As far back as I can remember, it started with me in a bed with this girl. (Starts as a dream, ends up a nightmare.) I remember being aware that this was the last chance for us to get back together. I can't remember what I was doing or what I was supposed to be doing, but I remember she was ignoring me most of the time, and refusing me in a very childish, singsong voice. Nothing was working, and I was getting increasingly frustrated, and I eventually gave up and left the room (through a bright glowing doorway which sharply contrasted the dark room). I ended up in a kitchen, and I saw a pot of instant noodles boiling on the stove. She came out of the room and wandered over to the stove, wondering if her noodles were cooked yet, in a way that was very everyday, normal; as if the past hour on the bed never happened. The sequence of events gets blurry here; I remember feeling angry, and I remember drinking water straight from a teapot, but I cannot remember if it was hot water or not. Eventually, I stormed back into the room, and hid my head under the pillows and blanket in frustration. It was at this point that my parents came home, and somewhere along the way this girl must have morphed into in my brother, because they started scolding him for not finishing a task they assigned to him while they were out. And he came back into the room and came to where I was trying to hide/sleep/escape and said, "I told you so." Outside, my parents were yelling loudly and arguing about why they should not have gone out and left us in charge of this unspecific task... and and everything was just crashing in and coming down and I was trying to curl into a ball but none of it was going away... I screamed. My subconscious screamed a piercing, haunting, pain-wrecked psychic scream that echoed within the confines of my own head, a mental manifestation of all the pain, frustration, despair... When my parents came round to see what the noise was about, I started vomiting. I remember I crawled off the bed and onto the floor, because some part of me was saying, "Get off the bed; it's going to hell to clean it off the bed. Do it on the floor." The last thing I remember before I shot myself up through the levels of consciousness was the caustic bile projectile vomiting out of my throat, and I was on the floor on all fours, trying to aim it upwards to hit my father's face with it.
I remember in my first few seconds of consciousness, after confirming that I had a terrible dream, I was wondering if I had really started vomiting in real life. No, my mouth was closed; I wasn't screaming. So far, so good. But as I lay there, unmoving, on my decidedly Japanese-style futon bed, the visions still vividly etched onto my memory, I slowly realised that, whatever positive thoughts and wisdom I try to furnish my upper levels of consciousness with, what lies beneath is terrifying, horrific, and still there. I wasn't scared during the dream; there was a lot of anger, and pain. But what really terrified me was the conscious realisation that that is what I am underneath all this, and the fear of it getting out one day.
But enough about that. Time for some happy stuff!
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| Like cute little kiddies! |
My host mom is in a "book club" at her son's school, and every two weeks they go to class to read a book to the kids. This week, she asked me if I wanted to read an English book to them. I said yes, and so I woke up to a rainy morning to head off for Jun-kun's elementary school, which was just a five-minute walk away.
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| Hey, look at me! A grown adult taking pictures in the vicinity of a public elementary school! |
There really isn't much difference between what I saw at these elementary schools and what I remember of primary schools. You take off your shoes at the door before you head to class; that's about it. When we went in, the kids all stood up, and they had an appointed person to start the greeting before the rest of the class chanted it in unison.
The book I read was "We're Different, We're the Same". Yuka-san said she usually tries to read English books to the class, because most of the other mothers read Japanese books, and she's one of the few who know how to speak English. The book's an initial foray into the nature of racial harmony, pointing out that while all our body parts look different, they are actually essentially the same, and all with the colourful cast of Sesame Street characters to highlight the point. I think it would have been better if I didn't look so East-Asian; it would make the point so much more obvious; but you take what you can get.
I have to say, the little kids were all so darn cute. I'd read a page, and then Yuka-san would translate it for me. And they'd be making all sorts of comments (I actually don't know what they're saying). And before I turn the page, they'll be guessing what body part would be coming up next, and start yelling and guessing. It's adorable. And at the end of the session, they actually give the kids time for comments; many of those who volunteered their seven-year-old children's-book-connoisseur's opinion that even though they didn't understand English (it's only taught in schools from third grade onwards), they enjoyed it a lot (tanoshii). One girl said that she's from Hawaii, and she actually knows English! She kind of shyly stared at me for thirty seconds, before saying in a small voice, "I know English," and my heart just melted, seriously.
