Japan - love it and leave it

When people ask me about my twenty-three years in Japan, and what I learned from it, the first thing that comes to mind is that it made me a firm believer in scientific truth. And by that I mean that when one speaks of truth, one is revealing little more than what the world knows at any given point in time. Absolute truth is pure illusion, and the best metaphor for knowledge is the story of the blind men and the elephant. One man grabs hold of the tail and describes the elephant as being "like a whip." Another touches its side and sees it "as a wall." A third puts his hands on the trunk and thinks it is a hose.  And that's only half the story. The truth is not that we should stand back and wait till we can get a view of the whole elephant, i.e., the actual truth. The truth is that even then all we have is a better picture. But not the whole picture. The whole picture remains eternally beyond our grasp.

Let me explain why I say I learned to think like that from my time in Japan.

I learned to accept, gradually, that I was always going to be changing my take on the place.

All life is about change, and hopefully, if one is lucky, I think one comes to see personal change as growth, as something positive.

I had a conversation some years ago with John Bester, the English language translator of a book which was, for many years, central to my understanding of Japanese culture. It's called 甘えの構造, Amae no Kōzō, in Japanese. In English, it's The Anatomy of Dependence. I took issue with the author's, Doi's, contention that Japan is not merely "unique" but "uniquely unique," i.e., that it is more of an outlier culture, at least compared to all other modern cultures, than the rest. John Bester, whose knowledge of Japan greatly exceeds mine, agreed with Doi: Japan is "uniquely unique." 

I just refused to buy it. All cultures are unique, I insisted, and when one tries to describe something so complex as a national culture, all one is really doing is revealing one's experience of it, and perhaps more significantly, one's inexperience.

I have left Japan - I left it in 2006 - and so the question no longer hounds me. But I continue to live with a Japanese husband, and the once endless sifting through the question of the ways Japan might be said to be unique has been replaced by endless speculation about how to separate the ways my husband seems to reflect traits that I want to mark as "Japanese" and the ways in which he is merely a distinctive human being. In the end, this question has gone from being an interesting academic pursuit to being of no consequence. Boring, even. What does it matter. We are in a committed relationship and what matters is that commitment, not the correctness of any analysis of his behavior.

For those still engaged in such pursuits, however - and I assume that means most foreigners who are long-term sojourners in Japan - I assume it continues to be relevant, and inevitable.

Another insightful Japan observer once told me that he could pretty much put his finger on how long a foreigner had been in Japan by their choices of what to say about Japan and how to describe it. One goes, he said - and I agree very much with this view - back and forth from the conviction that one has "figured it out" to the conviction that one really doesn't have a very accurate picture of the culture as a whole. The more one knows, in other words, the more one has to accept that one doesn't know all that much. Which, I suppose, is one way of defining wisdom, the admission of one's own limitations.

Many people come to Japan and instantly decide they have to write a book. "This is such an interesting country," you hear foreigners say all the time. "I need to get it all down while it is still fresh." But that's the point. What you're "getting down" isn't insight so much as it is truth as defined by "everything we know so far." Truth is the sum total of all knowledge but only to date, and anybody with a good background in science knows that truth gets redefined with each new bit of data. Only fools make absolute truth claims. Everybody else realizes it's like grabbing a handful of mercury. If you're smart, you'll avoid statements that begin with "the truth is..." and say something like, "As far as I know..." instead.

Most books written for the general public on Japan, if I'm not mistaken, are written by people who have lived there for no more than a couple, three, four years. And that means, if my other observations are correct, that they are inadequate takes on a complex civilization. I taught language and culture, i.e., the stuff of the fields of linguistics and anthropology, at a Japanese university for eighteen years. That means I was frequently more familiar with Japan than my younger students were. Because I am not racially Japanese and because my knowledge of the language is limited, many of my students took it upon themselves to explain Japan to me, thinking they were doing me a favor. They, most of them, had no way of knowing that when they began a sentence with "Wareware Nihon-jin..." - "We Japanese..." they were not so much informing me of something I might not know as they were inviting a response like, "Shame on you. Why are you reducing such a wonderful broad civilization to a mere listing of a few ways in which Japan strikes the world as distinctive?" They were, in other words, no more sophisticated about the land of their birth than most foreign sojourners. And they were easy prey to those who would sum up complexity in a few sentences.

I maintain that view. Japan will always be a major part of who I am. It will always be home. Both alien and strikingly familiar. Rich and wonderful and maddening.

