Formalisms and Formalities

[I'd like to use this post to introduce a new feature on this website: Apture.  You may notice that there are no links at all in this post.  That is because Apture allows easy lookup of words and phrases: simply highlight any word or phrase on this page and move the cursor over to "learn more".  A pop-up window from Wikipedia or Google or some other source should appear...]

The Japanese are often stereotyped as being excessively formal.  This stereotype I think is true for the Japanese (although necessarily oversimplified and commonly misused); but America is full of formalism too.  Our formalism is qualitatively different than that of the Japanese, but in my experience formalism has a quantitatively equal role in each country.  In Japan, formalism is often associated with the most mature expressions of traditional arts: kata in karate; shodo; even the infamous Japanese bureaucracy has its roots in the formal rigors codified in Confucianism.  Formalism lies at the received base of the culture (especially with Shinto), and this is difficult for the American in Japan to grasp.

American formalism on the other hand is a modern invention, unrefined, and even wild: Taylorism and scientific management; organizational theory and Edward Bernays; the elaborate dance sequences associated with modern finance and commercial banking security protocols; outsourcing and automated customer services; the grand and complex American healthcare system; and finally (corporate) job applications.  This kind of formalism is as American as apple pie.

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Housing Preferences in Japan and America

I have a student who is a professional landlord - not an absentee landlord, but a painting, renovating, cleaning, advertising, photographing, traveling, active landlord.  She explained to me that this month will be quite busy for her and her husband, since the Japanese school and fiscal years start in April, and both students and the vassals we call salarymen begin their annual migrations in March. 

She asked me about my experience living in and renting a variety of apartments - four to be exact.  The first was in New Zealand.  This was a white house on a hill that overlooked Otago Peninsula.  I got along famously with my flatmates, and the landlord company was content to stay away and collect checks; but I shivered myself to sleep every night.  My second experience renting was my senior year of college.  I shared a house with seven other bros, which straddled the university and surrounding gangland.  The floor was often covered with beer, and the walls were full of holes even before we moved in.  The rent was prohibitively expensive, and the landlord used every opportunity he had to try to extort our deposits from us.

The other two apartments I've rented were in Japan.  The first was a Nova apartment.  In typical Nova scum-bag fashion, the rent was seriously marked up, and mysterious "cleaning fees" were rumored (although I was never charged).  The company would call occasionally with inane complaints about trash, as anytime anyone in the building made a mistake sorting trash or failed to follow proper disposal procedure when moving out, all the other tenants assumed it was the stupid gaijin and called Nova to complain.  This apartment was tiny, and zombie cats ruled the night.  I moved out quickly and into a Japanese-style house with two friends.  It was here that I stayed until my first daughter was born, when I moved in with my wife's parents. 

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The Shamisen Redemption

One of my students is the curator of an art museum in my city.  We were talking the other day about the idea of Western art as subtraction stories as opposed to the idea of Japanese art as functional.  As Japanese society changed in response to contact with the West and people stopped using swords or wearing kimono (because it is so expensive), much of Japanese art also "died" - or was at least frozen in carbonite.  This works as a general overview to Japanese art history.  

Due to the nature of traditional Japanese arts as functional, there was never any concept of art as aesthetics until that idea was introduced by Westerners.  Japanese visual artists today have to walk a thin tightrope between the absurdity of producing traditionally Japanese, functional works of art for revisionist aesthetic reasons (since "art" has been de facto defined as aethetics) and appearing to do little more than copy Western modern artists.  Accordingly, creating good modern art is more difficult for Japan than it is for the West, since everything Japan's artists produce will ultimately be seen through a lens of Japaneseness.

What I mean by Western art as a subtraction story is that Western art has a history of the gradual removal of constraints - the opposite of Japanese art as necessarily bound to the constraints of function.  If we look at the history of Western poetry, for instance, we still see with Shakespeare and Marlowe a general reliance on the iambic pentameter and rhyming patterns of the ancients (even though those standard rhyme patterns and meters emerged from another language and culture entirely).

Fast forward to Walt Whitman and poetry becomes all about breaking "suffocating" rules of rhyme and meter whilst yawping barbarically.  This idea of directionless rule-breaking would find its most absurd expression in E.E. Cummings, who wrote about extremely conventional subjects in extremely unconventional ways.  

