The Look

"the look...of love...is in...your eyes..."

Not quite.

I first heard that song on "Austin Powers," and I love it, but beyond those lyrics I know nothing about it.

After nearly one year of living as a minority in Japan, you start to take inventory of "the looks." By that I mean, the various expressions with which strangers check you out and make sweeping decisions about your character and your place in life after a 2-second glance. Sometimes they stare much longer than 2 seconds, but the judgment is clearly passed in 2 seconds or less. After thousands of strangers give you these looks, you start to become outside the outsider, or outside of yourself, and you see the entire situation from another point of view. You look for a way to amuse or entertain yourself while patiently enduring the gazes you can otherwise do nothing about. You start to notice a pattern. And then you start to categorize all the ways people see you before they know you.

• The Alien. What is that thing? I've never seen anything like that in my life. Is it hostile? What is it doing on my street? Should I be afraid? Can it eat rice? Has it heard of chopsticks?
• The Foreigner. Look at that girl, she is white, but does that mean she's from America or France or Brasil? I think Brasil. None of it really matters, because she's not Japanese. She is different, different, different. If I don't look at her maybe I can forget that she's different.
• The Invader. Foreigner. Damn foreigner. You don't belong here. Go back to wherever you came from.
• The New Species. Hmm, that's interesting. Don't see one of those every day. In fact it may be the first time I've ever seen one like that. Sure is interesting. Kind of nice to look at. I wonder what it eats. I wonder what happens when you poke it right there.
• The English Teacher. Ah, she must be an English teacher. Typical.
• The Exotic Babe. Whoa, a white chick. Dude. Whoa. A white chick. Do you have a boyfriend?
• The Princess. She is so white, it's like she's from a fairy tale. I can't believe people can have skin like that. She's so beautiful. I wish I had skin like that. She looks so refined.

I'm sure there are a few more that I'm forgetting...but when you hear people whisper as you walk by, or when they look at you so long and hard you think they've turned to stone, or when they take 1 second to decide they don't want to sit by you on the bus, language barriers and lack of words don't matter anymore. The messages are clear.

School Festival

Sorry I haven't updated lately but 2-months-in-advance departure preparations have made life hectic. I've been busy mailing boxes home, requesting return dates from the board of education, worrying about pension returns, compiling helpful information for my successor, etc. Nothing too exciting as of late.

However, it looks like somebody threw a party in my calendar -- almost every weekend is booked until my return to America: firefly festival with Mayumi, movie weekend with Meegan, dance performance with a teacher in Kyoto, perfume museum visit with me myself and I, a couple going-away parties, and the fastest-approaching: the 3-day school festival. It begins on Saturday and lasts until Monday, so I will be working through the weekend with regular work hours. (Luckily, pending rain changes, I will have Tuesday and Wednesday off). I'm really looking forward to the festival because the students have been preparing for MONTHS, and I'm excited about spending time with them outside the classroom. I should be tired but happy when that is all over, and hopefully students will feel the same.

Dan Is Coming to Visit - AGAIN!

On Sunday we'll meet in Tokyo and travel around a bit before coming back to Fuji. This time we hope to work in some karaoke, a fish market or two, and sushi -- there's a great conveyor-belt restaurant I want to take him to. I took the whole week off because the kids have exams and I wouldn't be teaching anyway. So this week I've been working overtime to complete everything ahead of schedule.

Between now and the time Dan arrives, I'll be summer-proofing my apartment again. It is slowly but surely getting warmer, wetter, and more humid. This means I have to re-vamp my closet fresheners and dehydrators to prevent my clothes from growing mold or mildew. This also means I have to reinstate the lovely roach traps that look like insect party barns. Like where sororities and living groups held their semiformals in college -- the roach traps are little cardboard barns with sticky dance floors. Only the poor roaches don't get to tap their feet too long.

Roaches are gross, yes. But I prefer them to something that stings or bites.

Please Remember

No matter what is going on in your life, no matter how many mistakes you've made or how screwed up you think things are, no matter how much baggage you carry, no matter how much is weighing on your shoulders, no matter how convinced you are that you're not good enough...please remember that people love you, and would rather have you and each and every little thing that is "wrong" about you than to have no you at all.

This is a fact.

I am so very sorry.

A Rice Cake a Day...

could never keep the doctor away. At least, not if you're an employee of the Japanese public school system. Teachers have to get check-ups once a year. But once a year is not "365 days," it's once every calendar year. So even though I've been here for only 10 months, yesterday I had my 2nd medical check-up, because the law requires "one check-up a year." If you are easily grossed out, don't read this post. But frankly, the point of my blog is to report life in Japan. Frankly. And I cannot STAND their medical system.

