02.25.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:06 pm by Max
Like a lot of things in life, entries on this blog seem to come in waves.
It’s Monday night here in Japan now. My wife and kids came over to Utsunomiya on Saturday afternoon and spent the weekend with me. It was fantastic to be with my kids again, absolutely great. And it is so much work taking care of two toddling boys, one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever done. I forgot how wild they can get, what with their being away a lot of the time. Mickey busied himself peeling an onion and then unceremoniously tossed it on the floor, giving it a big dent. “Oh no-o-o!” I whined, picked up the onion and cooing to it in a singsong voice. “Mickey hurt you, poor onion; Mickey is scary, Mickey is a bad boy.” All the while Mickey had a mischevious grin on his face. A little after that Mickey took a plastic knife and lacerated the skin of a yet unripened kiwi, after which I coddled that fruit and put on the same sympathy show.
Here are more photos from (I think) October of last year. There are 53 photos in this set. Not all the photos are that great, but my main criterion here is eliminating the obviously really bad photos, such as blurry shots. If I only show the best shots I risk presenting a narrower record of our memories.
Permalink
02.24.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:24 pm by Max
Here are some photos from, ahem! last October. Well, I’m slow but at least I try. There are 40 photos in this series, so I must issue a word of warning to the connection-speed impaired.
Plus, here’s a pic of a rather thuggish diaper company: nappies for hoodlums in training.
Permalink
02.21.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:18 pm by Max
Now that I’ve decided I won’t be living on/in this island nation forever, I’m starting to find more and more things wrong with it.
Especially so when it comes to the Japanese mentality. Tonight at the supermarket I asked someone on staff to tell me the ingredients of the croissants from the bakery (there was no label). Point being, I don’t want to ingest trans fats if I can help it. The woman just kept repeating over and over, “The bakery is closed and they have gone home.” “Yes,” I responded, “I am aware of that but couldn’t you just walk into the kitchen and check the ingredients book? I’m sure there’s a book like that there.” She just couldn’t deal with it, refused to deal with it, could not envision stepping out of her own narrow, defined area of responsibility. She couldn’t even think of calling the manager. I was probably a little harsh with her, which was unfair of me because, she being Japanese, I knew she would remain polite despite my rudeness. I wasn’t really rude, I used polite language, but I was rather forceful. And I couldn’t help finishing with a little lecture, saying, “It would be nice if you could give customers the information they need when they come to your store.” She just apologized and went back to work, but I can imagine how pissed off a worker in an American supermarket might have been if I had lectured him or her. Yes, I can be an asshole. I wouldn’t have given that lecture back home, because I know they would care even less over there.
This is unfair of me. But I think it’s also human nature. (Remember earlier on this blog how I ranted against Canada, saying Japan was my home for life?) We humans are wonderful at justifying our own actions. Did Hitler or Stalin regret any of the carnage they caused? No-o-o.
Anyway, I have a history of making impulsive decisions so I’m giving myself many months to save up money here and get ready to go back. (Quick note to doubtful self: does setting a long timeline for a decision make that decision any less impulsive or emotion-driven? Well, there’s nothing wrong about having emotional reasons for wanting to go back, but my reasons should be sound and not based on the heat of the moment. Basically, something’s changed inside me and I don’t think I could be happy here anymore. We’ll get into this heading back home thing later.)
My kids are learning Japanese apace. I find myself getting frustrated with the fact that their Japanese is so good and their English so poor in comparison, but such a result is entirely unavoidable given the circumstances (I can only see them for two days this week). It’s funny with me, I’m always looking for issues. Especially language issues. In Korea I got pissed off that people wanted to speak English to me even when their English was not as good as my Korean. When I first came to Japan, I got annoyed at the Japanese staff because of the way they always mixed Japanese and English, “You know where this place is, deshou? [right?]”
Me and my issues. The kids will learn English eventually. Shiho seems OK right now about an eventual move. I hope she doesn’t change her mind in a year or so. And I especially hope her parents are not against the move—that would cause her to become very conflicted and maybe feel she had to choose between me and them. But it all comes down to a simple fact: are her parents willing to take care of her and the children and pay for everything down the line? If not, it’s really not much of their business where I relocated my family.
Now for some notes about kids at school.
