Guest Post: Maria Rainier on Cultural Arrogance

This week's post comes from Maria Rainier who contacted me, like, a month ago, and offered to write a post. I'm pleased with how it turned out, even though it was a long time coming. Like me, Maria has experience living in Japan, and her views on cultural cross-pollination and adjustment, while unique, certainly resonate to some degree with my experience. That being said, her opinions are entirely her own and I welcome the diversity she brings to core::minimalist. I hope you enjoy her article, and feel free to give her link a click once you have reached the end!

_DZ

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Around the World in a Little Over 80 Days and What I Learned About Cultural Arrogance

Until I arrived, America was my promised land. And then it all went to hell. People didn’t greet me with huge smiles when I entered convenience stores and they didn’t give me an exaggerated bow when I left (they also threw my change back at me instead of placing it in a little plastic tray and gently nudging it across the counter toward me). Nobody had any sense of personal space in concerts or bars. Nobody had any manners. My friends gave me funny looks when I gave themomiage, or gifts. Everyone told me to stop apologizing.

To a college-bound kid who grew up in Japan, America was a nightmare.

And then there were the questions. It’s not news to most kids who grow up abroad that when you go (or go back) to America, you get an interesting array of questions. Here are some—word for word—that I was asked:

Do you eat raw fish?

Do you live in teepees?

Is Japan that island off the coast of Africa or somewhere?

Do you guys have gnats? I hate gnats.

Is Hiroshima still in ruins?

I won’t go into the Hiroshima bit. I want to, but I won’t. Instead, I highly recommend a great book, Stephen Walker’s Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.

Cultural Superiority: the American Way

What I will go into, however, is how appalled I was that when I offered a couple of American friends Japanese chocolate candies—and anyone who’s ever had Japanese candy knows that it’s phenomenal—they took one look at the foreign writing on it and said, “I don’t eat furren food.”

This would not be the last time I’d hear something to the effect of, “Why doesn’t the world do things theAmerican way?”

For a few years, I went through an I-hate-American-and-I-can’t-wait-to-graduate phase for this very reason. I found the Americans around me to be self-righteous, self-important, and self-serving. If it wasn’t in English and if it didn’t praise the Lawd or Amurrica (as the two are synonymous to many Americans I know), it was trash.

Cultural Superiority: Not Just the American Way

In 2007, I studied abroad in Europe. My home-stay family lived in northern Italy, where locals spoke more German than Italian. I found that if I spoke Italian to the town baker or gelato man, I got dirty looks. These looks, however, were nothing in comparison to the derision on the faces of Romans to whom I accidentally spoke German. German was the “lesser” language, while Italian was the language of the oppressors.

Similarly, when I visited my family in Japan that same year, I found that if there was a Mandarin-speaking person in a Japanese town, the usually humble and open-minded Japanese turned up their noses and protected their purses. Koreans and southeastern Asians had the same effect on many Japanese I saw.

Not too long ago, a Chinese trawler bumped into a Japanese patrol boat around what the Japanese call the Ryukyu Islands, which they boldly deemed their territory and therefore held the Chinese captain and crew hostage for days before returning them to their country. The history between these countries can’t be discounted—before WWII, Japan defeated Russia, China, and Korea, and the Imperial Army’s conduct there was less than reputable. Post-WWII turf wars aside, China and Japan haven’t been buddy-buddy on anything: China keeps kidnapping Japanese citizens and putting lead in their toothpaste, and many Japanese refuse to admit to the Nanking atrocity. That many Japanese citizens hold deep grudges and prejudices against the Chinese and feel a sense of cultural superiority over them is no exaggeration.

This sounds oddly familiar. Since the colonists’ defeat of the English oh-so-very-long-ago, many Americans can’t stop poking fun at the Brits and Europeans (and the latter can only laugh at American antics). Meanwhile, North American treatment of Latin Americans is beyond abysmal. That racial epithets—most of which I didn’t even know existed before I came to America—can be so blithely dropped in everyday conversation is a point in itself.

The Kamikaze Incident

Bigotry is alive and well, not that it’s news. In September of this year, an American military base employee in Japan ran over an elderly Japanese man going home from his garden plot across the road. He died three hours later. He also happened to be the vice chairman of the anti-base housing coalition, which happened to be having a very important meeting that day with a prominent Japanese official to prevent the nearby military base’s planned expansion. Local Japanese often fall victim to military personnel’s drunken driving and prejudices, ear-splitting and low-flying jets, and the humiliation of living under the thumb of the country that dropped not one but two atomic bombs on them over sixty years ago.

On that base, whispers quickly abounded among American military and civilians: Did he do it on purpose?

What for, how, and why, I might ask?

You know, they used to be kamikaze. . . .

Oh, right. That hugely misunderstood band of brothers who were forced or brain-washed into dying for their lying government and Emperor because if they didn’t, their families would be punished and they’d be sent to a deadly war in the Southeast, anyway. That thing that no one in Japan talks about anymore because it’s ludicrous and horrifying even to them. That thing that’s been falsely linked by the ever-so-fair-and-balanced Fox News to the 9/11 terrorists when in fact the kamikaze never once targeted civilians in a non-combat situation. Oh, yeah. That thing.

But I Don’t Mean to be a Killjoy

Yeah, American prejudices and examples of cultural superiority annoy me more than anyone else’s, I think. That’s my own bigotry. Bigotry is alive and well. Again, it’s not news. You don’t have to look far for it, either. I found it around the world.

The good news in all this? That there are sane people around the world, too, whose kindness knows few, if any, culturally implemented bounds. It was an American who let me cut thirty people in the security line at the Kansai International Airport when I had five minutes before my plane took off. It was a Japanese man that let me charge my camera battery and warm my frosted hands in his sake store in Iwakuni. It was a My Lai massacre survivor who hugged me when I told her that my mother was a Hiroshima victim. It was in Grand Cayman that locals and Americans worked together to shelter and feed abused and stray animals on the island. These are the truths that let me sleep at night.

