Author Archives: tokyopurplegirl

Mr. T

Mr. T is homeless. I first met him about six months ago, and since I usually see him about once a week I have got to know him a little. Thinking about American people all over the world getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving, I thought I would introduce Mr. T to you and tell you a little about how he lives. Getting to know him and talking to him has made me thankful for the comforts and security I have.

I don’t know how long he’s been homeless, but it’s over ten years. I’d say he was in his fifties, but I’ve never asked his age. He often spends the day sitting in church (where I met him), listening to a small radio with earphones. Recently he’s been listening to the sumo tournament.

Several years ago I used to help out at another church in the diocese one Saturday a month, when there was a group who made food for homeless people in Shibuya. We used to spend several hours making pork soup and rice balls, or curry rice, and later in the evening another group took the meals to Shibuya Ward Office where a lot of homeless people slept. Several things have stayed with me since then; the care that was taken to cook a nutritious meal; the way we changed the menu according to the requests that were fed back to us, and the loving way everything was done. One of the group members told me that if a homeless person came to the church during the week, someone would cook a bowl of noodles and sit with him or her while they ate, to share some time together.

It was that last point that came back to me when I first met Mr. T, and his friend Mr. M. They were both in church, sitting quietly. We talked for a while, and it was then that I heard that Mr. T is from Hokkaido, and has no living relatives. Mr. M was from Chiba, and had a family, but never went back there. They told me that they’d been sticking together for over ten years, and that they slept in the entrance to a bank. In the winter they have sleeping bags to protect them from the elements, and in summer they have trouble with ants.

Mr. T seems to know all the places around Tokyo where he can get food, but to get to any of these places he has to walk. Depending on the day of the week there is food available at different locations, and Mr. T told me this evening that on Sundays there is a church which provides a meal. (It is common practice for Japanese Anglican churches to cook a meal after the service and for everyone to eat together, and it is this meal that Mr. T shares.) He also knows where he can go to be warm, so in addition to our church he often goes to a library, which has some kind of seating area downstairs where he can stay until it closes in the evening.

Last week I saw Mr. T for the first time in several weeks. He hadn’t been around and I was wondering where he and Mr. M were. In some distress he told me that he hadn’t seen Mr. M for over a month. They had often gone their separate ways during the day, but one evening Mr. M didn’t return to the bank entrance. Over the course of the month since then, Mr. T had gone in search of his friend; to the hospital which cares for homeless people; to the places where they had been together to receive food; to the park where Mr. M’s friend lives in a blue tarpaulin tent. Mr. M had spent a week over there once, helping his friend collect aluminium cans, crushing them and taking them somewhere to get money for the scrap metal. He tracked down the friend but no one had seen Mr. M.

Mr. T is desperately worried for his friend. He was worried that he had been involved in some kind of traffic accident, or that someone had beaten him up, but as time has gone on he has changed his mind. I had noticed that Mr. M had trouble walking, and Mr. T told me that he had a lot of sores on his legs, and he’s worried that his friend got some kind of infection. He used to put band-aids on his legs when he could, but if he couldn’t get any he used to use sticky tape. Mr. T is still waiting for his friend to come back, and that is how he reports the situation when he sees me: ‘He hasn’t come back yet.’

It is upsetting to listen to his distress, to his loneliness, and his feelings of despair that he has been unable to find and help his friend. Mr. M never seems far from his thoughts, and he often mentions him. A decade-plus friendship is a long one at any time, in any place, but on the street they have been each other’s support for so long, and now Mr. M is not there.

Life often whizzes by, there is so much we don’t see or don’t want to see every day. Getting to know Mr. T, to call him my friend, I have heard about how people live on the streets. It’s not easy to live with the information, and it makes me wonder at the resilience of the human body and spirit. So this Thanksgiving, although I’m not American, I shall appropriate it for my own. I am so very thankful to have a roof over my head, enough food to eat, enough money in the bank, for all the security that brings. Thankful too for all my friends, but I send up extra prayers for Mr. T and Mr. M, that Mr. M will find his way back and they can support each other again as they have done for years.

Missing the point

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Japanese English has been a source of amusement for a very long time; I remember watching Clive James on British television in the 80s filling programmes with ill-advised product names or the sight of Japanese people competing in extreme and bizarre game shows. At the time Japan seemed a distant and completely alien land.

