Compassion, Damn It: A Four Part Discourse

I've been waiting to write this and post this, and I've seen so many better written, somehow more valid representations, explanations, and points of view, but I still feel that what I need to say has a purpose and value.
So I am saying it.


Part One: It Shouldn't Be You

Even if you are personally in disagreement with homosexuality or any alternative to the cis-gender hetero-normative culture out there, you should be able to see that 49 people being shot dead is a bad thing, and is indicative of some much bigger problems.

The father of the shooter was recently quoted as saying that his main problem with what his son did was that God alone should judge others, including those awful sinners, the gays. While I take issue with a lot of this, I also agree that if you do believe so strongly in the Bible or the Koran, you should avoid judging others, regardless of their sins. I draw the line at child-molesters, as forgiveness for pedophiles is a bridge too far for me, but people engaging in consensual relationships with adult partners are outside of this. Those people's business, regardless of that anyone else thinks about it, should be their own.

So if you think it's a sin, it's not your job to judge it, stop it, or hurt the people involved. It's your job to love, and at very most pray for the people involved. What you don't realize is that they might be praying for you, too-- to open your heart and mind, to accept them for who they are, to know and love them as much as they love you without the caveat of chopping their soul into pieces so as to more easily fit into the box you're prescribing. But regardless of who prays for whom and why, the point is that we all sin in our own ways, and it is not your place to judge. At all. Much less who gets to live or die.


What the world needs now is more compassion, more love, more caring about each other and less of the selfish divisions driven by the differences between us.

Fewer guns, less violence, a call to love over hate. There are a lot of positive options, but I don't know if America as a whole will take them.

I've been living in a country with virtually no guns for the last 8 years, and guess what, America? I don't feel cheated, or uncomfortable, or unsafe for the lack of easy-murder-machines made available to the public.
Quite the opposite. I don't have the strange anxiety in the background of my mind, telling me that guns and bullets are everywhere, and people in general are stupid, easily over-heated, passionate creatures. If we were living in the states, I am sure I would be more scared about the times when my husband is late coming home. It could be traffic, or a number of other innocuous things. Or maybe he cut off a redneck in a pickup (or some thug or any other person with a hot temper and a gun) who decided that the little Asian dude was talking funny and needed to be put in his place.
Instead, I rest easily, knowing that my daughter is more likely to be struck by lightning than a stray bullet and that no matter how my husband drives, the likelihood of road-rage-murder is pretty damned minimal.

A few years ago, my mother was almost killed when some would-be gang-bangers decided to cruise up beside her on the freeway and fire a gun at her vehicle. Apparently this is some kind of initiation tactic. When the police were called, their suggestion was that my mother chase down the suspects herself. So, with police suggestions like that, I can almost understand the desire for personal protection, but if guns were harder to get, less personal protection would be necessary as well. A lot of stuff needs to change, but continuing on the path as it is cannot be done safely. We don't all need guns. None of us need guns. None.

One could argue that my mother, had she been carrying a firearm, could have fired back at the assailants instead of freaking out about being shot at while driving. Answers like that turn The Land of the Free into the dystopia of Mad Max proportions.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to live there.

Part Two: It Could Have Been Me.

Relocate the incident a bit to the northwest. Turn back the clock a decade or so, and that could have been me. That could have been me twelve years ago with my best friend of the time, doing what I had seen in Queer As Folk and taking him to a place where he could find someone more available than the friend of his brother's on whom he was then crushing hard.
Turn back a little less and it could have been me with my straight, single female friends, looking for somewhere to dance without the threat of contact with unwanted genitals.
The same year, it was the GSA on an unofficial outing. The same semester, it was my other roommate and I blowing off steam after midterms by watching the drag show. It could even be the one night a girl gave me her number, the only time I was hit on by a member of the same sex.
Turn back the clock just over 8 years, and it's just before I moved to Japan, going to the drag show with my mom and her friends and enjoying our time together immensely.

At any of these points, it could have been me shot dead in a night club by a well-armed madman.
But it wasn't. I got to grow up, graduate from college, move abroad, fall in love, get fat, get married, have a baby, and live well enough to be in such a position as to write about this now.
I'm lucky as hell. But I don't feel lucky.