Bio: Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching various online programs and blogging about student life issues. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

If you understand this sentence, sasuga

A recent blog post by jibtv blogger Anna Kunnecke got me thinking about uniquely Japanese words. Her deconstruction of the word bimyou highlights what is so hard about the Japanese language - that is is full of words that represent abstract ideas. Bimyou is definable, but depending on the context will mean different things. Anna has already written about that word, so I will turn my attention to a different word: sasuga.

Sasuga is one of those words that Japanese ex-pats love to drop when talking with other ex-pats. (One of them even uses it as a clever title for his blog.) It can be an adjective or an adverb, and is defined something along the lines of “clever, adept, good, expectations, as one would expect.” Example dialog: “Did you just see what Gary did!? He climbed that 50-foot fence using only his arms!” “Ooh! Sasuga Gary!”

This use of sasuga would be appropriate if Gary had a penchant for climbing things with only his arms, but had never attempted something as tall as 50 feet. You would expect Gary to top his old record.

Sasuga also carries the connotation that you would not expect anything less of a person, and in this context can be used to create a humorous situation out of a decidedly maladroit action. If you already expected someone to screw up, uttering a sarcastic "Sasuga!" when they do something like this is appropriate.

It’s this dichotomy that makes sasuga a joy to utter and a bane to hear, because the the word can either be praising or belittling, with no audible difference in intonation. You just don’t know. You don’t know if your friend is praising you or veiledly saying, “Surprise surprise, you lived up to what we thought you could do.”

In this way sasuga is brothers (or sisters, if you prefer) with the term atarimae, which means ‘expected’, ‘reasonable’ or ‘blatantly obvious.’ In Tokyo, for instance, it is atarimae that the trains run on time. Knowing the connotations of atarimae is extremely helpful, because if someone does something that is atarimae only to receive a reply of “sasuga,” then it is likely a sarcastic comment.

All this to say that when a foreigner new to the country hears the phrase “sasuga gaijin(foreigner),” they have no way of knowing whether or not it is a complement, because they have not yet learned what is atarimae and what is not. It’s one of those things you have to, as Anna says, take as a quicksilver-kind of word and go with the flow until you can determine the context. And if you figure out the context more quickly than your other gaijin friends, then I have one thing to say.

Sasuga!

_DZ

Dann writes from his home in snowy Minnesota, where sasuga is the correct response to -15F weather.

The Fleeting Value of Professional Sports When Viewed Through The Lens of a Traveller

As a kid, I was a huge sports fan. I watched sports whenever possible, played sports, and talked sports to whoever would listen. During my kindergarten and early elementary years I liked Japanese baseball, and followed teams like the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, Orix Bluewave, Seibu Lions, and Kintetsu Buffaloes with enthusiasm. Unlike in American sports, where a city or state owns a team, Japanese sports are sponsored by companies - the Yomiuri is a major newspaper, Orix is a financial firm, and Kintetsu and Seibu are both railway conglomerates. Sumo was another favorite sport, and for the first two weeks of every other month my family and I would crowd around the TV during the 5-6pm hour to watch the great wrestlers duke it out with one another. Participation in soccer during my later elementary years paved the way for interest in the Japanese soccer league, or J.League for short. Favorite teams included the Yokohama Marinos, Kawasaki Verdy, and Kashima Antlers. Sometimes my private soccer club would play the elementary prep teams of these clubs, who were always formidable opponents.

During this time I also followed American basketball with a passion, the Chicago Bulls being my favorite team to follow. Every morning I would tear through the newspaper to find the sports section and read up on the happenings in the NBA, halfway across the world. If the paper happened to run a picture of MJ, it was a glorious day for my scrapbook.

Card-collecting was another way I was in-touch with sports. I collected baseball, basketball, and occasionally football cards throughout elementary, but only basketball card collection continued throughout middle school. Basketball cards were a way for me to stay close to my American roots, and I took great pride in my collection. A far as I knew, the Japanese card-trading scene was non-existent, and I saw trading cards as a uniquely American thing.

Interest in following sports slowly waned beginning in high school. I still played sports, but just didn’t care about sports as a whole as much. I had other interests, I guess, like music, cars, and computer games. I went to see the occasional game, but as far as memorizing stats and removing newspaper articles, that had ceased.

I had a brief love affair with European football (Arsenal woo!) in the past few years, but for the most part I have avoided following sports too closely. This year I tried to follow the international Formula-1 racing circuit, but lost interest half-way through June.

All this to say, really, that the more I think about it the more I can’t help but opine that following sports with enthusiasm is merely a construct of increased proximity - a mild form of nationalism, as it were. Right now I live in Minnesota, whose Vikings are 9-1. I don’t really care about the Vikings, yet find myself caught up in all the excitement over their new-found success. Come Monday I inevitably wander over to NFL.com to see how they fared the previous weekend. ‘They’re in MY city, and them doing well reflects well on me,’ I poorly rationalize. Why should I care?

If passionately following sports is indeed a mild form of nationalism, then it all seems very silly to me, a third-culture kid. I’ve seen kids crazy about J.League, teens going nuts over the NBA, college kids raving about their favorite English footy team, and adults getting uproariously drunk and high-fiving over a touchdown against those worthless Packers. It’s all the same everywhere. And what difference does caring about sports make, if indeed you’re only excited about the sport because of it’s proximity to your residence? When you move a lot, like I have, it becomes rather tiring to have to start all over again with a new sport or team to match each new city. Teams win, teams lose, and over the long run it seems pretty pointless and of fugitive disposition to get excited over the present state of a team. Equally useless is reminiscing over how good your football team was ‘back in the day’ (pre-2000 for Detroit. Zing.) Are there not better things to spend time on?

