Troublemakers and small children
Before we moved into our hostel, I performed a cursory Google on it and found some fine be-yotching about a certain long term resident, who was labelled a "troublemaker". We moved here anyway (never trust the net, yeah?). Ever since I've been here, I've been trying to figure out who, if anyone, is the person who generated anonymous net gossip. The mystery only lasted a couple of weeks. This time round, the bitcher was largely accurate.
This long term resident, J, is a complex character. It would be nice to label her a crackpot and have done with it, but there is a lot of pain there, a nomad whose restlessness has taken her from England to Qatar to Romania to Japan. She used to be Australian, but her accent has been shorn and tweaked by every country she spent time in, producing a peculiarly global English. She is a bore who assumes her every action is of interest (the first time we met, she performed a fine solo on the problems with Microsoft Excel), but also a mine of useful information. Great friends with A, a resident who moved out but recently, she relied on him for emotional support. No significant others; a workaholic; she has friends, but a world-weary face.
That's the background. The troublemaking kicks in when you introduce the house-owner and administrator, Ms. W. I've had no issues with her so far; the house seems a little rule-heavy, but enforcement is minimal. However, the obstreperous J did encounter difficulties of the rent kind (I believe) and was asked to move out. She refused, and brought in the lawyers. Many ichiman (ten thousand yen) later, she was firmly ensconced in her room, where she has now lived for 12 years. This hostel is kinda pricy; she could get a cheaper, better room closer to work very easily. The situation between the warring parties reminds me of a frozen sea; a perpetual battle captured in stalemate. They are usually icily polite, but J (who, I must admit, often shits me to tears) will often explode into action, storming into the office to demand a shortcut to Word on the desktop or other similarly trivial things. The services are carried out with brisk efficiency and minimal contact. J often darkly mutters to me about 'her' in the kitchen but so far I have avoided taking sides at all. Both sides won't relent until someone dies, I reckon.
---
I went hiking near Kyoto yesterday and now I can't move my legs. It seemed like a good idea to run the whole way down, slipping and sliding in the mud, leaping from rock to log, swinging around trees in a joyously primal manner, overtaking Japanese hiking groups and leaving them with a fading sumimasen! Like much glorious boyishness, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Today, the weight of a single restless toddler on my knee was enough to make me squeal.
Still, the hike was grand. 15km or so; I saw a snow monkey and pilgrims with bear bells; cedar and remnant snow; a Buddhist temple at the top of the mountain complete with a meditating monk. I went with Jeremy, my new favourite person. He's an American thirty year old child with a ponytail and hat and a smile that the word goofy was invented for. He's delightfully idealistic, and his laugh is so infectious that I find myself really trying to set one off so I can partake too. He is someone I would like to keep from my time here. Conversation flowed easily; miles were eaten by legs and we sweated heavily in the rare sunshine. We took our shirts off after the first hour or so, to the shock of the middle aged trekkers who repeatedly asked us if we were 'samui' (cold) and then laughed/shook their heads at us at our departing backs. Jeremy's fluency in Japanese permitted Real Interactions with the hikers going in the same direction, and we were often surrounded by a gaggle of curious, friendly Japanese. One incident in particular stands out; we were racing down a steep hill, a small group noticed our rapid descent and stood aside for us. We left them with a few sumimasens, which made one woman say to her friend, wow, they can speak Japanese. This, in turn, made Jeremy shake his head and laugh. Sumi masen is about as easy as you can get. We talked about this a bit; he's been here three years, and he was begining to chafe at the culture gap, or at least the culture gap that he thought was deliberately erected by the Japanese to keep outsiders from entering. I told him about my two unusual encounters - S crying and the Japanese guy plucking my hairs. Jeremy laughed. You know why that happened, he said, that's because you are a foreigner and outside their frame of social reference, so they can interact with you in an entirely different way of their choosing. He might be right. I just read an article about foreign journalists in Japan; many Japanese journalists use foreign journalists to break a story on the various unmentionables - the burakumin (the former lowest caste who are still discriminated against), yakuza, bad news on zaibatsu, the Imperial Family and so on. An interesting idea, though, that there is this freedom of social interaction between cultures because of the lack of common ground and culture.
