Trembling Into a Brave New World, Again

I’ve been thinking a lot about my goals lately, which is never a bad idea. I left Prague to expand my horizons, but not only in a physical and abstract sense (since in the case of some travel these two can go hand-in-hand), but in a tangible comprehension of the most intangible of questions: “What is man?” “How does the world work” “What does it all mean?” I’d watched myself often slide into comfortable armchair explanations of the Problem of Pain, the Meaning of Life, and the Insanity of Humanity, but I knew I had no grounds to speak for and of people on whose ground I had never stood. The only solution (discounting the option of not talking about things I knew nothing about), was to go and see and find out.
The “going and seeing” part is no great burden in this day and age. While every new place seems to be teetering on the distant edge of the world in the eyes of those who have never been there, once you arrive the welcome party consists of a thousand people who have made the same journey, done the same things, and are already setting out for another not-quite-distant edge of the map.
The “finding out” is the true rub. The mantra of the foreign community in Japan says that after a week in Japan, you’re prepared to write a book on the subject, after a month you can get through a few paragraphs of hard facts, and after a year you find that there aren’t two words you can say that hold together. It’s that kind of place.
All in all, in setting out in a grand pursuit to understand the depth and breadth and true power of culture in the world today, I’ve landed in the Goliath of cultural understanding. Every world traveler I’ve spoken to or read in recent months has unhesitatingly named Japan as the most alien, most other-worldly place one can find. Every new experience and piece of information neatly punctures the ballooning theory thus far inflated, and no sooner is the new element incorporated and the theory puffed up again then the next missile-like encounter appears. The Japanese are very private. The Japanese are very friendly. The Japanese are very tolerant. The Japanese are very nationalistic. The country is very advanced. The country is very backwards. They want to be like America. They don’t want to be like anyone but themselves. They are very cultured. They are completely out of touch with their culture. They are extremely homogenous, but then how to explain such a diversity of contradictions? They are completely different from westerners. In what way? In no way. After 6 months here the only hard, undeniable foundation of fact I’ve been able to lay down is that the Japanese like rice, and they follow the rules. Anything else feels like nailing jell-o to a tree.
And so I put aside my goals of brotherly, multicultural, interracial, bridge-building, human-to-human understanding for a few months and focused on keeping my head above the rising sea of my own assumptions. Now, being half way through my time in Japan, I’ve started to realize the urgency of my situation. In no ways do I want to drift through, check off another country, snap some pictures, add some stories to my repertoire and move on. I want answers. I want to know the distance between “everywhere you go, people are people” and “I felt like I was on a different planet!” What does make us all one species? What makes us stare at each other in shock? On a planet of 6 billion separate worlds that are all shifting, mixing, absorbing, and clashing at a rate never seen in all history, how then ought we to live?
Some thoughts are beginning to surface, less absolutes than a categorization of what is not absolute, but perhaps those are the lines that must be drawn in before the painting can begin. Meanwhile, I’m finally trying to map out the big picture again. After July I hope to spend two months going through Vietnam and Cambodia, possibly Thailand, Malaysia and Burma, on the way to India. I still want to spend six months in India, though the details are still elusive.
Just before I came to Japan I chose a phrase to guide my search for answers, that being: “How do we live, how do we want to live, and how ought we to live?” Getting at the answers has been touch-and-go, but at least it grants some sensitivity to my internal “significant statement” alarm. My new brainchild, as yet uninitiated, is to ask two questions of everyone possible, especially as I travel through some of the most affluent and deprived countries in the world: “What one thing would you most like changed in your life?” and “What do you think could make that happen?” I hope to record these answers and start piecing together some understanding of humanity’s values, hopes, dreams, and perceptions of the world.
To backtrack for one final point; as headache-inducing as Japan has been philosophically, I expect India to be the fuse in this two-year attempt to make my head explode. From the very beginning, India frightened me, and the more I learn, the more I adjust to Japan, the more I learn about my own flaws and sensitivities, the more I wish I could find an excuse to avoid India altogether. But I know that my growing trepidation is the very proof that India is exactly where I have to go. Still, it is never easy to face something that you know, with absolute certainty, will change you forever in a completely unpredictable way. I learned long ago that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is completely ridiculous. There are so many other results of not dying.
The greatest instigator in my increasing concern is an increasing understanding of the difference between Japan and India. One thing is certain, while a year ago I might have been even more wet behind the ears than I am now, I sure knew how to pick countries! If the goal is to dive into the great worlds of culture, each as different from each other as they are from the west, I don’t know how I could have done it better. The shock, the pure, invasive, staggering shock, is going to be phenomenal. I can only hope that a few months in neighboring countries might dampen the blow, but I still fully expect to be crushed. But then that, after all, is the point. It’s a broken world, how can I touch it without being broken by it?
I’ve recently become enamored with a new author, Pico Iyer, a travel writer of great perception, energy, and an unmatched way of capturing the spirit of a place with words. To understand what I have ahead of me, I’m going to let Pico paint a picture of the two places he knows well. The first passage might be difficult to really grasp for anyone not familiar with Japan, but in all its mysterious references, quiet strength, and longing for something just beyond the shadows, this passage IS Japan for me:

