Ant And The Butterfly

Oh, shut up. Don't lecture ME about lecturing you. Just get used to the fact that you're being lectured to and everything will be fine.

Why. Why. Oh, please, why. Why can I never feel it in my heart to like Japan? To like the Japanese people? To even take them individually and separate them from their having been born Japanese, to forgive them for being Japanese no matter how fervently they try/pretend not to be?

All I can do, dear reader, is THANK GOD I can LOOK upon the Japanese as a non-Japanese and never be fated to BEING Japanese.

Because to me, actually BEING Japanese would be a fate . . . well, I won't go any further than that.

I don't know how they look at us. There are several million of them, so you'd have to ask them all separately. But I think that several million of them would answer that they think we're "fucked up," if that kind of term existed in the average Japanese's vocabulary (it doesn't).

And the reverse? About how WE view THEM? Well, I'll tell you one thing -- probably only one in ten thousand Westerners knows anything at all about the Japanese, warts and all, enough to actually have an opinion of them. In other words, to 99.99% of Western people, the entire Japanese race is a complete and utter enigma, filled mainly with stereotypes. It would be as if you thought all Canadians still trapped beavers and had policemen who rode around on horseback with those stupid red suits and dumb hats, or maybe just sat around dorm rooms wearing fur trapper hats and polishing off cases of 24 Molson Xs.

EXACTLY like that. I'm SO tired about hearing about geishas and rock gardens and temples and zen and utter meaningless crap like that . . .

But I'll tell you one thing that might shock you. After more than half my lifetime invested in dealing with the Japanese in one form or another -- as a husband of one of them, as a father to another -- I can safely say that I STILL don't have a clue of what it is they're about. And the MAIN REASON FOR THAT is that THEY don't have a fucking clue about what they're about -- most of them are as much of a complete mystery to each other as they are to you and me.

Imagine an eternal Russian doll . . . a big doll containing a smaller doll containing a smaller doll etc. etc . except in this case, the dolls just get smaller and smaller and smaller until you have to put them under a scanning-tunnelling electron microscope to see them.

THAT is how you -- and other Japanese -- must look at the Japanese. The old puzzle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a question wrapped in a curiosity wrapped in a ball of dung.

When I first try teaching my students about Japan, I see all their naive questions morphing around in their brains and I think: don't worry, little student. You can try and try and study and study and become a native speaker of Japanese or a Japanese citizen or somehow arrange a reincarnation as a Japanese, but YOU WILL NEVER BE JAPANESE and you will NEVER UNDERSTAND A SINGLE ONE OF THEM.

I'll just sum this whole diatribe up by telling you that it would actually be better for you to try to understand why an ant or a butterfly do what they do.

Yes, I like that. That is EXACTLY the way to approach understanding a Japanese.