Sapporo Snow Festival 2009: Everyone Here Is Crazy

I visited Sapporo for the world-renowned Snow Festival in February. The ice sculptures were pretty great, but my enjoyment of them was hampered somewhat by the fact that there was heavy snow all weekend. This video was taken in Odori Park amidst the insanity of a severe blizzard situation, where the only non-crazy person within walking distance was whoever was performing in the Yamaha keyboard booth next to one of the main event stages.

I live in Iwate prefecture, which can be thought of as kind of the Wisconsin of Japan—cold, rural, backwater-y, and not particularly exciting, the punchline to a million jokes that few people care enough to tell, but charming too, like most places can be especially when you can’t understand all the potentially hateful and base things the average John Q. Takahashi on the street is saying. Being such a backwater, Iwate prefecture—and specifically the town that I live in—does not have many English speakers, to the point where, since I am going for at least some vestige of anonymity with this thing, I am reluctant to even say exactly where it is that I live on my blog because doing so would instantly identify me as one of maybe three native English speakers in the whole place.

So I don’t have a lot of contact with other foreigners, and when I do see another person who looks like they might speak fluent English, I get kind of excited. I want to run up to them, give them a hug, and say, “Will you be my friend?” Living life without reliable avenues for communication is a lot more exhausting than people realize. And really, I don’t feel like this impulse is all that unusual. I mean, due to the homogeneous nature of Japan and the difficulties foreigners often face in adjusting to life in this country, it would make sense to assume a certain amount of camaraderie between non-Japanese living here, a badge we all wear with pride like veterans of some long-forgotten war. A secret handshake. A clubhouse in the woods. Midnight rituals. Fucking bylaws. I’d even be cool with just a wave or a thumbs-up as we walk by each other on the street, some simple gesture of acknowledgment between two human beings sharing a common bond as they pass each other all awash in a sea of Other-ness, as if to say, “Holy shit, dude, we’re in Japan!” It’s not much, but it’s a connection, something to keep the isolation at bay.

Operating under the assumption that other people in a situation similar to mine will share these sentiments, I try to smile and nod whenever I see a foreigner while I am out and about, especially in smaller towns where such a sight is a rare occurrence indeed. Back at the beginning of my stay this was to acknowledge a common bond, establish a dialog, maybe the occasional bit of small talk between comrades and arms in such. Initiating contact with strangers has never been my way, but the idea was that if I looked friendly and stuff that people would think it was okay to say “hello” to me. But I quickly discovered that most foreigners, when presented with this situation, will avert their eyes and pretend not to notice my doing this, as if I were their crazy ex-girlfriend or that irritating guy from work with with fifteen cats and a kee-razy story about each and every one of them. Since coming to this realization, I still make eye contact and nod “hello” to every foreigner I meet simply to make the statement that there has not been some sort of mutual decision on both of our parts to ignore the other’s existence. I passed one hipster-looking white dude in Sendai on a staircase, me coming up and him going down, and since casting his gaze down towards the ground as is normal would in this case have caused him to meet my eyes, he opted instead to turn his head so that he was looking at the blank wall next to him rather than, you know, the stairs.

I like to think that I would not have chuckled had he tripped because of this, nor would I have been doubled over with laughter had he broken his neck due to said tripping. But I can’t be sure. I’m working under the assumption that, since these encounters are so fleeting, these people do not yet have substantial reason to avoid me specifically, and so that their refusal to acknowledge my existence is illustrative of some larger reluctance to interact with other foreigners outside of controlled circumstances.

It still is not clear to me why exactly strangers in a strange land, when faced with the rare-ish opportunity to converse in their mother tongue, would choose to pretend like that opportunity does not exist. It probably has something to do with maintaining one’s sense of adventure or something. You make it to Japan, you go through the rigors of homesickness and culture shock and come out the other side reborn a semi-functional (if illiterate) member of Japanese society. You feel like a stupendous badass, a world-traveler, a self-reliant and dynamic personality. Even little things like being able to order at a restaurant or ask for things at the post office seem like feats of epic win. It feels good, like you’re capable of anything, and I guess some people either feel like it’s presumptuous to try to horn in on a random stranger’s nomad Bohemian fantasy or are living out said fantasy and are thus reluctant to have contact with foreigners for fear of upsetting the illusion.

Regardless of the reason, my existence was not acknowledged by a non-Japanese stranger in public until I visited Tokyo, a trip which took place after I had been in this country for almost four months. On Christmas Eve my friends and I took the train over to Akihabara, Tokyo’s legendary electronics district. There I was able to finally fulfill my long-time fantasy of playing a round of Dance Dance Revolution in an Akihabara arcade, and in that arcade we ran into a white dude with glasses and an “Arizona State University” sweatshirt who was waiting in line for some esoteric cube-based rhythm game. He turned to look at us.

