Showing posts with label Tokyo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tokyo. Show all posts
Monday, November 29, 2021
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Coronavirus Missives from Japan and the US
As published at Unz Review, TruthSeeker and LewRockwell, 5/8/20:
Five months into the coronavirus crisis, there is no consensus about anything.
When this virus was mostly limited to China, I tried to get as close as possible, so for two weeks, I stayed in Lao Cai, Vietnam. Nearly each day, I walked along the Red River to look into Yunnan, and what I saw were shutted stores, empty streets and almost no pedestrians. Each night, though, the highrises were lit up as usual. Seeing such desolation, I never imagined it would soon spread across much of the world.
In Hekou, there’s a large red banner showing Xi Jinping standing at a podium, with this message in Chinese, Vietnamese and English, “Adhere to the Road of Peaceful Development / Promoting the Construction of a Community of Shared Destiny.”
In Lao Cai, there’s a Trump Kids Kindergarten, by the way, and it’s run by the local Communist Party.
Leaving Lao Cai, I went to Si Ma Cai. Inhabited mostly by tribal peoples, this extremely remote district of 26,000 people blurs right into China, with plenty of smuggling going each way. One fine morning, I decided to just trek into the mountains. (I have a cousin whose estranged wife became a drug mule to China, by the way. This quiet, sweet and stoic woman was caught and executed.)
As I’ve stated elsewhere, I once crossed into Mexico from Candelaria, TX, because there was no border check, only a universally ignored sign saying it was illegal to do so.
My vague plan to absentmindedly mosey into the Middle Kingdom didn’t succeed. Here’s my caption to a photo from February 21st, “One of the last houses before the border. Couldn’t go any further. A soldier ran out of that house right there to stop me, and he was courteous about it. It took me three hours to walk here from Si Ma Cai. Mountain roads, up and down, a real pain in the ass. Almost no one has heard of this village, Na Cáng, and it’s not on any map. Two narrow lanes, too small for a car, lead to it. There is an elementary school, so kudos to that teacher.”
Leaving the Chinese border, I took a bus to Hanoi, but instead of going further south to eternally warm Vung Tau, where a room by the beach could be had for just $128 a month, a Tiger Beer cost 64 cents, and deeply satisfying conversations with close friends awaited me, I decided to fly to Seoul.
I emailed my buddy Rudy List in Michigan, “I’m flying to South Korea tomorrow night. Something this crazy, only you or I would do. I want to see how an advanced society deal with this coronavirus crisis...”
Rudy, “I have never received a more meaningful compliment. Thank you!!!” Actually, Rudy is much battier than I am. In 1975, he walked alone into Iraq from Iran, as machine guns on either side were trained on each other, “It was the loneliest two hundred yards I’ve ever walked. Either side could have shot me and blamed it on the other.”
Fact is, no one knows entirely why he does anything. What may appear as courage is actually pant-soiling cowardice, and sadism is dressed up as empathy, or vice versa. Maybe I’m just in love with Corona-Chan? As Anatoly Karlin will tell you, she’s one hot babe.
Outside Busan Station, I saw this on the back of a woman’s coat, “It’s either the flu or love… the symptoms are the same.” Seeing my photo of it, Ian Keenan comments, “Precisely the most commonly cited subtext of Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera.” If any plague is love, it must be the earth falling in love with itself.
As luck would have it, I’m in the freest country on earth right now, where stores, restaurants and bars are all open, and subways, buses and trains run on regular schedules. I must have emerged from over half of Busan’s 150 subway stations. There are a dozen beaches here, each with its own character, and even the countryside can be reached by public transportation. As someone who walks compulsively for miles nearly each day, I’d be in a cranky mess if forced to be sheltered in place.
With its unmatched coronavirus coverage, Unz Review has become a vital symposium on this global catastrophe. Brilliant analyses and key statements abound.
Gilad Atzmon, “Since we do not know its provenance, we should treat the current epidemic as a potentially criminal act as well as a medical event. We must begin the search for the perpetrators who may be at the centre of this possible crime of global genocidal proportions,” and he calls on whistle blowers to come forward.
Citing a list of circumstantial evidences, including the fact that America’s intelligence agencies “were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself,” Ron Unz is convinced this pandemic is an American biowarfare attack on China.
Agreeing with Unz, Kevin Barrett expands, “Independent historians have convincingly argued that such history-changing crises as World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the 1971 birth of the petrodollar, 9/11, and the 2008 collapse were all engineered by the Zionist-dominated usury banking cartel that rules the West. In every case, the bankster cartel has profited from the destruction of real economies and real value. When smaller competitors go broke, the big banksters buy up hard assets at pennies on the dollar, further consolidating wealth in the hands of the few. And crises and wars force governments to go ever-deeper into debt, borrowing from the banksters at compound interest that will enslave future generations.”
As led by China and Russia, the economic integration of Eurasia leaves the US out in the cold, so it has no choice but to demonize and attack both relentlessly, on several fronts. If the coronavirus pandemic is indeed the work of Uncle Sam, then he may have shot himself in the foot, or even worse, in the head. Banksters can’t benefit from hard assets if the polity itself has been shredded. Sure, the coming unrest will give the state a pretext to mow down discontents and browbeat the rest, but perhaps our rulers have, finally, underestimated our collective rage.
Meanwhile, let’s hear how three individuals are dealing with this madness in Japan and Idaho:
Renzo, an Italian in his 40’s who’s been living in Japan for 17 years
The hotel I am employed at was temporarily closed from April 7th following this situation, with reopening just now rescheduled for June 1st.
Fortunately, my salary has been guaranteed these two months, and also there will be a cash handout of about 1,000USD per person from the government.
We still can go out; everyone here wears a mask but aside from that really not much else happening to prevent things getting worse.
Shops are bustling with people, the real number of COVID-19 infections likely several times higher than government reports are indicating daily.
Back in Tuscany, in Castelfiorentino, regretfully one of my closest uncles (already 87) died in hospital a week after he was admitted with Covid-19 symptoms.
Max von Schuler-Kobayashi is an American who has lived in Japan for 45 years. Writing in Japanese and English, he is the author of six books on military history and present society.
We in Japan are much better off than the US or Great Britain. I put this to the extreme cleanliness of Japanese people in general.
For example, Japanese people always remove their shoes when returning home. And bathe every day. A Japanese home is always kept very clean.
Also Japan has a very competent health care system. We have National Health insurance, based on income.
It means that all people have access to the same general care. I checked this morning, some 11,200 active cases.
A good number of these are foreigners, such as from cruise ships. But the number of recovered people per day is beginning to outnumber the number of new cases per day. Perhaps we have reached plateau.
Personally, since my work involves speaking in front of many people, so I am unemployed.
In Japan, we have a unique situation. Our constitution was written and forced upon us post WWII by Americans. So it severely limits Executive powers. Our Prime Minister cannot simply order a lockdown.
What has happened is the political leadership has asked for voluntary lockdown, well a partial one.
Bars and restaurants can be open until 8pm. Last order is at 7pm. Schools are closed. Movie theaters closed.
But this is all voluntary. If a bar wants to remain open until late at night, the government cannot send police.
My guess is that some 80% of the Japanese population is complying with these guidelines. For a while, pinball gambling establishments would not comply, but public shaming did the trick. There is a vibrant sex industry in Japan. Since most cases of Corona virus are male, it is estimated that some 40% of new cases in Japan come from the sex industry. However, they are now closed also.
The Japanese government has to decided finally to send relief payments of ¥100,000 yen per person to people unemployed by Corona, sex workers will be included. I think I qualify. In the future, I think world trade will shrink. I think the Global economy is over. The future Japanese economy will be much more local.
I don’t think Corona will disappear, but will be with us for a long time, as a seasonal epidemic.
I think Japan is better prepared to handle the transition to a more local economy.
This is not from any prescient government planning. The government is mostly 2nd and 3rd generation idiots who grew up with a silver spoon.
I don’t think the present Japanese government will remain.
Rather, it is the native ability of the Japanese people to persevere and weather a crisis. It will be hard, and there will be some people who simply will not survive, say someone from an elite university, being involved in foreign trade, suddenly moving to the countryside to become a farmer. But most people will adapt.
I think war on the Korean peninsula very possible, and perhaps in China. The Chinese have been very dishonest about the state of Corona Virus in their country. They never did get it under any kind of control, they just pretended to for business reasons. Now it is in Beijing. They too are facing collapse of present society.
The American Empire certainly over, I see civil war in America, and eventual breakup, into at least 5 entities. I don’t see massed armies like the Blue and Grey of 150 years ago, but rather a guerrilla war. I think the cities will depopulate, most city people will not survive rural life. The future transport system of the US will be by river, some rail, and horse. Most car and truck transport will disappear for lack of fuel. I don’t see a national electric grid as maintainable.
Western Europe will be similar.
The two countries that will still resemble present life the most will be Japan and Russia.
Paul Bonnell, a 47-year-old high school teacher and track coach, living in Bonners Ferry, Idaho
I have been reading your Coronavirus Missives and recent blog posts with fascination--curious about the different reactions, responses, and experiences around the world. Thanks for the opportunity to contribute a post to your collection.
I live in Bonners Ferry, Boundary County, the northernmost county in Idaho, U.S.A., bordering Montana, Washington, and British Columbia. Bonners Ferry has a population of about 3,000. Boundary County around 11,000. We have one stoplight; a dozen restaurants and churches; a few lumber mills, hair salons, and bars; a couple of hardware and building supply stores; a resort/spa/casino; some grocery stores; a bookstore; a bowling alley; a non-profit arts theater; some thrift stores, banks, and fabric shops; antique stores; a pawn shop; auto parts stores, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities, a community hospital, some dental offices and veterinarians; a U.S. Wildlife Refuge; a U.S. Forest Service ranger station; a sturgeon and burbot hatchery; the county library; a few gas stations and real estate offices; and various other businesses.
