2014 In Review

2014 In Review

January

I have a long-held belief that whatever it is one is doing at the stroke of midnight at the commencement of the New Year is a sort of metaphor for how one will spend the rest of the year.  Not being able to afford to hold or attend any parties, I spent the evening of December 31^st, 2013 playing Minecraft, drinking cheap bourbon, and listening to blues music.  Now, these are my default states of being at any rate, so it is not surprising that I’ve spent most of the year drinking Jim Beam, hitting the Xbox, and listening to a lot of Freddie King.  But I have also spent most of the year broke, so I guess that’s the takeaway.

I spent the rest of January struggling with Chinese classes, taking notes about the History of World War II, and being patronized rigid by a law professor who quite obviously hated having to teach an Intro class.

February

The second month in Seattle is always interesting.  We have a sort of fake spring in the second or third week of the month, during which the weather approaches niceness and the temperature gets up around sixty.  This lasts just long enough for suckers who have moved there from out of state to make outdoor plans for the following weekend, just in time for the weather to return to its state of godawful misery and damp grey coldness.  This year was no different, although the Seahawks were in the Super Bowl. 

“I’ll be able to watch, no problem,” I told my roommate.  “I never work Sundays.”

Of course, when I went in to check my hours for the week, I was on the schedule, along with everyone else, and a snippy memo from Corporate to the effect that everyone will be working on Superbowl Sunday. 

It was therefore an amazing coincidence that the front suspension went out on my car, and I caught triple pneumonia, and my grandmother passed away (a tragedy, to be sure, but the fact that it had happened some thirty years previously ameliorated the pain somewhat), and I had three different papers that were all due, and oh the hell with it, I’ve been waiting forty years for this, I quit.

The game is now a matter of public record and I still watch the highlight reel on YouTube when I need cheering up.  My roommate and I have been Seahawks fans since we were kids, so we were sort of expecting the typical Seattle choke, but apparently Russell Wilson didn’t get the memo on that one.  Good thing, too.

March

I spent a lot of time in March going to school, studying things at school, bringing things home from school, and trying to find money for school.  I had already been accepted to university in Tokyo, but one of the conditions of the visa is that each student must prove access to something like thirty thousand dollars, including financial aid.  With scholarships and everything, I was still about five thousand dollars short.  Plus, I still had to eat and so forth. Fortunately, I was working at the school, so I had a little money coming in that way.

April

In April I had Winter Quarter Finals, and got A’s in everything.  I also had some sort of birthday, which I celebrated by going out with some friends to, I think, every bar in the International District, ending with my buddy Joel and I eating in some Chinese restaurant at about 4 AM.  So, not too different from any other birthday.

May

I forget.  There were lots of classes.  I was still taking Chinese, and Linguistics, and Astronomy.  I probably had some coffee.  There might be photos; I don’t recall.  I was still sending out scholarship applications, not having realized yet that those are pretty much a dead end. I worked at school, was President of Phi Theta Kappa and the Go Club, and was Vice President of something called the Japanese Chit-Chat Club.  I gave a couple of motivational speeches that were very well received, and I won a couple of awards at school, some of which even had a little monetary love attached.  I was too busy to be stressed out, yet I still managed to find the time.

June

I made the financial deadline for my visa in the absolute nick of time and started the application process, and had a couple of lovely meals.  Oh, and I also graduated with honors from Highline College.  I walked down the aisle loaded down with swag; it was pretty cool.  Afterwards, Joel and I went out for a drink or two, then hung out at my place the following night and drank and ate a bunch, then took the train into town the next day and spent the whole day drinking and eating with our Chinese instructor and other friends.  If this was the party for my two-year degree, I can only imagine what the four-year will be like, and my MA might just do me in.

July

I was going to drive my ancient Volvo the fourteen-hundred-mile round trip to Twin Falls, Idaho, to visit my parents, but it was just too knackered to make the trip.  A friend offered to lend me a spare car, but then had to lend it to a co-worker; in exchange, she bought me a plane ticket to Boise, and I used the money I had budgeted for fuel to rent a car and drive to my brother’s house.  I spent most of the week helping my parents move into their new, smaller apartment, and about half of that time I spent trying to get my father, in his eighties and undergoing chemo, to sit down and stop trying to help.