I came to these reflections this morning after watching a video of a young American who was about to leave Japan after six years there. He is a wonderful illustration of what I mean. He has a love-hate relationship (and perhaps that's too strong: like-dislike will probably do) with Japan that reflects the experience of somebody with six years of intimate connection. Not necessarily a more accurate description than by somebody with two years or a less accurate description than by somebody with fifteen years, but a different experience. In a different place of an evolution which is not necessarily linear.

I can relate to this guy. He's playing the game all of us gaikokujin - non-Japanese - have played and will probably always play. Developing our knowledge base and simultaneously playing with the idea of truth. And getting only a partial picture.

Here's the video in question, if you're still reading and are still interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yauSILFvC5U

Piano, piano

I’m still trying to get my head around the anti-gay legislation that passed a couple weeks ago in Arkansas. 

A quick history.  Fayetteville, where the University of Arkansas is located, passed an anti-discrimination ordinance last August 19.  Almost immediately, money started pouring in from folks like the infamous Christian media family, the Duggars (“19 Kids and Counting”), to pay for a fear and loathing campaign.  Shades of the California Prop. 8 campaign, pushed particularly hard by the Mormons and Knights of Columbus.  In Arkansas, where evangelicals are the major homophobic force, the pitch was even dirtier.  According to Christian mama Michelle Duggar,

I don’t believe the citizens of Fayetteville would want males with past child predator convictions that claim they are female to have a legal right to enter private areas that are reserved for women and girls.  

The law that was aimed to protect not just LGBT people, but other minorities as well, and not just the transgender people the religious right have now focused their particular loathing on, was repealed, 52 to 48.  

Turns out that was only a warm-up.  Arkansas then went on to pass Arkansas Senate Bill 202, with the deliciously cynical name, “Intrastate Commerce Improvement Act.”  And how is commerce improved, you ask?  This bill, now law, prohibits any municipality in the state from passing a law protecting minorities specifically.  The argument?  Christians, whose religious rights are trampeled on when they are forced to serve gays and lesbians, would not want to settle in Arkansas with cumbersome laws like this, you see.  By protecting their right to discriminate, business can only flourish in the long run.

It’s an idea whose time has come.  People are freaking out over the possibility that the Supreme Court may legalize same-sex marriage in all fifty states.  Once that happens, it will be hard to explain to your kids that you know gays are inferior because if they weren’t they would be allowed to get married and have their relationships recognized by the state.  No parent should have to explain that to their kids, right?  At least with this anti-pro-gay ordinance, you can assure your kids that you don’t have to worry about sitting next to one of them at a lunch counter.  Or be waited on by one of them.  Or if you do, and you don’t like the service, you can at least tell the restaurant owner and get his ass fired for being gay.

And so other states are following Arkansas’s lead.  A similar ordinance, identical to the Arkansas law right down to the “Commerce protection” label, have been passed in West Virginia and Texas. 

And if you are in the American majority and get your news from Fox or CNN, you can be excused for not knowing about this.  Neither network covered the news.  MSNBC did, but they are part of the lamestream media and only hardliner lefties listen to them anyway.

This too shall pass.  It’s merely a bump in the road.  A reminder that gay liberation is a long hard slog and there will be many more setbacks before equal rights and gay dignity are universal values.

I have finally begun to tackle my out-of-control personal files of several decades of old stuff.  I’ve got utility and phone bills back to the 80s and that’s just for starters.  So I’m trying to get ruthless and clean.  It isn’t easy.

I keep coming across things I just don’t want to throw away.  Like this letter I wrote to an unknown student some twenty-two years ago.  I was teaching in an English program at Keio University in Japan and we were reorganizing the courses.  We put the word out that we wanted student input for workshops we might offer, hoping to get a sense of the kinds of things students were interested in talking about.  My colleague, Yoshiko Takahashi, came to me in some distress over a letter she got from one of her students.  “I just don’t know how to respond to this!” she said.  I told her I would take care of it.  Here’s my response:

To the Student in Professor Takahashi’s class who is afraid of gays:
 I have just seen your response to the request for new workshops.  On that response sheet, you have written that you would like a workshop to teach people how to “escape from gays.”  You included my name, in parentheses, as an example of one of the people in that category.
 I don’t know who you are, and I don’t need to know your name.  I am asking Professor Takahashi to give this letter to you.  (Or if she doesn’t know who you are, to give this letter to the whole class so you will be sure to read it.)  I cannot tell whether you are serious or joking, but in either case, since you suggested I am one of those people you would like to run away from, I would like to say something to you.
 Gay people are everywhere.  Many of your classmates and many of your teachers are gay.  Some will readily tell you this; others consider this a part of their private life which they choose not to share with you; some are ashamed of being gay.
 The world is changing, however, and more and more gay people are insisting on being recognized as both gay and human, and deserving of the respect that is due all human beings.  It will become increasingly difficult for you to “escape from gays” as you go through life.
 The question is, why would you want to?  If you are gay yourself, and ashamed of it, you will come to accept yourself in time and realize there is no more reason to be ashamed of yourself than if you are blind, or left-handed, or very short or very tall or in any way “different” from the majority of people.  If you are not gay, you need to realize most gay people have no interest in bothering you; there is nothing to “escape” from!
 If you suggested this idea as a joke, you should realize that the suggestion is not a joke to gay people.  On the contrary, it is hurtful.  Think how you would feel if you were living in a foreign country, and somebody suggested that they wanted advice on how to “escape from Japanese.”  You would then feel the oppression of bigotry and you would understand why this is not a joke.
 If you are serious, and you are suggesting that people who are gay should be removed from your sight, let me urge you to think very carefully what you are asking.  Do you also want to separate yourself from people that are different from you in other ways?  Are you afraid of people of other races?  Other religions?  Are you afraid of handicapped people?  Or is your prejudice only against people whose sexual and emotional feelings are directed toward people of the same sex?  Do you really think we should put people in jail, or in a hospital, or on a desert island somewhere because they love differently?
 Gay people, like any people who seem strange and different to you now, can turn out to be people you know, people you like, people who can teach you things, people you care about, and people you can live with, if only you take the trouble to find out more about them.
 Please take that time.  Learn about gay people, as you learn about people from other cultures.  There is no need to run from the blind, no reason to run from the French or from Chinese or from Africans, no reason to run from people with blue eyes or people who wear strange clothes or people who are gay.  The world is big enough for us all.
 You don’t need to be afraid.  As I said, I don’t know who you are and I am not going to try to find out.  But if you and your friends would like to come talk to me, I would be happy to talk with you about this or any other subject.  My office hours are Tuesday and Thursday afternoons between 2:30 and 4:30.
 Yours truly,

I never heard from this student and have no idea of whether this letter even registered on his radar. Gay students on my campus were so closeted in the early 90s in Japan that my being openly gay worked against me.  Students who wanted to keep their gay secret avoided me like the plague, at least on campus.  Within the decade they began to get noticeably better, however, and not too many years after this, our English Department actually made a film about coming out.  

It's useful, I think, to look back.  Finding this letter put the Arkansas setback in perspective.  And reminded me of that wonderful Italian saying:

Piano, piano, si va lontano - If you're going a long way, take it slow.

credits

Kinki no more

“Kinki Tours,” it said along the side of the bus.  And the bus stopped and out poured a whole bunch of folk all carrying bags marked “Kinki Nippon Tourist.”

Now I’ve seen everything, I remember thinking.  Bad enough you have to be a tourist, do you have to advertise that you are a tourist?  And do you have to announce to the whole world that you are on some kind of porno tour?

That was years ago, long before I went to Japan and became familiar with Kinki as the name of a region of Western Japan made up of seven prefectures, which include the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe and Nara, among others.

Kinky (with a y) is an English word that makes people laugh when they hear it.   It means something on the order of sexually perverted.  But in a funny and generally harmless way.  “Romantic,” they say, “is the use of a feather in foreplay.  “Kinky” is when you use the whole chicken.

After twenty-four years of life in Japan, you’d think the word would no longer catch my attention.  But it does.  Every time I encounter the place name as an adjective, I smile again at the sound.  “Kinki souvenirs,” “Kinki Regional Development Bureau,” “Shop Kinki!”  Endless possibilities.  “Kinki Rooftop Bar,” the sign says, and I imagine folk frolicking about topless and wearing combat boots. 

Lots of words which sound perfectly routine in one language take on obscene or other off-color connotations in another.  When “Vicks” started marketing their cough drops in Germany, they had to change the spelling to “Wicks” or come up with a whole new word, because “Vick” is pronounced “Fick” in German, and “fick” is the German word for “fuck.”  Similarly, Clairol had a similar problem with “Mist Stick” – “Mist” is the German word for “dung.”  Ford Pinto in Brazil found “pinto” means “small dick.”  Chevy Nova in Spanish means “no va (doesn’t run)”. 

For a while, Mitsubishi Motors marketed their Pajero in Argentina and other Spanish-speaking countries, until they realized they were selling “jack-offs.”

