Gaijin Girl

so i came to japan with this idea that we shouldn’t judge other people’s cultural values because who says that “ours” are so right anyway?  then i started considering the cultural values of the united states and how maybe all my personal values don’t mesh with the widely accepted ones in my home country.  so i am aware that people from other cultures of course may have different values than those widely accepted in their home environments.  i try to keep this in mind in my studies as much as possible because i certainly don’t want to generalize an entire population based on some cultural theory i might not even know that much about.

i have always felt a little conflicted about the roles of women in traditional mexican culture that is often still prevelant in homes in tucson today (with some of my former students) and how i wanted to show the girls in my class that they could be anything and go anywhere without belittling any of their familial roles or connections with their families.  for instance i could encourage them to go to school at yale or somewhere else far away, but then what would happen to their familial structure?  how would they cope with leaving their families, etc?  for me it was no big deal to live far away from my family, but that value is not usually consistent with the familial/cultural values and practices of most of my students.  this was just one of the many things i was considering in the whole debate if some white teacher should even be teaching those kids anyway.  i mean, who the hell am i to think i can teach them what they “need” to know?  and who decides what they get to learn anyway?

so of course there are definitely aspects of japanese society that are shocking to me and also cause a little well of anger to rise inside my white priveleged grrl tummy.  the most glaringly obvious are the gender roles/marriage institution here.  for instance if a woman is legally married, regardless of the husband’s actual role in her life, she has to get his permission to receive some serious medical treatments.  supposedly this is to insure payment for the treatment; the husband will pay because the woman is ultimately his “responsibility.”  they supposedly might not be able to trust the women to do so after she receives the treatment, especially if the treatment involves some type of mental issue.  also in documented rape and domestic violence cases, women can also be questioned regarding the actions they carried out that ended up leading to the men’s violent acts (i.e., he is so stressed out from work, if you are “behaving badly” when he gets home late at night, how do you expect him to react?) and so on along those lines. it seems to be widely accepted here that you shouldn’t really talk about such events anyway but just handle them yourself instead of alerting the proper authorities, seeking counseling, or even “burdening” family members and friends with your problems by confiding in them.

now because i work in a mostly western environment and have mostly gaijin friends, sometimes i forget about these aspects of japanese society–simply because i am allowed to.  i am not married to a japanese man; i am not really too involved in my community.  i can just go into tokyo and get lost in the anonomous sea of gaijin and then come home to my lovely josh and be thankful that no one expects me to conform to japanese gender roles because i am clearly not japanese.

well, this week some events got me thinking of other japanese societal values outside of the gender realm.  i won’t go into details here for obvious reasons, but something really serious and health-related happened that could have been potentially dangerous/embarrassing for everyone involved.  some of the attitudes of the japanese people who were invoved were to a) pretend that nothing was happening, b) create logical reasons for the strange events that had no basis in reality just to “explain away” the situation so that we could go back to option a), c) assume that the situation would just go away after we talked about it without taking any real action, d) assume that everything would fix itself in time and that we couldn’t do anything else to help, e) blame everyone else for the events that had happened.  it was really really scary to me.  and the most fucked up thing was that i got called out for speaking up about my disagreement with these “solutions” to the problem.  in fact one japanese person, whom, up until now, i had considered to be a friend, took it upon herself to tell the others that they just had to accept my weird american spoiled bitchiness because i didn’t understand japanese ways and that i would go back to the U.S. soon anyway.

while she may have a point there, i hope that i am not perceived as bitchy and spoiled just because i have respect for myself and the other people involved by speaking up for an environment in which everyone is safe and can feel comfortable.  her comments have caused me to wonder if, despite all my studies about tailoring communication styles to meet different people’s cultural needs, i really do have no idea how to tolerate cultural differences.  i am not sure what other specific behavior i have exhibited before this incident that she finds spoiled or bitchy, but her claims could be legitimate.  what worries me is the thesis i will be writing about cultural differences, communication, and education.  if i can’t accept cultural differences in the country i am currently living (and if those around me feel i don’t understand their culture and are counting the days until i beat it out of here), maybe i should look into a different line of work.

