Ch-ch-changes
I've been deliberating about Kiyono recently, trying to figger it out. See, I know I've got to leave and that cross-cultural relationships are damn hard work long term (the hangdog faces of the long-term married gaijin tell me that, worn down by years of never quite feeling at home) but for now I want to be in love in the knowledge that it will end, to heighten the now. But I think Kiyono wants to insulate herself; be close, but not so close that it will hurt when I leave. I know it's wrong and irresponsible of me to want both things - love and freedom - but I do, I want her to love me and I her and for this to happen in the light of the fact of my other life back home, away from this dreamland. She asks, drunk at her favourite bar, if I love her, and I give perhaps the limpest response to that question that I've ever given. I think I will, I say. Five minutes later, I upgrade that weak response to yes. I'm an idiot. But I need her, and perhaps she needs someone like me now, a rebound temporary boyfriend. Later, perhaps as punishment, she tells me she loves wrestling and literally throws me across the bar, pinning me down with surprising strength.
This is complicated by the fact that my brother is leaving for home in a month and a half and things must change. Either I move in with Kiyono for love and economic reasons (haven't asked yet) or I take off north and hitchhike to Hokkaido to weather the summer, working as a WWOOFer. I'm leaning towards taking off north. The seasons in Japan are heightened versions of Australian seasons; we've got nothing to compare. Winter is brutal and summer is just plain nasty; stink hot at 6 am, humidity hanging over the city like a cloud. Kyoto has the most extreme weather in Japan, followed by Osaka. I sweat profusely on the airconditioned train, I sweat at my airconditioned work. I can't stand humidity; I'm ready to move on, ready to say goodbye to English teaching and nappies for a while, and I don't think Kiyono will come with me. This is going to be difficult.
Rats in a new environment suppress their extraneous urges (breeding) until they are settled; perhaps this is me too, in terms of love. Love is not so much the luxury of does she or doesn't she, it's more of a mutual need, here. If not for Kiyono, I'd feel terribly lonely, adrift, a tumbleweed flipping through the days of my visa. But, I need newness, I want to learn Nihongo (something to take home, a way to return), so off to Hokkaido. I didn't come here to be comfortable, I came to be uncomfortable, to learn. I don't want my mind to settle over a place like a cloud and obscure the remarkable everyday. It's happened already in Osaka; I rarely notice my surroundings on the way to/from work, to/from Kiyono's. I want to notice things again. But a job demands settledness. Will Kiyono come? She's settled here.
See, I really want to learn Japanese, to be able to speak so that when I come back, I can actually communicate. But teaching English means using English; if I live somewhere remote, English won't open any doors. Japanese only. And that means I'll actually learn. Learning Japanese is like slowly gaining a map of this place, really really slowly. The strength of Japanese culture is, I think, at least partly maintained by the difficulty and difference of the language. It's like a massive party of a hundred twenty million or so to which I was not invited but gatecrashed and now I stand awkwardly in the corners of the society while the main thrum, everything, life goes on all around me. I can start and leave conversations now but I have nothing to fill in the middle. I've transplanted myself to a place where many things are familiar - high-tech modernity - but where the underlaying layer of culture, tradition and above all, language, is different. I feel like I'm starting again, and I am, I suppose. Reconsidering journalism; perhaps teaching? a book? If I wrote a book I'd want to avoid writing a shit one. Too many of those. But here I am, illiterate and wide-eyed standing beneath huge hotels and train stations the size of an Australian airport. I don't know the relative strength of words - "tabun" I was using as 'maybe' when it's closer to 'probably'. It would take me twenty years to be able to understand nuances. But the real challenge is words without equivalents, slight variations in the way Japanese people perceive the world as compared to my English viewpoint.
I love that when Japanese people speak, the particles are emphasised - wa, to, mo, ni - and they sound like linchpins, pivot points on which the conversation turns.
---
I want to live my life forcefully, as if I'm going to die tomorrow. Hence, I'm in Japan, a place which is new to me. I want to live intentionally, rather than drifting. But it's hard work to remain conscious, and I usually just slip back into the waking dream which is the safe way I live my life. Real, intentional life is terrifying. Sometimes, I manage not to care about the inevitability of my extinction and the end of all things, which deflates my (modest) ambitions instantly. But most of the time I just do what everyone does and ignore it, ignore death, concentrating on my succession of nows, head down. It's as if our minds veer away from sickness/death, a large blind spot of discomfort. Look there's a wheelchair, a cancer patient - and my mind blocks out the importance of this fact because I don't want to know. Like nature, really. You see shoals of fish fleeing a predator, not looking back. The fish know that on the margins, they are losing some of their number, but they rarely look back, only snatching tiny terrified glances before locking their sights on the horizon, hoping they won't be the next to be silently engulfed as everyone races together.
