December 2009Archives

By Claytonian

I know all there is to know about the staring game. I had lots of training as a lad. You see, I used to go to a lot of church. I recommend church for young people. Not only can you get morally indoctrinated, but you have lots of boring time to pass and thus a fertile field in which to raise a vivid imagination. I must have fought so many pirate kings in my head during sermons over the years.

Frequently, my zoning off would be interrupted by younger eyes. Little kids would be staring at me over the pews. One day as a teen I started staring back to amuse myself. Kids are the best stare-off opponents, for they are largely unselfconcious. Getting a kid to avert their Village-of-the-Damned-gaze is a proud accomplishment.

In my modern Japanese existence, this immature game has made a comeback. Only the opponents are Japanese people of all ages. The older ones are counter-stared into shame quite easily, and the kids are easier than American tykes, but one has to be vigilant, lest they sneak their eyes back upon you.

So the game is to counter-stare, feign relaxation , and then counter-stare again just when they thought it was safe to spy a foreigner.

This morning I had a particularly tough game.  The kid was a mouth-breather. If I laugh at that, if I even crack a smile, I lose this titanic battle of wits.

Oh no! She's got a twitchy bunny nose! Must not snicker! The mother is in on it too! Tag-teamed?! Ah, they're down for the round and its time to act non-chalant. Wait. What's that in the corner? A toilet booth? We are in the toilet car?!

And with that the game gets too funny. I laugh, and lose. I must collect myself; only a matter of time until someone gets curious at the laughing foreigner and my game starts again.

By Emily Connor

One of my favorite things about Japan are all of the drinks. And no, I don't mean the alcoholic ones (although they can also be nice!), but the countless numbers of canned coffees, sodas, teas, soups, and so much more that can be found in convenience stores or in 'jidouhanbaiki' (vending machines) scattered throughout the city. Vending machines are so abundant in Tokyo that I used to joke around saying that it would nearly be impossible to die of dehydration in the city. I'm not sure of the exact number of vending machines in Tokyo, but I once heard that the people to vending machine ratio is something to the effect of four people per one vending machine. That's a lot of drinks. Unlike in the US, though, what really sells drinks in Japan is if they stamp the words 'kikan gentei' (limited-time only) on the display or on the drink itself.

Limited-edition stuff sells like gold in Japan. It can be something extremely obscure like red-bean flavored soda or salt flavored lattes and just because the product will only be available for three months or so, everyone has to buy it and try it at least once, snap a photo and then post it on the Internet somewhere. It's a phenomenon. I've seen so many bizarre drinks in my days that I can't even begin to recall all of them, but some of my personal least-favorites have been peppermint soda, ''Hawaiian'' blue colored soda (I never knew ethnicities had flavors!) and also a new concoction yogurt-type drink containing vinegar and lemon flavors. Just who comes up with these things? And why do we all buy them? Even I have been guilty of buying drinks, photographing them and writing about them on my personal blog in the past... It's just addicting!

Granted, not all of the limited edition drinks are bad, per say. Some are really delicious, such as a hot canned chai latte that I love to drink the winter.  Once in a while game and anime companies also collaborate with drink companies to create highly collectable and awesome beverages, which excited my inner otaku-ness. I also freaked out when one drink company recently combined two of my favorite things: ginger-ale and the color pink. Pink ginger-ale-- can you imagine?!

Are all of these drinks really necessary? No, of course not. But they're something uniquely Japanese and interesting, and I'm really glad that the beverage companies continue to conjure up such fun drinks. If anything, at least they're interesting conversation topics and something to talk about when nothing else comes to mind. So next time you're in town, give one of Japan's funky drinks a try... You (maybe) won't be disappointed! 

by Anna Kunnecke

 

At the heart of communicating in Japanese lies a paradox.  It's 'less is more' taken to almost unimaginable extremes, where the purest form of communication is believed to be nearly wordless.  True connection, see, comes not from talking about one's feelings or opinions, but from knowing what the other is thinking and wanting without anything ever being vocalized.  It's quite a romantic notion, but also one that scuttled any chance I ever had at having a deep relationship with a Japanese significant other; at the crucial moment, when a soulful silence was called for, I needed to prattle--and I needed the prattle to be reciprocated.  In other words, I kept spoiling the goddamn mood.  (I've asked my friends who are married to Japanese how they manage, and they say cryptic things, like 'Well how much do you need to discuss with your spouse anyway?' or, 'Sometimes I think it's easier because we communicate more simply.'  As someone who gets gleefully tangled in semantic knots on a daily basis, to my great joy and also to my chagrin, I can only regard this feat of silent communion with wonder.)