Obsessing over a sports team is revealed to be the hollow joy that it is when you confront it a set of eyes that have spent time examining it’s evanescent qualities regardless of the home culture. The only logical choice to make is to either follow sports passionately wherever you are, which quickly becomes exhausting, or to disregard sports almost entirely, by which you risk potential alienation at the water cooler. This is not to say that following sports is bad; sports, all sports, are exciting, electrifying, and, hopefully, God-honoring. But you don't need to follow any kind of team to enjoy it. I simply think that knowing beyond the simple “Yeah the Vikes played Seattle last weekend and won” is not worth it. It is simply too broad a world out there to narrowly focus on one little corner .



_DZ

Jump Rope 2: Jump Harder with a Vengeance

If you were at any time a Japanese elementary school student, it’s practically a given that you can jump rope at a professional level. I am not even joking. Japanese kids can jump rope like it’s their job. The public school system, subsidized by both the government and the jump rope industry, is largely to thank for this, as they make jumping rope a three-month-long mandatory P.E. staple. Prizes are given out to those who can jump rope the longest, resulting in kids jumping in class, starving during lunch, and wetting themselves on a regular basis. Learning to run while jumping rope is an important skill to learn at this stage in development. The highlight (or, for me, the lowlight) of the year is the school-wide competition that marks the end of the jumping season. This is where kids break out their Nike Shox, trash-talk dictionaries, and carbon fiber jump ropes and proceed to double-jump until their arms almost fall off. This routine is repeated ever year, so that the average elementary school graduate has (roughly) over 13,000 hours of jump-roping experience and no rotator cuffs.

Double-jumping, passing the rope beneath your feet twice in one jump, is not an easy task for a foreigner like me to accomplish. I never was able to do it, and this relegated me to 45th string on any and every jump rope team and exposed me to repeated kickings of sand in my face. You see, Japanese kids have refined jumping rope to a surprisingly deep level, complete with many different jumping styles, such as Aya Jumping, alternately crisscrossing your arms with each jump, and Kousa Jumping, in which you keep your arms permanently crossed while you jump. At the higher levels both of these techniques are combined with double-jumping, resulting in a whirr of activity that turns a cord of nylon into carbon-hardened steel and a mere elementary school child into its martial arts master, no doubt employable at a thousand different sushi restaurants nation wide. I, meanwhile, was off in the corner, spitting out sand and trying to synchronize my body so that both feet lifted off the ground at the same time.

For those less inclined to individual competition, jumping rope could be turned into a group exercise through utilization of the O-nawa, or large rope. This rope, held by one person on each end, was rotated slowly, the goal being to see how many kids could hop in and synchronously jump. I, of course, was still working on my coordination so I usually was relegated to be a holder, since I was tall for my age and could move my arm in a more or less consistent circular motion.



Japan, however, wastes this potentially profitable natural resource, as once the Japanese student graduates elementary, jumping rope is never spoken of again. It is treated as a stage in life that one must go through and then move on, much like soccer is considered in the US. It’s something that, regardless of how good you get at it, you must discard it and grow up. This means that now is the prime time in my life to get good at it, so I can reclaim some lost dignity from my youth. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some Shox to buy and some sand to kick.




Dann writes from his home in Minnesota where, unfortunately, his mediocre rope-jumping skills are his main way of keeping warm.

In Which I Write 3000 Words About My International Peer Groups

We all know what the word “peer” means. Our teachers and parents use it often. We hear the terms “peer pressure” and “peer review” and know how to react. There's usually no question who our peers are - they are the people around us in our age group. Everyone is your second grade class is your peer, but not every second grader in your county. Second graders in France are not your peers, unless you’re a French second-grader.

It is these people (peers, not the French) who have the most influence over us as we grow up, exhibited linearly in grade school and then exponentially in high school. Our peers influence what we wear, how we talk, and what music we listen to. We know where we fit in amongst them; who’s cooler than whom. It is painfully obvious who fits in and who doesn’t, but we certainly don’t imagine that there are people who don’t feel that they belong in the peer group. Of course everyone is included, the logic goes. We say you are one of us, so you are. We compare ourselves to you, so you have to do the same.

Yet as a missionary kid growing up in Japan, I never felt I belonged in a set peer group. I was never purveyed that acceptance. My situation, though, is rather unique in that I had a few different groups from which to choose as my peers.

At an early age I was whisked off to Japan - a white missionary kid in an Asian country. I had three potential groups to choose from: white kids, Japanese kids, and missionary kids (MKs). All three of these groups seem equally large when you’re a missionary kid, though that idea of course seems silly now.

The straight-forward choice is that I should have decided to fit in with the Japanese kids. After all, I spent almost all of my elementary school years in Japan, going to both Japanese kindergarten and public elementary school. They were my classmates - my peers. I spoke their language. This was really the best choice, but I didn’t take it for reasons explained later.

The worst choice was to consider the white kids in America as my peers. Even though they looked like me, I only saw them once every four years due to the missionary home assignment cycle, and kids change a lot in four years. Yet this was half of my peer group. See, I had the unfortunate lot of being born in June. American schools run the school year Sept-May, so people born over the summer, myself included, are tacked on at the end as the youngest in the class. Japanese school, however, runs April-March, meaning that kids with June birthdays are some of the oldest in the class. That was also me. The result was that, because of my family’s moving schedule, I enrolled in American first grade, completed seven months, and then enrolled in Japanese first grade. (The later result of this is that I only attended two months of fifth grade, but that is irrelevant.)