This is the Kootenai Valley, ancestral home of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho. Three mountain ranges meet here—the Selkirks, Purcells, and Cabinets. Long ago the Purcell Lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered everything here with thousands of feet of glacier. Now, it’s forests and farms, including one of the largest hops farms in the world, Elk Mountain Farms.
To date, Boundary County has no official cases of Covid 19, although we are proximal to places that do have cases, and people speculate--people who swear they’ve had it, people who know people who have it, people who say they called in, but were told there was no testing availability. Here, as elsewhere, the "numbers game" has been an ongoing conversation.
I am not really sure what to think of the various layers, except that early on I read about testing in places like South Korea and Vietnam, and from what I have heard, that has not been the case here. The current number of cases in Idaho is 2,158. Idaho was under a "Stay-Home" Order from mid-March through April; we just shifted to a "Stay Healthy" Order on May 1 and Stage One of the "Idaho Rebounds: Our Path to Prosperity" program.
From what I can tell, the whole situation raises compelling and thorny questions about jurisdiction, power, perceptions, (mis) trust of government, conspiracies, personal freedom, community responsibility, social class issues, urban-rural divides, culture, popular mythology, faith crises, the real estate market, etc. I wonder if these issues are always here, maybe just more exposed by all of this.
There's a sense of "remoteness" here--about 100 miles to Spokane, Washington and 500 miles to Boise, Idaho’s state capital--a geographical "tension" that the Covid 19 situation brings out. For all the apparent or inherent “isolation,” we also are more “connected” than we might let on. Ordinarily, I would be coaching high school and middle school track right now. We’ll bus kids over a 100 miles one way to Kellogg, Idaho for an afternoon track meet on a school day. We may live in communities that are far apart, but we also interact across those distances. People go touristing from here—Mexico, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Tempe. I had some friends who went to Palawan and Phú Quốc this winter. They came back (wearing masks) just as everything was ramping up in the U.S.
We're on a couple of major U.S. highway routes (U.S. 95 and U.S. 2) and the Great Northern railroad. Albertan cattle trucks roll through town every day, bound for feedlots and slaughterhouses--Spokane or maybe Yakima. On New Year’s Day this winter, a rock slide derailed a Burlington Northern diesel freight train into the Kootenai River. That one was bound for Pasco, coming from Minneapolis. At night, when I listen to the trains rumble through the valley, I think of all the trains--hauling oil from the Bakken in North Dakota, or Maersk and Yang Ming and Cosco shipping containers, or coal, or grain. Or passengers on the Amtrak’s Empire Builder. I think of our connection to the global system, even in this seemingly quiet corner of the world.
Will this whole thing make us think about complex realities? Political entities? Political unrest? Will we reflect on epidemiology, borders, regulations, public health, global travel, global trade, global war—or are we just reacting and/or moving on? Maybe we won’t have the time or energy or resources to do much else.
I teach high school during the day and community college at night. Our school district has been on a remote learning/"soft closure" set up since the middle of March. My college classes are now online. It's been challenging trying to figure it all out, but honestly, I’ve been amazed at how adaptable and resilient families, students, and colleagues have been. I’m curious about where all of this will take “school.” One of my colleagues thinks we could be heading for significant changes. Who knows? It feels like this right now is the greatest “school” lesson.
It’s been interesting talking to students. I talked to a student yesterday who said he’s been working extra shifts at the grocery store and studying Norse mythology when he can. A couple who are working at the hops farm. Another who is working on a CDL. Another who is writing a “Coronavirus Diary.” A student who has been loading trees at one of nurseries and working on firefighter certifications, set to work the summer fire season with the Idaho Department of Lands. My son worked as an “essential laborer” the last couple of days putting shingles on a roof with my brother-in-law. Some students are flexing school and work around each other, some are buckling down on academics, preparing for the AP exams. Some are just working jobs, maybe 60 hours a week. Some are taking care of siblings. And there are some I haven’t heard from or been able to contact. One student who wrote, “Mr. Bonnell, if I wanted to go to school online I would have just left school freshman year to do it then. I need the motivation of the classroom.”
I am concerned for students who have limited internet and other infrastructure access, challenging or dangerous domestic situations, food insecurity, homelessness, etc. Students working one or two jobs to help out their families because their parents got laid off. Students who live in the woods and don’t have internet access. One student contacted me, worried about being late with an assignment because they had lost power in a wind storm and were having to keep their new chicks from freezing. There are so many stories like this here and everywhere across the globe. I read about all the people on the move in India, trying to outwalk starvation, even if it meant contracting the coronavirus.
Many of the details of my life have been altered—a truncated ski season at the local resort, where I work and recreate on the weekends; a canceled season of coaching track; different teaching methods; a daughter home early from college, finishing the semester at home and working in an "essential" industry at the grocery store; a son doing high school at home and figuring out several weeks of not seeing friends or working and playing at the ski resort; Rebecca navigating the challenges of working from home; a couple of months of not playing music out with friends at local bars or restaurants or church; a canceled trip to the American Literature Association conference in San Diego, where I was supposed to present a hybrid project with the Circle for Asian American Literature on transnational adoption and documents (including vaccination records, interestingly). But these are just inconveniences and disruptions, not tragedies.
Many details of life have been similar. We live close to town but in the middle of a beautiful stand of trees—western larch, cedar, Douglas fir, white fir, hemlock, Ponderosa pine, white pine, and birch. I go for morning and evening walks with lovely views of the valley and the surrounding mountains. Around school responsibilities, I continue to work on research projects about the Chăm, Bru, and Ê Đê. Some music. Some photography.
Mostly, I have been working and thinking. I think about the personal and collective social and psychological ramifications of all of this. I am thankful to have survived war and wartime orphaning/abandonment, malaria, and adoption--and I guess I find that personal history to be connected somehow to this present. Survival. Making the best of difficult times. I look around and see potential for good—kind deeds and art and storytelling/story listening—and also potential for various upheaval and fragmentation and destruction. We’ll see what happens.
Five months into the coronavirus crisis, there is no consensus about anything.
When this virus was mostly limited to China, I tried to get as close as possible, so for two weeks, I stayed in Lao Cai, Vietnam. Nearly each day, I walked along the Red River to look into Yunnan, and what I saw were shutted stores, empty streets and almost no pedestrians. Each night, though, the highrises were lit up as usual. Seeing such desolation, I never imagined it would soon spread across much of the world.
In Hekou, there’s a large red banner showing Xi Jinping standing at a podium, with this message in Chinese, Vietnamese and English, “Adhere to the Road of Peaceful Development / Promoting the Construction of a Community of Shared Destiny.”
In Lao Cai, there’s a Trump Kids Kindergarten, by the way, and it’s run by the local Communist Party.
Leaving Lao Cai, I went to Si Ma Cai. Inhabited mostly by tribal peoples, this extremely remote district of 26,000 people blurs right into China, with plenty of smuggling going each way. One fine morning, I decided to just trek into the mountains. (I have a cousin whose estranged wife became a drug mule to China, by the way. This quiet, sweet and stoic woman was caught and executed.)
As I’ve stated elsewhere, I once crossed into Mexico from Candelaria, TX, because there was no border check, only a universally ignored sign saying it was illegal to do so.
My vague plan to absentmindedly mosey into the Middle Kingdom didn’t succeed. Here’s my caption to a photo from February 21st, “One of the last houses before the border. Couldn’t go any further. A soldier ran out of that house right there to stop me, and he was courteous about it. It took me three hours to walk here from Si Ma Cai. Mountain roads, up and down, a real pain in the ass. Almost no one has heard of this village, Na Cáng, and it’s not on any map. Two narrow lanes, too small for a car, lead to it. There is an elementary school, so kudos to that teacher.”
Leaving the Chinese border, I took a bus to Hanoi, but instead of going further south to eternally warm Vung Tau, where a room by the beach could be had for just $128 a month, a Tiger Beer cost 64 cents, and deeply satisfying conversations with close friends awaited me, I decided to fly to Seoul.
I emailed my buddy Rudy List in Michigan, “I’m flying to South Korea tomorrow night. Something this crazy, only you or I would do. I want to see how an advanced society deal with this coronavirus crisis...”
Rudy, “I have never received a more meaningful compliment. Thank you!!!” Actually, Rudy is much battier than I am. In 1975, he walked alone into Iraq from Iran, as machine guns on either side were trained on each other, “It was the loneliest two hundred yards I’ve ever walked. Either side could have shot me and blamed it on the other.”
Fact is, no one knows entirely why he does anything. What may appear as courage is actually pant-soiling cowardice, and sadism is dressed up as empathy, or vice versa. Maybe I’m just in love with Corona-Chan? As Anatoly Karlin will tell you, she’s one hot babe.
Outside Busan Station, I saw this on the back of a woman’s coat, “It’s either the flu or love… the symptoms are the same.” Seeing my photo of it, Ian Keenan comments, “Precisely the most commonly cited subtext of Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera.” If any plague is love, it must be the earth falling in love with itself.
As luck would have it, I’m in the freest country on earth right now, where stores, restaurants and bars are all open, and subways, buses and trains run on regular schedules. I must have emerged from over half of Busan’s 150 subway stations. There are a dozen beaches here, each with its own character, and even the countryside can be reached by public transportation. As someone who walks compulsively for miles nearly each day, I’d be in a cranky mess if forced to be sheltered in place.
With its unmatched coronavirus coverage, Unz Review has become a vital symposium on this global catastrophe. Brilliant analyses and key statements abound.
Gilad Atzmon, “Since we do not know its provenance, we should treat the current epidemic as a potentially criminal act as well as a medical event. We must begin the search for the perpetrators who may be at the centre of this possible crime of global genocidal proportions,” and he calls on whistle blowers to come forward.
