Geisha, Interrupted

Cartoon Wife

"So now that you`re married," the twelve-year-old girl I tutor asks me, "do you want to become like a Japanese housewife?"

"What do you mean by that?" I ask, raising my eyebrows. This could get interesting.

"You know," she says "you pat the kids on the back as you send them off to school...you make lunches and cook dinner for your husband...you clean the house and wear an apron all the time..."

I have no clue where she picked up these ideas. Her mother, after all, is a real-estate agent.

"and take a nap in the afternoon...and eat lots of doughnuts and sweets...and go shopping with the baby tied to you all the time...and gossip with the neighbors..."

She`s spitting all this out in rapid succession. As much as I enjoy talking to this girl, her monologues may be likened best to an express circus train on its way nowhere.

"and you budget the family`s money... but secretly keep some of your husband`s salary for yourself... then use to buy clothes for yourself at the department store..."

"OK," I stop her, finally, "where did you get all these ideas?"

"A cartoon!" she states matter-of-factly, without pausing to think at all.

"Which cartoon?" my eyes widen.

"Crayon Shin-chan!"

Of course, Crayon shin-chan. Shin-chan is a somewhat inappropriate children`s cartoon that no Japanese parents want their kids to watch. This makes the show`s high ratings all the more curious. The cartoon depicts a stereotypically average Japanese family, saving the fact that their 5-year-old son is a raging, Cartman-esque brat with an pimp`s vocabulary.

A lot of the jokes don`t translate well, but here it is anyway.

"You didn`t answer my question," my student has gotten impatient. "Are you going to be a housewife?"

"Well...no," I respond. "Do you want to be a housewife when you grow up?"

"Um," for the first time in our long-winded dialogue, she actually pauses to think. "No."

Put The Camera Down And Help That Woman, Please.

In Japan, it is especially painful to look on as our neighboring Asian nations- most recently China and Myanmar- are devastated by natural disasters. 

Just last week a 6.8 magnitude quake shook Japan, resulting in a few minor injuries and zero deaths. The non-existent death toll had nothing to do with luck: God does not watch over Japan more than he does any other country in the world, and Mother Nature even seems to harbor a special hatred just for us.  The truth is, we have resources that others do not.  Living here, I witness first hand the extent to which nature`s blows may be softened by advanced architecture and municipal preparedness.

In the seas surrounding Japan, a highly advanced tsunami warning system is in place, one that alerts Japanese residents of a tidal wave within seconds after an undersea quake.  That said, it was immensely disturbing to witness as so many other Asian countries did not get the memo when a quake struck beneath the Indian Ocean in 2004.

It is all the more painful to watch something so tragic when you know first-hand that it didn`t have to be that way.  It is really too bad that Japan is so busy bickering with her neighbors (largely over events that took place during the Second World War) to tackle bigger issues and share her wealth of knowledge with those who are suffering right now.

My Fifteen Mortifying Minutes

of fame, or something resembling it, came and went in the form of an interview on a US radio show just recently. The podcast is available online, but I still can`t bring myself to listen to it. I`m sure that even if I didn`t sound stupid on the air (which I`m pretty certain I did), there is no escaping my own self-criticism, so I am better off just not clicking there.

Memoirists are self-obsessed by trade, and memoirists with blogs are even worse. This really makes me wonder why I`m so deathly afraid of my own voice. It doesn`t make a whole lot of sense.

All in all, this whole debacle would be so much easier and tolerable if I could have been drunk the whole time.
Drunk, my own voice sounds great. Sober, it`s unbearable (and one of the hardest things I`ve learn in sobriety was that I`m not as phenomenal a karaoke singer as I`d once assumed.) Oh well.

I`ll give you the link anyway.

From what I hear, you have to fast forward through some guy talking about airline safety first.

4 Minutes in Tokyo

It`s 1:45 am, and we are violently roused from our sleep.  The bed is shaking in all directions, seemingly at once, and the light fixture above us is swinging back and forth.  It is not swaying lightly, like it would during a more moderate quake,  but whirling with momentum, as if possessed.  "This one`s pretty strong," T says to me as I cling to him; he is the only stable body in the room.  I am silent.  I can never speak during these first stages of an earthquake.  I am too busy waiting to know whether the tremors will taper off or or become even more violent.  And when they get worse, I can`t help but wonder if this is, in fact, "it."  "It," you know, is the one that everyone worries about, the one that is overdue, the one in which Mother Nature is supposed to crush all our pretensions of stability, and show the world that a global mega-city is really more of a suggestion than a constant.

It`s 1:46 am, and the shaking is long over.  T gets up to turn off the gas valve, then comes back to bed.  We lie there in silence, waiting, for the sounds of sirens, helecoptors, or any sign that the rest of Tokyo is not so ok.  Yet the night remains quiet; no noise is good noise.  Silently, we`ve survived again. 

