8 Insignificant Things About Japan That Please and Annoy Me

Between work, child, dogs and all the usual stuff I haven't had time to dedicate to proper posting lately. So, just for frivolous fun, here are eight completely insignificant things that are annoy and pleasing me about life in Japan lately. There's no discussion of meaningful social issues here, just randomness!

Annoying

Milk only comes in 1 litre cartons. It wouldn't seem like a big issue, but it is really annoying and really wasteful to have to buy three or four individual cartons a week. If you peek behind the counter of a Japanese Starbucks you'll see crate after crate of 1 litre milk cartons... even business can't get larger sizes, it seems. SO MUCH PACKAGING >.<

Pleasing

Eggs have the use by date stamped directly onto them, so if you finish half a pack, buy a new one and set them all together in the fridge there's still no confusion. It's a little thing but quite handy!

Annoying

My neighbourhood recently added two new categories of garbage, bringing it up to nine different ways we have to separate everything, all collected on different days and different frequencies (for example, burnable is twice a week on the same days each time but non-burnable is once a month on a completely random day). I really appreciate the recycling system and I don't even mind separating it into different categories (even though in Australia all the recyclables get collected together from the same bin then sorted at the recycling centre, so I KNOW IT CAN BE DONE). What really annoys me is having to take garbage out every single day and needing a schedule to know what to take out when because it is that frickin' complicated. Also, our garbage is even collected from different street corners depending on what type it is! There is no need for it to be this complicated!

Pleasing

Light switches glow when switched off. Again, a really little thing, but so helpful! No more groping  along the wall in the dark trying to feel for the switch. It's especially helpful in unfamiliar places.

Annoying

School lets out at completely random times with no consistency, and I get the times for the following week each Friday evening. That means if Monday is a "there's randomly no school after lunch today" day, I have literally zero business days notice to figure out child care or try to get time off work. The assumption is that every child has a stay at home mother and/or cohabiting grandparents. This increasingly does not reflect the lived reality, but schools seem disinterested in taking responsibility for kids between set hours.

Pleasing

Although these are horribly environmentally unfriendly, I do really appreciate them from time to time! They are sweat absorbing pads that stick inside your clothes to prevent staining (or visible moisture) and also deodorise. Usually I wear and undershirt, but it is SO hot and sometimes I just want to experience the textures of my nicer blouses without having my underarms hosting their own wet t-shirt contest.

Annoying

The "sender" is listed as gaikoku, overseas.

I posted this on facebook and four or five friends replied with their own... the gaikoku is so generous, sending so many packages! No matter how many times it happens, the use of "gaikoku" to signify the entire rest of the world and the prioritisation of foreignness over any other information (like, for example, the NAME OF THE SENDER) continues to annoy me.

Pleasing

 I love that children do not live a segregated existence here. They go everywhere with their families, and if they get tired they just sleep wherever they happen to be. 

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When I Was Mongolian (Flashback Friday)

You may not be aware that I was, once and many years ago, Mongolian. It was just for a couple of hours in the mountains of... Gifu? Possibly Aichi or Mie but probably Gifu. See? I had a hat and everything.

I have been trying to impress on my international students the difference between gaikoku in Japanese and any translation into English. "Foreign countries" or "abroad" just don't carry the same connotations. The time I was Mongolian is a good example of the difference, I think.

A small village in remote mountains wanted to invite some foreigners to attend a festival and liven things up, so the community leaders very kindly paid for a bunch of international students (myself included) to travel into the mountains, stay at a ryokan, have a big beery party/karaoke night with them, then attend the festival the next day. There had to be some sort of purpose beyond just attending while foreign, so the solution hit upon was that we would run a Mongolian booth, selling Mongolian cookies while wearing the kind of things you can see in the picture. Our little band included Australian, American, Chinese, Korean and French students... but no one from Mongolia. At the end of the day, though, we were all gaikokujin from the gaikoku, and Mongolia is in the gaikoku, so it totally made sense. Apart from the deep awkwardness of dressing up as a nationality, the situation became even more confused when well meaning villagers asked us to teach them Mongolian words and phrases.

