Leaving Behind Comfort

I am in Hiroshima.

After the bombing, after the war, Hiroshima began to rebuild itself and part of that rebuilding process has included the dedication of the entire city to peace.

I want to do my part.

It’s New Year’s Eve and I want to go, as do many Japanese, to a shrine or temple to pray for peace in the coming year. I choose as my destination Itsukushima, the shrine on the island, Miyajima, that is itself a holy place to the Japanese. The route from my hotel, the Comfort Hotel in Hiroshima, to Itsukushima, the shrine where I want to pray for peace, is complicated. Getting to Itsukushima means going by streetcar from Chuden-mae to Hiroshima Station, and then by train from Hiroshima Station to Hiroshima Port, and then by ferry from Hiroshima Port to Miyajima, then it’s a half-mile walk to Itsukushima. I don’t speak much of the language and I’m pretty much functionally illiterate and the city is unfamiliar and--and I have to go. There is no choice. I have to go, so I put my trust in the process and I leave behind comfort (in part in the form of my hotel) and I go.

I take the streetcar from Chuden-mae to Hiroshima Station. The streetcar is crowded, but no one will sit next to me. I am used to this. I am used to this from years of being the fat chick that no one would sit next to. And I am used to this in Japan where many people won’t sit next to foreigners. Many Japanese would rather stand than sit next to a foreigner. And before you get offended on my behalf, let me remind you of this: On the streetcar, in the subways, on most public transportation in Japan, it’s sort of like how, in America, a white person will almost never sit next to a black person on a bus no matter how crowded the bus gets, no matter how much that white person believes in equal rights. (Yes, I know that equality is not an easy road, and that we, in America, have dedicated ourselves to it. The day-to-day workings might be problematic, but we still believe that equality is worth fighting for, so we fight for it.)

At Hiroshima station, I board the train to Hiroshima Port and choose a seat without looking at anyone else in the car.

It isn’t until I’m seated that I hear the voices behind me.

“I forgot my fucking backpack!” one of them says, loudly. “Fuck. I can’t fucking believe it.”

Several people in the car look past me at the person who’s spoken.

I don’t turn around. I think that they must be your average clueless hippie-wannabe backpackers. Someone has left his dirty pack with its worn copy of Lonely Planet back at the youth hostel.

“You forgot your fucking backpack, man?” another one says. “Shit! You’re a fucking idiot. Do you want me to wait for you to go back and get it?”

“No fucking way!”

People look down at their books and cell phones, but the feeling in the car is one of determined disinterest.

I don’t turn around.

One of them says “You’re a fucking loser!”

There are loud guffaws and a volley of curses.

“No, man! No, seriously. I’ll fucking wait. Do you want me to fucking wait while you fucking go and fucking get it?”

“Nah. Nah, that’s a’right. Fuck! I can’t fucking believe it!”

The doors close. It’s going to be long ride to the pier.

The man in the seat next to me pulls a book out of his backpack. We make brief eye-contact and I want to apologize but I don’t. When he looks at me again, I want again to apologize and again I don’t.

At the next stop, a young woman gets on and sits so that she is facing me and facing the boys who are behind me.

The boys at the back of the car start to sing. Their song is about the girls they’ve fucked in Japan. It degenerates from there until they’re talking loudly about the Nips and the Japs and about how no one in this whole fucking country speaks any fucking English.

I look at the young woman. She is looking down at her cell phone, reading an email or text message or playing a game. I think about how she probably has the requisite eight or so years of education in English under her belt--as does nearly everyone on the train. She, like many Japanese, is probably steeped in American culture as it’s transmitted via the media, via movies and television, via music and music videos. She understands something of America and Americans, even if some of the specific vocabulary is lacking. I look at the young woman and I wonder what she is thinking.

I think about the young women who visit the clubs in Roppongi looking for boys just like these boys. The Japanese call these women Yellow Cabs because they pick up Western guy after Western guy. I think about The Kaisha student, the cute college girl who told Ben that she loved to go to the clubs in Roppongi because the boys there spoke English to her. I think about the curfew on the military base in Okinawa, about how the soldiers there have to be back on base by eleven p.m. after a fifteen-year-old was raped by four or five soldiers.

I look at the girl opposite me and think: You are a target.

I think: Welcome to America.

I think: You have no clue about how you are really perceived by Western men.

I look at the girl and I wonder what she thinks and what she feels about the boys on the train.

I wonder about how she (and everyone on the train) feels because in fact, I am unable to pick up on a lot of the emotional cues here in Japan. Even after six months in country, my perception of the emotional undercurrent of many situations is lacking. I am used to the big, overblown American emotions and so the Japanese emotions seem so subtle as to be nonexistent. I am used to Americans, used to a people who broadcast willful, violent-seeming emotions that are perceived in Japan as a kind of powerful, unaware arrogance.

