve grown every time I go back to Japan.
The last time I went to Japan, we had what might be called a “family reunion” dinner on my dad’s side, and it was the best part of that trip (family and food!). I’d always thought I had a rather small family (only child, only a total of 4 cousins), but I met relatives I didn’t even know I had. Over at our young-people side of the table, I sat next to (bear with me) my grandmother’s cousin’s great-grandson (that would mean a great-great-grandparent of mine would have been the sibling of this guy’s great-grandparent, I think), who was the same age as me. There was also my dad’s cousin’s daughter (or my grandma’s sister’s granddaughter, if you prefer), who coincidentally happened to be back in Japan from Germany (where she currently lives) at the same time I was there.

I’m careful to say “I don’t like going to Japan,” as opposed to “I don’t like Japan.” If I wasn’t proud of who I am, I wouldn’t have this blog. If you haven’t been to Japan and might be interested in going, I’d encourage you to do so. You’ll probably have a great time. For you, it’ll all be new, and you won’t have the problems I have. And if you’re white (or black, for that matter) and know 2 phrases in Japanese, everyone will love and adore you.

Which brings me to… I’ve had more than one person suggest to me that I’ll have a much easier time in Japan if I play up my American-ness. In a way, that might be true, as one of my problems is that I look and sound too Japanese to be an obvious “foreigner” (particularly if I’m with family), except I’m sure there’s something that seems a bit “off” about me. So while the average foreigner traveling in Japan will impress locals by knowing any Japanese or anything about Japan, I look and sound the part of a Japanese woman enough that I suspect I strike people as just weird and a little stupid. I feel this way pretty often in stores, train stations, information desks, hotels, taxis, etc.

But do I put on a fake American accent and pretend I don’t speak Japanese well? That wouldn’t exactly solve my problem of feeling like I can’t be myself in Japan, would it? Do I tell people every time “I’m an American”?…Right, because then people won’t think I’m weird at all. I’d just confuse people.

The struggle continues, I guess.

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…

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.

August 6, 1945…

A-bomb dome. Photo by my friend Catharine, with whom I went to Japan with summer '04.

It is the anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack.

I’ve been to Hiroshima twice.

The first time was in 1995 with my mom and a family friend from Japan, and it was coincidentally the day after the 50th anniversary of the bombing. Every monument at Peace Memorial Park was covered in strings of paper cranes. The second time was in 2004 with a Korean-American friend, and we sought out the memorial for Korean victims. It had previously never occurred to me to think about the Korean victims that were there under Japanese imperialism.

Both times, I visited the Peace Memorial Museum. It’s a large, extensive, and well-designed museum, where you can really see and hear the horrors of what a nuclear weapon can do. Particularly affecting are the everyday items left behind from the attack — a tricycle, a lunchbox, clothing — charred black and ripped apart, accompanied by descriptions of what happened to their respective owners. Every world leader should be required to visit this place.

You should visit, too. But if you can’t, a few film recommendations:

White Light/Black Rain: A documentary by Japanese-American filmmaker Steven Okazaki, this film about the atomic bomb attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is surprisingly even-handed and includes interviews with a wide variety of survivors…as well as Americans who were involved in the bombings.

火垂るの墓 (Grave of the Fireflies): This isn’t about atomic bombs (it’s about a firebombing in Kobe), but a related must-see nevertheless if you haven’t seen it already. They showed this to us at my Saturday Japanese school in about 3rd grade, and it would be an understatement to say I came out of it shaken.

うしろの正面だあれ (Ushiro no Shomen Daare?): I honestly don’t know if you can find this in the U.S. based on the fact that it’s difficult to even find any information about it, but this is another animated film set in WWII Japan that I saw when I was young.