I Remember

There’s a lot about Japan that I remember but never wrote about.

I remember:

On the train I sit opposite a vacant young woman. She is thin and pale with limp dark hair that falls to her shoulders and stark white bandages on each of her wrists. She doesn’t look at me, at me or anyone. She looks at the floor. Her three-year-old daughter sits quietly by her side.

There is a lot I wrote but never put online. In October of 2005:

Saying Goodbye

Maybe it was the curse-blessing of an upbringing in a large family that left me with an inability to say goodbye to people.

Why is it so easy for some people to let go of others?

I want to be loved for who and what I am, and I find that, and it turns out that though that part is right, everything else is wrong. And I should think of what I want in the next relationship, but all I can think about is how I don’t want to say goodbye in this instance.

I’m not going. I can’t do it. It’s wrong and it hurts me and I can’t do it.

And:

August 27, 2005

It’s just been one of those weeks. I’ve forgotten that the whole world doesn’t revolve around me and this is a very dangerous thing to forget in a culture where the (in)appropriateness of one’s behavior centers around the inconveniencing of others. And that sounds ominous, but it turns out that anything is okay here, so long as you hide what you are doing if it would be considered inappropriate.

Do you remember the scene from 1984, George Orwell’s novel, the one where Julia explains to Winston that she can break all the big rules as long as she keeps the small ones?

Well, here, it’s the same. The rules aren’t the same, of course...

This is going to get confusing, I’m sure. Let me try to explain:

Japan is a very subdued country in many ways. On the surface, to an American, the place seems almost overwhelmingly conservative. I am accustomed to a much more expressive population, accustomed to a people who are over-the-top, whose faces and movements are large and outlandish. The kind of behavior that is tolerated in America would be frightening at best in Japan. Here, people don’t cross their legs. They don’t whistle. They don’t let their faces betray their emotions. They don’t lose their tempers in public--not to the extent that Americans do anyway.

When I first got here, all of Tokyo seemed screwed down tight. Coming from America to a training house in Omiya (where I spent a month with a bunch of hyper-juiced Westerners), being let loose in Tokyo was like coming in from very bright sunlight. My eyes were accustomed to something else, and for a time I was unable to really see any ot the details. Now, my eyes are slowly starting to adjust...but what’s more, so am I.

Talking to Muji a few days ago, he said something along the lines of: You take yourself wherever you go.

I believe this-know it. But when I first got here, I was in some kind of limbo where I didn’t know myself. All the old demons hadn’t caught up yet. I had this vision of myself as a different person. Though I knew I would never be able to fit in here as anything but an outsider, I wondered how that outsider status was going to change me.

In some ways, it hasn’t. I’ve been an outsider all my life. I will continue, I think, to be an outsider all my life.

It’s taken me a while to catch up.

One of the bigger lessons here is the lesson about the universe giving you what you ask for. Honestly, you really do get what you ask for. Of course, there are several catches. One is: Do you really know what you are asking for? How would you know that you are getting what you want? Would you recognize your gift before it’s too late?

For example, I ask for love. I don’t know what this means, beyond wanting to find someone who appreciates me for who I am. I ask for love and then confront the issue of sex, of having been sexually assaulted as a child and of having to face those demons down now as an adult. I ask for love, and the universe, eager to give me what I want, sends David, who loves me without wanting sex. I find this intolerable. I ask for sex. The universe, eager to give me what I want, sends a number of men who are willing to give me sex. I ask for...more. I confront the demons of shame, of body shame. I confront the demons who hound intelligent women and make them feel undesirable. I confront the demons of...

Here, I fell in love with a student. I knew there was an attraction--but I assumed that it was one-sided. I assumed that I was attracted but had to stay away. I assumed that this was inappropriate. Then he left. (I assumed that he was here for another teacher, because of his attraction to another teacher, as he left when she left.) I...It’s only after he left that I find that I am heartbroken, heartsick. This coincides with homesickness. I am depressed when the time for his lesson comes around. I am frustrated with my job. I want to see him again. I wonder if this is possible and also wonder it its not just a kind of distraction that...that is making some other things easier. Does it matter?

I wonder if my heart matters. I wonder if what my heart wants matters. I wonder if this is important.

I want to be loved. I want for him to love me, to have been attracted--to still be attracted to me...

I want and am willing to stand up and face down this desire. I am willing to confront the possibility that it is impossible. And, too, I am willing to confront the possibility that it is entirely possible.