At kindergarten on Tuesday, kids were asking me questions (in Japanese) like “How do you say bouru in English?” and “How do you say painappuru in English?”, not realizing of course that “ball” and “pineapple” are English words.
Today I also talked with a couple four-year-old girls briefly. They kept calling me “Unko Sensei” (Poo Teacher), to which I retorted in similar name-calling fashion, “Then you are Oshikko Sensei” (Pee Teacher), to which one girl (the bolder of the two) then replied, “Geppu Sensei” (Burp Teacher) and followed through on her little character smear with an artificially induced belch.
I remember how the Grade 1 girls (and some boys) I teach writing to love to give and get a hug, but when these same students enter Grade 2, the hugs usually dry up. “No more of that!” the kids’ bodies seem to be saying. Today I was teaching Nao Ichiyanagi, a Grade 4 girl, and she was talking about having stress. “Stress?!” I blurted. “You’re in Grade 4! You won’t know stress until you’re an adult.” Of course that patronising remark was not true, considering all the stress teenagers here suffer due to exams. Yeah, I really don’t want my kids to grow up in a rote-learning educational system.
Well, I wanted to clean up, cook, and work out tomorrow, all before classes begin at 2:30. Let’s see if I can do that. Will write more another time and thanks for reading.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:48 pm by Max
I have a lot of thoughts that I wanted to share on my blog tonight. But at the same time, being here at home by myself, alone, all by my little lonesome, part of me just wants to sit in front of the computer and be catatonic. There’s cleaning up to do but I haven’t done it. There’s cooking to do. I just bought some ground beef (actually ground pork mixed with ground beef—more often than not the closest you can get to ground beef here; well, to be fair, it depends on the supermarket). Basically, I think because I’m here alone a lot, I can easily get into this pensive, paralytic mood. There was another adjective I was going to use, but I forgot it.
I’ll drag myself out of my paralysis, my nervous state of indolence, by broaching a number of different subjects.
First off, I’d like to send a big thank you out to my friend Shane, who lives in Delta (near Vancouver). I keep remembering a little anecdote that dates back to 10 years ago or more. Hanging out with Shane in his room, I remarked on how clean and neat it was—he didn’t have the junk problem that I did. He responded by saying, “I hate clutter.” For a time, several years or more, I told myself that I couldn’t live like Shane because I don’t like throwing things away and that all these notes and pieces of paper lying around were part of me being a creative person. But ever since I went back to Vancouver late last year, my outlook on crap has changed. A lot. I think part of it had to do with seeing how “low clutter” my mom’s house has become over the years. She really has it down to a minimalist lifestyle, which I think is great.
For me now, no more shit. No more crap. My newly born dust allergy gives me an additional incentive to clear away the crap—you want to minimize surface area, period. I think for a long time I had this information anxiety. I didn’t want to lose thoughts or ideas I had written down in my notepads. I once got all upset because I had left one of those notepads on a plane. The internet is a boon because my website allows me to keep all of my personal information in one place—writings, photos, videos, and more. All my banking is now paperless—rock on! (Though, dammit, I find that I have to print out my monthly bank statements because the goshdarned bank website won’t let me go back more than 18 months—and why the fuck not, seeing as how all the information is there, for Pete’s sake!)
I’ve started throwing shit away and giving shit away. Beginning with books. I used to think I needed to keep old books that I’ve already read, even if I was never planning to read or even browse them again. This impulse had something to do with, again, loss of information anxiety as well as a need to possess concrete testimony to what learning I have ingested.
Old clothes, too. Ditto packaged foods that I’d bought and didn’t eat (yeah, yeah, of course they weren’t expired). I’m going to keep nostalgic and sentimental items and doo-dads to a minimum from now on (do I really need that little wooden model of a straw Philippine house that was given to me years ago?). No more saving unused single servings of ketchup or soy sauce. Fuck the waste. I need my sanity. You gotta be ruthless.
And I think it helps to not receive junk in the first place. The first step in remaining junk free means not adding to it. I opened up a new bank account the other day (the boys’ daycare center required it) and the teller tried to give me a free towel as a gift, which I declined.
It’s sad, but you gotta be bad. Kindergarten kids give me little origami thingies or doodlings they made. I accept them with a smile, and then toss them a little later.
