Owner: A Japanese Story URL:http://www.20six.co.uk/ajapanesestory Join Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2007 08:18:08 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: The life and (exceedingly weird) times of a young Japanese American trying to deal with an oppressive mother, high school traumas, and general life in the weirdest town that the American Midwest ever did produce. Site statistics:Click here
September 1993 A Tight Grip 2007-04-01 13:56:16 When I came to the Midwest, a lot of things in my life change. The food change, the scenery changed, even the language changed. All of which is normal fare when you move to a different country. However, one other thing changed, something which I didn't expect. This thing, my Mother. In moving from Japan to the US, she changed from being the world's least attentive mother, to being the world's most controlling mother.In Kyoto, my Mother didn't care about any part of my life beyond the part that involved reading my report card. I went out early in the morning and came back late at night, and she neither new nor cared where I'd been in the mean time just so long as part of it included my school. It was that simple. It was the same with my sister. My Mother simply thrust Lucy into my care and got in with her own life. If I hadn't arrange for somebody to look after Lucy while I was at school, or while I was practicing in the Dojo, nobody else would have. The same went for changing, wa Read more:September
October 1993 The Vanishing Husband 2007-03-31 10:37:00 As you might expect, when my family moved to the small Midwest town that was to become our home, we created a certain amount of interest from our new neighbors. Give that we were moving in to a small community, that most of our things had arrived almost a week before we did (thus giving our neighbors plenty of time to speculate on who we were), and particularly given that my Mother was a white woman with two Asian children in tow, we created quite a bit o interest For the most part, out new neighbors just wanted to know the normal things. Such as who we were, where we had come from, and what we were like. What created the real stir, though, and caused some less conventional questions to come to mind, was that, even after my Mother had settled us in to our new home, no husband arrived to support her. In Kyoto In Kyoto, pretty much everybody that I had know had known that I didn't have a father at home. They knew by the way that I never mentioned my father, and by the way th Read more:October
, Vanishing
, Husband
July 1993: A Town Divided 2007-03-29 20:53:00 Throughout the course of this journal, and correspondingly throughout a fair portion of my life, I have spent a lot of time complaining about the makeup of the small Midwestern town in which I found myself living. Specifically, that this makeup was made up of precisely one type of person. However, now is probably as good a time as any to concede that, while it might have seemed this way, it wasn't entirely true. My town wasn't as monotone as I've lead you to believe, in fact it was split into two distinct camps. Camps which, quite frequently, hated each other more than words could say, but which were also grudgingly forced to admit that the town couldn't survive without them. Being new to America it took me a while to see this divide, and a while more to appreciate what it meant, but once I understood about it a lot of things began to make sense. A History lesson In order to understand how this situation came about, you need to know a little bit about the town's history. In th Read more:Divided
October 1993: The Great Phys-ed Paradox 2007-03-29 16:21:00 As with many schools in the US, the Midwestern school that my Mother sent me to had both a strong sporting culture and a physical education program which mandated that “If you were physically able to take part, then you had to take part”. No excuses, no exception. I found this quite irritating, as I didn't want to take part. At least, not in the way that they wanted me to.IntroductionIt wasn't that I had something against school sports, or even sports in general, it was just the rigid way that the school applied the mandatory nature of its physical education program. Specifically, that it applied it to me at all. You see, as strange as it might sound, I'd never had to participated in normal physical education classes in Japan. Instead, I'd been given special leave to practice what my teachers considered to be 'more important' thing. Namely, competitive sports that looked good on school resumes, and which could be utilized to win nice shiny trophies.CoachingFrom the ag Read more:October
, Great
, Paradox
