It is interesting talking to Lynn about Japan because her second husband was Japanese. He was from Mito, a city near Tokyo, and Lynn spent some time there visiting her in-laws. Their marriage broke up after he fathered a child with his Russian mistress, a child he's never seen.
Early on, before I knew that she had met her ex-husband in the US (or perhaps it was Canada) I made some major gaffe talking to Lynn about how often American women meet Japanese men outside of Japan and think that they're the bees' knees. (I don't think I used the term "bees' knees.") But those free-spirited men seem to change when they're standing on Japanese soil. They become Japanese again, I meant, and Japanese men take it for granted that they are at the top of the food chain and they expect to be catered to always.
Somewhere in there was probably some hint of the scorn I felt towards non-Japanese women who hadn't much thought to investigate their Japanese spouse's culture and so they were surprised when their perfect little husbands landed on Japanese soil and became perfect little dictatorial beasts.
I wasn't trying to insult Lynn of course (though I likely did). What I was mostly trying to do was explain my own experience to the people around us, trying to explain how uncomfortable it is for a staunch American feminist to navigate a culture which is, to put it very diplomatically, pre-feminist. A less diplomatic reading? Women in Japan are doormats. They are expected to be obedient and submissive, slavish in their devotion to their men. (That's changing, of course, but not fast enough to suit me.)
So Lynn does have some perspective on that particular situation, and probably her opinion is far more profound than my own. So I was interested in her response when I showed her this picture:
That is a photo taken during my first week (perhaps even my first night) at The Kaisha of me with the other female teachers. In the front row, from left to right, is Kano (who was the forty-something, Dior addicted, former news reporter who lost her job when she got too old to be on television, a la Christine Craft), Kazuko (who owned, with her choreographer husband, a dance studio in Tokyo), and Akayo (who is, these days, getting a PhD in secondary language acquisition from, I think, Cambridge). In the second row, from left to right is Elaine (a Californian who left the personnel department at Fox Television to travel to Japan), Yoko (who was an exchange student to the US while in high school and later lived for nine years in Boston as the privileged wife of a high-up-there executive, and was now working as a translator for Nissan in addition to teaching), Yuko (who grew up in Indiana and Singapore and was educated in various international schools), and me, your humble servant.
As I explained all that to Lynn, she stopped me at Elaine and said, "Wow. She's gorgeous."
I said, "Isn't she? And the first thing she told me when I got to Japan was, 'I haven't had a date in almost two years.'"
Lynn was as surprised at that as I had been.
Elaine, to be sure, was as gorgeous in person as she in that photo. She was just absolutely stunning, tall and olive-skinned, with dark, beautiful eyes. She was also very vivacious and upbeat in a way that I'll never be. I didn't tell Lynn, but when I had first laid eyes on Elaine's picture on The Kaisha website, knowing that I had to go and replace her, my first thought was: I'm not going. I wasn't about to go and try to take the place of this absolutely stunningly beautiful woman.
Elaine's first conversation with me was about how it was so difficult for her to get dates, and though she had been there for nearly two years, the only person she had dated was a young man (about four years younger than her) from a school outside of Tokyo, out in the sticks. The relationship hadn’t lasted very long.
All that surprised me because I had my first date about a week after I arrived in Tokyo, and thereafter the offers kept coming. I dated two men relatively seriously, but there was never any extended shortage of men who were less serious, who just wanted to take me out for drinks or dinner. I felt inundated with offers and sometimes I felt uncomfortable by the persistence of some of the men. But Elaine? No. She was persona non grata in Tokyo.
I was confused by that so I asked my friend Yoko about it. When I asked, we were sitting in a Dotour coffee shop in Ginza and I swear I was the only foreign woman in Tokyo that day because earlier, while I sat outside waiting for Yoko to arrive, men had slowed down and turned completely around to stare at me. I am normally ignorant of this kind of attention, but that day I noticed and felt really self-conscious as a result.
Yoko’s response to my question (“Why can’t Elaine get dates?”) confused me. She said, "To us, Elaine looks Asian." Yoko meant, of course, "to us Japanese."
I remember looking around at the sea of Japanese men and women in the crowded coffee shop and thinking: How does looking Asian in an Asian country put Elaine at a disadvantage? But I said nothing and Yoko changed the subject.
The next time I talked to Elaine was weeks later. I had replaced her at The Yurakucho Kaisha and she had moved on to another school. One night she joined me and my coworkers for dinner in Ginza and she told us an awful story about some gaijin--an American or an Aussie--who had confronted her on the subway for playing her iPod so loud that the music could be heard from her headphones.. When he told her he could hear the music and she should turn it down, she got pissed off and asked him, “What the fuck is your problem?” And then he had started yelling at her on the subway that she was a bitch, that she was rude, and, as he got off the subway, had completed his rant with a few choice racial epithets, “You fucking Nip! You fucking Jap!” Elaine had been so shocked that, telling us the story, she began to cry.
Rinako, another coworker born and raised in Tokyo, asked her, “Did he think you were Japanese? I mean, you speak perfect English.”
“I don’t know! Why would he think I was Japanese?” Elaine wailed. (And honestly, to me, she didn’t look at all Asian. She looked like a stunningly beautiful American woman--an image reinforced by her laid-back Californian style of speaking.)
Later, when Elaine was a bit drunk, she leaned against one of my Japanese coworkers, a devastatingly handsome young man named Masashi. She threw her arms around him and said, “I can’t get a boyfriend in Japan. Will you be my boyfriend, Masashi?” Masashi laughed nervously and said, “Of course,” while he tried to shrug away from her. I goggled at that little tableau, never having seen a woman of Elaine’s caliber throw herself at a man and miss.
A few days later at lunch, I told Yoko (who wasn’t there that night) about it. “I still don’t understand why Elaine can’t get a date,” I said to Yoko. “She’s gorgeous.”
Yoko, perhaps a little wary of having to explain such obvious things to me, said, “You’re from America.” Yes, I said. “And Elaine’s from America,” Yoko said. Yes, I said, she’s from California. Yoko said slowly, “But Elaine’s parents are not from America.” No, I said, her mother is from the Philippines. “Right,” Yoko said, and she changed the subject.
I was still confused, but that night I went home and had a chat with Professor Google. I’ll save you the trouble of googling “Philippine women Japanese men” and just tell you that what you will find is that Filipinas who come to Japan mainly come to make their living on their backs. They come as “entertainers,” hostesses and prostitutes. They come on three-month visas that are rarely renewed.
In other words, Japanese men see a Filipina face--a face like Elaine’s--and they make some assumptions. Most of those men would gladly sleep with Elaine (and she always had a line up of guys who wanted to come over late at night) but they never wanted to be seen in public with her. (One guy who she tried to get to take her out, stood her up and then later claimed that he had fallen asleep on the train.)
That was Elaine’s story.
Lynn was shocked.
“I know,” I said, “Me, too. I mean, look at her.”
No comments:
Post a Comment