These boys are broadcasting that attitude at top volume.

The boys joke about how drunk they are and about how little money they have left after payday. One of the boys makes a comment about his big schlong and the others laugh and one says loudly that, well, look where you are.

I look at the man opposite me and I wonder what he understands of this conversation. He doesn’t look up. Instead, he looks down at his book. He is quiet and handsome man and, like many men in Hiroshima, is not nearly as refined as the men in Tokyo are. Hiroshima is the country and this man is a country boy. But he is a country boy who reads--and it’s not manga that he’s reading either. He is reading a proper book.

I look at him bent over his book and I wonder what he is thinking.

Japanese men--the ones who admit to it anyway--often have some kind of inferiority complex when it comes to American men. They know they’re shorter and have slight, less powerful builds. They believe their penises to be smaller. In fact, it comes down to a similar kind of complex that white men have about black men, only here, the translation is from Japanese to American, not from white to black.

The curses of the boys at the back turn into background noise and I stop listening. I don’t pay any attention until I hear one of the boys at the back say to another boy, “Just sit down.”

The boy’s voice has gone from its earlier bravado to a kind of whining. He’s asking and not ordering.

“C’mon, man. Just sit down, okay?” he whines. “Just sit down, man.”

I finally turn around to check out the boys.

I see that these boys are not your average backpacking tourists. No, these are soldier boys.

Near to Hiroshima is Iwate. At Iwate, there is a large American military base. I happen to know this only because I typed “Hiroshima New Year” into a google window and came up with the handbook for soldiers relocating to Iwate. Hiroshima is the nearest large city to Iwate and I’m sure that occasionally, the base pukes up guys like this who descend on the city dedicated to peace. Here they drink their paychecks and spend what’s left on cheap souvenirs and even cheaper women.

These are some of those guys.

I see that the biggest guy in the group of four is standing in the middle of the car facing me. He is wearing a bright red zip-up sports jacket and blue jeans and his hair is cut into a high-and-tight and he is red-faced, drunk. He sways slightly as he surveys the people on the car.

The guy takes a few steps in my direction and I think he is going to speak to me and I watch him.

“C’mon, man,” one of the guys whines. “Sit down, okay? Okay, man? Just sit down.”

The big guy hesitates and tries (and almost succeeds) in making it look like he is not hesitating. Then he turns around to face the other boys.

When his back is turned, the man in the seat next to me snaps his book shut and moves to the other end of the car.

I switch seats so that I am facing the group of four men. I want to watch them.

The big one rejoins his group but remains standing. One is lying stretched out on a seat, the priority seat for handicapped and elderly passengers, his feet up on the handicapped railing. Two other sit opposite him, half-passed out. They all look alike, their individuality militarized out of them.

But as ground down into sameness as they are, these boys are still the real American diplomats, the overseas boys who represent the real America, not the America on television, not the America in the movies, but the real, day-to-day inner workings of America and Americans. These are the Americans who leave the non-Hollywood impressions behind. And those impressions are not good.

But before you get it in your head that six-months in Japan have made me anti-American, let me take my thumb off the scales for a moment.

There are bad people in Japan. And bad things happen in Japan. In fact, recently in Hiroshima, a cram school teacher stabbed one of his problematic twelve-year-old students to death after class one day. And it’s not just Hiroshima that’s violent. Near where I live, in Higashi-Mukojima, a group of adolescent boys were arrested for assaulting the homeless people who live along the Ara River. When they were caught, they admitted that they just liked the scared look on the faces of the people they beat up. And too, Japan is rife with dishonest politicians and crooked cops just like America. These men milk the public for billions of yen every year--and just like in America, they do it with a smile and when they’re caught they get a slap on the wrist. In Japan, there are men who beat their wives and parents who beat their children. It’s not that it doesn’t happen here. It happens here just like it happens in America.

But unlike in America, on a day to day basis this kind of public behavior is just not the norm.

Shit, my thumb crept back on the scale, didn’t it? Well, not really: Yes, people in Japan drink and act like idiots. They pass out in stairwells and puke up their dinners on train platforms. Yes, people here act like assholes. They make comments in Japanese that they think I don’t understand. They give dirty looks to my Japanese companions when they hear them speaking English to me. Yes, I’ve even been purposefully knocked in the legs with the corners of briefcases for some perceived slight on crowded trains and I’ve been pushed out of the way in such refined settings as the national museum by men. Yes, it happens. It will probably continue to happen. I don’t get angry. And it’s not because I’m soft. I mean, hell, I come from an angry country. I come from a place where angry is an art form. I can do angry. I can even make it translate in such a way that people would react just as they would at home. But you know what? I don’t want to.