I want. I want him and I...

My heart rages and I...

My heart rages and I am learning how to stand up to it. I am learning how to stand up to disappointment. I am learning how to battle desire. I am learning how and when to leave it.

Leave it! Judi yells at Cooper. I am learning how to leave it.

This week I am crazy for home. This week I want for someone to tell me that they are in love with me. I want Yu to tell me that he loves me.

I want to open my email and find an email from him, asking me to dinner. I want to go to dinner and have a wonderful conversation and I want for us to be in love and for everything to be as it should be.

And this will happen, I know. Perhaps not all the part before everything being as it should be, but I trust that, whatever happens, it will be as it should be.

This much I know.

And:

I ask Go what the first movie he ever saw was, and he answers, “Never Ending Story.” Seth, who’s been talking to Ben, doesn’t hear. I ask Seth what his first movie was, and he answers, “Never Ending Story.”

“Albuquerque?” Katsu says to me. “Isn’t that where the balloons are?”

I find bagels in Shibuya. They’re edamame and soy milk bagels, but still bagels. I buy one to have for lunch, along with a matcha soy milk latte.

And:

I struggle with this day of travel. I sit next to a couple, two men, on their way to some fabulous vacation in the Caribbean. One of them is nervous about flying and I think his partner would like to hold his hand. The don’t hold hands. It would be a breach of etiquette for me to tell the American homosexuals that I wouldn’t mind if they held hands, so I don’t. All the guidebooks about American say not to do this. So I must be doing the right thing.

Actually, I don’t know what the American guidebooks say about America. I only know what they say about Japan and the Japanese. American guidebooks are all about how to find the cheapest, easiest, fastest ways to do things. In other words, American guidebooks are really guides to remaining American while traveling. American guidebooks are about how to bargain and about what the local equivalent of McDonald’s is. (But anymore, we don’t bargain. We usually just take what we want, or, alternatively, we take what we are given and then end up believing that we deserved what we get.) I read all the American guidebooks, with the exception of the books aimed at the uppermost economic brackets, the ones printed on the heaviest, glossiest paper, with lots of pictures. They are not much larger than trade paperbacks, but they weigh a ton. They’re travel eye candy, travel porn like the monthly magazines that tell you every month about the newest beach hot spots and the priciest new camping equipment. I don’t have the means to buy them nor the means to follow their directives. Instead, I read the guides aimed at the backpackers and the college students, the guides that are heavy with hostel addresses and cheap hotels and drinking establishments. Without fail, each one warns about drug offenses and each contains the obligatory guide to finding cheap eats and cheaper women. These are not guides for women, but they do explain how to prey on women. I read those guides. I read those guides and I read the guides that are aimed at middle class travelers, the ones who want to see the museums, the temples, take the walking tours are of the gardens and the expensive shopping areas, where one people watches rather than shops for couture. They lean on boutique hotels and traditional (but on the inexpensive side of traditional) accommodations.

Why read them all? Well, of course, why not? But also: I want to know. I’m not just reading to find out what the place is like, I’m reading so that I might perhaps avoid making some kind of useless fool out of myself. I want to know the experiences of others. I want to navigate a city (that I’ve never seen) like a native (which I find out is impossible, considering that in Tokyo, even the natives can’t navigate like natives. “Always get a map,” one woman, born and raised and living even now in Tokyo, writes.) I want to know what to order in the restaurants and how to eat it and how to say thank you. I don’t want to be one of those tourists who points, grunts, nods, holds up fingers instead of being able to use the actual numbers. Teach me the culture, and let me learn to navigate it like a native, I pray, even knowing that this is impossible. I know from experience, from watching the white kids who try (and either fail to or succeed in) infiltrating brown kid culture) that culture is not something you put on like a coat. It’s more like one big skin graft than it is like a shawl. I’ve seen firsthand how stupid the white kids who try to make an Orale! sound natural really sound. (And, to be entirely fair, at some point in my life, I stopped being able get away with a natural-sounding Orale!--and whether that was level of education, or the misguided aspiration to be the brownest white person I could be, or some combination of those things with sides of other things remains to be seen.)

The man to my right orders tea. The flight attendant, one of the bilingual ones, leans over me and says to him, “Ocha ka bancha desu ka?” (Do you want green or black tea?) I understand this question, but apparently he doesn’t (or doesn’t hear) so she repeats it. He replies, in English, “Green.”

