帰国

Okay, I really want to go to bed, but I wanted to bang out some quick thoughts on my overall experience on my last night here in 守口市。

I have a lot of mixed feelings about the whole thing. And I think that's to be expected. I'm definitely glad I came. I'm really determined to put my Japanese skills to use, and get better, and maybe even someday call myself fluent. It's good to know that I still have that resolve after spending 4 months here. I am not sure how I feel about living in Japan, though. I think that when this current 20s-ish generation grows up a little more, there are going to be a lot of social changes. So maybe I'll wait until then to live here again. But you know, this was a really important experience for me, as a young person, as an American, as a woman. It was really quite something to be in the minority. And you know that's another thing--Japan's homogeneity scares me to death. Sure, there are foreigners living here, but I think that if Japanese society would stop marginalizing non-Japanese so much, we might have an easier time. Part of this has to do with the language barrier. The general view is that Japanese is a ridiculously hard language, so no foreigner is going to know any of it. The truth is, Japanese is not a hard language to speak, not at all. You can convey entire sets of emotions and feelings with just one word, instead of having to construct an entire sentence. Compared to English, Japanese spoken sentences are extremely short. Reading and writing is a different beast however, but the more aggressive you are with your spoken Japanese, the more people will try and understand you.

I suppose next time I should try living in a smaller town. Andy has had some wonderful experiences in less-populated areas, and I've had other people tell me that the relationship you have with people in a smaller town is radically different from what you have living in a big city like Osaka, and I believe that 100%.

But you know, it was fun, I didn't work too hard, and I certainly learned a lot. And I'm really excited to go home and have my beautiful California summer and eat burritos and go to the beach and play video games and see all the people I missed so much while I was here. And I'm sure when I come back, I'll have an even better grip on things.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about blogging. I really liked having it as an outlet. If I do decide to continue though, I'm going to start a new one at a different address. So, thanks for reading, I really do appreciate it.

それじゃ、また。

痴漢

A few days ago, the Center for International Education at Kansai Gaidai sent out an e-mail advising students to be careful around town, as lately there had been a couple of reported incidents of girls being groped around the area. Today while I was walking home around 6:30 PM, on a street almost directly in front of my host family’s house, some young guy rode by on his bike, grabbed my ass, and rode away. Flustered, I yelled at him, though couldn’t do anything else because he was faster than me, and the only other person on the street was a middle-aged woman at the opposite end. I wished I knew how to say what I really wanted to tell him in Japanese, but I was glad I did anything at all instead of remaining silent, like so many Japanese women do. When I got home, I told my host father, who was extremely sympathetic, and was glad that I wasn’t hurt or robbed, and told me to forget about it. And sure, I’m glad I wasn’t hurt or robbed either, but the incidence rate of this kind of sexual harassment is so high in Japan, and women are told to just forget about it because there’s nothing you can do. So much of it goes unreported, because women don’t think there’s anything the police can do for them, and they’re pretty much right. So for exactly that reason, I told my host family, and I e-mailed Kansai Gaidai about it, because at least it’s being reported somewhere, and I am not silenced. (To Kansai Gaidai’s credit, as I was writing this they e-mailed me and asked me to come in and provide more details so that they could report it to the police by my host family’s house.)

I am the most frustrated and angry because I already feel like as a woman and a foreigner, I can never be an integrated member of Japanese society. It’s hard for me to articulate how I feel oppressed as a woman here, but I definitely do. And it’s clear to me, and my host family, and Kansai Gaidai, that foreign women are a particular kind of easy target for chikan (perverts), probably not only because we’re exotic but because we have less agency. I understand that this kind of thing happens everywhere, and of course it happens in the United States, but because this kind of sexual harassment is so common in Japan, and because Japan is otherwise absurdly safe, and because women have significantly less agency here, etc., I am outraged.

Tokyo Disneyland

So I have approximately a million things to say about Tokyo Disneyland... I really wanted to write an academic comparison paper comparing it to the one I am familiar with in Anaheim (god, what has a liberal arts education done to me?). Andy kept mentioning an article he read about it in a book called Remade in Japan which I guess I'll have to check out now.

Anyway, in case you are not familiar with my relationship with Disneyland, I grew up in LA, and therefore have been to the original Disneyland quite a few times in my life. This summer, I went 3 times with different people, and had lots of fun! So naturally, I wanted to check out Tokyo Disneyland.

The first big difference was that TDL (as they call it) is really only about 30 minutes away by train from central Tokyo, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to access than the one in Anaheim, which in itself is a good distance away from LA (maybe an hour in good traffic) but you also have to brave the 5, a treacherous freeway, which when faced in rush hour can mean about 2-3 hours. But even with crowded trains, it was no problem to get to TDL, and they drop you off almost right in front of the park. I was proud of Tokyo for not renaming the stop to Tokyo Disneyland (it's 舞浜 Maihama).

They have Cinderella's castle at TDL, where we have Sleeping Beauty's, and I liked Cinderella's asymmetrical design a lot more.


Here's me being a snarky American in front of it. It's their 25th anniversary. We had our 50th a few years ago.

Probably our biggest mistake was that we were there during spring break, which is Japan's equivalent of summer vacation, so everyone in the world Japan was there. I generally avoid Disneyland at its busiest times, so perhaps it's that I'm not used to being there when it's crowded, but I've never experienced 2+ hour wait lines before. The longest we saw, as we were getting ready to go, were 210 minutes (that's 3 and a half hours, kids!) for Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, I think.

Another interesting thing was lines for snacks, which were absurdly long. I really wanted a churro but never got one because the lines were always too long. T__T Also, their flavors of popcorn ranged from very strange to delicious-sounding (soy sauce and butter, curry, honey, and caramel) and tons of people had purchased the fancy popcorn buckets shaped like characters.

We did eat something Mickey-shaped... it was this pizza, which did a really good job of tasting like American and not Japanese pizza.



I wish we had a picture of the Mickey-shaped manju (meat buns), because we decided that was the quintessence of Tokyo Disneyland.

While we were waiting to get on Pirates, a cast member dressed as a very convincing Jack Sparrow came through, and when he passed by us he patted me on the shoulder and said, "'Allo, mates." Future career options: cast member at Disneyland in Anaheim who speaks to Japanese tourists, or cast member at TDL who speaks to English-speaking tourists.

The crowd was mostly Japanese college students, I felt. Of course there were families, and high school/middle school aged kids, but I saw a lot of groups of girls and also couples (Disneyland is a popular date spot in any country, after all). There were only a handful of non-Japanese people, but I imagine it's the off-season for them... although what with cherry blossom-viewing season right around the corner, they'll probably show up soon.

Everyone was wearing their special Disney headgear, which changes pretty frequently from what I gather. The must-have item of the moment were little hats that are attached to hair clips, so they're comically small. Probably the weirdest one I saw was a girl who had a Stitch hood/cape thing that pretty much looked like you had skinned Stitch and made him into a cape... his head was a hat on your head, and it went down to his hands which were little mittens for you. Kind of weird?

One of the more strictly Japanese parts of TDL was the gift shop at the end. As we were leaving, the crowd in the gift shop for omiyage (presents you bring your friends and family after visiting someplace special) was enormous. The line for making your purchases was just as bad as for the rides. I was glad I bought mine ahead of time in Adventureland. The sheer variety of differently packaged boxes of chocolate, snacks, candy, etc., was also staggering... omiyage is such an important, crazy part of Japanese culture, one I have definitely not mastered. But I get cut a little slack since I'm a 外人... hopefully.

We had a lot of fun, despite it being mad crowded. I hope to go back someday when it's not so crazy.