It was actually a lot of fun and I have fond memories of the kindness of the village leaders ("you're vegetarian and can't eat any of this food? Let's order more beer for you!"), but it remains one of the weirder things I've been asked to do.

For more articulate musings on "the gaikoku", click here and visit This Japanese Life.

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A New Perspective on Gaijinhood

I accidentally joined a cult the other day. I'll write about that some other time... anyway, the reason I mention it is that during the cult meeting, I had one of those all-too-familiar "talk through the gaijin" experiences. If you've lived in Japan for any amount of time you will no doubt know what I mean. Here's an example from a Cub Scout parents and leaders drinking party a few months ago.

I chatted to one of the other mums for a while, then we grabbed our beer bottles and proceeded around the room to pour drinks for other people (that's how socialising happens at these things). Each person we approached did exactly the same thing: Ask the Japanese lady questions about me. As in, "where is she from?" "Can she speak Japanese?" "How long has she been here?" When I was new to life here I used to try to answer these questions and the conversations just went like this:

"Where is she from?"
"I'm from Australia."
[Ignoring me and continuing to ask the Japanese person next to me:] "Can she speak Japanese?"
"I'm talking to you in Japanese right now."
[Still ignoring me:] "How long has she been here?"

So, eventually I gave up and just smiled mutely while taking advantage of the free time to drink more. Japan has not been good for my liver. Anyhow, on this occasion it was kind of nice watching the other Cub Scout mum getting more and more irritated as the same conversation repeated over and over. A little sadistic, maybe, but I felt glad to see her frustration instead of having to explain mine to her.

So, back to the cult. The Japanese lady sitting beside me kept having questions directed to her instead of me, and I was sighing internally. Then the main culprit, an elegant old lady with immaculate silver hair, began talking about how hard dealing with school must be for me as a "gaijin". I wouldn't understand the system, or the requirements, or what to buy for my child. I must be having a really hard time. In fact, there have been quite a few things that have been hard. I am fortunate to have worked in the local elementary school system for four years, and that's got me through pretty well, but I still get completely flummoxed from time to time by things that the staff take so for granted that it just hasn't occurred to them to inform me of. So although what this lady was saying was to some extent true, it isn't necessarily true that just because I am a 外人 I'd struggle. I mean, there are lots of international parents in Japan who speak native level Japanese and never seem to find anything hard. I was sitting there raging in my heart and twitching to lash out when the lady continued:

"When I first moved here from Korea I had to enroll the children in school immediately, and I had no idea how to do anything. Every day I got something wrong and my children were teased at school because of my mistakes. Japanese people often don't understand how hard it can be for gaijin parents here."

And there it was. Her surname was Japanese and she spoke our local dialect, so I'd assumed that she was yet another Japanese person othering me and making assumptions about me. In fact, she was empathising and remembering her own difficulties as an outsider. It was me who had leaped to judge her, not the other way around. I was so wrapped up in memories of past frustrations that I hadn't seen the kindness she was offering me. When the meeting finished she squeezed my hand.
"It'll be alright," she said, "your child has a family and love. Everything else is just decorating."

A few days later, I was playing with Tiger in a park while a steady stream of school kids walked by on their way home. A little girl, about 10 or 11, saw us from the road and yelled "gaijin!" She came running over to us and collapsed in a smiling puffed out heap in front of me.
"You are a gaijin, right? You look like a gaijin."
"Yes", I said, "I'm from Australia."
"I'm a gaijin too! I'm from China, but I've lived here since I was in kindergarten. Bye!" And off she ran, back to her waiting friends.