--
Japanese kids are so much more touchy-feely than we are, when playing with their own sex. There is a famous prank which involves jamming a thumb up someone's arse to see the response; like the classic rugby tactic. Foreign teachers are by no means immune; I've had it done once to me and I nearly died.
---
How cool are the kids here? Fucking cool. Notes on guys: a New Dork tshirt; a fuckyoufuckingfuck cap, a proliferation of chains (not lame skater wallet chains but a crosspollination from the bondage underground), innumerable studded pouches coupled with true cowboy boots and shirts dipping down to pecs; tanned skin, lightly muscled. Obscenely playful hair. Beyond metrosexual into a full acceptance of male fashion and equal vanity on behalf of both sexes. Not everyone is ultra-trendy, but most people dress better and crazier than Australians do. One leg up one leg down jumpsuit. Nikkabokkas, massive flared pants, working class wear, with two-toed boots. Tight tanktops and headbands; svelte hoodies with stripes. Girls: Girls hair here is amazing, like a cascade, thicker hair, an explosion out from the scalp. Subculture fashions - tanned girls with hair a little bleached and frothed, going against the mainstream wish to be whiter than other Asians (hence widespread use of umbrellas in summer). Waif hippies; beret-toting girls decked out in glittering stones, peaked beanies, silk belts, heavily distressed jeans, modified with anime overlays on the jeans, gothic lolitas, dark goth mixed with ye olde dresses almost like corsets, self-modified jackets, waistcoats. And both guys and girls decorate their mobiles with trinkets, sprigs of jewelery, plastic figurines, pictures of themselves and friends dotted around the screen.
---
It's late in rice planting season and if you walk through Osaka's suburbs, you see an occasional farmer plowing his field, ten centimetres deep in water. At night, I can't sleep because ten thousand frogs croak in frenzied bursts from the water below. Only in Japan.
I've been deliberating about Kiyono recently, trying to figger it out. See, I know I've got to leave and that cross-cultural relationships are damn hard work long term (the hangdog faces of the long-term married gaijin tell me that, worn down by years of never quite feeling at home) but for now I want to be in love in the knowledge that it will end, to heighten the now. But I think Kiyono wants to insulate herself; be close, but not so close that it will hurt when I leave. I know it's wrong and irresponsible of me to want both things - love and freedom - but I do, I want her to love me and I her and for this to happen in the light of the fact of my other life back home, away from this dreamland. She asks, drunk at her favourite bar, if I love her, and I give perhaps the limpest response to that question that I've ever given. I think I will, I say. Five minutes later, I upgrade that weak response to yes. I'm an idiot. But I need her, and perhaps she needs someone like me now, a rebound temporary boyfriend. Later, perhaps as punishment, she tells me she loves wrestling and literally throws me across the bar, pinning me down with surprising strength.
This is complicated by the fact that my brother is leaving for home in a month and a half and things must change. Either I move in with Kiyono for love and economic reasons (haven't asked yet) or I take off north and hitchhike to Hokkaido to weather the summer, working as a WWOOFer. I'm leaning towards taking off north. The seasons in Japan are heightened versions of Australian seasons; we've got nothing to compare. Winter is brutal and summer is just plain nasty; stink hot at 6 am, humidity hanging over the city like a cloud. Kyoto has the most extreme weather in Japan, followed by Osaka. I sweat profusely on the airconditioned train, I sweat at my airconditioned work. I can't stand humidity; I'm ready to move on, ready to say goodbye to English teaching and nappies for a while, and I don't think Kiyono will come with me. This is going to be difficult.
Rats in a new environment suppress their extraneous urges (breeding) until they are settled; perhaps this is me too, in terms of love. Love is not so much the luxury of does she or doesn't she, it's more of a mutual need, here. If not for Kiyono, I'd feel terribly lonely, adrift, a tumbleweed flipping through the days of my visa. But, I need newness, I want to learn Nihongo (something to take home, a way to return), so off to Hokkaido. I didn't come here to be comfortable, I came to be uncomfortable, to learn. I don't want my mind to settle over a place like a cloud and obscure the remarkable everyday. It's happened already in Osaka; I rarely notice my surroundings on the way to/from work, to/from Kiyono's. I want to notice things again. But a job demands settledness. Will Kiyono come? She's settled here.