BBC News the other day reported that the folks in charge of Kinki University have concluded it's time to stop being an international joke.  I think it's probably more pragmatism than shame, however.  Until recently, the large university in East Osaka didn’t worry much about how its name sounded to foreigners.  It was, after all, the name of the region in which it was located.  But like many Japanese universities now suffering from a lower and lower number of applicants, they are beginning to look overseas for more foreign students.  Afraid advertising themselves as Kinki might put people off, they’ve decided to change their name to Kindai University. 

Changing a university’s name is no small matter, I should think.  All those records, all those signs that have to be changed.  All that letterhead!  And all that history and tradition stopped dead in its tracks.  Why go to all that trouble?   Do you see Denmark changing its “Speed Checkpoints” to accommodate English-speakers?

And, besides, why would foreign students not want to have it on their resume that they attended “Sexually Imaginative University?”

This little anecdote should fit in my now very large file of absurdities I compiled over the years to keep myself laughing instead of crying as I struggled to bridge the cultural gaps between where I came from and Japan, where I was making my home.  But actually it fits better into the category of the politics of language.

That may not be immediately obvious to most people.  But I worked in a university language department filled with rivalries and power struggles.  You would imagine people involved in the teaching and learning of foreign languages and cultures would be more cosmopolitan than most places. That was not the case. English traditionally dominates language departments in Japan, and that means more jobs for English teachers, fewer jobs for teachers of other languages.   They went to great efforts to force students in to other languages, but in the end, students understood the practical value of English as an international language and pressured us accordingly.

Now, in retirement, when people ask me how my life is going, and whether I miss the teaching, I invariably say that I miss my students but not the politics of the work environment.  Some of the acrimony of faculty meetings sent me and other teachers of English running for martinis, a bottle of wine, a hike in the woods, anything to clear the hostility from our lives.  One Japanese teacher of French actually suggested we teachers of English, particularly the Americans, were little more than "cultural imperialists."   Another suggested we might be allowed to teach English literature, but language teaching should be taught by native Japanese, so they could keep the imperialism out of the classroom.

That was a couple decades ago now.  I don't want to generalize to the entire Japanese population - there are nationalists in all corners of the country and elsewhere in the world equally concerned about the uncertainties that come with outside cultural influence on their culture, and language classes make an easy target.

But the language imperialism charge came immediately to mind as I read the news about the goings on at Kinki Dai.  (Or Kindai, as it will now be called.)  (Dai = daigaku = university)  Wish I had had that example to use in those faculty room discussions.  To illustrate that in the end, so many of our battles over culture come down to money.

I took things too seriously at times.  It annoyed me no end that they could not see that I was far more critical of American foreign policy than they were, and my criticisms had more substance.  I was a peacenik.   I was actually thinking in those days of getting my permanent residence in Japan.  (I did become a permanent resident, actually.)   An imperialist was not who I was.  They were judging me by my outward characteristics.  It was prejudice in its rawest form.  My goals were not to make little Americans out of my students; it was, ironically, to help them go out into the world and make of their lives whatever they wanted to, including selling even more Toyotas to Americans, if that was what would make them happy.  (I have only owned Toyotas for the past thirty years, by the way.)

If the decision were up to me, I'd say they should keep the Kinki name.  Seriously.  It's a name that goes back centuries.  Can you imagine Texans changing their name to suit Chinese students in their midst?

But maybe, in the end, the folks worried about the spread of English around the world were right. It may not be the Americans forcing the Japanese to take their cue from them.  This is a Japanese decision, after all.  But it may also be an illustration of how, when the guy who is powerless anticipates what the guy in power wants, and does it before he even asks - that's when you know the bullies (imperialists) have won.


Addendum, June 3, 2014:

I note from Japanese sources that I misunderstood what Kinki was actually doing.  They do not intend to change the name of the university.  It will go on being called Kinki Daigaku in Japanese. Only when corresponding in English will they avoid the name, and use Kindai instead.

Also, the new policy is not due to go into effect until 2016.

Photo credits:

KinkiRooftop Special

KinkiUniversity 

 FartKontrol 

 KNT  

Sound Princesses and Puckered Lips

My mind has been reliving memories of Japan lately.  I don't know why.  That wonderful photo of Mt. Fuji from a friend's balcony (to the left) set it off, I think.  And friend Bill's response.  Bill spent some time there visiting me and never once got a glimpse of Mt. Fuji.  He's persuaded that Fuji is all a scam to attract tourists.  Once they get there, he says, they realize it was all a phony come-on.