If I had not taken Japanese first grade, I think I may have adjusted to the Japanese as my peers. My parents would have explained that I was a big second grader now and that is what second grade was, like how the Japanese did it. I would have accepted that and everything would have been fine. The problem was, I had my American first grade experience to compare to this new Japanese first grade, and I liked the American one much, much better. I knew the kids there looked like me and that I fit in with them. American kids were cool and played with cool toys. Japan, I soon thought, was the opposite of cool. I had to speak a different language. Kids at my school, kids who played with less-cool toys*, all pointed and giggled at the little blond kid. Hence, pretty much my entire Japanese elementary career was spent comparing the “crappy Japanese system” to my “utopian American experience”. Very early on I forged a massive superiority complex; I saw myself as a super-gifted and special kid forced to live in a system that was so far below him it wasn’t funny. Since I saw myself this way, it was only natural that I developed a feeling of learned helplessness. I was stuck; I wanted the American kids as my peers, but they were no longer around.

I tried to deal with this by finding other white kids around me, other missionary kids, and using them as the other half of my peer group. The problems with this were that A) I only saw them a few times a year and B) I didn’t confine my peers to my age group. As long as they were missionary kids, I saw them as peers. As stated earlier, our peers influence how we behave as we grow and mature. My cues as to how to act, dress, and talk, then, came from two sources - my memories of my “peers” in America, and my fellow missionary kids whom I saw but a few times per year. With these two groups largely absent, I spent a lot of my elementary years alone.

Since a good chunk of peer interaction is comparison on a daily basis, and I didn’t have that, I saw myself as constantly behind the times. Every time I hung out with missionary kids they had newer, cooler shoes or were throwing around a new slang buzzword that I didn’t know. I was constantly playing catch-up, which only added to the frustration of being stuck in Japanese school. Not only was I stuck at school with kids who weren’t my peers, but I was on the low side of cool every time I was with kids who were. Older MKs got to do stuff that I could not, and I would look at that as my failure to meet some universal standard of cool rather than just, you know, because I was younger.

This inability to consistently engage with people I considered peers cultivated my belief that what was important was owning things that cool kids had. In order to be cool, you had to have what the cool kids had and dress the way they did. It never occurred to me that they were probably just as insecure as I was, or that they were influenced by others as to how to dress or act.

I’ll acknowledge here, then, that, yes, I was completely unaware that experiences I had were not universal. I grew up thinking that I had a super-vanilla, mega-boring life, and that every other MK got to have way more fun then I did, all the time. It didn’t occur to me that I had had experiences that others would envy. I assumed that every MK had everything I did, plus more. So thus, I was determined to make up that difference. This obviously never happened, because we can’t all have the same life experiences.

With sixth grade came the rotation of one year in America, and I was anxious to get back to my “real friends” and my “authentic” peer group. I was enrolled in a private Christian school full of kids who looked like me - the same kids whom I had learned with as a first-grader. I had a lot of catching up to do, but that was the easy part - I just had to buy (or get my parents to buy) the right stuff. Having my own interests took a backseat to what I thought would make me cool. Soon my room was full of basketball gear and apparel, street hockey equipment, Tech Decks, Beanie Babies, a portable CD player, sports trading cards, Hot Wheels cars, and vintage American coinage. From a fridge full of Gatorade to Atomic Warheads in my mouth and Lee Pipes on my legs, if I thought it would make me more American, I wanted it. Though this strategy would prove to fail as a long-term strategy in the near future, that failure was not something that my sixth-grade self had to face, because I moved back to Japan after a year.

The four years between ages twelve to sixteen, my family’s third term in Japan, marked what I like to call the Span Of Floundering and Alienation, or SOFA for short. Seventh grade was the year that I was enrolled at the Christian Academy in Japan (CAJ), a school for missionary kids - a school of, that’s right, my peers. I had gone for twelve years without a set peer group, and now I had one with which I had to interact every single day. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know how to act on a daily basis around kids whom I knew to be exactly like me. I was white, spoke two languages, had lived in two countries, had lived in the Japanese system and had educated parents, just like most of them. I couldn’t use the excuse of being white (as I did in suburban Japan) or the excuse of being a missionary kid (as I did in the US) to explain why I did things my way to these CAJ kids, and buying stuff alone wasn’t going to get me accepted into their group. I had to learn how to interact with a peer group, my peer group, in a dynamic, flowing, relational way. I never thought that I could be part of such an intimate peer group and all of a sudden I realized I could be, if I could only figure out the cryptic rite of passage. The SOFA was marked by my consistent failure to do so.

Why was this so hard for me to do? A small part of it was, no doubt, my lack of access to unlimited money with which to buy my acceptance. Another (less tongue-in-cheek) part of it was that a large part of my class had grown up together through elementary school, and it’s always hard for an outsider to break into a close-knit group. The biggest and most glaring problem, though, was that I was a teenager who didn’t really know how to make friends. In America I had made friends with the children of my mom’s friends, or with kids who had wanted to hang out with the “kid from Japan.” I had kids practically lining up to talk to me, and could pick and choose those to whom I would grant my friendship. In Japanese school I was pretty much a loner who made a different new best** friend every year, though I think they may have befriended me out of pity. I had four, maybe five kids who I enjoyed hanging out with and would rotate among them every few months.† The missionary kids I hung out with I saw as friends by default - their camaraderie not unlike that enjoyed by prisoners of war.

Seventh and eight grade were the years when my superiority complex was destroyed. I realized that I wasn’t some superkid who everyone wanted to hang out with. I had to earn my place in the peer group. I wasn’t some, as Tyler Durden puts it, “beautiful and unique snowflake.” I was floundering. I had to find my niche, my talent that set me apart. Most of those two years was spent by myself, trying to make myself special, and I tried a lot of things. I wrote for the middle school paper, ran for student government, and acted in plays. I taught myself some BASIC programming and spent countless hours learning my way around the Internet, Windows 98, and Mac OS. I played soccer, basketball, ran track, and wrestled. I wore skate shoes, rode a Razor scooter, sagged my jeans and backpack, and used adult language with increasing frequency. None of that seemed to matter, though, because I still didn’t watch the right movies, listen to the right music, own an MD player, wear the right clothes, or get invited to any sleepovers. I wasn’t popular with girls.†† I wasn’t cool.

