There are lots of ways to measure how “civilized” a particular country is. None of these methods are definitive, but when grouped together they give us a general idea of where are the nice places to live, and where are the places to be emigrated from with all possible haste. How a society treat its prisoners. How they treat their dead. How they treat the marginalized and less fortunate.
Gross domestic product.
Mean income.
Strength of currency.
Literacy rates.
Cultural exports.
After spending three months in Japan, I am inclined to also say that the widespread availability of pizza delivery is also an important factor to consider when evaluating a country’s quality of life.
I mean, sure, in many ways America is like a Third-World country with delusions of grandeur, what with its medieval healthcare system, its broke-ass public schools, and the rampant baseness of its national character, but in almost every city and town in the Land of the Free there is at least one establishment you can call to have delicious—or at least moderately tasty—pizza delivered to your home or office or arbitrarily designated dropoff point on a street corner or someplace like in the first “Ninja Turtles” movie. In Japan this service—and indeed, real pizza in general—is not available outside of major cities.
Now, I’m not saying that a country has to have pizza delivery in order to be civilized, or that pizza delivery automatically categorizes a society as somehow more evolved. All I’m saying is that pizza delivery certainly strengthens the case.
I have this idea in my head that people who are driven to come to Japan (or anywhere else, I guess) to teach English tend to be cut from a different cloth than the rest of humanity, and that I myself am not of the normal overseas teacher stock. I say this because my own interpretation of shared events differs wildly from that of the other ALTs I have spent time around.
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.
I purchased a CD by the Blue Hearts at a music slash movie slash video game store in Kakuda, Japan while visiting a friend and fellow ALT. We decided to film me opening the CD as a study on cultural differences, but things quickly took a turn for the sinister.
Mr. Blithe used to be an English teacher in Iwate prefecture, Japan. Now he's probably going to be moving to Portland for law school, which is perhaps less exciting but only by a little bit. Sometimes he likes to write about concerts he's been to and complain about society, or he will remember a funny thing that happened while he was still in Japan and will write about it.
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