Citing a list of circumstantial evidences, including the fact that America’s intelligence agencies “were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself,” Ron Unz is convinced this pandemic is an American biowarfare attack on China.
Agreeing with Unz, Kevin Barrett expands, “Independent historians have convincingly argued that such history-changing crises as World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the 1971 birth of the petrodollar, 9/11, and the 2008 collapse were all engineered by the Zionist-dominated usury banking cartel that rules the West. In every case, the bankster cartel has profited from the destruction of real economies and real value. When smaller competitors go broke, the big banksters buy up hard assets at pennies on the dollar, further consolidating wealth in the hands of the few. And crises and wars force governments to go ever-deeper into debt, borrowing from the banksters at compound interest that will enslave future generations.”
As led by China and Russia, the economic integration of Eurasia leaves the US out in the cold, so it has no choice but to demonize and attack both relentlessly, on several fronts. If the coronavirus pandemic is indeed the work of Uncle Sam, then he may have shot himself in the foot, or even worse, in the head. Banksters can’t benefit from hard assets if the polity itself has been shredded. Sure, the coming unrest will give the state a pretext to mow down discontents and browbeat the rest, but perhaps our rulers have, finally, underestimated our collective rage.
Meanwhile, let’s hear how three individuals are dealing with this madness in Japan and Idaho:
Renzo, an Italian in his 40’s who’s been living in Japan for 17 years
The hotel I am employed at was temporarily closed from April 7th following this situation, with reopening just now rescheduled for June 1st.
Fortunately, my salary has been guaranteed these two months, and also there will be a cash handout of about 1,000USD per person from the government.
We still can go out; everyone here wears a mask but aside from that really not much else happening to prevent things getting worse.
Shops are bustling with people, the real number of COVID-19 infections likely several times higher than government reports are indicating daily.
Back in Tuscany, in Castelfiorentino, regretfully one of my closest uncles (already 87) died in hospital a week after he was admitted with Covid-19 symptoms.
Max von Schuler-Kobayashi is an American who has lived in Japan for 45 years. Writing in Japanese and English, he is the author of six books on military history and present society.
We in Japan are much better off than the US or Great Britain. I put this to the extreme cleanliness of Japanese people in general.
For example, Japanese people always remove their shoes when returning home. And bathe every day. A Japanese home is always kept very clean.
Also Japan has a very competent health care system. We have National Health insurance, based on income.
It means that all people have access to the same general care. I checked this morning, some 11,200 active cases.
A good number of these are foreigners, such as from cruise ships. But the number of recovered people per day is beginning to outnumber the number of new cases per day. Perhaps we have reached plateau.
Personally, since my work involves speaking in front of many people, so I am unemployed.
In Japan, we have a unique situation. Our constitution was written and forced upon us post WWII by Americans. So it severely limits Executive powers. Our Prime Minister cannot simply order a lockdown.
What has happened is the political leadership has asked for voluntary lockdown, well a partial one.
Bars and restaurants can be open until 8pm. Last order is at 7pm. Schools are closed. Movie theaters closed.
But this is all voluntary. If a bar wants to remain open until late at night, the government cannot send police.
My guess is that some 80% of the Japanese population is complying with these guidelines. For a while, pinball gambling establishments would not comply, but public shaming did the trick. There is a vibrant sex industry in Japan. Since most cases of Corona virus are male, it is estimated that some 40% of new cases in Japan come from the sex industry. However, they are now closed also.
The Japanese government has to decided finally to send relief payments of ¥100,000 yen per person to people unemployed by Corona, sex workers will be included. I think I qualify. In the future, I think world trade will shrink. I think the Global economy is over. The future Japanese economy will be much more local.
I don’t think Corona will disappear, but will be with us for a long time, as a seasonal epidemic.
I think Japan is better prepared to handle the transition to a more local economy.
This is not from any prescient government planning. The government is mostly 2nd and 3rd generation idiots who grew up with a silver spoon.
I don’t think the present Japanese government will remain.
Rather, it is the native ability of the Japanese people to persevere and weather a crisis. It will be hard, and there will be some people who simply will not survive, say someone from an elite university, being involved in foreign trade, suddenly moving to the countryside to become a farmer. But most people will adapt.
I think war on the Korean peninsula very possible, and perhaps in China. The Chinese have been very dishonest about the state of Corona Virus in their country. They never did get it under any kind of control, they just pretended to for business reasons. Now it is in Beijing. They too are facing collapse of present society.
The American Empire certainly over, I see civil war in America, and eventual breakup, into at least 5 entities. I don’t see massed armies like the Blue and Grey of 150 years ago, but rather a guerrilla war. I think the cities will depopulate, most city people will not survive rural life. The future transport system of the US will be by river, some rail, and horse. Most car and truck transport will disappear for lack of fuel. I don’t see a national electric grid as maintainable.
Western Europe will be similar.
The two countries that will still resemble present life the most will be Japan and Russia.
Paul Bonnell, a 47-year-old high school teacher and track coach, living in Bonners Ferry, Idaho
I have been reading your Coronavirus Missives and recent blog posts with fascination--curious about the different reactions, responses, and experiences around the world. Thanks for the opportunity to contribute a post to your collection.
I live in Bonners Ferry, Boundary County, the northernmost county in Idaho, U.S.A., bordering Montana, Washington, and British Columbia. Bonners Ferry has a population of about 3,000. Boundary County around 11,000. We have one stoplight; a dozen restaurants and churches; a few lumber mills, hair salons, and bars; a couple of hardware and building supply stores; a resort/spa/casino; some grocery stores; a bookstore; a bowling alley; a non-profit arts theater; some thrift stores, banks, and fabric shops; antique stores; a pawn shop; auto parts stores, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities, a community hospital, some dental offices and veterinarians; a U.S. Wildlife Refuge; a U.S. Forest Service ranger station; a sturgeon and burbot hatchery; the county library; a few gas stations and real estate offices; and various other businesses.
This is the Kootenai Valley, ancestral home of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho. Three mountain ranges meet here—the Selkirks, Purcells, and Cabinets. Long ago the Purcell Lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered everything here with thousands of feet of glacier. Now, it’s forests and farms, including one of the largest hops farms in the world, Elk Mountain Farms.
To date, Boundary County has no official cases of Covid 19, although we are proximal to places that do have cases, and people speculate--people who swear they’ve had it, people who know people who have it, people who say they called in, but were told there was no testing availability. Here, as elsewhere, the "numbers game" has been an ongoing conversation.
I am not really sure what to think of the various layers, except that early on I read about testing in places like South Korea and Vietnam, and from what I have heard, that has not been the case here. The current number of cases in Idaho is 2,158. Idaho was under a "Stay-Home" Order from mid-March through April; we just shifted to a "Stay Healthy" Order on May 1 and Stage One of the "Idaho Rebounds: Our Path to Prosperity" program.
From what I can tell, the whole situation raises compelling and thorny questions about jurisdiction, power, perceptions, (mis) trust of government, conspiracies, personal freedom, community responsibility, social class issues, urban-rural divides, culture, popular mythology, faith crises, the real estate market, etc. I wonder if these issues are always here, maybe just more exposed by all of this.
There's a sense of "remoteness" here--about 100 miles to Spokane, Washington and 500 miles to Boise, Idaho’s state capital--a geographical "tension" that the Covid 19 situation brings out. For all the apparent or inherent “isolation,” we also are more “connected” than we might let on. Ordinarily, I would be coaching high school and middle school track right now. We’ll bus kids over a 100 miles one way to Kellogg, Idaho for an afternoon track meet on a school day. We may live in communities that are far apart, but we also interact across those distances. People go touristing from here—Mexico, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Tempe. I had some friends who went to Palawan and Phú Quốc this winter. They came back (wearing masks) just as everything was ramping up in the U.S.
We're on a couple of major U.S. highway routes (U.S. 95 and U.S. 2) and the Great Northern railroad. Albertan cattle trucks roll through town every day, bound for feedlots and slaughterhouses--Spokane or maybe Yakima. On New Year’s Day this winter, a rock slide derailed a Burlington Northern diesel freight train into the Kootenai River. That one was bound for Pasco, coming from Minneapolis. At night, when I listen to the trains rumble through the valley, I think of all the trains--hauling oil from the Bakken in North Dakota, or Maersk and Yang Ming and Cosco shipping containers, or coal, or grain. Or passengers on the Amtrak’s Empire Builder. I think of our connection to the global system, even in this seemingly quiet corner of the world.
Will this whole thing make us think about complex realities? Political entities? Political unrest? Will we reflect on epidemiology, borders, regulations, public health, global travel, global trade, global war—or are we just reacting and/or moving on? Maybe we won’t have the time or energy or resources to do much else.
I teach high school during the day and community college at night. Our school district has been on a remote learning/"soft closure" set up since the middle of March. My college classes are now online. It's been challenging trying to figure it all out, but honestly, I’ve been amazed at how adaptable and resilient families, students, and colleagues have been. I’m curious about where all of this will take “school.” One of my colleagues thinks we could be heading for significant changes. Who knows? It feels like this right now is the greatest “school” lesson.
It’s been interesting talking to students. I talked to a student yesterday who said he’s been working extra shifts at the grocery store and studying Norse mythology when he can. A couple who are working at the hops farm. Another who is working on a CDL. Another who is writing a “Coronavirus Diary.” A student who has been loading trees at one of nurseries and working on firefighter certifications, set to work the summer fire season with the Idaho Department of Lands. My son worked as an “essential laborer” the last couple of days putting shingles on a roof with my brother-in-law. Some students are flexing school and work around each other, some are buckling down on academics, preparing for the AP exams. Some are just working jobs, maybe 60 hours a week. Some are taking care of siblings. And there are some I haven’t heard from or been able to contact. One student who wrote, “Mr. Bonnell, if I wanted to go to school online I would have just left school freshman year to do it then. I need the motivation of the classroom.”
