Nagasaki

Nagasaki City is not the easiest place to describe. Since the Portugese traders came in around 1570 the place has become quite an international hotbed. There is a cool China town and lots of Christian sites as well as some Mung dynasty architecture. It is on the water and hilly. There is a little river that runs through it. The north part of the city is all modern partly because it was demolished by an atomic bomb little more than 60 years ago.

South Nagasaki, the part of the city that remains intact, is so cool that it is my new favorite place in Japan. (I still haven't been to Kyoto, Kobe, or Nara, so I have some traveling to do.)

Many things have crossed my mind while in that city as well as after. There was the time that Aki and I went to this out-of-the-way restaurant that looked very decent and normal only to find that the family who owned the place may have been both on cocaine and part of the Japanese mafia. We figured this out because of a strange taste in the soup they served and by observing this family for a while. The grandpa was singing karaoke from the TVs behind the bar, but it was more than just singing--it was some sort of trance he was in and I don't know if alcohol could explain it. It was Sunday night, but that doesn't account for the fact that we were alone in there with this one odd family (supposedly the owners of the place), complete with a very peculiar 4-year-old and a grandma who could not really pronounce a full sentence. If the FBI or CIA is reading this then I think I can safely say that we've found one of the major trafficking nodes of southwest Japan. That place was not really a restaurant.

The city was shutting down early that night because it was Sunday and it was getting cold. It was a strange experience to walk down these streets where every little store had already put down its metal door. Whatever happened to nightime window shopping?

The next morning we made it to the atomic bomb memorial sites. First was the museum where relics were displayed, including a clock that had stopped at 11:03 from the heat of the explosion at that exact time 60 years ago. In the museum I realized that the American military had named their atomic bombs "Little Boy" and "Fat Man." Something is extremely disturbing about the amount of euphemism put into these names.

We walked over to the Peace Park where many statues were displayed as well as a sign telling people to lot let their dogs soil the garden. But before that we stumbled on a park where the epicenter of the bomb had been. There was a circle of places to sit around it and a strange black monolith in the middle. On the side a cross section of a damaged cathedral is standing straight up. It's strange to have this park in a place that has been completely made over. The whole northern city seems to have been completely rebuilt and what the destruction is replaced by are these two or three very pronounced memorials. The eyes of older folks in the tramcars, which settled themselves in a peculiar way on me, seemed to suggest that the tragedy was not well forgotten. One young Japanese man in the museum gave me a less than friendly stare as we passed each other. But I cannot blame him.

See why it's hard to describe? There are so many major aspects of this city, so many details, that they all get jumbled up. It's like a jambalaya or champon soup, only more odd, perhaps as if some ammonia was added to the champon soup. Very intense, slightly discomforting, but still somehow perfectly capable of beauty and joy.

I found the photos I thought I had lost. Human error. Perhaps the picture can speak better than anything I could write about women in Japan and the familial bonds that exist here.

Last night I watched the second of my two Ali G dvds (thanks Nick!). It's really good, what can I say? Arthur Danto was pretty caught off guard, as was Newt Gingrich on the first dvd. The Kazakhstani lover may be my favorite role though, but I can't really choose between the three he does so well. I am also finishing up The Tipping Point today. It is surprisingly interesting and mind-opening.

I'm going to Kumamoto City tonight for my Japanese class then I am taking a bus to Fukuoka City, one of the biggest in Japan. Then, on Sunday, Aki and I are heading to Nagasaki City. It will be my first time there and I am very content to be going. It is supposed to be one of the most beautiful cities in Japan (especially for its nightview) and has some European-influenced architecture because it was a major port town and one of the main links to the outside world for a long period of Japanese history.

friends make my life

My friend Amber really loves this format with two photos lined like this. Here is a poem by Walt Whitman that I memorized for a class in college. I always remember it when I am missing my friends the most and I need some sort of way of expressing it.

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it
and twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

. . . . . . . .