I know I am not the only person whose heart breaks for the families and friends of the victims of the Pulse Massacre.

If you are one of the people who feels nothing for this incident, who thinks those people had it coming for being who they are without fear, I want you to remember this, especially if you know me and love me at all. Or even just like me a tiny bit.

That could have been me. I could have died there. And, because it was at a time and place rooted pretty firmly in my past, you might not have ever even known me. I would never have become who I am now. My relationships with friends and relatives are significantly more fruitful than they were in those days.
Think about your life. Think about whatever little place I may hold in it and ponder that space being replaced by a painful void. If this hurts, mourn for these victims and their families. Show some compassion. We're not all that different, really.

So mourn, and love, and feel damn it. Don't tell me it doesn't matter and please don't treat this as a non-issue.
It's a big deal. A really big deal.


Part Three: Priorities

Japan has frequent earthquakes. It's nature. So they build for it. The standards for how and where to build are very high, and the restrictions severe, for good reason. I was here for the Magnitude 9 Earthquake, and guess what? A lot of furniture got destroyed, some buildings had cracks, but almost nothing collapsed. Part of this is because a fairly major quake had struck 30 years previous, after which everything was built to new standards, which is why they didn't fall in 2011. Unfortunately, earlier this year, Kumamoto prefecture suffered a devastating quake of a lower magnitude. The high number of casualties can at least partially be attributed to the fact that they had not had a major quake in a much longer time, so nothing had been rebuilt to new standards in some time.

America doesn't have the same standards for building, so when we hear about a Magnitude 6 or 7 in California, people start asking about body counts. America hasn't adapted to the geological problems that come with living on a fault line the way the Japanese have, and one could argue that those exacting standards are bad for business. Such work could cost contractors and construction companies too much in materials, labor and time.

Bad for business and too expensive in dollars, but ultimately bad for living conditions and expensive in life.

This is not unlike the gun situation.

In Japan, there will be quakes and people have died in building collapses, which is why the standards are so high. Because keeping people alive in general is considered more important than keeping the rich exceedingly rich, at least when it comes to natural disasters.

America's disasters aren't natural. They are every day and all around. They are children finding the firearm meant for home protection and putting wholes in themselves, their friends, or their parents. They are people with serious psychological issues being able to get an assault rifle legally. They are the guns, the shootings, the constant "prayers and thoughts" with no government follow through of better legislation.
Because keeping the gun manufacturers' wallets fat is more important than keeping our people alive.

And that, my friends, is seriously fucked up.

Part Four: Dear America

So, America, it's like this. You're great. I love some parts of you, and some of your people, and some of your culture and even some of what makes you so damned arrogant. I love you, but I can't be with you. I can't have you around my daughter. You're diversity is wonderful and all, but you're dangerous. You're hanging with a bad crowd, and until you make some big changes, we're not going to be seeing a lot of each other. We'll keep in touch online, and I'm not revoking my citizenship or anything that drastic, but I am not visiting you when you're like this. I can't. My family is too important to let something like your lax gun laws destroy it.
Thanks for the good times, and I hope this isn't forever.
Adios.

Saying Goodbye to Grandma: Part 2, the Funeral

Today was truly exhausting, but I think it went okay. Evidence of this exist in anecdotes told by my husband's extended family and the fact that my in-laws thanked me (assumably for trying to participate while also trying to keep Julia in line, but more on this later) when they drove me home and my husband went off to finish up whatever needed to be finished.

Julia was disruptive/adventurous basically the whole time, but she really enjoyed the flowers.
Japanese funerals are a bit different from their western counterparts, but strangely enough, even in a society where social norms are dictated with such force that a lot of things appear practically cookie-cutter style, the funeral is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all option.

Of course, the religion of the deceased is taken into account, and most people in Japan fall into the Buddhist-Shinto combination so a lot of funerals are similar in many ways. My husband generally tells me any time there is a Christian funeral of any kind, more out of idle curiosity than anything else. They are rare, and we usually have to have this huge lecture on the many versions of that religion, and how they are different, and what they mean. They are rare here, Christians and their funerals, but Tomo's eldest aunt is apparently a Christian of some kind, so who knows? I mean, I didn't know (or judge. I really don't care what people believe most of the time...)