I am concerned for students who have limited internet and other infrastructure access, challenging or dangerous domestic situations, food insecurity, homelessness, etc. Students working one or two jobs to help out their families because their parents got laid off. Students who live in the woods and don’t have internet access. One student contacted me, worried about being late with an assignment because they had lost power in a wind storm and were having to keep their new chicks from freezing. There are so many stories like this here and everywhere across the globe. I read about all the people on the move in India, trying to outwalk starvation, even if it meant contracting the coronavirus.
Many of the details of my life have been altered—a truncated ski season at the local resort, where I work and recreate on the weekends; a canceled season of coaching track; different teaching methods; a daughter home early from college, finishing the semester at home and working in an "essential" industry at the grocery store; a son doing high school at home and figuring out several weeks of not seeing friends or working and playing at the ski resort; Rebecca navigating the challenges of working from home; a couple of months of not playing music out with friends at local bars or restaurants or church; a canceled trip to the American Literature Association conference in San Diego, where I was supposed to present a hybrid project with the Circle for Asian American Literature on transnational adoption and documents (including vaccination records, interestingly). But these are just inconveniences and disruptions, not tragedies.
Many details of life have been similar. We live close to town but in the middle of a beautiful stand of trees—western larch, cedar, Douglas fir, white fir, hemlock, Ponderosa pine, white pine, and birch. I go for morning and evening walks with lovely views of the valley and the surrounding mountains. Around school responsibilities, I continue to work on research projects about the Chăm, Bru, and Ê Đê. Some music. Some photography.
Mostly, I have been working and thinking. I think about the personal and collective social and psychological ramifications of all of this. I am thankful to have survived war and wartime orphaning/abandonment, malaria, and adoption--and I guess I find that personal history to be connected somehow to this present. Survival. Making the best of difficult times. I look around and see potential for good—kind deeds and art and storytelling/story listening—and also potential for various upheaval and fragmentation and destruction. We’ll see what happens.
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Belonging, Not Belonging, Who Cares?
As published at Smirking Chimp, Unz Review and TruthSeeker, 10/26/19:
In Saigon, I can easily go a week without seeing any white person, but today, I ran across two white Mormons on bicycles, with one having this paper sign on his backpack, “TIẾNG ANH MIỄN PHÍ” [“FREE ENGLISH LANGUAGE”].
I also passed a young white man pulling a suitcase down the street, his face showing discomfort from the intense heat, at least, and probably because he was all alone, without a single syllable to connect him with anyone. It seemed he was headed towards the bus station, a good mile away. He could have gotten there on the back of a motorbike for just a buck, but to do that, he had to speak some Vietnamese, for this was nowhere near downtown.
Half an hour later, I saw him on another street, going in the opposite direction, so he was walking in circles, apparently. Looking determined, the lanky man in shorts marched briskly along, a foot away from swarming motorbikes. Don’t bother me, his face was trying to say, I know what I’m doing.
Actually, the dude wasn’t that forsaken, for there were English schools all over the neighborhood, with white people inside each. This knowledge must have emboldened him to meander through this alien environment. Even if he spoke no English, it had to be comforting to know there were other whites, or at least foreigners, around. He wasn’t the only one who didn’t belong.
Lost in Tokyo, I approached the only black man on the street for directions. He helped me. Needing to use a phone in Kuala Lumpur, I cheered up to hear Vietnamese spoken nearby. She lent me hers.
Also in Tokyo, a white guy could tell immediately that I wasn’t Japanese and, more surprisingly, as likely an American. Relieved to arrest a compatriot on the sidewalk, the Iraq War vet and military contractor was garrulous. He had been drinking all night.
Even in Vietnam, I was clearly an outsider in 1995, on my first trip back. Besides my lighter skin and Americanized body language, I was also dressed like no one else. Once, a stranger touched my jeans in admiration. They were called “cow pants” then. Unlike most people, I never picked my teeth in public or squatted.
In 2019, it’s much harder to single out a việt kiều [overseas Vietnamese], for many people here have adopted the American casual look of jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, flannel shirts and sneakers, etc. The conical hat is still common, but ao dais have become extremely rare, regrettably. Colorful printed pajamas are usually found only on the frumpy middle-aged.
Haircuts are cooler. Tattoos spider. Urban sophisticates browse foreign cuisines, jet overseas and are mesmerized by American films, so their demeanors and postures, too, have evolved, or been tinkered with, I should say. You no longer see men holding hands.
With more cash, dental care has much improved, and at each dentist office, white models beam from signs. As with so much else, whites provide the standard and target. My teeth, by the way, are among the worst here. In three decades, I have visited the dentist exactly twice, and only in Vietnam.
Until a century ago, Vietnamese routinely lacquered their teeth black. That custom is long gone. The 20th century was one of accelerated and often violent changes. Marveling at its conveniences and gadgets, we survivors often forget its staggering body count, social rending and psychic brutality, even as we continue to endure it. Millions of souls have been flushed down the progressive toilet.
The 20th century promised to liberate you from traditions, customs, family, nation, hometown, marriage, friendship, love, memory and even biology, so how could you resist? Thinking you have gained the moon and more, you lost your only birthright, an anchored life on this heavenly earth.
Unmoored, people lose their mind. At my Philly apartment complex, there was a young white man who would dress up as Tarzan in our courtyard. Half-naked in the semi dark, he would look up, half fearful, half excited, at all the windows.
“We should call the cops,” my alarmed wife would say.
“No, the guy is harmless.” I understood such loneliness.
Another young white guy would spend up to four hours washing his BMW, a gift from his dad which he almost never used. He had nowhere to go, really, no one to meet. The entire world had been lost to him, and there was nothing left but the electronic screen.
In Penang, Malaysia a few months ago, I was astonished by the stone and wooden sculptures, ceramic figurines, carvings, murals and architecture of Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi, a clan house. If this was an example of Chinese art in a distant immigrant community, then how marvelous are buildings in China itself? Outrageously, thousands were wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, so that Chinese scholars must travel to Penang to study the splendor of Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi.
Visiting Guatemala in 1956, Norman Lewis encountered a missionary who bought traditional Zutuhul blouses with copulating horses, only to burn them. The Indians were given Mickey Mouse ponchos and skirts.
With exceptions, and I’m being very measured here, your heritage must be protected and endlessly studied, for its wealth can’t be adequately assayed even after several lifetimes. Walk backward. Look back!
Yet, some tough guy has thundered, “And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcasses upon the carcasses of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.” Verily, I say unto you, Communism and Christianity are squirted from the same urinary meatus. Please don’t save me!
With its righteous mobs and myriad ordnances flung from the sky, as if by God, more was destroyed during the 20th century than all others combined, but it’s the ongoing ideological violence I’m trying to define and battle, and it’s basically this: the local or provincial is supposedly backward and inferior to the global and cosmopolitan, and to reach this higher state, one must begin by learning the lingua franca, which is now English, or some bastard version of it.
Squatting on the ground and picking my teeth, the few that are left, that is, with none shiny black, unfortunately, I most emphatically declare, “Fuck English!”
Fuck, too, Evelyn Waugh, Norman Lewis, Paul Bowles, Paul Theroux and all the rest, for they have polluted my beautiful, radiant mind of color with the slave masters’ suffocating lingo. With each sentence, I’m being drawn and quartered by all of Western civilization.
To acquire another language is hard enough, but to have a prolong intercourse with an alien culture is nigh impossible. Very few have done so. Most never stray far from the guided tour bus. While some may find disorientation liberating, most will balk.
There is an atavistic fear of being a misfit in a crowd, of being eyeballed, fingered, targeted or swarmed, and this terror is amplified if you have no words to fend off, explain, ingratiate or even grovel with. Speechless and diversely striped, you’re indeed a helpless animal.
In 33 Moments of Happiness, German Ingo Schulze has a narrator describe Russia, “Never, not in any other country, have I felt so vulnerable, so defenseless. I knew: If something happens to me here, no one will help me. If I stumble, they’ll trample me down, if I scream, they’ll rob and strip me. They can spot foreigners at a glance. As if we were a different color.” Funny man.
You don’t even have to be of a different color. Last year in Phnom Penh, I met by chance a Vietnamese, Ni, who had arrived in Cambodia in 1991 with just $15, which dwindled to $2 in two weeks. Unable to find work, Ni figured he’d have one last meal, then run in front of a bus, but as he debated this solution, a Toyota Camry actually knocked him down.
Out leapt the enraged driver, and as Ni was being slapped around and abused in rapid, incomprehensible Khmer, bystanders did nothing. If I fight back, they might just finish me off, Ni thought, for I’m just a “youn.”
Ni was sure he was digested, as the Vietnamese like to say, for he was about to be excreted back into the earth, just as he wished anyway, for after this humiliating beating, he would still have had next to nothing, nowhere to go and no reachable friends or relatives.
In Istanbul, I was also cornered and roughed up a bit, but I got away, and I’m not blaming anybody, for I was stupid. In a different Istanbul neighborhood, a restaurant owner refused to charge me, so delighted was he to have a visitor from so far away.
Miraculously, a savior appeared to change Ni’s entire life. Leaping off his motorbike, the middle-aged man shoved Ni’s tormentor away, and even punched him, to the crowd’s astonishment. They shouted at each other.
Suddenly, the Camry driver looked frightened, backed off and babbled what sounded like apologies. Even more unbelievably, he emptied his wallet to hand Ni two thousand bucks.
“Take it,” Ni’s rescuer shouted, in Vietnamese!
“No, two hundred is enough, brother,” so he pocketed that.
Though Vietnamese, Ni’s savior was a general in the Cambodian Army.