The people all around me on this shiny autumn morning, refulgent and cloudless – though the trees are beginning to turn, and today, for the very first time, we put on thicker sweaters – are the very old, the very young; the others are off tending the fires of official Japan. I walk across the path in midmorning, and see old ladies walking with canes, out to get exercise as the leaves come down, or, as often, with tiny creatures by their sides, pointing out to them the cosmos flowers, that dog in winter coat. The very old and the very young live on the edge of things – though they’re central in Japan – and are closer to the woods; they don’t have to go and check in on the daylight world. They can talk, or make up stories, about creatures still known as kamisama here, or nature’s gods.
The grandparents weren’t such good parents themselves, perhaps, when they were young; but nature is affording them a second chance. They have time now – in the short term – and freedom, while it lasts, to pass on whatever their grandparents passed on to them. To tell the toddlers at their side that the fox who waits at the edge of the trees isn’t really a fox at all; to say that that stranger who sits in the frame on the shrine isn’t a stranger at all, but their grandmother’s grandmother. The children, lost in their own games, don’t bother to say that there isn’t a picture of any old woman on the shrine at home, and they know the foxes they see on TV aren’t real. That’s what makes them special.
They listen, because that’s what they’re supposed to do; perhaps they nod. And, being natural lawbreakers, they tell their grandparents a thing or two, about what that animal is saying to its owner, and what the secret name of that tree is. Their fathers are seldom visible, and their mothers are chafing against the uncertainties of a world of 7-Elevens and feudal rites; but the deer, the badgers stay the same.
(Sun After Dark, Vintage Departures, New York, 2004, pg 146-7).

That, at least in essence and atmosphere, is the world I’ve inhabited for the last half year, and will become more comfortable in the next half year. Now, compare that to the spirit of my next destination, the next place I will try to get my head around and somehow understand how it inhabits the same world as Japan, as California, as Prague, to somehow capture the “human element” in it all that can make strangers friends and foreigners brothers.

