Cultural Contradictions.

“Does Japan have any contradictions?”

My brother asked me this a while ago. I shrugged in reply, not sure where he was going with this.

“You know like how America is obsessed with freedom but has more people in jail than China.”

Ah yes. Cultural contradictions. Like how Americans spend time and money on their front lawns and then hide inside their homes.  Japan has them in spades. They love nature here, and also everything being individually wrapped (and I mean EVERYTHING. I've opened a bag of peanuts to find bags of peanuts inside.) But the most obvious contradiction is their relationship with gambling.

Ask a Japanese person about gambling and they all say the same thing “Gambling is illegal in Japan.”

What about pachinko? 

“Eh… that’s different.” My boss told me gambling with pachinko works something like the electoral college system does in America, its participation by proxy. If you win at pachinko, all you can do with your tub of ball bearings is trade them in for a Pikachu doll or a tea set. You leave with your doll, confused by the whole experience. Why was it so stressful? Why were there people chain smoking at eleven am? What just happened to your money? But on you way out a man from the small store next door calls you over and offers you a nice stack of cash for your doll. You hand it over and thus, gambled by proxy.

Contradictions are everywhere, and not just perpetrated by the Japanese. Most of the ex-pats here pine for the home they’ll never return to. I'm guilty of this as well. I spent last Saturday with a man from Holland complaining about how lousy the beer is in Japan while we drank delicious shochu- Japanese moonshine- that his wife had infused with sour plums. We always want what we can't have. Maybe that's the contradiction of desire.

Safety is a contradiction in Japan. Japan is a very safe place, but never have I felt more consistently in a state of danger. Takayama is supposed to be very safe, it's not near any fault lines or in danger of being hit by a tsunami, yet they use emergency broadcast speakers every day, a safety feature that would do little to save my English speaking ass. And yet, when Mt. Ontake erupted, less than 30 kilometers away, all my Japanese friends told me not worry, we were upwind from the deadly plumes of ash. Finally, a genuine threat, and for once I felt safe.

There’s even a religious cult (hey that’s what the locals call it) that is centered in Takayama because its perceived safety. They picked a city an island plagued with tsunamis, typhoons, earthquakes and volcanoes, for safety. Maybe they worship the contradiction.  

One of my students, an incredibly gifted girl explained it to me.

“Do you know this place?” she asked, and drew its recognizable roof and the peach atop it. I nodded. It was hard not to know it. The temple is huge and is visible from almost everywhere in the city.

“They believe it is like the story of Noah, do you know it?”

I feigned ignorance and sat in amazement as a Japanese high school student told me a parable from my own culture.

“Noah got two of every animal and put them in his boat . It rained, and everyone died, but Noah and the animals were safe.”

I got chills. I’m not religious, not in the least, but it was amazing to hear a story I'm familiar with told to me by someone who didn’t grow up knowing it. It gave it a certain magic that fairy tales possess. 

“They believe their temple is the boat.”

Wow. Bravo. A perfect parable. Made magical to me because it was told in a foreign land. Contradictions abound.

But what do you think? I asked her.

“Well, Takayama is very safe.”

“Yes, yes, yes but do you believe these people were chosen by god to be safe in their ark?” Hey, its not often you get to talk about metaphysics with a high schooler. She smiled devilishly. This is what she had been waiting for. 

“No. I think they’re just the animals.”

I just set her up for the punchline. This enchanting story of religion and survival was just a rouse, another brilliant contradiction,  made sweeter for involving a familiar ancient religion and the fools that believe it.

Joe Darris Mitchell lives in Japan with his darling wife. If you liked this, why not read more about foreigners or the floods he barely survived?

The insects of Japan

The creatures of Japan hide from the tourists. 

Forests thick with pine and insects cling to the mountains, people cling to the cities, but everywhere seems void of the beasties in between.

For weeks, I stared into the woods, quietly peeked around abandoned temples, and scanned the sides of the highways, hoping to glimpse a beast of Japan. Anything would do, a monkey, a fox, a black bear crashing through the clouds that rest between the mountains, but they all alluded me. Over time a few animals appeared: angry swallows that furiously destroyed the beginning of a nest above our door when we returned from Kyoto; big mean crows that caw for the end times from the power lines, but nothing else.