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An Hour in Japanese TV Land

The following account of my Saturday evening is completely true and totally uncensored.

The clock on the wall was ticking toward 10:30. I had just finished hanging the laundry in the living room. (Just go with it, this is Japan remember.) A familiar snoring reverberated from the bedroom, an unintentional but unmistakable message from the wife that I could go ahead and play Lone Ranger again tonight. Twenty-four hours ago I had sketchy plans to meet up with a buddy for that ever-elusive beer; unfortunately on this day, like most recent days, I had been deep into my work and the fascination of how slow my microchips can operate, and I forgot to get back to him. So there I stood, all alone, between two racks of wet clothes and my sleeping family. It was 10:25 on a Saturday night.

This, by the way, is not the bad part.

The bad part is, I decided to turn on the TV.

I stepped on train tracks and tripped over dinosaurs as I scrounged around for the remote. Then I fell onto the couch and clicked that baby, hoping for…well, anything. I'm still optimistic after nine and a half years. After a moment staring at a blank screen I got up and walked over to our TV with built-in VCR, which you have to turn on manually if that’s how your son turned it off. Then I plopped back down as the picture warmed up.

First thing I saw were three walking, singing pollen spores getting their lights punched out by a psychotic football player spray-painted the color of aluminum foil.

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The Way of the Gods - Part III

tsubaki flowersThis is part three of a three-part series.  Part one can be found here.  Part two can be found here.

A shrine official told us five friends of the bride that we had to wait in the chrysanthemum lobby again, as the shrine would be sponsoring family pictures.  My wife and I thought it was an appropriate time to put the required monetary gift in the pink, frilly envelope that I had bought at a twenty-four hour convenience store for 310 yen at 5:45 that morning after I had finished my hellish night-bus ride to Yokohama.  Before making the trip down to Kanto, we had scoured the Internet for guidelines on how much to give as this was the first time we had been to a wedding as a couple.  

Just as I was about to stick the correct amount of money in the envelope, the rest of the procession returned to the room with the pink carpet where we were waiting, which made us look like assholes; I panicked, and the envelope and cash fell to the floor and flew around comically in the wind created by the door opening.  I had to scramble around on all fours to grab all the cash and put it in the envelope - and I had to do this without creasing the bills (Money with wrinkles is considered in poor taste for a wedding gift, and appropriate for a funerary offering.) - before any more people came into the room.  

Maybe five or six relatives of the groom witnessed me rolling around on the floor grasping for loose cash before I managed to conceal my activity under one of the many brown, industrial folding tables and surreptitiously hand the envelope and cash to my wife so she could go to the bathroom and prepare everything in polite privacy.  

While she was in the bathroom, the shrine baba came and told everybody to head outside and start boarding the microbus.  I obviously couldn't go yet, since I was waiting for my wife.  There was an awkward moment where the shrine baba visibly wondered whether or not to approach me and ask why I wasn't boarding the microbus, but then she decided that the risk was too great for her - me being a foreigner and common knowledge being that Japanese is too difficult for foreigners to understand; she instead just pretended I didn't exist.  After about ten minutes, my wife came out of the bathroom and whispered, "you would not believe how small that envelope is!"  The shrine baba informed her - of course - about the microbus waiting for us outside.  We put on the airs of embarrassment that etiquette demands for taking so long, and pretended to kind-of-run all the way to the microbus parked twenty feet away.

The reception was at another facility, Meiji Kinenkan, which was where the Imperial Constitution of Japan had been hammered out some one hundred and forty years before in the presence of the Meiji Emperor himself.  After a ten-minute, meandering microbus ride through the crowded streets around Harajuku Station, we entered the drive of a very ostentatious building which managed to retain the general architectural theme of Meiji Jingu while simultaneously looking thoroughly Modernist.

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The Way of the Gods - Part II

This is part two of a three-part series.  Part one can be found here.

After fighting through crowds of tourists laughing childishly at the "Takeshita Street" sign, Nigerians hawking hip-hop wear and shouting "Yo! Genki!?" at passersby, and the strangely-coiffed, various in-groups of pre-teens clustered around Harajuku Station, my be-dressed wife and a be-suited I made our way past scattered, camera-wielding foreigners and Japanese alike down the long, wide paths beginning at the quiet and stately entrance to Meiji Jingu.  Fifteen minutes later we arrived at a boring administrative building near the honden (main hall) of Japan's largest shrine.  