Ninth and tenth grades, the later half of my SOFA, were less tough times because I had, in effect, lapsed back into helplessness and resolved that I wouldn’t be able to weasel my way in with my peers. I had to look out for myself and find my own friends. The few close friends I made happened to be those who also, for various reasons, didn’t conform with the normal social peer group. We were the rebels, I suppose - the fringe participants. I was still active in sports and extra-curricular activities, though most of the time spent outside those was spent alone. I had a girlfriend‡, but she dumped me after a month. I cared less about school and more about computer games. I slowly gave up on trying to buy stuff to fit in. I listened to my own music and read my own books. Looking back now, I see that I still had suppressed resentment over being in Japan, because I remember eagerly anticipating the move back to America for my junior year of high school.

Junior year brought with it two revelations: that I was an emotionally stunted person (surprise!) and that I was much less rooted in America then I had led myself to believe. My emotional state was a result of the previous two years, during which I had idealized the military and its lifestyle. Basically I believed that showing emotion was a sign of weakness, a sign of being out of control. My subconscious helplessness that showed signs of bubbling up was suppressed by feeling that I could be in control of my feelings. Since emotion is something you have to cultivate, suppressing it for long enough will diminish your overall ability to feel it, and the early signs of that stage were beginning to manifest in my daily demeanor.

My parents sent me to counseling for it, which I thought was weak but went anyway. After a few sessions my counselor was seriously considering putting me on medication, but I eventually started opening up to him. It was actually an extraordinarily pleasant experience, and now I believe that everyone should have at least three months of counseling. It didn’t help, though, with fitting in with my peers.

Going to high school in America made me realize that there were indeed many aspects of my life that kids with no overseas experience could simply not understand. Many of my habits, mannerisms, and ways of thinking were notably different. Being in America made me realize that I could not refer to myself as “American” as a way to validate my actions. I had to accept that I was, most likely, more Japanese than American.

This I accepted, and my senior year back in Japan was marked by a time of personal growth as a self-confident person. I thought I knew where I fit in in the world and therefore was comfortable with myself. Looking back, I think I was fooling myself and just hiding behind my girlfriend. I had a steady girlfriend during the entire year, a cute Asian a year younger than me, and she was my life. We were together all the time, which meant that I didn’t have to worry about interacting with my peers to gain validation. I had her, and she thought I was awesome. I ignored my peer group, life seemed good, and I proceeded to end high school.

I wish I could say that this story has a happy ending, but it really doesn’t. I still struggle to be comfortable around people my own age. My SOFA mentality still bugs me. I’m fine around kids even one year younger or older than I am, but if someone graduated high school in 2005 like I did, they should prepare for me to feel awkward and inferior around them for no real reason. It’s pretty frustrating that I still feel this way.

So what do I think could have made a difference? Not repeating a grade might have helped. That was where I got the superiority complex and accompanying helplessness. Not being enrolled in a private bubble school in America might have helped. It was there where I had kids line up to interact with me. Those might have been things my parents could have changed. But what could I have changed? I could have not used my skin color (in Japan) or my international experience (elsewhere) to excuse myself. I could have faced the challenges that I chose to ignore or maybe completed my senior year alone in order to grow more. But I didn’t. But you know what? That’s OK, because I got through it and am able to look back on it and learn from it now. I don’t have any regrets, because having regrets means that I’m not comfortable with who I am now, and that’s not true. I write my experiences down so that others, so that you, can learn from them and perhaps find meaning in some experiences in your own life that you have missed until now. The journey is long, and you shouldn’t have to walk it alone.




*This part I suppose I can blame on my parents, who never really let me indulge in the fad-oriented Japanese youth culture. I never had a NES, SNES, N64, Tamagotchi, Digimon, battle pencils, or a battery-operated plastic train set. I never played Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh, never watched Dragonball, Ultraman, Power Rangers, Kamen-Rider, or any animated television series, and never read a single manga series while in elementary. In general, I never watched Japanese TV, and thus was left out of the hype surrounding the newest toys. To this day, I can’t recall a single Japanese toy commercial. To be fair, though, I did have Mini Yonkus, a few hyper-yo-yos, and a ton of LEGOs.

**Or “only” - whichever you prefer.

†Three, if you only count full names that I can remember. Kobayashi Akihiro, Yoshino Yuya, and Nakao Soutaro.

††This is probably still true.

‡She was Japanese, attended a different international school and was a grade younger than I. I did not see her as a peer.


_DZ

Multicultural Stereotypes and Politically Incorrect Adolescents

Growing up in a multicultural environment, amidst people with unique backgrounds and varying cultural norms, means that one gets to experience relationships with a myriad of individuals. Most of us grow up among people who look like them and act like they do, and more or less live lives homogenous with those on their same city block. For others, myself included, how we look and act are not necessarily tied with that same bond of cultural peer pressure. The main lesson you learn from a multicultural experience is that people are much more complicated than they look.

I spent my high school years at CAJ, an international school filled with caucasian Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, South-East Asians, Indians, Aussies, Norwegians, and kids from various African countries. Despite our differences, such as whether we had parents who spoke English or not, we had a few things in common - for one, we lived in Japan and spoke English. Most of us spoke more than one language, and conversation that seamlessly integrated multiple languages was commonplace.

Most of us had also spent significant time in another country. Depending on the years spent in which country, the development of a classmate might gravitate towards a culture different from the Japanese culture in which we were all currently immersed. In other words, you couldn’t tell how a classmate was going to talk or act based on how they looked. You had to, at least briefly, interact with them to see what they were about.

For example, a minority on the campus were the American kids who only spoke English. They (probably) had American parents, spoke English fluently, and went out of their way to stay that way. This meant not taking Japanese language courses, eating only American food, paying for American cable television, etc. As a minority they no doubt felt a little self-conscious, as they were often excluded from the bilingual chatter that dominated the international school scene.

