Of Logistics and Race

Sorry for the lack of updates! It's been a busy week or so. But, sorry to disappoint those of you who were starting to hope, I am in fact still much alive and kicking, and will continue to saturate your RSS feeds and email alerts with my drivel. So, to fill you in on the basics...

1) I have decided to recontract. So assuming my BOE doesn't think I suck rocks and refuse to take me back, I will be signing my soul away for another year here in Crazyland.

2) I have received my materials for my CLAIR (Council of Local Authorities for International Relations) correspondence course in Japanese. Those of you who attended college with me are invited to make your own inferences about how dutifully my studies are progressing thus far.

3) I have five days off in a row in mid-November. Those with ideas for destinations, offers of hospitality, or interest in coming along are encouraged to pipe up.

4) I have now experienced an enkai. It came as a double header last weekend and certainly merits deeper exploration of its cultural and interpersonal significance.

5) I threw a Halloween party for 253 kids at my elementary school this week and I think I can safely say it was a success. I am never again writing 253 hiragana nametags by hand, attaching them 253 gift bags, each of which I had to holepunch to attach the tag, and stuffing all 253 bags by hand with candy. Never. Again. At least the kids had fun, and I think the staff really appreciated it too.

6) This week I had Monday off, 1 of my classes cancelled on Tuesday, and spent my elementary school teaching time handing out candy. On Wednesday, one of my classes was cancelled and I was excused from one because they were doing translation. Today, my elementary school cancelled so I spent the day sitting at my computer on chat, except for 45 minutes when I was invited to a class party to eat cake and play Bingo. I know it sounds like bull pucky but please believe you when I tell you that my job actually is kind of stressful. Really. Just not in the workload sense.

So for the real meat of this post, I'm going to talk about something that's pretty controversial, pretty loaded and - in the West - a pretty universally accepted truth.

I'm going to talk about racism in Japan.

In the West, we more or less take racism in Japan for granted. I remember once or twice a Japanese person in the States told me that Japan is not a racist country. I remember also how hard I worked to keep from busting out laughing because I thought they were nuts. Amazingly, now that I live here, I am going to make an assertion that - especially given that I elicit stares everywhere I go and people come up to me in the grocery store and peer into my basket to see what I'm buying, and children follow me down the street in awe - seems crazy. I am telling you straight up that, at least when it comes to Westerners like myself, the Japanese are not racist. I can't speak for their attitudes towards, say, Koreans, not having experienced being a Korean person in Japan. But as a Caucasian American, the Japanese are not racist.

Racism, I think, carries heavy implications about hate, or beliefs about inferior intellect, or similar bigotry. I think what the West mistakes for racism in the Japanese is none of these things. We are simply a multicultural, multiethnic society by nature. We are used to "different" - linguistically, racially, culturally, religiously, everything. We see it every day. We have seminars on it at work.

Japan isn't racist. It simply lacks a concept of "different".

The staring isn't because they think I am inferior or worthless or that they hate me. They stare because I am DIFFERENT. And different doesn't happen here. In a country so thoroughly homogenous, the notion of diversity is, pardon my slight pun here, foreign. And when it is thrust upon them, the Japanese react, unsurprisingly, with insular behavior, shyness, and an inward-turning reaction that is easily mistaken for discrimination. In reality, I think it is a natural enough human response in a society that pretty thoroughly lacks a concept of, much less exposure to, diversity. If you saw someone in the US walking butt naked down the middle of the freeway wearing a clown wig, you'd stare. You're not being discriminatory; it's just a completely alien appearance and you are reacting to something unforseen and for which you lack a learned appropriate response. So you manifest the natural, basic human reaction of surprise and curiosity. And while I am probably not quite as crazy as someone walking naked down the interstate in clown accessories, I am just as unexpected in the 99.99% homogenous society into which I have gaijin stomped over the last few months.

So, ironically enough, this gaijin, who is regularly reminded just how alien she is here, finds herself defending the Japanese. They are not racist - they simply lack a comprehension of diversity, which is not the same thing.