“Dad, just tell me where you want this,” I would say, holding a box.

“I can show you,” he would reply, getting up out of the chair.

“No, just show me,” I said, “and if you get up again I’m going to tape you to that chair.”

Between that and explaining to my mother that World War II is long over, so she doesn’t need to save three-square-inch strips of used aluminum foil, it took a few days to move them.  It was very nice to see my brother’s garden in full bloom, however; I’ve never been there any time other than Christmas.

August

I spent August getting ready for school.  I sold a lot of stuff, cleaned up the house and boxed up my things as best as I could, bought the supplies I thought I’d need (namely a four-pack of Old Spice deodorant and loads of the Italian shaving cream I like), and visited the last few restaurants on my list.

The last week of August, I packed up my stuff and flew to Tokyo, having only a minor issue with the airline over whether or not I could carry my guitar on the plane.  My position, backed up by Federal law and FAA regulations, was that I could; Singapore Airlines took the opposite position.  It took some careful negotiation, but I finally let them put my Gretsch CVT in the hold of the giant Airbus A380. 

The flight to Tokyo, when flying economy class from LAX, takes approximately three hundred hours, but I eventually arrived.  I wrestled two suitcases, a guitar, and a laptop case containing a MacBook Air and two iPads through the Tokyo summer night (average overnight low temperature: four hundred and fifty degrees, with two hundred percent humidity) into a hotel in Ueno.  I checked into the hotel, and, utterly exhausted, walked across the street to a Lawson’s for a can of Yebisu and to McDonald’s for a cheeseburger.

The next day, I made my way across Tokyo and into Hiyoshi in Yokohama, where our dorms were located.  I got moved into a room not much bigger than the sleeper cab in my old International.  It was tiny, and next to the train station so very noisy, but it had free broadband internet and an air conditioner, which I turned on and did not turn back off until nearly Halloween.

September

Classes started in September.  I took Japanese, International Relations, Politics of Identity, and something called Superpower America.  I started looking for work, and didn’t find any.

October

Classes continued, I kept looking for work, kept not finding any, and my savings ran out.  Things, not to put too fine a point on it, were not good.  I kept busy, though, walking a lot and looking everywhere for some work.  Mostly, I just worked on classes.

November

My friend Ryan and I were referred to a nice apartment in Kawasaki and threw money at the landlord until he let us move in.  We got bicycles and I started working a little bit at the university; enough to keep me from starving.  I also had a lot of help from a lot of friends, way too many to name here.  I wrote a lot of karma checks in November, and I’ll have to pay them forward and back.

December

Got all As, including from the instructor that I was told didn’t give As.  Got signed up with two teaching agencies, and they started sending some teaching work my way.  Not all of it worked out, but some of it has, and I’m pretty confident that after the first of the year people will start.  Right now I’m looking at two lessons starting in January; that plus my financial aid money (considerably more this semester, as my matriculation fee and housing aren’t being taken out) should keep me alive; as I get more lessons, I’ll be able to slowly dial it in so that I’m not working too much but still getting paid a decent wage.

So, here we are.  I’m sitting in my living room, watching Young Frankenstein on the TV and typing this.  I’m slowly getting back into the habit of writing, which is an important habit to have in university.  And grad school, as well; starting to look into those.  I’m in debt, only have some change on me, and a couple of my credit cards are a little late, but everything is going to be okay.  Sometimes I lose perspective, but everything will be okay.

Thanks.

Precious Little Darlings

            When I was a kid, one of the things I really hated was people who started their stories with, “When I was a kid…”

            My parents were prime examples of this sort of person.  Both of them had grown up in rural Southern Indiana during the Great Depression; both of them had been from poor families to begin with, that only got poorer after the loss of a parent.  My mother was shuffled around from relative to relative and treated as a live-in servant, my father lived in a two-room shack in the country with no heat, indoor plumbing, or floor.  Trying to convince these people in 1978 that my life was over because they wouldn’t buy me a pair of Brittania jeans was an uphill battle, to say the least.

            But it didn't do me any harm to do without things from time to time, and it taught me how to fend for myself.  For example, I went and got a job flipping burgers in my senior year of high school so that I could buy clothes for school.  On one Saturday, I got a check with some overtime on it: one hundred and twelve dollars.  Flush with this newfound largesse, I drove up to SeaTac Mall to do some shopping.