These kids were the rare exception where outward appearance meshed with their general behavior - how they talked, acted, dressed, etc. More common were the kids who had mixed identities, or who acted like they belonged in a culture even if they didn’t look the part. People are, of course, much more complicated than one-word labels, but adolescents, given the chance to create labels for each other, will inevitably do so. The following chart attempts to document the labels that I heard during my years as an international school student in Japan.

What You Were on the Outside vs. What You Were on the Inside

Some of these labels are humorous, others possibly offensive, and others might be just plain dumb. Why they are based on food, I don’t know. Most of them are blatant stereotypes but, as the old adage goes, stereotypes are created to mimic reality. And indeed, even in my small social circle, there were individuals who fit these descriptions to a T.

There were the Asian kids who listened to hip-hop and dressed in Phat Farm or FUBU, or the white kids, the Eggs, who spoke mainly in Japanese and followed anime and manga. CAJ, a school founded for missionary kids, was the cheapest international high school in Tokyo, thus spawning the division of Japanese kids, the business kids, whose parents might have cared less about the religious element of the school but still wanted them to have an English education.

My presentation of a neat chart like the one above obviously begs the question, “So, which one are you?” Like most people, I don’t think I fit neatly into one category. I think I’m somewhere in between American and Egg. Being an Egg was something I grew out of as I aged, and the longer I am away from Japan, the less egg-y I get. It’s not a permanent condition, though. Put me with a few other Eggs or a couple of Twinkies and I’ll be right back into it.

_DZ

A Tribute to The Missionary Van

Jesus tells his apostles in John 13 that, “the world will know you are my disciples by your love.” In the case of missionaries, the world will also know who you are by what you drive. Every mission field has its own missionary car - in African countries it may be a jeep, in Europe perhaps a pickup truck, but, in Japan, it is the missionary van.

When you’re a missionary kid in Japan, your family drives a van. There is no getting around this. And it’s not one of those cool vans, like the dubbers have in which they cruise the downtown. No, it’s one step away from a painters van. It’s like a grey metal bucket with seats. It will get you no girls. It is a Missionary Van.




We really couldn’t complain, though, because the vans were provided, insured and maintained by our respective missions. Plus, when you’re a missionary you’re always transporting people, a purpose at which such vans excel.

Nonetheless, we kids in the mid-‘nineties were dedicated to promoting our vans like they were our pets. We were always comparing vans, highlighting their features, praising their virtues, and trash-talking each others rides. Things could get crazy and kind of heated.

Kid A: “Dudes, my van is so cool. It seats eight and can fit three suitcases in the back!”

Kid B: “Man, but yours has a jumpseat. That’s so lame. My van has a full front bench seat and can fit seven comfortably. Plus it has sliding doors on both sides.”

Kid A: “Dual doors may be cool, but a jumpseat means that you can like flip the front seat around and face each other and play games and stuff!”

Kid B: “Yeah, and be riding backwards and barf! Your family has a barfmobile! Hah! PLUS my van has leather.”

Kid A: “Nuh-uh! No one barfs in my car! And leather is stupid. It gets too hot.”

Kid C: “Guys, both your vans are lame because they run on gas. My family’s runs on diesel, and diesel is awesome.

Kid A: “What’s diesel?”

Kid C: “It’s cheaper.”

Kid A: “Why is it cheaper?”

Kid C: “Because it’s BETTER.”

Kid B: “Really? What does it do?”

Kid C: “I don’t know, but my dad says that it is better. My van also has an automatic transmission.”

Kid A: “Man, your dad doesn’t know anything. And your van is a dumb color and seats six.”

Kid C: “Well at least my van doesn’t have stupid STRIPES all along the side of it! Hah!”

Kid A & B: “Stripes are dope.”

Kid C: “Oh, and two words. Sun. Roof.”

Kid A: “Sunroof is one word.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Yah-huh!”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Yah-huh!”

Sunroof or no sunroof, these vans had very few worthwhile features to highlight. Like I said before though, they were functional - they moved people and cargo efficiently. Now that we’re older, missionary kids still have fond memories of their vans growing up, and it’s one of many points of solidarity that they can share with other missionary kids. My family went through (I think) three vans while I was growing up, each one a little better than the one before it. This influence may even be part of why my current vehicle is a van. I have a soft spot for vans, even if mine never did have dual sliding doors.




Dann writes from his home in Minnesota, where, in a nearby parking lot, sits his van that can seat three legally and (at least) ten illegally.

Regret, Insecurity, and Buying Girl Shoes

In his book The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz notes how human beings hate to recognize taking personal losses. He points out that, in fact, we hate to lose so much that we often resort to irrational behavior to offset the psychological distress suffered when we experience a loss. He illustrates this point with a story about buying a nice sweater, only to discover later that it didn’t fit as well as he thought. He kept the sweater in his closet for months on end, despite his unwillingness to wear it, unable to part with it because it had been expensive. I laughed at the story. Haven’t we all had moments like that in our lives?

The most memorable example in my history was when I was in eighth grade. It was around the turn of the millennium, when every middle school boy who was “cool” owned a pair of skate shoes, regardless of whether or not he actually owned a board. At least in my view it seemed that way. I desperately wanted to be cool, and I saw skate shoes as my ticket to the good life of being invited to video game parties, being in on in-jokes, and extensive communication rights with eighth-grade girls. But first, I had to convince my mom that I actually needed the shoes.

American skate shoes -they had to be Vans, in my case- were usually imported to Japan and, as a result, were not cheap. Up until then the most my mom had ever spent on shoes for me was ¥7110, for my first pair of ASICS soccer cleats. A pair of Vans typically went for ¥9500+, so clearly I had a lot of begging and pleading to do.

