Gone, But Not Forgotten

In addition to a completely brand-new entry (below this one), here are some things I never put in the blog. They were written immediately after I returned to Tokyo after my brother's funeral, in those days when I was raw, grieving. And in that spirit, the spirit of those days, I leave them as I found them, as I wrote them, unpolished.

March 8, 2006

I haven’t updated in a while. Coming back to Tokyo was stressful, returning to work was stressful, and I have had a kind of reentry panic that reminds me of my first days in Japan.

The flight home was longer than the flight out. I don’t mean that it was a longer flight, because of course it’s close to seventeen hours no matter which direction you’re going, but I mean that the flight back to Japan seemed interminable. I was seated in the bulkhead next to a tall, muscular man who was made even bigger by sheer dint of being American. He took over my armrest without thinking, and stretched out into my space, and I was reminded of the careful manners of Japanese that allow them to be less intrusive. I put on my headphones and I covered myself with David’s jacket and I slept. I slept and slept and slept, waking only to visit the bathroom and to stretch and to drink water.

It’s really not as bad as all that, but my brother’s having died of a heart attack reminded me of my own vulnerability to such things, and has magnified the somewhat inevitable feelings of helplessness that one feels when one is so far from home, in a country where one does not speak the language. So there is that. And I am aware that those are selfish feelings, too.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Of course my job has eaten up a hundred hours. I returned to work the day after returning to Tokyo, and on my first morning, I found a note on the board in one of the classrooms that had my name on it. It was in Japanese except for my name, so I pulled it from the board and later asked the head teacher what the students had been told about my absence. She said they had been told that there was “a sadness in the family” and she explained that that is the euphemism used for a death in the family. One student brought me flowers, a potted hyacinth about to bloom. Several students asked if I was okay. And what could I answer? Yes, thank you. I’m okay. Yes, thank you.

And I taught my classes and I came home and cried and worried and called home and cried. I watched hours of DVDs and cried and cried and cried. I carried a knot of grief around and I smiled at students and I came home and I cried.

I went drinking with a couple of students and another teacher on my second night back. We went to a traditional Japanese restaurant where you leave your shoes behind and sit on tatami mats and there is no well beneath the table to put your legs. We ate sashimi and a million other things and we drank. I amazed them by speaking and understanding Japanese, and I told them--only half jokingly--that speaking a foreign language is easier when you’re drunk. We sat at a half round table that was set against a tall window. We looked out over the Ginza and drank and talked.

Northern Exposure

Seeking escape, I pulled out the DVDs that Dave sent me for my birthday, way back in August of last year. I have always loved Northern Exposure, so Dave sent the first and third seasons of the series. I had watched three or so episodes of the first season, but had set them aside, waiting for a time when I really needed them.

What I really love about Northern Exposure is the symbolism of them.

Ben could see people as people, but I have grown accustomed (in America anyway) of being able to see people as symbols.

March 16, 2006

My life is a mess these days, and that mess is a reflection of exhaustion and sadness, and that mess is reflected in the state of my apartment and the state of my body. I’m tired all the time, and I eat and drink too much and I don’t feel like taking care--of anything. I want to sleep all the time and I can’t sleep either.

March 18, 2006

Not Like I Expected

There are four of them, two girls and two boys, and they sit in little couples, boy-girl, boy-girl, bracketed on one end by the subway seat railing and at the other end by their teacher, a short Japanese man in cotton drawstring pants and running shoes shot at the heels. My eyes have grown so accustomed to Japanese faces that I examine them closely and eventually come to the conclusion that they must only be half Japanese (the kind of children that the Japanese call “halfs” and think are cute and untouchable both). They all speak fluent Japanese. Each of them holds a flyer for what looks like a fun show a show with actors in kabuki-like makeup, and each of them has folded and refolded the flyer until it is creased precisely, folded into and unfolded from some origami design that calls for precise angles.