First of all, thank goodness I am under 30. Because of Japan's extremely high rate of stomach cancer (due to high levels of salt and stress), everyone over 30 has to drink a disgusting liquid and have their stomachs either x-rayed or probed with a camera. The doctors come to your place of work to perform the exams. Can you imagine a strange doctor sticking a tube all the way down into your stomach at your workplace once a year just for a check-up? And it's required by law.

Luckily I got to skip that part. However, I still had to fill out all the forms and "endure" other tests, such as a rather rough EKG, blood tests by glove-less nurses (which really freaks me out), vision tests, and yep, the dreaded cup-in-the-bathroom test. Now. In plain English the medical form says "All of your health information is confidential. We never show this information to a 3rd party." Somehow, I found this hard to believe. The form goes on to ask you all kinds of detailed questions, such as how often you eat, what times of day you eat, how many times you use the bathroom, etc. Invasive as it feels, the paper is the easy part.

The difficult part is that you are not supposed to consume ANYTHING after 8pm the night before your exam. No food, no water, no chewing gum, nothing. Yet 15 hours later you're expected to pee into a cup. Guess what? It didn't work. My body doesn't hold liquid for 15 hours so by the time my check-up rolled around the nurses were not happy. In fact they acted personally disappointed in me. Too bad! Next time, let me drink! I briefly wondered if they would ask me to return another day to complete my tests. Then I laughed it off.

As usual, the nurse drawing my blood had trouble finding a vein. As usual, it bruised rather badly. Today, my school's nurse came up with 2 English teachers (because she only speaks Japanese) to inquire about my arm. Evidently the doctors had called my school nurse to inform her of my condition. I complied and rolled up my sleeve, which resulted in much cooing and ooing and awwing over my red and purple inner elbow. They told me to ice it. I thought it was nice that the blood nurse had been concerned about me. But then, the nurse changed the subject in Japanese. My heart started to beat faster because I knew what was coming. In my pereferal vision I saw my two vice-principals, 2 older male teachers, and a younger female teacher, all within 5 feet of my desk. All of these people could hear the nurse saying in clear, loud Japanese that I had not completed the urine test so please return another day to pee in the cup. I was mortified. It was obvious to me that everyone was listening. Really, they had no choice. I thought about how the form promised no one else would know anything, and how half my co-workers now knew that I did not pee in a cup, that I had little veins, that I had trouble with a rude nurse, that I bruise easily. I am still mortified. I looked at my school nurse and the embarrassed English teachers who were translating, and I said with a smile, "They have my blood. I am not going back." This led to a "discussion," or a polite argument, for the next 10 minutes, about how I really should spend my own transportation money to complete a test I just had 8 months ago in a country I will leave in 2. And, they had my blood. As far as I was concerned, that was good enough. Some foreigners become disenchanted with Japan because of the pressure and expectation to always do what you're told, just like everyone else, without even the spark of a question in your mind or an inkling of desire to go against the grain. In some cases I can tolerate this well. But damnit, I decide when I pee. And that is THAT.

Surprise, Surprise

the pictures I didn't know he took

The Photographer

my dad

Closer to My Neighborhood

...tea fields on my way to work...

Hamamatsu 3

...setting up for the after-party...

Hamamatsu 2

...the beach, 120 seconds southwest of the kite festival...

Hamamatsu

...the famous Hamamatsu kite festival, perhaps the biggest in the state -- millions of people, hundreds of kites, pounds of fried noodles and gallons upon gallons of beer...

"In the Neighborhood"

...no-it-is-not-a-love-hotel (just bars and restaurants), my favorite store-front painting on a sweet shop (owned by a teacher's relative), koinobori (carp streamers) for the childrens' festival...

Fuji San, Fuji Shi

All photos compliments of Dad. :)

But Here I Am

Inspiration for this post has been "lifted" without permission from Adam Hollowell. Hopefully, however, I have not directly copied any of his passages. No one has offered me half a million dollars for my blog yet, but this also means nobody is ordering me to pull my writing off the net.

I'm sitting here barefoot in a Sunshine Will t-shirt, nursing a sinus infection, "Son of a Sailor" by Jimmy Buffet playing on my iPod, knees and feet tucked under me saza style, cool tatami reeds lightly biting my shins, a bowl of sticky rice and baked pork in one hand, chopsticks in the other, the smell of pan-warmed soy sauce and sugar tapping my nose...and I ask myself with a laugh, what events in my life led me to this place?