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god, i hate mondays.  josh and i had such a lovely weekend that this morning was a cruel reminder of the fact that we have to go somewhere at a certain time and act professional all day in order to survive on this planet.  yuck.

anyway, let’s talk about march.  the month of march i mean.  we had many visitors.  the first was our dear friend fran.  she is a girl whom we met on our first day in japan.  she was in our training group at the small nova branch near our apartment in gifu, and she lived in nagoya, which was about a 20 minute train ride away, so she often ate meals with us in between training sessions at our apartment and stayed over a few times when we went out after work and she missed her last train home. we stayed in touch with her when we moved to ageo, but she stayed in nagoya working for nova, which just got shittier and shittier.  apparently they switched her schedule so that she never had consecutive days off, she had increased work loads due to the lack of teachers, vacation time was out of the question, and pissed off former students were showing up and threatening the employees almost every day.  (if you don’t know, it’s because nova went bankrupt and students who had paid for lessons in advance lost over half their money….not to mention the employees are still owed part of their lost wages.)  anyway, all that said, our friend’s life after the nova scandal was not improving.  so she decided to leave japan and go back to the usa.  but before she left, she stayed with us for over a week, and we had a wonderful time together.  actually while fran was staying with us, another girl, whom i met during the training for my current job, also left japan to return home (scotland) indefinitely.  so march was filled with saying goodbyes to people whom we had just gotten to know here in japan.

for josh’s birthday weekend, we took a trip to ueno park/zoo and asakusa, a really old shrine in tokyo.  here are fran and josh in ueno park:

at asakusa we saw the first signs of spring, which made me really happy.

on josh’s actual birthday we were all sick (especially me), so we didn’t do much, but we had fun hanging out at home and went out to our favorite local bar.  here josh enjoys his mochi birthday goodness:

he’s so cute, ne? 

anyway, i am really glad that he was born and that we got to celebrate together.  shortly after his birthday, his sister came to visit, but i think those stories are for another night.  i’m super tired.  thanks for readin! 

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i am so turning japanese.  military time even.  except in my work ethics, i suppose.  i still bitch about working on my break and doing unpaid overtime.  can’t take those american (privileged) values away from this girl! 

anyway, let’s not talk about work.  it’s dreadful, and i want to spend my time lying in the sun playing guitar all day, not having meetings about who should do what.  i’m feeling quite disheartened with the whole concept of money right now.

well, anyway, in february josh and i tried to go on a trip.  we had decided that we had had enough of sitting around watching terrible movies (at least they were in english!) on his computer in our tiny room every day.  so we scrimped our first real paychecks and decided to go on a tour to see some wild monkeys and also visit a castle two prefectures away.  well, as fate would have it, our first real vacation in japan was snowed out.  we got up before the sun rose to catch a train and then caught a bus only to turn around after a few hours because of the dangerous road conditions.  so we spent the rest of the day in shinjuku eating doughnuts, drinking wine, and taking pictures in the snow.

it was nice.

anyway, we rescheduled our trip, and it was UNREAL.  first of all the “wild monkey park” was actually the opposite of wild.  it was an area in the forest where people feed monkeys some weird mixture from buckets so they will play near the admission area and they can make money.  the monkeys are so tame that they have no hesitation about approaching/touching humans, and it was really fucking scary.  i mean, who wants wild monkeys running all around them?  i prefer viewing my wildlife from afar.

if i had to choose between sliding down this steep snow covered ramp or having monkeys touch me, i was totally going for the slide….now way i was touching those hand rails!

in a way the experience was cool because we got to see things like this up close and personal:

but it was a little too close for comfort for me.  i don’t think i would have gone if i had realized how much i would be intruding in these monkey’s space…i don’t guess it would have mattered much since there were about 8000 other people there though.  anyway, what an experience!

after that we went to matsumoto castle, which was super beautiful and had a lot of interesting information in english.

we also had about 30 minutes to run around the downtown of matsumoto, which i have decided is one of the cutest cities ever.  it is on our list of places to revisit….someday.  i have a lot of really long lists.

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