It`s 1:47 am, and T checks the internet from the palm of his hand. 
"6.7 off of Ibaraki," he says. 
A 6.7, centered north of the capital and out to sea, I process the information.  That`s nothing.  A  6.7  could have been devastating elsewhere, but this city is practically built upon springs, I remember.  It, would have had to be more in the neighborhood of a magnitude 8 or 9.
"Tsunami warning?" I ask, knowing that we`d been forgetting something.
"Hold on," he waits a few moments for the data to come in, "Nope," he replies, "No tsunami."
"Okay then," I say softly, "good night again, love."

It`s 1:48 am, and I am already drifting back into a carefree, dreamless sleep. 

all the wiser

Here are five random things I realized while I was away:

1) When I am in New York City, I walk about four or five times faster than I do when I am anywhere else in the world.  T brought this to my attention when we got back to Tokyo, where my pace seemed to slacken automatically.  When asked why this was the case, I responded that "Maybe it`s because, in New York, I am always trying to get the hell out of wherever it is I am."

2) There are cherry blossom trees all over the neighborhood where I grew up.  I was fascinated to realize this as I looked out the window of of my parents` car, on the way to their house in Long Island.  Granted these blossoms as not awesome as those in Japan; still, how could I have never known they existed before?  Well for one, their forecasted date of blossoming had not been a top story on the nightly news for many weeks prior. The Japanese really are far more appreciative of nature sometimes; people are acutely aware of each subtle change in season and what it symbolizes.

3) Most of the perves you encounter while walking down the street in America, the kind who very visibly look you up and down as if it`s any of their business, are young-ish aged men.  In Japan however, most young men are very shy when they see an attractive woman, so they are more likely to hide or run away.  This leaves all the perving to the senior citizens, who seem to have finally gotten over this characteristically (cute, but not entirely sexy) Japanese humility.  I far prefer the Japanese species of perv, largely because I stand a far greater chance at kicking his shriveled ass, should it ever come to that.

4) I love vending machines!  I missed them immensely while I was away!  When dealing exclusively with vending machines, there`s no need to speak with the so-polite-it-makes-you-uncomfortable (Japan) or the angry-at-the-world-and-that`s-somehow-your-fault (New York)  service industry professionals in either part of the world.

5) American television, whether it is taken out of context or not, is far dumber than Japanese TV.  And that says a lot.  I will post more later about the adventures in American television that I endured throughout my sojourn.

No really, I will.  I am back.

I 愛 Entertainment Weekly

The following review is pasted from last week`s issue of my new favorite magazine:

downside up girl

Some months ago, Jade was telling me about a famous Japanese folktale which I - never having been a child growing up in Japan- had never heard of before.  This is likely why I found the story so fascinating.  It was about a boy named Urashimataro who saved the life of a turtle, prompting the turtle to take Urashimataro on his back to a palace under the sea. There, the boy lived a life of luxury and decadence in the company of a princess.  After three days however, Urashimataro missed his mother and wanted to go back up to the land.  On his departure, the princess gave him a box and told him never to open it (of course).  Urashimataro took the box and returned to his native land.  There, he was shocked to learn that 100 years had gone by on the land in what had been only three days under the sea.  At this point Urashimataro naturally opened the box, which released a magic spell that turned the boy into an old man.

The folktale suggests that time passes differently in different places, in different environments or contexts.  I`ve been thinking about Urashimataro (whose name, when translated badly, means "upside-down-island-boy") a lot lately.

I was so much like Urashimataro that time 3 or so years ago when I actually attempted to move back to America, after spending quite a few decadent years in Japan just after college.  I came back and everyone had grown up and gotten real jobs and knew how to act like adults in this culture.  And it sucked.  So instead of opening Urashimataro`s box, I went running back to Japan.

But now, years later, the situation has completely reversed itself.  I feel as I have changes so much while living in Tokyo the past couple of years, but everything here has stayed the same.  I am the anti-urashimataro (downside-up-trench-girl?).  In the year-and-change I`ve spent sober, I`ve built a really stable life for myself back in Japan.  And it`s awesome.  I love my life in Tokyo.  But it just doesn`t exist here.  At all.  Having been drunk or high all the time has not left much of a life for me to come back to.  It is like early sobriety for me all over again. I feel like I have to build my American life up again from scratch.  But to be honest, I`m not really trying that hard to do so.  So much has been happening that I don`t really feel as if I`m here or there.

Oh yeah, and I got married last week.  It kicked ass. 

and i`m off...

So I`m leaving Tokyo tomorrow for a 3 week sojourn in America, where, if all goes according to plan, I will get married and launch a book.  Little things like that.  I haven`t been back there since the summer of 2006, and I`ve never been back as a sober and generally unfuckedup person.  That said, I am bracing myself for a reverse culture shock of unprecedented proportions. 

And it`s already started, for example, I am totally scared that I`m going to get shot as soon as I get off the plane.  So much is evidence that I watch the news in Japanese, and that I haven`t set foot out of these islands in far too long.  When I tell Japanese people that I`m originally from New York,  they usually ask me if I own a gun, if my family owns guns or if my friends have their own guns.  At this point I have to explain that not all Americans own guns, it just seems like it because we are getting shot at all the time.

Of all the things I could be worrying about. 

Anyways...off I go!

Rest In Peace

I hope you`re in a better place now.

The Things That You Find In The Drain

   

(click on pictures for larger images)