Tonight Aoi tried to color my hair black with a calligraphy pen.
Again.
Aoi is the brilliant 5-year-old Japanese girl at my homestay who learned to speak English fluently by watching Disney movies. But brilliance is relative, as she also believes that by coloring my hair black she can single-handedly make me Japanese. One of the funnier episodes involving her developing concept of race happened when she thought about bringing me to her youchen (kindergarten), but then decided against it because “it is only for Japanese people”. But soon she added “wait! you could come if you wear a wig!”.
Well I guess it makes sense. While her parents are teaching me how to abide by Japanese customs and speak Japanese, Aoi is doing her part by coloring my hair black. I suppose someone could tell her that there are many gaijin (foreigners) who also have black hair, but that would spoil the humor for all involved.
~me~ at 6:37 AM
I am working on a three-part poem about traffic. My field work is done every weekday morning without exception, for about an hour (depending on traffic). This project came about some months ago when I began taking deep meditation-style breaths while caught in traffic jams to avoid succumbing to utter madness, and discovered that there is a rhythm to it all.
Around the same time, during cherry blossom season at the end of March, I was driving down a narrow street with my homestay mother and she mentioned that the scene is so aesthetically pleasing to the Japanese because of the many many flowers that are clustered together in a tiny place. Hmm…kind of like the Japanese themselves, I thought to myself as images of the incredibly crowded streets of Shibuya or Shinjuku, packed Tokyo subways and the congested roads I experience every day, went through my head.
I suppose it is nice when nature recreates your own experience; even more so when it portrays something that is usually dirty, smelly and frustrating in an attractive light. Shows that everything has its beauty I guess.
~me~ at 2:58 AM
Speaking of crappy weather, there is a typhoon coming tomorrow afternoon. Fucking figures.
Today at work one of the office ladies decided to gasp when I reached for something on the top of my shelf because she got a glimpse of my bare back. She told me that my shirt is too short and I bluntly responded: “no, it’s not”. That is the kind of day I’m having.
Meanwhile, there is a regular feature on the game show I’m watching right now in which 6 or seven women get on stage in string bikinis and the contestants guess which one has fake boobs. It seems that the Japanese like to keep their women either fully covered or wearing nothing at all, no in between. Any ambiguity would make women seem too human I suppose; god forbid.
~me~ at 5:59 AM
I don’t understand it. Everyone here says that little earthquakes from time to time are good because they release the tension in the ground, but lately it seems like these “little earthquakes” just keep getting bigger and longer and more frequent. I was teaching a class during the big earthquake on Monday, and all of my students had to get under the table. It was really scary to be in a position of authority in such a situation seeing that I know as much about “earthquake safety” as any other New Yorker who’d never felt the ground shake before leaving the continent.
I was with my family at a temple in Kyoto last weekend, when we passed a statue of the “weather god”. With his arms flailing wildly, his appearance was such that he could have seemed quite at home in Dante’s Inferno. I joked with my brother that the god of weather is portrayed in such a way because Japan is such a haven for natural disasters. With all the earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami, typhoons, etc. it’s a wonder this place is actually inhabited. However, with all Japan’s mountains, valleys, volcanos, and oceans, the natural scenery here is also breathtakingly beautiful. There is a poetic sense of beauty in destruction that people sometimes talk about. I am only beginning to understand it.
~me~ at 4:55 AM
Ok I’m back. Like for real. Why was I gone? Well, I’ve been traveling around the country with my parents and lately I’ve been commuting two hours to work from my parents’ hotel in Tokyo. Also, I have been drunk a lot (my family is Irish). No need for excuses though, I just didn’t feel like writing…
The Simpsons Go To Japan, part II (i.e. observations by Lea’s family)
“I think that the Japanese need to lighten up, and forget about 80% of their rules. Like changing into separate slippers for the bathroom: sure, your bathroom floor stays nice and clean but my feet to go in these germ filled shoes that everyone in the building puts on…”
-my mother
“It’s anti-pants day! I’ve been lobbying for this at home forever!”
-my brother, at a festival last week in Asakusa where many traditionally dressed men were curiously not wearing pants.
“I’m almost relieved that the Japanese drink so much; at least they have fun sometimes.”
-my mother
“It’s crazy that in a country that’s so technologically advanced, the housewife is still centuries behind the rest of the world. You’d assume that they’d at least have a dishwasher or a drier or be able to drive a car…”
-my mother, discussing my homestay mother at dinner one night
“It’s crazy that in a country that’s so technologically advanced, they still eat with two sticks.”
-my brother, in response (as he happened to be having difficulty with chopsticks at the time)
~me~ at 2:59 AM