It's strange how the same things that can give you so much joy can also give so much pain. Also the same things that keep humans so well populated and lively are the things that can bring our downfall (i.e. our passions). I am often shocked by both the apparent complexity and simple duality of life. It's absurd, breath-taking, frustrating, difficult, and yet so simple and easy at times. Haha. I need to make more jokes on this blog. I'll do that soon. But when I think about humor I realize that it involves sadness and despair. But instead of making us express that sadness and despair it is an acknowledging bypass of those feelings (most of the time, but sometimes the very funniest things can also make me sad). Laughing seems to be the acknowledgement of our often complete powerlessness in life's workings.

You don't have to look hard to find an article about the drastic changes that are happening on earth. Every week there is a new article about this glacier melting faster, a new discovery about how even more warming is expected than usual, or a report on some car bombs in the Middle East. Then you can watch the movies "Closer" and "Syriana" in order to get a nice cynical view of personal relationships and the current international political economy, respectively. These are all things to which I have been exposed as of late in my superbly isolated home.

It's amazing just how much perspective and attitude change life. If you were to only have access to those media listed above the world would have a pretty nasty taste to it. But with a different palette of colors the world, including all of your problems, can completely transform.

I speak for the people I know my age when I say that life after college is no fairytale. We are now exposed to just a little more of the elements, to vulnerability, and a much greater chance of loneliness. This is the time that we are really forced to grow. College was like a big all-day, all-night nursery school. We were never too far from our friends unless we locked ourselves up in our rooms and never came out (which happened to a number of us, especially during our senior year).

The common response seems to be to seek more of what we have lost. Law school or grad school of some sort seems to be a popular choice. With grad school you can hit three birds with one stone: a new community of young people, the feeling of being productive, and learning something new (and debt/poverty forces recent graduates to be productive even after grad school is finished). Friends of mine have accomplished some of the same things by moving to the same city together and working. Life alone seems intolerable, especially after we've been accustomed to just the opposite problem.

But maybe all we need is a little change in perspective. But I suppose that won't be enough in the end. Was it always like this for people leaving college? Why do they even have college if it creates such an emptiness after it is completed? I feel like no one warned me of these things. They don't teach us this at high school and they certainly don't teach us this at college. If we were lucky though, we heard it from recent graduates who dared to venture out of the grasp of their college friends. I guess I am one of them. But even if I warn you it will do nothing to prevent the loss unless you clutch to your friends and move to a city together. Run along!

Epiphany about Japanese Culture

After a day at work I finally decided to go and enjoy the good weather today. Getting my head moving brought forth a simple but very constructive understanding that I had not fully grasped before.

The understanding rests on the concept that in Japan society everyone is family. The individual is then affected not only by his or her family but by every member of his or her society. This accounts for the sometimes overwhelming friendliness of the people here (especially when accepting a foreigner into their group), the xenophobia (when not accepting a foreigner), the huge amount of stress to conform, and the sometimes unappealing ways that stress is relieved.

In my last post I mentioned how the desires in one's life are very much affected by their awareness of the regard of family, friends, and loved ones. Imagine if your whole society consisted of this group? All of a sudden each action in your life would be under much more careful scrutiny. You would be more highly rewarded for following the path that you are "supposed to" follow and you could be more damaged if you neglect that path. It is, in local Maui people's terms, "one presha cooka" (a pressure cooker). It is an extremely positive force that includes a powerful support structure for all members of society. But it also may be related to some of the less desirable sides of society here like the snack bars and the xenophobia.

All in all I am just happy that I have come to a much better understanding of this place, even if it is, necessarily, a bit of a simplification.

"My goal is to enter high school."

