You wake up half-naked in an unfamiliar room. Your pockets are full of leaves and your hair is a fucking mess. There are some cats in the corner. They look at you with a mixture of pity and distrust. “How did I get here?” you ask yourself. You could lay there pondering this question for a long time, but I think you should find a shirt, try to do something with your hair, apologize to those cats, and get the hell out of there. Get on with your life.
That’s how I feel these days when asked “How did you come to live in Japan?”
Nine years have passed. My life here is now larger and more important than the impulses and events that brought me here. I want to pull on my bra and shirt, pull my hair back in a ponytail, and get on with my day.
But, that’s me being defensive…and more than a little unfair. I do not live an unexamined life. Daily, I sit and type. Weekly, I offer myself up as a specimen. This is me. This is my life. Look …if you’d like. Maybe this will resonate with you. Perhaps you will feel less alone. Perhaps this explains something you’ve wondered about. Perhaps you are a dirty voyeur: I don’t ask that you keep both hands on the keyboard, just that you don’t assume I want to know what you do with all of this. Perhaps it is all irrelevant.
So, when people ask how I got here, I know it is a slap for me, someone who has put so much out there, to tell you “Oh… that doesn’t matter now.” It’s not that I am not allowed to shield parts of my life from view. I am allowed and I do…this is my examined but filtered life…but that question is one that most everyone has about me. I can’t make it off-limits, it creates too large a disconnect. Ignore the woman behind the curtain! You can’t push such basics to one side, surround them by traffic cones, and ask everyone to think of them as “off limits.”
I get defensive because I feel like I don’t have a good answer. It is a question that I used to have many answers for….but… as time flows it erodes the relevancy of the answers I once wrote. I once stood, with my friends, on the shore in Chicago. We wrote in the sand the things we wished to be free of and let the waves pull them away from us.
I fell in love with ukiyo-e prints…you can barely see the outlines.
I grew up in a time in America when we were constantly aware of Japan…they were going to buy us….bye.
The heft of history…crumbles.
I worked for a crazy man and I needed to know Japan isn’t all bad…the wave rolls away, taking him with them.
My path was clear before I started. I had to write my reasons. I had to build them. I had to present my case to the jury to get here…and it took me two years to get here. Wait. I have to start before applying to come here. Many of you don’t know the back story.
Cliffnotes, as presented by the unsure….to be read with a rising inflection.
Uuuuuuhhh.
I was in Japanese classes eight hours a week. It was after I graduated from art school…although I had tried to fit Japanese into art school but that didn’t work. It was after the Japanese smut comics job for the man with one ear and the breakdown when I shaved my head except that little curl right in the middle of my forehead…and cons. I ended up back in Madison, confused and wounded. I thought I was going to diversify my undergraduate class experiences and get a masters in social work and take a few more steps and become a sex therapist but…on a flight back from New York I looked at the classes at the UWMadison…and suddenly I was in a Japanese history class and eight hours of Japanese a week…blame Michelle, blame the con kids, blame the man with one ear who I no longer hunt. Thank my father’s love of history. Thank art. Thank my own curiosity.
End notes.
In my first year of Japanese classes I applied for the JET program to come to Japan. I wrote about how my interest in Japan had been awakened at a young age, either due to the news articles about how they would buy us all or Ukyou-e prints of women or Starblazers. I typed on, no doubt borrowing strongly from Fred Schott’s book America and the Four Japans: Mirror, Model, Friend and Foe. Atomic world! Animation cross-pollination! Design! Cultures entwined! Woodblocks as packing and how this helped flatten impressionistic paintings. Zolalalalalalalal! I wrote about how I have always been involved with teaching in one way or another and this would be an extension of that path.
Oh, yeah, and in the questions I also went above and beyond the duty in explaining my issues with depression. Not my brightest moment but darkest days were a large part of why I was back in Madison in those days, all sore and confused. I couldn’t escape the shadows just then…and I offered them up too easily. Perhaps if I had started blogging then I would have had a better place to put those petri dishes of self…but I was wary of blogging. The boy who put me on a plane back to Madison had a blog… and on it I was “The Girl”…and when I read of myself I cried. Ironic, ne?
Well, I thought I was a sure thing for Japan. I’m good with words! I can sell myself….JET didn’t even grant me an interview.
Collapse crying on the stairs. Bring me to the bar. Hug me. Hold me. Cue winter.
Another year of Japanese classes: 127 students had been violently weeded down to 30. We were the smart, the stubborn, and the too stupid to know when to stop or what else to do with ourselves. Don’t think I was the former. I struggle with second languages. My high school Spanish teacher once threatened to defenestrate me, so frustrating the gap between my communication skills and the language aspects we were tested on was. I did a summer program to pull up my glaring, 3rd year, D. Japanese didn’t come any easier to me…I worked my ass off for my low B.
My worst boyfriend ever called me at 3AM before one of my 2-hour finals…and told me he had cancer. This was a lie. I pushed on, stubborn.
I took classes, worked in a video store and a frame store, I broke up with that boy (to the cheers of his friends) and stubbornly pushed forward. I am not good with no. I’m not used to it. I was going to GET there. Mt. Fuji could have erupted…half the islands could have fallen into the oceans…. the Golden Land could have been crawling with mother-fucking zombies and I would have still fought to get there.