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In Which I Discover that I am an Imperialist Monkey

Researching for this post, it seems like this experiment never actually happened, FYI (Image Source Here)

 Have you ever heard about the experiment with the monkeys, ladder and bananas? Click the image to enlarge and read if you haven't. Although the specific details seem to be untrue, the story is based on published research about learned fearfulness (see Psychology Today). When I first read about the "experiment" I thought immediately about an exchange I had with my father when I was fifteen and had just started working as a kitchen hand. My dad went to use a wet dish cloth as a pot holder when taking a roasting tray out of the oven, and I told him not to. "Why not?" he asked. "I don't know" I said, "they told me at work never to do that." "I wonder why..." dad said, went ahead and did it, and got burned quite painfully. The dampness in the cloth turns into steam, apparently. My dad is like that, he wants to know how everything works. He'd be the monkey getting beaten up by everyone else. Actually, when he talks about his childhood, I think that's exactly what it was like. I remembered this story a while ago when reading This Japanese Life:

"Monkeys Eat Corn
Perhaps it’s a bad sign that after reading about monkeys, my mind wandered to my life as an expat. But a recent study, published in April in the journal Science (and a NY Times story here) made me think about social adaptation.
In the experiment, researchers dyed two batches of corn – one pink, one blue. For two groups of monkeys, the blue corn was soaked in a disgusting liquid, and the pink stuff was standard monkey corn. For the other groups of monkeys, they switched it.
So, two groups of monkeys grew accustomed to pink being inedible, two grew accustomed to blue being inedible. Soon enough, the monkeys only ate one color of corn (the delicious one).
Then the scientists stopped making the other color taste so bad. Once the monkeys got used to which color was good, they both ended up being the same. What happened was interesting: High-status monkeys never bothered eating the gross-colored corn, but low-status monkeys occasionally had to. And even though these low-status monkeys knew that the corn was identical to the good stuff (identical, now, aside from the color), they still favored the “good” color when they could get it. Meanwhile, babies who grew up watching mom eat one color of corn barely even registered that the other color of corn was even food. They’d shit in it.
Monkeys shitting in food have a lot in common with me, as an expat. I’m not always down on my life, of course, but anyone in one culture can get accustomed to interacting with certain things in certain ways. It’s a given: The institutions shape how we interact with them, and then that shapes how we interact with each other. Sometimes this institution is a school or job hunt, and sometimes it’s the people giving us corn.
But then the researchers did something really cool.  They took some monkeys and introduced them to the monkeys in other areas – areas where the opposite color of corn was “the good stuff.”

Wild Vervet monkeys, trained to eat only pink-dyed or blue-dyed corn and shun the other color, quickly began eating the disliked-color corn when they moved from a pink-preferred setting to a blue-is-best place, and vice versa.

These guys went in, looked around, and lost their old cultural identities. This is, at a literally primal level, a version of culture shock. Humans, lucky us, have a much more complicated set of adaptations to deal with. We don’t just want to eat some corn, we want our identities validated."

For anyone who lives in a culture not their own for any length of time, life becomes a balancing act between experiencing and respecting the host culture on the one hand while retaining a situated sense of self (and depending on your approach to ethics, trying to be culturally aware without succumbing to subjective morality). I've mentioned before the way cultural differences are often discussed in Japan on the one hand in completely trivial ways while on the other as completely uncrossable divide. People ask me if it's hard not wearing shoes in the house. They don't believe me when I say that many Australians have shoe-free houses and that I never wore shoes inside growing up. But even if I had... why would it be difficult to take off my shoes? (Slipper culture is another issue of course!) No-one ever asks if it's hard being casually insulted on a daily basis, because it doesn't occur to them that it's a cultural thing. But if I brought it up I imagine the response would be that I just didn't understand The Japanese Way ™. In fact, my supervisor at city hall asked me a while ago if I had any experiences of racism. He was very eager about it so I tried to think of an example that had been unpleasant for me but not so serious that it would turn into a 'thing'. So I told him about a function I had just attended for sports people who had represented our city at the prefectural tournament. I was there representing our naginata team and shared a table with representatives from various other sports. A man sitting opposite talked loudly about me all evening, despite the fact that I was speaking Japanese with everyone else and could clearly understand him. He didn't say anything bad, but it was a non-stop stream of: "I have to text my wife that I'm sitting opposite a 外人! She'll never believe it! Someone take a picture as proof. Oh look, the 外人 is eating some melon. Wow! It's eating melon with a fork! Gotta get a photo..." And yes, he literally took photographs of me eating while sitting opposite me at the table, without ever once speaking TO me. "Oh, but you have to understand that it's very exciting for Japanese people to see foreigners" my irrepressibly optimistic boss responded. "It's not discrimination or any bad thing!" And that is how it always is. You have to be understanding. You don't get to feel uncomfortable. You have to see the funny side of things when the fifth kid in a row asks your cup size during class and the teacher is obviously hoping that you'll answer. Anyway, back to the monkeys. Or rather, to me being a cultural imperialist.

