A Japanese Story

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January 1994: Americenterism
2007-04-12 00:00:00
Being a fluent English speaker, and having lived among Americans for many years, you'd think that it would have been easy for me to settle into my new life in the Midwest. I know that I certainly expected to fit in quite quickly. However, once I arrived, I found the transition to be more difficult than I ever imagined. Not so much that I had trouble with life in  America itself, but rather because the attitudes and approaches of the people that I met during my early years there put me off of the whole idea of living in America, and made me cling defensively onto the memories of the life that I'd left behind.I bet you don't know what this is?Among the things that put me off of living in America was that many of the people that I met there were had a very Americacentric view of the world: meaning that they knew about America and believed that it was the beginning and end of the world, and they had very big blind spot when it came to figuring out what people who were not from A...
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November 1993: Penmanship
2007-04-10 00:00:00
While I largely think of American state run schools as being designed only to meet the requirements of absolutely average people, and being mildly chaotic breeding grounds for antisocial tendencies where Ritalin or Lithium are dispensed in the place of discipline, there was one thing about my particular school that I did appreciate. I am left handed, in America nobody even blinked when I picked up a pen in my left hand. This was something new and exciting for me.When I was first sent to school I was sent to a Japanese school near to my grandfather’s home. It was a very good school and it was very strict, which meant that people who wrote with their left hand were strongly discouraged from doing so, and that anybody who persisted was punished for it. At that age I was too young to get the a regular bus by my self, and there was no school bus in the world that would have traveled the distance between the base and the school, so I slept at my grandfather’s house during the ...
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December 1993 - An Akito by Any Other Name
2007-04-10 00:00:00
When people think about their names, there are generally two schools of thought.1)That they are something that is deeply personal that forms part of your individual sense of identity.2)That they are a general label given to you by your parents that you can take, leave, or change, as is convenient.For the most part, I never gave much though to my name while I lived in Japan. I basically treated it like a title. People either called me by my family name, or by my family name with an honorific attached, and that was about as complicated as it got. My teachers called me by my family name. My friends, neighbors and classmates called me by my family name. Even my fellow compound dwellers called me by my family name. In fact, until I was 14, the only people who ever used my given name were my closest friends and my Mother. Even my sister called Oniichan (the 'cute' form of big brother) rather than use my given name. This worked out fine in Japan, and was considered to be a little more fo...
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October 1995: "Mono Panic"
2007-04-10 00:00:00
Mono?The first time that I was introduced to the word 'Mono', the shortening for Mononucleosis, was while watching an episode of the Simpsons that a friend had recorded for me some time earlier. In the episode, one character asked another “Can you get Mono from riding the Monorail?”. Not understanding this phrase, or why everybody else thought that it was hysterically funny, I asked a friend who, between fits of laughter, briefly explained things to me.After listening to this explanation, I went to the school library and looked up Mononucleosis for myself. About five minutes later I was pretty much satisfied that I knew everything that a teenage boy, who was in no way planning to become a doctor, needed to know about Mono, and I left things at that.However, it wouldn't be until a year later that I would find that my basic knowledge didn't quite tie in with what the rest of the town thought Mono was, what they thought Mono meant for the community, and what they though...
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November 1993: Labels
2007-04-03 00:00:00
PrologueAs any regular reader of this blog will know, right up until I was 14, I'd spent my pretty much my entire life living around homesick American ex-pats. Thus, I arrived in the Midwest with a rather romanticized vision of what life there was like, and I quickly noticed a plethora of idiosyncrasies where what I was seeing didn't quite match up with what I had been told. One of which was the prevailing attitude to race.Not having actually witness much of American life for myself, I had grown up believing that America was the world's only true multi racial society. A place where black, white, Asian, and everything in between simply mingled together and lived in perfect harmony. I was wrong. I had also grow up believing that nobody in America really thought about race because everybody was American, and that was what mattered in the end. I was wrong here too.Label s At this point I could start to write about racism. All of the bad things that I have seen Whites doing to Blacks, a...
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July 1993: ¿Podria repetir, por favor?
