In demand for good business

I hesitate to write something like this, because I can't be sure who's reading it. But as I doubt I have very many followers, and perhaps even fewer people linking to here from our business website, I think I'll go on and state what I feel must be said.

I was watching TV last night through dinner -- feeling a bit bummed out from failing quite horribly my shot at the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), 1st level, and thinking that I should get started right away at studying (in whatever free time I can manage) for the next one in six months. With only five (sometimes six) channels to flip through, there wasn't anything particularly interesting on at this hour; however, I decided upon a program that had just started which revealed design ideas and plans for upcoming car and other consumer appliance models. 「空想からのデザイン」 (kusou kara no dezain), was the motto, I think -- basically meaning something like "a design of fantasy." It continued to repeat this creed as it cycled through different ideas from cars and whatnot that would highly appeal to today's Japanese youth.

I'll focus on the car bit since I think this is a great example of exactly what kind of practice has put me in such a sour mood. When asked if they ever planned on buying a car, the random young interviewees among the busy crowd said they'd rather not as cars are expensive and there are after all many trains that can take you just about anywhere in Japan. Hence the problem in the eyes of both the show's staff and the car manufacturers: a lack of demand. Now I'm of course looking at this and thinking about the 温暖化 (ondanka), global warming, awareness promotion commercial I'd seen just a few hours earlier on the same day. Isn't this hesitation in the consumer public to buy more CO2 emitters a good thing? Yes, I know, there's an financial crisis on our hands as well, and an economic stimulation is necessary to keep the cash flowing and businesses in business. But is creating and selling more cars the best way to handle this? Worried about the manufacturing employees? I'm sure they are too. But our best way to tackle issues in general isn't to merely tackle them one at a time. Societies are still unreasonably bad at handling their problems in a relational and systemic manner...

Anyway, the creation of demand seems at the heart of this matter -- an unabashed ignorance of what should be done, what should be in demand, and what we know we can make quick and easy money off of. Take a couple of examples of the car model design ideas. There's the 'theater car,' described by one of the designer representatives as basically 'a theater on wheels' and great for making easy friends. (It's probably also effective in impressing girlfriends.) Then there's the camera-attachment car, which features a large but unobtrustive manually controllable camera on the dashboard -- perhaps thought at first useful for videotaping roadtrips but clearly advertised both on the show and by the company for turning inward and videotaping ourselves (or two young teenage girls showing peace fingers, as was the case). The first model is tied to our friendship needs and loneliness, an acknowledged social issue in mainstream Japan. The second turns to what appeals in all of us: our ego, promoting a new and shiny narcissist fashion of driving.

Here at MIE (and many other businesses and even schools) we are constantly pushed to follow a very similar way of business. We have attempted in several avenues to create demand where it isn't readily available -- in this case, for English. English is showcased like a car as a cool and popular thing to have. It is further manipulated to distort real issues into seeming the solution to our own personal or social problems. Don't have friends? Learn English and meet some cool white people. (You can see a black person on an advertisement every now and then as well -- which must mean we're becoming even more "international.") Wishing you had tendered your curiosity of everything and studied harder while you were young? Well, you still can! Come study English, and keep your mind strong and working! And when none of that works, it's easy to point out the rising foreigner population -- ignoring all the Chinese, Filipinos, Brazilians, etc. who have been present here for some time now -- the rising population of Americans (who are deemed anyone who's white...and now maybe black too.) The international/intercommunity commucation problems that World Englishes have the ability to help solve are actually being put on hold for the sake of those trying to make the same quick buck.

And the worst part is, most everyone believes them.

MIE teaching developments

Long time no write...

Things have been very busy at MIE in the past. Recently, though, it feels like things have calmed down a little. I'm still working about as hard as before to prepare for classes and such; but I feel much more organized than before, and I've given less attention to attracting new students than before.

I'm becoming more organized thanks to trial-and-error and a couple of changes of habit. I'm attempting to keep a schedule book now (something I loathed the idea of before), and I try to hone my teaching plans for the adults' classes in on making basic materials (textbook stuff, etc.) more exciting than they would be otherwise. Up to now, I practically did away with basic materials or attempted to create only my own. While I appreciated the opportunity to be innovative, I failed to give enough value to a foundation in resources; I was more or less just copying anything I liked here or there and dishing it out at high speed. But now, I'm weighing in the fact that the textbooks I've selected are ordered in a professionally decided way, and while I shouldn't become completely reliant on them, I should definitely give them the credit and attention they deserve. Besides, extending from the texts still allows me the opportunity to do and use what I want, and with more relevancy than the random fashion I had going before.

The children's classes have completely revolutionized. I owe everything to a little research I did on methodologies used in Montessori schools after being introduced to one during my stay in the US this past Christmas. I've been making the materials myself (boxes neatly organized with colored juggling bean bags or miniature objects for pronunciation games or rearrangeable shapes, including print-out laminated flashcards), which has taken a decent toll on my time as well.

As far as my waning attention on attracting new students, I feel completely justified by saying that we have done just about all we possibly can in that area, including flyers, posters, radio advertisement, and institution visits, and I honestly think that the better thing to focus on at this point is making the classes here so good that they advertize themselves via word of mouth. Quite frankly, I'm sick of soliciting myself anyway -- just a couple of fallen ethics short of prostitution. People will come and stay at this point because they want to, not because they've been convinced that they need something that they see no realistic immediate benefits in (aka, the process of creating demand).

Anyway, things will probably continue to grow busy again from here, as I will have to start visiting and teaching at local elementary schools and the military base in the next town over.

Other random news:

- I just purchased a Japanese Acer Aspire One yesterday, which is what I'm using at work now.
- I've begun adding extended pages to the MIE website that will include further interesting studies and study methods in both English and Japanese.
- The rain and fog here today is beautiful in a wet and dreary way.
- Naoko will be graduating next month. We're not sure yet how that will effect our lives until she starts working less than a month later.
- I'm growing my nails out for no great reason except that I'm finding unexpected advantages in having them.

Translations -- 翻訳、、、

I've just added language translations by Google to the side bar here -->
Please use freely ^-^

Googleよりの翻訳リンクをサイドバーに付けときました。-->
ご自由に使ってください！

Mitoyo International Exchange...

The Mitoyo International Exchange Company

This is my new home. ...It's also my new workplace.

こちらは、私の新しい住まいになっている。、、、そして、私の新しい職場にもなっている。

My room is on the second floor. It's a Japanese-style room with a very small kitchen and a bathroom. I will live here for a few years for now.

部屋は二階にある。ちっちゃい台所とトイレが設備された和室だ。一応何年かここに住むつもり。

Right now, we have English and Chinese classes. I hope that we have more activities soon.

今は英語と中国語の授業をやっている。でも、すぐもっと活動ができていくといいんだけど。

Anyway, until next time!

それで、またね！

There seems to be a small trend growing on Youtube.com to make multilingual mosaic-like soundbytes in scenes from different popular movies. Last night, I stayed up til 1am watching song scenes from Disney films (particularly from Pocahontas and Mulan) in such 'multi-language' formats. "Colors of the Wind," rendered in Korean, Japanese, Thai, Cantonese and Mandarin for its 'Asiatic' rendition, for some reason or other moved me considerably. It's one of the few times I've tasted a small bit of the beauty in a diversity of spoken languages, even through such a simple form of media.