At one of our many summer seminars for elementary school teachers we were broken into groups and told to play a card game with simple rules. That catch was that we weren't allowed to speak, and we were told that is was an exercise in non-verbal communication. After a minute some members were told to switch groups and keep playing. We did it a few times, and then the game ended and we were told the real purpose of the activity. If you're familiar with Barnga you'll have recognised it by now: each group is given slightly different rules, so when the players are shuffled around the group has to cope with players who have different expectations of how the game works. Some players will dominate their new group and enforce their original group's rules, some will go with the flow and assimilate into their new group's rules, and some will get confused or angry. It shouldn't come as a surprise if you know me or have been reading this blog for a while that I completely dominated every group I entered, ruthlessly enforcing "my" rules and quashing all opposition while all the while thinking what a great job I was doing of communicating non-verbally. Hearing the real purpose of the activity was an eye-opener. It wasn't news to me to discover that I am bossy and domineering, but it was a big shock to discover that I had gone through the whole exercise without ever once contemplating that perhaps the other players who were "doing it wrong" were actually playing with a different set of expectations. When it comes down to it, despite my desire not to be, I'm still one of the monkeys at the bottom of the ladder beating up the new guy without stopping to wonder why.

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Foreigners, You Know, For the Kids

I haven't obscured her face because it was so long ago that I can't imagine her being recognisable today

I have no idea who this child is. I was having dinner with some friends circa 2005, and her parents just walked over, put her in my lap and took a photo. I’m not sure who was more freaked out about the situation, her or me.

I was walking with the man-person recently when a little girl, about five years old, yelled out 外人だ (foreigners!) and broke away from her mother, running over and throwing her arms around my waist. Beaming up at me she pleaded 遊ぼう (play with me)??

It’s been the case for a long time that foreigners, specifically English-speaking foreigners, have been prominently employed in the education field. A lot of kids have happy experiences playing with a fun, cheerful foreigner at an “international pre-school”, English conversation class, baby “let’s sing and play in English” class and of course at elementary school. It’s not surprising that kids see us and assume that we are there to entertain and play with them. What is slightly less understandable is the way adults push children to interact for them. “Ask her where she’s from” the mother on the bus will ask her child in Japanese. The child turns to me and says “where are you from?” in Japanese. I answer in Japanese. “What is she saying?” The mother asks the child, and the child repeats exactly what I said back to the mother. “Wow, foreign languages really are easier for children!” The mother marvels. The child and I roll our eyes in synchronisation.  

While I don’t mind at all (I love kids and do actually find them easier to communicate with), I wonder how safe it is for the children involved. I guess paranoia about stranger-danger is a very un-Japanese thing, and I usually like that about Japan.

No idea where they were heading after we decided to go home... or what they were doing in the red light district in the first place for that matter. A lot of the working girls bring their children to 'work' with them, but this lady wasn't dressed like the usual employees in the area.

Once when an Australian friend was visiting we were out in the red light district late on a Friday night, on our way back from some all-you-can-drink karaoke. A woman with a six year old boy wanted to practice her English and engaged some of our group in conversation while the visiting friend and I played a wild game of tag/dragon ball through the nearby park and side streets. His mother never even turned around to see where he was. While I think it is wonderful that children are given more freedom and that society as a whole looks out for all children in a communal way in Japan, I was pretty shocked by that particular incident. A group of drunk strangers, chasing a very little boy through the bushes in the red light district in the wee hours of the morning surely warrants at lest the occasional look-see. Being foreign doesn’t automatically mean someone is safe to leave your child unattended with, any more than being foreign makes them automatically more dangerous.

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