Friday, February 2, 2018

Exhaustion and Foreign Opinions: A Rambling

My kid is sick, but it is just a cold with a bit of a fever. It will be okay. We already got a checkup and medication yesterday, so at least that is taken care of for now. We'll see how it shapes the coming week. On the upside, I did get to work yesterday so my paycheck won't be quite as screwed as otherwise.

Also, this gives a better reason for our delay in setting up the Girl's Day dolls, a yearly Japanese tradition that I suck at preparing for as it requires an entire house deep cleaning session and I am a hoarder.

I've been working toward the clean house goal over the last few weeks but failed to take out the recycling this week so I am still staring at a large box filled with compacted cardboard boxes. I know I am supposed to see a pile of garbage or at best a pile of recycling waiting to go out. Instead, I see raw materials for any number of great projects, and just looking at it, my mind starts to wander. If I could get my hands on a small jigsaw, wood glue, dowels, and appropriate fabric coverings, I could build a massive, wall-sized dragon-shaped shelving unit and it. would. be. beautiful!
And the good thing now is that I have been around long enough to know that the vast majority of these massive project ideas are not possible for me to realistically accomplish. I do not have the time or space required for this task, much less the rest of the materials. In the end, this would wind up being yet another box of rubbish taking up more space than it should be allowed to in the back room of my apartment until one day I get fed up and take it out finally or die and someone else takes it and everything else to the curb.

So there's that. Despite being in a bit of a slump, I managed to get 5 blog posts written last month and will work toward getting nine out this coming month. I'm already toying with ideas for this month's incentivized posts on my Japan blog over at City-Cost.

The other thought I had today with some level of interest was in regards to whether or not we're "allowed" to have opinions about foreign cultures and customs and how our unique position changes that. Specifically, someone mentioned how weird Groundhog Day is and I responded with the weirdness that is Setsubun, which happens this week in Japan. Today actually. Then someone told me that that was why we should respect foreign cultures and that she thought my custom was interesting.

That was a fine reaction, and there was nothing wrong with that except that it isn't my custom. It's my husband's and his culture's and just really not mine. In Japan, I am essentially Jack Skellington in Christmas town, if he'd decided to just live there after he passed through the tree in the forest. Nothing here is really allowed to be mine and yet it is. It isn't my culture but it is my life and the course of my experience.

And this goes back to a debate from ages ago that isn't really worth commenting on except to get it out of my head. I was told by some random-internet-white-chick that I was a bigot for using the term Engrish to describe mass-produced products with English errors. The point she had was it sounded racist to her, having visited some parts of Asia a few times in her short life, and Asian languages are hard so we shouldn't make fun of others for not knowing English. I agreed that we shouldn't make fun of people for not knowing English and further explained that as an English teacher and expat living in Japan, I have to say that companies that employ copywriters can easily get these things checked by a native English speaker for a small fee. Instead of doing that, they assume their grasp of a language they refuse to note the complexity of must be good enough to forego that small charge. Then we wind up with weird bits that I think everyone should have a chance to laugh at. I'm not knocking down the doors of the copywriting office, accusing people of speaking "Engrish" but instead buying the products and sending them to people who will enjoy them all over the world. So the companies are still getting paid for their sub-par work and the patrons of my second Patreon get to enjoy silliness. Me calling it Engrish doesn't seem to hurt anyone's feelings, not even those of my Japanese husband.

What bugs me most about this interaction is probably that the woman refused to listen to me and just kept calling me a bigot. Her methods were flawed but when I tried to work with her to better our mutual understanding anyway, she revealed that she wasn't capable of operating at that level. I thought she was giving a corresponding theoretical analogy. She was actually just trying to accuse me of being a bully like some real-life bullies she once knew. When I pointed to the errors in her logic, her responses became even less logical. That was the day I learned that it isn't just the conservatives who plug their ears and ignore whatever makes them uncomfortable. Liberals do it too.

I'm not saying we should all engage in hate speech or that Engrish itself is a universally OK term. It is in a gray area, as it could conceivably be used to hurt others, so it depends on how it is used. The way I use it is not racist, as confirmed by my Japanese husband and multiple Asian and Asian-American friends. The companies that produce these products have a chance to fix these errors and not assume lingual superiority despite their inadequacy. They do not. Either they do not understand the nuances of language, as almost any foreign language media should be checked my a native speaker to ensure quality, or they do not care. Either way, it is their failing, and an easily correctable failing, so we get to laugh at the results. They still get paid for making the silly things. Who is losing here?

But this also speaks to my time abroad. I no longer consider anything that could theoretically in some way be considered somewhat racist as definitely racist and unusable. There is more to it than that and at the end of the day, any Caucasian American person deciding what other cultures and races can consider offensive is inherently wrong. We don't get to say what they must or must not consider offensive. Some terms are patently offensive while others are currently considered innocuous, and those definitions do change over time.

One must have an informed opinion, and no one speaks for an entire race, but calling someone in an interracial marriage with an Asian man racist against Asians shows a level of willful ignorance I am not comfortable with engaging. And I shouldn't feel bad about leaving the conversation after the one Asian person in the conversation confirmed that Engrish as it is used by me is NOT racist.
Some part of me keeps bringing this back up though, like I need to feel constantly under attack by strangers who know nothing about me. I think it's the inner-teacher-brain, wanting to have better taught this person about the realities of the world around her despite the fact that she would never have been able to understand them without living them.

But that leads me back to my point for today, which was along the lines of this: Living in Japan means I get to have an opinion about some Japanese things. I'm not a tourist, fresh of a plane, gawking at the maid cafes. Nor am I an expert, fluent in the language and well versed in the content of every newspaper. I know some things from classes I took in college and some things from my personal experiences in living here long term. In a few months, I'll have been living in Japan for a decade. Ten years of watching these seemingly bizarre cultural elements and figuring out some while others continue to baffle me; ten years of changing inside and out while struggling to find comfort in a country where I will never be allowed to own property or become a citizen; ten solid years of studying this culture from the inner outside and analyzing the living hell out of it...Yeah, I'd say I get to have an opinion.

And those are my thoughts for today.

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