01/07/2003 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Went out to yet another good-bye party. This one wasn’t a farewell party - the person is transferring to another part of Japan, not leaving the country. When I was Japan for the first time I went to a farewell party and a welcome party almost every week it seemed, but this time it’s much better. Still far too many, but that’s the nature of this work, I guess.
02/07/2003 It’s A Church, Not A Cult!
I made the mistake of answering my door this morning. I work a rather odd schedule - I don’t start until 1:00 PM and I finish up at 9:00, so that means I usually wake up around 8:00 and go to bed around 1:00 or so. It took some getting used to, but now it’s comfortable.
My doorbell rang about 10:30 or so this morning and I quickly answered it. I should have looked in the peephole first. I’ve been waiting for the newspaper collector to come by and get some money for the last 2 months. It’s one of those situations in which I probably should do the ethical thing and call so that I can pay and also so that the newspaper doesn’t just stop coming one day, but I keep putting it off to see how long it will last.
Anyway this morning I opened the door to find two middle-aged women standing at the door, looking very surprised to see a foreigner standing there. I’ve had a few experiences where I open the door to find the salesman shocked, mouth open. Some even say ‘gaikojin’, which means ‘foreigner’, or specifically, non-Japanese person, to my face. It’s hard to imagine a door-to-door salesman saying ‘a black!’ when an African-Canadian opens the door in Toronto, at least not one that actually sells something. These two ladies today were undeterred. They started firing questions at me in rapid Japanese, which I had trouble following. They kept asking me what time I woke up, and asking if it was 5:00. I understood the question but I couldn’t understand what they were getting at. It turns out that they are a part of some cult, and they have meetings at 5:00 AM. They asked me to come and attend their meetings, but they said it was only in Japanese. They got excited when I told them my wife was Japanese (one of the ladies, the stranger looking one, even clapped) and gave me some book.
This is not my first experience with door-to-door religious recruiters. Last year I picked up my old apartment’s intercom one morning and a woman spoke in English about meeting some children and wanting to share some things that she learned when she went to an island. She was obviously Japanese and trying very hard to speak English, but it sounded as if she just looked up the words in the dictionary. Electronic dictionaries are popular in Japan but it often confuses communication more than it helps, since the people who use them often end up sounding like a semiotics professor who forgot the Prozac. On my way to work I found a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet in my mailbox. Another time, at my old building, I came back from shopping to find a friend of mine talking to two non-Japanese men in suits. I just passed on by, but they were Jehovah’s Witnesses as well, and my friend, an Australian who had studied philosophy in university, made the mistake of telling them that he wasn’t interested because he was an aethist.
Japanese people, for the most part, don’t really seem particularly religious. Christianity never took hold here and the two main religions, Shinto and Buddhism, don’t really require much of it’s followers. Shinto is more of a set of guidelines than a religion, and Japanese Buddhism seems muted. I think the lack of religion leads to these cults - such as the Aum cult, the ones who gassed the Tokyo subway a few years ago - because I do believe there is an inherent need in people to believe in something.
But I don’t think they should bother me in the morning.
Monday, July 07, 2003
27/06/2003 Porno Porno Porno!
I was thinking about porn today. No, not like that. I was in the convenience store near where I work, where they have a rack of magazines, including an extensive porn section. In Japan lots of people stand at magazine racks and read, and the owners of the store don’t seem to get angry. They do it in bookstores as well, which is one reason, my fiancé claims, that the big box store type book store isn’t popular in Japan. Of course there were some youngish-looking guys leafing through porno mags while high school girls walked by, and I thought how you would never see that in Canada, because a lot of neighbourhood places have stopped selling porn, and it just wouldn’t be done.
I’ve been on commuter trains next to middle-aged salary men flipping through porn mags, or even worse, porno comics, while old women and young children sit across from them. I couldn’t imagine that happening on the GO train or on the TTC - somebody would say something, more likely with an angry indignation and much shaking of fists. But in Japan, no one arches an eyebrow.
At my old apartment building, newspapers and magazines were picked up once a month for recycling, and tenants would often stack their magazines in the front hall. Last summer there was a stack, and I mean 20+, of porno comics. Curious, I rifled through them, and not considering myself a prude, I found most of it disgusting - lots of comic high school kids having sex with each other, and other things you couldn’t get away with in ‘real’ porn. Last month it was middle-aged woman porn, another collection, this one stacked in a large brown paper bag. Once again curiosity got the best of me and I leafed through, to find myself once again disgusted. I have nothing against porn, and I admit that sometimes I look, but I can’t really understand why you would want pictures of unattractive women doing bizarre things with salad tongs. Nevertheless, this collection represented a serious commitment to collecting porn - it appeared to be a monthly magazine, which means that this collection had to be at least 2 years worth.
