I feel like it's been a long time since I've written one of those "what I've learned about Japan and thusly myself" kinds of entries, which means that there are lots of little seedlings swimming around ferociously inside my vacuous spaces, desperately seeking the light. Who knows what form they will take by the time I get around to birthing them all.
But, as a new friend referred to me casually as "profoundly negative," and as this comment has impacted me in a profound way (we won't even get into my existential crisis, it's still a bit of a sore spot), I've decided to have a go at Japan. Just for a little while. Just to give you a glimpse of the seething underbelly (in case you thought that it had evaporated).
So one of my ways of dealing with this experience was to try not to make generalizations, and to wait as long as possible before lumping any observations into what could be called a trend. I just think life is safer that way. I mean, it's fun to go around blurting out statements like "Japanese people are so fucking annoying because they never bend the rules...EVER!" or maybe "Japanese people are all so vain and appearance-obsessed...do they ever leave their pocket mirrors at home!?!" and feel a sense of gaijin-solidarity in what you are certain is a brilliantly insightful statement about the Japanese people as a whole. But I do think it's valuable to refrain from the ease of these generalizations. Oh yeah, it's also fun to say things like, "The Japanese language is so inexact and lacking in nuance...there's only one acceptable way to say anything!" (I'll let you figure out the problem with that statement on your own)
Okay so here's where I get hypocritical and try to posit my own insightful observations and anecdotal evidence, but after that introduction you're supposed to be more inclined to believe me, as well as to think that my observations are superior to the ones that most people make. It's all part of the plan, you see.
It is a very frequent occurrence here that people look at me with that "you're so kawaiso" face and then say something like, "Japan is very different from the United States, isn't it" or "Japan is just a hard place for foreigners to understand, ne!" While both of these statements might be true, I think that slapping a label onto one's seikatsu like that (it's so easy, isn't it!) just gives you a place to hide, instead of forcing you to probe further into it.
What if I said that Japan was NOT so different from the United States? What if I said that Japan is so modernized and Westernized that living here is pretty much as close as you can get to living at home in a foreign country? After all, nearly everything can be found in English, nearly everything in the stores/on the streets/inside your home is recognizable and easy to figure out, and to top if off, your gaijin status makes you immutable to cultural faux pas (not true, by the way, but it helps my argument).
Okay, so if it's not the "difference" (what a buzz word...dynamics of difference and all) that makes adjustment difficult, what is it? The clue is in the second statement (made by a Japanese person) that a non-Japanese person can never understand Japan. What I've found to be the definitive barrier in ever passing through that 4th stage of culture shock (bicultural adaptation or something along those lines) is not that Japan is such a different place than the United States, but that Japanese people believe it is.
It's one of those things where you can walk down the street and imagine that you're in the States -- all of the store fronts are in English, cars are whizzing by, McDonalds and Starbucks are rearing their ugly heads...things just feel American -- except that everyone around you is Japanese. This in itself isn't even the problem (after all, you imagine that you can conversationally engage most of them, right? What else have your 3 hours of Japanese a day taught you?). The problem is that each of these people is carrying around an idea of their own Japaneseness, and this idea involves looking at you as the antithesis to that.
At the very least, this explains the consistency of comments like "You can use chopsticks so well!" and "Your Japanese is so jouzu!" after only the most nominal displays of usage. In general, I feel that this assumption about one's relationship to Japan and Japanese culture is the underpinning for every interaction between Japanese people and foreigners, and the one that has forever barred me from seeing this place as "home" (though Pomona gained such status after I'd lived there for only a handful of months). I've found that Japanese people are extremely dedicated to (obsessed with?) defining themselves in relation to their national identity (are Americans as obsessed with teaching you about American culture and traditions? No, because Americans don't believe they "have any culture"...another fundamental problem that I can't delve into at this point), but that they are astonishingly misinformed about what this identity means.
In my experiences here (look how well I utilize qualifiers and shy from making bold statements like "Japanese people ARE this and that..."), I would say that Japanese people define themselves first by their nationality, and then by their cultural identifiers, which consist of things like Japanese food (which Americans probably don't like), Japanese traditional art forms (which Americans should look at, but won't really understand), and the Japanese language (which is obviously too difficult for Americans to learn). What about the rest, people!? I won't even begin to suggest the things that I would attribute to the construction of the true"Japanese identity," or the ways in which these things are systemically repressed. (p.s. if you've gotten this far, congratulations and I owe you a coke or something)
Instead, I'll poke the obvious holes in my argument that you should have thought of by now. 1) I am in no position to tell you how Japanese people define themselves, if you've listened at all to my experiences here. 2) There are different levels that do exist, but they are not accessible to me at this point. 3) The hypocrisy of this entry is too blinding to even allow for consideration, let alone agreement.
So I still have more thinking to do. I'd just like you to know that when I say things like, "I really can't wait to go home, " it's not my queen-sized bed in Portland that I have in mind. And for my sake, at the very least, please don't think that it's because "Japan is so different from the United States." Maybe for some people it is. Maybe for me it is, and I'm just in denial. But I'd like to think it's something different than that.