After a lot of searching and plenty of skeptical looks from my mom, I succeeded in convincing her to purchase me a pair of uni-sex Vans for ¥7800. I nearly died of anticipation over the weekend because I couldn’t wait to wear my new Vans to school the next Monday.

I strolled into first period like I had just stepped out of a Rolls at the curb, cooly deposited myself into a seat in the back of the room. I sat there with a huge grin on my face, and everything was good until Andrew turned around and saw me. Andrew wore skate shoes AND actually skated, and to me was the epitome of eighth grade “cool”. He had already pretty much reached his adult size by seventh grade, excelled in sports, and had no shortage of girls who wanted to talk to him. He took one look at my Vans and snickered, “Hey, you know those are girls shoes, right?”

“No they’re not,” I retorted, “They’re both.”

He looked at me like I had just told him that Thailand was in Europe.

“No dude, they’re girls shoes. You’re wearing girl shoes.”

And then he laughed. I shrunk down in my chair, completely mortified. Regardless of whether or not they actually were “girl shoes,” the fact that who I thought was the coolest guy in my class thought that they were girl shoes meant that they were. And if I continued to wear them, everyone else would soon also know that I wore girl shoes. I was wearing girl shoes. My weekend quest to find the perfect shoes had resulted in girl shoes.

I walked around school for the rest of they day wishing that I wouldn’t walk. Wishing that I could innocently tread over a land mine that some malicious soul had placed under the hallway carpet. At least if I was in a wheelchair, I wouldn’t have to worry about people making fun of my shoes.

The school day couldn’t seem to end soon enough. As soon as the last bell rang I sprinted home -a twenty-second dash, as I lived in the school dorm at the time- to change back in to my familiar, worn Wal-Mart sneakers. The Vans were thrown on shelf and sat there for most of the year, shunned during my attempt to slowly recover from the psychological loss. After all, they were the most expensive shoes I owned! I couldn’t just get rid of them!

I finally screwed up enough courage to part with them and gave them to a girl who was a year younger than me who also lived in the dorm. To this day I haven’t bought a pair of shoes that were even close to the price of those Vans.

So what about you, dear reader? Do you have any such stories in which you held onto something expensive that you never used out of fear of the guilt that you would feel of you ever did get rid of it? Did you eventually do so? Or do you still own it? I want to hear your stories!



_DZ

The Combini and Filling Station as Unique Aspects of Culture

When was the last time you wanted a snack or a drink really suddenly, or forgot you needed an extra pack of cigarettes? What did you do? Chances are, if you were in the neighborhood of a convenient store, you drove or walked over there to get what you needed. Once inside, maybe you realized you needed some other things too, like milk, bread, or cough drops. You bought the items, and walked outside. Now, if you had driven there, you might decide that you also needed some gas, and took the opportunity to fill up. You have just had a uniquely suburban American experience.

Because the expansion of the suburban US was based around the automobile and, subsequently, the highway, gas stations and convenient stores have mostly evolved as one and the same. It seems natural to be able to stop by the gas station on the way home if you suddenly realize you need bread or some other grocery item. The separation of the convenient store and the gas station is seen only in very urban areas, at least in America. In other cultures, in this case I will highlight Japanese culture, it is not always the case.


Take a look at this picture. This is a Casey’s General Store, a chain prevalent in the upper midwest United States despite its name being best said in a Southern drawl. It is in a suburban neighborhood, as evident by the houses around it. It is not stranded on some highway exit oasis. It has a few gas pumps, and inside you will likely find fresh pots of coffee, donuts, coolers full of soda pop, bags of chips, and beef jerky, among many other things. The store will probably stock some basic automotive items, such as motor oil and air fresheners, and along one window will be a magazine rack, filled with glossy periodicals. Behind the counter you will also probably find cigarettes and in the back cooler, depending on the state, there will be alcohol. In short, it seems to be a typical American convenient store. I imagine that the store follows the formula typical of just about any so-called “convenient store” around the globe. But why the gas pumps? Why is shopping for goods and gassing your car associated with one another? Because of America’s fondness for the automobile and the prevalence of it in the expansion of suburban American life across the continent.

Japan is a nation that loves its cars. They are very good at making them, as evidenced by the availability of Mazdas, Toyotas, Hondas, and Nissans, etc, all around the world. But cars came to Japan after the country was already entirely settled. Cars were a luxury; a way of getting from Point A to Point B more quickly as opposed to exploring a brand-new Point C. As such, the homogeneity that convenient stores have with gas station in the US did not play out the same way as it did in Japan. Indeed, convenient stores and gas station in japan are two entirely separate businesses. Popular convenient store, or combini, brands in Japan such as 7-Eleven, Lawson, FamilyMart, AM/PM, Sunkus and MiniStop have nothing to with selling gasoline, instead leaving that to well-known petrol brands such as Shell, Jomo, Esso, Eneos, and Cosmo. These filling stations almost always have garages and car-washes attached to them as well. They are also the hubs of the local automotive culture. Hot-rodders congregate at the local gas stations late at night, admiring one anothers’ cars, and full-service attendants will pump your gas, wash your windows, and empty your cars ashtray with a smile. A Japanese gas station will occasionally have a restroom or vending machine inside, but not much else. Certainly not food.

Combinis, on the other hand, are always stocked with a wealth of foods, drinks (both hard and soft), cigarettes, magazines, and household items. Most will even stock toys and video games and will let you pay your cellphone and utility bills! These goods and services are almost never found in American convenient stores. There are a few other notable differences as well.