One aspect of the Japanese language I understand down to my very bones, though, is the concept of bimyou.    Though it's become ubiquitous and slang-y in the last few years, simply meaning 'weird' or 'shady' or even 'whatever, dude,' it's actually a formidable concept.  It doesn't just acknowledge shades of gray, it rolls around and frolics in them.  Bimyou is often translated into English as subtle or delicate, but that misses the very bimyou-ness of bimyou.  It's a word that describes not just a slight difference between two things, but something more ephemeral, a quality that is neither one thing nor the other, neither here nor there.  In a language where even straightforward facts must be wrapped in gauzy disclaimers and ribbons of hazy formalities, a word as beautifully quicksilver as bimyou has become a safe way to hedge any conversational bet.  It's the silver bullet that combines 'it's hard to say' with 'I can't get into that right now' and 'If I told you I'd have to kill you' with a nice salty dash of 'I have no flaming idea' and 'dude, that's totally skanky.'  You have to figure out which meaning is meant according to context. 

But this is where this very lovely versatility is its own downfall.  I am going to tell you a deep, dark secret about Japanese culture: I have come out of many meetings marveling at the subtlety of the discussion, asked my Japanese colleagues to deconstruct the nuances of what just happened, and after some hemming and hawing, had them confess that they really have no idea either.  Boom!  That explains a lot.  One of the great curtains of Japanese mystery has just been drawn aside, and it turns out that half the time even Japanese people don't know what the hell the subtext is!  But rather than trudging in and clearing up that fuzziness, the Japanese way is to ride along, surf the tide, and see where you end up.  It's not wrong, but boy howdy is it different than the American way of communicating.  It is, in a word, totally bimyou.  

By Martin Faynot

Some people joke that if you come to Japan and teach English in the countryside, you will be treated like a celebrity. In many ways that's true. What other vocation, besides celebrity, elicits requests for autographs. Well, not requests, but chants really--you haven't experienced horror until you've had a whole class of third graders say "sign, sign, sign, sign, sign..." in eerie unison with that distinctive katakana intonation. It's such weirdness that seems to get left out of the jokes about becoming a local celebrity.

For instance, there are the people that hunt you down. Celebrity stalkers who, getting the faintest whiff of a native English speaker, will track you to your home and force their friendship upon you. All for the sake of being able to practice English. It may make sense if they needed English vitally for their jobs, but the majority of these people seem to just have an unnatural obsession with the tongue though it seems to elude them even as they focus on it. Some of them try to bribe you by giving you food. Tupperware-enshrined traps, I tell you!

Slightly less creepy are the spies. Everyone in your town will watch your every move, and you will never even know it until they tell you, a week later, where you were last Monday at 8 pm, and what you were wearing. Then they ask you why you were there doing those things. Maybe this is an attempt at conversation? Not even jogging late at night escapes the view of the inaka-collective eye.

I've been out of the small-town teaching business and back to relative normalcy for a while now, but recently I encountered a new type of foreigner-in-Japan celebrity, and it hit me in the city: that of D list celebrity vlogger. You see, though my videos are only followed by a few thousand people (and only about 10% that group ever really watches), the relatively small population of foreigners in Japan has made me stand out for other foreigners. I'm only a YouTube stumble away. But much like the small-town spies I've encountered in the countryside, the foreigners are content to spy me from afar and then send me emails later about when, where, and what I was doing. The people and the circumstances may change, but being a celebrity, and an undeserving one at that, will always feel a little odd.

Hello everyone out there, my name is Emily and from now on I will be writing a weekly blog here for jibtv.com. Some of you may already know who I am, but for those of you who have no clue who I am, I'll start off with a brief introduction.

I'm currently 20 years old, living as a musician in Tokyo. I began living in Tokyo when I was 18 and have done some work as a tarento and have also gone to school here. Since 2007 I have been actively making video blogs on YouTube and gained around 40,000 subscribers from my in-character videos about Japan and life in general. However recently my life has been busy with recording my first album, which has always been my greatest dream in life.

However my blog here will not only focus on my music or even on working in Japan, but will instead be about things that interest and fascinate me about my second home country. I really love Japan and everyday is a great experience for me which I hope to be able to share with all of you. Of course living in a foreign country is not easy, but it's great fun and I plan on writing about some of the highlights of life here.

I hope you all enjoy reading what I have to write about. I'll post something more informative here in the very near future.

by Anna Kunnecke 

A few weeks ago I was recording a character voice for a video game when the tech said something that stopped me in my tracks.  He was very young, an American guy just out of school, and I asked him what had brought him to Japan.  I expected him to say a love of Japanese film or perhaps a mania for video games, considering the work we were doing, but he was much more prosaic.  He said that he had come to Tokyo to make his way because LA was too hard.  After I stopped laughing at him, I told him soberly that if he thought it would be easy for him to make movies in Tokyo, then he might as well pack up and go home.  I can't believe how many foreigners like this I encounter here, and it never fails to piss me off.  