2007-04-01 00:00:00
While I had a lot of trouble adjusting to life in the Midwest, and frequently found myself confronted with strange or confusing situations where I didn't know exactly what was expected of me, I wasn't the only person in my small family to have such difficulties. Just as I had problems, so to did my baby sister. Though, her problems were slightly different.While my problems were largely cultural; I neither understood, nor liked, the pervasive culture of our new town, Lucy's problems were communicative. I brief, everybody else in the town spoke English and, not to put too fine a point on it, my sister didn't.¿Pod ria repetir, por favor?To say that Lucy couldn't speak English wouldn't be entirely accurate. She had as good a grasp of basic English grammar as any child her age could be expected to have, and her understanding of more complex things, like tenses and conjugation, wasn't too bad either. However, where Lucy ran into difficulties, was Vocabulary. She had a stock ...
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October 1993 – The Vanishing Husband
2007-04-01 00:00:00
As you might expect, when my family moved to the small Midwest town that was to become our home, we created a certain amount of interest from our new neighbors. Give that we were moving in to a small community, that most of our things had arrived almost a week before we did (thus giving our neighbors plenty of time to speculate on who we were), and particularly given that my Mother was a white woman with two Asian children in tow, we created quite a bit o interest For the most part, out new neighbors just wanted to know the normal things. Such as who we were, where we had come from, and what we were like. What created the real stir, though, and caused some less conventional questions to come to mind, was that, even after my Mother had settled us in to our new home, no husband arrived to support her. In Kyoto In Kyoto, pretty much everybody that I had know had known that I didn't have a father at home. They knew by the way that I never mentioned my father, and by the way t...
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July 1993: A Town Divided
2007-04-01 00:00:00
Throughout the course of this journal, and correspondingly throughout a fair portion of my life, I have spent a lot of time complaining about the makeup of the small Midwestern town in which I found myself living. Specifically, that this makeup was made up of precisely one type of person. However, now is probably as good a time as any to concede that, while it might have seemed this way, it wasn't entirely true. My town wasn't as monotone as I've lead you to believe, in fact it was split into two distinct camps. Camps which, quite frequently, hated each other more than words could say, but which were also grudgingly forced to admit that the town couldn't survive without them. Being new to America it took me a while to see this divide, and a while more to appreciate what it meant, but once I understood about it a lot of things began to make sense. A History lesson In order to understand how this situation came about, you need to know a little bit about the town's history. In...
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October 1993: The Great Phys-ed Paradox
2007-04-01 00:00:00
As with many schools in the US, the Midwestern school that my Mother sent me to had both a strong sporting culture and a physical education program which mandated that “If you were physically able to take part, then you had to take part”. No excuses, no exception. I found this quite irritating, as I didn't want to take part. At least, not in the way that they wanted me to.IntroductionIt wasn't that I had something against school sports, or even sports in general, it was just the rigid way that the school applied the mandatory nature of its physical education program. Specifically, that it applied it to me at all. You see, as strange as it might sound, I'd never had to participated in normal physical education classes in Japan. Instead, I'd been given special leave to practice what my teachers considered to be 'more important' thing. Namely, competitive sports that looked good on school resumes, and which could be utilized to win nice shiny trophies.CoachingFrom the...
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September 1993: It's my name, so give it back
2007-04-01 00:00:00
When I first arrived in the US, I was pretty open to the idea of settling down and fitting in. I wanted to learn about the local culture, the local history, and the way that things were done in the American Midwest. However, a year later, I was not even remotely interested in fitting in. I didn't care about the local culture or the local way of doing things, and I had become militantly Japanese to the point of lunacy. Going so far as to act more “Japanese” than I had done in Japan.Largely, my change in attitude was an act of retaliation. I saw America as trying chip away at my heritage and my sense of identity as a Japanese boy. So I militantly stuck to my guns and refused to integrate. Regardless of how stupid it was.In most cases, it was a plethora of little things that turned me from being open minded to closed minded. Things that, individually, might not matter, but together added up. It was also the way that nobody else seemed to notice these things, and the way th...