Now that I’ve lived here for over twenty years, I still see the silly stuff, the Collon chocolate, Pocari Sweat (sports drink), the reversed ‘l’s and ‘r’s, I still pull out my iPhone and take photos of particularly funny examples. I joke about it and say that I’m glad to see there’s a long way to go before English teachers are obsolete, but sometimes I don’t find it so funny. In the 21st century, when we can access information from all over the world within seconds, when people travel so much and cultures are intermingled so much more than in the past, I wonder about the magpie-like appropriation of any word or image that seems cool, and what the impact of that can be. I know that Japan is not alone in this; other countries in Asia do the same and it’s not hard to find websites dedicated to cataloguing it all. In the past week I have been thinking about the appropriation of strong words (specifically f***) and images that are sacred to one religion but an apparent accessory to other people.

Last year, I was looking online for Hello Kitty goods to send to a friend’s daughter, and a search took me to Japanese Amazon, where among all the kitchen utensils and other goods for the home I came across this, the Hello Kitty crucifix:

It was being marketed as a Hello Kitty ‘with a playful pose, in a sailor suit’. There was ‘plain type’ and ‘cross type’. It was expensive; ¥15,000, or about £100. I put it on Facebook at the time, finding it ridiculous in some kind of awful, eye-rolling, whatever-will-they-think-of-next kind of way. Last week I mentioned it to someone who wasn’t in Japan then, and I posted it again, and someone else saw it and called Sanrio (the company who markets Hello Kitty) and explained to them the power of the image they had appropriated. It turned out that the image had been licensed to another company, which had in turn commissioned a designer and these pieces were part of the resulting collection, though the cross was not part of the original agreement. Once they understood the juxtaposition of images and how some people may feel, Sanrio decided to ask for the item to be removed. They didn’t want Hello Kitty’s image to be tarnished.

It reminded me of a conversation a friend overheard in Yokohama some years ago. A young Japanese woman was choosing an accessory at a street stall, and the vendor asked her if she would like the cross ‘with or without the little man’. It’s funny, but it’s also toe-curlingly crass, depending on your point of view. I certainly don’t want to become one of those people Richard Dawkins loves to hold up for ridicule, but I do think that we should respect each other’s sacred images. The same goes for images of monarchy, which many people admire or revere, and, to some extent, national flags. It is not always the case that Japan treats its own sacred images in a way that implies respect. A trip to Kamakura will provide many opportunities to buy sweet bean paste-filled buns shaped like the Big Buddha, and even a kind of Buddha-shaped candy on a stick. I find these items slightly disturbing, but they seem popular with visitors to the area.

As well as the appropriation of sacred images, there has long been a casual use of so-called taboo words. At its mildest, it is the throwing about of ‘Oh my God!’, which even junior high school students will use. They copy it from TV comedians. At its strongest, it is merchandise with f*** all over it. At the school I used to work at I once saw a badge on a student’s pencil case with ‘f*** you’ on it (Hello Kitty again), and recently I have seen these two examples, both in Harajuku:

At first sight they probably seem comical, but are they? In Tokyo they may seem cool, but how would you feel if you were sitting next to someone on a train or a plane and they were wearing the shirt on the right? Are you sure you’d feel completely OK? Might you want to check if they understand what they’re broadcasting to the world?

Maybe I seem a bit squeaky, up on my hand legs yapping about something that a lot of people are not offended by in the least. Someone made the same point to me today, that f*** has become just another modifier, no different from ‘very’. I disagree with this, because in my experience people use the word with people they know. No one walks into a shop and uses that kind of language with the people working there. It’s not used in the media as just another word. It has power, and if it’s not used between people who know each other well, it’s fighting talk. It’s aggressive.

In 1992, a 16-year-old Japanese high school student called Yoshihiro Hattori went on an exchange trip to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. While he was there it was Hallowe’en, and with his homestay brother he dressed up in a costume and went to a party. Unfortunately they went to the wrong house, and the owner, spooked by strangers at his door, confronted the two teenagers with a gun, and shouted ‘freeze’. While his homestay brother understood, Hattori did not, and stepped forward, only to be shot at point-blank range and killed. There were two trials, one criminal and one civil, and the man who had shot him, Mr. Peairs was acquitted of the criminal charge but found liable in the civil trial. Since then, Mr. and Mrs. Hattori have campaigned for gun control and established a charity to enable American students to visit Japan.