Yet I was also naturally inclined to later reflect on the significance of the ethics concerning such an international corporate business as products of Disney fall under. Movies and songs like these had a substantial influence on my moral upbringing when I was quite young. That such stories and imagery of popular American film industry are now passed on to the youth of a plurality of nations worldwide, in their own respective languages, bids one consider the content, the messages, imbedded in them. (The same bidding is made by any widely distributed media production generated within the scope of the world's nations' majoritarian perspectives.)

Etically (as opposed to emically) speaking, is it not possible that the world's young are all being raised under primarily Western (more specifically American) moral guidance in this way? Naturally, if you believe in the possibility that such media reflect overarching (or perhaps deeply underlying) universal emotions and portrayals of the human psyche, one must still ask why America is the number one selling producer of it. Is it just that Americans can afford to make so many? India makes hundreds (if not thousands?) more movies per year, but who is familiar with anything of theirs beyond their Bollywood productions (whose genre itself derives from the far more renowned American Hollywood)? How have such American film media grown so popular in the first place, such that merchandise of major corporations like Disney are now in place all over the world via everything from daily stationary to theme parks? Is it just because the stories' messages are universally good, as some would put it? Is it the quality of the production? Isn't it odd how despite more historical and even more artistically moving alternatives, it continues to be corporations like Disney that take most of the international spotlight?

(If nothing else, consider the biases in the storylines and plot changes in these movies. I was rather surprised, for example, to read that Mulan had been originally written as the tale of a Chinese girl whisked away from a life of oppression in her country by a British prince figure who introduces her to the Western world... Big red flag.)

By now, of course, we can no more say that such stories and forms of education media haven't become a part of these nations culturally speaking than that a Japanese seafood dish isn't a part of my anatomical person after having ingested it. It can't be argued that those in foreign countries watching these films are any less touched by some of the content than we Americans are. Regardless, however prone to swells of emotion we might be when listening to such 'childhood classics,' it would be a sign of ignorance not to regard such matters more steadfastly, wary of the possibility (what I'd argue an overwhelming probability) of a moral monopoly we're creating for our future global generations, extending far past even as huge an industry as Disney. After all, it is the world's children we're talking about here, not just yours and mine.

Euro-Chinese food

Here's a not-so-rare account of the sort of experience a person of my complexion and outline can expect from even some of the more metropolitan areas of 'internationalizing' Japan. Although I'm sure one finds this sort of thing no matter what country they may choose to live in, it's one of those things that white people in particular (even having stayed for years) may have the most difficult time adjusting to, despite its overall harmlessness (compared to cases of discrimination that result in more overt forms of violence). Thus it is particularly worth experiencing, I think, as a white person, the experience of being unspokenly minoritarian.


It was my idea to go to the little Chinese restaurant near my apartment. I'd been craving it for a week, and it seemed like a nice way to end the day J-------, my friend from San Francisco, and I spent with a couple of our Japanese friends at an old traditional house of theirs -- an endless series of low-ceiling tatami mat rooms whose floors seemed to give very slightly in some places, in contrast to the mostly refurnished and modern look of the kitchen where we had tea and spoke in Japanese and English about miscellaneous things. That evening, J------- and I met at the end of the covered shotengai, to keep neither of us waiting in the dark dreary rain that had conquered the night, and took off on the two-minute ride through the light drizzle. I pointed out the broken restaurant sign on wheels that still stood lit out front despite the act of violence it had encountered.

A teenage couple, the boy in a hoodie and gold chains, the girl in extensive makeup and with her hair done up in an unnatural dark brunette bush, sat toward the back of the flourescent lit single-room parlor, which echoed with the sounds of the large black TV box that sat on the half wall blocking the view of the cashier or the kitchen from the entrance. We were motioned by a chubby man playing the part of both chef and waiter to sit on the other side of the automatic glass door across from a man sitting cross-legged in his chair straining to watch the television from his inconvenient location. Blocking us even further from most of the rest of the room was a small potted tree that I couldn't classify but nonetheless appreciated for its cover.

The chubby man walked over now carrying an order ticket, wearing a starch white chef's apron and an unappealing two-corner hat that made him look like a butcher. He stopped for just a moment to look me over, then turned to J-------, thumbing at me while asking,

"どっからきました？" Where is he from?

My friend looked lost for only a second then replied, America. Without hesitation, as though this wasn't the first time I was saying it (although I never had with the amount of conviction I feigned this night), I stated in a clear voice that traveled farther than I'd intended it that we were both Americans. The chef took a step back, as though to literally try to get a look at some bigger picture, and restated in perplexity what I'd said. He didn't take his eyes off J-------, asking her if she was nisseijin, a Westernized Japanese, to which (with what seemed to me like slight indignation), not even bothering to go into the significant detail that she hadn't even a trace of Japanese blood from her Chinese parents, she answered,

"いいえ、アジア系..." No, I'm Asian(-American).

The chef repeated the word she used as if it had never come out of his mouth before (perhaps it hadn't), taking a few steps back and disappearing quickly from view behind the unidentified tree without taking our order. He came back every now and then to check on us and answer a question we had about a dish of shrimp in chili sauce, seeming unsure which of us to speak to but keeping his eyes steadfast on J-------. I apologized at length to her for putting her in spotlight without her permission. Unnerved at first, we allowed ourselves to drop it and move forward in conversation. A woman who made a point to look at neither of us, and who I assumed to be the chef's wife, took our order and occasionally stopped at our table to pour us water.

I read a line the next morning from Lahiri's The Nameless that seemed to well characterize the way I felt at that moment: "...In this misrendering they are joined." I don't know what I'd do without the friends I've made in this place, both native and foreign to it. I'm far too oversensitive to these things to handle them alone.

I stood in the middle

of the massive walkway of Washington D.C.’s international airport, responding to the details of the scene around me, of the wild flurry of face colors and outbursts of random expressive dialogues. I first wanted to flee to a corner, but decided to just walk the course. I had not realized how deeply I had been internalizing my immediate environment overseas, my brain now scrambling to adjust to the flux between the quiet, mundane and (dare I admit?) homogenous feel of the noticeably harmonious processes and events at Japan’s airports and accommodations, to the in-your-ears, in-your-face haphazard scrimmage of mayhem that I had arrived at here again. I started forward thinking, “It’s not really quite as big a difference as all that. You’re just being overly sensitive right now...” I could not wait to be in safety again in meeting my family.

I went home to Tennessee for Christmas. Actually, I arrived home just a couple of days before we set out for Arkansas for Christmas. It was a family first, possibly to become a tradition if things played out well. The trip there gave me the opportunity to look around at all the space Americans take for granted. From the plane, I remember finally thinking of a decent example of imagery to help explain what it is like to view the suburban neighborhoods of the two countries from the sky: about a thousand of a Monopoly boardgame’s small green plastic ‘house’ pieces being crammed together to represent Japan, and a sporadic dotting of the land with the large red ‘hotel’ pieces for the States. Having said that even, I am not sure I could really give the full impression in just words.

