essay in a language seeking life

7/30/2019 Essay in a Language Seeking Life

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Essay in a Language Seeking Life

It is close to nine in the evening sometime in the year 2001. An email is just in from thevice principal at the international high school our son attends. (We live in Japan.) In it heexplains to me what is explained to my parents back in America when it is me who is inhigh school and it is time for me to take a Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Back thenthere is a ready made package of talk that is given to parents; that package has notchanged much in thirty years.

That email starts me wondering. Wondering, I begin writing. At this moment the testingordeal is being brought home because it is our son who is involved. His future is to bedetermined--to one degree or another--by a few hours spent in an uncomfortable andunhealthy sitting position in a coldly stressful atmosphere trying to answer questions

about things in which he might have little or no interest.

Just what is it about these exams that is so important?

It seems that being human in this age is in part about keeping ourselves statistically fitaccording to whatever criteria happen to come down from the powers in the system thathappens to be. Exams are a way to measure. SAT exams have become for some partof a socioeconomic rite of passage in America. In other places, in other ages, there wasfeet binding, penis tying, rib crushing girdles, male or female circumcision, and muchelse that is condoned and seen as important by those particular societies for reasonswhich seem valid to people then. It can be interesting to look at what we as human

societies fancy from one age to another, from one culture to another. Statistics, exams,certification--that whole package--are so important now. Not many look at theseanthropologically though.

*****

My writing nook has a little window. My wife asks a carpenter to cut one in the wall so Ihave a bit of light. The windowʼs glass is glazed so that from outside looking in I can't beseen distinctly. I am a blur. It is a window that, looking out of it, seems permanently iced

over. Could I see clearly through it, or if I open the window, I have a partial view of ourneighbor's house and, if I lean forward, can look at a parking lot farther down the street.

My wife, Morie, is Japanese. I am from America and am an ethnic mixture. A fusion. AScottish German English Russian Jew. My father's speculation has it that I am partAmerican Indian too (Osage it would have been) mixed in through my maternalgrandmother's side from when her people were mud hut dwelling sodbusters in Kansas.

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Now, with what is called our mixed, interracial, or international, marriage, our childrenare fusions even more.

In America it is as a white person I go through life. My skin has an earthen tone that isnothing like white, but "white," in American society, doesn't mean an actual color on a

spectrum. One thing that growing up in America teaches me, even if it is not a formallesson like ones at school, is that white people are privileged in ways that many codedwith colors other than white are not. Another thing that growing up there means is thatforces behind the scenes keep me in the dark about the color business, or in the white.

Labeled by my society's color coding as white, coerced to live within that color's socialand psychological range, I innocently absorb attitudes that are racist. With no choice butto be the color my world puts on me, I--along with every person who has ever thought ofhimself or herself as "white"--directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly, get along inlife by burdening those who had neither asked for nor agreed to a subservient role. Weeach are an accomplice to an injustice, and, for those who believe in it, it means bad

karma. Though unable to articulate it at that young age, there is a wilting, unwholesomefeeling to that process of becoming white, there is a sense of complicity in an immoralact. This comes with the benefits being light skinned offers.

*****

My father's mother is Jewish. She immigrates to America with her family from Russia.They sail to America from Liverpool, England, and it is said by my cousin Marilyn thatmy grandmother might have been born while crossing the Atlantic. She grows up as a

Hebrew, but when she marries my grandfather she converts to his religion. He isChristian, a Methodist. Through the two of them, different religions, different ethnic andcultural backgrounds, come together. Often--as is told me later in life as a middle agedadult--theirs is not often a peaceful joining, but they manage to stay together until deathdoes them part.

My paternal grandfather dies when I am three or four. My grandmother lives with usthroughout much of my childhood and, in all those years of her bickering with mymother, with my father, or, later, with me, throughout those years with her perpetualharping on sundry points, I can't remember her ever once mentioning anti-Semitism orany kind of discrimination. She doesn't talk of the Holocaust or the ovens. Her family

has not experienced that. Though there are pogrom in the Russia her family flees, sheis not yet born.