See, I really want to learn Japanese, to be able to speak so that when I come back, I can actually communicate. But teaching English means using English; if I live somewhere remote, English won't open any doors. Japanese only. And that means I'll actually learn. Learning Japanese is like slowly gaining a map of this place, really really slowly. The strength of Japanese culture is, I think, at least partly maintained by the difficulty and difference of the language. It's like a massive party of a hundred twenty million or so to which I was not invited but gatecrashed and now I stand awkwardly in the corners of the society while the main thrum, everything, life goes on all around me. I can start and leave conversations now but I have nothing to fill in the middle. I've transplanted myself to a place where many things are familiar - high-tech modernity - but where the underlaying layer of culture, tradition and above all, language, is different. I feel like I'm starting again, and I am, I suppose. Reconsidering journalism; perhaps teaching? a book? If I wrote a book I'd want to avoid writing a shit one. Too many of those. But here I am, illiterate and wide-eyed standing beneath huge hotels and train stations the size of an Australian airport. I don't know the relative strength of words - "tabun" I was using as 'maybe' when it's closer to 'probably'. It would take me twenty years to be able to understand nuances. But the real challenge is words without equivalents, slight variations in the way Japanese people perceive the world as compared to my English viewpoint.
I love that when Japanese people speak, the particles are emphasised - wa, to, mo, ni - and they sound like linchpins, pivot points on which the conversation turns.
---
I want to live my life forcefully, as if I'm going to die tomorrow. Hence, I'm in Japan, a place which is new to me. I want to live intentionally, rather than drifting. But it's hard work to remain conscious, and I usually just slip back into the waking dream which is the safe way I live my life. Real, intentional life is terrifying. Sometimes, I manage not to care about the inevitability of my extinction and the end of all things, which deflates my (modest) ambitions instantly. But most of the time I just do what everyone does and ignore it, ignore death, concentrating on my succession of nows, head down. It's as if our minds veer away from sickness/death, a large blind spot of discomfort. Look there's a wheelchair, a cancer patient - and my mind blocks out the importance of this fact because I don't want to know. Like nature, really. You see shoals of fish fleeing a predator, not looking back. The fish know that on the margins, they are losing some of their number, but they rarely look back, only snatching tiny terrified glances before locking their sights on the horizon, hoping they won't be the next to be silently engulfed as everyone races together.
--
Japanese kids are so much more touchy-feely than we are, when playing with their own sex. There is a famous prank which involves jamming a thumb up someone's arse to see the response; like the classic rugby tactic. Foreign teachers are by no means immune; I've had it done once to me and I nearly died.
---
How cool are the kids here? Fucking cool. Notes on guys: a New Dork tshirt; a fuckyoufuckingfuck cap, a proliferation of chains (not lame skater wallet chains but a crosspollination from the bondage underground), innumerable studded pouches coupled with true cowboy boots and shirts dipping down to pecs; tanned skin, lightly muscled. Obscenely playful hair. Beyond metrosexual into a full acceptance of male fashion and equal vanity on behalf of both sexes. Not everyone is ultra-trendy, but most people dress better and crazier than Australians do. One leg up one leg down jumpsuit. Nikkabokkas, massive flared pants, working class wear, with two-toed boots. Tight tanktops and headbands; svelte hoodies with stripes. Girls: Girls hair here is amazing, like a cascade, thicker hair, an explosion out from the scalp. Subculture fashions - tanned girls with hair a little bleached and frothed, going against the mainstream wish to be whiter than other Asians (hence widespread use of umbrellas in summer). Waif hippies; beret-toting girls decked out in glittering stones, peaked beanies, silk belts, heavily distressed jeans, modified with anime overlays on the jeans, gothic lolitas, dark goth mixed with ye olde dresses almost like corsets, self-modified jackets, waistcoats. And both guys and girls decorate their mobiles with trinkets, sprigs of jewelery, plastic figurines, pictures of themselves and friends dotted around the screen.
---
It's late in rice planting season and if you walk through Osaka's suburbs, you see an occasional farmer plowing his field, ten centimetres deep in water. At night, I can't sleep because ten thousand frogs croak in frenzied bursts from the water below. Only in Japan.
posted by Doug @ 6/10/2005 12:17:00 am
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