Whew!
That was close.
I very nearly succumbed to a temptation that would have precluded all other pursuits, including writing.
I very nearly lost myself somewhere down the rabbit hole of Japanese Netflix.
Do I need to rewatch the entire series of Cowboy Bebop for the fourth time? Probably not. But I can. Japanese Netflix has it, along with all the Gundams, Galaxy Express 999, Dragonball, and just about every other manifestation of animated nostalgia I could hope to request. Japanese Netflix also has the most recent seasons of current shows, though I’m a little out of touch… Which Japanese shows are the kids into these days? Whatever they are, I’ve got the most current seasons of those, while all you suckers back home are still waiting for them to be localized!
That gloating is clearly in jest; there’s simply no reason to feel jealous once you realize that the system works both ways, and all us suckers here are still waiting on most of the hit U.S. shows and movies to be localized as well. It’s terrible if, like me, you try to avoid reviews and see new films as a blank slate, because you basically have to stay off the internet- but it’s awesome if you’re still having trouble coping in a world without Breaking Bad, and want to revisit the time when season 5 was still a fresh new release.
Then again, it may just boil down to your area of interest. Sure, America has many of the sleek and trending series, but Japan maintains dominance in all those wonderfully inexplicable game shows and live-action fantasy sagas, wherein the only things looking cheaper than the hero’s cg-powered flame sword are his atrociously fake mutton chops.
On the evening I first pulled up Netflix and saw all this, I thought to myself, “If I go in, there’s no getting out.”
So I tried to fight it. I opened some word documents: the newest essay waiting to be completed; the sci-fi novel mired in its earliest stages. I glanced at the half-finished comic still languishing on the Procreate canvas.
And I thought: all work and no anime makes Jack a dull boy. Let’s do this.
Three seconds later: tapping the delightfully grainy thumbnail of those old-school mobile suits.
Five seconds later: bouncing up and down on the couch in unbridled excitement.
Nine seconds later: face palming.
Oh, you buffoon. What were you thinking? It’s Japanese Netflix. Of course there aren’t any English subtitles.
*cue Vince Guaraldi’s classic Peanuts theme Christmas Time is Here, as I shuffle slump-shouldered back to my makeshift desk, murmuring, “Guess I’ll wriiiite, then…” *
I can’t really claim to have beaten temptation; I simply benefitted from an immunity to its allure, independent of my own level of determination (er, lack thereof).
It’s like the classic biblical tale from Genesis, when the serpent whispered to Eve in the garden, “Hey, come and check out thisss sssweet apple. Come on, sssheeeple, it’ll open your eyesss.”
“Sorry,” Eve said, pointing at her mouth and shrugging her shoulders. “I have OAS. Allergic to raw fruits.”
She walked off, with the serpent desperately calling after her, “Wait! What about a rhubarb of realization? A potato of perception? If rawness is the problem, we can sun-dry these tomatoes! They’re tastier like that anywayyyy…!”
And that’s a much different story than the classic musical tale from Genesis, wherein the serpent tempts Eve with an Invisible Touch, yeah.
So until I get my language skills in order, Japanese Netflix will not distract me and prevent you from receiving these bulk loads of my thoughts.
To which you, through the gritted teeth of a strained smile, say, “oh… uh, yeah, thanks,” like a surprised fast-food drive-thru patron receiving a bulky handful of thirty napkins from the employee at the window. You’re not sure you want all that, but concede there might someday come an unfortunate situation where they’ll be useful.
Which brings us to September: that rare month that unites fans of both country and funk, as Alan Jackson and Earth, Wind, and Fire both remind us to remember (though for admittedly different reasons). It’s my third month in Naka City, Japan, and looking back over what I’ve written thus far, even I’m surprised at just how little I’ve actually said about life here. Aside from some tangents about toilets and temperature, I’ve kinda been stuck on these macro trends in travel, as opposed to the probably more interesting specifics on just what teaching and living in Japan is like.
Can’t really be helped. Sometimes blogging is a lot like pooping on day three of a juice cleanse: you had no idea just how much was backed up in there, and now you really can’t do anything but hold on for dear life as it rushes out in a torrent.