I was helped in my quest to become junk free (ongoing, and I still have a long way to go) by a piece of advice on the net that struck home. Don’t, the article said, tell yourself that you may need that item in the future. Toss it. You can always buy it again if you need to. True, there’s waste when we toss useful items. But who the fuck is going to remember where they put these things? And where do you put them? I’m amazed by the sheer volume of shit I brought over from Korea three years ago. Stuff in boxes I had completely forgotten about and had not used once since I’d come to Japan, not once. Useless fucking junk.
I won’t accept junk from other people anymore, either. A lot of my junk was useless items given to me by friends who wanted to get rid of their junk. Stealthy bastards, they were. Now I’m doing the same thing, giving a whole shitload of junk (old kids’ toys, extra cushions, you name it) away to a junk-hungry kindergarten to which I am farmed out.
That line from an episode in Season 6 of The Sopranos rings true. Tony mentions how all the shit you own weighs you down. It really does. My mother-in-law’s house is like a cave (my mom’s words). The kids smell like mold after sleeping in the mom-in-law’s mildewy bed (but I shouldn’t be so hard on the parents-in-law. Mom-in-law has done a good thing by getting the kids to go to bed early every night). I remember this guy who lived in a small one-room basement apartment in Vancouver. You could hardly move around in the place; it was piled high with boxes of crap.
If you’re not careful, crap can really ruin your life, as this article (full content requires subscription) shows (excerpt quoted below).
As the caseworker from Child Protective Services approached Sue Howard’s home last year, she knew something was wrong. Outside the one-storey brick house on a quiet, leafy street in Nacogdoches, Texas, a blue dresser stood against one wall. The front porch was crowded with papers, books, an open bag of cat food, toys, a bunch of shoes and several pairs of roller skates. The white steel front door, which had fallen off its hinges, was propped up in the door frame.
Inside the house it was much worse. The entry hall was crammed with a love seat, boxes and so much clothing, the caseworker had to step on it to get to the dark, wood-panelled living room and then the dining area, where piles of papers, books and other objects (including boxes and boxes of expired cookies) were stacked on nearly every surface.
Man. What a nightmare that would be.
I really like this new minimalism. It’s the new me. I can’t control what my wife wants to keep, but I can keep my own shit to a minimum—so it doesn’t weigh me down. Yep, baby, this is definitely a trend, not a passing phase. I’m really happy about this. From now on, the only things that matter are people (family, friends, and other relationships), nature, and money. I do want to be able to live well when I’m retired.
* I was tempted to use the word “testament,” even though I knew it wasn’t the right word; you see, my will (in the sense of “spirit”) has weakened over the years since I’d learned about this usage issue, because I often see this word misused in fine publications. However, a quick visit to the style guide of the Economist set me straight again.
Permalink
02.14.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:18 pm by Max
Maybe I should start a new category for this blog’s sidebar, under the heading of today’s post. For a while (the last couple years or so), I’ve been trying to be relatively upbeat and positive in my daily outlook on life, for the most part because I think people complain too much about life and neglect to mention all the things that are good about it (especially for people who live in rich countries). You know how it is: we humans enjoy complaining, and have a great time talking about the things that rub us the wrong way. With that that in mind, maybe it’s time for the pendulum to swing back a little—maybe I’ll start blogging more about the things that piss me off.*
Here’s one of ’em.
You may remember how I wrote several weeks ago of my cultural confusion when traveling between Japan and Canada. Well, in my brief foray back to Canada, I had a helluva time readjusting to saying hello to unknown personages in the street. Just as I had gotten readjusted to this Canadian cultural norm, I was back on a plane for Japan. And then a couple days later, I found myself in the part-time teacher’s room (a room that a whole messload of part-time teachers share) at Utsunomiya University. I was just doing a couple dishes at the sink, when a teacher I didn’t know walked in the door. She was new to me probably because it was a Wednesday, and Wednesday is not a teaching day for me (I was at the university to work out). Well, this lady walked in the room and I looked up from the sink into her face. As my eyes met hers, I cheerfully said “Hello”—only to be instantly rebuffed as she walked past me towards the center of the room. In the short moment I had registered her face, I saw that it was was completely neutral and blank, devoid of expression: the classic Japanese mask. (It’s a face so neutral and unexpressive that for dirty furriners like me [or maybe just for me], it can seem downright hostile. Quite often, you can have no hope in hell of reading a Japanese person’s face. Totally the opposite situation in Canada, of course. Our faces are like road maps to our souls.)