But Japan changed my expectations, or it tried to anyway. I was lying in bed with my wife. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.

I strained my ears over the chirping crickets and croaking frogs. There was something else. It reminded me of the night I’d spent camping at The Grand Canyon, where elk bellowed louder than RV generators. It was their cousin, the sika, Japanese deer. I listened to these creatures crying to each other from the forest until my house trembled from the gentle aftershock of a faraway earthquake, perhaps a tectonic plate tucking its neighbor into bed, and I fell asleep.

I awoke to a different Japan. The deer told me that Japan’s not a land of the beast. Japan is the land of the insect. The deer knew this, and by staying hidden forced me to accept that I’d have to look for animals in a lot smaller places. I didn’t have to look hard.

A few nights later, moths started to invade the school I teach at. First one was at the window, then two, six, twelve, finally fourteen huge white and grey moths beat their wings at the screen to get to the light that stirs something inside of them. My students screamed in fear. They pantomimed scratching their skin to the bone. These moths are poisonous. I left after dark to find hundreds of white moths assaulting the lights in the parking lot. They swarmed the light on the front of my bicycle as I pedaled home. These moths travel around Japan, a perpetual plague of locusts that grow thicker and thicker until their population density is so high a virus burns through them and they die off until their eggs hatch the next year. This is their second season in Takayama, and no one wants a third. The next night our coworker enlisted our support in battling the moths and we left the office smashing the lighter colored females that invaded our building, trying to prevent eggs that would lie dormant for a year before they spilled open, like containers of radioactive waste. The idea of Mothra terrorizing the island makes more sense.

But I expected more than bugs. Japanese fiction is larger than life. Godzilla destroys cities while giant mechanized Gundams defend the planet. Power Rangers still defend against monsters that that threaten to crush Tokyo every Saturday morning. Japan is a culture so obsessed with the huge and surrounded by the tiny. There’s just not enough room for anything big here. Supposedly there’s monkeys and bears, but not like in the west, the most underpopulated of continents. There’s no steel dumpsters here, no fear of raccoons knocking over garbage cans.

People bring what little wild there is into civilization. Children ogle beetles that cost 3,000 yen in the grocery stores and the bold ones venture into the woods equipped with nets and plastic cages. We visited a chipmunk park, a giant cage filled with the adorable rodents. Locals keep it secret from the tourists, and gladly pay the entrance fee to spend a few minutes with the closest thing I've seen to a wild animal. I went to a BBQ the other day, and our soul entertainment besides the delicious Romanian food, was the variety of creatures the six year old boy captured for our amusement and the terror of his mother. He found grasshoppers bigger than my thumb, praying mantises, singing crickets, tiny frogs, and a beetle he feared to touch but wouldn’t leave alone until I shot a video for him.

 

The Japanese obsession with the tiny pushes its way into the foreigner’s psyche. We went to a friend’s art exhibit, a Hungarian who’s lived in Japan for twenty five years. Brightly colored paintings of insects painted into enormous monsters greeted us from his canvas. There was a wasp larger than my arm and butterflies that threatened to blow away ancient pagodas. “The people scare them from the temples. I painted these to give places back to the insects.”

The obsession with the tiny affected me as well, for the other night I ventured out to bring home a singing cricket. There’s supposed to be good luck, and I miss having am extra heartbeat in our home. I followed the crickets’ song until I came to a patch of high grass. I turned on my light and searched for the source of the melody. The crickets saw me coming and hopped away. I tried to stand but something stopped me. I bent back down, went back to my task, but again, the crickets easily evaded capture. I stood and again bumped my head. It was a spider web. The monster living in the middle looked bigger than any creature I’d ever seen in the states from behind the safety of a pane of glass. The arachnid wasn’t intimidated by me crashing into its home. It busily wrapped a mouse in silken netting, and dared me to touch its sticky web a third time. I scurried home, afraid of a tiny creature that’s trap could catch something as big as me.