Just so you know, that poop joke may have to suffice this month. I’m looking over my notes and noticing surprisingly few bowels-based observations.
And yeah, I do take copious notes throughout the day (and sometimes frantically at 2:34 a.m. when I awake from a dream with a cry of, “Eureka!”). Marc Maron had an awesome segment in his most recent stand-up special where he read through some of the enigmatic phrases he’d scrawled on post-its in these sudden moments of clarity, that he later drew upon for use in his material. As I’m looking through my own set (archived in a typo-ridden series of iPhone notes, as opposed to post-its- pft, millennials), I’ve decided I’d like to do the same. Here goes:
Why do these school bathrooms never have hand soap in the dispensers? This is nothing new; I’ve run into the same problem everywhere I’ve ever taught. You realize there are children in this building, right? If anything, the soap dispensers shouldn’t be limited to the bathroom; they should be placed regularly throughout the hallways like fire extinguishers, ensuring no one ever has to travel more than 75 feet to reach something anti-bacterial. I’ve been giving high-fives all morning; my hands are literally swathed in disease. But it’s my lunch break, so I guess there’s nothing left to do but my best Schwarzenegger impression as I give my immune system another crucial workout: I’m gonna pump *clap * you up!
Vowel teams? Who the fuck knows?
It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where calling a man’s penis size “big boy” is not condescending, but that elephant on the condom box has me believing it’s meant in earnest.
The inner thrill an artist gets when the masses enjoy their work- did the sculptor of that nude anime model in the Akihabara toy shop get the same thrill upon realizing that thousands of otaku were masturbating to his work? Does the collective unconscious emanate a sort of energy during periods of mass absorption in a singular pursuit? And is the creator particularly sensitive to this wavelength? Could Gal Gadot feel the collective relief of fans when, for the first time in nearly a decade, they saw a DC film that didn’t make them want to kill themselves? On that note, Suicide Squad was perhaps the most fitting title for a summer blockbuster yet.
Japan: where even the dogs are polite.
Okay, that was fun! Or for those of you who aren’t me, but now know a little bit of what it’s like in my brain: “Fun? That was nightmarish. I feel like I just rewatched The Cell…”
Last month (really just over a week ago, as I was so behind my (admittedly self-imposed) deadline on the August edition), I mostly talked about the honeymoon period resulting from a new move. To quickly revisit: I find myself at a critical juncture here, quickly moving away from the starry-eyed throes of wonder and into a normal life. This transition is perhaps for the best. If I’m happy for too long, I’m going to run out of things to talk about. I’m well aware that the “success” (both my aunt and best friend loved it) of Pooping in China was not due to the quality of writing; it was because I got food poisoning and shit my pants while teaching, and withstood all the other guys at the public bath pointing at my penis and openly discussing how a human being could be so hairy.
Misery. Where would art be without it? There would be, literally, no Russian literature. Perhaps if Dostoevsky had just been a slightly luckier gambler, in place of Crime and Punishment we’d have The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Russians. For novelists in Siberian prison camps, or the ear-severing manic-depressive depths of Thujone poisoning, the starving artist is not a familiar archetype, but an active choice: paint, or porridge?
That archetype doesn’t hold up as well in the current first world, as any look between, say, Aretha Franklin and Miley Cyrus will prove that one’s level of artistry is not contingent upon their weight. Because no one actually believes that Hannah Montana is superior to the Queen of Soul.
I mean, I guess those people are out there. But honestly, even the very idea of their existence makes me angry.
Now I am by no means miserable, but the honeymoon has waned- and as my own moderate social ineptitude comes into greater focus with each new faux pas, I’ve developed a more nuanced view of the culture.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then consider the following photo my treatise on the gaijin experience:
Japanese sanitation is next level, and I’d like to highlight it by contrasting it with my own western culture in a few key areas:
America: When’s the last time this person washed their hands? Have they been picking their nose? Am I about to contract scabies? Ah, what the hell- put ‘er there, stranger!
Japan: Handshakes…? Uh… nah, brah, we’re good. Let’s just give a little bow and keep our diseases to ourselves.