But, with her conversion to Christianity, marrying outside her religion, does she ever feelrejected by her Jewish relatives? My father tells me that her parents initially are againsther plans to marry my grandfather but that after they meet him and see what kind offellow he is they consent.

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After marriage, does she ever feel isolated or unwanted surrounded as she is by mygrandfather's connections, surrounded by those who attend his church, his friends, hisfamily? She grows up in Philadelphia and, married, lives in Eastern Pennsylvania in asmall partly industrial town surrounded by fields and pastures. Royersford. Many aroundher have German or Dutch surnames.

My cousins on her side of the family, around my age, across the river in Philadelphia arebrought up Jewish. Because of that fact are their lives in some way more restricted thanmy own? Or less?

When one of those cousins, Sara Lee, travels with her husband to England during theBush administration (2006) she meets, she says, with anti-Americanism as well as anti-Semitism. If it is me alone there might be just the anti-Americanism. Is there aqualitative difference? I'm thinking there must be for her, especially since she is notunaware of history.

On the other hand my wife, a Japanese, and I are aware, when we live there a coupleyears after being married, that there are people in America who do not consider us agenuine American family, and we become aware that there are people in both Americaand Japan who do not approve of mixed race marriages, or miscegenation, which in theU.S. when I am young is still illegal in some states. We are aware of all this.

Is it ever allowed for any of us to be just human? From what I can gather from our familyhistory the answer is no. On the Scottish side, things--English aggression--in the homecountry drives people off the land to work the mines. That is what they do when theyimmigrate to America. They settle in Shenandoah, which is a coal mining region ofeastern Pennsylvania, and work in that industry though not in the mines. He is a hostler

at a coal mine, that ancestor.

The Jewish side comes from Russia but before Russia they are—according to anuncle--in Spain. Spain they are forced to leave because of the Inquisition. Then they areforced to leave Russia due to the pogrom.

Do I come from an environment where the way of looking at the world is not bright andsparkling?

*****

At school some classmates no doubt suffer more than me because their skin color isdarker. Because of their skinʼs color, many, most, or all are often at a disadvantagewhen it comes to getting into higher education or finding a job.

Until a certain age, until exposed to a scene beyond my immediate family, I am unawareof the word race and what it means in my society.

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The first experience I can recall is sometime before elementary schoolʼs third grade,since we move to a neighboring town where I enter fourth grade. The little circle ofrecently built houses, including the one we live in, borders on “The West End,” which isa part of town where African-Americans are a majority, the Black section. At the outer

perimeter of one curve of our housing circle is what we called “the field.” When we areold enough to venture away from our own yards and our mothers' watchful eyes thatfield is mostly where we play. It is an area of undeveloped lots, a place full of a knee-high grass (weed) with one tree, a pin oak, off near a street that ends our turf. That fieldis our outdoors. Those grasses or weeds, that single tree under a sky are all that is left--after that housing development goes up--to transmute nature into our feelings of life.

One afternoon while I am playing alone a dark skinned boy wanders over into that fieldfrom his home in The West End. His name is Billy. "Wanna play?" What we do toentertain ourselves is gone from memory but after a while it is snack time. I invite Billy toour house for milk and cookies. My mother seems happy enough to have him as guest.

After Billy goes home my mother praises me. What for? For inviting a "colored boy" intoour house. My mother has nothing negative in mind or any underlying message to putacross, but the fact that she divides us that way, according to skin color, is my firstmemory of an awareness of racial difference.

It seems to me now that I may have absorbed at least some color consciousness beforethat time with Billy Meekins, but that incident stands out vividly in memory, maybe asinnocenceʼs end. But there is something before that, though it is not a clear memory:going to a local grocer with my mother, seeing a Black child and asking her why thatchild's skin is black or brown, did he or she get burned.