We entered a lobby of sorts that would have been indistinguishable from a hotel reception area but for the giant chrysanthemum seals ostentatiously displayed everywhere.  After simmering for fifteen minutes or so, we were escorted by a high shrine baba to a modern-looking, pink-carpeted room with ordinary chairs placed flush against all four walls.  Shallow, white china teacups were arranged on brown industrial folding tables set in front of these chairs; a gold-leaf folded screen lay auspiciously at the far end of the room.  At a table in front of the gilded screen sat the couple to be married, with the groom's guests trailing off to the left and the bride's guests stretching to the right.  My wife and I sat at the terminus next to the door in the exact middle of the far wall directly facing the couple.

There were about forty people in the room altogether, almost all of whom were family members, including the younger sister of the bride, who was also our friend and had recently given birth to an apparently quiet, well-behaved baby.  Of the forty allowed to attend the ceremony, there were five non-Shinto priest non-family members: my wife, me, and three other friends of the bride.  The groom, who grew up at Yasukuni Shrine, had no friends who were not also Shinto priests. 

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The Way of the Gods - Part I

It's fortuitous that Kevin wrote about love rules in Japan vis-a-vis Valentine's Day, because I attended a wedding over the weekend that I have been meaning to write about all week.  This wedding was one of if not the most profound cultural experience I have had in Japan.  I will try in vain to convey some of this profundity in the words that follow.  This post is the first of a meandering and exhaustive three-part series on the event.

Kevin used the word "neo-tradition" at the beginning of his post.  Perhaps because I am familiar with the pejorative usage of the terms "neo-liberal" and "neo-conservative", I immediately perceive the destructive power of the term "neo-tradition".  In the metaphorical parlor rooms of the blogosphere that I haunt, the term "postmodern conservative" is used to denote the conscious choice to revive lost tradition - the rational judgment that blind adherence to tradition is essentially superior to the cerebral uncertainties of fractured modernity's all-consuming void of purposelessness.  

I for one see such a dichotomy as false; tradition is necessarily a yoke - whether benevolent or malevolent - and it is for this reason that neo-traditions will ultimately be nothing but baseless human attempts at coercion.  I wrote in the comments to Kevin's post:

..."neo-tradition" embodies all the scorn I think hiding behind the word "tradition" to force unfounded and absurd obligation on other people really, really deserves...I have no problem with "neo-traditions" that everyone agrees on observing; nor do I have much of a problem with restrictive "paleo-traditions". It's obligatory neo-traditions that must be destroyed. These are like nationwide hazing.

For all the goofy neo-tradition one encounters in Japan (Don't think the U.S. is exempt from widely-observed neo-tradition.), paleo-tradition still abounds.  It is trying to understand some of this paleo-tradition and to filter it from vulgar neo-tradition that gives purpose to the expatriate intellectual mission.  For me, the most interesting, most difficult to understand, darkest (in a good way), and most quintessentially Japanese tradition is Shinto.

Shinto torii at the summit of Mt. ZaōDepending on one's definition of the word "religion", Shinto may or may not qualify.  Shinto is best described as an aggregate of received practices; it is not necessarily a belief system.  Shinto is the indigenous cultural system of Japan, and was likely practiced in some form when Jomon peoples were first cultivating chestnuts.  In the Shinto cosmos, kami (essences) exist in all things, and humans and other animals become kami after they die.  Shrines, unusual natural elements, and other designated places are interfaces to the world of the kami; shrines, artifacts, and amulets act as conduits to the spirit realm.  Shinto has been described as an optimistic system: people are good, and evil is caused by only evil kami.  Protection from evil requires diligent adherence to correct ritual, the logistics of which have been handed down as cultural treasure through the generations.  These rituals connect modern Japan to its prehistoric past, to the vague darkness which pervaded all existence before the intellectual upheaval which accompanied the light of letters that came from the continent.

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The Legend of Mimitan

by Peter Blinman for The InductiveMy older daughter has light hair and eyes despite being half Japanese, and this makes strangers here really notice her.  It pisses me off, and it pisses my wife off too.  It's unfair to our daughter, who is treated as a foreigner in the only country she's ever known.    