I remember a few years ago in a Seattle bookstore, I saw a book called "Everything Zen." Japanese architecture, Japanese religion, Japanese tea ceremony, Japanese gardens. I have no idea why, but I was riveted and had to own this book. I didn't have any previous interest in Japan. But the book spoke to me. The copy was tattered but I couldn't even wait for the store to order a fresh one. I bought the tattered copy. At the time I had no idea that I would one day live in Japan.

Last week I was sitting on the floor of a restaurant with Meegan, cooking Japanese pancakes. Eggs are included, but instead of butter and sugar, you add cabbage, pickled ginger, beef, tiny pieces of squid. "No, like this," I said bossily, instructing my friend to sprinkle on the seaweed after she painted on the sauce.

Today I stood in front of 42 Japanese students, waving a blank bingo card in their faces, telling them in Japanese, "Anywhere is okay. Please choose any box and write the words in whatever order you choose." The words, of course, being English ones. I stepped back for a second, staring at their Playboy pencil cases and striped bow ties and stern expressions, and asked myself with a laugh, "What events in my life led me to this?"

I sat there at my desk, hunkered over a bowl of tempura and white rice, Japanese words and school uniforms and test papers floating around my head...and as I bit into a piece of vegetable tempura I realized it was one of my favorite foods from childhood: fried okra. I grew up in the American south. But I was staring out the window at Mt. Fuji, eating the same food. I traveled this far to come back to the same food. And I wondered, are we really that different? That time I stole fried okra from my brother's dish when he wasn't looking, 15 years ago...there could have been a sneaky sister in Japan doing the same thing to her younger brother.

So how did the events in my life lead me here? It's one of those beautiful questions I don't actually want to answer. I feel like I forged my own path, yet at the same time, I never saw this coming. Two years ago I just never would have dreamed this. France, maybe. Asia? No. Yet here I am. I can't imagine my life now without this experience, and I am already realizing how much I'm truly going to miss this place. I'm not Japanese, but there was a seed inside of me I didn't know about. This place sprinkled that seed with water, and now whatever is growing will never be cut back. Like kudzu. That beautiful, winding, all-consuming vine of my childhood--a part of my happiest, earliest memories--it came from Japan.

Mom and Dad...

are in Japan!!!!! I leave for Tokyo tomorrow, and will spend the next week celebrating Japan's Golden Week by traveling, talking, and eating Japanese food with my parents. I'm so excited to see them. B I wish you were here too.

True Evil

I'm sick. I left work an hour early, came home and went straight to bed, then woke up long enough to take a pill and eat a piece of bread. I felt like I'd stuffed myself.

Then I decided to reach out beyond my sick bed and type a quick post. I walked to school this morning, because when I get sick, I like to deny it for as long as possible. I believe that if I tell my body everything is fine, the problem will go away. I always do this yet always to no avail. So I walked but still felt awful after the breeze and sunshine. But sickness is not the "true evil" to which I refer.

The true evil was the bugs zooming around my head this morning. Things literally happen overnight in Japan. You sleep, and boom, typhoon season. You sleep, and boom, your apartment turns into a refrigerator. You sleep, and boom, cherry blossoms are everywhere. You sleep, and boom, the spawns of wasps and Darth Vader form clouds on the sidewalks you have no choice but to cross on your way to work. These bugs were everywhere this morning, yet I've never seen them any other day of my 8 months in Japan. None of them stung me but every time I walked through a cloud of black I prayed. The weirdest part about these solid black wasps was that they weren't shiny. They weren't hairy, but their black bodies were distinctly dull. For some reason this really disturbed me. Bugs with matte-black exoskeletons are much more frightening than bugs with shiny skins.

I have no idea why. But they looked really evil.

Earthquake, The Sequel

I don't know about aftershocks, but there are definitely beforeshocks where I live. A day or two ago I was talking to Dan when I felt a small earthquake. It was very short and not very strong, but it was enough to trigger my fear instincts. My whole body was tense and I was ready to run (even though running somewhere solves nothing in an earthquake). Even when they're small, they frighten me. I tend to get dizzy a lot, so maybe I'm more sensitive to a moving ground than most people. Last time I felt an earthquake I blamed it on "just getting dizzy," until my supervisor asked me if I had noticed the earthquake. But the way to test it is by looking up at the light strings. When I was talking to Dan, I looked up at my lamp. And the string was definitely swaying.