I remember at the time, a lot of the Japanese people I worked with expressed shock at so much of what had happened; the use of a gun when all someone had done was knock on the wrong door; the acquittal of the man who had shot Hattori, and also, ‘Did you know what “freeze” meant?’ It seemed no-one did until this incident. He didn’t understand one word, stepped forward, and was shot. Under the law, Mr. Peairs was within his rights, but a high school student lost his life because he didn’t understand that one word.

So, is it important that a Japanese person who wants to wear an item of clothing with f*** on it understand the weight and power of that word? I think it is. If they understand it and still wear it, all fine and dandy. If anyone takes issue with them they’ll know why and will have worn it knowingly. The trouble is, I don’t think they do. It’s cool, it’s English, they vaguely know it’s not a good word, but I think that’s as far as it goes. All it takes is a misunderstanding over one word. It might start a fight, it might simply cause offence, it might spoil a vacation or create unfortunate stereotypes on both sides. Is it worth it?

Japan for lazy journalists

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It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged by British journalists in Japan that this is a wacky country, full of people behaving oddly. All you need to do to file a report is ask a few people their opinions, extrapolate some general truths from what they tell you, attach some stereotypical images or statements and voilà! You just reported from Japan.

Or did you?

Japan is a fascinating country, and is no more stereotypical than any other country. Of course you can portray Britain as a nation of cups of tea, football hooligans and Peter Rabbit. France has its snails, garlic and berets. Edified? Fascinated? Want to hear more? No, I didn’t think so. So why is there an appetite for these entertaining-but-shallow-to-the-point-of-saying-nothing-new-at-all articles about Japan?

In the UK I would imagine that Clive James has a lot to answer for. To general acclamation and amusement, he filled a lot of TV programmes in the eighties with footage from Japanese quiz shows and commercials. Takeshi’s Castle, a game show from the late eighties presided over by Takeshi Kitano was at least recently shown on British TV and assumed to be representative of Japanese TV today. These are the images burned into the British psyche, over-the-top TV programmes, Japanese people gone wild.

What is disappointing is this; when British journalists come to Japan they set about reinforcing these stereotypes, instead of exploring this great country and testing the clichés to see if they hold true. Yesterday evening on Facebook, two friends shared a link to a newspaper article , the latest in this proud tradition of recycling tired ideas and calling them your own. I found it exasperating for three reasons; it repeats clichés about Japan; it presents facts or ideas that have been around for a while and are nothing new and for good measure it throws in an extraordinarily offensive blanket statement about Japan. The article in question is titled, Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? and was written by Abigail Haworth, who has also written for Marie Claire. The article would probably have fitted much better in a magazine, though I would still take issue with a lot of the content. (I have tried to add the link here but can’t seem to make it work, oops.)

The article leads off with promises of much titillation to come; not only has she managed to use the word ‘sex’ in the headline, but in the first paragraph we meet a woman who used to be a ‘professional dominatrix’. More random facts about her make up the majority of the first four paragraphs, with a small number of statistics about Japan’s falling birthrate mixed in. And so it goes on . . . and on . . . and on . . . seesawing between a strange mix of 6th-form level research about Japan’s population, and pronouncements from the ex ‘professional dominatrix’ about the state of intimate Japanese relations.

There is actually a large amount of data but it is dumped unceremoniously throughout the article, maybe to prevent it from being solely the thoughts of one Japanese woman with an unusual CV. There are glancing references to the 2011 tsunami and ongoing problems at Fukushima Daiichi, as well as mention of social phenomena, such as hikikomori (shut-ins), otaku (geeks or nerds) and the charmingly named ‘parasite singles’ (single adult children who continue to live with their parents). In fact, the article becomes a catalogue of social issues without managing to analyse even one of them in any depth. Because that would undermine the point of the article, which seem to be justifying interviewing a very dubious woman who has set herself up as an expert with no apparent training or qualifications.

In addition to her main interview subject and a relentless flood of statistics and reference to social issues, Ms. Haworth also interviews several twenty- and thirty-something Japanese people, who declare that relationships are ‘mendokusai’, or tiresome, troublesome. They’d rather do other things, like concentrate on their career (or play games on their smart phones). They view personal relationships, with the demands that would be made on their time and money, to be too much trouble. For the women, the choice presented is an either/or proposition. Do you want a career or a marriage and family? You can’t have both. Well, yes, you can. It’s not easy, but Japan needs more people in the workforce, and more woman are expecting to have a career. It’s hard to juggle everything, but isn’t it hard for women everywhere?