I set out the next day, protected by sunlight, in search of a pet. Each time I pushed aside a handful of grass still wet from the rains of tsunami, dozens of creatures crawl away: Godzilla, Mothra, the monsters Rita Repulsa sends to attack the Power Rangers. I saw their true forms, geckos, caterpillars, frogs so small I was afraid to break them.

I caught the cricket I was hoping would lull me to sleep. He sang too loudly all night about beasts living deep in the mountain forests, and monsters rising from the ocean to wipe humans from this island, and give it back to the insects. Mammals are never so rude. I threw him from my window and he hit the roof with a thunk, saying nothing is larger than me. I hope a swallow eats him.

Next week I plan to climb Mount Norikura, a nearby mountain that promises an easy assent. I should settle for poisonous moths and beetles large as my hand, but I still long to stare down a bear crossing the path, or be robbed by a snow monkey. I harbor dreams from a place too large, where deer run through suburbs and concerned citizens donate money for the wolves to return.

The sika convinced me of nothing. They told me of the insects, of the tiny, but I wasn’t listening to their words, only their voices. I’ll find them yet, and no cricket song will help me rest until I do.

Learn to speak Australian! (very EXPLICIT)

CAUTION: This post has Australians in it, so there is gratuitous use of the word cunt. Sensitive cunts are advised to tune out.   

Our first few hours in Nagoya were spent driving around in a sweltering car listening to our GPS yell Japanese instructions on how to get to Immigration. Somehow, we found the place, and got our residency cards.

Yay! We get to stay. Time to celebrate.  

We arrived at the hotel ravenous and headed out in search of food without showers. Bad idea. We found a restaurant in a basement and were served dumplings by the Chinese chef’s children, who were raised in Japan and spoke English. Energized by the globalism of the experience, we pressed on.

My wife wanted to go shoe shopping, and after 2 days of festival drinking, I was obliged to go with her. She thinks the women’s fashion in Japan is lame except the shoes. “It’s all tan and pastel pink, but the shoes are boss.” Unfortunately she was a half an inch too big for every pair of shoes she found. She doesn’t even have big feet. She’d squeeze into some sweet spiky platforms, stand and pout. Too tight. Eventually Raquel’s stench overwhelmed her and the salt flats growing on my shirt betrayed my misery, so we went back to the hotel.

We showered, napped, and went out to a bar called the Elephant’s Nest after hitting up the arcade next door.

The Elephant’s nest wasn’t very crowded, so we sat a table next to a group of gaijin. We caught them glancing at us, and not knowing how else to make friends, we glanced back. After a few sips of beer they asked us to help settle a bet. They wanted to know where we were from. “America?” We nodded. Their friend lost the bet, but he left before buying the next round. “Where do you think we’re from?” the two remaining gaijin asked, sidling closer.

“England?” I guessed.

“England? Do we sound like a couple of English cunts to you?”

That makes two times we have switched the Aussies and the Brits. They both hate it. We kind of love pissing them off. 

They guessed what part of America we called home by asking what kind of food we liked.

“Cheese steak?”

No.

“Pizza?”

Uh-uh.

“Bar-B-Q?”

Bingo!

“Texas! You cunts are from Texas? We fucking love Texas! You cunts like the Rangers yeah?”

We pretended to care about baseball but the charade quickly fell apart.

“So you’re saying this cunt here’s been to more baseball games than you?”

We nodded, but explained that we were going to the Sumo tournament the next day, so it’s not like we didn’t like sports or anything. They were going too, and that somehow convinced them we were sports aficionados “Oh yeah, what sports do you like? Rugby?” No. “Cricket?” Nope. “You cunts would love cricket!” They showed us videos of glove-less catches while I tried to think of something else to talk about.

The beers set in and we talked of travel tips to our homelands, of kangaroo steak and the beauty of Sydney, of the pros and cons of 6^th street and the Bar-B-Q hierarchy in Austin. They explained the rankings of cunts in Australia (Good and bad cunts are both good, as is sick cunt, in fact cunt is a compliment unless you’re called the dreaded annoying cunt). The conversation only grew heated when it turned to the metric system.