Hung above the chalkboard in the second grade class of the junior high are pages with one student's wish or dream written on them (much like you might find in a more decorative way at a Shinto shrine). Most of these wishes and dreams are extremely humble by American standards. One wished "to pass the second grade test," another dreamed to "be a police officer," and one simply wanted to become "a beautiful woman." Then one wants to be a nurse, another a lawyer. But of all, the most illuminating may be the one in the title of this post. For here in Japan one must test into high school, one is not automatically accepted. This is a rigorous process, more difficult in some ways than the entry requirements for American colleges which may only require that the student has taken an ACT or SAT and does not decline a student if his/her score is very low. Here students are completely sorted by their abilities on these tests. Their tests will decide where they can attend high school.

The two most unusal wishes to me are "to give people hope" and "My dream is to find the dream." I thought the latter, which was written by a quiet student named Ryuichi Hirata, is particularly clever.

This morning during a morning assembly where some students were handed awards for their good work on kanji proficiency tests I was reminded of another thing that I never had to do when I was in middle school. Here it seems like nearly every student takes these standardized tests (even in elementary school) and individuals differ dramatically in their abilities. It just shows that the language aquisition here isn't a gimme, it is something that takes hard work and dedication, and additionally, a system of institutional rites in order to encourage/support this hard work and dedication.

Now that I have finished, for the time being, my own formal education, has the structure of my changed so much? Do I still not work under the same assumptions and guidelines that lead me through every year at school? Do I still not function on a yearly/semester-long basis, always trying to plan and make something solid each time? Perhaps there are better ways to ask these questions.

"My dream is to find the dream" may be a good way to turn our heads to, although this was probably not the intended interpretation of the sentence, one of the most major questions that arrives to a thoughtful person. It is not good enough just to dream, one must search inside one's dreams for something deeper, for the reason why one dreams at all. Unfortunately for the thoughtful person, these answers don't seem to exist. They break down into abstract feelings, emotions, and social forces that, all together, can create the illusion that there are concrete reasons why you have certain dreams or goals.

Ask yourself the question "why do you strive for the things you strive for?" and perhaps you will see what I am talking about. If you reply, "because I want to," you are being quite honest. If you reply "because all of the forces in my life (including my friends, family, and loved ones) make me feel as though I want to," then you may be answering even more honestly. Ideally you would want to honestly be able to answer "because I want to help the world," "because I want to help people who are suffering," "because I want to save the environment." However accurate these answers would be in your mind, in the complex web of social interactions in your life, as well as your past and the memories thereof, the true reasons why you strive for certain things would be much more dynamic and multi-faceted. One would part would be to fulfill your commitment to your parents or guardians, one would be to impress/help your friends, another would be to be good to your dog or the person on the street you don't know. Then there may also be the simple desire to feel good, to feel happiness flowing through your veins. But you cannot do that without paying attention to those social responsibilities your life has accrued.

Probably Ryuichi's sentence "My dream is to find a dream" means that he wants to actually have a dream but he doesn't yet. I feel his pain. Life almost requires the kind of automation that is propelled by social institutions like schools in order for that kind of dream to be perpetuated and advanced toward, but even then dreams do not necessarily appear in our minds.

When the world starts to feel disintegrated and confused is when the dreams cannot find a holding place in the mind. This is a good argument for establishing social order (and personal order), but then you would still be faced with the philosophical unsoundness of dreams if you were willing to step into the disorder and look around for a while. Perhaps it is a matter of not asking too many questions.

What are your thoughts, dear friend?

Distant Exposures

I think that exposure to the world is one of the greatest factors in awareness and understanding. Of course I must be more specific if I am going to make such a claim...

It is perhaps not only the exposure but the desire to open your eyes and look at those things right in front of you. But if they are not there to see because they are somehow blocked from your view then you may not get to see them.

Living in the countryside in Japan is a challenge precisely because of what I am not exposed to here. When you are that much farther from things that drive you in life it is hard to be at your best. But when you remember them your eyes can suddenly be opened. What I am exposed to here is enough to be happy despite my quiet (inexistant) social life during the week, but it is not enough to lift me as high as I can go.

I assume that many of my friends feel the same way where they are now. What I recommend is to try to look farther out than what you can see now and perhaps you'll see something that you've been missing as of late.