And don’t think I wanted to go to Japan because I thought of it as a Golden Land. Every time I use that tem for Japan, lace it with sarcasm, ok? Japan is flawed. I knew that. I know that. I read about the maggot underbelly. I wanted that conflict and contrast. I don’t love it here but I am not the sort of ex-pat who loves to hate it here. Here is just where I am, warts and all.
I’m an American: I’d feel out of place without extreme contradictions. And, man, when I left? I had no clue how extremely conflicted America was about to get.
I’ve got a history: I love the imperfect. Who else could someone like me love? Birds and feathers, like attracts like, freaks are never lonely in sideshow dressing rooms.
My second year of applications: I tore apart my words, discarding the weak ones, the doubts, the shadows. I flooded it all with lights until the wrinkles points were blown out. I made myself unrealistically irresistible and acted like Japan was similarly turned out.
I didn’t mention the darkness. I never whispered, “I need to take a vacation from my social life, these friends, these boys, my confusion, my flaws, my mistakes and regrets, those bodies, my high profile in any of circles I travel in…let me start over for a few years…give me quiet.” I didn’t shrug and say, “What else will I do with my fine arts degree?”
I applied to JET and to the Chiba-Wisconsin SisterCity Program. They both offered the same contracts, but the sister city program was smaller, three people or so a year instead of in the, then, thousands of JETs…and you knew which prefecture you’d end up in.
I made it to the interview stage. I presented myself in Chicago (with a fever and bronchial issues) and nailed it, even when they asked about depression issues. They had my application from the year before…I walked from class to a building in Madison and nailed it again. Both programs… what can I say? They wanted me. That was what I was used to.
I went with Chiba-Wisconsin…three of us would fly out on August 7th, 2001. Bring on the mother-fucking zombies!
Much happened between the acceptance and the airport but that is another story and I’ve told it before.
When I landed, “Why did you come to Japan?” was still with me. It was the interview question asked of every new face. From the Japanese, my new co-workers, it was the first test. What sort of gaijin are you? What are you intentions with our country? What issues will we face with you? Do you know what you’ve gotten into? Do you respect? Do you see this Wa? You’re not thinking about upsetting this Wa, are you?
I got your Wa right here, I’d parry…shall we discuss some Yasujiro Ozu over sake and treats? Nu-uh…you didn’t just comment on my chopstick skills. You do that again and I’ll cut you or bring up the burakumin…your choice.
What sort of gajin was I? My friends had opinions on that before I landed. Marg had hated it here, hated the attention, but had told me that I’d be fine…because she had watched me walk the attention gauntlet daily in America and figured, paradoxically, Japan couldn’t possibly bring me the level of daily scrutiny America had. Everyone else took glee in teaching me that proverb of the up-sticking nail getting hammered down.
My first year I sunk myself into the wood of the land. I got lost. I avoided eyes and hammers.
Now, I’m a mighty tall nail who fits in well enough. Japan, my contradiction and my life.
The other people who asked why Japan were the other foreigners. We all shuffled the ranking dance of questions. I find it unbecoming for other ex-pats to act like we don’t have our own culture of Confusian rank and file because we ALL did this dance:
Why did you come here? Who do you work for? What do you do? How’s your Japanese? Oh, really…are we going to have to pull our experiences out, right here and right now, and measure?
After nine years, what I can flash if things get to that point? It takes more than two hands. It makes whales blush….and it’s deep too! (wink)
And I think the ranking dance is behind me. It bores me. That is another reason the question shuts me down. It’s either shut up or risk the contempt resonating in my answer.
Japanese people still ask me why…and I usually need to redirect them. If they are my co-workers and bosses, I want them focused on my life in Japan and why the experiences within it qualify me for what it is we are doing together and the situations that might arise. That girl, before Japan, she also qualifies me for this…but that is going back to far. The reasons I came are not as important as why I am here, at this desk or classroom, with you, doing this. Anime did not make me a pedagogy wonk. Ukyo-e might have helped lead me to the art school that sharpened my ability to communicate in many media, and that knowledge is something I apply in the classroom daily, but you don’t have time for that story. My study of Japanese history is nothing in comparison to what four years in one school taught me. I have been in your classrooms, not just the English ones, I have been forged in them…and I know that is what I have to prove to you before we can get into niceties and chitchat…and in comparison to those things, what brought me to Japan is small talk.
The dancers? The friends? The boyfriends? They ask…but it isn’t an urgent question nowadays, just an idle one. They care more about the fact that I am here. They want to know who I am. How I got here is such a small part of who I am.
Japan and my life in it no doubt defines me more than I will know. I’ll get a clearer sense of it when I am elsewhere, in another time, looking from a distance. Many of you can see it better than I. Many of you are here because I am there. When you ask what brought me here… why Japan…you ask not because you want me to define myself by my answer, but because you want to understand my life better.
I hope this has helped you understand me a little more.
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parasitegirl
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Date: 2010-08-20 04:41 am (UTC)Dina
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Date: 2010-08-20 04:48 am (UTC)It is helpful to know people enjoy what it is I write...I would write anyway but, well, it makes me feel a little less crazy when it connects.
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Date: 2010-08-20 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-20 02:17 pm (UTC)Some days I'm really glad I have time to click through and read an entire post from you.
Date: 2010-08-25 12:12 pm (UTC)Re: Some days I'm really glad I have time to click through and read an entire post from you.
Date: 2010-08-26 04:22 am (UTC)