Little earthquake, for sure.


Well last night I woke up to a strange noise, a rattling of metal and glass and wood, and fairly violent shaking even though I was horizontal in my bed. This time the instincts kicked in, but I froze. I was alone, it was 2 or 3:30 in the morning (I don't remember), and I was terrified because it was my biggest earthquake yet. At the time I couldn't really tell if I was awake or dreaming about it. But the fear was definitely real. I remember telling myself, "I sleep right under a window, that's not good," and making a mental note of where my shoes and earthquake kit were, in case I needed to leave the building after. And I also remember thinking, "This is how it could happen, earthquakes can happen in the middle of the night like this, when you're not dressed, it's dark and cold outside, and you're very, very alone." And I remember crying a little bit for no reason in particular. Still, I wasn't sure if it was real or not. I was still half asleep. I thought to myself, "When an earthquake happens in the middle of the night, it will be like this." I thought I was dreaming instead of actually experiencing it.

It was scary. Scary enough that everybody at work (experienced earthquake veterans) said it was scary. Yet a lot of teachers (mainly the older men) didn't wake up at all.

You Are (Where You) Eat (It) ?

With about 340 new students and 2 classes to plan and teach entirely on my own, the work has finally returned. And I'm happy about it. Feeling needed, productive, creative, and useful makes me feel GOOD. Spring vacation is nice and all, but feeling purposeless with no kids to teach is not much fun. Now the students are back! And I love them!

I can't stand American Diet Coke. Recent newspaper articles have acknowledged what is fairly obvious: all "global" products are not created equal. Some people were upset when they discovered that the fat content of McDonald's fries varies from country to country. As you globe-trot and see the same golden arches, you assume you're getting the same product. But fries are more likely to kill you in some countries than in others. Because of various regulations, costs, etc., there are disparaties between American fries and FRENCH fries and Dutch fries and Japanese fries. And maybe you think this is "unjust," or at least worthy of newspaper report-age.

But how else can companies succeed on a global scale? They survive by adapting their products *just* enough to suit the preferences of the people without having to change the name of their brand. Did you know Haagen Daaz (sp?) makes "red bean" and "green tea" flavored ice cream? Would you ever find "red bean" ice cream in America? No. In Japan? Yes! So of course McDonald's fries will be a little (or very, according to those fat percentage charts) different depending on where you are eating.

Well so is Diet Coke, and this is the main one I care about. It shows how we could potentially become DIFFERENT PEOPLE based on the overall taste preferences of a country. Consumerism taken to the extreme, you say? I think not, considering how much people can be judged by their food preferences. (It's ridiculous!) Consider this example:

American Diet Coke is terrible. French Diet Coke is quite delicious. Japanese Diet Coke is alright. Now pretend I'm out with a bunch of friends on a picnic, and someone else was in charge of the drinks. Say they brought only Diet Coke. In America, I could be labeled the "picky" one, the "spoiled" one, the "difficult" one, because I would choose to drink nothing over a nutra-sweet-after-tasting gross American Diet Coke. It could also exclude me from the "sorority girl" stereotype because I would prefer REGULAR, calorie-laden Coke to the calorie-free kind. So people could make all these judgments about my personality, without even realizing it, because this idea of me becomes an intangible, unchanging FACT in their minds: LAUREN WILL NOT DRINK DIET COKE, therefore she is X. I find this example amusing, and extreme, but I will have trouble believing anyone who tries to dispute the fact that they make assumptions and judgments about people's personalities based on the foods they eat. What if I told you I never drink beer? What if I said don't like "bitch" drinks? The mere TERM "bitch drink" associates a whole stereotype and personality and gender with a food preference. I'm talking about alcohol but it applies to everything. Read these words and think about the images of people that come to your mind, and the personality traits you automatically assume they have: tofu. steak. lentils. Red Bull. cotton candy. meatloaf. grits. pizza. thin-crust pizza. strawberries. I could build entire people on these single words and I bet you could too.

On with my original point. If the exact same picnic situation occurred in France, or in Japan, I would gladly drink the Diet Coke. And all those assumptions or stereotypes or images that people might have made about me in America simply would not have been made in France or Japan. So to my friends, I could seem like a different person. Lauren, picky? What are you talking about?

Anatomy Lesson

"Some people won't dance
if they don't know who's singing.
Why think with your head?
It's your hips that are swinging."

--Propellerheads


And I'll admit -- I love the James Blunt album.