We rented a large three room cottage sitting just on the shore of Lake Ouachita, looking out with several other cottages across the expanse of a mirrored sky and mountain range vista. My mother, a dear friend, my younger brother, my older brother, my sister-in-law, my nephew, and my niece. We decorated the house to where we could have made Christmas postcards out of the picture of the living room. My mother stirred up inticing aromas in the kitchen. Our friend looped an Eric Clapton blues and country concert on the television. My sister-in-law took turns with my older brother tending to the little ones. He traded places occasionally with my little brother in keeping the fireplace alive. I stepped out onto the back deck to watch the predusk mysts crawl up the hillside evergreen branches to pass over the mountaintops. In spite of all the family activity indoors, the mysts gave me an eery feeling - as if for a moment something in me believed it had not yet left Japan. I recognized it as that part of me that sometimes plays games, beckoning me to glance closely at a natural scene nearby and guess whether or not I would recognize it from Japan or the States; until giving it a closer look, there are times that I doubt I would.

Feeling a bit playful, I wrote everyone’s names on their presents from me in Chinese/Japanese characters. The process of selecting the characters, feeling lucky enough if I can find a combination that might express a coherent thought and still be aesthetically attractive, and feeling enlightened to find one that further actually describes something I see in the person I am creating it for, is one that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. I felt doubly happy to find within me no expectations toward anyone else’s appreciation (although I was told it was indeed appreciated), just joyful to have taken the time for myself to try to communicate something to others both in how I think of them and in how a certain lingual portion of my mind now operates; the work was a greater reward than whatever reception it entailed.

Having taken that selfish moment for myself, I worked harder to pay close attention to where I was, what people were doing and saying, to not let the gestalts of my second home overseas distract me from what was actually happening around me now. My older brother introduced me to Alex Grey through an illustration book and video, and the three of us with my younger stayed up until the early morning hours discussing our impressions of this type art and relevant matters. We also talked about our intention for their visit to Japan, which was finally revealed to my younger brother as his graduation-to-be present. Even after my older brother keeled over into bed, the latter two of us stayed up the rest of the night to talk about our lives and futures and to clean the living room.

I have missed these conversations. The point to which I am inseparably attached to my brothers often goes unrecognized through our long periods of silence between us. I wonder at times if I have ever really tried to express this attachment to them, or if that is necessary. In any case, I look excitedly forward to the possibility of their visit, which will encompass a large variety of adventures I have been planning (but not overplanning) for us.

Sitting in a cheap Mexican restaurant branching from a motel we rented on the way back to Tennessee, my last night in the U.S. for now, I thought about the extension of our family in Mexico (calling it that by another case of inseparable attachment to two Mexican exchange students who lived with us in Tennessee years back) and other extensions spread all over the continent (an international web of attachments). I wondered if my family could ever see my stay in Japan as I see it, just an extension of the web to the other side of the globe, no more separated, no less attached. Perhaps some of them do.

I hugged them each in the airport before the security check, reminding myself to embrace them in the manner of embracing the fact that this could always possibly be the last time - not in the order of making predictions but of never taking anything like this for granted. I would not think to consider this if I did not love them as deeply as I do.

I have almost never seen Japan

from an airplane during daylight hours before. At night, the assorted lights decorate the horizon and emanate a warm beacon of welcome to returnees. In the day, the origin of those lights shows itself. It was breathtaking to me - in the worst way. What were tens of thousands of modest twinkling lights, coming together to form a massive display of Tokyo’s hospitality and sense of togetherness, became thousands of grey, mostly featureless buildings and other city accessories covering the landscape as far as one’s eyes can see.

I glance at the other passengers staring out their windows, gaping at the sight of their own city, and I wonder what they are thinking. Amazement? Horror? Comfort?

I had also still never seen Fuji-san in person before, and I scanned the sight below for it. One or two mountains looked promising at first. Then, from the side of my tiny window, something monstrous slowly creeped into the scene. I simply could not believe the awesome size of what I was looking at, and it made me forget the ugliness of the prior subject for a moment. Mt. Fuji towers above everything, a sky-reaching formation that dwarfs the entire rest of the island’s topography, like a pillar to the heavens. Its snowcap shines with the brilliance and intimacy of the moon. It was immeasurably more inviting than any number of lights the city could offer.

I finally noticed that a heavy smoke was billowing ominously from the sides of the mountain, not unlike clouds seeping out of the cracks from some magical world beneath the earth. The sun shining fiercely on all sides, I thought that it must be steam, evaporation of the snow. One might otherwise mistake it for pre-eruption volcanic activity, that is how much of this steam was pouring from it. I was surprised it had taken me as long as it did to notice it, and became horrified again at what it was suggesting. Starting from immediately outside the mountain’s circumference, the grey boxes covered every inch of land, crowding around the stage to watch the rising stage smoke of the performance high above. Fuji-san is surrounded by an apparent plague of concrete. Imagining the skin of a mammoth creature, I thought to myself, My god, it looks like cancer.

I hate to paint such a picture of any part of a country I have come to endear, but this critical point must be realized of it: Japan threatens itself with forgetting, and forever losing, itself to a development project it no longer needs and is letting continue in dangerous excess.

Having made it

to Osaka by plane, I took the rest of the way home (which took nearly all day) by trains along the shore of the Seto Inland Sea. This sea has come to hold a lot of memories of this country for me. I gazed at the path I took during a ridiculously long bike trip to Himeji (from Osaka) on the way to Hiroshima over three years ago. I remember having stopped then at the entrance to the Seto Bridge crossing into the south island of Shikoku, which at the time seemed distant and mysterious to me, thinking, ‘I wish I had the room on this trip to go there...I promise I will someday,’ bowing to the island before continuing on along the shore. I now live on that island... I guess I fulfilled the promise after all, however unintentionally. I smiled as the train approached the the turn to cross the bridge.

It was just turning 6:30 when I got home, collapsing on my unmade futon in the middle of the room, leaving my bags in the doorway. My good Japanese friend, M---, had mailed me while I was on the trains, reminding me that we had a promised arrangement to visit Konpira-san, an old mountain that features shrine a bit south of the city, for our traditional New Year’s shrine visit and prayer, called hatsumode (初詣). I had nearly forgotten it was New Year’s Eve. I slept for four hours in my clothes before my alarm sounded to go to the station to meet him.

We talked nearly the entire train ride, my brain on Japanese auto-pilot while the rest of me fought to wake up. Things around us grew darker and darker as the train wound its way into the rice paddy acreage toward midland Shikoku. We arrived in Konpira welcomed by red candle lanterns that lined the sides of the river and streets. People shuffled excitedly in small groups in all directions, trying to decide where to be for the midnight climax or how to get there in time. M--- and I headed upriver of the majority of the crowd toward a temple set at the foot of the mountain that still had a good view of the valley town. The toll of the temple bells began ringing just as we neared the long flight of entrance steps, and I immediately began counting them.