I feel lucky that my parents didn't raise me to believe anything stupid about people withdarker skin. Or about people with lighter skin. As I grow into the surrounding world,though, there is stupidity all over, with neighbors and their kids, in the scene at schooland in the schoolyard. There the expressions white cracker and chocolate bar are heardevery day. Also heard is the word nigger, which is used profusely by some kids, who getit from adults or an older sibling.

Paralleling the way our natural surroundings are impoverished by houses constructedfor a baby boom population (including my family) is the way our heart nature isdevastated by racism. There are activities too, such as organized sports, religion, and

scouting, that are supposedly building us up healthy in spirit, mind, and body; is thereno racism in these?

In those schoolyard and playtime scenes I am being forced to identify with one group asopposed to the other, to feel I belong with those with whom a skin color code hasgrouped me. The social law is to belong or be considered a traitor and be rejected bythose lighter skinned kids, by "my own kind," as a “nigger-lover.” (In "respectable"society the social dynamic at work probably is not expressed so crudely; it may be more

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subtly "suggested," but the effect is the same.) As I come to accept that division bycolor--as we all inevitably have to at some level--whatever innocence or goodness thatmay have blessed my childhood is lost.

We each are put into a cage of race. Therein we are given an assumed identity. Coming

out of that cage, if ever we do, it is possible we might feel at a loss as to who we, whatwe, are.

It is impossible to say for sure what kind of indoctrination is operating on darker skinnedchildren. Something is happening. They are being told about whites. Is it negative? Aresome parents telling their kids not to play with whites the way some white parents telltheir kids not to play with blacks?

Indoctrination? As a child I have no idea what misery light skinned people historicallyhave brought upon darker skinned people. The walls that defend the little white world Igrow up in do not allow me to get a sense of the depth and depravity of skin based

ways of seeing, how skin color constructs the very scene that shutters my vision. I amtypically white American in my ignorance and am lead to think I am happily so.

Indoctrination? We are too young to be aware that dark skinned individuals and darkskinned communities are under perpetual indoctrination by their light skinned “fellowcitizens” even though they may have never met a white person.

An American way of living, operating through the persons of little boys and girls in aschoolyard, violates our human natures, cuts us off from ourselves, makes us notwhole; it sets us off on a destructive quest for happiness. Without a community ofourselves, without free access to each other, there is an emptiness, and in America

pursuit of money has ever more stepped in to replace a human community lost.

Dividing us the way American society does, according to skin color, prohibits ourentering each other's lives. As children we are, yes, there together in a classroom, inphysical proximity on a playground, and we are with each other on teams playingsports, but do I know much at all about the dark skinned ones I spend my school dayswith? Outside the activities structured by school or community, interracial mingling is forsome still stigmatized.

There are things we become aware of through freely interacting as friends or as lovers,but when association outside the locker room or school room is frowned upon or barred,

how much of our world can we see?

In high school we talk some, but no one speaks. No one dares. One sister, Vicki,speaks. We are juniors and there is a time of “interracial tension” moving some tobehave in hateful ways or in reaction to that hate. Vicki Burroughs is the only one whospeaks--ever--in that school. “How do you think it feels,” she asks us all sitting in thatclassroom (there was discussion about the recent incidents), "when most of the peoplearound you don't even want you with them?"

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That, spoken, is the only real learning that goes on in that school.

In our childhood there are other harmful things we are exposed to, such as warindoctrination and the threat of nuclear mass destruction, and there are more immediate

phenomena such as the DDT fog sprayed in our neighborhood to get rid of mosquitoes.Children on our circle run after those trucks, frolic in the smelly clouds. No one tells us itis DDT and we do not know what DDT is or that it is toxic and can make us sick.

No one tells us calling someone nigger will cripple us.