September 1993: It's my name, so give it back 2007-03-29 15:47:00 When I first arrived in the US, I was pretty open to the idea of settling down and fitting in. I wanted to learn about the local culture, the local history, and the way that things were done in the American Midwest. However, a year later, I was not even remotely interested in fitting in. I didn't care about the local culture or the local way of doing things, and I had become militantly Japanese to the point of lunacy. Going so far as to act more “Japanese” than I had done in Japan.Largely, my change in attitude was an act of retaliation. I saw America as trying chip away at my heritage and my sense of identity as a Japanese boy. So I militantly stuck to my guns and refused to integrate. Regardless of how stupid it was.In most cases, it was a plethora of little things that turned me from being open minded to closed minded. Things that, individually, might not matter, but together added up. It was also the way that nobody else seemed to notice these things, and the way that Read more:September
September 1993 - An informal adoption 2007-03-27 21:07:00 When it comes to Mother's, mine wouldn't win any prizes. Not unless they were being given at the Child Services “Most Dysfunctional Family” awards. In fact. She was a pretty terrible mother all round.In Kyoto, my Mother was almost completely absent from my life, and she had basically been content to let me to fend for myself. I left for school early in the morning. Went to a combination of private classes, friend's homes, and dojo seasons until it was late. Then I came home to sleep after it had gotten dark. All without involvement from my Mother. Half of the time she didn't know where I was or what I was doing, and she didn't really care either. She didn't even seem to care that I often took my baby sister along for the ride (My world was full of friends with mothers, or older sisters, who fell over themselves to help me look after Lucy). Just so long as I remembered to pick up the groceries while I was out.This all changed when we reached the Midwest. Suddenly, my M Read more:September
September 1993: The Flag incident 2007-03-25 15:25:00 Having come from a rather stricter background than is normal, my school days were largely without incidents of the conventional kind. I was never tardy, I always did my homework, and I certainly didn't get involved in any of the pranks, schemes, charades or other shenanigans that popular culture seems to believe go on in modern schools. However, this didn't mean that my schooling wasn't without it the occasional hiccup. I did get in trouble on occasions, but mostly for things that I simply wouldn't believe could happen if they hadn't happened to me.An Inauspicious StartHaving arrived in the Midwest from overseas with the minimum of records, and having subsequently thrown everything into chaos by being boosted a grade, I wasn't able to start classes with the rest of the school, or even be assigned a homeroom, until about three days into the year. Meaning that I started school proper on Wednesday, rather than Monday.In my school, Wednesday mornings were pep mornings. As such, the h Read more:September
September 1993: Schooling in America 2007-03-25 10:47:00 It's true that, when I first arrived in the Midwest, I was a little disappointed with what I found. I'd been expecting a big city with bright lights and tall buildings, and had ended up in a rural town where people still believed that crop circles were caused by witchcraft (no, seriously). However, despite my initial disappointment, I didn't let myself get down because of one eagerly awaited event. The start of the school year.For most of my life, I'd lived in the shadow of the America
n education system. I'd literally grown up with stories, from the other families on the base and the dwellers in the Kyoto compound, about how much more modern and progressive the American system was than the Japanese system, about how much better equipped American schools were, and about how America's system had allowed it to nurture the scientific and creative talent necessary to achieve great feats like putting a man on the moon. However, when the start of the school year rolled round, things tur Read more:September
, Schooling
July 1993: A Mother's Work 2007-03-23 15:04:00 When we left Japan, we did so with such haste that I barely had enough time to say goodbye. My Mother decided that we were moving, the moves came, and we moved. It was as simple as that. Or so it seemed at first.However, as things progressed, clue after clue emerged to tell me, squarely and unambiguously, that things weren't quite so simple.The first clue was that we had somewhere to go to, somewhere finished and furnished. The next clue was that there were two cars waiting for us in the garage, one of which was the imported kind that you have to be on a waiting list to buy, meaning that it had been ordered some time prior to the events that lead us to leave Kyoto. Finally came the discovery that the house had been purchased, by a mystery buyer, a full 6 months before our arrival. After that, it was so obvious that my Mother had been planning a sudden getaway for quite some time that I stopped bothering to take note of all the signs. It was Kyoto all over again.Of course, as with Kyot