And damn, did I want to punch the living daylights out of that bitch. I was so humiliated, so full of anger, I wanted to lash out and put her in the hospital. Here I was, three days after being back from Canada, after experiencing two weeks of anxiety and trouble getting used to saying hi to strangers again, feeling all the disconnect and uncertainty involved in that readjustment, and finally having gotten used to it—and then I was back in Japan and this bitch just nonverbally bulldozed right over my sorry ass.
It’s just like when I’m on campus and I see current or former students walking down the paths. I know they see me and recognize me, but they more often than not studiously avoid my gaze and avoid saying hello, keeping their eyes on the concrete. Sometimes (only sometimes) I remember their names and call them on their avoidance, and only then will I get a reaction. And maybe not even then. Sometimes they (pretend to be? seem?) suprised as if I have shocked them out of a daydreaming stupor. Once I was biking and I saw a student go by on his bike—a really shy kid with extremely poor social skills (and this is a digression, but I think a lot of people in this country have poor social skills, at least insofar as I define them, and we could start with the criterion of being able to make eye contact with and interact with and relate to people you don’t know well)—and I shouted his name: “Tatsuya!” For the briefest moment, he stopped his bike and looked over his shoulder, only to continue biking again right away and then I shouted his name again, and then he stopped for an infinitesimally longer moment and finally made eye contact as I said hello, but he still couldn’t muster up a word in reply, and off I went and off he went. This was a kid in my class who had so much trouble making eye contact with me it was like I was the Medusa or something.
Fuck, this is just an outpouring of emotions for me. I have so much to get out and my hands just cannot keep up. You see, I’ve become like the Japanese now. When I went to Canada, I couldn’t handle eye contact with strangers in the streets, and when I was walking down a very quiet block and saw another pedestrian coming towards me from up ahead, I was internally hemming and hawing and didn’t know what the fuck to do, where to put my eyes, whether to say hello or what, so often I just kept my head to the ground and I could feel the discomfort of the other person and their eyes on me, begging for eye contact, but what could I do? Japanese just don’t look around like we do. When I’m riding my bike, I like to look around at all the buildings and trees and whatever, but they just keep their eyes fixated straight ahead as if they didn’t have an interest in the world (in both senses of the phrase).
OK, real stream of consciousness today. Like I said, there is so much to get out.
* Or I could blog about the quirks of Japan. Like the popularity of marijuana imagery, even though stoners are at an absoulte minority in this country. How people have car air fresheners in the shape of pot leaves dangling from their rearview mirrors (“room mirrors” in Japanese). How yesterday I saw an ashtray with the picture of a marijuana leaf and some nonsensical marijuana poetry written on it. How people wear T-shirts extolling hemp or have key rings dangling gold-colored pot leaves.
How one of my kindergarten kids was wearing a T-shirt that said “This kicks ass” or something like that.
How when I was idling in my car at a red light today, I saw a salaryman in his car behind me, and he was dressed in some kind of white suit (protection from chemicals?) that covered every part of his body except his face (and did it even had little pointy things that looked like ears?) so he looked like a bleeding bunny rabbit, and don’t forget the incongruity of his dead-serious expression. Boy, I wish I had gotten that on camera.
While we’re at it, check out this great site (which is a book promo) about Japan’s sex industry.
On another tangent, I have this theory about Japanese male sexuality. I’ve read that Japanese men have some of the lowest sperm counts of all ethnicities. That sex between married couples in Japan is one of the lowest frequencies in the world. And I know that there are bars where men can go just to drink with and talk to pretty women who seem interested in them and massage their egos. And I know about the men who buy “schoolgirl panties” and the men who grope girls on crowded subways. Put it all together and it just makes me think Japanese men have a diminished sexual drive compared to other cultures. (Was it the Nigerians who had sex most frequently? Does this somehow correspond with the fact that they say poor people are often “happier” than rich people?)
Oh, man. I wrote a lot tonight, and it wasn’t my finest quality writing. But I had to get it out, and here it will stay. Goodnight.
