2/28/2007

Not too long ago, a Japanese friend of mine summed up his recent return to Japan after a year in Toronto with a brief summary of the ride home from Narita: a quiet train car crammed to the brim with tired Japanese faces, cell phones, and adult comics. His biggest reactions not only focused on the homogeneity of the crowd or the fact that everyone was so infatuated with having their cell phones out all the time even while next to their friends, but that most of them—particularly the business men—looked exhausted to the point of passing out. It was at this point I remarked sarcastically that “yeah, most salary men in this country look like they want to die”, but the look my friend then gave me seemed indicative of something more to lament over rather than to laugh about. Well, I was laughing anyway.

From the standpoint of an outsider partially assimilated into Japanese society, I found my own reactions to my friend’s feelings about coming back “home” to be quite…odd. It was as though he in some ways had become more North American than I was. Granted, I’ve been living somewhere in Asia for the past two consecutive years. During that time frame I’ve been to Japan six times to date, the longest stay being about 11 months. Since my recent return back, I regularly frequent Tokyo but I hardly think about being the very visible foreigner within a sea of tired Japanese faces. I don’t think so much about the inverted nature of people in this country as they live their lives so closely to each other and yet rarely dare to acknowledge the presence of anyone they do not know—Japanese or otherwise—beyond a brief apology as they push through the crowd, on their way to whatever place they’re in such a hurry to get to.

Over the next few days I’ll be attempting to cover some points of daily existence over in this country that I get the feeling most expats alike—including myself—simply tend to gloss over after being here for so long. As for the Japanese, unless they’ve spent significant time overseas, telling them such things about their own society is often akin to trying to tell a fish that it’s a surrounded by water. Overall, I feel it’s nonetheless important to be aware of such things, because to do the opposite would equal complacency. And well, I don’t know about any of you, but I would never have gotten as far as I have in this or any other country I’ve been in with that kind of attitude. In other words, complacency is the word that describes 40 year old expats who complain about still teaching at NOVA after 10 years, even though they never tried to do anything about it. Well, anyway…

And with that, tomorrow’s topic: “Part 1: The Reality of the Japanese Social Dichotomy” (or, “The Difference between a Japanese Person and Everyone Else”)