• Combinis do not have fountain drinks. This is indicative of Japan in general, actually, where free-refill-type fountain drinks are rarely found.
• Also related to drinks, combinis do not have fresh coffee. Japan seems to have cornered the market on canned coffee (though the legitimacy of actual competition in this market is debatable), and most coffee in Japan is thus sold in a can.
• Japan in general is not a big consumer of beef jerky. While in any American gas station one can be expected to be confronted with a wall of dried beef as soon as they enter the store, this is not the case in a combini.
• Apart from a delicious dish called oden, very little food in a combini is what Americans would consider “fresh”. While it’s true that most food in a combini is encased in plastic, it does taste surprisingly fresh once removed and eaten. I attribute this to the ease of transport across Japan (though I mean mainly Tokyo and other cities here). Food is able to to be moved quickly, allowing for fresher food on the combini shelves. It is wrapped in plastic because, well, let’s face it, nearly everything in Japan comes wrapped in plastic.
• Lottery is handled by a separate system in Japan, and combinis do not sell lotto tickets.
• Despite having bottled soft drinks in the store, most combinis will have vending machines right outside the door selling the exact same things! Not only do Japanese vending machines sell drinks, but also tobacco and alcohol as well. It is truly curious to see vending machines right outside of the stores.

While it s no secret that frameworks of commerce in countries reflect the lifestyles of its people, I find it really interesting to compare the cultural differences evident when contrasting the American filling station and convenient store with the Japanese combini and gas station. Japan clearly was a nation where the combini came first and cemented itself as the go-to spot for spur-of-the-moment groceries and other goods, while the gas stations sprung up later to cater solely to the automotive needs and demands of a growing economy. In America, however, the growth was synergic, resulting is brands like BP, Casey’s General Store, WaWa, and Texaco that have a good deal of food and home products for the man or woman on the go. Such contrasts are beautiful examples of diversity in this increasingly connected world, and should be enjoyed and treasured.






_DZ

The Explanation of "1+1=田 "

I suppose it is high time I explained the former header of this website. The title is just one of many elements that reinforce the an overarching theme of things not being as they initially appear - not as they seem on the surface. As a missionary kid, I often feel that people I meet label me for their own convenience. It is there way of interpreting me - by sticking me in a neat “third-culture kid” box. I feel that this is a gross oversimplification, and in doing so actively work to defy such labels. I work to stay unclassifiable, and an innocent, seemingly nonsensical equation, 1+1=田, exemplifies this in a multicultural context.

At first glance the equation just looks like a simple first-grade math problem with a Japanese kanji character tacked on the end. This problem, though, not only makes sense to every Japanese elementary schoolchild, but it also makes them laugh. The equation, once explained, is trivially simple and is a practical joke that is played on any unsuspecting first-grade classmate. All it really is is just smashing the 1+1 together and then splitting the equals sign so it rests above and below it, resulting in the Japanese character for rice paddy, read “ta”. This character, easily identified because it actually looks like a real rice paddy, is one of the very first kanji that Japanese children learn in school. In practice, the riddle looks something like this:

“What’s 1+1?” one child will ask another.
“Two,” the second dutifully replies.
“Wrong!” the riddler gleefully announces, “It’s actually 田!”

The victim is left to solemnly ponder his stupidity and newfound knowledge. Should the victim already be wise to the “田” answer, the riddler can still outsmart him or her my claiming that the correct answer is found by smashing the two numbers together, or 11. In extreme cases, the riddler resorts to using the “correct” answer, two, as the right response to the riddle. This results in much laughter and spreading of rumors among the class that Little Jimmy doesn’t even know that 1+1=2. How stupid is HE!?

Yes, kids can be cruel, but by the second semester any joker still stupid enough to pop the question is met with a scornful look and a bored, rapid-fire answer of “2, 11, or 田.” Something simple becomes annoyingly complex.

Growing up in Japan as a white, blond, foreigner, I was the subject of many such pranks, and usually the last one in the class to catch on to the tricks and gimmicks going around. Allow me to give another example.

The game of rock-paper-scissors is universally accepted by the Japanese kids as the de facto way to settle disputes. Since most elementary school disputes involve people not getting what they want, in order for one to get what they want it is essential to master the psychological aspect behind the game. Jan-ken, as it is called in Japanese, is used in everything from playground games to serious rug-rat judicial processes.

When it is played as a game is when the kids are free to be the most creative with it. Normal jan-ken involves three hand positions - fist, palm, or two fingers out. This gets boring rather quickly when played repetitively, causing the initiator of the match to use some creative juices to turn a simple game into a complex question-and-answer exercise. Consider the following:

Kid 1: “Hey, let’s jan-ken.
Kid 2: “Ok.”
Kid 1: “Jan, ken, poi!”

This is standard procedure, equal to the American “rock, paper, scissors, shoot!”

Kid 1: ”I win! Let’s play again.”
Kid 2: ”Ok. No prisoners this time!”
Kid 3: "Go for broke!"
Kid 1: “Jan, ken, how-many-hairs-do-you-have-on-your-head?” (said in Japanese, of course)

Kid 2, in a grievous effort, has extended a closed fist.

Kid 1 and 3: “Haha! You’re saying you have no hair! What are you, BALD? Baldy baldy baldy ha-ha-haha-ha!”

Kid 2 walks away, sullenly, dejected.

The appropriate response in this situation would have been to vigorously shake both hands and have your fingers simulate a considerable amount of hair. A display of an open palm, paper, would also be acceptable, but only barely. In this way, school-kids keep adding questions that require specialized hand gesture to answer. This can lead to some amusing but incredibly demoralizing mistakes, such as when one gives the hair-on-the-head response to the newly conceived how-many-porno-mags-do-you-own question. This might indeed be the playground jungle at its cruelest.

All that to say that not everything is a s simple as it appears to be - not everything can fit neatly into a box. To extend that personally, not every missionary kid grew up in an alien land ignorant of cable T.V. or pogs. “1+1= 田” goes to show that every person is much more complicated then first impressions make them out to be. Not only might they not be normal, but they might even defy your “normal” expectations of someone radically different. Just because I grew up in a different culture doesn’t mean that I will look normal through everyone’s kid-raised-in-Japan lens. I can recognize this about myself, and I hope to make it a lifelong ambition to recognize it in others as well.





_DZ