“Sensei, sensei,” they call, and ask if they can put their belongings on the rack above their heads. They can. Each stands and turns and each tries in vain to put their bag on the rack that is high above their heads. Their sensei stays seated, lets them try first, then he stands to help them. Their belongings safely stowed, they sit again, and begin to monkey around. Their sensei allows a certain amount of this, a certain amount of playing with hats and teasing each other, and he shushes them when they get loud (loud meaning chatty because this is still Japan and it is rare that people are ever American loud, even children).

“They clean my heart,” one student says to me when I ask her if she likes children. She has come to a lesson, essentially a private lesson as it is during the day. Most of our students work during the day and so the school is quiet, the classes consisting of one or two students--three at most. She is a beautiful thirty-one year old woman who has the job that many Japanese women dream of: She is a flight attendant. That sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? But no, this is a highly sought-after job, shimmery with glamour, with a high-salary and requirements for beauty that American women have long spurned. The student is thirty-one and has been working as a flight attendant for eight years. I ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up and she says that she always wanted to be a flight attendant. I ask why. When she was four, she explains, she saw a flight attendant and was impressed by the uniform. “That’s a stupid reason,” she says, but, no, I don’t think it is, and I say so. What appeals to us at the age of four is important in shaping the rest of our lives. I know this. I ask her how she likes the job and she says, “It wasn’t what I expected.”

She explains that the job is hard. She has to be very polite to the customers and especially polite to the especially rude customers. She is on her feet all the time and suffers from jet lag. She gets sick often from breathing recycled air. She loves to travel, but since the exclusive Japanese airlines mostly cover the Pacific rim, she travels to countries like Vietnam and Thailand over and over and she doesn’t like ethnic food. I’m making her sound spoiled, but in reality, she is not. Well, she is not down-to-earth either, but she is, for this country anyway, quite likeable for a woman who chose a glamour job and whose whole life has pointed her in the direction that Japanese women are pointed in as a matter of culture. She is a fine representative of this place and her position and her disappointment in her position don’t belie this.

She and I have been talking about children because I have asked her how she has been since I last saw her and she tells me that has gone to visit a friend who has a two-year-old son. The child hadn’t liked her at first but then, after a few hours, liked her. He had called her by her nickname and asked her to read to him. Her friend had asked after her later, when she had gone. I ask if she has children and she tells me she is not married. I ask her if her older brother (we’d talked about him in an earlier lesson) has children. He is not married either. You can go back and find her age, but I’ll remind you that she is thirty-one. She is a thirty-one-year-old unmarried woman. That means that she is a loser in Japan. Well, but she is both a winner and a loser in Japan. She has the glamour job and all its trappings but she is not married and doesn’t have children. Her parents are glad that she’s achieved her dream to be a flight attendant, but they’re sorry that she hasn’t achieved theirs. They want grandchildren.

“It’s not like I expected,” she says.

Someday

Another student wants to study abroad and has tried to learn English in Japan as a precursor to going. She has spent nearly four years studying at The Kaisha and has the requisite eight years of English study behind her in school, including at university where she studied sociology. Now in her mid-thirties, she studies English and takes menial jobs. She is a receptionist in a law office and for a part-time job, she cleans offices. She is in her mid-thirties, unmarried, with no children.

She wants to go to Canada to study, but she is starting to feel as though she were too old. We talk and I tell her that she should go. She is only quote unquote too old in Japan. Here, it’s unusual for women in their thirties to return to school. They’re too old to marry. Sometimes they’re too old to find work. Businesses won’t hire women in their thirties. Age limits appear regularly in want ads despite age descrimination being illegal.

I tell her to go. I tell her that the age of women doesn’t matter in America, in Canada, too probably. I tell her that the average age of a student at my university was 27.

She, and the other students who hear this, are amazed. Older students are unusual in Japan. Very unusual. I tell her that I will return to school when I get home. Go, I tell her. “Someday,” she has always said of going, “Someday.”

I tell her, “Someday is now.”

Expectation

Buddists connect suffering with expectation. You suffer because you expect things. I came to Japan thinking I was not expecting anything from Japan. I came with as few illusions as I could, but it turns out that a few had snuck into my suitcase, into my pockets, in the corners and dark recesses of my mind.