Movies were everywhere in India. But then everything was superabundant in India: signs, shrines, spices, smells, men, gods, beggars, cows, sobs, titters, marvels, horrors and more marvels. India itself seemed all perpetual motion and emotion, an overfull, overbright, overdone triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. Here was life, not on the grand, but on the epic scale, the Human Comedy, the Human Tragedy, played out on streets filled with too many people, too many feelings, too many schemes. India itself was simply too much.
The country’s recent history alone was something of a tumultuous spectacle, piled higher with incident and thicker with Tragedy, Comedy, Melodrama – proliferate plotting and non-stop action – than any movie on earth. In the few months before I arrived in India, its longtime, risen-and-fallen-and-rerisen Prime Minister had sent her army to storm a sacred golden shrine, and then had been killed by her own bodyguards. Her son, who had never before held office, became Prime Minister. Riots swept through the capital; men were burned alive, whole settlements were put to the torch, trains rolled through the countryside piled high with bloody bodies. Five weeks later, a cloud of poison gas had escaped from a chemical plant, killing thousands as they slept, in the worst industrial accident in history. Three weeks after that, the world’s largest democracy had held a national election. A typhoon in neighboring Bangladesh had killed as many as 20,000 people and swept whole islands into the sea. An Air-India plane had suddenly, inexplicably, fallen from the heavens, and 329 people had been killed, in one of the worst airline disasters ever recorded. A peace agreement between the Hindus and Sikhs had been reached at last, following which the moderate leader of the Sikhs was promptly assassinated by his followers. Meanwhile, civil war continued in Sri Lanka, there was more unrest in Assam and each day brought news of another politician gunned down by turban terrorists.
Yet this constant explosion of eventfulness was, if anything, even more unrelenting on the small scale. For the sights of India are, to a large extent, the streets themselves, and the streets are chaotic open-air stages presenting life in the raw and humanity in the round. Through the avenues of Bombay stream sadhus and shamans, bullocks carts and cows, rickshaws, rusty Ambassadors, turbaned men and veiled women, three-legged dogs, two-toed beggars, buses and bicycles and rites and sights and more people, more soldiers, more cows. Bleeding into this pandemonium is the confusion of the temples – not, as a rule, havens of meditation and quiet, but the Indian compendium all over again, a bombardment of sights and sounds and smells, monkeys, flames, chants, offerings, holy men, pilgrims, wonder-workers, musicians, more rites, more sights, more people. The streets of India are swollen with an embarrassment of riches, a richness of embarrassments. And it is on the streets that millions live, make love, defecate, and die.
(Video Night in Kathmandu, Vintage Departures, New York, 1988, pg 258-9)

As someone who has said, with full acknowledgement of all its implications, that “to ignore the ugly truths of reality is a slippery slope to perpetuating them”, how can I slip by a place such as this, crossing over to the other side of the street and tip-toeing by? At the whiff of real challenge and real failure, how can my chest not swell and my back tingle? How can I not be terrified? And while the world is certainly not getting any easier, or friendlier, or more loving, neither, it seems, am I. Though my mission to change the world has somehow morphed into a desperation to change myself, the two might not be so very different after all.
Another well worn phrase comes to mind: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