By tradition, the bells are rung 108 times. I have heard different explanations for why, but the one I have found the most interesting (and is probably the most accurate) is that it is derived from the Buddhist notion of shikuhakku (四苦八苦). The shiku part directly reads as ‘four sufferings,’ standing for life, old age, sickness and death (生老病死, shouroubyoushi), which after seeing in four different men is what drove the Buddha (Shakyamuni, or the Gautama Buddha) to seek enlightment and thereby realize his Buddhahood. They are the four attributes to living that characterize our humanity and from which we can never hide or run away from. The hakku part reads as ‘eight sufferings,’ symbolizing four more sufferings that accompany and thereby magnify the four base sufferings, being the suffering from separation from those we love (愛別離苦, aibetsuriku); the suffering from the meeting of people toward whom we grow bitter (怨憎会苦, onzou’eku); the suffering from the inability to attain what we desire (求不得苦, gufutokuku); and the suffering from our inescapable attachment to the five elements comprising us physically, mentally and emotionally (五陰盛苦, go’onjyouku). In a more colloquial use, shikuhakku has come to mean being in a really painful or stressful situation.

But the really neat part is how one gets 108 from this (and this part was actually explained to me by one of my junior high school students). You see, ku is also one of the readings for ‘nine’ (九) in Japanese, and so shikuhakku can also be read as ‘four nine eight nine’ (四九八九), from which we get 4 * 9 = 36, and 8 * 9 = 72. Finally, 36 + 72 = 108, which is apparently congruent with the number of earthly desires described in Buddhist texts. I have no idea who thought this all through, but it reminds me a little (though perhaps not on the same scale) of the word-embedded mathematical relationships in the Hebrew language. Anyway, the bells are thus rung 108 times in respect and mindfulness for those in suffering, including (to a far lesser recognized extent, I think) ourselves.

I used to approach the concept of suffering in Buddhism with a lot of skepticism, feeling that it did little else but denounce life as just a grand play of suffering and pain, as nearly all religions do to some degree or other. In recent years, however, I have to come to recognize that, outside of the stricter sects (again, found in just about any religion), the suffering mentioned in Buddhism seems to point at more than anything a potential for suffering. Life is not inherently a world of suffering, but can be made one, inflicted by others or (perhaps most importantly according to the teachings) by oneself. It is therefore less about that there is sickness and death and so on, but in how we approach these fundamentally human events. That is how the Buddha died (in Gautama Buddha form) even in having become the Buddha, for he recognized the illusion by which we paint the event as ‘death’; thus, the Buddha died and did not die (-- recognize any parallels with Christianity here?...). It still leaves a lot to consider about those countless around the world who have been victimized and made to suffer by political decisions and big corporation money scheming, maintained by residents and consumers in ignorance of their day-to-day decisions. (Coincidently, the Chinese character chosen to represent this past year of 2007 was 偽 [gi], which basically means ‘deception’or 'fraud,' in response to these very violators of the country and world’s peoples.) Some of the truly mindful, I think, see suffering as a product of the mind yet nonetheless a substantially real and embodied matter of infliction by interaction with internal and external forces. Thus, ‘illusion’ or not, we are still all obligated to be mindful and do something about this suffering mess we have created or are in the very least perpertuating throughout our daily activities.

I thought of this as I stood at the edge of the temple grounds overlooking this quiet marginal region of the Takamatsu area. The final bell tolls sounded and left us in several minutes of silence.

お正月一日に見た夢

I have a lot more I'd like to share about my holidays -- I just haven't written it yet. So, for now, I'll just post what I dreamt the other night...

In Japanese culture, one's dreams on the night of the first day of the new year (that's a mouthful) can hold important omens for the new year and oneself. I haven't gone into a whole lot of overanalyzing of the dreams I had, but I wrote them down as soon as I could after waking. They're here for anyone who's interested, until I get the rest of what I want to write into blog form...

壱

Two small dragons barely escape beyond a hidden door in the wall of a severely flooded house. Arrows strike the door where they swam just moments before. Outside the door, the two begin to quarrel.

“There’s no hope. It’s over. The country will soon go to ruins.”

“It’s not over yet,” the older one says. “There is still hope. I have something to show you.”

The two press together under a jingasa hat that surfaces just above the water and make for the other end of the house. Beyond the porch under which they hide, archers continue to shoot at and ransack the house. As the two of them swim slowly out from beneath the porch, they see a small drop, now a small waterfall from the flood, toward the east extension of the house. Under the water shines the light of a single room. The older dragon moves them toward it.

A group of children are pretending to be soldiers on just this side of the porch, and they playfully shoot their smaller versions of arrows at the hat as the approach. A couple of them, unlike the adults, immediately recognize that something is swimming beneath the seemingly lost floating hat. A robust child takes one of his arrows and ducks it into the water beneath the hat to strike at the victims from below. The arrow pierces the breast of the older dragon, who cries and sinks away. The other takes an arrow the child has dropped and strikes from the water up into the child’s neck. The arrow misses all vitals but visibly wounds the child, who attempts to cry out, finds himself unable to voice anything, and immediately scrambles away from the scene. The dragon turns to help his senior, only to find him sunk, dead, at the bottom of the drop.

弐

There is a grand stage with no curtains, that opens to no audience. The strong air of countless deaths hangs here. In a past age, we see men come here - willingly or forcibly we cannot be sure. They stand almost naked with their hands tied behind them, but they do not struggle or fight to flee. An unseen presence watches from the impenetrable darkness back stage; but it shows no signs of controlling or urging them forward.

One of the men onstage looks upward as something too fast to be seen descends upon him, snatching him up before drawing back to its invisible overhead origin in a flash of light. The man begins to shout something before he disappears, but it is indecipherable.

A second man goes and stands waiting on a one-board plank above a hole in the stage. From the underwater depths below, a shapeless red mass rises and rapidly changes shape to encapsulate the man, like a large deranged mouth that twists shut to incarcerate its victim. A face like that of an ancient dragon mask appears painted on its outside, its eyes glaring hauntingly forward at nothing. As suddenly as it appeared, the mass drops into the water and sinks to the bottom. As it buries itself in the sand, a voice inside can be heard crying, “This is it! This is the last chance!” It then disappears forever into the sandy bed.

Another man hangs perilously from his ankles by a rope dangling above the waters. It dips him down to about his midriff. We watch from his eyes, gazing down into the merky blue darkness, as another dark maroon shape begins growing larger in approaching him. It looks like a bloated twelve-armed starfish, spinning something shiny from its center. It stops a few meters away and shoots its central appendage forward, seemingly past the man’s line of sight. Then, the pain of the neck being severed from one’s shoulders dawns on him, and we see ourselves drifting slowly downward as the head falls away from the body, toward the gaping, featureless creature. We hear the man’s final thoughts, “It’s the last chance. Before its all over...”

From the darkness of the backstage, something seems to bow its figureless head. thousands of men continue to come onstage in this manner.

参

The stage is bare. It appears old and mostly unused; however, there is still something eery about it that reminds one of what it was before.

A black foreigner in a mustard-color kimono stands below where the audience is supposed to be, waiting. On the stage appears five or six other people: a Japanese man, a white curly-haired blonde, and several younger adults who appear to be their children. They peer down over the man in a heavy solidarity.

“All have come to us,” says the woman.

“All has come to us,” says the man.