Grandma, as it turns out, was not religious, so we had no monks, no priests. No stuffy pontifications. Instead, her family and friends gathered, her son read a short speech, shared a DVD of pictures from her life, and her friends read letters aloud.
We missed most of this as Julia seems to think any quiet moment is the perfect time to scream or sing or run ton the front of the room and bellow.

So we waited in the hall for her to calm down and tried to come back into the ceremony hall, where we then waited for about five minutes to run back out again.

That in essence was my morning, which is why I don't know more about the letters. Were they from her life or written to her by the reader? Or were they from people who couldn't make it, guests who didn't get to come and say goodbye in person? I just don't know, though odds are even if I did have the chance to hang around, I would probably have misinterpreted the lot of them.

I heard the tears from the crowd though, even from outside in the hallway. Emotions flowed, as they should at times like this. My father- in-law was teary. I never noticed before today how much deeper his voice is comparing to his son's.

After the letters came flowers. First, everyone is given a long-stemmed white carnation to bring to the front, place in a pile on a stone slab, and pause to reflect on the deceased, who is at this time in the room, face visible through through a see-through panel in the lid of the casket, which is wood covered in pink brocade, strangely gorgeous.

You might be asking yourself why there is fabric around the outside of the casket, and from a western perspective, this is a good question and something I don't think a lot of Japanese people would recognize as weird.
This is not a coffin that will ever see dirt. It will be taken to the crematorium and burned in its entirety. They can put cloth wherever they want. It's not like it'll have much of a chance to get stained before it disintegrates.

After the white carnations, more things are said and done, that I also missed due to toddler-rage. When we returned, the lid of the coffin was off, and the name of the game was surrounding the deceased in flowers.
Nothing wrong with that, I think, with my American mind. Totally makes sense to me actually, and so much better than stupid non-biodegradable objects, because this isn't going to be a burial. Surround her with the beauty of life. Let it go with her.
They did her make-up and hair well. She looked genuinely at peace. It was actually quite lovely.
Julia really got into this flower bit, picking the perfect place to put small handfuls of pink roses and purple carnations. My husband handed me a purple-edged white rose and I picked up an orchid to accompany it and placed them in any spare area around her upper body that looked a little bare.

In a casket almost overflowing with flora, she looked very well loved.

After this, the pink box was sealed, the see-through panel shuttered, and the procession headed out toward the waiting hearse (which my husband dutifully drove) and shuttle-bus (for people who didn't fit into the hearse, like us and my mother-in-law) which took us to the crematorium.

At the crematorium, we said our final goodbyes to her physical form as we knew it and I kind of missed out for my screaming daughter, but I tried to do whatever the right thing looked like at the time. Julia and I ran around outside for a bit, and then inside for a bit and back and forth and man, I was worn out. We sat down to a lunch of sushi I could actually eat, which was exciting and made my mother-in-law proud of me. Julia ate veggie-chips and then ran around a bunch more. At one point she almost interrupted another family's last goodbyes and had to be headed off by both my mother-in-law and myself, simultaneously.
It is interesting to note that at full gallop, I can only just match my tiny mother-in-law in full kimono.

I don't know how she wore all of that without sweating. I mean, I was sweating like a small cow by the end of the day, and mine was just lined polyester.

There was a significant amount of me running after Julia, who was anxious to find trouble, but it wasn't all bad. All of my father-in-law's relatives made note of the fact that he was exactly the same as a child, and that they had watched the deceased do exactly as I was doing more times than anyone remembers.

Somehow, that makes it all fit.

After the burning comes bone collection, in which every family member picks through the remnant ash for any big, white chunks of bone and using one of several pairs of long, thick chopsticks, retrieves the charred marrow. I watched the older woman who I believe was the deceased's sister, lifting a chunk of what I think was hip-bone with one pair of chopsticks while her daughter helped by picking up the same piece with another pair. Together, they guided it into a large ceramic box.

And then Julia was screaming and we had to go outside again. Presumably

Eventually, we all departed, though this time the toddler of destruction and I got to ride in the comfort of my husband's car all the way out to our family grave, in a nice, comfortable cemetery north of Sendai.

My daughter and I slept on the way. Upon arrival, we ran out to change a diaper and then made our way to the family grave. Once the whole family was gathered, the cylindrical ceramic container was guided into place, behind a usually-closed hatch, beside an identical container, the final resting place of her husband.
Together, again, at last.