Headed for Japan, stepping onto that plane at Philadelphia's international airport, I aminwardly a bit terrified of being myself. My nature, my spirit, has been under attack,abused by the world I grow up in; It teaches me how to abuse others, which isconnected to abusing myself. That me is a person who grew up wounded many times,scarred, a person who, as a result, maybe takes hurting others as a matter of course. Is

there some faint hope in me at the time, a hope that living among the Japanese will healme, will cure me of myself and let me live unafraid? Am I looking to be--as a clearlymarked outsider--more freely myself, more fully human, than what is allowed inAmerica? Is Japan, to me at the time, a place to escape an American storm?

*****

In America the fact of my being American is subsidiary to other concerns such as mysocioeconomic condition, my religious or political affiliation or lack of one, my

educational background, my skin color, or whether Iʼm a “good guy.” These are

prominent, more than the fact of my being American. Here in Japan, though, beingAmerican means more, it means Western and foreign, not Japanese. The rest--outsidesocial status in my own country--is irrelevant. I'm a gaijin (foreigner, outsider) and thatcondition in one way or another works into life's every social aspect here.

Almost every day here in Japan I am reminded that I am an outsider. It may besomething so seemingly insignificant as a passing group of school boys who shout"Haro!" (hello) after they think they are at a safe distance. Or it could be a waitress at arestaurant who looks at my wife for confirmation of an order I have just given her inJapanese. Or a red-faced drunk now with courage to try his English on me. Or the looks

on faces when I enter any public place, that here comes something different. None ofthis really upsets me. Tuning it out becomes a survival strategy. It's like not hearing theconstant engine noise on the highway a hundred yards down the slope from ourtownhouse community.

My presence here and my being an outsider cause some sense of irregularity for theJapanese too. Is out of the ordinary perceived as a threat? “Threat” is too strong a word.Something potentially problematic or bad.

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One bit of irony is that soon after my arrival, through at times an English languagenewspaper, its letters from readers to the editor, and through several non-JapaneseWestern acquaintances, I am propositioned with the notion that the Japanese areprejudiced, are racist. Because, supposedly, they don't like foreigners. They call us

“gaijin,” which, to some, has a negative aura. They keep us distant and at the timethrough convolutions of bureaucratic procedure make it legally challenging to remainhere or to become a citizen. These Japanese, then, who had been Westernized atgunpoint, so to speak, or by the cannons on Perry's ships and after, and laterWesternized again by atomic bombs, these Japanese, according to some, are racist.

It is hard to measure the social devastation the forced opening of Japan by the Westbrings. It is argued by some that Japan's own colonial expansion, its rapidindustrialization and foreign aggression were defensive reactions to Westerncolonialism in Asia.

With defeat in WWII, the prewar ideology the Japanese manufactured to supportJapan's modern nation building and overseas expansion programs--such as theemperor worship and sacred land propaganda (which to me seems incongruous withthe very idea of modernity)--is in the same condition as Tokyo: charred remains. Theentire society--including all the schools and religious institutions--had been brought intoa world of make believe. But, with defeat, what remains to believe? What is there forpeople as life supports? After the war, what moral code by which to raise their childrenis viable? What is to be taught in schools? What frame of reference is there? Howapproach the concept of nation?

These are all ripple effects of Perry's arrival. Of being no longer a country shut off from

rest of the world.

America would come to fill that vacuum. It might be said that in Japan ʼs translation ofAmerican style democratic individualism much is lost or misinterpreted. Gail LeeBernstein, in Harukoʼs World: A Japanese Farm Woman and Her Community, reports anobservation made by an elderly Japanese woman: “Young people are getting selfish.They misunderstand the word democracy and think it means freedom andselfishness” (p. 104).

Professor Bernstein quotes Harukoʼs husband, Shoichi: “. . . parentʼs had lost allconfidence in themselves on account of reforms in the schoolsʼ ethics courses since the

American Occupation, which replaced the traditional values of filial piety and obediencewith democ rat ic tea chi ngs that see med to giv e offi cia l san ct io n toassertiveness.” [English versions here and above are Professor Bernsteinʼs.]

Can it be said, even, that in America the notions democracy and individualism arecorrectly interpreted? Who can say? Who can judge?