            When I came home a few hours later, my dad was sitting in his chair by the window, reading.

            “How’d it go?” he asked.

            “Fine,” I mumbled.

            “You get everything you wanted?  Did you get that black leather jacket you were after?”

            “No.”

            “How about those designer jeans?  How much were they?”

            “Sixty bucks.”

            “Wow.  Did you get them?”

            “No.  Went to mumble mumble instead.”

            “Didn’t quite catch that.  Where did you go?”

            “I said, I went to Discount Jeans Warehouse.”

            I felt that the smug grin I got in response was really beneath him.

            The expectations of Japanese children seem to need a similar adjustment these days, at least in the opinions of some studies.  Are Japanese children really as spoiled as they seem?  A casual stroll through Kawasaki Station would seem to prove this.  Children screaming, crying, pitching epic fits in the middle of the station, laying flat on the floor and hollering because Mom won’t stop at McDonald’s – it seems like one can see evidence everywhere.

            Any expatriate can share half a dozen anecdotes about spoiled Japanese children: the adult researcher who still lives with his parents, who still cook his meals and do his laundry; the high-level education professional who wakes up at 4:30 every morning to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner ahead of time for her teenage son; and the moms who travel for hours up to Tokyo every weekend to clean their sons’ dorm rooms.

            None of these things would be, by and large, acceptable in American culture.  A grown man who still lives with his parents is slightly creepy and a case study in arrested development.  A career mom in the States would encourage her children to take on as many household chores as possible to help with the workload.  And any American college student who had his mom come up every weekend to do his housework would be a relentlessly-teased American college student.

            So why should this be the case?  Surely any society that spoiled its children to such an extent would run into serious trouble after one or two generations; after all, once Grandma has died and taken the Secrets of Laundry with her, who will wash the clothes?  If something happens and Mom can’t cook dinner any more, how long can we eat 7-Eleven oden before our digestive systems seize up?  (Hint: not long.  Not very long at all.)

            The key to understanding this question might be in a Japanese concept called amae.  According to Japanese academic and psychoanalyst Takeo Doi, in his work The Anatomy of Dependence, amae is defined in English as “indulgent dependency.”  This can be expressed as a mother-child bond, in which the mother experiences fulfillment by, in effect, keeping her child in a childlike state for as long as possible.  This would seem to make a certain amount of sense: some moms only feel a sense of self-worth when they are being a mother.  Spoiling a child and indulging their helplessness would ensure that Mom has a job for a long, long time.  In this light, amae starts to gain traction as a concept.

            Another possible answer might lie in the Japanese education system.  In the book Japanese Sense of Self, Joseph Tobin writes that “the Japanese school system is viewed by most Westerners (and not a few Japanese) as a Godzilla-like monster with (the Ministry of Education) for a brain and preschools for a mouth,” chewing up little kids with individual, vibrant personalities and turning them into automata who are totally dedicated to the group dynamic above all else.  “The nail that sticks up is pounded down,” as the old saying goes, and it is therefore not surprising that, after a long day of being pounded down, these little nails might find their way home to the indulgent care of Mother.  (It also might explain why the sarariman, after a long day of being pounded down in the office, enjoys his return home to a hot bath and warm meal.)

            A third factor might be the infantilization in Japanese culture.  This is a nation that worships kawaii, a word so pervasive that it has cross-pollinated to Western culture as well, although, as with most Japanese words that make the leap to American society, such as otaku, without all of the implications intact. Rima Muryantina, in an essay posted to academia.edu, quotes a couple of ancient Japanese proverbs, “Katawa no ko hodo kawaii (‘A deformed child is the dearer to his parents’) or Kawaii ko ni wa tabi saseyo (‘Send the beloved children on a journey’).”  These proverbs do not reference the modern concept of “cute” inherent to kawaii at all; rather, they call upon an older and more untranslatable concept assigned to the term: feelings of compassion and dependency within the family unit. 

            It is quite possible for words to be passed down from generation to generation with some or all of their original meanings intact.  The English “awful,” for example, quite literally means “full of awe,” and has over the years changed in meaning from a generally positive term to a negative one.  Likewise, the word “terrific” has done a similar volte-face, transforming from its original meaning, “inspiring terror,” to its modern positive usage.

