A Love/ Hate Relationship

Way down south in the archipelago that is currently my home, it's not particularly foreigner friendly. One of the things that I find most distasteful is that if you're outside, at some point, you are likely to be pointed and gawked at. The only difference in the gawking of the adults and the children is that adults are more likely to whisper "gaijinda!" instead of shouting it like children will.

A gaijin is what I am. Literally, "outside person". As such, I am expected not to understand any Japanese so it's not much of a surprise that young and old alike think there's nothing wrong with announcing to their nearest neighbors that one of those "gaijin" are in the proximity. I once had a schoolchild ask me (in Japanese), "How come you can speak Japanese? Aren't you a foreigner?" My boyfriend used to complain about being harassed by herds of elementary school kids while walking home before he moved to the big city. They would point and stage whisper "It's a foreigner!" and inevitably one brave soul or another would wait until he was yards down the street to shout after him, "Hello! Goodbye!" to earn a slew of nervous giggles. I've caught the eyes of staring old woman, smiled, bowed my head, and greeted them only to earn a hurried look away, as if pretending they'd never even seen me. My boyfriend, being a foreign man and therefore dangerous, has been glared at by complete strangers on his tram ride to work dressed head to toe in the salary man's staple suit and tie. We once sat on the tram next to an old woman who promptly skewed her body away from us and put a handkerchief to her nose and mouth as if afraid to smell us or catch our foreignness.

Though I sometimes find these reactions funny, sometimes sad, and sometimes irritating, it doesn't actually bother me, either. It doesn't stay with me and change how I feel about this place or these people. As an American, the concept of foreigner isn't remotely as exciting or even detectable as it is for the locals of Satsuma. So I may find the gawker's behavior rude and unnecessary, yet I'm aware that more often than not it's due to sheer surprise and ignorance. And that's why I'm here anyway, to internationalize not only my elementary and junior high students, but the community. I live in such a small place that you can literally count all of the foreigners in the town on two hands. Needless to say, most people here haven't conversed with a noticeably foreign person on even a semi-regular basis. Which is why we're alternately treated like celebrities, talking monkeys escaped from the zoo, or deadly parasites.

On the flip side, being noticeably white can often have the reverse effects, too. Some Japanese will speak to me as if I'm fluent without ever having met me before, which, in my opinion, is the more natural of the two assumptions. Getting by in a town with only 8 foreigners without learning decent Japanese is akin to holding your breath underwater until you've about passed out. That is to say, unless they're studying to be an English teacher or regularly attend an eikaiwa (English conversation class) Japanese ladies and gents down here probably can't say much more than "Hello. How are you?" And yet the ones who can speak a little English tend to be so friendly and so eager to talk to you. I usually get a kick out of the kids who get excited to see me. When they point and yell "it's an outsider," I point back at them and say, "it's a Japanese person!" They tend to look briefly confused before laughing.

The greatest part about meeting people who are unaccustomed to the presence of one who looks different from them, is earning their friendship, respect, or even occasionally, their admiration.

Watching as the relationship progresses beyond the intial shock of having to interact with someone who looks like me is one of the reasons I love teaching junior high kids. Elementary kids are easy, they love you almost immediately. But with junior high kids, you have to earn it. Nothing about this job is more rewarding than reflecting on when you first met these guys and they were always silently awkward with you and would barely look at you unless you were in English class. Compare that to now: they yell my name in the hallways just to say hi, they tell me their names over and over again just so I can remember them, they joke with me, tell me about their lives, they ask about mine, they'll even try out their English with me, and I've even been hugged by some of the girls. What a difference one and a half fabulous years makes.

Natural Catastrophes

I'm originally from New Jersey, a state in America where the only natural disaster that commonly dares approach the surly shores of the Garden State are mild hurricanes. The last major hurricane to hit the home of pork roll breakfast meat was in 1821 (or so Google informs me)!

The wonderful archipelago that I live on now, however, sits squat on the "ring of fire." Volcanic explosions, tsunamis, earthquakes...you name it and Japan has recently had one. Although well aware of this before I arrived in July 2009, I wasn't even ready for my first small quake which happened to hit the little town I dwell in precisely as I finished shaking the mayor's hand. I practically shat myself, but the white-haired, well groomed man who I'd just exchanged introductions with, didn't even pause. He carried himself like a boxing champ and sat down in his corner of the ring, continuing the conversation as if my eyes and mouth weren't locked open in terror. That moment was pinned to my brain as my first real experience of life in Japan because of two immediate thoughts: 1. How many of these happen here in one year? And 2. It's pretty simple to tell the accustomed from the uninitiated when it comes to natural disasters.

The mayor's stoic indifference to the tremors and my brush with panic are apt metaphors for the difference in Japanese and American news coverage of the recent catastrophes in Tohoku, Japan. While many people outside of Japan seem to believe that the local news coverage is attempting to make things seem better than they are, Red, White, and Blue news coverage has been doing its best to convince Americans that people are brainlessly screaming through the streets. It's very likely that the Japanese press was/is doing its best to prevent mass hysteria, but also true that the people mad with panic then and now are practically non-existent in number. In fact, in much of the news coverage I've seen on Japanese channels, people were rather too calm, putting themselves in further potential danger by filming the earthquake and tsunami damage to their homes and neighborhoods, live. I vividly recall live news coverage of the tsunami in Sendai City, in which a truck driver was standing astride his 8-wheeler on a bridge, watching the oncoming tsunami wave as if it were only the rain coming down.

The earthquake was huge, the tsunami was disastrous, the nuclear reactor explosions made it all a travesty. The Japanese people were rightly frightened, but now they are doing what they have a reputation for doing best. They are fighting together, and staying strong. Even in my realm of the Land of the Rising Sun, so far south that neither tremors or waves at all were felt or seen, citizens are sending bottled water, toilet paper, and other necessities to the regions worst affected. Just as Americans worked together to triumph over the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Japanese are working towards the same.

Keep Japan in your thoughts and prayers and donate to the Red Cross.