When Vietnam invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day of 1978, it took them just two weeks to reach Phnom Penh, and there, they set up a puppet government. With a client army built from scratch, they inserted Vietnamese officers. Some of these adopted Cambodian names and stayed behind even after the Vietnamese withdrawal in 1988. History is filled with obscured facts and secrets.
The general put Ni up in a hotel, treated him to many meals. Seeing that Ni was bright and enterprising, he set Ni up in a lumber exporting business. With the general’s contacts, it thrived, which bred other ventures, so by the time I met him, he was the owner of a hotel, restaurant, construction firm and, most lucratively, a bonsai dealership that could sell a single tree for as much as $350,000.
I met Ni’s Vietnamese wife, who arrived in a Toyota Camry. As she drove us around, Vietnamese pop music from decades ago filled our bubble. They had five children, with the three oldest sent to Vietnam to attend universities.
“If you want to move to Cambodia, I can help you out with the paperwork or whatever else,” Ni said to me twice. “I mean it.”
Ni considered me mình, you see. We belong to a many hearted flesh. “Mình” in Vietnamese means body, oneself, we, us or one’s spouse, so there’s a merging of one’s everything with all those who share the same language, culture, history and blood. It’s the most natural and ideal state, according to this one word. This month, mình beat Indonesia 3 to 1. Mình eat rice daily, they eat bread.
Speaking of soccer, a recent match between Malaysia and Indonesia ended 3-2, with two goals each scored by naturalized players, the ex-Gambian Mohamadou Sumareh and ex-Brazilian Beto Goncalves. Sumareh arrived in Malaysia at age 17, while Goncalves showed up in Indonesia for the first time at age 28. Citizenship has become more of a bureaucratic quirk than anything reflecting reality.
Invest two million Euros in Cyprus real estate and you can become a citizen of that country within six months. I saw a poster in Saigon, “BECOME A CITIZEN OF THE REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS / AND GET RESIDENCY IN CYPRUS / THROUGH INVESTMENT WITH THE BEST REAL ESTATE AGENCY IN CYPRUS,” so without speaking Turkish or Greek, and knowing nothing about his new home, a Vietnamese can suddenly become a Cypriot. I strongly suspect, though, he will remain a mình in all senses.
Without two million Euros, can a Vietnamese just show up in Nicosia and claim he’s an undocumented Cypriot? After all, no human is illegal.
I started this article at Mộng Cầm Café, named after a girlfriend of the poet Hàn Mặc Tử, but only the most literate Vietnamese would even recognize that. Then I moved to Kidzooona, a shopping mall playground. As my two-year-old nephew, Suki, played, I typed. Now, I’m at a Family Mart, the Japanese convenience store chain. To loosen my few remaining brain cells, I’m downing Tiger Beer and Doritos. Whatever works, man. It’s never easy.
Looking out the plate-glass window, I just witnessed a funeral procession, with its dragon hearse and mourners in white, and an oboe’s whining drifting in. Across the street is “Anna Dental Clinic.” For cachet, its sign is also in English. You’re killing me.
Two days ago on this block, I photographed a young woman wearing an army green jacket, “ROMH NEW GENETION A PSYHIC LOVE HVE WILL EXIODE ACRCS ALL COURES YOU WLL.” She would be a star poet in the Bard’s MFA Writing Program. I should know. I taught there for four summers.
I began this article thinking I would talk about Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, the Ashcan School and how the local must be nourished by homegrown art that reflects it, but alas, I couldn’t finesse any of that in. Maybe soon? At my advanced age, however, soon may turn out to be never. I’m feeling more digested by the second.
Sweating and grimacing, perhaps that lost white man is still wandering?
.
In Saigon, I can easily go a week without seeing any white person, but today, I ran across two white Mormons on bicycles, with one having this paper sign on his backpack, “TIẾNG ANH MIỄN PHÍ” [“FREE ENGLISH LANGUAGE”].
I also passed a young white man pulling a suitcase down the street, his face showing discomfort from the intense heat, at least, and probably because he was all alone, without a single syllable to connect him with anyone. It seemed he was headed towards the bus station, a good mile away. He could have gotten there on the back of a motorbike for just a buck, but to do that, he had to speak some Vietnamese, for this was nowhere near downtown.
Half an hour later, I saw him on another street, going in the opposite direction, so he was walking in circles, apparently. Looking determined, the lanky man in shorts marched briskly along, a foot away from swarming motorbikes. Don’t bother me, his face was trying to say, I know what I’m doing.
Actually, the dude wasn’t that forsaken, for there were English schools all over the neighborhood, with white people inside each. This knowledge must have emboldened him to meander through this alien environment. Even if he spoke no English, it had to be comforting to know there were other whites, or at least foreigners, around. He wasn’t the only one who didn’t belong.
Lost in Tokyo, I approached the only black man on the street for directions. He helped me. Needing to use a phone in Kuala Lumpur, I cheered up to hear Vietnamese spoken nearby. She lent me hers.
Also in Tokyo, a white guy could tell immediately that I wasn’t Japanese and, more surprisingly, as likely an American. Relieved to arrest a compatriot on the sidewalk, the Iraq War vet and military contractor was garrulous. He had been drinking all night.
Even in Vietnam, I was clearly an outsider in 1995, on my first trip back. Besides my lighter skin and Americanized body language, I was also dressed like no one else. Once, a stranger touched my jeans in admiration. They were called “cow pants” then. Unlike most people, I never picked my teeth in public or squatted.
In 2019, it’s much harder to single out a việt kiều [overseas Vietnamese], for many people here have adopted the American casual look of jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, flannel shirts and sneakers, etc. The conical hat is still common, but ao dais have become extremely rare, regrettably. Colorful printed pajamas are usually found only on the frumpy middle-aged.
Haircuts are cooler. Tattoos spider. Urban sophisticates browse foreign cuisines, jet overseas and are mesmerized by American films, so their demeanors and postures, too, have evolved, or been tinkered with, I should say. You no longer see men holding hands.
With more cash, dental care has much improved, and at each dentist office, white models beam from signs. As with so much else, whites provide the standard and target. My teeth, by the way, are among the worst here. In three decades, I have visited the dentist exactly twice, and only in Vietnam.
Until a century ago, Vietnamese routinely lacquered their teeth black. That custom is long gone. The 20th century was one of accelerated and often violent changes. Marveling at its conveniences and gadgets, we survivors often forget its staggering body count, social rending and psychic brutality, even as we continue to endure it. Millions of souls have been flushed down the progressive toilet.
The 20th century promised to liberate you from traditions, customs, family, nation, hometown, marriage, friendship, love, memory and even biology, so how could you resist? Thinking you have gained the moon and more, you lost your only birthright, an anchored life on this heavenly earth.
Unmoored, people lose their mind. At my Philly apartment complex, there was a young white man who would dress up as Tarzan in our courtyard. Half-naked in the semi dark, he would look up, half fearful, half excited, at all the windows.
“We should call the cops,” my alarmed wife would say.
“No, the guy is harmless.” I understood such loneliness.
Another young white guy would spend up to four hours washing his BMW, a gift from his dad which he almost never used. He had nowhere to go, really, no one to meet. The entire world had been lost to him, and there was nothing left but the electronic screen.
In Penang, Malaysia a few months ago, I was astonished by the stone and wooden sculptures, ceramic figurines, carvings, murals and architecture of Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi, a clan house. If this was an example of Chinese art in a distant immigrant community, then how marvelous are buildings in China itself? Outrageously, thousands were wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, so that Chinese scholars must travel to Penang to study the splendor of Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi.
Visiting Guatemala in 1956, Norman Lewis encountered a missionary who bought traditional Zutuhul blouses with copulating horses, only to burn them. The Indians were given Mickey Mouse ponchos and skirts.
With exceptions, and I’m being very measured here, your heritage must be protected and endlessly studied, for its wealth can’t be adequately assayed even after several lifetimes. Walk backward. Look back!
Yet, some tough guy has thundered, “And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcasses upon the carcasses of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.” Verily, I say unto you, Communism and Christianity are squirted from the same urinary meatus. Please don’t save me!
With its righteous mobs and myriad ordnances flung from the sky, as if by God, more was destroyed during the 20th century than all others combined, but it’s the ongoing ideological violence I’m trying to define and battle, and it’s basically this: the local or provincial is supposedly backward and inferior to the global and cosmopolitan, and to reach this higher state, one must begin by learning the lingua franca, which is now English, or some bastard version of it.
Squatting on the ground and picking my teeth, the few that are left, that is, with none shiny black, unfortunately, I most emphatically declare, “Fuck English!”
Fuck, too, Evelyn Waugh, Norman Lewis, Paul Bowles, Paul Theroux and all the rest, for they have polluted my beautiful, radiant mind of color with the slave masters’ suffocating lingo. With each sentence, I’m being drawn and quartered by all of Western civilization.
To acquire another language is hard enough, but to have a prolong intercourse with an alien culture is nigh impossible. Very few have done so. Most never stray far from the guided tour bus. While some may find disorientation liberating, most will balk.
There is an atavistic fear of being a misfit in a crowd, of being eyeballed, fingered, targeted or swarmed, and this terror is amplified if you have no words to fend off, explain, ingratiate or even grovel with. Speechless and diversely striped, you’re indeed a helpless animal.
In 33 Moments of Happiness, German Ingo Schulze has a narrator describe Russia, “Never, not in any other country, have I felt so vulnerable, so defenseless. I knew: If something happens to me here, no one will help me. If I stumble, they’ll trample me down, if I scream, they’ll rob and strip me. They can spot foreigners at a glance. As if we were a different color.” Funny man.
You don’t even have to be of a different color. Last year in Phnom Penh, I met by chance a Vietnamese, Ni, who had arrived in Cambodia in 1991 with just $15, which dwindled to $2 in two weeks. Unable to find work, Ni figured he’d have one last meal, then run in front of a bus, but as he debated this solution, a Toyota Camry actually knocked him down.