July 1993: ¿Podria repetir, por favor? 2007-03-22 22:02:00 While I had a lot of trouble adjusting to life in the Midwest, and frequently found myself confronted with strange or confusing situations where I didn't know exactly what was expected of me, I wasn't the only person in my small family to have such difficulties. Just as I had problems, so to did my baby sister. Though, her problems were slightly different.While my problems were largely cultural; I neither understood, nor liked, the pervasive culture of our new town, Lucy's problems were communicative. I brief, everybody else in the town spoke English and, not to put too fine a point on it, my sister didn't.¿Podria repetir, por favor
?To say that Lucy couldn't speak English wouldn't be entirely accurate. She had as good a grasp of basic English grammar as any child her age could be expected to have, and her understanding of more complex things, like tenses and conjugation, wasn't too bad either. However, where Lucy ran into difficulties, was Vocabulary. She had a stock of
November 1993: Labels 2007-04-02 17:57:00 PrologueAs any regular reader of this blog will know, right up until I was 14, I'd spent my pretty much my entire life living around homesick American ex-pats. Thus, I arrived in the Midwest with a rather romanticized vision of what life there was like, and I quickly noticed a plethora of idiosyncrasies where what I was seeing didn't quite match up with what I had been told. One of which was the prevailing attitude to race.Not having actually witness much of American life for myself, I had grown up believing that America was the world's only true multi racial society. A place where black, white, Asian, and everything in between simply mingled together and lived in perfect harmony. I was wrong. I had also grow up believing that nobody in America really thought about race because everybody was American, and that was what mattered in the end. I was wrong here too.Labels
At this point I could start to write about racism. All of the bad things that I have seen Whites doing to Blacks, and Read more:November
October 1995: "Mono Panic" 2007-04-06 16:06:47 Mono?The first time that I was introduced to the word 'Mono', the shortening for Mononucleosis, was while watching an episode of the Simpsons that a friend had recorded for me some time earlier. In the episode, one character asked another “Can you get Mono from riding the Monorail?”. Not understanding this phrase, or why everybody else thought that it was hysterically funny, I asked a friend who, between fits of laughter, briefly explained things to me.After listening to this explanation, I went to the school library and looked up Mononucleosis for myself. About five minutes later I was pretty much satisfied that I knew everything that a teenage boy, who was in no way planning to become a doctor, needed to know about Mono, and I left things at that.However, it wouldn't be until a year later that I would find that my basic knowledge didn't quite tie in with what the rest of the town thought Mono was, what they thought Mono meant for the community, and what they thought w Read more:October
, Panic
December 1993 - An Akito by Any Other Name 2007-04-06 15:40:50 When people think about their names, there are generally two schools of thought.1)That they are something that is deeply personal that forms part of your individual sense of identity.2)That they are a general label given to you by your parents that you can take, leave, or change, as is convenient.For the most part, I never gave much though to my name while I lived in Japan. I basically treated it like a title. People either called me by my family name, or by my family name with an honorific attached, and that was about as complicated as it got. My teachers called me by my family name. My friends, neighbors and classmates called me by my family name. Even my fellow compound dwellers called me by my family name. In fact, until I was 14, the only people who ever used my given name were my closest friends and my Mother. Even my sister called Oniichan (the 'cute' form of big brother) rather than use my given name. This worked out fine in Japan, and was considered to be a little more forma Read more:December
November 1993: Penmanship 2007-04-06 15:27:05 While I largely think of American state run schools as being designed only to meet the requirements of absolutely average people, and being mildly chaotic breeding grounds for antisocial tendencies where Ritalin or Lithium are dispensed in the place of discipline, there was one thing about my particular school that I did appreciate. I am left handed, in America nobody even blinked when I picked up a pen in my left hand. This was something new and exciting for me.When I was first sent to school I was sent to a Japanese school near to my grandfather’s home. It was a very good school and it was very strict, which meant that people who wrote with their left hand were strongly discouraged from doing so, and that anybody who persisted was punished for it. At that age I was too young to get the a regular bus by my self, and there was no school bus in the world that would have traveled the distance between the base and the school, so I slept at my grandfather’s house during the wee Read more:November
