it's not life that matters but the journey...

Its so nice to have my cat back with me again - he follows me from room to room, crying when I am out of sight.  Good thing that I am not so busy right now.  I have been meeting friends and former students, and yesterday I rode the train to Shizuoka, about 40 minutes away, for lunch and shopping.  Its a much bigger city, full of department stores and people. It was nice to go there again and see different surroundings.

I haven’t been doing a good job of finding examples of funny English lately, even though I have been out quite a bit.  It does seem that English is everywhere in this country, even though most people can’t even read it or understand it.  People of all ages wear t-shirts with English phrases or words, which are sometimes inappropriate (like young girls wearing shirts with Playboy and the bunny logo – do they know its not the same as “Hello Kitty”?)   Similarly, I see people wearing shirts in the U.S. with Chinese or Japanese kanji.  I guess just like we think that Kanji looks interesting, Japanese people must think that English looks “cool” or interesting.  So why don’t they learn to speak it or understand it properly?  That is something that I intend to find out.   At a coffee shop yesterday, I saw a paragraph written in English on the wall of the outside seating area.  There were two misspelled words, and other words rantogether (missing a space) – but I guarantee that I am the only one who noticed it.  I was with three of my former students (all from the English course at the high school where I taught from 1998 to 2000).  They are all out of college now and have traveled to foreign countries (Aiko lived in Stockton, California for about three years). We also ran into a girl who had been a third year (senior) English course student when I began teaching there.  The students in English course at that school generally graduate with a high ability in English because they study it 10 hours a week with 2 foreign teachers, have English camps, and a homestay in Australia.  But sadly, the girl that we met couldn’t even say one sentence to me in English.  Its been a good six years since she graduated from high school, and I guarantee that she has not used English since she left there.  It’s a real shame, and she was probably embarrassed – rightly so!

There are some other things that I’ve encountered in my outings lately that demonstrate just how backwards Japan can be!  It’s a known fact for anyone who has visited or spent time in this country that Japan is homogeneous.  Foreigners do live here, especially in the metropolitan areas like Tokyo, Osaka, or Yokohama, but generally are very scarce, making up perhaps 1 or 2 percent of the whole population. Stereotyping and discrimination are alive and well here.  When almost everyone looks and acts the same, it’s easy to judge anyone who looks different, or to have the wrong idea about “foreigners.”  Japanese get most of their ideas of westerners from our Hollywood movies:  we are all rich and live in big houses, we are all beautiful with tanned perfect bodies and great hair, and we all have guns!  (Well, don’t we?)  And chances are that in the rural parts of Japan, or the smaller towns (like where I am now living), most Japanese have only seen black people in the movies, or on television.  So, its not too surprising to see here in our little corner of Fuji city a glaring example of discrimination against black people.  Though, sadly, 99.9 percent of the people here wouldn’t even know that they are doing anything wrong.   There is a coffee shop very close to our home, and when I saw the sign, I was instantly reminded of the old Sambo’s restaurants (most Americans of a certain age can remember these), remnants of a more intolerant time in our country.  Well, America has come a long way, and with our PC attitudes, the images used for "Sambo's" restaurants are no longer acceptable.  However, here in Japan, they don’t understand.  The restaurant here is called “Chibi-kuro,” which literally means little black boy.  But Masahiko told me that “Chibi” is derogatory slang for a short kid – in the U.S. we might say “shorty” – and “kuro” means black. The sign is what is more offensive, with a cartoonish picture of just the head of a little black boy, looking like something you would see on an episode of “South Park.”  The whole thing seems innocent enough because it comes from a children’s book that Masahiko read as a kindergartener by the same name – apparently the woman who owns the restaurant was a kindergarten teacher and thought that the book was “cute.”  But I don’t want any black people to come here and see the sign – because it shows how far this country still has to go towards cultural awareness.