It’s Been…It’s Been.

It’s been a crazy week. A dark week peaking into the realm of the human psyche.

Well, I guess it was technically last week that I was asked to change some materials I had made for the lesson on dreams. My illustration for the common dream of falling depicted a stick figure falling head first from a building. I was told that there was a student who had attempted to jump to their death. So I changed it to falling out of bed. Well, don’t know if people actually dream about that, but I at least have hypnic jerks all the time.

Then on Tuesday the trains were late because of an accident. A 人身事故 (jinshin jiko, an accident where a train or train car kills or injures a person). It had been nearly a year since I was delayed by that on my way home from work. I remembered because that time I had taken a taxi because I was really tired. And it was raining. It was during the rainy season.

In comes Wednesday and things seem to be going well enough. Went to Japanese class. Everything was fine. On my way home I saw an ambulance with its lights flashing and sirens on…then I saw it again. It was going in circles. They must’ve been having a hard time finding where they needed to go. I thought, “man, that’s messed up.”

Didn’t think I’d be flagging down a similarly circling ambulance within just 2 hours. Taking an ALT to the hospital for the second time in my 3 years here. A serious sickness sometimes just pops outta nowhere. The body odd, indeed.

June seems to be a tough month.

Going Home + Some Thoughts on “Gaijin”

The first time I came to Japan, back in 2004, I didn’t have culture shock.  I did have reverse culture shock when I returned to the States.  It lasted a week or two.  Americans seemed unbelievably rude; I couldn’t stand it!  I kept accidentally biting on my fork, so I went back to chopsticks for a while.  And I had only been in Japan for 2 weeks! When I visited the country of my birth for the first time after immigrating to the States, I didn’t really have culture shock either.  But when I got back to the States after that trip, Americans seemed unbelievably polite.  If I remember correctly, my thought as the cabby at the airport loaded mine and my mother’s luggage into the taxi was “Thank God for the Americans!”

I haven’t had culture shock this time around either.  Partly, I think that having been an immigrant to the States in a time when assimilation was still the norm in education gave me the mindset that “when in Rome, the Romans make the rules and they might not be rules I’m familiar with.”  So, I don’t go, “OMG they do things differently! Arrrrgggghhh!!!” I just go, “This is how they do things.  I may or may not like them, they may be good or bad, but for now this is what it is.”  So, it would seem I am now only capable of being shocked by the place I call home – the States.  But, as my reentry from Honduras showed, things like level of politeness are relative. At the moment, I no longer feel that Japanese are more polite than Americans.  I think each is polite and rude in different areas, so it ends up evening out. In any case, that’s just one aspect of a bigger story.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens when I get back home this Saturday.  And then, what will I think when I get back to Japan in April?

Anyway, while I don’t have culture shock proper, there are things that annoy me.  I suppose it’s possible one day small things will irritate me enough to the point where I’ll experience this big bad culture shock the JET orientations focused so much on preparing us for.

Well, one of those small annoying things is how many Japanese use the word “gaikokujin” or “gaijin” to refer to people who are not Japanese while said people are in their own country. Now, I’m not talking about the debate over whether foreigners should even be called either word.  Frankly, I don’t care if a Japanese calls me “gaijin” or “gaikokujin.”  As long as I’m an American living in Japan, I am a foreigner, the same way that as long as I was a Permanent Resident in the States, I was a foreigner.  To make the difference clear, this is what one of my second years wrote in her composition about what she wanted to do when she and the other second years go do a homestay in Australia:

“When I go to Australia, I want to speak with many foreigners.”

She wrote that in English, so the mistake was immediately clear.  What this sentence says is “I want to speak with people who are not Australian nationals.”  What my student wanted to say was “I want to speak with Australians.”  If she had been speaking in Japanese to other Japanese, her intended meaning would have gone through.  But to say that in English to someone who didn’t know much about the Japanese language and culture, well, I imagine they might have been confused as to why she wanted to go Australia expressly to speak with people who weren’t Australian nationals.  At least one other student from her class wrote the same sort of thing, and a few from the first years did so also in a later assignment.  It’s not just children; from what I’ve read on the Japan blogosphere and heard from other JETs, Japanese traveling abroad tend to call that countries’ people as “gaijin.”  I suppose it’s okay as long as they’re speaking in Japanese, but I wish more Japanese people would realize that if they’re speaking in English (or Spanish or French or…a bunch of other languages, probably), they can’t use the word “foreigner” to refer to people who are in their own country. To that end, I think I’ll add a bit saying as much in my broken Japanese to this post later when I have time to sit down and try to write something intelligible.