What I learned about her today was that she was from Shiogama, just like her husband. They were neighbors, with similar names. His was like mine, and what hers would become. Hers was one sound off, one of the most common names in Japan. Suzuki, she was, but Tsuzuki she died.

And now I do believe she is at peace.

Saying Goodbye to Grandma: Part 1, Pre-funeral

Tomorrow we say goodbye to the funeral services for my grandmother-in-law.

It seems stupid to feel so much. She was older and somewhat embittered, and my only memories of her involve a lot of confusion on my part. By tone and context, there were a lot of guesses at probably meanings on my part, but she spoke in a way that was unintelligible to me. Was is keigo mixed with Miyagi-dialect? How would I know?
And where was she from really? I never knew. Most Japanese women of her generation (and a few following generations) relocated to the hometowns of their husbands, and she was likely no exception.

But the fact is I knew little of the woman.

We met for the first time the day of the quake, when all needy family members relocated to the best house in the family-- that of my parents-in-law, where my soon-to-be husband and I had already been living.
By the time I got to there, the sun had set and our strange lingering handshake was lit only by the flash-light my father-in-law held aloft.

I think I understand my in-laws now better than I did then. Before this, I had met Grandpa Nakamura, my mother-in-law's father who speaks plainly and is the reason why my husband also smiles with his whole face. Grandpa I have a chance of understanding, but Grandma Tsuzuki was different.

I am a little disappointed in myself for never mastering Japanese to the level necessary to understand her. That sucks and cannot be rectified, but I am more comfortable talking to my in-laws now than I ever have been before, so at least there is that, I guess.
I also feel sad about not showing her a male heir to the name. My husband is the last male Tsuzuki in this line, but we haven't had a son. I had originally planned to have 2 in quick succession, but one is expensive enough for now, emotionally and financially. Also, I don't know how I would keep up with two at a funeral. Tomorrow will be hard enough with just one.

That said, there will be smaller children and older children, all girls, all second-cousins to little Julia.

They'd been preparing for her departure for a while, and this is known by her frequently saying things like "Oh, this will be my last family gathering..." at every family gathering since before my daughter was born. When my in-laws bought a dress for me to wear to our Japanese wedding party, they also got me a funeral suit, which doesn't fit me now but speaks to how long this preparation process has been in place.

I think she is at peace, and I think she will happy to have her bones rest alongside her husband's. I think she spent too long missing him. But what do I know.

Tomo was nervous about asking her what she thought of him dating a foreigner way back when, but after we'd been together for a little over a year I think, he took a trip up here and broke the news to her. We didn't know which was she would go-- and it's hard to tell with older folk, here and elsewhere. Rampant racism and bigotry is not uncommon in people from a different time, but I was the first girlfriend my husband ever introduced to his parents, and our relationship was going to be special and probably would have continued without her consent, but it would have been easier with.

As I have heard the story told, my husband explained that he was dating an American, and Grandma's only response was, "Well get married then. And have some kids as soon as you can."

I'm glad she was in support of us, and I hate that I never really had a conversation with her, but I am happy to know that she is now at peace, and without pain.


We saw pictures they had been picking out for the dvd for her funeral the other day at my in-laws house. Her wedding picture was the first one out, and she was gorgeous. Tall and lean, kimono-clad with the ornate hairstyle that most Americans associate with geisha. It could have been a wig, of course, but I know nothing of wedding customs from the early Showa era. I know she wasn't a geisha, at least. I'm not an idiot....most of the time...


Tomorrow will be a full day of trying to keep everything calm and cool and collected despite everything else.

At least my black eye is healed, and my in-laws had time to take me out to get a new funeral dress/suit for the event. At least we found shoes my size that could be worn while chasing Julia. At least the $15 I spent getting the only black formal toddler dress in Julia's size and new shoes and tights in Sendai Thursday was not wasted, At least we're using my husband's company, so he can make sure things work the way they are supposed to.

And today I am also so very thankful that I had a friend who could watch my daughter for a few hours while I taught English.

Tomorrow is going to be hard, but it'll be okay. We'll get through it. It's only one day.

It's only one day.