“Do you guys speak English?” he asked.

“Yes we do,” I said.

“You can always tell here,” he said, motioning to the Japanese people all around us. “It’s convenient.”

“You have no idea how nice it is to hear you say that,” I said.

As I rode the Shinkansen up to Miyagi, when I wasn’t sleeping or listening to the old man in the seat across from mine suck off a toothpick for what seemed like (and actually was) two hours, I spent some time reading a book about the ending of the world and allowed my mind to wander, entertaining visions of moving to Tokyo and doing the big-city thing after a lifetime spent in places where a bunch of my friends and I could get together and while away half the night standing in a circle asking each other a million permutations of the question, “So, what is there to do?” without ever coming up with an acceptable answer. Sure, the rent’s high and I’d continue to have trouble communicating with people due to my lack of Japanese ability for the foreseeable future and would still probably feel isolated and alone more often than not even amidst all those huddled millions…but my thinking is that if I can put myself in a place that has the best of everything to offer, I can at least be hopeful of eventually finding whatever it is that I am looking for—be it serenity, security, a decent cup of coffee, inspiration, motivation, and/or creepy anime memorabilia for me to browse through in back-alley storefronts and then not buy in quantities sufficient to last an Age. The seasons of my soul (or whatever) have often been characterized by unnamed longing, so a big city seems like it might be the right place to hang out in. It’s simple mathematics: even though I still don’t know what it is that I want out of life, it is statistically more likely that if I ever do figure that shit out, I will be in a better position to obtain whatever Thing it is in Tokyo than I would be in most other places. Unless that Thing I wanted out of life turned out to be snow, in which case my current place of residence would provide a pretty solid foundation on which to build my future.

In Iwate prefecture—a place that sucks even compared to the other sucky (and not-so-sucky-but-still-kind-of-meh) places I have spent significant amounts of time in, and sucks even more than a similarly proportioned American town would simply because of the language barrier—I often feel like I am drowning, so far removed from anything that moves me or even feels real that, for all my complaining, I don’t even know how to go about improving my life other than to wait for my current contract to expire in March and toss the dice again to see if the next place I end up will be an improvement. It’s hard for me to tell whether my current existential discomfort is due to my own bad attitude and inability to experience joy even while inhabiting a place that actually is beautiful and serene and magnificent, or whether I have 100% accurately described said place as being total ass and am thus justified in being a little disgruntled every now and then while I plan my escape. Am I making a Hell out of Heaven, or am I merely seeing Hell for what it is?

If I moved to Tokyo, though, maybe I’d finally be able to tell once and for all whether it’s me that’s crazy, or whether it’s everyone else.

I have a lot to say about Tokyo, although it might take me a while to get it all down. Stay tuned.

Tripping the Light Ascetic (Ganbatte-Fest ‘08, Part 2)

I am testing this theory by giving the following quiz to as many foreigners living in Japan as I can find who will talk to me. I used everything I learned while sleeping through Statistics and Cultural Anthropology class to conform to the standards of scientific rigor, so hopefully the results will give me a clearer picture of the tendencies of the ALT mind. I would be interested to see what kind of answers the readers of this blog would give, so feel free to give a response in the comments section. This is based off of something that really happened to me and the wild variation in perception among a group of about five other English-speaking ALTs of what seemed to me like a fairly straightforward descent into madness.

So, here we go:

Say you’re in a restaurant with some other people. Since they are all fine upstanding bohemian types, said restaurant is a little hole-in-the-wall kind of place off of the main thoroughfare, a real “authentic experience.” You go to order food and the menu has no pictures and is written all in kanji, which no one in your group can read because it is obtuse by its very nature and was designed in ancient China to make learning it as difficult as possible in order to elevate the literate class. The proprietor of the establishment regards your inquiries about the food with a nervous smile and a shake of the head. So your order blind, just point at something that doesn’t cost too much and hope for the best. Maybe the food’s good, maybe it’s not. You have no way of knowing what it is until it arrives at your table–and even when it’s in front of you, you still might not know!

How awesome or not awesome would you rate this situation on a scale from one to five, where five is the most awesome and one is the least awesome?

This happened to me when I hung (hanged?) out with other teachers in my prefecture back at the beginning of my stay in Japan, and was in fact one of the early signs that I might have been in over my head. I would not consider this restaurant incident to be any fucking way to live at all, sort of a misguided attempt to expand one’s horizons that strays too far into the realm of lunacy to be a very valuable learning experience. But most of my contemporaries thought it was totally sweet, all “I can’t wait to tell the folks back home that I ordered some food without even knowing what it was!” whereas I was sort of inclined to keep that a secret from all but my very closest and most trusted friends.