One of the most obvious expectations I had was for myself. I assumed that I knew more Japanese than I did. Turns out that nearly two and a half years of study hadn’t really prepared me.

I also expected that I was going to be a better teacher than I am. I don’t particularly enjoy teaching and have come to look upon it as just another job and to dislike and even resent some of the students I teach.

“The devil is asleep or having trouble with his wife, or we would not have come back to easily.” --Robert Peary

March 23, 2006

Two teachers are dating (one of them the five year old, one of them a part-time teacher). I know about it, and--well, everyone knows about it, really. It’s one of those office romances that everyone just lives around. Everyone that is except one of the managers who is, as they say, sugoi jealous of the situation. It’s not that she’s necessarily interested in the male teacher that forms one half of the couple, but she is upset that some of the attention that he normally paid her as a matter of sucking up to the managment has been diverted by the new teacher. Honestly, the couple in question isn’t creating problems for themselves. I mean, they don’t flirt in the office and the five-year-old has so far resisted playing favorites, but the manager has contacted the regional manager with the information that it “makes her uncomfortable” that one of the part-time teachers is paying so much attention to the five-year-old. The manager’s behavior, in many ways, is typical. Some days it seems that it’s always the fourth grade around here. One girl is so upset that the boys aren’t paying attention to her that she puts her her head down on her desk or cries to the teacher.

I had a similar problem when I was substitute teaching in elementary schools. One girl, all of ten years old, was upset that her friend played with another girl at recess. She came in and put her head down and when I didn’t pay attention, she started to cry. “Teacher,” the students around me said, “she’s crying.” I asked her if she was sick and she said she wasn’t, so I said, “Okay, then. Just sit with your head down,” and I went on with my lesson. This irked her, so she cried louder, and when I failed to respond, she escalated the behavior, pulling things from her desk and throwing them around. “She’s mad,” one of the students told me. “She’s mad because her friend played with someone else.” “Oh?” I said, “That’s too bad.” And I went on with my lesson.

It’s always the fourth grade with most women in Japan. Today, the manager brought a lunch. As New Guy and I were prepping our lessons, she began to unpack her lunch to show the five-year-old what it contained. New Guy and I paid no attention to this loud display of amazement over a grapefruit and a banana and some onigiri, but the five-year-old loudly exclaimed in excitement (and in Japaanese) over each item. “Sugoi! Sugoi, ne?” When the lunch failed to amaze everyone (meaning me and New Guy), the manager packed up the lunch and went to the front counter and didn’t speak to either me or New Guy for the rest of the day.

Welcome back to the fourth grade.

I’m tempted to say that all Japanese women are like this, but that isn’t true. Many are. Many women here cling ferociously to some time in their lives when a pink was the dominant color scheme and Hello Kitty seemed the height of sophistication,. Doesn’t matter if they’re walkign around in Dior (as one teacher does), they still have ttheir pink panda bear stickers all over their folders (the same teacher). And who can blame them? Their scociety isn’t set up to allow them to compete as adults. There are even fewer high-powered jobs for women in Japan than there are in the West, and men control the game to the extent that women are still, even when employed in the same positions as the men in their offices, expected to serve tea at meetings and clean up afterwards. They’re a long way from hanging any “Your mother down’t work here, so clean up after yourself!” signs over sinks filled with dirty coffee cups. The women don’t have many venues in which they can compete as adults, so many compete as children might, who is the cutest, who has the most pink stuff, who can attract the most boys.

ISome of the more mature teachers pay no attention, but this quiet, mature behavior is not the norm in my office. All day long, I work with women who screech like excited ten year olds over the new stickers, and who draw hearts around their signatures. I work with women who wear high heels and short skirts and who scuffle, pigeon-toes down the street because they think it’s cute to walk that way.

I work with a woman in her forties who decorates her folders with pink panda stickers and who pulls her hair back into a modified ponytail.