Permalink
02.11.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:01 pm by Max
Yes, long time no update. A number of small things have happened on numerous fronts.
First, I washed my car today. It was nice to be out in the cool winter air and the white winter sunshine. Outdoor, blue-collar work is definitely good for the soul. It’s one of the best ways to help yourself deal with your fears and anxieties. A remedy, a kind of therapy. You don’t go into escapism land like when you watch a movie. Your fears and anxieties are still present in your mind as you lather suds on the hood of your car, but you are better able to deal with them. Next time you’re stressed, say no to the Nintendo and get your ass outside for a walk in the fresh air.
I just got back home from seeing the wife and kids at my mom-and-pop-in-law’s. Immediately upon entering my now lonely and quiet apartment, I took a dump. What Mark Hellie (my old co-worker and friend who I met when I first went to work in Korea) said about taking craps is downright true: there is something called the psychological dump factor. Speaking of the psychological dump factor, tonight Mickey wanted to take his dish of applesauce (just mashed apples, no sugar added I think) underneath the table. I initially protested and said, “Mickey, you have to eat at the table like everybody else.” It turned out, though, that he wanted to hide out with his applesauce under cover of darkness in the curtain-draped table, the better to concentrate so he could take his dump. Life is weird that way. Continuing in a scatological vein, Shiho said the other night Milo woke up at 4 am, whining and complaining that his own farts were really smelly. Which reminds me of another incident, back when the kids were drinking a lot of breast milk and formula. Either we were burping Mickey or Milo—I don’t remember who—and the boy let out a huge burp. So huge that he shocked himself silly, his limbs and body thrashing for a brief moment. That anecdote serves to demonstrate the disconnect between an infant’s body and his consciousness—ie, infants aren’t yet truly aware of their bodies and what they can do.
It is hard being away from the kids and wife, but this is the way things work. As my adoptive father in Canada said, society has this misconception of life as “normal.” But nothing in life is normal, bad shit happens to people all the time, you get hit by that figurative bolt of lighting, your offspring could get vaporized by, of all things, a balloon bomb. I was hoping to just be able to be a good dad to my kids, but fate has momentarily intervened. My wife had a ton of stress and suffered a breakdown, meaning she and the kids are staying with her folks. I could be living over there with them, even putting up with the dust that causes a bad allergic reaction on my part, but maybe it’s a good thing I’m not. The place is, in my mom’s words, “a cave”—useless junk and crap piled up everywhere (interestingly, I’ve begun my own voyage to de-pack-rat-ize my life)—and I think Shiho’s parents and I would be at each other’s throats, quite literally. They’ve already been pretty hard to deal with so far, overreacting really easily, getting uppity and angry for no reason. Shows you how crises bring out the best in people. But I shouldn’t dis them too much. On balance they have been really good to me.
I got some news from my brother Steve that my adoptive father seems rather frail lately. More bad news. I hope my father can pull through this illness and at least enjoy a few more good, productive years of life.
A few nights ago I heard noisy footfalls and grunts outside my front door and—well, I don’t know if the two events are connected, but anyway—when I left my apartment in the morning, I found someone else’s keys in the keyhole of my door. Nonplussed and bemused, I was also worried someone had been trying to break in. Then I jiggled the key back and forth and found it wouldn’t turn the lock (although it fit in the keyhole). Then I began to look around and spotted a telltale pile of vomit not three feet from my front door and suddenly all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. I handed over the keys to one of the nurses who works at the “skin clinic” on the first floor of our apartment building, explaining to her what had happened and asking her to pass on the keys and the story to Mrs. Aoki, a nurse at the clinic who is also the apartment manager (yes, I know it’s weird to have a clinic on the first floor of an apartment building and also that it’s weird for the building manager to be a nurse in that clinic as well as the chief cleaner-upper for the building, the person who sweeps up the common areas and cleans the stairways and whatnot. Truth can be stranger than fiction, especially in Japan).
So, it was worth posting on my blog tonight, if only to preserve the memory of a few anecdotes which, given the passage of time, might have been forgotten and thus consigned to oblivion. Time now for a snack and a movie. “Doritos for the mind,” my friend Kevin might say.
Permalink