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*****

There are times I feel confused about I'm doing here. My job is teaching, teaching some

dimension of English. Here the language is broken up as speaking, listening, reading,writing. I teach a course in American Studies. There is a course I used to do in poetry,another in translation studies, and right now there is one on 1960s counterculture inAmerica.

My confusion might be a result of living in this world, where relations with others areprecarious as are relations with our social institutions and jobs. Am I, as a teacher, adescendant of those in an ancient sacred profession, or am I a replaceable part hired toshow up in a room, a white Western face, a token gaijin, to put in a schooladvertisement? My own sense of it is what matters and that is what this writing is about.

My experience of schools in Japan has been going on--at this writing--for 32 years,more than half my life. Never have I been through any aspect of Japan's school systemas a learner; it has always been as a teacher, a foreign teacher, an import, an implantfrom somewhere outside.

This writing is based on various teaching experiences in various settings: part time at a junior high school, full time at a high school, full time and part time at universities, fulltime as contract teacher at a private English language school, and as a private tutor.

I'm an immigrant, although my citizenship is still with the USA. It is possible for me tobecome a Japanese citizen, but I do not because I dislike bureaucratic procedural

nuisance.

Looking from where I am at what is called education in Japan, I do not get a clear imageof what is or is supposed to be happening. There are statistics of course that we canrefer to find out what is going on. Statistics are overabundant here in Japan too, as theyare in any country now where there is easy access to computers, but do they mean anymore than that now there are computers? Is the world any better for all the statistics?

This writing is not about statistics. This is a contemplation of the various blurs inexistence that are given the name education. It is an attempt to make something out ofit all, to make of it a personal sense, a human sense--as opposed to a statistical

accounting.

*****

I am 26 years old when I come. At the time, 1980, there is no prerequisite for coming toJapan as a teacher of spoken English. For a job teaching here all that is asked for is a

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college degree. One's major is not an issue, nor is experience. Is there a notion thatteaching is such a mechanical thing that anyone can do it by repeating a step by stepformula over and over?

Considering what other young people from America, coming also to teach, have done

as preparation it doesn't seem that I am too awfully unread. My readings on Japan are abook on Japanese art history. A few D.T. Suzuki books on Zen. A book on Japanesereligions. A Reishauer book on Japanese history. Hobsbaum the historian on Japan'smodernization. The Chie Nakane book on feudalism and modern corporate structure.The Benedict book.

There is a language book a linguistics professor at Delaware gave me. Japanese is alanguage I want to study but my regular graduate school course work is already anoverload; fitting in an extra class is not possible. In my little spare time my lessons inJapanese begin, all on my own with that text and later in the language lab at school,listening to tapes, practicing pronunciations and phrases over and over until the

muscles in my throat and mouth can better shape sounds so I can say things moresmoothly.

Compared to someone who'd majored in Japanese studies I know very little. What Ilearn isn't nearly enough, but once here my efforts with language and culture continue.

Upon arrival a group of us (a fresh batch of YMCA instructors) are met at Narita Airportby our orientation program director. A good guy, knowledgeable, fluent in Japanese. Heappears to know how to interact well with people here, or it seems that way to me thenthough I can't really tell what is being said back and forth. We have a one weekorientation with him in the Mitaka ward of Tokyo. It is helpful.

*****

Before stepping onto that Narita-bound plane at Philadelphia International Airport, Ihave positive things in mind about Japan. Otherwise why would I commit myself to twoyears here as a contract teacher? Japan is the land of 弧掌難鳴 “ko-sho-nan-me,” or

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” as it had been rendered in English (by whomI don't know, but maybe by Suzuki Daisetsu). That is the famous Zen koan attributed toa Chinese monk and then, another version of it, to priest Hakuin. Japan, to me, is a landof satori, enlightenment.