Why?

Well, why should I?

I recognize these actions for what they are and I don’t feel the need to retaliate. I have come to see these actions as a deep unhappiness and uncertainty with an unfamiliar situation that manifests itself as a covert act of aggression toward someone who symbolizes that situation. I know that people here have little experience with foreigners, outsiders, and that makes it easy to objectify them/us. I know that, to the Japanese, outsiders are threatening, dangerous, wrong. Not only is this a monocultural society, but too, Americans can be very threatening even in America. (Yes, we get drunk and puke our dinners up in parking lots. Yes, we shove people out of the way. Yes, we make loud comments about foreigners when we think they don’t know the language.) The Japanese stereotype of the average American is that we’re big, loud, angry and arrogant. We take up too much space with our bodies, with our gestures, with our voices. And to a Japanese, a big, loud, angry, arrogant person is not really a person. Why? Because Japanese don’t act this way in public. To a Japanese, a person doesn’t act that way, only animals act that way, and to a Japanese, it looks stupid and stubborn just like an animal, and so foreigners must not be people, they must be animals--or objects. If they’re animals or objects objects, then it’s easy group them together and then turn them into targets. It happens all the time.

And it works both ways. (Yes, my thumb was on the American side there, wasn’t it?)

Those boys on the train were channeling that sentiment but in the other direction, treating the Japanese as objects. To those boys, these quiet people lack courage. Japanese people don’t assert themselves in a way recognizable to Americans and so they not must care about their rights as people. If they can’t stand up for themselves, then why should we stand up for them? The American view is that it is a basic responsibility of each individual to stand up for what they believe in. As Americans, one of the primary ways that we define ourselves as a group is through a sense of individuality and responsibility to individual rights.

This is not considered a basic responsibility in Japan. And this leads to a lot of conflict between Americans and Japanese, still, years after the war.

Let me try to see what those boys on the train saw:

As Americans, they’ve signed away at least four years of their lives to protecting what we see as our individual rights and responsibilities. They might not see it that way, but they are steeped in American culture, and to some extent, we all see it that way. As Americans, they were sent to a country where responsibilities don’t include a basic sense of individual rights. The Japanese don’t--won’t--stand up for individual rights the way Americans do and if don’t--can’t--do that, even with our help after the war, then they don’t deserve to be treated like people. If they’re not people, then they’re not really human and we don’t have to treat them as though they were. I mean, just look at them. They all look alike and they all sound alike and they all act alike and not one of them speaks no fucking English. And, hell, man, these Jap chicks are easy; easy to pick up, easy to fuck, and even easier to forget. That’s why we won the fucking war. We won the fucking war because these fuckers have no fucking guts. Let’s bomb this whole fucking country back to the fucking stone age. Let’s kill them all and let God sort them out. Only this ain’t no Christian country--haw, haw--so there ain’t no god to sort them out.

Here, let me state the obvious: The situation is complicated.

Later, I have a kind of delayed reaction to the behavior of the boys on the train. Later, as I consider what I should have done, I think that maybe I should have gotten up and gone to speak to those boys. I get angry at myself for not saying anything, for not standing up to them. This is me being angry at myself for forgetting to be an American in the face of Americans. (“In the face”? That’s American, right there.) But what would I have said?

I might have told them to mind their manners, that, yes, many Japanese know at least some English and that their behavior and words were offensive to the people on the train. I think this, then I realize that an appeal to manners and etiquette would have carried little clout with boys like this, so then I think that I might have threatened to make trouble for them, to report them to their superiors. They are soldiers after all, and so they must, by definition, answer to someone. I might have said that I would contact that someone.

Ah. But why? Why?

Just as in America, I find myself caught in the curious space between two cultures, neither of which I am committed to, neither of which I understand completely from the inside out. I find myself again in that curious borderland, that liminal space where I am indefinable and therefore indefinite. I find myself feeling powerless not peaceful, so I make a pact with myself to seek peace, in part, by seeking to understand.

Peace begins with individuals who decide on a personal policy of peace. Peace begins with a person who is at peace with herself. I decide then on the complicated path of trying to understand a complicated situation.

I am in Hiroshima, in a city dedicated to peace. It is in Hiroshima where two cultures that were once at war with each other are faced with the prospect of establishing peace with one another and with the rest of the world. It is in Hiroshima, a city dedicated to peace, that it is easy to see that peace is not an easy prospect. It is not an easy road. It is not an easy road, but we have to believe. We have to believe and this belief has to be put into action. Perhaps the first step is to put our trust in the process. Perhaps the next step is to leave behind comfort and seek understanding. Perhaps the step after that is realizing that the route is complicated but that we have to do it. We have to go. We have to go. There is no other choice.