Comic books and candy, or plane tickets 2007-04-12 18:53:52 Comic books and candy, or plane tickets (April 1994)When my family arrived in America quite a lot changed. Language, customs, scenery, they were all different. Unfortunately, they were not all that changed. My Mother changed quite a bit too.In Japan I had been virtually without parental restriction. My Mother barely registered that existed, and cared even less, so I could basically come and go as I pleased, and I often did. However, as soon as we arrived in America, my Mother suddenly became a lot more concerned about where I was and what I was doing there. My near total freedom vanished in a heartbeat, only to be replaced by a life of near total control. My Mother became the arbitrator of just about my entire life, and it wasn't a temporary situation either. It went on and on and on, right up until I left for college.With this said, my situation was eased at time, when others intervened on my behalf to give me some small escape from the life that my Mother was busy organizing for me Read more:Comic
Americenterism 2007-04-12 14:10:00 January 1994: AmericenterismBeing a fluent English speaker, and having lived among Americans for many years, you'd think that it would have been easy for me to settle into my new life in the Midwest. I know that I certainly expected to fit in quite quickly. However, once I arrived, I found the transition to be more difficult than I ever imagined. Not so much that I had trouble with life in America itself, but rather because the attitudes and approaches of the people that I met during my early years there put me off of the whole idea of living in America, and made me cling defensively onto the memories of the life that I'd left behind.I bet you don't know what this is?Among the things that put me off of living in America was that many of the people that I met there were had a very Americacentric view of the world: meaning that they knew about America and believed that it was the beginning and end of the world, and they had very big blind spot when it came to figuring out what people
Janurary 1994: 住めば都 (すめばみやこ<img src="http://www.20six.co.uk/ap/smilies/wink2.gif" border="0" align="absmiddle"> 2007-04-12 10:07:00 住めば都 (すめばみやこ) - Sumeba Miyako There is an old Japanese saying that goes 住めば都. Loosely translated, it means that you can get used to living anywhere, or that if you live somewhere for long enough it will become your home. It's a good saying, and while I would like to believe that it is true, for my Mother and myself though, it was not. She tried living in my world, but was too stubborn and too resentful to accept it as her home. Likewise, I was the same when it came to living in the place that she called home. My Mother thought of Japan as a prison that she had been confined in when her father died, and she thought of her marriage to my father as being a chain that further bound her to somewhere that she did not want to be. She also saw me, and my Japanese nature as being a reminder of part of her life that she wanted to forget. In much the same fashion, I considered Japan to be my home
Sex Ed 2007-04-18 17:31:00 Sex Ed (February 1996)At various points throughout my time in the Midwest my school tried to educate my fellow students and myself about sex. Overall, the school went to a lot of trouble to do so, and its lessons were very varied. Various educational means and methods were used as were various levels of detail. Occasionally a guest speaker would even be involved. However, while diverse, most of these lessons had two thing in common. The first being that they included very little about the actual physical act of sex, and the second being that they included no mention whatsoever of contraception.Sex EdDespite having some form of sex ed most every year (ranging from heath class to biology), there was pretty much nothing anywhere in the material that we were given that mentioned the fact that sex usually involved a man and a woman engaged in a physical act, or that it involved certain parts of the body that the law requires use to conceal when out in public.Seriously, unless you had access
Master and Student 2007-04-22 17:28:38 Martial Arts (July 1993)While the two sides of my family, the Japanese side and the American side, are probably about as different as you can get, they do have one single thing in common. This being martial arts. It was one of the very very few things to do with Japan that my Mother didn't instantly loath.HistoryOn my Japanese side, my grandfather had been an expert from a long line of experts. He learned from some of the best that Japan had to offer and in his younger days he had trained the children of the clan that we served (Historically, my family served as retainers to one of Japan's, now largely defunct, noble families). Even when he was old and crippled he was still formidable and could break a man in two with his hands even though he could barely move his legs enough to walk. My father too was a martial arts expert. My grandfather and great uncle trained him to be a formidable fighter, and every minute that he had of his own time he spent practicing the ancient arts.On my Am Read more:Master
