5.26.08
Luckily, the countryside is right next door.
I’m beginning to think that smaller, more frequent updates are the way to go, instead of being long-winded and occasional… I hadn’t realized it had been so long since my last update.
One of the more amusing (and frustrating) things about Japan this time back revolves around the Japanese reaction to strangeness. I’m not talking about myself… I stick out like a sore thumb, and am quite used to the stares and questions and odd combination of surprise, admiration and fear I inspire. Instead, the reaction I refer to is how the locals are treating Masako.
Masako was born and raised in Japan, a full-blooded native who left the country for the first time in her early twenties and has spent a total of about nine of her thirty-something years abroad. So what’s been the local reaction to a girl speaking her native language to native speakers?
Everyone thinks she’s a foreigner.
We really couldn’t figure it out, at first, but we had several theories.
One of mine was the “difference effect”, the assumption (often correct, but sometimes not) that in a group of mixed strangers, those who look the most alike will be partnered with each other in the most common possible configuration. For example, if you encounter a Caucasian man, a Caucasian woman, and an African-American man standing together at a party, and all three are wearing wedding rings, the natural assumption is that the two white folks are a couple, though of course it’s perfectly possible that the woman is actually married to the African-American man, or that the two men are from an enlightened state that allows same-sex marriages, etc. This happened to us once; Masako and I were helping a client (a Japanese man recently moved to Michigan) to buy a car. The salesman and I were alone and he made a couple of lascivious comments about Masako, thinking she and the client were a couple… I corrected his assumption, and he was a bit red for the rest of the visit.
In Japan, though, the effect runs through me, because I am so obviously different than the natives. They see me, know I am a foreigner, and see through body language, etc. that Masako and I are married (because we are definitely not keeping a businesslike distance or formality with each other). I figured that they thus assume that Masako must be a foreigner, too. However, she reports that even when she is alone, people still assume her to be a foreigner.
One of Masako’s theories was the observation that she dressed more casually than most Japanese, and usually wears very little or no makeup, a condition that 99% of most Japanese women wouldn’t be caught dead in public in; she figured that they were assuming she was from elsewhere in Asia. However, on the rare occasions she does wear makeup and dresses more formally, people still assume she is a foreigner.
So what is it?
Masako had spent just about five unbroken years in the States before we returned to Japan in March of this year. Not nearly long enough for a native speaker to forget her first language, of course… but long enough for her to have to occasionally pause for the correct word, to mess up slightly on the correct degree of politeness for a given situation, to fumble for a second before remembering how to write a kanji character or two.
This very slight hesitation, this very slight “off”-ness to her words and actions is what is doing it.
This says a lot for how dialed in most Japanese are to subtleties like this. It also says a lot for how much Japanese assume that other Japanese are going to look, speak, and behave just like them.
More on this as it develops…
Other news in brief: I’ve managed to lose about fifteen pounds in two months without even really trying. Part of it is the fact that I’m walking a lot more, both for pleasure and out of necessity (pacing back and forth in classrooms four to five periods a day is a good light workout). Part of it is the fact that I no longer work from home and therefore can’t eat whenever I feel like it… I’m at school ten hours a day with one meal, and that is nutritionally balanced and usually around 800 calories… which means that even with a big dinner I rarely eat more than 2000 calories in a day, and I’m burning a lot more than that with all of the physical activity. It’s nice, except for the fact that I’ll need to punch some new holes in my belts soon, and most of my pants now fall straight off without one.
The Playboy Bunny Head logo, now almost disappeared in the States as an icon, is alive and well in Japan. It seems that the Playboy Empire has licensed this logo to various Japanese companies, and you can see it pretty much everywhere, on many everyday items. Including items used by my students.
Granted, in Japan the logo isn’t closely connected with the magazine, and nudity of the mild sort featured in Playboy isn’t a big deal over here… but it’s still more than a little disconcerting to see a seventh grade girl wearing socks that sport an embroidered pink Playboy Bunny, or retrieving a pen from her Playboy pencil case…
And now, some photos:
First off, I can’t decide if the photo captions should be at the top or the bottom of the pictures… I’ve been going with bottom so far, and will continue to do so unless I get a lot of complaints. Thoughts, anyone?
As I’ve mentioned before, 74% of Japan is forested, and looks absolutely nothing like what most people think of when they hear “Japan”. The city of Toyota is no exception. Here’s the city limits, along one of the highways (yes, that’s a highway) leading in from the southeastern border. Real bustle, huh?
Geez, you just can’t get awy from all of the oppressive urbaniza… uh, never mind. Nice cedar forest here.
FABULOUS DOWNTOWN HUSTLE… oh, you get the point.
Terraced rice fields, southeastern Toyota. The two in the FG are flooded and awaiting planting, the others look like they’re ready to be tilled. As of this writing, all are no doubt filled with young rice plants that should mature and ripen in another couple of months.
A cormorant, fishing in a river next to the previously pictured highway.
An old-school Japanese house, sadly abandoned and neglected for about twenty-five years, north-east Toyota. The roof is thatch, tightly-woven, nearly fireproof, and will last for seventy-five to eighty years if well-made, which is a lot longer than the rest of the house will stand.
And, to wrap up this time, an artsy-fartsy shot of a bamboo thicket by the side of the road.
More to come, stay tuned…