They are the family of Manketsu (万決 - ‘a thousand decisions’). Their children are theirs more by adoption than by bloodline. Many appear ready to kill themselves, or kill the foreigner below if given the order to do so.

“Why do you choose us?” the man quietly demands.

The foreigner lowers his eyes for a moment, thinking of an appropriate answer. He finally thinks of something to say just as the woman breaks the silence.

“Perhaps you’ve heard of us without knowing it. After all, you surely don’t know the origins of such Westernized poetry as the child’s ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider,’ now do you?”

Confused, the foreigner looks up to see them all staring heavenward as the woman begins to rehearse what could only be the commonly silly rhyme hideously warped by an ancient Japanese tongue. Devoid of its familiar light and playful English rhythm, it falls into a deeper and deeper mystic frequency, like a mantra sung by a thousand hermit monks. A clearer sense of the poem’s true meaning begins to flash in his mind, beckoning images of things forgotten and things never meant to be understood.

The family onstage seems to wait for something to descend upon them, surrounded in an air of life-threatening urgency by the words, filled with an unbearable weight in dread of whatever is to come. The foreigner falls back, perplexed by the scene before him, as the earth all around him slowly shifts into a violent quaking.

>>><<<

All is black except for the bright white lines of a two-dimensional grid that lights up beneath my feet. I stand on one of the thicker jagged lines apart from and above the grid by a small distance. The grid bears a resemblance to a warped graph without value tags, and the line I stand on reminds me of a map’s train track depiction, though one without a beginning or end in sight.

I look out over the horizon of lines to just barely see a large dot connected by another thick formless line that runs somewhat in my direction. I travel effortlessly at great speeds over the one I am on, to eventually find the 45 degree-angle junction I suspected existed. Taking the new route, I see blurry flashing images to my right, that each for an instant fill the black void beyond my path - images of familiar places and people.

Coming to a stop at the dot that has only barely room for standing, I wonder what I was supposed to find here. The images over the horizon have stopped, and I stand simply waiting.

In this place between sleep and wake, I quietly recall that everything, without exception, is meaningful; it is to one’s benefit to acknowledge that before continuing to anywhere. At that moment, the space beneath my feet rises, like a topographical map gone three-dimensional. I am lifted higher and higher into the air on the peak of a giant land mass, whose sides are lined with more presently shapeless symmetry toward its base. The white dot extends out, seeming to melt toward the downward-sloped sides, into an elaborate snow cap. As it comes to rest in its growth, I find myself looking down from the crest of Fuji-san into the expanse below.

All around the mountain, against the deep green of trees at its base, thousands of tiny grey buildings form, sweeping outward, as though a light is dilating from the mountain’s center to show what lays beyond. I watch the progression of buildings move farther into the distance in all directions, occasionally running up against much smaller dead hillsides and shore lines. The mountain’s sides begin to steam and turn to bellowing smoke.

“This is what I’m meant to see,” I think as I become dissolved in the clouds of steam and am blown up into the invisible heavens above.

お終い

きよしこの夜による、、、

Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute heilige Paar.
Holder Knab im lockigten Haar,
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!


Silent night! Holy night!
All are sleeping, alone and awake
Only the intimate holy pair,
Lovely boy with curly hair,
Sleep in heavenly peace!
Sleep in heavenly peace!

（http://www.stillenacht.at/en/text_and_music.aspにより）

これは多分もう知っている「清しの夜」から最初の連。歌の生まれてきたドイツ語に基づいてのこの英語には、もっとも人気のある下のバージョンを比べたら、多くの違いに気づくかもしれない。そして、その日本語：

Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin mother and child
Holy infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace
Sleep in heavenly peace

清しこの夜、星は光り
救いの御子[みこ]は、馬槽[まぶね]の中に
眠り給う、いと安く

現在のこれの英語がどうできたかのについてはあまり分からないけど、日本語バージョンの方は不思議だと思う。これもよく分からない。日本語ウィキペディアによりの説明を読んでも明らかにならない。ここからの下記しかなかった：

「【きよしこの夜】にはじまる日本語の歌詞は由木康による。」

でも「由木康」のリンクには何もつないでいない。そしたら、記事のその続きは：

「近年では中学校などで英語教育も兼ねて英語の歌詞で歌われている。また中学2年生の英語の教科書の一つである【NEW HORIZON】で、きよしこの夜が作られるまでの物語が紹介されている。」

この事実からこそ、僕が歌のもとを調べたかったな。やっぱりここまででもの結果は面白いなと思う。

Merry Christmas!

bilingual misconception

This is an essay i wrote for this year's prefectural English Journal, which circulates around the junior high teachers' offices of Kagawa Prefecture. The actual publishing date is sometime in early spring, I believe, but as it probably won't be read by anyone outside of the prefecture (not to mean that everyone in the prefecture might), I'm posting it here as well. I was going to call it "Bilingual Misconception," but I reconsidered after a conversation with someone outside work regarding how important a role the title can play to a mainstream audience. I chose something possible more intriguing, especially to any teachers who are curious or neurotic about English teaching here.

The original plan was to have a complete Japanese translation to appear side-by-side with the English. Unfortunately, there was a general lack of time and writing skills (on my part) to get it finished on time, and as it would have come to something like six pages anyway, i scrapped all but the translation of the first paragraph (to serve as, I hope, a sort of hook for Japanese readers, for whom it is especially intended). I also had to do away with about a page or so of information I believe is quite important to a lot of the argument being made here -- again, page limits forced a compromise, and it would have taken far more that what I had at the time anyway to fully demonstrate the links I wanted people to see.

Nonetheless, I hope someone out there gets something out of it. Tear it apart as you wish; it's an open forum, and we're all well opinionated persons at this point in the game.

11.2007

平成十九年十一月

Our Mistakes Concerning English

kelsey

I read the sentence again for perhaps the sixth or seventh time, listening to the early teenage girl sitting next to me in an empty, stuffy classroom try to correct her mistakes and repeat it to me accurately. She only has three more days, through which she is already busy with club activities and other obligations, to memorize a full-page length speech that she is expected to give in front of a live audience that includes teachers and parents. Yet she is still unable to adequately recall even the first few lines of the first paragraph. I had already made her translate it and began the practice under the impression that she had some idea of what she was trying to say in this foreign language. But the words continue to disappear into the sounds of the rotating fan, her face tense in concentration to dig up, or simply create from nothing, the right sounds to, what is after all to her, a nonsensical string of sentences. Through the window, the tinny melody of one of the last representative tunes of old-Japan nationalist fervor grows louder from the van’s blaring megaphone outside. The student tightens her face all the more, trying not to　forget the tones she just heard sound from my mouth.