Fortunately, even without Mt. Fuji, Japan is a land of endless delights.   Some are joys to behold – the gardens, the flower arrangements, the kimonos.   And some surprise and tickle the imagination - macho gangster-types walking around in pink slippers, hot café au lait in vending machines.

One of the things about Japan that Westerners often comment on is the number of ways that differences between men and women still show up, whether in the men-only practice of teeth-sucking or the women-only practice of hiding behind the hand when laughing.   “Femininity” has traditionally been associated with delicacy, modesty and refinement, and coarseness and aggressivity with males.  It's grossly unfair, of course, to compare what most would consider the positive aspects of one group with the negative aspects of another, but behind these stereotypes there can be some truth.

Consider the otohime machines in a women’s public toilet, for example.  Paruresis, you see.  My new word for the day.  Just to get an idea of the spread of the concept, I typed paruresis into Google translate to see what it might be in other languages.  A Chinese translation popped up immediately.  It’s 害羞膀胱, pronounced haishu panguang, and it translates shy bladder.  It’s the phobia some people have of being unable to urinate when somebody is close enough to see or hear what they are up to.    

Otohime, 音姫, to return to the Japanese context, translates sound princess. It's a machine that makes the sound of flushing water.  So common was the delicate fear of Japanese ladies of being overheard making tinkle noises that they used to flush the toilet constantly while taking a whiz,

resulting in a massive waste of water.  Lost in translation is the fact that there was an actual princess with that name (different characters, of course).  Note, in the picture at the right, that there is a volume control to match the strength of your desire to mask the sounds of nature.

Since a public campaign to get women to stop this waste of water failed miserably, Toto Toilets came to the rescue with the sound princess, originally a battery-operated device attached to the wall, and, more recently, as the picture above illustrates,  a feature of the bathroom plumbing system in modern houses.   Before you begin your business, you wave your hand in front of the sensor (or push the button) and voilà, your own personal Niagara.

Unfortunately, I’ve been told, many women fear people can distinguish the sound it makes from the flushing of a real toilet and thus they would be revealing their desire to avoid embarrassment by making use of the device, so they don’t use the machine, and keep flushing the actual toilet instead.  At least some women use it, however, and it is estimated twenty or so litres of water are saved by this modern technical advance.

What prompted this reverie on bathroom practices was an article I just came across about another Japanese female sensitivity – being caught opening your mouth too wide.  Having an “ochobo-guchi,” (“puckered lips” – i.e., “small” -mouth) in Japanese – is much to be desired.  Or so they tell me.  Personally I have a preference for women unafraid to guffaw.

In any case, apparently this hamburger chain called “Freshness Burger” found that their equivalent of the “big mac” wasn’t selling very well.  The problem was women on a date didn’t want to be caught opening their mouths enough to have at it.   The Japanese version of "ladies don't eat grinders."  The solution?  A new kind of napkin, or "wrapper" to hide the mouth when eating.

I've often quoted my friend Luis’s description of Japan as the land where “the world’s best microsystems are invented to deal with some of the world’s worst macrosystems.”   Here’s another example.  The PR campaign to save water didn't work.  Why should a PR campaign to become unafraid to get your lips around a fast-food behemoth?  Never underestimate the world of commerce's ability to accommodate reality.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so have a look at this link to the YouTube illustration of what I’m talking about.

Whether you’re a “vive la différence conservative or whether this story makes you groan at the slow pace of gender equality, I trust you’ll appreciate Japan’s never-ending supply of creative ideas.

And lest you think we're the only place on the planet that can twist language into a knot to serve political or commercial purposes - and in this case both at the same time - consider the name the company is using to market these masks to keep women "modest."  They're called "liberation wrappers."  Women are being "liberated" from "ochobo" syndrome, you see.

Abe Cheerleads the Bullies

Prime Minister Abe visits Yasukuni Shrine

Nobody’s ever surprised when they hear just how low a politician can go.  Just this week there was a media circus over a duck hunter from a place where “Cajun redneck culture and Ozark redneck culture intersect,” a  reformed drug addict who now represents American family values and prays to Jesus, and who should therefore, we are told, be forgiven for an occasional off the cuff remark about how the blacks back in “pre-entitlement” days were oh so happy all day just singin’ their little hearts out, and because he declared that being gay "morphs" into bestiality and that they "invent ways of doing evil." 