America: If the tower of garbage piled on top of that overflowing public bin gets much higher, God’s going to rescatter the peoples of the world and scramble all their languages. But fuck it! This is in public- in other words, someone else’s problem! Chuck that recyclable bottle up on the heap and be done with it! I’ve got places to be, people to see, and electronics to dispose of improperly.
Japan: What, just because this is a major sporting event, or cultural festival with millennia of history, and thousands of people are in attendance, you expect to just dump your trash here? No, there’s no public garbage can, and if you’ve got something you no longer want, you can take it home, rinse it, sort it as either combustible or non-combustible, further sort it as landfill waste or shreddable waste, drop it in the correspondingly-colored waste bag (blue, yellow, or green), label the bag with your name, ward, and section, and take it to the appropriate collection site for your residency area- you know, like civilized people do.
Seriously. The Waste Disposal Handbook is 28 pages, with 9 pages strictly devoted to sorting specific items by trash category. And you better believe that if you haven’t bagged everything correctly, the collectors are leaving your shit exactly where you left it until you fix your mess.
America: Shit, that inspector from the UN Security Council is here! Quick, hide those port-a-potties from Bonnaroo- they violate Article I of the Biological Weapons Convention.
(It’s funny that so many states in our fine union still have such strict gambling regulations, when basically every bowel movement in a public bathroom is a wager: how many layers of seat protector do you reckon will keep the flesh-eating bacteria off your ass?)
Japan: The subject of Japanese toilets alone took up more than two full pages last month. Suffice it to say, the design of the toilet itself promotes cleanliness, and Japanese people, whether in the privacy of their own homes or in public, tend to treat it with a correlative level of respect.
America: Hey, you know that pair of shoes I’ve been wearing around the city? The ones caked in motor oil-slickened gutter grime? Yeah, right, the same ones I wore in that biohazard Bonnaroo bathroom! Well now I’m wearing them in your home, and using them to grind millions of potentially lethal bacteria into the deepest fibers of your carpets. No, but it’s cool though- I gave ‘em a little a wipe on the front mat. Speaking of: “Come back with a warrant,” hahaha classic!
Japan: Are you fucking nuts? No, seriously- are you an insane person? This isn’t the Middle Ages and I know you’re aware of germ theory- so drop those E. coli repositories at the door and put on some slippers. Likewise, I don’t want to catch those slippers anywhere near the toilet- there’s another pair just in front of the bathroom door for that.
America: Hey, the germs on my hand obviously weren’t bothering me- aw, but they made you sick? Tough, that’s your problem! Oh, that Big Mac cardboard clamshell I threw on the pile compromised its structural integrity, and now the floor is a mound of trash ringed in melted ice and condiment-saturated grease? Tough, that’s some custodian’s problem. Wait, your whole family has a staph infection because I wore my boots in your kitchen? Well hey- that’s what health insurance is for, right?
Japan: We have a little something called The Golden Shower Rule: pee into others' toilets as you would have them pee into yours. In short: we’re all in this together, and your problem is my problem.
Don’t get me wrong- this is not a Disneyworld fantasy land with everyone constantly holding hands and complimenting one another (though the smiling cartoon characters on nearly every public sign would have you believe otherwise). People still cut you off in traffic, or play their music too loudly, or leave their used condom in a parking lot. But for the most part, the Japanese live by the ethic of avoiding meiwaku- being annoying or bothersome to others.
My first week here, I went to a festival in the nearby town of Chikusei, as hundreds of people gathered there to watch a bunch of young guys in loincloths hoist a massive shrine of the Buddha up onto their shoulders and carry it through the streets. Those streets had been closed to auto traffic, and opened to countless food stalls and souvenir stands. There were posses of teens with fastidiously counter-culture hair contriving disaffected airs. There were kids trotting alongside their parents, swinging novelty light-up toys and chewing on skewers of grilled meat. There were businessmen in increasingly-disheveled levels of dress slugging beers and clapping one another on the back. In other words: all the typical sights you expect to see at a public gathering just about anywhere in the developed world. What I didn’t expect to see happened at 10 p.m. A parade of whistling police cleared off the street, and within five minutes, everyone had complied and returned to a relatively orderly assortment on the sidewalks. As I looked back at the now-empty street itself, I did a double take.
