Notes To Self, Too

Take Note

I finally got off my ass and added a few links to the sidebar.

One is to the flickr site.

One is to the 'blog of The Kaisha Trainer who reads this blog. I've known about it for awhile, but I thought it'd be nice for the people who read my journal to have another perspective on the city and kaisha that we have in common.

Enjoy!

Notes To Self, Too

More phone emails to myself and the explanations and details and stories behind them:

blank spaces, waiting for the dead

At Yasukuni Shrine’s Yushukan there are rooms and rooms of photos of the men, women and children who died in defense of Japan. They are now kami, dieties.

The photos are perhaps 3 by 5 inches, and perhaps two hundred of them hang together in a large rectangular frame. There is room after room of frames. At the end are several empty panels, waiting.

couples grooming

In Tokyo, the mere presence of a Western woman is enough to prompt insecure women to unconsciously groom themselves. Does that sound strange? Well, welcome to a country where Westerners are like movie stars, so much so that in smaller towns, some of the English teachers have been asked for autographs. I have been compared to Jennifer Lopez and Catherine Zeta Jones and even Gwyneth Paltrow. Stop laughing. I’m serious. So, yes, many Japanese, even in a city as large as Tokyo, don’t know what to do with foreigners.

We Western women make Japanese women especially nervous about themselves. When they get nervous, they groom. They touch their hair, smoothing it down. They touch their faces. They look at me and they look away. They look and look away, and they unconsciously groom themselves.

That is the women who are alone or in groups of other women. But the women who are part of a male-female couple? Well, this is where it gets interesting.

It’s no secret that Western women are the objects of Japanese male desire in Japan. If you’re female, imagine sitting in the same room with your boyfriend and your boyfriend’s favorite Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. (Yeah, I know that sounds like conceit, but it happens to be squarely planted in truth.) Imagine how you’d feel. The women here feel the same way. So they groom. They don’t groom themselves, though. They groom their boyfriends. If I sit on the train across from a couple and the woman feels insecure, nine times out of ten, they’ll start this strange little grooming process. They groom and pet their boyfriends, offer them candy, stroke their faces. If they’re standing, the women will often rub up against their boyfriends like cats in heat. (One man, looking at me, pushed his girlfriend away when she did this.)

I wouldn’t offer this as an observation if I only had a single data point.

a mr man on train & his ashamed parents. no one sits near them either

Yesterday, I sat across from a mentally retarded man on the train. He was with his parents. His parents couldn’t make eye contact with anyone. They looked down at the floor, ashamed. Other people stared openly. Two men sat, then noticing him, stood up and moved away.

a blind man boards @ narihirabashi

I am still on the train across from the mentally retarded man and his parents. At Narihirabashi, a blind man gets on the train. I have seen at least one blind person a day every day for the last several days. If this were a dream, I’d wonder about the meaning. But since it’s not a dream, I know that it's related to my own power of vision or lack thereof. I move through this world, through Japan, blind. But I move through it. That is my own act of bravery.

matching shoes

I am still on the train across from the mentally retarded man and his parents. I look at his shoes which are black leather, slip on, hearts across the instep. I look at his mothers shoes. They are the same style, but brown.

iidab. have i been? smoking

I am early meeting friends at Iidabashi Station. I step out of the station for a smoke. I look at the tiny street near the station entrance and I am overcome with a wave of deja vu. I have never been to Iidabashi before. Have I? When?

kamikazi and ken
an american in japan cannot escape war.
bride dolls
bears

At the Yushukan in Yasukuni are several bride dolls donated by the families of the young men who died too young to marry. They are beautiful dolls lined up in glass cases and placed among the photographs of the dead.

Similarly, there is a series of carved wooden bears.

2man in cash in her wallet
rich choco
phone mail astrologythey're together, older man sits
blind girl,kame

The student is young and very pretty and when her Japanese teacher asks her what she does, she says she doesn’t work. The lesson is about describing your house. She tells him she lives with an older man. Ahhh... Later she pulls out her wallet to pay for her lessons. She wants to pay in cash. She only has ni-jyu-man (200,000 yen or two thousand dollars). Will that be enough? she wonders.

In the grocery store near my house, I catch sight of a package of dark chocolate. “Sophisticated bitterness” it says on the front.

I check my horoscope online, on my phone.

On the train: The two men are together, one older, one younger, both in business suits. The older man takes a seat. The younger man stands. At the next stop a seat opens up next to the older man. The younger man continues to stand.

Another blind girl, this time in Kameido.

offrg seat 2 apr & havg seat offd 2 me HMsta
hearing a woman make ann. on jr doko?

When April was here, we walked together to the station and on the platform, there was a seat on the bench. I indicated that she should take it and she sat down. The women already sitting acknowledged this small act by making room for me on the bench.

I am on the Yamanote Line (?) and I hear something I have never heard before: A woman making announcements. The train’s engineer must be a woman. This is the first time, in ten months of daily train rides, that I have heard such a thing.