We put up with this kind of discrimination for two reasons.  First, it is usually well-meaning and born of failure to empathize; second, we're planning on moving to America next summer.  Were we to stay in Japan, we would continue to have to deal with smart-ass teenagers greeting my daughter in English, strangers coming up to my wife out of the blue while I'm at work and she's shopping with my daughters to ask if she's married to an American or if my daughter can speak Japanese, a school system and culture that encourages the bullying of those with physical abnormalities such as light hair and eyes, and an effective glass ceiling for half Japanese children on all jobs outside of the tabloid entertainment industry. 

Dave Spector, a longtime American resident of Japan and talking head, puts the glass ceiling problem in a suitable light:

Making foreigners cuter takes away the threat of foreigners being more powerful, or having more know-how, or more sophistication. So definitely, they use that in a way to make themselves more comfortable. So I've done things on Japanese TV that are totally silly, or ridiculous. I mean like jumping rope with French poodles. Doing things like the lowest Bozo, circus kind of stuff. But it doesn't bother me at all. A lot of times the foreigners on TV, models and what-not, are compared to pandas. They use that term here - pandas - because they're cuddly, you can go and have fun with them, and throw a marshmallow and that's about it. And you don't get involved any more deeper than that. But...since I'm making half a million dollars a year, I'm very happy to be a panda. I'd be a much lower animal. I'd be like a sloth, or something, or a hedgehog, you know, for that money. So it doesn't bother me at all.

Many permanent Western residents of Japan consider Spector to be a sell-out, but I sympathize with his premise: I am a guest in Japan, Japan has been very kind to me, I have a home and culture I can go back toif I want, and Japan is not made and shouldn't be made solely for my complete satisfaction or the satisfaction of other Westerners living here.  The nation has absolutely no obligation to go out of its way to make me feel loved or included.  Despite this, I generally love living here, the people are kind and extremely hospitable.  They do go out of their way to make me happy, and I certainly don't mind being treated as an ignorant foreigner since I... like... am one.  I have no reason to be upset about extremely rare acute or common chronic discrimination directed against my person. 

But my lack of a right to fair and equal treatment does not extend to my daughters.  I don't want them growing up considered foreigners in their own land, trained as children to jump through hoops, socially isolated, spoiled in some regard, and forced to accept unsatisfying and shallow senses of self-worth.

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Four Cultural Gaffs in One Day (Maybe)

I may or may not have made four cultural gaffs yesterday.  The trouble with living in a foreign country is that you often never know whether you're in the wrong because of some cultural misunderstanding or whether you're just dealing with a bad individual (or whether you're a bad individual).  I've gotten better at realizing when I'm about to cross some cultural line, but I usually don't even get this right in my own country, so I try to err on the side of caution (or on the side of being taken advantage of - future post).  Here are three scenarios presented for your own consumption, my dear readers...  

...A student quit my lesson yesterday morning.  I was especially disappointed and confused because I always thought her lessons were great, and she was one of my favorite students.  At about one in the afternoon, my student walked into a classroom that I rent out with two other freelance teachers and announced that she wanted to have class outside.  I thought this was a bit strange considering it was December and it was actually snowing.  I had tea and a heater ready inside the classroom, but, the customer is always right.  

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On TOEIC and Embracing the Void

This passage comes from a TOEIC prep book I used in a lesson yesterday.  I found myself fighting back vomit as I maintained a requisite, grinning, foreign visage of utter seriousness:

A really good city must have all of the necessary facilities for its citizens.  There must be government offices, which people use to register automobiles, pay taxes, and so on.  There must also be plenty of financial institutions like banks, loan offices, and insurance companies.  Shopping is vital to peoples's lifestyles, so there must be lots of places like shopping malls, clothing shops, and grocery stores where people can buy things.  Citizens also need to enjoy their lives by, for example, seeing a game at a sports stadium, watching a performance at a theater, seeing a movie with friends, or dining at a nice restaurant.

After teaching that class, I blasted Marilyn Manson on my iPod on the way home.