The guidebooks say things like this happens all the time.

The initial quest for knowledge obscures the ethnocentric angle offered when one culture tries to explain another. Judgment is implied or stated outright. We are meant to find it strange or to find it strange that we don’t find it strange. I find it strange. Then I find that I don’t find it strange. Then I find it strange again. After a while my meter refuses to calibrate. And the more I read, the worse it becomes.

I don’t limit myself to the American guidebooks, I also read a few written by British authors. The Brits have a relatively comprehensively systematic approach. If they address it at all, they don’t limit themselves to information about travel etiquette (which Americans are sorely lacking in and don’t know how to fake), but instead seem to focus on reintroducing to native soils the seeds of the rotten fruits fallen from the tree of colonization. They are always, it seems, laying the groundwork for future bouts with foreign cultures. It’s almost as though they believe that they will be able to infiltrate and go native next time. (Fat chance there’ll be a next time.) Even though the Brits put into place a number of the cultures they’re now visiting as tourists, they’ll never rule the world again if only because even the Brits seem to hate British food.

Once their charm and manners could carry them through. (Charm and terrorization of the natives was such a winning combination...)

On the flight to Tokyo, I sit on the aisle, trapping in two business men (I hesitate to call them salarymen, though I’m not sure why). Are they the “average” Japanese about whom I have read? They both drink ocha. (Ah-ha!) One accepts an oshibori, one does not. (Damn.) The parameters for my study are limited: We are on a plane after all. One gets up to go to the bathroom, one does not. One naps. One does not. One takes the chicken, one takes the pork. They both eat the sad nigiri sushi first. They both wave off the offer of drinks other than ocha...Is that average? Hey, Mister, are you average?

I know the value of what one can learn from a book. Having been enamored of Louisa May Alcott’s stories for children, I became one of the few Hispanic girls on the planet who could speak fluent nineteenth century white girl.

How much culture am I hired to teach with the English? Sure, there’s English and then there’s English. My students will most likely know more grammar than I do. They’ve spent six to eight years (or more, if they went to college) studying English. So what am I doing here? Well, there’s grammar and then there’s communication. Some argue that one has nothing to do with the other--which I don’t believe, by the way. In fact, I would argue that you can communicate without the modern rules of American English grammar, but grammar could not exist without efforts at communication. For example, in the realm of American English , no, you don’t bring up the homosexuality--but you can express your opinion if someone does bring it up. There’s the English that says you can’t ask questions like, Hey, Mister, are you average?

You see that I’ve rather cleverly avoided saying what, if anything, the American guidebooks say about the Japanese? I have. I have because I have horrible fear that the moment I write the inevitable sentence beginning, inevitably, with, “The Japanese---” Mr.A will look over and I will find myself in the embarrassing position of having to share close quarters with a man who I’ve inadvertently insulted (versus advertently insulting him,which I think I did earlier...)

Do I find anything charming about the people I’ve met so far? Douglas MacCarther was famous for having said that “they” are quote a nation of twelve-year-olds. I am charmed solely by the fact that this seems not to be the case.

And:

In the Aussie bar, I shove myself between two guys who are glued to the television set above the bar where an Aussie-England game is going on. “Just say, ‘Shift over, boys,’” one of them, a shaved headed, heavyset man says. I say, imitating his accent, “Shift over, boys,” and his friend, an incredibly handsome Alec Baldwin look-alike, laughs. It’s my round, so I order a Cooper for Seth, a mid-sized Asahi for Ben and a soda water for myself. While I wait for the bartender to deliver, I talk with the men. Turns out that they’re not Aussies but Englishmen from Manchester. Alec has been in Tokyo for nine years and Baldy was here for three years, found the requisite Japanese wife and moved back to England. He’s back to visit his best friend Alec.

“Where do you teach English?” I immediately ask Alec Baldwin (whose name really turns out to be Alec). He laughs again and says, “All over.” I say, “So then you work for ECC.” He kind of tilts his head at me. The drinks arrive and I hand them to their respective owners and continue to chat with Alec and Baldy. They are amazed when they find out that I’ve only been in Japan three weeks, because (as Baldy says) I seem very comfortable with the whole concept of picking up and moving to another country. But to be fair, they are even more amazed that I had never owned an umbrella before coming to Japan. “Where are you from?” Baldy wants to know. I tell them in the backwards way I’m becoming accustomed to answering: “America, New Mexico, Albuquerque.” Since they are native English speakers, I add, “Where Buggs Bunny should have taken the left.” They both break into song, “Oooohhh Albuquerque--” and I say, “Whaaat?” Turns out there’s some song about Albuquerque that completely missed Albuquerque. I turn the tables by singing the Morrissey song, “Oh, Manchester, so much to answer for!” And they don’t recognize it.