I could count on one hand the amount of trash left on the pavement. A stray skewer here, a plastic wrapper there, but on the whole? Almost pristine.
What is this strange dimension where people actually give a shit about their public spaces? Shit, man, I could go on a hike in an American national park- a place with the stated intention of allowing people access to the beautiful and untainted natural world- and find enough bottles and granola bar wrappers at the trailhead to outweigh all the refuse collected from all the gutters in a typical Japanese city block.
This isn’t the Japanese honeymoon period talking. This is the American separation period turning darker and lapsing into the kinds of thoughts that lead to divorce. I mean, America, baby, I would actually never, but seriously? Get your shit together.
Now that bit earlier about Americans not giving a shit about one another? It was an exaggeration to be sure. Watch the coverage of any American crisis, and you’ll see story after story about people, all better than me, who cross the country to help out their fellow citizens in times of need.
But we do have this innate sense of individuality. America is a society built on revolution; we have no king, and our only state religion is the church of Picking Yourself Up By Your Own Goddamn Bootstraps. Not to mention our history as a melting pot (not to be confused with melting pot, a cannabis-based fondue recipe), resulting in an infinitely-complex mix of cultures. While Japan has its own mix of ethnicities, it’s far more homogeneous.
Those are some of the broader and more noticeable trends, but who’s to say whether they really account for the difference in communalism of culture. Why do Japanese people give more of a shit? I do not know. There are simply too many variables at play here. Is it history? Demography? Geography? Is there an innate worldview shaped by language? Subliminal messaging imposed by the rigidity of thirteen separate, individual stripes on the American flag, contrasted with Japan’s encompassing circle of the sun?
There’s surely a formula to graph this out.
What? Oh, no, I’m not actually going to do it, if that’s what you were thinking. I wouldn’t even know where to start (this mathematical inability brought to you by a Bachelor’s in English; Bachelor’s in English, because while both Finnegan’s Wake and that trig equation are incomprehensible, you can only bullshit your way through a paper about one of them).
I definitely appreciate this country’s penchant for cleanliness- especially after my experiences living in China, boiling the fecal matter out of my tap water and ignoring that mother holding her pissing baby over a bus station trash can. It’s why I’m doing my best to conform, and always dropping my sandals at the bathroom door, even though I have yet to find a pair of bathroom slippers that accommodates my monstrous Caucasian feet.
That said, I do have some minor reservations (I never claimed to be Anthony Bourdain), particularly at one of my schools: Seishin. Seishin is a kindergarten with a separate extracurriculars building abutting its enormous playground. This extracurriculars building is essentially an educational duplex of two classrooms. On the first floor: me, teaching my after-school English classes. On the second floor: the dance teacher, teaching her after-school dance classes and regularly overloading the building’s circuit breaker by repeatedly setting her air conditioner to 18 degrees Celsius (64 Fahrenheit) (is it pretentious of me to start using Celsius and metric? Whatever, they’re superior, I wish America used them both, and as Gandhi said, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change” (the bumper sticker version is “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” but I don’t think he ever actually said that)). It was on one of these afternoons when the power abruptly cut out that I first took my notes on sweat, later inspiring my initial essay’s opening. Because when the power’s out, the only thing to do is open the windows; but when your classroom abuts a kindergarten playground, and open windows put your class eye-level with children screaming atop a slide, you realize you have a choice: to either keep the windows closed and sweat and teach in (relative) peace (dance troupe upstairs is always stomping away, regardless), or open the windows for a little relief and sacrifice your students’ potential for paying attention to anything happening inside the classroom.
This separate building of ours isn’t maintained by a dedicated custodian. I sweep out my classroom, dance teacher sweeps out hers, one of the office workers from the kindergarten comes by to swab down the toilet, and that’s it. The small front porch where the shoe cubbies are? That’s left to its own devices- and by that, I mean it’s left to the spiders.
I’m not particularly afraid of spiders. What that means is that I don’t have arachnophobia, and am not paralyzed with fear upon coming into contact with one of them. I do, however, maintain the appropriate level of caution and concern towards spiders that I believe is natural for mentally healthy adults. You folks with pet tarantulas are anomalies, and in prior phases of human development you likely would have been culled by the forces of natural selection.