Out leapt the enraged driver, and as Ni was being slapped around and abused in rapid, incomprehensible Khmer, bystanders did nothing. If I fight back, they might just finish me off, Ni thought, for I’m just a “youn.”
Ni was sure he was digested, as the Vietnamese like to say, for he was about to be excreted back into the earth, just as he wished anyway, for after this humiliating beating, he would still have had next to nothing, nowhere to go and no reachable friends or relatives.
In Istanbul, I was also cornered and roughed up a bit, but I got away, and I’m not blaming anybody, for I was stupid. In a different Istanbul neighborhood, a restaurant owner refused to charge me, so delighted was he to have a visitor from so far away.
Miraculously, a savior appeared to change Ni’s entire life. Leaping off his motorbike, the middle-aged man shoved Ni’s tormentor away, and even punched him, to the crowd’s astonishment. They shouted at each other.
Suddenly, the Camry driver looked frightened, backed off and babbled what sounded like apologies. Even more unbelievably, he emptied his wallet to hand Ni two thousand bucks.
“Take it,” Ni’s rescuer shouted, in Vietnamese!
“No, two hundred is enough, brother,” so he pocketed that.
Though Vietnamese, Ni’s savior was a general in the Cambodian Army.
When Vietnam invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day of 1978, it took them just two weeks to reach Phnom Penh, and there, they set up a puppet government. With a client army built from scratch, they inserted Vietnamese officers. Some of these adopted Cambodian names and stayed behind even after the Vietnamese withdrawal in 1988. History is filled with obscured facts and secrets.
The general put Ni up in a hotel, treated him to many meals. Seeing that Ni was bright and enterprising, he set Ni up in a lumber exporting business. With the general’s contacts, it thrived, which bred other ventures, so by the time I met him, he was the owner of a hotel, restaurant, construction firm and, most lucratively, a bonsai dealership that could sell a single tree for as much as $350,000.
I met Ni’s Vietnamese wife, who arrived in a Toyota Camry. As she drove us around, Vietnamese pop music from decades ago filled our bubble. They had five children, with the three oldest sent to Vietnam to attend universities.
“If you want to move to Cambodia, I can help you out with the paperwork or whatever else,” Ni said to me twice. “I mean it.”
Ni considered me mình, you see. We belong to a many hearted flesh. “Mình” in Vietnamese means body, oneself, we, us or one’s spouse, so there’s a merging of one’s everything with all those who share the same language, culture, history and blood. It’s the most natural and ideal state, according to this one word. This month, mình beat Indonesia 3 to 1. Mình eat rice daily, they eat bread.
Speaking of soccer, a recent match between Malaysia and Indonesia ended 3-2, with two goals each scored by naturalized players, the ex-Gambian Mohamadou Sumareh and ex-Brazilian Beto Goncalves. Sumareh arrived in Malaysia at age 17, while Goncalves showed up in Indonesia for the first time at age 28. Citizenship has become more of a bureaucratic quirk than anything reflecting reality.
Invest two million Euros in Cyprus real estate and you can become a citizen of that country within six months. I saw a poster in Saigon, “BECOME A CITIZEN OF THE REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS / AND GET RESIDENCY IN CYPRUS / THROUGH INVESTMENT WITH THE BEST REAL ESTATE AGENCY IN CYPRUS,” so without speaking Turkish or Greek, and knowing nothing about his new home, a Vietnamese can suddenly become a Cypriot. I strongly suspect, though, he will remain a mình in all senses.
Without two million Euros, can a Vietnamese just show up in Nicosia and claim he’s an undocumented Cypriot? After all, no human is illegal.
I started this article at Mộng Cầm Café, named after a girlfriend of the poet Hàn Mặc Tử, but only the most literate Vietnamese would even recognize that. Then I moved to Kidzooona, a shopping mall playground. As my two-year-old nephew, Suki, played, I typed. Now, I’m at a Family Mart, the Japanese convenience store chain. To loosen my few remaining brain cells, I’m downing Tiger Beer and Doritos. Whatever works, man. It’s never easy.
Looking out the plate-glass window, I just witnessed a funeral procession, with its dragon hearse and mourners in white, and an oboe’s whining drifting in. Across the street is “Anna Dental Clinic.” For cachet, its sign is also in English. You’re killing me.
Two days ago on this block, I photographed a young woman wearing an army green jacket, “ROMH NEW GENETION A PSYHIC LOVE HVE WILL EXIODE ACRCS ALL COURES YOU WLL.” She would be a star poet in the Bard’s MFA Writing Program. I should know. I taught there for four summers.
I began this article thinking I would talk about Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, the Ashcan School and how the local must be nourished by homegrown art that reflects it, but alas, I couldn’t finesse any of that in. Maybe soon? At my advanced age, however, soon may turn out to be never. I’m feeling more digested by the second.
Sweating and grimacing, perhaps that lost white man is still wandering?
.
Thursday, December 20, 2018
Friday, December 7, 2018
Kawaii, Somber Japan
As published at Unz Review, Intrepid Report, Smirking Chimp, OpEd News, TruthSeeker, LewRockwell and TruthSeeker, 12/9/18:
Before my recent trip to Tokyo, Kawasaki and Osaka, I emailed an American friend, “Japan contrasts so sharply with chaotic and dirty Vietnam. Unlike here, almost nothing happens on Japanese sidewalks, no eating, drinking or even smoking!”
He replied, “Myself, I would prefer ‘dirty’ Vietnam to Japan, any day.” Though only in Vietnam as a soldier, he still has fond memories of the country.
On the way to Tan Son Nhat Airport, the young taxi driver asked where I was flying to.
“Tokyo, I answered. “It’s my second time. They have a great subway system, brother,” and it is the most reliable, cleanest, safest and easiest I’ve ever used, with great amenities at most stations. “Who knows when Vietnam will have something similar?”
He guffawed, “We’re five hundred years behind them!”
From Narita, I took three trains to Nippori, Hamamatsucho then Azabujyuban, from where I walked to my room at International House. On the way, I passed the Juban Inari Shrine. All Japanese temples are elegant and understated, even when huge. Crossing the street was suddenly no longer an adventure. Though Vietnamese have become much better at stopping at red lights, many still bristle at the idea.
Japanese do occasionally jaywalk, and I would see more of it in Osaka than Tokyo. There are also more graffiti and littering in the home of takoyaki, Japan’s only remaining red light district and its worst slum. Japanese are not as anal as Germans, who would stand alone at a curb at 3 in the morning, waiting for the walk signal to change, with not a single car in sight in any direction.
Opening the shoji blind, I could see the tastefully landscaped garden where Yukio Mishima had his wedding reception. After unpacking, I became reacquainted with the heated toilet seat, the anus shower whose jets could be adjusted and, most comfortingly, the stream of warm air that dried even my nuts.
Vietnam’s leading novelist of that era, Nhất Linh, also committed suicide, but only quietly, with poisoned wine. Unlike badass Mishima, Nhất Linh didn’t have a gay lover hack at his neck repeatedly with a samurai sword.
During my previous visit to Tokyo, I spoke to a bookstore audience of my admiration for Japanese boldness, “Although transgenderism is in, with everybody cutting his penis off, only a Japanese could come up with the idea of offering it as a meal, at a banquet.” To my surprise, no one there had heard of Mao Sugiyama.
Sugiyama’s ballsy announcement, “Please retweet. I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen… I will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.”
There was no time to waste. Within hours of arriving, I was in a Roppongi restaurant with a few of my Tokyo friends. While downing beer and sashimi, we talked about their troubled nation.
Translator Miwako Ozawa shared that she didn’t know her neighbors, and that Japanese only say hello to strangers in elevators and on mountain trails. Her husband, photographer Samson Yee, added that I shouldn’t judge Japanese sociability by my friends, for they are all cosmopolitan writers and intellectuals, “If you meet an ordinary Japanese, you’ll have to climb so many walls before you get to know them.” As another indicator of the Japanese’s shrinkage from direct experiences, Samson pointed out that only 23% even hold a valid passport.
We’ve all heard about young Japanese recluses, the hikikomori, but did you know that at least 43% of Japanese between 18 and 34 are virgins? A third had never even been on a single date.
“How did Japanese go from bathing together, men and women, young and old, to being mostly alone?” I asked. No one could answer.
Writer Mieko Kawakami said that Japan’s previous tranquility and equilibrium were achieved only with much sacrifice by women, and the continuing breakdown of traditions is actually freeing women from onerous roles. Probing this theme, she is working on a novel about a woman having a baby without a man.
Many Japanese now live alone, then often die without anyone noticing, sometimes for weeks. Family members don’t call or even email them. Through a friend, I was able to visit an octogenarian who rarely left his messy apartment. His is the generation that built contemporary Japan. In the same complex, we passed a door whose letter and peep slots had been sealed by tape, to prevent the dogged stench of putrefaction from seeping out. It’s a common sight there. With its stigma of sordid death, the apartment will be hard to rent, thus adding to the glut of empty houses in Japan.
The live man’s apartment smelled bad enough. It's a stagnant, fermented funk which actually made me pause at his genkan, and I'm no olfactory pussy, dwelling in Saigon. Carrying two six packs of Asahi beer as gifts, I braved my way in.
Next to his bed were six bottles of hard liquor and a stack of illustrated sex manuals. Cheered up by such rare visitors, he chattered away, and anyone could tell he must have been quite charismatic in youth, and a ladies' man. He admitted to having a crush on the woman, sent by a charity organization, who came twice a week to clean.
“Is she young?” I grinningly asked.
“Yes, very young. Maybe 55!”