---
We got back to civilisation and hitched a lift back into Kyoto. It was a crazy ride - no seatbelts, with the guy and his wife looking over their shoulders at us the whole time, talking to Jeremy. We nearly killed some people, and then nearly killed some more by mounting the pavement in an effort to track down pedestrians for their local knowledge of train stations for us. After each burst of conversation, Jeremy would translate and annotate it with his own thoughts - perhaps they wanted to ask us for dinner? how would we refuse? - and it was excellent, having a Secret Impenetrable Code, like a voiceover in a movie. They left me at a station, after the woman took me across several streets and down into the station, making sure I wouldn't get lost. It was very kind and made me think I had been inaccurate in thinking underlying anti-gaijin sentiments were rife.
---
At the restaurant on Saturday and again on the hike, I managed to terrify a number of small children unwittingly. Since I now Work With Kids, I think I have an automatic right to pick up small children on the street and whisk them round my head making aeroplane noises. It's a hard impulse to resist, sometimes. Anyhow, at the restaurant, a small boy snuck up behind me and then skulked past, stealing a look at me. The second time he did it, I went boo! and opened my arms. The kid shat himself and fell over backwards, nearly hitting his head on the table. He sat there on his ass with a rabbit-in-the-headlights look on his face, terror mixed with fate. It was great. Then, on the hike, another kid wasn't looking where he was going until he was very close to me; finally glancing upwards, he saw a towering gaijin with flaming red hair and a phenomenonally large nose coming towards him at speed. Cue kid shitting himself and darting to one side in half a second flat. It's strange - I suppose I have this assumption that all Japanese kids are secretly like the kids I 'teach' - inured to the foreigners surrounding them in their gaijin petting zoo.
---
Before we moved into our hostel, I performed a cursory Google on it and found some fine be-yotching about a certain long term resident, who was labelled a "troublemaker". We moved here anyway (never trust the net, yeah?). Ever since I've been here, I've been trying to figure out who, if anyone, is the person who generated anonymous net gossip. The mystery only lasted a couple of weeks. This time round, the bitcher was largely accurate.
This long term resident, J, is a complex character. It would be nice to label her a crackpot and have done with it, but there is a lot of pain there, a nomad whose restlessness has taken her from England to Qatar to Romania to Japan. She used to be Australian, but her accent has been shorn and tweaked by every country she spent time in, producing a peculiarly global English. She is a bore who assumes her every action is of interest (the first time we met, she performed a fine solo on the problems with Microsoft Excel), but also a mine of useful information. Great friends with A, a resident who moved out but recently, she relied on him for emotional support. No significant others; a workaholic; she has friends, but a world-weary face.
That's the background. The troublemaking kicks in when you introduce the house-owner and administrator, Ms. W. I've had no issues with her so far; the house seems a little rule-heavy, but enforcement is minimal. However, the obstreperous J did encounter difficulties of the rent kind (I believe) and was asked to move out. She refused, and brought in the lawyers. Many ichiman (ten thousand yen) later, she was firmly ensconced in her room, where she has now lived for 12 years. This hostel is kinda pricy; she could get a cheaper, better room closer to work very easily. The situation between the warring parties reminds me of a frozen sea; a perpetual battle captured in stalemate. They are usually icily polite, but J (who, I must admit, often shits me to tears) will often explode into action, storming into the office to demand a shortcut to Word on the desktop or other similarly trivial things. The services are carried out with brisk efficiency and minimal contact. J often darkly mutters to me about 'her' in the kitchen but so far I have avoided taking sides at all. Both sides won't relent until someone dies, I reckon.