, Student
Back on the Base 2007-04-22 11:31:00 One Disenchanted Evening (September 1993)When I first moved America I was expecting to live in a large modern city, and was somewhat dismayed when I found that my new home town was a rural backwater. I'd been expecting skyscrapers and malls and bright city lights, and I ended up with barns and tractors and a complete lack of the trappings of civilization that I'd been expecting. To be frank, at first I wondered what on Earth could have possessed my Mother to move there. However, understanding soon followed. When it came to picking a place to live, my Mother had apparently done her homework very well.Back on the BaseAlthough the Midwest was unfamiliar territory to me, the town had a very familiar feel to it. The scenery might have been different, and people were driving pickups and station wagons rather than jeeps but other than that it felt almost exactly like being back in the family compound of the base where I had lived as a child. Seriously, the feeling was overwhelming. The way
Guns, guns, guns, and idiots, too. 2007-04-26 21:07:09 Guns, guns, guns, and idiots, too. (October 1993) With the tragedy of Virginia Tech and the murder of the Mayor of Nagasaki in the news, I've been thinking a lot about guns, gun ownership and my relationship with guns in general. Yes, it's true that I've lived around guns for a long time, that I've used them on many occasions, and it's even true that I used to own several (Some of which I doubt were legal). However, it's also true that none of the above were due to any actual choice of my own. Indeed, I'd be quite happy to live in a world where they weren't a factor. The Early Years For those of you who don't know, Japan is one of the least gun friendly places in the world. We don't have the constitutional right to bear arms, quite the opposite in fact. Handguns are reserved for the police, and assault weapons are reserved for soldiers. We can't sign off on a gun permit for one of the few legal types of firearm (mostly shotguns and low power rifles) without a psych certi
Vendetta 2007-04-29 09:46:00 Vendetta (November 1993) As school children, most of use have, at one time or another in our lives, come to the conclusion that one of ours teachers was out to get us. It might have been the math teacher who always called you up to the board when a particularly nasty equation needed solving, the geography teacher who used to shout out at you in front of the entire class if he didn't think that you were paying attention when it was clear that you were, or even the psychotic gym coach who seemed to be unusually fond of making play dodge ball. We've all been there. Of course, as adults most, of us have grown to realize that it wasn't true - that said individuals were just teachers doing what teachers do - and they weren't really out to get us. Not me though; I know for a fact that my school Councilor was out to get me. He grabbed onto a chain of thought and refused to let go, and never missed a chance to push his own personal agenda on to me. More than this though, he also made it h Read more:Vendetta
Another Job 2007-05-22 13:37:00 Another Job (July 1994)Over the course of my time in America I met a great many people, some of whom I loathed and whom loathed me with equal abound, and some of whom I am extremely glad that I met.One of the people who falls in to this second category is a man named Mr. Grey. He was a friend, mentor and a benefactor to me, and he was the man whom restored a great deal of my faith in humanity by giving me a chance to put my talents to use at a time when I felt that the entire town was trying to impose mediocrity on me.Mr. GreyMr. Hank H Grey was an American’s American. A man whom was larger than life and the embodiment of the American spirit of his day. He was a varsity quarterback in high school, and was a big name in college ball too. He married a girl who was both the homecoming queen and the head cheerleader, and people even said, as they are want to do, say that he could have become one of America’s all time greatest football stars had he not shattered his knee while r
Another Job 2007-05-25 14:21:34 Another Job (July 1994)Over the course of my time in America I met a great many people, some of these people were my friends, others loathed me, and many saw me as a background actor in their lives and simply ignored me. A few of these people, however, saw something more in me and intervened in my life in such a way that I will be forever grateful to them.On of those whom falls into this last category was one Mr. Hank H Grey. He was a friend, mentor and a benefactor to me, and was probably the closest thing that I had to a father figure during my life in America. He was the man whom restored a great deal of my faith in humanity and whom taught me that there was more to the "The American Way" than firearms, consumerism and conservatism.Mr. GreyPut in the simplest terms, Mr. Hank H Grey was an American’s American. A larger than life embodiment of the American spirit of enterprise, equality and opportunity.Mr. Grey had lived the American dream. During his high school