六、七回目に文を読んだところだっただろうか。風通しの悪い、空いている部屋で隣に座っている女子中学生が、何度も原稿を繰り返して言い直し、僕のことばを繰り返しながら聞いていた。彼女にはあと三日しかなかった。スピーチの原稿を暗記しなければならないのに、部活や勉強に忙しくて、まだ最初の一、二文も、ちゃんとおぼえていないらしかった。先生や両親が聞いている前で発表しないといけないスピーチの原稿の一ページも。すでに、彼女に文章を書き直させていた僕は、英語で言いたいことを、彼女はもう分かっていると思いながら練習に入った。ところが、彼女の自信のない声は、部屋の扇風機の音に消え入ってしまって聞こえない。発音しようとしている単語の意味もよく理解していないのに、彼女の顔はだんだんこわばっていった。窓からバンのメガホンをとおして、昔ながらの響きが残っている愛国心を代表する曲がブリキのような音で鳴ってきて、彼女は曲の音にかき消されないように、もっと顔をぎゅっとして、ただ僕の言ったことばに集中しようと頑張っていた。

This is not an uncommon scene here in Japan today. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Science, Sports and Technology (MEXT) has been generously funded to carry out the government agenda of creating a bilingual Japan by 2006/07.[1] Though the agenda’s timeline has ended, the popularity of English as an international lingua franca, and the government’s own international economic interests, have not died down. The plan applies to everyone in the country, and not just those interested in the language. It seems to be assumed that English will be as valuable to the rice paddy farmhand of Kotohira or Tsuji as it will to the corporate employee of downtown Tokyo or Osaka. Japan believes there is much benefit in a bilingual citizenry – a citizenry that includes any one regional Japanese dialect and the ‘international’ monodialect English. This belief has coincidentally arisen at the same time with a national reawakening for Japanese tradition and national identity.

Of course not everyone thinks this way. JET Program ALTs, including myself, have had a valuable opportunity to see and work in the inner structure of the education system in this country, and to witness a small part of the period of adjustment Japan is still making to the overarching globalization effort. Through this short time, I have reconsidered many times what my purpose is in being here and what the government’s actual intentions are for us ALTs through this major reforming engagement toward Japanese-English bilingualism. It now seems to me that there are a few conceptual mistakes about the role of English and why English has become a mandatory subject in Japan’s education.

There are at least two major factors for the discrepancy concerning what version of English should be learned in Japanese education. One of these factors is country-wide popularity of the globalizing World English (WE). With the awareness of the growing number of English speakers in the world, there is a pleasant but unrealistic idea that has formed that English can be an all-encompassing communication bridge between us and the billions of other people around the world, interlinking us in a web of idea-sharing and harmony. Thus, WE is thought of as a sort of ‘door to the world’. This may be partially true, but it ignores essential lingual and political details, for example that there are over twice as many speakers of Chinese (about 1.051 billion) than English, and that in fact English (at 340 million) is only fourth in the sheer number of native speakers in respect to Hindi (370m) and Spanish (350m).[2] In fact, English is really in the top ranking only in the number of countries where it is spoken, due to the European and American colonialism that spread around the world, including Japan, centuries before. There have been identified hundreds of different dialects and thousands of country-variable portmanteaux of English – thus, it is better to say that there are many Englishes throughout the world. However, with so many differences and exceptions, it is hard to say that WE is really a single, unifying lingual ‘bridge’.

Secondly, with the United States being the highest ranking economic competitor in the world (in regards to GDP), if any English is important to learn, many say it should be the ‘American’ dialect. These people perhaps believe that it is for the country’s benefit to develop good economic relations with the world’s wealthiest superpowers, and one clearly diplomatic way to do this is to study and use the wealthier country’s particular version of its language. Indeed, nearly all of the resource materials available for private English study, as well as those that are used in the public education system [3], cater to a United States version of English, especially in pronunciation, intonation, word choice and spelling.

There may be other reasons to cater to this particular form of English. For instance, some argue that ‘American English’ is the most neutral form of English among those of other countries. But in reality, this idea of neutrality is absurd. The selection of a ‘neutral’ – which here means ‘being a common middle-ground among a diversity of types’ – is arbitrary: it is merely propagated as a ‘standard’ variation. The lingual monoliths known as General American English and Received Pronunciation (RP), or the Queen’s English, are each also known as “Network English” and “BBC English,” denoting the English accents and word choices used in media in the United States and Britain respectively. They have become representative dialects of the nations they serve, despite representing only a small particular region of each country among a diversity of language variations.[4] However, as BBC has reduced its discrimination against English accents and manners of speaking, it has lost popularity among English authorities and learners in other countries (i.e. Japan). These countries instead consider monodialect United States Network English the ‘most neutral form’ of the whole English language.[5] Unfortunately, this particular kind of English is often what people refer to when talking about World English – thus, WE has become more and more associated with the United States’ General American English.

In my opinion, we should recognize that the education of English as a truly international language cannot resemble the education of any other subject in Japanese public schools, for English’s diversity in the real world – what I call real-world Englishes (RWEs) – requires diversity in how it is learned and taught. Therefore, one more point to consider is that Japan’s present highly centralized education system would probably be in knots trying to accommodate that diversity. With RWEs, English education would revolve around mostly those living in the English-speaking communities of particular regions of the country or continent, including both immigrants and English-speaking Japanese, and not merely around the dominant patterns offered by superpower nations. Today’s ‘World English is little more than a language industry provided by those supporting the world’s dominating corporate leaders. Meanwhile, an education system of RWEs supports the world by giving equal representation of the world’s English speakers and not conforming to one standard form of English in one’s own country. This system of RWEs would also prove what many authorities and learners of English might fear: that there really is no perfect English, only more context-appropriate English. In reality, the present education of World English is strongly centralized around the United States. That is, this order for bilingual citizenry is a top-down determination by authorities, further perpetuated by its popularity among a misunderstanding public, concerned for Japan’s welfare in a U.S.-oriented world economy.

In short, the simplistic pragmatism idealized in World English as a single language communicable among the world’s billions is critically challenged by the technicalities of the language’s evolution, as well as ethically challenged by its political history and government intentions. I do not mean here that all intentions for learning English are to appease the United States. Besides envisioning it as a door to the world, the government and many education authorities appear to view the language as a door to Japan as well.[6] But with language imperialism comes cultural imperialism, as we can see with the English language detracting more and more attention from the nation’s traditional character through its introduction of especially U.S. attractions (i.e. Disneyworld, Hollywood, Halloween, individual-oriented attitudes toward pedagogy, etc.). In any case, if this nation-wide Japanese-English bilingualism is to come true, I believe it is now every Japanese citizen’s obligation to reconsider exactly why English has become such a valuable industry to this small island country, and finally, if everyone can live with English’s unnecessary lingual and cultural American monopoly.

[1] From the MEXT English program website: http://www.mext.go.jp/english/topics/03072801.htm

[2] There are many websites and disputes regarding this topic. These are some of the sites I referred to: http://www.vistawide.com, http://web.ku.edu/idea, and http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/

turner/languages.htm.

[3] Mike from the New Horizon textbook may have been born in Australia, but the textbooks’ CDs reveal that he didn’t grow up there…

[4] Network English was actually derived from only a small portion of the United States mid-eastern region. Unfortunately, the mistaken idea of a ‘neutral’ English (i.e. media’s Network English) is made by many United States citizens as well as Japanese, such as the big business of accent reduction indicates.

[5] Of course, this American English will naturally seem easier for you to understand if you have only listened and read American-style English since you were a student. But this does not mean it has any ‘natural neutrality.’