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Reflections on Spending Thanksgiving in Japan

I have spent Thanksgiving in Japan for the last four years, and I have slowly begun to forget about this great American holiday.  Yesterday for me was a regular work day.  I woke up early in the morning, played with my older daughter, made breakfast for everyone, played some more on the grassy expanse in front of the art museum, went to teach four classes in the afternoon, was home by eight, enjoyed my younger daughter's newly developed capacity for belly laughter, ate pasta for dinner, and fell asleep at ten.  

The fourth Thursday in November is a regular workday in Japan, as is December 25th.  In the past -before I worked for myself - I was made to feel guilty for wanting to celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter.  At Nova, my Australian boss explained to me that Christmas was not a special day for the Japanese.  The students would have no sympathy if I wanted to take the day off.  They might even quit the company or start hating America!  My first Christmas Eve here, a different Chris went out until 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning with some other wild foreigners and slept through his Christmas Day shift.  After that, I decided never again to spend Christmas in Japan.

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Conspiring With Him How to Load and Bless

November in Japan is a lonely, depressing month.  The bright colors of fall have peaked and gradually turn to brown.  It is still too early to ski, and Christmas vacation remains over a month away.  The weather is too cold to play outside, but not cold enough to play outside in the snow.  Days end at 4:30.  And there is no football.  Or Thanksgiving.   

To alleviate periodic episodes of anomie, I turn to the rustic luxuries of onsening and the harvest.  

An onsen is a Japanese hot spring resort.  Unlike western hot springs, onsens are not simply muddy holes in the ground, but carefully decorated and managed pools of varying size, shape, and material.  They are often deep in the mountains, or at least on the outskirts of civilization.  Fukushima being a rural urban center, I live at the confluence of several onsen resorts and often visit one if I have a free half-day.

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to a modern hotel which sported a swimming pool, a jacuzzi, a traditional indoor bath, an outdoor bath called a rotenburo, and a sauna.  No one else was swimming in the pool, and the afternoon sun reflecting off the peak fall foliage on the other side of the river behind the resort shone through floor-to-ceiling windows and turned the slightly broken surface of the water a flickering golden, orange, and red hue.  Freshly fallen fall leaves floated on the surface of the rotenburo.  The dry heat of the sauna provided a comforting respite from the crisp fall air and the pervasive water vapor of the indoor bath.  After soaking in a welcome and rare aether free of infants screaming, I bought a glass bottle of 5% milk from the vending machine and floated aimlessly back to my home with my family in our four-door Nissan

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On Cultures And Values

Jason Kuznicki and E.D. Kain are discussing Bill Maher's latest comments on Islam over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, and I posted the following comment:

Isn't that essentially the same criticism leveled against Rawls's veil of ignorance; that forcing us to choose would require depriving us of so much information about ourselves that we cease to be capable of rationality?

As an American living in and writing about Japan, speaking Japanese in my daily life (outside of comments at the League and posts on my own site basically) with a Japanese wife and stepson and two young daughters of mixed ethnicity, this question is near and dear to my heart.

For practical reasons, my wife and I have decided to continue our lives in America and not in Japan: as parents, we’re not really making this choice for ourselves so much as we’re making it for our children.  I can earn more money in America, and, frankly the Japanese school system is a nightmare.  I would probably allow my children to enlist in the military before sending them to public schools in Japan.  The third principle reason why we've chosen America over Japan is because children of mixed ethnicity are seen as "foreigners" in Japan, whereas children of mixed ethnicity in America are, well, every American.

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Fukushima, "Floral Paradise"

the top of Mt. AzumaI came across this tourist video on YouTube for my Japanese prefecture of residence, Fukushima, while searching for video of a crazy moth/ant attack from ten or twenty years ago near one of the schools at which I work.  I couldn't find what I was looking for, but the tourist video, discovered accidentally, is sufficiently corny, campy, trite, whathaveyou, and with kool muzak, so please enjoy.  

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Cultural Attitudes towards Public Smoking

In Japan, a typical pack of cigarettes can be purchased on nearly every street corner from a vending machine for 300 yen or so (about $3.30), and this includes brands imported from the United States.  Here is an advertisement for Winston which I saw today on my way to work:

 

Some things about this advertisement: could you imagine it in the U.S.?  As I mentioned in my last post, I consider advertisement to be the ultimate window into a culture.  And the content of this ad especially speaks volumes of Japan, but not in the way you might think.

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