The neighborhood was a post-war new town development, filled with identical apartment blocks, and very few stores or restaurants within easy walking distance, especially if you’re on your last leg. A playground with its slide and jungle gym sat empty. “This is incredible,” I said to my friend. “We haven’t passed one cafe or bar. If this was Vietnam, people would just sit outside, drink and socialize.” There was a tiny seniors center at a forlorn strip mall. We strayed in to find six old people lounging around a coffee table, sipping tea. When they all got up to leave, I asked, “Why are they all leaving at once?”
“It’s the Japanese way. We do everything together!” Or at least they used to.
Convenience stores are ubiquitous in Japan. At a Family Mart, the owner told us that for many old people nearby, his little store was not just where they could get grocery, but a few words addressed to them, plus a smile.
In Japan, more than a third of the population are older than 60, and adult diapers outsell those for babies, yet everywhere you look, there are cartoon figures. It’s a country that balances its business suit graveness with the infantile. A supermarket chain’s logo is a kawaii dog, with a slogan in English, “Smile every day!” Vending machines feature a round-eyed boy flashing a victory sign, “We’ll Be Happy!” Pachinko parlors are tsunamis of cartoon characters and childish colors.
One day, I talked to a class at Waseda University, and among the students was a remarkable 20-year-old. Having lived in Indonesia and Australia, she was fluent in Indonesian and English by age 15, but for three years in high school, took English courses, like everybody else, and to not show up her classmates or teachers, pretended she didn’t already know the language, and even faked a Japanese accent. At age 16, she became an idol singer, thus a minor celebrity. Idol starlets are presented as impossibly cute airheads, thus her profile page lists her interests as Rilakkuma, teddy bears and panda dolls, but away from this public persona and obligation, she is a supremely mature and confident woman.
Her singing career, then, is merely theater, a form of cosplay, and she’s been playing it well, but it’s nearly time to move on, hence her serious studies at a good university. Japan, too, has shown an exceptional ability to switch gears. From not eating beef for over a millennium, it now produces the best beef in the world. Overnight, it went from being America’s fiercest enemy to its most ardent emulator.
In contrast to the spectacularly colorful images of Ginza or Shinjuku, much of Tokyo is rather drab, and its citizens are mostly dressed quite somberly. As for school kids, they’re austerely uniformed. Even Germans aren’t so severely attired. For most Japanese, then, the windows for making any individual statement, in fashion or anything else, are actually tiny.
At a subway station, there’s a poster reminding people to hold onto the handrail while riding the escalator. The illustraton showed two long rows of commuters, separated by sex, with all the men in identical blue suits and yellow ties, and all the women in identical pink coats.
In Vietnam, the improvised, slap dash and sloppy are routine, but in Japan, each detail has been well-calibrated, and every gesture well-choreographed and rehearsed. This rigorous attention to particulars result in Japan’s stunning beauty, for nothing there is ugly, not even its kitsch, but perhaps I’m just betraying my gaudy Vietnamese esthetics here. In Osaka, there’s a supermarket chain, Super Tamade, that features bombastic, multi-colored displays of lights outside, while over the merchandises, there are neon and crayon-colored cartoon whales, dolphins, octopuses, blow fish, submarines, airplanes and helicopters, etc. Pointing out a Super Tamade, my Japanese friends expected me to laughingly sneer, but I only swooned, “That is very beautiful.” Who needs Jeff Koons or acid when you can just shop at Super Tamade?
In Shibuya, I stared for a good minute at a small, round, cast iron plate on the sidewalk, because the floral pattern on it was so gorgeous, and many Japanese manhole covers belong in art museums.
Dining with editor Shigeki Tabata, I picked up a bottle of soy sauce and gushed, “Look at how beautiful this graphic is. Look at this subtle greenish gray!”
Editor and translator Motoyuki Shibata tempered my enthusiasm, “When everything is overly determined, it can be oppressive,” and I do agree, and perhaps Japanese life should be more unscripted, for the sake of its stressed out citizens. High, exact standards are particularly burdensome to those who have to serve, Samson pointed out to me, and he’s witnessed angry commuters scream at subway employees.
Even more than Singapore, Japan is filled with signs telling everyone to do everything. At a small neighborhood temple, I encountered a sign showing a round-eyed schoolgirl in uniform, and instructions on “How to worship.” Written in both English and Japanese, they weren’t just meant for ignorant foreigners, “1. Bow twice. 2. Clap your hands twice and pray. 3. Bow once more.” At subway stations, there are elaborate charts showing which numbered car to get into to make your particular transfer the easiest. Near apartments blocks filled with old people, large signs encourage you to say hello and smile at the old farts to cheer them up. Sidewalks are pasted with warnings against smoking in public. Hotel lobbies forbid the use of cellphones. Has there ever been a more anal society?
In Vietnam, on the other hand, rules and boundaries are often never acknowledged or ignored, so everything blurs and blends. Very well-traveled, with three years in Africa and one in India, Samson has visited Vietnam three times. Like me, he likes to wander aimlessly, so once found himself in an alley, where he sat down at a restaurant table. Only after minutes did a woman appear to give him a cup of tea.
“I’d like a menu, please,” he asked, but she looked surprised.
“Menu?”
“Yes, a menu, please.”
She laughed, “This no restaurant. This, house!”
Every state uses its educational system to indoctrinate, and in Japanese schools, kids are forced to form human pyramids, as high as ten tiers, a practice that each year causes more than 8,000 injuries requiring insurance payments. On her phone, Mieko Kawakami showed me image after image of children perilously stacked. From 1969 to 2016, there were actually nine deaths from kumitaiso, but to infuse unity and a sense of collective achievement, it persists, to the disgust and anguish of many parents.
Check out Kyary Pamyu Pamyu in her music video, “Candy Candy,” sung in infantile English. At the beginning, she runs, most bizarrely, with a piece of toast in her mouth, past a row of suburban houses, with their parked cars, manicured shrubs and kids’ sporting equipment. With her huge pink hairbow, strawberry colored hair and a pale pink and purple skirt that resembles an upside down lotus, deifying her nether regions, she’s a kawaii fantasy streaking through drab and uniform normalcy.
In Osaka, middle-aged women are known for their short curls and preference for clothing with the spots, stripes or face of their favorite big cat, but in four days of roaming the city, from its lowest to most chichi neighborhoods, I encountered only a single cheetah or tiger fashionista. Hopefully, this regional distinctiveness is not fading. Roar on, Osaka oba-chan!
To the amusement of my Japanese friends, I kept returning to Jonathan’s, a chain restaurant, for there I found an evocation of a much gentler and cheesier America. Many dishes were Japanese spins on American comfort food. Bathed in bright lights and muzak, I happily ate hamburger patty smothered in demi-glace, roast beef kissed with a mild horseradish, fried chicken, potato wedges, french fries, corn and spaghetti, the last prepared with salmon roe, scallops and seaweed. The Coke, 7-up and punch flowed endlessly at the drink bar. I felt returned to a much improved version of my school cafeteria in Tacoma, Washington. There was a curious offering called “doria,” which turned out to be a rice gratin, topped in this instance by four Hiroshima oysters. Yum, yum, yum. Near the cash register was a selection of cheap toys, and the plastic coffee cups came in baby blue, pink and yellow.
Perhaps because so much has been lost, nostalgia, even for someone else’s past, is a strong undercurrent in Japan. One manifestation of this is the pervasive cult of childhood, when all doors are supposedly still open. In his crisp, well-tailored suit, a virginal salaryman stares at the soft porn dancing girls while colored lights flash and hundreds of metal pellets bounce downward. Though with the world on his shoulders, he’s still a child.
Before my recent trip to Tokyo, Kawasaki and Osaka, I emailed an American friend, “Japan contrasts so sharply with chaotic and dirty Vietnam. Unlike here, almost nothing happens on Japanese sidewalks, no eating, drinking or even smoking!”
He replied, “Myself, I would prefer ‘dirty’ Vietnam to Japan, any day.” Though only in Vietnam as a soldier, he still has fond memories of the country.
On the way to Tan Son Nhat Airport, the young taxi driver asked where I was flying to.
“Tokyo, I answered. “It’s my second time. They have a great subway system, brother,” and it is the most reliable, cleanest, safest and easiest I’ve ever used, with great amenities at most stations. “Who knows when Vietnam will have something similar?”
He guffawed, “We’re five hundred years behind them!”
From Narita, I took three trains to Nippori, Hamamatsucho then Azabujyuban, from where I walked to my room at International House. On the way, I passed the Juban Inari Shrine. All Japanese temples are elegant and understated, even when huge. Crossing the street was suddenly no longer an adventure. Though Vietnamese have become much better at stopping at red lights, many still bristle at the idea.
Japanese do occasionally jaywalk, and I would see more of it in Osaka than Tokyo. There are also more graffiti and littering in the home of takoyaki, Japan’s only remaining red light district and its worst slum. Japanese are not as anal as Germans, who would stand alone at a curb at 3 in the morning, waiting for the walk signal to change, with not a single car in sight in any direction.
Opening the shoji blind, I could see the tastefully landscaped garden where Yukio Mishima had his wedding reception. After unpacking, I became reacquainted with the heated toilet seat, the anus shower whose jets could be adjusted and, most comfortingly, the stream of warm air that dried even my nuts.
Vietnam’s leading novelist of that era, Nhất Linh, also committed suicide, but only quietly, with poisoned wine. Unlike badass Mishima, Nhất Linh didn’t have a gay lover hack at his neck repeatedly with a samurai sword.
During my previous visit to Tokyo, I spoke to a bookstore audience of my admiration for Japanese boldness, “Although transgenderism is in, with everybody cutting his penis off, only a Japanese could come up with the idea of offering it as a meal, at a banquet.” To my surprise, no one there had heard of Mao Sugiyama.
Sugiyama’s ballsy announcement, “Please retweet. I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen… I will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.”