Going Naked 2007-10-21 14:29:21 Although it might seem strange to some people, particularly those with a more conservative upbringing, but right up until I was 14 years old I had absolutely no concept of male prudishness. None whatsoever. I literal had no idea that one man might feel in any way uncomfortable at the thought of being in a state of undress while in the presence of another man. I'd grown up in a world where such an idea simply didn't exist. On the base, my world had consisted of servicemen who had absolutely no inhibitions at all around each other. The showered together, they got changed together, and they had a penchant for skinny-dipping together at every opportunity. Outside of the base, I went to public baths and hot springs where communal male nudity was the norm and I showered in school a after martial Read more:Going
9/11 2007 2007-10-06 05:28:00 Each year, when 9/11 roles around, my company holds a memorial service for its American employees and any of our American client who happen to be in Japan at the time. Even though I don't consider myself to be American the fact that my Mother is means that I'm permanently on the guest list, and I make a point to going out of respect for those who lost their lives on that day. For the most part, the company memorial ceremony is usually nothing too fancy. A 10-15 minutes of memorial with a basic religious ritual, then a 20 minute buffet and networking session afterwards. All conveniently timed to coincide with lunch. so that employees can meet, greet, and eat, and then be back at our desks without breaking our normal working routine. However, things were a little different this year.However,
Bedtimes 2007-09-08 13:46:48 October 1995 - BedtimesI know that there is a lot to be said in favor of living in a small community like the Midwest town in which I found myself. From my years spent living on the base as a small child, and from the time that I lived in small town America, I can well appreciate the support that a small community can give you, when it comes together to rally around you. However, I have also seen exactly what can happen when such a community rallies around against you.During my time in the Midwest I noticed that, when it came to my increasingly dysfunctional family, there were three kinds of people. There were those who saw what was happening in my family and tried to help Lucy and myself as best they could, there were those who seemed to be utterly blind to our plight, and there were thos
Traveling without moving 2007-09-08 13:41:37 August 1995 - Traveling
without movingIn geographic terms, I was well traveled boy. By the time I was 16 I'd been around the world a couple of times on planes, boats and cruise ships. However in real terms I'd managed to grow up with a rather stunted experience of what life is like in other countries.I knew what other countries should be like but only because I have read about them in books had seen pictures on them on the television, and with the exception of Hawaii and Spain, where my family draws its non Japanese roots, my experience of other countries can be summed up as being like looking at the inside of a plush hotel. Which was exactly where I'd spent much of my time over seasIf I hadn’t been well read, and raised in Japan, I might well have grown up thinking that everywhere f
Gadgets 2007-09-01 05:16:38 January 1995 - Gadgets While Japan is widely thought of as being one of the most high-tech nation on earth by most young Americans, it is a misconception to think that this means that every Japanese household is a mass of gadgets and wizardry. Actually, in Japan we tend to live far simpler lives than our American counterparts and, unless they’re ‘cute’, the gadgets seen on the television in America are usually reserved for a few city dwellers and ‘hip teens’. When it came to gadgets, or even electrical appliances, my childhood existence in Japan was very simple even by Japanese measure. Downstairs we had an icebox, an electric whisk, an oven and a vacuum cleaner, and upstairs we had an air conditioning unit. Apart from a couple of telephones and four li
Conservatives, Liberals....and mad dogs 2007-08-05 12:05:00 Conservatives, Liberals
....and mad dogs (1996) Having spent the better part of teenage years living in a small Midwestern town; somewhere out past the boondocks, I have long had a familiarity with the well known killjoy that is the All-American-Conservative. Indeed, I have encountered them, and come to blows with them (usually verbally, sometimes physically), on many an occasion.Throughout that part of my life, the part that I spent in the Midwest, I generally considered said conservative to be the polar opposite from normal. A breed of man (and often woman, too) whom could find vulgarity in purity, whom saw egalitarianism as being a plot destroy their way and quality of life, and whom saw the first amendment as giving them the constitutional right to try and impose their views on the rest Read more:Conservatives
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