Chiru

(chiru: the verb Japanese people use to describe cherry blossoms falling from the trees)

The only living things that ignore me in this country are the cats. God bless them and their stereotypical kitty style.

The hardest thing about living where I live is the complete and total lack of privacy. I watched "The Big Chill" yesterday and couldn't help but laugh at the line, "I feel like I'm never alone. Didn't they do a study on lab rats who went crazy from lack of privacy?" Yeah, I know why. (And no, I'm not alone when I type most of these blog entries!)

On to the real reason I'm writing:

Nothing in Japan makes me feel instantly transported to my childhood like the baby-pink snapdragons I pass on my walk to work. I see snapdragons and immediately feel 5 years old, and suspect that a cat is hiding in the shrubs somewhere for me to drag out and carry around, and that my brother is behind me in the yard riding a small vehicle with an odd number of wheels. Never have I felt safer in my life...an unexpected illusion in a foreign country. And the owner of the snapdragons doesn't even know that I exist.

Yesterday I walked home through light rain and mist because I wanted to feel refreshed. The smell of greens welcoming the rain almost knocked me out it was so thick. (I love that smell.) And then I realized walking home that day would look totally different to me because of the scents that would reach me through the water in the air. Yesterday the air was a totally different canvas and the paint seemed completely new.

So I was walking along inhaling hard with every breath. I wondered if these Japanese smells would be good combined in perfume. If Angel included chocolate, and tons of perfume contained ambergris, I'm convinced that I could turn natto and mirin and maybe even sticky rice into something attractive.

I was mainly focused on my nose, until I came across a still-life in motion -- frozen but moving, more so a part of nature than the houses and sidewalks surrounding it, yet so isolated and seemingly cut off from the reality in which I was standing. The scene was like a fantasy turned virtual reality and I was on the edge of the fantasy looking in. Everything with this surreal quality that made me think if I tried to touch it, my hand would sweep through trees and plants as if they were holographic projections.

So, instead of pushing my luck, I stood on the edge of the sidewalk, and peered in. For at least 15 minutes I stood motionless, just staring at something so beautiful I felt it was only created for the hope that someone would stop and notice it.

It was a small square park lined with cherry trees still in bloom. The petals, saturated by mist, appeared pinker than usual. I saw no birds, people, or other moving things in the park; only the plants, so the rather large, old cherry trees took over with this frozen, regal quality, so proudly but so quietly displaying their blossoms.

That in itself was not so unusual; I'd been accustomed to the lovely cherry trees for at least a week. What caught my eye this time was the only movement in the whole park: it was snowing.

But not snowing everywhere. Onto me fell only small taps of rain. There was a very distinct line between where it was snowing and where it was not, and this is probably what made me feel like I was looking into a picture instead of living in the reality of it.

It was the snow of big, fat, beautiful flakes, that fell so slowly they seemed to defy gravity, so silently they seemed to defy anything mortal. They fell and decorated the plants like confetti, stuck in place by the dampness of the rain.

These delicate chips of whitish-pink silk kissed the sidewalk and the street pavement and just stuck without melting. Then I looked up past knarled tree trunks, past branches spread widely, asymmetrical but balanced, past the browns and greens into the pink and white clouds of that little sky. The cherry trees were snowing their flowers. That's why nonoe of the flakes dissolved on contact. It wasn't snowing frosted ice; it was raining flower petals in that little fantasy world beneath the trees. I couldn't believe how slowly yet how steadily the petals fell. My sense of time and seasons became confused. It was the 2nd time in my life I'd seen it snow in spring, but the first time I'd seen snow without feeling cold.

Of course the cherry trees would have been the cherry trees, regardless of my presence or lack thereof. But I stood there like I was watching a performance, a celebration that was put on just for me. I felt like the trees weren't mourning the loss of their blossoms, but instead celebrating the spring...and like the whole display had been silently orchestrated for me -- modest, but at the same time desperate for someone to stop and notice.

I know I've gone on and on...but it was truly one of the most amazingly beautiful and natural things I've ever seen. I felt like the tree was talking to me. And I'm not even a hippie.

People who think you have to camp to truly appreciate nature, who think you have to pitch tents and iodize your water and stay dirty to really know what nature is...those people are only seeing one color in the prism. I don't think people should be expected to dig holes with trowels before others will believe that they love things about the outside.

This morning after walking to work over sakura-lined sidewalks, I had to scrape cakes of cherry blossom petals from my shoes. It's a miracle I didn't slip on all that silk.