There was no time to waste. Within hours of arriving, I was in a Roppongi restaurant with a few of my Tokyo friends. While downing beer and sashimi, we talked about their troubled nation.
Translator Miwako Ozawa shared that she didn’t know her neighbors, and that Japanese only say hello to strangers in elevators and on mountain trails. Her husband, photographer Samson Yee, added that I shouldn’t judge Japanese sociability by my friends, for they are all cosmopolitan writers and intellectuals, “If you meet an ordinary Japanese, you’ll have to climb so many walls before you get to know them.” As another indicator of the Japanese’s shrinkage from direct experiences, Samson pointed out that only 23% even hold a valid passport.
We’ve all heard about young Japanese recluses, the hikikomori, but did you know that at least 43% of Japanese between 18 and 34 are virgins? A third had never even been on a single date.
“How did Japanese go from bathing together, men and women, young and old, to being mostly alone?” I asked. No one could answer.
Writer Mieko Kawakami said that Japan’s previous tranquility and equilibrium were achieved only with much sacrifice by women, and the continuing breakdown of traditions is actually freeing women from onerous roles. Probing this theme, she is working on a novel about a woman having a baby without a man.
Many Japanese now live alone, then often die without anyone noticing, sometimes for weeks. Family members don’t call or even email them. Through a friend, I was able to visit an octogenarian who rarely left his messy apartment. His is the generation that built contemporary Japan. In the same complex, we passed a door whose letter and peep slots had been sealed by tape, to prevent the dogged stench of putrefaction from seeping out. It’s a common sight there. With its stigma of sordid death, the apartment will be hard to rent, thus adding to the glut of empty houses in Japan.
The live man’s apartment smelled bad enough. It's a stagnant, fermented funk which actually made me pause at his genkan, and I'm no olfactory pussy, dwelling in Saigon. Carrying two six packs of Asahi beer as gifts, I braved my way in.
Next to his bed were six bottles of hard liquor and a stack of illustrated sex manuals. Cheered up by such rare visitors, he chattered away, and anyone could tell he must have been quite charismatic in youth, and a ladies' man. He admitted to having a crush on the woman, sent by a charity organization, who came twice a week to clean.
“Is she young?” I grinningly asked.
“Yes, very young. Maybe 55!”
The neighborhood was a post-war new town development, filled with identical apartment blocks, and very few stores or restaurants within easy walking distance, especially if you’re on your last leg. A playground with its slide and jungle gym sat empty. “This is incredible,” I said to my friend. “We haven’t passed one cafe or bar. If this was Vietnam, people would just sit outside, drink and socialize.” There was a tiny seniors center at a forlorn strip mall. We strayed in to find six old people lounging around a coffee table, sipping tea. When they all got up to leave, I asked, “Why are they all leaving at once?”
“It’s the Japanese way. We do everything together!” Or at least they used to.
Convenience stores are ubiquitous in Japan. At a Family Mart, the owner told us that for many old people nearby, his little store was not just where they could get grocery, but a few words addressed to them, plus a smile.
In Japan, more than a third of the population are older than 60, and adult diapers outsell those for babies, yet everywhere you look, there are cartoon figures. It’s a country that balances its business suit graveness with the infantile. A supermarket chain’s logo is a kawaii dog, with a slogan in English, “Smile every day!” Vending machines feature a round-eyed boy flashing a victory sign, “We’ll Be Happy!” Pachinko parlors are tsunamis of cartoon characters and childish colors.
One day, I talked to a class at Waseda University, and among the students was a remarkable 20-year-old. Having lived in Indonesia and Australia, she was fluent in Indonesian and English by age 15, but for three years in high school, took English courses, like everybody else, and to not show up her classmates or teachers, pretended she didn’t already know the language, and even faked a Japanese accent. At age 16, she became an idol singer, thus a minor celebrity. Idol starlets are presented as impossibly cute airheads, thus her profile page lists her interests as Rilakkuma, teddy bears and panda dolls, but away from this public persona and obligation, she is a supremely mature and confident woman.
Her singing career, then, is merely theater, a form of cosplay, and she’s been playing it well, but it’s nearly time to move on, hence her serious studies at a good university. Japan, too, has shown an exceptional ability to switch gears. From not eating beef for over a millennium, it now produces the best beef in the world. Overnight, it went from being America’s fiercest enemy to its most ardent emulator.
In contrast to the spectacularly colorful images of Ginza or Shinjuku, much of Tokyo is rather drab, and its citizens are mostly dressed quite somberly. As for school kids, they’re austerely uniformed. Even Germans aren’t so severely attired. For most Japanese, then, the windows for making any individual statement, in fashion or anything else, are actually tiny.
At a subway station, there’s a poster reminding people to hold onto the handrail while riding the escalator. The illustraton showed two long rows of commuters, separated by sex, with all the men in identical blue suits and yellow ties, and all the women in identical pink coats.
In Vietnam, the improvised, slap dash and sloppy are routine, but in Japan, each detail has been well-calibrated, and every gesture well-choreographed and rehearsed. This rigorous attention to particulars result in Japan’s stunning beauty, for nothing there is ugly, not even its kitsch, but perhaps I’m just betraying my gaudy Vietnamese esthetics here. In Osaka, there’s a supermarket chain, Super Tamade, that features bombastic, multi-colored displays of lights outside, while over the merchandises, there are neon and crayon-colored cartoon whales, dolphins, octopuses, blow fish, submarines, airplanes and helicopters, etc. Pointing out a Super Tamade, my Japanese friends expected me to laughingly sneer, but I only swooned, “That is very beautiful.” Who needs Jeff Koons or acid when you can just shop at Super Tamade?
In Shibuya, I stared for a good minute at a small, round, cast iron plate on the sidewalk, because the floral pattern on it was so gorgeous, and many Japanese manhole covers belong in art museums.
Dining with editor Shigeki Tabata, I picked up a bottle of soy sauce and gushed, “Look at how beautiful this graphic is. Look at this subtle greenish gray!”
Editor and translator Motoyuki Shibata tempered my enthusiasm, “When everything is overly determined, it can be oppressive,” and I do agree, and perhaps Japanese life should be more unscripted, for the sake of its stressed out citizens. High, exact standards are particularly burdensome to those who have to serve, Samson pointed out to me, and he’s witnessed angry commuters scream at subway employees.
Even more than Singapore, Japan is filled with signs telling everyone to do everything. At a small neighborhood temple, I encountered a sign showing a round-eyed schoolgirl in uniform, and instructions on “How to worship.” Written in both English and Japanese, they weren’t just meant for ignorant foreigners, “1. Bow twice. 2. Clap your hands twice and pray. 3. Bow once more.” At subway stations, there are elaborate charts showing which numbered car to get into to make your particular transfer the easiest. Near apartments blocks filled with old people, large signs encourage you to say hello and smile at the old farts to cheer them up. Sidewalks are pasted with warnings against smoking in public. Hotel lobbies forbid the use of cellphones. Has there ever been a more anal society?
In Vietnam, on the other hand, rules and boundaries are often never acknowledged or ignored, so everything blurs and blends. Very well-traveled, with three years in Africa and one in India, Samson has visited Vietnam three times. Like me, he likes to wander aimlessly, so once found himself in an alley, where he sat down at a restaurant table. Only after minutes did a woman appear to give him a cup of tea.
“I’d like a menu, please,” he asked, but she looked surprised.
“Menu?”
“Yes, a menu, please.”
She laughed, “This no restaurant. This, house!”
Every state uses its educational system to indoctrinate, and in Japanese schools, kids are forced to form human pyramids, as high as ten tiers, a practice that each year causes more than 8,000 injuries requiring insurance payments. On her phone, Mieko Kawakami showed me image after image of children perilously stacked. From 1969 to 2016, there were actually nine deaths from kumitaiso, but to infuse unity and a sense of collective achievement, it persists, to the disgust and anguish of many parents.
Check out Kyary Pamyu Pamyu in her music video, “Candy Candy,” sung in infantile English. At the beginning, she runs, most bizarrely, with a piece of toast in her mouth, past a row of suburban houses, with their parked cars, manicured shrubs and kids’ sporting equipment. With her huge pink hairbow, strawberry colored hair and a pale pink and purple skirt that resembles an upside down lotus, deifying her nether regions, she’s a kawaii fantasy streaking through drab and uniform normalcy.
In Osaka, middle-aged women are known for their short curls and preference for clothing with the spots, stripes or face of their favorite big cat, but in four days of roaming the city, from its lowest to most chichi neighborhoods, I encountered only a single cheetah or tiger fashionista. Hopefully, this regional distinctiveness is not fading. Roar on, Osaka oba-chan!
To the amusement of my Japanese friends, I kept returning to Jonathan’s, a chain restaurant, for there I found an evocation of a much gentler and cheesier America. Many dishes were Japanese spins on American comfort food. Bathed in bright lights and muzak, I happily ate hamburger patty smothered in demi-glace, roast beef kissed with a mild horseradish, fried chicken, potato wedges, french fries, corn and spaghetti, the last prepared with salmon roe, scallops and seaweed. The Coke, 7-up and punch flowed endlessly at the drink bar. I felt returned to a much improved version of my school cafeteria in Tacoma, Washington. There was a curious offering called “doria,” which turned out to be a rice gratin, topped in this instance by four Hiroshima oysters. Yum, yum, yum. Near the cash register was a selection of cheap toys, and the plastic coffee cups came in baby blue, pink and yellow.
Perhaps because so much has been lost, nostalgia, even for someone else’s past, is a strong undercurrent in Japan. One manifestation of this is the pervasive cult of childhood, when all doors are supposedly still open. In his crisp, well-tailored suit, a virginal salaryman stares at the soft porn dancing girls while colored lights flash and hundreds of metal pellets bounce downward. Though with the world on his shoulders, he’s still a child.
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Saturday, December 1, 2018
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