Another thing that I noticed, which harks back to Mr Ng's wisdom, was that children start out intelligent and then become stupid people as they grow up, through their "education" (used in a loose sense, like that received from parents or teachers). Yuka-san had brought in a map, to show them where Singapore is, and she unfolded it in the front of the class and asked for volunteers to point out where Singapore is on the map. And so many kids raised their hands almost instantly: "Pick me! Pick me!" And when they came up to the map, they stood there staring at it for a long time before finally pointing to a wrong country (Indonesia, usually). But that's not the point. The point is that as kids, we're not that afraid of trying out things, things we don't even know anything about, just to try. And it's not like they sunk into depression when they were told that Borneo isn't actually Singapore; they were as excited as all the others to find out where Singapore really was, and how small it actually is. But we lose this sense of curiosity and daring when we grow up; or, more likely, it's weeded out of us through "education". Hopefully, with people like Sir Ken Robinson pushing for educational restructuring, we can shift away from the current factory-line model of education, to a system which actually encourages curiosity and discovery, which is really the whole point of the endeavor.
Lunch at the Waseda cafeteria again today; I tried the miso ramen, which was excellent.
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| Very soon I'm going to run out of witty captions for the food photos. |
What really made me happy was to discover that the katsu thing I bought had a core of cream cheese in the centre. I mean, it's not like it's expensive cheese or anything, but just the fact that I can keep being surprised by what Japan has to offer, even in the smallest of ways, shows that I still have much to learn about this country.
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| Yup, out of witty captions. |
I tried to talk to the guys who sat at my table, but they didn't speak any English at all. Strike one. The old lady who next sat down did speak a bit of English; like Saito-san last week, she's here studying English (but not specifically literature). She was very enthusiastic about it; at one point she was trying to convey to me that her friend was coming over to meet her and that I should stay for a while to talk to her as well, but she didn't know how to say that in English, so she turned to a student at an adjacent table and asked if he could translate for her. It was a mixture of adorable and awkward at the same time, but it was very, very fun, and I'm glad for the experience.
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| You have to be this old to take a selfie with me. |
Class today was about Naomi, a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki, about a man who falls in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, which puts me in mind of Lolita, which I guess is the western equivalent. There's much commentary about modernity and the "modern girl", but what made sit up and pay attention is the relationship between the two characters. Prof Jacobowitz called it a masochistic novel, and I didn't know that masochism had a different meaning outside "hurting yourself for sexual pleasure"; in a literary sense, it has to do with voluntarily surrendering power over yourself to another person. It was pretty interesting; I've never seen it that way before, and I guess I'll start seeing masochistic relationships a lot more now that the eyelids have been pulled back.
On the way home, I happened to pass by a blooming flower (that would be pejorative in certain British slang); what's special about it is that it was very, very red, but against the backdrop of a huge green bush. And I spotted it.
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| We are still far from a stable cure for colourblindness. |
My host mom was coming home late tonight, so my host dad brought me out for dinner at Denny's, which in Japan is a popular chain of family restaurant. Wait, did someone just say family restaurant?
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| OhmygoshI'vealwayswantedtogotoafamilyrestaurantbutI'veneverhadafamilyinJapanbeforesoIneverqualifiedtoenter omigoshlivingthedreeeeeam |
It's really appropriate that I just watched Working!! before I came to Japan, so I was super excited at seeing the full family restaurant experience. I ordered a hamburger with rice which looked really good in the picture (tip for restaurant owners: if you don't have English menus, then please at least fill your menu with pictures).
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| NWARGH |
I also had an interesting conversation with Koike-san about the differences between Japanese and Mandarin. Specifically, how Japanese has the katakana system to incorporate foreign words; Mandarin has to make up a special word combination ("electric brain" for computer).
I was supposed to spend the night writing my essay, but I got distracted by these two guys:
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| Anarchy in the UK, meet Comedy in the East-Asian Region. |
I spent three hours talking to these two crazy people, and I've never been happier. I really miss all the YNC people, and these guys especially; it was great just catching up with them again. (Why is GMT+6 afraid of GMT+7? Because GMT+7 GMT+8 GMT+9!)
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