We’re evolutionarily programmed for pattern recognition: those berries are tasty, those herbs cure nausea, those eight-legged things are often poisonous. Recognizing spiders for the dangers they are simply means deferring to the millennia-long process that propelled us to the top of the food chain. And it’s a process that still plays out for each of us everyday; kind of like how guys who wear tight Affliction shirts to the bar are essentially signaling to females that they’re both available and undesirable for mating, or black-and-yellow color combos warn us all of imminent danger, either in the form of bee stings or Waffle House-induced diarrhea.
So while I appreciate the practice of leaving shoes outside, I don’t always appreciate leaving my shoes open to potential habitation. Especially with these Japanese spiders; there always seem to be two in a web. I thought maybe it’s just mating season, but one is always way smaller than the other. I know nearly nothing about spider biology; are the males and females of certain species drastically different in size? Is it typical for the smaller one to hang out behind the larger, like some Padawan watching and learning from the behavior of its master? Because it really is a widespread occurrence; I first noticed it on a morning jog around a nearby pond, when I saw three separate webs with the nearly identical arrangement of these two types of spiders. The resultant déjà vu was so dizzying, I half-expected the nearby elderly couple feeding ducks from their bench to transform into agents and gun me down.
One last point about footwear: I love high-top sneakers. I love them so much, I packed a pair to wear here, in the country that requires they be left at most doorways. I thought: so, I’ll spend an extra twenty seconds or so lacing or unlacing when I visit a place. So what? I’m not really so lazy as to forgo my preferred footwear (eschew, eh?) because of such a minor inconvenience, right?
Wrong.
So, so wrong.
I had about two weeks with my Chuck Taylors before I realized that it just ain’t happening. With a fiery, Patrick Henry-esque cry of “Give me loafers or give me death!” I made the switch to slip-on shoes. My Converse now rest on the shelf like a set of fine china, reserved for rare special occasions when the effort seems worth it. And so crumbled the first brick in the wall. Part of me worries it may set a worrisome precedent; I’m thirty now. Is this the age when convenience and comfortability start commandeering the decision-making process? Is this next period of my life about to descend into complete apathy, with ill-matched socks and shorts and sandals all thrown on together, and no more resistance than a quick shoulder shrug and a “fuck it?” Am I one beige windbreaker away from retiring to Florida?
Or maybe it’s just situational, and one of the unfortunate aspects to an otherwise fine system. Having spent so much of my life in the American south, I’m used to this; the awful and wonderful often walk hand-in-hand there. “Whoa- that waitress just said Aryans are the superior race! But… then she called me sweetie and offered me an extra large serving of pie…”
The mind takes the shape of what it rests on. Where we focus our attention can alter our worldview, especially given most of our minds’ tendencies to get caught in feedback loops. Barring rigorous transcendental meditation or a frontal lobotomy, it’s simply something we must deal with- and when the loop inevitably starts its shit again, do we want it to be positive or negative? Post-honeymoon, this is an important choice. If I focus on the cleanliness and public good, I’ll likely continue sounding like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, surveying these found cultural treasures, and simply wanting to be part of that world. Or, I could take a more cynical view, and start sounding more like Lewis Black, with wild diatribes that hover somewhere between castigation and aneurysm.
I’ll summarize a yogi friend of mine, who said that when feeling emotions, you have three options: express them, suppress them, or transmute them. Why not make a habit of expressing the good and transmuting the bad? We are our habits, right? At least, that’s what Aristotle and nearly every successful professional athlete since has said.
And as I finish those words, I look at the morning sun rising outside my window, take a deep, fulfilling breath, and nod to myself. Today is a choice. I walk downstairs to the foyer, and the pair of shoes left at the front door, still loosely laced from the day before. Still standing, I try pulling one on, using my index finger as a shoehorn, but go off balance and hit the front door with a reverberating bang.
“Ahhhh FUCK this!”
Post-credits sequence: Just realized I totally forgot to include that hospital scene from last month's trailer. Wooops.
Uh, next month then?