[6] There is a persistent theme throughout the textbooks and in the opinions of many teachers that English is an essential tool to sharing aspects of Japanese culture to foreigners and the ‘outside’ world.

I wish to especially thank Kishinoue Kayoko, Ben Dewar and Nakamura Hanako for their constant help and support in the forming and writing of this essay.

The Last Days

The final days of my trip in China – which basically entails the last half – included many more new experiences that I did not bring myself to write about. On the evening of my last journal entry (the one just prior to this one here), I noticed that I had come to the very last line to the very last page of my notebook. I intended to buy a new notebook the next day to record the rest of the trip, but as I began to look for one, I firstly realized that finding a notebook without going completely out of the way in a city I knew little about was proving to be futile, and secondly, that I was spending so much of my evenings writing that I was perhaps missing out on some of the other events my colleagues were talking about. I decided to take the last page as a sign and not to pursue finding another notebook right away.

A while later, it has been hard to choose how to talk about what I saw during the rest of our time in Xi’an and the remainder of the trip in Shanghai. Rather than try in vain to give a detailed chronology of events, I want to share a few of my most memorable impressions from the country before I returned to my home in Japan.

>>><<<

On our final day in Xi’an, we visited the world renowned Terracotta Warrior statues. Emperor Qin, the one who united the kingdoms of ancient China to make it one land – and the same emperor who I believe is featured in the famous Chinese film Hero – upon reaching an elderly age ordered that a life-size clay imitation of each of the thousands of warriors who served him in his armies be created, so that he may be buried with them after his death. The people under this bidding suffered endlessly to have them ready by their tentative deadline, shaping and firing the clay in pieces before gluing them together and painting them (now the paint has been destroyed on most of them due to the immediate effect of the air upon their exhumation). The emperor died before their completion (and so the necessity to carry out the order to the end was halted as well), however as many as 8000 (maybe more) statues were buried along with the emperor. Over time, people with a vengeance against the emperor’s cruelty are said to have broken in to the underground and destroyed many of these statues.

Regardless, hundreds now stand excavated in one of the burial sites for all to see. They stand together, horses, weapons (real ones), carts, all facing one direction as if prepared for the next battle to come. It is such a mix of emotions to stand before something so hauntingly amazing yet knowing that it required so much involuntary suffering to make. I left with the others for Shanghai with that image in mind, of thousands of warriors standing, waiting together for a battle that would never come, in an age where battles no longer bear any resemblance to the ways of honor and even respect that hand-to-hand combat entailed. Mind you, I still find all war ugly – but there must be given a great care of respect in one’s regard to the difference between the warriors of old and the State-wielded militia of our time. It is not black and white either. The past had its share of military-minded individuals, and the present still holds, I believe, at least a handful of new warriors. But the hearts of the military-minds carry no philosophy, no meaning, no sense of life inherent to the concept of death they witness; and the present-day warriors’ swords are no longer blades of metal – indeed, they are in their greater numbers likely not found in the fields of war today at all.

>>><<<

Upon arriving in Shanghai, we all sat on the bus from the airport sleepily observing the environment around us, perhaps only a couple of us listening to the information our new Chinese guide was serving us. She was younger than the others and her slightly wavering fluency gave the impression that this was still one of her new experiences in her business. In my dreamy state, I watched her carefully, noting her movements and fluctuations, little details of her personality revealing themselves through her more unguarded moments. I allowed myself to enjoy this one-way company with someone I had never met, forgetting about myself even for a bit to enter her head (as best I could) and see the world through her. She was nervous but also headstrong. Her youthful, slightly inexperienced appearance seemed to annoy the other older male guides with us, and I felt that despite her somehow sensing that, she kept her confidence about her. In forgetting about myself for those moments, engrossed in this simple and honest willfulness, I allowed myself to become completely engrossed by a stranger.

I have not really spoken of it with anyone, but I feel now, with the likeliness being that I will never see Lilang again, this sort of obligation to write about it and make yet another case of the mysterious of life and love known to others. It deserves it, I think.

She told everyone that her English name was Meibo (not a name I am particularly familiar with, but a nice one nonetheless), however I still came to call her by her real name. I am not a confident person when it comes to attractions to people – I tend to create romantic scenes in my head and prohibit it from becoming anything more than that on my part. I do not think it is so much that I am closed to the idea as that experience has taught me to look for signs of promise in people that I rarely actually see. In any case, though, this time it had nothing to do with any romantic endeavor, and the attraction really had very little place in the preset as it did in the effect following my selfless meandering into her persona. Confidence usually being held in check by a sense of disbelief in my fantasies, it ran into no antagonism here, as there was no fantasy to which it was expected to respond. I felt completely free to just say something to her – and I did, at almost every opportunity that presented itself, sharing everything from families to our multiple international names to future intentions. From our first meeting on, I regarded her as a close friend, intimate through the deep and boundless potential she contained for something more than that. And her smile indicated she felt the same of me. We smiled often.

>>><<<

Shanghai was simply amazing. My general distaste for cities is often nevertheless overridden by the sheer wonder of design and structure that some of the world’s major cities incorporate. Shanghai, like some places in Japan, shows a large interest in developing its more eco-friendly aspects alongside its mass industry. All along the highways and the building rooftops were trees and gardens, some tucked under beneath the roads below, wasting as little space as possible on bare concrete. The next day, I would visit, alone with two other travelers, the city planning and development center to observe a full-scale model of the city that covered the floor of a three-tiered, banquet floor-size room, surrounded by displays of management and development details, videos, maps, etc. A lot of it was rather tourist-oriented, but it did succeed in giving the sense that Shanghai had a pretty elaborate plan for itself in the years to come. One display arranged a line of photographs of the city’s major river inlet and port region, showing one-year increments of growth over a ten year span. The speed was unbelievable, and it left me speculating just how much of the country’s financial resources were being pulled in, not unlike a black hole, by this centralizing vector of a yet widely poverty-stricken nation.

In fact, financial distribution had become a prominent theme to this remainder of the trip. Considering Shanghai alone, my very first experience having got off the bus was a brief detour through a side venue to a park to get to a region of the city whose marketplace guaranteed a place for us to eat. The path along this venue was stricken with people. Broken, disfigured, poorly or hardly clothed, old and young, unmercifully approaching us to sell us some junk they found, or to simply beg from us with plastic cups, save those who had clearly given up long before and now merely lay on the road waiting for nothing. In catching sight of one girl whose face was heavily scarred and whose hands had apparently been the victims of some previous tragedy, followed only a few steps away by a beaten, crumpled man who was forced by some inexplicable condition of his legs to travel the streets on a wooden board with wheels, I nearly lost myself despite being among my peers. I wanted to cry out, hold the girl who hopelessly staggered through the streets in my arms and take her away from that place, scold without remorse those who I was traveling with for their utter insensitivity to it all. The inhumanness of that moment was unbearable, and I was reminded again of the people I had seen in the poor village of Xi’an, irrationally contemplating how it was possible that this could happen to people.

Humans among humans, now all the more resembling humans among machines. We do not realize the nature of ourselves, machines, as that all that is human is left abandoned somewhere else, on the outskirts, on the streets of the forgotten. I think the lesson of diplomacy here was perhaps lost on everyone that day.