I agreed with them mostly, the metric system is superior in a lot of ways. I mean, who really knows how many feet are in a mile? What’s the relationship between gallons and tablespoons? Why are their two kinds of ounces? But I would not budge on my love of the Fahrenheit scale. Fine, use Celsius for science, but for the weather, Fahrenheit is ideal. Each degree of the Celsius scale covers too much sweat. Fahrenheit is more precise. Why does Celsius use negative temperatures when it regularly gets that cold? Zero degrees in Farenheit means you’ll lose a toe, plain and simple. And why only use numbers up to 45? In Fahrenheit, if its triple digits, you know it’s damn hot or you need to go to the doctor. The Aussies didn’t agree.

“In Celsius it’s hot if it’s over 30.”

“But that’s not really that hot.”

“Yeah but in Celsius 30 degrees is 30% of the temperature of the water boiling on your stove.”
Right because that’s what I compare shorts-weather to: a pot of soup.

“Why bother have days that are negative?”

“Well we got a right smart cunt here don’t we?” One Aussie asked the other.

They tried to talk to us about politics. It’s mandatory to vote in Australia, so it’s probably mandatory to talk about politics, but I deftly changed the subject.

“Whoa is this 1-Direction?”

“This cunt likes 1-Direction! You fucking cunt, you!”

We all laughed and finished our beers and agreed to visit each other’s countries once we got home. We hoped to meet again at the Sumo match, but being sports fans, they had much better seats than us, and we didn't see them again.

“I can’t believe these American cunts are going to’ve seen more Sumo matches than Baseball games.”

 

Yup. That’s me. The American cunt at the Sumo Tournament.

Joe Darris lives in Japan with his darling wife. Normally he lives in Takayama, but sometimes the schools close down for a week to give the teachers a break, and he gets to travel. If you enjoyed this story, please +1, and share with any Aussies you know. SUBSCRIBE if you want more!

Tune in Thursday to hear about the Sumo match that almost ended our marriage!

I Risk my Life with a Duel-Bladed Barber.

I have an unnatural fear of barbers. Just the thought of sitting in that swivel chair, draped and unmoving while the barber hacks away at me with hinged razorblades fills me with dread. For years I’ve been going to my sister-in-law’s salon. Carla’s awesome. She knows what I want (shorter hair) and never makes me explain how to cut it. Still, going there is a harrowing experience. Techno blares, fashionable women eye my unkempt appearance, and the owner offers my coffee drinks I can’t pronounce. Sometimes in desperation I go to Bird’s Barbershop. They offer you beer while you wait and I always need a drink during stressful situations. I even got to know a barber there that I liked. He knew how I liked my hair (shorter) and we were both very comfortable with not talking.

But then I moved to Japan. Goodbye Carla. Goodbye quiet barber.

My hair was already too long when I got here. It’s barely been two weeks here and already I look like and Australopithecus (it doesn’t help that everyone around me looks so damn put-together).

I decided to go the nearest spinning blue and red pole I could find. I figured if the haircut went well, it would be easy to come back, and if he suffocated me with aftershave or drowned me in one of those hairwashing sinks, Raquel wouldn’t have to travel far to enact revenge. I parked my car, stifled the urge to vomit, and walked in. The shop was decorated with two barber chairs, a few plants, and a collection of miniature race cars.  Convinced it wasn’t a salon for old ladies, I politely yelled, “Sumimasen!”

That’s what you do in Japan when you need help in a place of business. You yell sumimasen and they come running. Most businesses seem deserted until you yell sumimasen. At restaurants waiters don’t come check on you or try to sell you desert or another beer. You want something, you yell sumimasen. Like many customs in Japan, it’s kind of strange, and it’s kind of nice.

The barber emerged from the back of the shop, like a demon summoned from beyond the Seventh Gate.

“Sumimasen,” I said, much more meekly this time, showed him a picture of my head with shorter hair, and pretended my fingers were scissors.