            It is therefore not a grand leap in logic to consider that the word kawaii, practically built in to daily use among some Japanese (especially those young women between the ages of 10 and 50), might still retain some vestiges of the original, some elements of semantic programming that connect the concepts of “cuteness” and “helpless dependency,” and so from there to the “indulgent dependency” of amae.  It is in human nature to forgive and indulge adorable things.  As the couplet by American humorist P.J. O’Rourke goes, “It’s always tempting to impute/Unlikely virtues to the cute.”  Cuteness is a survival mechanism, it generates sympathy in humans and compels us not to leave our children in trees or to abandon them on the toy floor at Yodobashi Camera, no matter how much they scream and cry for the Doraemon playset.  The line between caring for the cute and indulging their every whim is a vague one, however, and can easily cross over into outright spoiling, especially when grandparents get involved.

            It’s also important not to ignore the cultural aspect of this issue.  Not to put too fine (or blindingly obvious) a point on it, but Japanese culture is not Western culture.  Specifically, it’s not American culture, with its emphasis on independence.  Tobin notes the prevalence of ethnocentrism in American cultural studies of Japanese life, the overpowering need for American exceptionalism in all things driving our need to assign binary values to another culture based solely on our own. 

This is a very easy mistake to make, especially in a place like Japan, where it sometimes appears as though whole sections of American culture and belief have been wholeheartedly adopted.  Just because the people here wear Nike shoes and eat at McDonald’s and shop at Costco does not mean that they are Americans, with American values.  Americans tend to place a high value on independence, with children leaving to make their own way in the world as early as possible and moving out of the house to assert control over their own lives.  We venerate the cowboy, the fighter pilot, the renegade: lone wolves who follow their own path and find success on their own.  Individual success holds greater merit in the American national eye than does team effort.

So are Japanese kids more spoiled than their American counterparts?  I would have to say it’s a case of apples and oranges.  The roles and expectations of children within the family unit differs considerably between America and Japan.  In America, a child in his teen years is expected to begin learning the skills that will allow him to function independently of his parents.  These skills can include driving, basic homemaking functions, and the first steps toward financial independence; Japanese teens, by contrast, concentrate on their studies to the exclusion of little else, in order to pass the stringent university entrance exams.

            Ultimately, it’s the prioritizations that create the cognitive dissonance in the culture.  Japanese people look at American kids as being blithely disinterested in their schoolwork or family, not understanding the need to prepare children for an independent life.  They might not also realize that American colleges are relatively easy to get into, but rather difficult to excel in, in contrast to Japanese schools, which have notoriously stringent admissions standards but are fairly lax in terms of required schoolwork.

            Americans, in turn, might not understand the strict entrance requirements for a Japanese university, nor the subtle class structure that rules their hierarchy. A degree from a top-tier college, such as Tokyo or Kyoto University, can mean an addition of  several thousand dollars a year in starting salary, not to mention access to certain high-level jobs in government or with top corporations.  It’s therefore understandable that high school students are encouraged to concentrate solely on their studies, to the exclusion of household chores and a social life.

            ‘Twas ever thus: the problem with teenagers is, ad oculos, that they are teenagers.  Having experienced them in several cultures, their main issue is that they are trying to find their way in a world in which all the rules are subject to change without notice.  It is the last period of growth in a human’s life in which everything is changing: attitudes; physicality; sexuality; relationships; everything.

            The best that we can do is offer our support, understanding, and perspective.

            Still no excuse for that kid screaming in Yodobashi Camera, though.

Bibliography

Doi, Takeo, M.D. The Anatomy of Dependence. Kodansha USA, 2014.

Muryantina, Rima. "Academia.edu." Why Is It Important to be Cute? Depicting The Notion of Kawaii Via Natural Semantic Metalanguage. www.academia.edu (accessed December 16, 2014).

Smith, Herman and Nomi, Takako. "Is Amae the Key to Understanding Japanese Culture?" Electronic Journal of Sociology (ICAAP), 2000.

Tobin, Joseph. "Japanese Preschools and the Pedagogy of Selfhood." In Japanese Sense of Self, edited by Nancy R. Rosenberger. Cambridge University Press.