And:

At dusk, the fortune tellers set up their tables on Chuo-dori in Ginza. They light their lamps and sit patiently behind their tables. I pass one man each night and catch his eye and smile, and he smiles back and does a seated half-bow in return. I would stop and ask my fortune, only Ben told me that a basic reading--in Japanese only, of course--runs about five thousand (or fifty dollars). I can get my preprinted fortune at the temple in Asakusa for a measly one hundred (or one dollar).

But the preprinted fortunes are not always kind.

To get my fortune at Asakusa, I put a hundred yen coin into a slot in the counter and then I pick up a large can that has a small hole in one end. I turn the can over so that the hole faces the floor and I shake the can until a stick pops out. On the stick is a number in kanji that corresponds with a numbered drawer. During my last visit, stick go-jyu-hachi popped out.

Go-jyu-hachi, I thought, putting the can down and stepping away so that the next fortune seeker could start the can routine. Go-jyu-hachi...five ten eight. Oh, right, fifty eight. The numbers on the drawer are also in kanji, so even though I go through the translation, I still have to find go-jyu-hachi. Which I do after a moment. I pull out the drawer and grab a piece of paper.

The fortunes are in Japanese and English. Go-jyu-hachi is translated: 58. Bad Fortune.

The day turns dark.

It had been a good day up until the bad fortune. I had ridden the train into Asakusa chuckling to myself over Ken’s antics the day before. I had smiled at several families with their small children. The children here, if they are below a certain age, don’t have to follow the conservative rules of behavior on the trains. Not that they aren’t polite anyway; they’re just more exuberant than your average JR rider. They stand on the seats and point at interesting things. They run in little circles near their parents. They use their mom’s camera to take pictures of their tiny siblings. They have fun doing things and don’t look so exhausted as their parents. They make an ordinary train ride interesting.

And:

Yes, I was (am?) in love with him. Ouch. Yes, it’s Matthew all over again: A too-intelligent being, a man too sceptical for love. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch...I am grateful for this reminder that my heart is not dead. I am as grateful for him as I was for Matthew. I am grateful for the reminder that I retain the ability and the desire to love another. I am grateful for the ability to love. I am grateful--as grateful for rejection as for acceptance. I am grateful. I am grateful.

I walk around Shop QQ and have imaginary conversations with him. We are buying things together and he is teasing me about being hopelessly ignorant of the things that are so stullifyingly familiar to him. We are both seeing things through new eyes because we are together.

Indulging in those kinds of fantasies are as dangerous as indulging in homesickness, and I try to stop them. My heart grinds against the track of reality and it sounds like the brake as the inexperienced conductors bring the trains into the stations. Here is where I have to get off.

That’s a clumsy metaphor, I know. But what I’m trying to say is that I refuse. I refuse to allow myself to mourn what never was. I refuse to...and my heart says otherwise.

This is such a clumsy existence. I want things to be seamless. I’m glad they’re not. I want things to be easy. I’m grateful that they’re not. I want things to go smoothly. I’m glad they don’t. I want to cry over this. I’m grateful that I can. I...want. I want. I want. If I could dissolve that want, I’d be grateful for that too. I’m grateful for wanting. I’d be just as grateful for not wanting.

I’ll weather the suffering and not get attached to it. I’ll weather it and let it move through me. I am no more solid than it is.

My heart is broken.

And:

I miss chairs.

I know that most of the people in most of the world throughout most of the history of most of the people of most of the world have gone without chairs. I, however, have been fortunate enough to have had chairs to sit in all my life, and I don’t now own a chair.

Correction, I don’t own a chair with legs. I have this chairlike piece of furniture. A chairling or a chairless or a chairette. It begs the question: What is a chair?

For me, chairs have legs. My chairling is legless. It sits right on the floor and is a cushion with a back.

It was novel at first, my chairette. It’s novel until you screw up a knee or something trying to hop into it. There is no hopping into a chairette.