The Japanese have a strange relationship with sex. I think a lot of it stems from never having a puritan past, so it doesn’t have that moral hangover we do in North America. It’s not exactly European either. Ads for viagara, for example, can’t spell out viagara, because that would be too upsetting. Instead they change a letter or two, so it comes out as ‘viagana’, but it’s mutually understood what is being advertised. Every magazine has a woman in a bikini on it, not just the more ‘macho’ ones - you open it up and it’s about computer software.
The hostess bar scene is also hard to explain to non-Japanese. It’s supposed to be some ancient tradition that has been converted to keep up with the modern times, but a hostess bar is more or less a place where you pay a lot of money to go to and have women pour you drinks and listen to your stories. That’s it. It’s hard to believe that there isn’t any under the table hanky panky, but I’ve been assured that hostess bars are not for that. Though it happens, I’m sure, after hours, and a few years ago there was a somewhat famous case about a British woman who came to Japan to work as a hostess and one of her customer killed her and cut her body up.
There’s no social stigma attached to such places either, which I’m not sure is troubling or refreshing. It’s hard to imagine American politicians visiting a sleazy bar where women in tight clothes pour you over-priced watery scotches and keeping their reputations intact. Even in Canada, where we tend to be a bit more forgiving about such things, it would signal the fiery end of your career as if you had stood up in the House of Commons and advocated fiercely for ‘rounding up all the darkies’. Yet, in Japan, it’s business as usual.
I was thinking about porn today. No, not like that. I was in the convenience store near where I work, where they have a rack of magazines, including an extensive porn section. In Japan lots of people stand at magazine racks and read, and the owners of the store don’t seem to get angry. They do it in bookstores as well, which is one reason, my fiancé claims, that the big box store type book store isn’t popular in Japan. Of course there were some youngish-looking guys leafing through porno mags while high school girls walked by, and I thought how you would never see that in Canada, because a lot of neighbourhood places have stopped selling porn, and it just wouldn’t be done.
I’ve been on commuter trains next to middle-aged salary men flipping through porn mags, or even worse, porno comics, while old women and young children sit across from them. I couldn’t imagine that happening on the GO train or on the TTC - somebody would say something, more likely with an angry indignation and much shaking of fists. But in Japan, no one arches an eyebrow.
At my old apartment building, newspapers and magazines were picked up once a month for recycling, and tenants would often stack their magazines in the front hall. Last summer there was a stack, and I mean 20+, of porno comics. Curious, I rifled through them, and not considering myself a prude, I found most of it disgusting - lots of comic high school kids having sex with each other, and other things you couldn’t get away with in ‘real’ porn. Last month it was middle-aged woman porn, another collection, this one stacked in a large brown paper bag. Once again curiosity got the best of me and I leafed through, to find myself once again disgusted. I have nothing against porn, and I admit that sometimes I look, but I can’t really understand why you would want pictures of unattractive women doing bizarre things with salad tongs. Nevertheless, this collection represented a serious commitment to collecting porn - it appeared to be a monthly magazine, which means that this collection had to be at least 2 years worth.
The Japanese have a strange relationship with sex. I think a lot of it stems from never having a puritan past, so it doesn’t have that moral hangover we do in North America. It’s not exactly European either. Ads for viagara, for example, can’t spell out viagara, because that would be too upsetting. Instead they change a letter or two, so it comes out as ‘viagana’, but it’s mutually understood what is being advertised. Every magazine has a woman in a bikini on it, not just the more ‘macho’ ones - you open it up and it’s about computer software.
The hostess bar scene is also hard to explain to non-Japanese. It’s supposed to be some ancient tradition that has been converted to keep up with the modern times, but a hostess bar is more or less a place where you pay a lot of money to go to and have women pour you drinks and listen to your stories. That’s it. It’s hard to believe that there isn’t any under the table hanky panky, but I’ve been assured that hostess bars are not for that. Though it happens, I’m sure, after hours, and a few years ago there was a somewhat famous case about a British woman who came to Japan to work as a hostess and one of her customer killed her and cut her body up.
There’s no social stigma attached to such places either, which I’m not sure is troubling or refreshing. It’s hard to imagine American politicians visiting a sleazy bar where women in tight clothes pour you over-priced watery scotches and keeping their reputations intact. Even in Canada, where we tend to be a bit more forgiving about such things, it would signal the fiery end of your career as if you had stood up in the House of Commons and advocated fiercely for ‘rounding up all the darkies’. Yet, in Japan, it’s business as usual.
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