And the politician part?  Well, that would be Sarah Palin talking about how terrible it is that we are trying to shut down free speech and not let the good Christian people of America express their religion anymore.  Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty, the guy I’m talking about, in telling the world gays are all about bestiality and inventing evil are “just expressing what most Christians think,” you see.

But Sarah Palin, despite the narrow miss when we might have put her within a heartbeat of the presidency, is history.  She’s now a national clown.  Dumber than her shoes.  No need to take her seriously.

That’s not the case with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan.  He’s gone and done once again what the prime ministers of Japan sometimes do when they decide it’s time to bend down and smack their lips against the backsides of the rightwing geezers still pining away for days of military glory.  When they decide it is in their political interest to pay an official visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where the war criminals who planned the brutality in China like the Nanking Massacre are buried. And are honored to this day.  Imagine how that feels to a Chinese.  Or a Korean.  Or a Filipino, when that happens.  

(I blogged about Yasukuni a short time ago, here.)

So much time has passed.  We are a whole new generation of people, we Japanese and we French and we Indonesians.  We run the International Space Station together, we Russians and we Americans and we Japanese.  All together in marvelous harmony and cooperation.  Time to let bygones be bygones.

Until an asshole like Shinzo Abe comes along.

I remember an article in Der Spiegel at the 50^th anniversary of the end of World War II.  This was a great day for the German people, they said.  Why?  Because they were freed from the mindset that launched the invasion of most of Germany’s neighbors and constructed ovens for the genocidal killing of Jews and others.  This was the first day of a new life for Germany.  Germany was finally on a path to becoming the nation is has become today, with a capital city in Berlin people are flocking to for art and entertainment, with a powerful economy that is keeping the EU churning (I’m not endorsing their politics necessarily).  Germany is a country to be proud of today.  So thank you, liberators of not only the concentration camps, but of Germany itself.

And what do we do with our historical association with the Third Reich?  We vow to lead the world in peaceful cooperation and the rule of law.   We certainly don’t celebrate the wars and aggression of yesteryear.  We don’t forget, we don’t diminish, whitewash or trivialize.  And we look forward.

Abe, are you a complete idiot?  Do you not have the slightest respect for the victims of the Yasukuni war criminals?

Abe's defenders argue that there are only fourteen war criminals at Yasukuni, including the Big Guy, Tojo, and that he's honoring all the soldiers who fell in service to their country.  And that he's only going there to pray for peace.  Yeah, right.  Then how come he picks the very day to visit when the Chinese are celebrating the anniversary of Mao Tse Tung's 120th anniversary?  Japanese are masters of detail and every political nuance is carefully calculated.  It would seem this is an act of bravado on Abe's part.  See?  You can't tell me what to do, you Chinese fool!  I'm in charge here.

And the Chinese response? 

"Honoring the shrine is, in its essence, embellishing and falsely beautifying Japan's military invasion and colonization." 

And the Korean response?

"South Korean Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism said that he cannot help but deplore and express anger and urged Japan to stop "beautifying" its invasion."

No modern day Japanese child needs to have any feelings of guilt for the bombing of Chinese cities during the 1930s and 40s.  They weren’t alive at the time.  But they should get from their schoolbooks and from their parents and grandparents an appreciation for what Japan has become since 1945, how it has built itself up from despair and destruction, how it now builds laboratories in space where their astronauts share common goals with fellow astronauts from Russia and America.  They should be allowed to look forward, in other words.  With optimism and pride. Japan, like Germany, is a country to be proud of.  Why would you focus on that other Japan that is no more?  Why would you bring it back to life?

I take this all very personally.  I have family in Germany.  Years of close association.  A deep love of German music and art, and when things get tough it’s German fries and Bratwürste that lift my spirits.  I also have a valid green card for Japan.  If I go back, they have to take me in.  It was my home for over two decades and I will always be proud to have been associated with that marvelously engaging place.  Pisses me off all the time, of course.  But in the way somebody you love pisses you off when they act like a turd.

I’m pissed at the moment at Japan for allowing this lowlife politician to drag Japan back to the time when it was a scourge as a nation.  Come on, guys, let’s hear your voices.  Tell Abe you deserve better.  You really do, you know.  Don’t let him get away with this.  Throw the bum out and get in his place somebody to represent you who has the courage to stand up to the bullies among you.  You deserve to be able to travel around the world and not have people want to spit at you.

Abe represents the wrong Japan, just as the skinheads represent the wrong Germany and the Ku Klux Klan represents the wrong America.

Is it really that hard to understand?  Do we really need to explain these things?