I miss being able to quantify how hot it is.

In Tokyo right now it’s damned hot. I don’t know exactly how damned hot it is because I only have a thermometer that expresses degrees Celsius. (In fact, I don’t really even know if the usual term is Celsius or centigrade.)I have an air conditioner, but I rarely turn it on. I couldn’t explain why this is, except that I am, for some strange reason, determined to survive the summer having run my air conditioner fewer than a half-dozen times. It’s 31 or 32 degrees at the moment, and I couldn’t really say how hot that is to me. It’s damn hot, but bearable. It’s been 35 some days and I don’t really know how hot that it either. I would guess that it’s in the 90’s--perhaps even in the upper 90’s, but that’s only a guess.

I feel the down spiral of homesickness rearing its ugly head and I am determined to see it through. I watch and wait and wonder, but I will not succumb to it.

I don’t care about so many things and I wonder how I got into this state in the first place.

I woke up from a nap this afternoon and thought: God is anything that is behind the scenes. We could understand it if we weren’t so determined in the results of our own self-interest, but because we are so incredibly self-centered, we don’t understand just how...God works. God is, then people doing things for other people. God is whatever we don’t see. God is genetics and evolution. God is the ghost in the machine. God is the building and unbuilding of culture. God is whatever is intangible. God is ideas and feelings. God is love and invention. God is this godawful heat.

I watch people watch me on the train. I am slowly forgetting my own face. I am slowly being erased and redrawn and that is not a comfortable process. I don’t mind it because I tell myself not to mind it. That’s almost the only reason. I don’t mind it because I know that I don’t have a choice about it and I’m determined not to make myself miserable over it. I am here and this is happening and that is God too.

And:

In the woodblock print exhibit at the Tokyo National Museum is a run of prints of famously beautiful women from the Edo period. One series depicts the classes of women: upper-class, middle-class, lower-class. There are two women in each print, each dressed according to their station and surrounded by the accompanying accessories that define their classes. It goes without saying that the upper-class women are better--and completely--dressed and the lower class women? Are still perfectly (to my eye) arranged, though one bares her breasts and another has opened her kimono to show--gasp--her legs to the knee.

The women of modern day Edo (Tokyo) are similarly arranged.

Five or six days a week, I ride JR from Higashi-Mukojima, a lower-class neighborhood that consists mostly of modern high-rise apartment buildings mixed with tiny, bi-level single family houses, most of which were built after we bombed the hell out of Tokyo in WWII. The women who ride JR with me from Higashi-Mukojima are the lower- and middle-class women on their way to shop in larger communities like Asakusa for groceries that can’t be had from Shop QQ (the 99 yen store near Higashi-Mukojima station) or to work behind the counters in the department stores in places like Ginza. At Asakusa, I change from JR to the metro for the ride into Ginza. The Ginza trains are cleaner, the station is cleaner, the people who get off at Ginza (rather than staying on to Shibuya) are a little better dressed. They wouldn’t, for example, bare their breasts.

They do show some leg though. The style of dress here is alien to my eye, and therefore feels, looks, and seems wrong, but knowing that, I’ll go ahead and try to describe it.

The big thing right now (and for the last several years) for the schoolgirl set are enormous white socks worn bunched up to just below the knee. When I say enormous, think those pants that the little gang-banger wannabes wear in the US, the ones that are so ridiculously large that they drag on the ground and expose the wearer’s boxer shorts. These socks are the Japanese version of those pants. They’re huge, easily doubling (and in some cases tripling) the girth of the calf. I saw these socks for sale at Shibuya station, and they are 80 centimeters of thick-knit white sock. (When I was in middle school, leg warmers over jeans were The Thing, so I understand this trend to some small extent.) I read somewhere that they’re supposed to make the leg look slimmer, and I’m not sure if it works, because all I see when I look at the schoolgirls wearing these socks is: Damn, that’s a sock right there.