He looked at me the way a master sushi chef must examine Fugu before he risks his diners’ lives and filets it for them to eat. I understood. I’m a hairy man. I’m not ashamed. I have chest hair, back hair, arm hair and toe hair. There’s hair on my ass and hair on my knuckles. In Austin my beard won the 6-month sprint division at the annual Come and Shave It facial hair competition, which basically means, I am way too hairy.

After a long moment he nodded. Hai. I sunk into one of his swivel chairs, and he began.

First he draped me in plastic (think Dexter), then extended two horrifying stirrup apparatuses. I thought of my wife’s descriptions of visits to the gynecologist and I stopped breathing. Was he going to probe me? Maybe at Japanese barber shops they didn’t stop the haircut at the neck, maybe they did the whole body at once. I hoped I had clean underwear.

Thankfully there was no probing. He got to work, and the little depression had made slowly filled with hair (who wants to see hair on the floor of a barbershop?). Like many Japanese crafts, his work was meticulous. Everyone in our neighborhood has beautiful gardens with manicured trees. In the city, I rarely see the majestic shade trees so common in every American neighborhood, those exist at temples and on the mountains. All the neighborhood trees are trimmed constantly, so they look like stunted old men. Each tip of each branch is cut with a pair of shears, one by one, so they tree never appears unkempt. My barber had the same zealous OCD. Inch by inch he worked, never moving on until that region of my scalp was finished. In America I think we tend to work in broad strokes, then refine the work afterwards. In Japan it seems to be about painstaking perfection one snip at a time.

The haircut was going well. No major arteries had been severed. He hadn’t removed my oversized ears. I couldn’t compliment his work because I can’t speak Japanese outside of bars, so, naturally, I began to grunt.

Grunting takes some getting used to. At first it can be off-putting. I’ll be telling someone a story, and my victim looks away and grunts. At first I thought I was boring them, but that’s not the case. It doesn’t matter if I complement the deliciousness of a meal or talk about Godzilla’s atomic breath and it’s relation to the Atomic bomb, my conversation partner stares into space and grunts. It seems like I’m being ignored, but really it means they’re politely listening. It’s considered aggressive to maintain too much eye contact, and grunting shows you’re paying attention.

I was definitely paying attention to the barber, so I grunted like a pig in slop. He seemed to appreciate my grunts, and smiled. He finished up, held up a mirror for me to see the back of my head and asked, “Neck shave?” I accepted, otherwise not only would I sound like a wild boar, I’d look like one.

To my dismay he whipped out a straight edge. Where was the electric clipper with its plastic guard to protect me? Oh god this was the moment. He’d spared me thus far because he liked his victims to be well trimmed! He clearly had a sick fascination with cleanliness. He was going to wrap me up in the plastic he’d draped me in so when he slit my throat, my blood wouldn’t leave any evidence.

I closed my eyes, and said farewell to the world.

I felt the blade scrape against the back of my neck as he plotted how to begin the mutilation. Would he go straight for the carotid artery or was he a windpipe kind of guy? Maybe he’d just sever my spine so I I’d be paralyzed while he hacked my body to pieces.

The seconds ticked on, my death loomed closer. Was he wiping shaving cream on his towel, or was it blood? I’ve read that there’s blades so sharp you don’t feel them cut you. If those exist, they exist in the land of the samurai.  

Finally, after an eternity of scraping and wiping, scraping and wiping, he was done.

I survived!

I politely declined the shampoo (it wasn’t too late for him to fill the sink with hot grease or hydrochloric acid), paid my tab (careful not to tip, tipping is rude), and bowed my thanks for the haircut, his English abilities, and my life. He bowed deeply, so I bowed again. This seemed to distress him so he bowed once more, very seriously this time. Fine. I still don’t get the bowing thing, so I smiled and left.

I got back into the car and looked at my haircut for the first time. I can never really look at my hair inside the barber shop, even in the States. I always just tip generously and get the hell out.

 

He did a fine job. I’ll probably go back in a month (who am I kidding? More like three) because at least I won’t have to explain how I like my hair.