---
I went hiking near Kyoto yesterday and now I can't move my legs. It seemed like a good idea to run the whole way down, slipping and sliding in the mud, leaping from rock to log, swinging around trees in a joyously primal manner, overtaking Japanese hiking groups and leaving them with a fading sumimasen! Like much glorious boyishness, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Today, the weight of a single restless toddler on my knee was enough to make me squeal.
Still, the hike was grand. 15km or so; I saw a snow monkey and pilgrims with bear bells; cedar and remnant snow; a Buddhist temple at the top of the mountain complete with a meditating monk. I went with Jeremy, my new favourite person. He's an American thirty year old child with a ponytail and hat and a smile that the word goofy was invented for. He's delightfully idealistic, and his laugh is so infectious that I find myself really trying to set one off so I can partake too. He is someone I would like to keep from my time here. Conversation flowed easily; miles were eaten by legs and we sweated heavily in the rare sunshine. We took our shirts off after the first hour or so, to the shock of the middle aged trekkers who repeatedly asked us if we were 'samui' (cold) and then laughed/shook their heads at us at our departing backs. Jeremy's fluency in Japanese permitted Real Interactions with the hikers going in the same direction, and we were often surrounded by a gaggle of curious, friendly Japanese. One incident in particular stands out; we were racing down a steep hill, a small group noticed our rapid descent and stood aside for us. We left them with a few sumimasens, which made one woman say to her friend, wow, they can speak Japanese. This, in turn, made Jeremy shake his head and laugh. Sumi masen is about as easy as you can get. We talked about this a bit; he's been here three years, and he was begining to chafe at the culture gap, or at least the culture gap that he thought was deliberately erected by the Japanese to keep outsiders from entering. I told him about my two unusual encounters - S crying and the Japanese guy plucking my hairs. Jeremy laughed. You know why that happened, he said, that's because you are a foreigner and outside their frame of social reference, so they can interact with you in an entirely different way of their choosing. He might be right. I just read an article about foreign journalists in Japan; many Japanese journalists use foreign journalists to break a story on the various unmentionables - the burakumin (the former lowest caste who are still discriminated against), yakuza, bad news on zaibatsu, the Imperial Family and so on. An interesting idea, though, that there is this freedom of social interaction between cultures because of the lack of common ground and culture.
---
We got back to civilisation and hitched a lift back into Kyoto. It was a crazy ride - no seatbelts, with the guy and his wife looking over their shoulders at us the whole time, talking to Jeremy. We nearly killed some people, and then nearly killed some more by mounting the pavement in an effort to track down pedestrians for their local knowledge of train stations for us. After each burst of conversation, Jeremy would translate and annotate it with his own thoughts - perhaps they wanted to ask us for dinner? how would we refuse? - and it was excellent, having a Secret Impenetrable Code, like a voiceover in a movie. They left me at a station, after the woman took me across several streets and down into the station, making sure I wouldn't get lost. It was very kind and made me think I had been inaccurate in thinking underlying anti-gaijin sentiments were rife.
---
At the restaurant on Saturday and again on the hike, I managed to terrify a number of small children unwittingly. Since I now Work With Kids, I think I have an automatic right to pick up small children on the street and whisk them round my head making aeroplane noises. It's a hard impulse to resist, sometimes. Anyhow, at the restaurant, a small boy snuck up behind me and then skulked past, stealing a look at me. The second time he did it, I went boo! and opened my arms. The kid shat himself and fell over backwards, nearly hitting his head on the table. He sat there on his ass with a rabbit-in-the-headlights look on his face, terror mixed with fate. It was great. Then, on the hike, another kid wasn't looking where he was going until he was very close to me; finally glancing upwards, he saw a towering gaijin with flaming red hair and a phenomenonally large nose coming towards him at speed. Cue kid shitting himself and darting to one side in half a second flat. It's strange - I suppose I have this assumption that all Japanese kids are secretly like the kids I 'teach' - inured to the foreigners surrounding them in their gaijin petting zoo.
---
posted by Doug @ 3/22/2005 10:03:00 pm
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