Up a level from the schoolgirl set are the twenty-somethings. Now, let me say again, fashion is not my thing. It wasn’t my thing in the US, and it isn’t my thing in Japan. Yes, there are clothes here in my size. Yes, they’re hellishly expensive. No, I’m not here for the clothes. Which is a good thing, because the clothes, even the stuff that is hung in moodily lit stores and carries hefty price tags, is cheap-looking. There’s a lot of stuff that looks like you’d see it on the clearance rack at Wal-mart week after week, getting marked down until it hit the coveted under a dollar division. It’s made of the thinnest knit fabric and is often in color combinations like orange, purple, and brown (that’s one shirt) and maybe it’s got some sequins or some ruffles (or, even better, both) thrown in there for good measure. They also mix patterns with abandon. There isn’t the sense of a pattern thrown in there to accent a solid. No, if one pattern’s good, then three must be better. If that leopard print in orange and grayish-blue looks good, then it’d look even better with that lacy brown and black skirt. Why not add a green sequined handbag and call it an outfit? Ooops. Almost forgot the sheer lace trouser socks to the knee and the bronze high heeled sandals. I’m not exaggerating here--or if I am, it’s unintentional, as I feel conspicuous if I’m wearing more than two colors at a time. These women? They’re fearless that way.

It looks cheap (though any glance into any clothing store will convince you otherwise) and it looks tacky (to my eye), and it’s widely worn by all. (In their defense, it is damn hot here and so thin clothes are a necessity. And too, the women are relatively conservative so that there isn’t the the kind of skin exposed that you would in the US. They aren’t running around in tank tops and shorts here, kids. The only people who do that (and who look really bad doing it) are the tourists. The women here wear skirts and layer their tops to stay cool.

I can’t, however, explain the color and pattern thing, except to say that at the Tokyo Museum, one of the exhibits explained that patterns became popular during the Edo period as Noh costumes began to be copied by the elite for everyday wear. I think, in part, that they’re still living out this particular trend, sort of the way we still think of black as the elegant color--based on what, I wonder? And speaking of black: Brown is the black here. By that, I mean that brown is considered the elegant, refined color in this place. Brown is the black of Japan, so you see it mixed with everything and in every possible shade, including grayish-brown and bluish-brown. And me? I’ve actually never been good with color. It’s kind of funny, considering that I’m an artist, but the color thing? Escapes me. I was looking at the kimono exhibit and one kimono was labeled something like “Reddish-black crepe silk kimono.” I looked up and saw brown. It’s like when potters at the studio would go on and on about the fabulous red glazes that had some out of the kiln in the last firing, and I’d look at the stuff and see brown. It’s iron red, they’d explain, as though that made it red. And I’d look again and, nope, it’d still be brown. That’s brown, I’d point out. And they’d roll their eyes at me and wait until I had left to point out that some people just don’t get it.

Also for the twenty-something set are the trouser socks to the knee with skirts look. No, really, these women are running around in thousands of dollars worth of thin, cheap-looking clothing and knee-highs. And they wear all of this with high heels no less.

The shoes here are incredible. “Anything goes here,” Anita said to me one afternoon in Harajuku, where we were looking at imported used clothing (don’t ask). She’s right, of course, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the shoes that you see on the streets. The women here wear the most outlandish shoes ever. I have never seen some of these fashions. It’s like the whole town is infected with some virus that makes them all want to secretly be professional ballroom dancers or strippers, shoe-wise. These shoes are something else. First, ninety-nine point nine percent of the women I see are wearing heels. I wear heels at work (which I change into when I get to work) and flats everywhere else. But the women you see in the parks, at the shrines, on the trains, in the subway--they’re all tripping along on these impossibly high, strappy sandals. And it can’t be comfortable. In fact, I saw special bandages in one department store for the cuts that you get across the tops of your feet from wearing too tight strappy sandals. Some of them have feet like ballet dancers, just wrecked from wearing their sad little shoes. I feel for these women. I feel (after having worn heels to wander Asakusa with Chie that day and ended up wearing bandages for several days after) their pain. Ellaine thinks that it’s because they weigh nothing, these women, that they are able to traipse everywhere in heels, but I don’t believe it. I think it’s more the “suffer in silence” thing that we reserve in the US for things like domestic violence rather than high-heeled shoes.

And, turning from fashion to domestic violence, I will say that this week’s discussion group is about domestic violence in Japan. This should be interesting. I was looking at internet statistics (and, yes, I know that that internet statistics add a category to the “lies, damned lies, and statistics” hierarchy) on intimate partner violence here, and I found one survey that suggested that 1 in 20 Japanese women are the victims of domestic violence. Sounds extreme, doesn’t it? But consider that in the US, that figure is 1 in 3. (Too, that doesn’t take into account reporting rates probably being much, much less in Japan’s shame-based culture.)