There seems to be an attitude left over from the 1980s that Japan is an easy place for foreigners to make a living without having to work very hard.  I expect it from the weathered veterans who taught English in the 'bubble,' making hundreds of dollars an hour for little more than chatting in their native tongue, but in a fresh-faced kid just out of school?  His sense of entitlement rankled, and it also stank.  

So I was pleasantly surprised by something that Ellen Sandler said in a recent workshop.  She's a producer and writer on several hit American TV shows and had come to Tokyo to run seminars for screenwriters and actors.  When asked the inevitable question, "Do I have to move to LA to 'make it'?",  she was gracious but blunt.  Basically she said that there is no shortage of hungry actors and writers in LA, and that the industry had shifted so that geography was no longer the most important part of the equation.  With web and digital media changing the landscape so drastically and so fast, all the rules were being rewritten.  In other words, don't quit your day job, kid--or at least, don't quit your day job and move to Hollywood.  Instead, she said, work where you are.  Do something interesting here.  If you do something interesting enough, eventually the agents will come after you instead of the other way around.  She pointed out that Tokyo is hardly a tiny hamlet, and we are not exactly cut off from the art/film/fashion world here.  In her words, "This is Tokyo, for crying out loud!"  

The reason it felt so refreshing is that there is a tendency among foreigners here to view their time in Japan as not quite real.  They see it as time out of their real lives, more akin to a vacation or a sabbatical than a life trajectory--even if that sabbatical has lasted close to ten years.  Since I spent such a chunk of my formative years in Tokyo, it will never feel that way for me.  It simply is what it is, just like Philadelphia or Chicago--a city with its own flavor, as connected and challenging as anywhere else.   And where you can make or break yourself, for better or for worse, but definitely for real.

By Kevin Cooney

Most people spend their life searching for the perfect person.  They search for meaning in this transient earthbound life.  They search for answers to eternal questions about life.  For me, mostly I search for my keys and my train pass.

I am a moron.  That is to say an idiot, a spaz, a dimwit, a nimrod, a maroon. If I were smarter I'm sure I could think of more, but that's all I've got off hand.  I'm almost tempted to call it a skill, this ability I have.  I have the canny ability to lose things regularly and forever.  I've lost just about everything at one time or another.  Bags, wallets, coin purses, umbrellas, ohhhh the umbrellas... I have lost hundreds of umbrellas.  Sunglasses, watches, books, cellphones, even larger seemingly impossible to lose items like laptops and bicycles.  And yet, here I am perennially ransacking my apartment looking for a keys like a spy hunting micro-ficshe in an enemy hotel room.  

I'm starting to think I'm sleep walking or something during the day.  Only due to the kindness of taxi drivers, fellow train passengers and bemused cafe staff have I managed to limit my loses in recent years.  I've taken to chaining my wallet to my pants, so that if I can at least find my pants, I can find my wallet.  Fortunately, I can almost always find my pants.  I've begun giving myself a body search every time I stand up.  My grandfather did the same thing, doing a quick inventory of possessions before moving to a new room.  I used to mock his little "Do I have everything?" jig, but I've begun the same dance.  "Glasses, wallet, phone, Ok! We can go!"

It's in these moments that I lose things that I am grateful to be in Japan.  Anyone who has lived here, and like me is a moron will tell you.  Lost items almost always turn up again.  It's freakish, unnatural and utterly mystifying to me how a lost wallet found in the middle of the street can be returned to its owner cash intact.  I'd say 80% of my lost items have made it back to me.  Not including, of course, my tribe of orphan umbrellas out there... somewhere.

Most recently I lost a small USB device.  A USB device that due to advances in technology is the size of a pack of gum and priced around 300 dollars. While I appreciate this new space age technology, I shouldn't own anything that small and expensive.   It went missing a few weeks ago, and after inquiring at the shop where I purchased it I was told to call the company's main office.  

I dread calling main offices.  My Japanese is fine for normal conversation, but dealing with keigo, the highest politeness of Japanese language on the phone is near impossible.  I have begged telephone operators to simple down their "Are o tsukau you ni onegai shimasu" to something briefer like"Are ne!"  Seriously... you humbly request that I consider using something.  Just tell me to do it.

After three attempts to navigate the keigo speaking auto-menu I was finally able to reach a human being.  She told me which buttons I was supposed to have pressed to get to the right department, but hadn't.  Finally connecting to the right person, I managed to explain my situation, and work out a solution to the problem which will end up costing me only 30 bucks.  I hung up the phone, relieved I didn't need a new multi-year contract and a wad of cash for my stupidity.  

Amazingly, I was glowing. Yes, I had just lost something.  Yes, It was a waste of time and money.  But I had managed to work everything out, by myself on the phone in a foreign language.  Maybe I'm not so stupid after all.  All I had to do then was bring the new permission code to the electronics store to get a new device.  The permission code I wrote down during the phone call.  Somewhere on a piece of paper on my desk.  Somewhere.