We Are The Zulu Warriors of Japan

I don’t think we were actually lost. We knew more or less where we were, it just wasn’t clear where we would be next. Our walk from rural Japan to even more rural Japan had taken longer than we expected, and now the approaching evening brought autumn’s first nip to the air. All we wanted was to find the quickest way home.
However, according to the half hour consultation with the inevitably overly-helpful lady at the village office, my fellow JET Keith (who fortunately CAN speak Japanese, unlike his hiking partner) gleaned that our only option was the long process of taking a bus to the nearest city, walking across town to the train station, and from there catching the train home.
When the bus arrived it was completely empty of passengers, which was a blessing for me since this was my first time on a Japanese bus and I made at least three protocol mistakes before even getting into a seat. We sat immediately opposite the doors, and basked in the countryside that rolled by outside, keeping our eyes peeled for sudden flashes of “the Real Japan”; a hidden shrine here, an old woman in a colorful kimono there, and everywhere covert double-takes from people who noticed the two pale faces peering into their world from behind the bus window.
After a few stops without any addition to the short passenger list, we came to a stop that, from our perspective, appeared to be empty as well. But when the double doors to our left slammed open, we were instantly caught in the beam of 20 saucer-sized eyes gaping up at us. Ten knee-high, uniformed, speechless elementary school students stood outside, frozen in... in what? Not exactly terror, or interest, or confusion. Maybe it was a combination of all these, or simply a shock strong enough to shut down their brains for a second, like the deer in the headlights that pauses for a moment to contemplate whether it’s about to be raptured into deer heaven, be abducted by aliens, or hit by a truck. It’s a look that every foreign resident of Japan must learn to accept, and ideal even enjoy.
After a long moment the children managed to push one of their number up onto the bus stairs to test the waters, like penguins testing for seals. Keith and I had no intention of passing up this chance to fulfill our duty to “nurture grassroots internationalization,” and as each pair of saucer-eyes scurried by we let out a cheery chorus of “Hello!”, which caused each saucer-sized pair of eyes to upgrade to frying-pan-sized and sent them all diving for the very back of the bus.
As the bus moved on our attention was entirely shifted to the inside of the bus. And no wonder; we could practically feel the undivided attention focused on the backs of our necks. Keith and I started a conversation about the reaction we so effortlessly elicited, and tried to put ourselves in the tiny shoes behind us.
“Wow, they were really shocked! It’s just so easy!”
“Yeah, I wonder what’s really going through their heads....What do you think would cause us to have the same reaction to something?”
“Well, it’d have to be on our own turf, so say you’re nonchalantly getting on a bus back in America, and on the bus is sitting... what?”
“An alien?”
“Not really, it should be something that you knew existed, but you never expected to see, at least not there.”
“Someone from some very obscure part of the world, who looks very strange...”
“Like a Zulu warrior or something! Yeah, imagine you’re getting on the same bus you’ve taken every day for years, only this time the doors open and there’s a Zulu warrior in full regalia sitting there looking at you! That’d give me a few seconds pause!”
As we contemplated our presence in rural Japan as comparable to a Zulu warrior walking around New York city, the thought became both more humorous and more depressing. To a certain extent I think all of us enjoy the attention we get here, the celebrity of standing out in (and above) any crowd, feeling just a little bit famous. Last week I was swarmed by a group of my elementary school students who wanted my autograph, and one little boy who couldn’t find a piece of paper tore off his shoe and held it up to me with a pen. “Sign, please!” I’ve never felt closer to being a rock star in my life.
At the same time, the image of the lonely warrior wandering around New York underlines the fact that we are indeed far from home. We will never blend in, never be Japanese, and never stop getting pointed at and watched. There will never come a day when we are no long treated a little like aliens, for “alien” (at least in terms of nationality) is what we are, and Keith and I had the undivided attention of 10 huddled children to prove it.
Several stops down the road, we heard the children gathering their things and preparing to leave. Screwing their courage to the sticking post, one by one they marched by us. And low and behold, as easy student passed by, an exuberant “good-bye!” was bestowed upon us. When we responded in kind they laughed, and dashed happily off the bus, waving to us from the sidewalk.
There is certainly a lot to be said about the closed communities of Japanese society, the often dire lack of English ability, and the absence of awareness or sensitivity regarding anyone from “the outside,” and we who are from “the outside” often get fed up with it. After all, we are trying to be multi-cultural and multi-lingual, we are giving years of our lives to open up communication with these people who point and stare at us. And of course America especially is much more a melting-pot than Japan will ever be, full of multi-ethnic people who don’t consider it impossible for outsiders to become one of them. Try asking a Japanese person about how to understand Japan, and you’re likely to hear some variation of “impossible.”
Say what you want about this island nation, still one fact remains. Of course New York is a more comfortable and open-minded environment for a foreigner than rural Japan, but these elementary school students made me realize something about my own subtle feelings of superior multiculturalism. If I were to step onto my bus in New York and found a Zulu warrior staring at me, I’m sure I would exhibit the same bewilderment, staring, and rushing to the back of the bus as those 10 year olds. But when the time came to disembark, I really doubt that I’d have the courage to engage him with a wave and a friendly “good-bye!” For one thing, I certainly wouldn’t be able to say it in nearly perfect Zulu.