The number of social issues mentioned in passing is quite breath-taking: celibacy syndrome, hikikomori, otaku, parasite singles, oniyome (devil wives), soshoku danshi (grass-eating men), otomen (girly men) . . . each one would be an interesting subject for an article, but Ms. Haworth is eager to bring the article full circle and return to the dominatrix.

Anyone reading this article who knows Japan will recognise all the terms used, and will also understand that this preoccupation with the falling birthrate has been a concern since the ‘1.53 shock’ in 1990. The birthrate continued to fall until it reached its lowest in 2005, when the average number of children fell to 1.26. Since then it has increased slightly, but is still at a level to cause concern, particularly when the impact of the ageing society is also a factor. Japanese life expectancy is the highest in the world, and the costs that go along with that are huge. The country needs a workforce large enough to take care of the elderly. But this is not news, it’s been a concern for over two decades already.

More Japanese women are expecting to have a career, to have some financial independence. This is an appealing idea. They probably grew up during the Bubble years, when family life to them meant their mother working hard at home and taking care of the family, while their father was a kind of drone, working long hours, bringing home his pay, but not having much to do with the emotional life of his family. In the nineties I can remember some of my students telling me they didn’t see their fathers from one week to the next; he was gone before they got up in the morning, he came home after they went to their rooms at night, and on Sundays he went to play golf. They heard him coming and going but didn’t see him or interact with him at all. Japanese family life might seem to be under threat now, but the foundations started to crumble decades ago, in the post-war years, when everyone was working to rebuild the country. Everything else took a back seat.

I wonder about the impact of smaller families on the attitudes and social behaviour of today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings. With smaller families there are far more only children who have grown up not having to share, who are comfortable with their own company, with some kind of solitary life. They either live alone, or they live as a ‘parasite single’ with their parents, and have their needs taken care of. Why swap that for a different kind of arrangement that requires more work?

I also wonder about the impact of Western ideals, all the Disney princesses, the Hollywood movies, the expectation of a love story and happily ever after. Pre-war, most marriages were the result of the system known as omiai (お見合い), sometimes referred to as arranged marriages, but really arranged introductions to suitable partners. Post-war, the Western concept of courtship and marriage, commonly referred to as ren’ai kekkon (恋愛結婚) or love marriage has become prevalent, but even in 2013 over 6% of marriages are the result of omiai, and posters advertising agencies promising marriage within a year are a common sight on trains. It seems to me that a young Japanese woman, contemplating her parents’ marriage and the effort required to achieve happy ever after might be more inclined to think, no thank you, I’d rather put my energy into my career.

In the article there is quite a lot of attention paid to Japanese people’s reluctance to have physical contact, and again, this is an imposition of Western expectations. Japanese people are not a nation of touchy-feely people. They are not huggers, they are bowers. Japanese people are not given to displays of physical affection, with their significant other or their family, even their children. I have been told by many students that they know their mother loves them because of what she does for them, especially providing delicious food, not because of hugs and kisses.

Finally, I mentioned at the beginning of this post that I was frustrated by three aspects of this article; the lack of new information, the clichés and a blanket statement. Buried in the middle of the piece, Ms. Haworth refers to Japan as ‘a country mostly free of religious morals’. That any journalist would write such an extraordinarily sweeping and damning sentence about any country, I find quite breath-taking. That any editor would let it through also amazes me. There are no facts or statistics to back this up. The majority of Japanese people refer to Buddhism or Shinto for their religious beliefs and ceremonies. Unlike Christianity, neither Buddhism nor Shinto requires or expects weekly attendance, so it’s difficult to find any kind of study which measures religious morality. I couldn’t find one. Therefore, standing alone as a bald statement, Ms. Haworth’s claim that Japan is ‘mostly free of religious morals’ is unsubstantiated and offensive.

I was very disappointed to read Ms. Haworth’s article, and saddened to see on the newspaper’s website that it is being read by a lot of people. Japan is dealing with a lot of serious issues; tensions with its neighbours, the problems with Fukushima Daiichi, Mr. Abe’s government and its desire to change the constitution – there are plenty of things any journalist with a sincere desire to inform readers about this country could be writing about. A dominatrix setting up shop and holding forth about people’s sex lives? That’s very lazy journalism.