I told the first years today, as they were getting “tips” for being in other countries, “Right now, I am a foreigner because I’m an American in Japan.  When I go back to America, I am not a foreigner. Please don’t call Australians in Australia ‘foreigners.'” The look of utter confusion on most of their faces…it was painful for them to ponder the concept, and it was painful for me to realize how painful it was for them.

The other day an interesting twist in this saga occurred.  I was messaging with a Japanese acquaintance who asked me if I used Second Life.  She said that she liked it, but that communication was hard, because most users on Second Life were “gaikokujin.”  My first reaction was “huh?” Second Life is run by an American company, so, to me,  if anyone’s going to be labeled a “foreigner,” it would be people who aren’t American nationals.  But really, it’s a virtual reality!  Who is a “foreigner” in a land that exists on a server?

悩んでるing

悩む = nayamu, meaning “to be troubled/worried with.”  I think, something about the way the word sounds makes me think it more appropriately expresses the sense of being troubled by something.  Must be the “naya” part makes me think of going “nyaaa nyaaa nyaaaa” but I don’t mean “nyaaa” as in the sound cats make but “nyaaa” as more like “nyeehh” like the sound the Enlish dub of Yu-Gi-Oh!‘s Jounochi (aka Joey Wheeler) would constantly make. Then I added “ing” to make it into the present progressive, which exists in Japanese, but it’s more fun to make these linguistic chimeras.

Anyway…

Yesterday I got permission from kyoutou-sensei to go to Korea in February.  It’s for the Distant Worlds concert in Seoul (a concert of music from the various Final Fantasy games, performed by an orchestra with choir, and in some cities, a rock band!). I can’t be bothered with traveling, but for Distant Worlds, I want to go so badly.  But that’s where the nayanderuing comes in.

I came on JET with a large amount of debt.  Not student loans either.  Of all things, medical bills from an accident.  Now that I’m employed (I had the accident while a college student after doing two years of full time volunteer work; not the best time for things that require large sums of money) it’s not a problem to make the monthly payments to the hospital.  The thing is, I feel guilty about doing anything extra.  Even my Elixir habit (at 200 yen/2.20USD  a can, it’s kinda extravagant) is starting to make me feel a bit guilty. A fellow JET reassured me that he was able to live “like a king” and still saved up over 10K dollars.  But I still feel bad because living extremely frugally would mean I could get out of debt faster.  Each month, I’ve sent a larger amount of money home than the previous month, and I feel like it won’t do to send any less.  But, affordable though the trip to Korea would be, it’s still money that could go to the hospital instead of for getting on a plane to geek out.

Yet, there’s something else bugging me.  Granted, this shouldn’t be that important, but since people constantly bring it up, it’s become annoying.  Many JETs spend their extra time and money traveling.  I think everyone (JETs, teachers, staff, random neighborhood people) expects JETs to travel, so I feel a pressure to travel.  When people would ask me “where are you going for winter break?” I started saying, “maybe I’ll take a day trip to Nagasaki or something.”  While I do think it would be interesting to go, I don’t really want to.  I just don’t get traveling for travel’s sake.  It’s different when you go somewhere after studying about that place, or will do some study there, or want to go to a specific event.  But just going somewhere to gawk for a few hours, take pictures, and buy a bunch of kitschy things…what’s the point? I’d rather be at home drawing, studying, watching dramas, anything rather than deal with the hassle of making travel arrangements just to go abrir la boca somewhere. (“Abrir la boca” literally means, “to open one’s mouth,” but is used to mean “to waste time”, especially by looking at stuff or doing things absentmindedly.)

So I figure, I don’t go anywhere, I can at least go to Seoul, since seeing Distant Worlds is actually something that I truly want to do. But then it just turns right back to my worries about my debt, and it’s an endless cycle of nayanderuing. Blergh.

Only my spreadsheet of expenses & savings keeps the nayanderuing in check.  *sigh*

To end on a funny side note…one of the things my students like to do when they’re avoiding paying attention in class is use various “fortune telling” websites (our class was held in the Language Lab; at least until the teachers got mad enough at the students for pulling the keys off the keyboards to banish them from the LL, lol).  Maybe it was in my second month here, but these two girls were on one site where you input a name, and it would display a “diagram” of the person’s brain showing what was on their mind.  Predictibly enough, when male names where input, it had a higher percentage of “H,” standing for “ecchi” meaning the person was thinking perverted thoughts.  (How it figured out that the katakanization of my co-ALT’s name was a male name, I’ve no idea, unless it has been programmed with common foreign names.) Anyway, when the girls put in my name, or rather, エリー, the diagram displayed a pretty even distribution of three things: 食、金、and 悩. In other words, what was on my mind was food, money, and worries. I couldn’t help but laugh and say, “Yup, sounds about right…” ^_^;;;