Stop standing around and go to the next chapter!Well, the new year has come, and so has the new Lord of the Rings movie. Unfortunately, nobody here in Japan seems to even know about its existence. They have no idea that it's probably the biggest movie to come out in 2001. When it comes to new movies, All I ever hear about here in Japan is Harry Palmer and His Favorite Broomstick or whatever it's called. That and a little about Shrek, which I already own on DVD. I want to see LOTR so bad, but I have to wait for the Japanese media to notice how big the movie is in America and then decide to bring it over here to Japan. Known in Japan as Yubiwa Monogatari, LOTR is a rather unknown book. Some ladies at my local Junkudo bookstore knew who Tolkein is and showed me where they had the books in Japanese. But this is a society that thinks that Final Fantasy is true fantasy, and on top of that they can't even pronounce the word "fantasy" correctly. They say "fantaji."
My two week winter vacation came at a perfect time. I've been really having problems with my job, as I discussed in my previous chapter of Greg's Life. And since I last wrote, I've learned that a fellow ALT I know ran into some big problems a while back with one problematic student, and was attacked by him. This ALT fought back in self-defense, and as a result was penalized. The boy who started the fight wasn't expelled or anything. But as I mentioned in Greg's Life #10, students in Japan can get away with beating up their teachers. My Japanese friends who are my age or older say that when they were in school, they couldn't have gotten away with the stuff that happens in Japanese schools today. Then again, it's been a long time since I've been in junior high and high school back home in America, so for all I know it could be even worse these days.
I've spent my winter vacation being a couch potato. I've watched every episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 I have on tape. I've watched 24 straight episodes of Robotech. I've scoured the shared video tape collection in the group room in our apartment building for any episodes of The Simpsons and The X-Files I could find. I ordered a whole bunch of MST3K DVDs from Amazon.com and I've rented a bunch of videos from the local video rental store. I spent Christmas night watching more X-Files episodes I'd rented and Mayu and I rented a two hour special of Knight Rider for nostalgia sake. That was our favorite TV show when we were kids, and the whole rest of the night and the following few days we were always singing the Knight Rider theme song. And speaking of David Hasselhoff, I just saw him starring with Christopher Plummer in a really bad 1979 sci-fi movie called Star Crash. The movie was so horrible that it would have made a perfect episode of MST3K. It featured a very young Hasselhoff as the emperor's son, a naked chick who's supposed to be a brilliant space pilot and who is obviously allergic to clothing, a pistol packing hick robot who's afraid of his own shadow and always seems to get blasted by space lesbians and bashed by cavemen, a lightsaber weilding dork who's supposed to be an android or something who can forsee the future but yet couldn't forsee a slow moving stop-motion robot sneaking up on him to whack him with a sword, a planet of amazon women and their dumb floozy queen who's almost as naked as the star of the movie, and a completely pointless space battle at the end of the movie with some cape wearing moron with an ego problem and a horrible super weapon that didn't really seem to do anything that bad except to attack people with lava lamp bubbles. Oh yeah, and it also features a 60 foot tall sword-weilding giant C-3PO looking robot with breasts. I haven't enjoyed a movie that horrible in a long time. I heard a rumor that David Hasselhoff has recently been elected king of Germany.
We celebrated Christmas a day early. December 23rd is the emperor's birthday, so everyone got Monday the 24th off as a result. So we celebrated Christmas a day early. Then on the 28th we drove to Nagano-ken to spend a week with my wife's family. They live in a small little town in the Japan Alps. It's real pretty, if you like snow. I don't like snow. I don't care for skiing either. I'd like to mention once again that Japanese houses are made of recycled popsicle sticks or something and have absolutely no insulative value at all. It's even worse in Nagano where it's colder than Himeji where I live. In Japan you need to use a kerosene heater to heat up a room and once it's warm you don't want to move to another part of the house. Since I don't have the freedom to move about and still remain warm, I feel confined and it's having an effect on me psychologically. It is seriously making me feel claustrophobic! Plus, every morning I wake up in the morning and see my cold breath and my nose is frozen. Summertime presents the same claustrophobic problem too, since once I get one room at a decent temperature, I am reluctant to move to another bed. I can't think, "Hey, I think I'll go lie on my bed and read a book," because doing so takes too much effort at gaining a reasonable temperature in the other room. It's so depressing.
I'd like to take the time now to point out that I really enjoy the band Lush. I'm listening to their CD "Gala" right now as I type and I think that Miki and Emma are really cool chicks. Thank you for your time.
Word has it that a sewage system is coming to their town, so they will eventually have toilets that flush instead of bottomless pits that collect poop. Needless to say, it's a bit of a hick town. I guess now that the 21st century is here, they want to integrate sewer technology that the civilized world has enjoyed since the flush toilet was first invented by Benjamin Franklin or somebody. Anyhow, this sparked a rather interesting conversation with Mayu's dad and her grandmother about the location of a new flush toilet. Apparently they think that they must put the bathroom where the current one is or else the house kami will get mad and do something bad to them. For example, they couldn't put the bathroom on the south side of the house or else the resident gods of the house will get upset and wreak havoc. (But doesn't something have to face the south side of the house? It's impossible to have a house that lacks a side that faces south.)
I could't believe it. I knew they pray to the butsu-dan (which I call a "Buddha Box") and have the shinto kami gods and ofuda papers up on top in the living room, but I had no idea that it is believed that these gods would purposely attack the residents if they rearranged their own house without consulting the gods first. When I heard this, I felt like taking the rolly polly Daruma god off the shelf, drop kicking him across the room, and ask Mayu's father, "Gee, does he get mad if you do that too?" I guess the kami say stuff like, "Hey, I want the couch against the other wall! And I thought I made it clear that I wanted blue curtains! That's it! You're gonna have a car accident!" I'm sorry, but I refuse to allow any gods to live in my house unless they pay their fair share of the rent. And on top of all this, her father has the local Shinto priest come over and write the calligraphy on the little ofuda papers to put around the house, and the priest tells him how to arrange his house. Sheesh, and people back home think that Christianity is out to control their lives!
My initial reaction was that it was one of the craziest things I've ever heard. But it's not insanity, it's called idolatry. And it's a tradition deeply rooted in this country's culture ever since it's inception. And when such traditions are handed down century after century, I guess it's easy for people to just go along with it. But I have a real hard time with the concept of people believing in the divinity of man-made creations like statues and such. The very fact that a person made the idol with his or her own hands out of wood or stone or clay makes the human being far more powerful than the idol. The fact that they are carved and formed from human hands and that I really can drop kick them across the room means that man has the true power, not these silly looking idols. Afterwards, I encouraged Mayu to take such opportunities to defend her own beliefs.
So I guess this is the point in my life in Japan where culture shock really sinks in. Sometimes I really start to think that the people here are controlled by an illogical culture. I hope that I'm at the peak of culture shock and it will soon taper off. I can keep my wits with God's help, and I can get through this. I have a feeling that in a few months when it starts to warm up a little enough to go for walks again and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, I'll start thinking that Japan is the best place to live again. Until the stiflingly hot and humid summer comes soon after that, I suppose.
Stop standing around and go to the next chapter!
Go back to the "Greg's Life" Table of Contents
"I'm gonna Willem Dafoe all over you!" ---MST3K
mail: greg -atsign- stevethefish -dot- net