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September 1993 - An informal adoption
2007-04-01 00:00:00
When it comes to Mother's, mine wouldn't win any prizes. Not unless they were being given at the Child Services “Most Dysfunctional Family” awards. In fact. She was a pretty terrible mother all round.In Kyoto, my Mother was almost completely absent from my life, and she had basically been content to let me to fend for myself. I left for school early in the morning. Went to a combination of private classes, friend's homes, and dojo seasons until it was late. Then I came home to sleep after it had gotten dark. All without involvement from my Mother. Half of the time she didn't know where I was or what I was doing, and she didn't really care either. She didn't even seem to care that I often took my baby sister along for the ride (My world was full of friends with mothers, or older sisters, who fell over themselves to help me look after Lucy). Just so long as I remembered to pick up the groceries while I was out.This all changed when we reached the Midwest. Suddenly, m...
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September 1993: The Flag incident
2007-04-01 00:00:00
Having come from a rather stricter background than is normal, my school days were largely without incidents of the conventional kind. I was never tardy, I always did my homework, and I certainly didn't get involved in any of the pranks, schemes, charades or other shenanigans that popular culture seems to believe go on in modern schools. However, this didn't mean that my schooling wasn't without it the occasional hiccup. I did get in trouble on occasions, but mostly for things that I simply wouldn't believe could happen if they hadn't happened to me.An Inauspicious StartHaving arrived in the Midwest from overseas with the minimum of records, and having subsequently thrown everything into chaos by being boosted a grade, I wasn't able to start classes with the rest of the school, or even be assigned a homeroom, until about three days into the year. Meaning that I started school proper on Wednesday, rather than Monday.In my school, Wednesday mornings were pep mornings. As such, th...
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September 1993: Schooling in America
2007-04-01 00:00:00
It's true that, when I first arrived in the Midwest, I was a little disappointed with what I found. I'd been expecting a big city with bright lights and tall buildings, and had ended up in a rural town where people still believed that crop circles were caused by witchcraft (no, seriously). However, despite my initial disappointment, I didn't let myself get down because of one eagerly awaited event. The start of the school year.For most of my life, I'd lived in the shadow of the America n education system. I'd literally grown up with stories, from the other families on the base and the dwellers in the Kyoto compound, about how much more modern and progressive the American system was than the Japanese system, about how much better equipped American schools were, and about how America's system had allowed it to nurture the scientific and creative talent necessary to achieve great feats like putting a man on the moon. However, when the start of the school year rolled round, things ...
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July 1993: A Mother's Work
2007-04-01 00:00:00
When we left Japan, we did so with such haste that I barely had enough time to say goodbye. My Mother decided that we were moving, the moves came, and we moved. It was as simple as that. Or so it seemed at first.However, as things progressed, clue after clue emerged to tell me, squarely and unambiguously, that things weren't quite so simple.The first clue was that we had somewhere to go to, somewhere finished and furnished. The next clue was that there were two cars waiting for us in the garage, one of which was the imported kind that you have to be on a waiting list to buy, meaning that it had been ordered some time prior to the events that lead us to leave Kyoto. Finally came the discovery that the house had been purchased, by a mystery buyer, a full 6 months before our arrival. After that, it was so obvious that my Mother had been planning a sudden getaway for quite some time that I stopped bothering to take note of all the signs. It was Kyoto all over again.Of course, as with K...
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September 1993 – A Tight Grip
2007-04-01 00:00:00
When I came to the Midwest, a lot of things in my life change. The food change, the scenery changed, even the language changed. All of which is normal fare when you move to a different country. However, one other thing changed, something which I didn't expect. This thing, my Mother. In moving from Japan to the US, she changed from being the world's least attentive mother, to being the world's most controlling mother.In Kyoto, my Mother didn't care about any part of my life beyond the part that involved reading my report card. I went out early in the morning and came back late at night, and she neither new nor cared where I'd been in the mean time just so long as part of it included my school. It was that simple. It was the same with my sister. My Mother simply thrust Lucy into my care and got in with her own life. If I hadn't arrange for somebody to look after Lucy while I was at school, or while I was practicing in the Dojo, nobody else would have. The same went for changing,...
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