Turning a corner to board the bus again after our meal, a woman quietly approached us with her cup, and I immediately noticed her shoeless feet and collapsing figure – not so much her body even as a lack of any outward signs of hope that are regular of a person. In her other arm was an infant, silent, its body as worn as its mother’s. We all walked by, and then, despite my awareness of the danger of giving to one when others are near (they can swarm you as if with the mind to eat you), I ran back at the last second on an impulse to drop what was in my pockets into the cup, replying to her sad Chinese ‘thank you’ with a Japanese ‘I’m sorry,’ as it was the only thing that managed to come to mind for me to say. Fearing I would lose it again as I nearly had at the park, I ran back to the bus without looking back, catching a glimpse of her just one more time as the bus passed her corner, the baby on her shoulder still lying motionless.

>>><<<

On the second to last day, I believe, we held an ISLP diplomacy workshop. It was meant to resemble something like the sort of forum actual ministry of affairs officials held, and the issues we were asked to debate in groups over were supposedly authentic issues that U.S.-China relations ministries were themselves pondering over. I have unfortunately forgotten a good bit of the particular issue my group of assigned, but I believe it basically ran that: There is a hypothetical business opportunity for a hypothetical U.S.-based multinational corporation that proposes proffering China an industrial location in one of the country’s less economically viable regions. It entailed production and export of a native form of craft (I think) that was already frequently produced by the region’s locals, offering a new venue of employment for them and a new assembly line for a popular exotic product for America. ......I am quite sure there was more to it than that, but the details have slipped my two and a half months later. In any case, we had to consider the value in this proposal, as to whether or not it would be and come up with legitimate alternative courses of action were something to go foul.

I am sure to the other members of my group I did not seem the least bit interested in the activity. I was in fact very interested. My apparent lack of participation was triggered by a quick realization that my response to the details of the issue were different in numerous ways from the others, and I decided that I would stand to learn more about today’s present day politics – through the newest line of American individuals predominantly educated in political science, economics and international affairs – by taking note of my colleagues’ deductions rather than imposing my own.

Philosophy (in the least) had clearly influenced my disposition to a perceived issue, whereby I immediately relegate to all possible ethical concerns, with heavy reflections on my own sense of morality, before making any initial decisions. My political-science / economically minded peers, however, laid out first and foremost America’s wins and losses at every step of the issue. No attention was called at all to the nature of the product concerned (it could have been anything from bamboo lantern stands to McDonald’s new tiger penis hamburger patties), or whether it would have a positive effect on the health and attitudes of both the people producing it and those demanding it. So much for any progressive forms of modern consumerism. Second, the common denominator remained the United States’ overall profit and return. Any negotiations that may have involved benefits for China’s rapidly changing economy were left completely unaddressed. There was no hint of prediction of the course of the country’s, or even just that particular region’s, growth in the presence of a possibly successful multinational enterprise. If there had been a map offered us to refer to for the activity, I am positive it would have been immediately replaced by a scoreboard: U.S. and China.

It is scary for me to think about the new generation of business and political leaders in the United States. I have to believe that those least likely to serve for the good of the nation, if simply because they are also those who would think to serve for the good of the world, are the ones who will make the most substantial difference in times to come. Carefully watching the attitudes and responses of my colleagues to this foreign culture, a culture we have by habit for centuries now posited as the Other to the West, I recognize the same tendencies that the least understanding of us also frequently display. It is one thing to be misunderstanding of a culture – and it is another to approach from the start with a preset of assumptions, or (in the style of the neocolonialist) an agenda, and an utter lack of sensitivity to the present differences. For a country whose history is riddled with chaotic changes, the States’ peoples are more often than not the least willing of those I know to change. I do not believe I am necessarily implying a liberal worldview – I am merely saying that to keep a conservative outlook in a nation that least resembles their own is dangerous and inherently illogical. One cannot be progressively diplomatic and not be open to change. (Note that I do not mean the business of forming comprises, but of amending the conditions for agreement from the bottom up, starting with the assumptions of what is ethical and what is important for each party.)

Some of those I watched on this trip displayed this sensitivity, I believe, and I hope that in time they are each recognized and encouraged for this character (as I do not feel it is my place, with respect to age and whatnot, to do this formally). We will very much need it.

>>><<<

On the last night, we dined at the top of Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower. (I continue to wonder who gave it its English name.) Standing far above the layout of the massive city, on a rotating floor that gave one sitting in her chair a full 180 degree outlook of both sea and skyscrapers, we became engrossed in the dim-light ambience, presented with a buffet of everything from French fries to pickled seaweed to all form of noodles. Again, the scene of my professor’s story stands out in my mind, looking out over a world of GDP-fixated corporation development and relentless poverty, ourselves immersed in an isolated hamster-ball world of pleasure and consumption.

I do not mean to be entirely cynical, of course. These were indeed also good times. We shared stories of our pasts and futures that gave way to a quiet sadness that we would have to depart from each other soon, many of us claiming that among all the academic congregations we had attended, this was by far comprised of the greatest people. I could feel how far my personality had slipped back into its more American mode of character, and I allowed myself to really enjoy it with few reservations for the remainder of that last night. I knew I would miss many of the friends I made on this trip. Throughout the evening, Lilang and I exchanged smiles at a distance, and I believe that I may have been the happiest person in the building that night.

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We all left for the airport in fatigue, despite being yet the last caravan that morning to depart for it. The bus ride seemed mostly silent to me, except for the conversations I had with my new friend from Georgia sitting next to me (unaware I had hoped Lilang would have the chance to sit there, thrilled that she would accompany this particular portion of the group to the airport). My eyes brushed back over the rushing city landscape, enjoying the pitfalls from the highway rail sides into deep green tree groves or city fountains. I reflected over all the experiences I had had in this city and those in the days before. The trip seemed to have lasted a month or so in my mind – hence the power of travel over even just ten days.

I separated quietly from the line waiting for baggage check, being one of the few who understood that I would be returning to Japan from here and thus obliged to depart on another airline. I preferred the secrecy of my unannounced farewell (caught on the way out by only a couple of people who made me promise to keep in touch). I sat in the waiting area, preparing for a three-hour hiatus preceding my flight home. I suddenly recognized Lilang walking toward me, showing no sign of hesitancy in sitting right up next to me, cutting off between us any of the physical distance I am so used to from my Japanese friends. She smiled. She had to return home in a few minutes. I asked if we should go downstairs for coffee or something, and she chirped that she does not drink coffee. Oh, yeah, I thought, I don’t either. I nearly laughed aloud at my life’s blunt refusal to be comparable to any extent at all to a movie scene, even in its more romantic moments. We talked about our homes for a little while, and she promised to contact me if she ever considered visiting Japan (which she said she had wanted to do anyway). She is still the only one of us to have any contact information between us, assuming it did not get lost since the time we first met. She left with both hands waving, subtly, disappearing from this last chapter of the journey as well. I was by far happier than I was sad.

After four hours in the air, I stared mesmerized out my tiny window at the black night of nothing that slowly became little by little overtaken by tiny lights, becoming swarms and finally a pronounced shape of coast and islands. My Japan was a beautiful sight to return to.