Zen is like a hero to me, shining in empty brilliance. It isn't until a quarter century laterreading a book called Zen At War that I learn of Japanese Zen's support for the nation ʼsimperial warmongering exploits. That seems shameful now, but, in such matters, whatreligion is innocent? Many Christians seem to ignore or forget--if ever they knew--thatChristianity is a supposed to be a pacifist religion.

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Enlightenment and gentle-looking raven-haired lovely women. Am I a victim of Westerncultural stereotypes concerning Japanese women? Maybe there is a tendencyeverywhere to see greener grass on the other side. Are those stereotypes reallyproducts of the West or are they made in Japan? Are Western men importing

stereotypes already made by Japanese men? Why would any men need to createstereotypes of women?

Also, in another dimension, there may be a longing in me to come to Japan to lust outon its women. To be skibby without censure. It is an inner moving I am stupid enough tothink is hidden and secret. Is it my idea, then, to find release for such urges with theseJapanese women who, I imagine, do not live under the same (puritanical) restrictions aswomen in America? These women: do I think to bring them away to my dark chamberand pleasure myself, Scott free. These women, my lust whispers, are outside America.Whatever propriety there may be in their own society does not matter because theirsociety is not my own. Am I shameful? Or am I just young and a jungle of hormones?

The man-woman thing goes on an on it seems.

At any rate things don't often go the way a libido likes. In Japan or anywhere I've heardof. Life is rife with fantasies.

*****

In the American society I am leaving there are, I hear, negative portrayals of Japanese.On television, old war movies are still being shown on UHF channels, but I can't recall

anything particularly objectionable except for the fact that the Japanese were the enemyand therefore the bad guys. The American soldiers called them “nips.” There is a linefrom a war movie that sticks in my head. An American sergeant instructs a G.I. wieldinga flamethrower “Spray the whole hill! Itʼs filthy with Nips!”

On T.V. German soldiers are called "krauts." Are these usages meant to be offensive?They are the enemy so I assume these words are uttered with ill-feeling. For “realism.”

Apart from the war movies, if I am exposed to negative images of Japanese whilegrowing up I can't remember what they are. That negative image world must havepassed me by, but then again I'm not of Japanese descent and am not sensitive to such

things and neither are my surroundings conducive to sensitivity. There is, where I growup, prejudice against African-Americans. There is no shortage of horrible names forthem. There is anti-Semitism.

Looking through my high school yearbooks, looking at studentsʼ last names, I marvel atthe ethnic diversity of our school. There are Italian names, Polish names, Irish names,German names, Scottish names, English names--and our high school is between tenand twenty per cent African American--but there are no Japanese names, no Chinese,

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and no Korean. This is in southern New Jersey across the Delaware River fromPhiladelphia. There are at the time (1972) no Japanese around which is why citizens donot feel threatened by a Japanese presence. There is no Japanese community thatmight be seen as competing for grades, jobs, or political power.

Except for the war movie content, I can't remember hearing anything disrespectful aboutJapanese people or about Americans of Japanese descent. If I'd been born ageneration earlier, growing up during the war instead of after it, I'd have beenbombarded by racist anti-Japanese propaganda. Is there an anti-Jap tap that can beturned on and off?

On the other hand, back in grade school my neighbor and I watch a Japanese programcalled Ultra Man on TV almost every week on a winter afternoon after school. Theepisodes are dubbed into English, which itself is for us one of the show's attractions,since the English sounds humorously off, out of place, not synchronized well with thecharacters' lip movements, and it is a quick, choppy, mechanical, intense, martial

sounding English we hear and imitate playfully. The monsters Ultra Man battles andeventually defeats make us grin skeptically because they look so obviously fakebouncing around in those floppy rubber costumes. We enjoy watching; those shows area source of pleasure and watching them does not make me think anything positive ornegative about the Japanese as a people.

In the world of electronic equipment, though, there are negative images of thingsJapanese companies make that are spreading throughout American society. Transistorradios are what I remember most vividly. To a local park we often play at comes aclassmate with a transistor radio. Its sound is weak and scratchy. Probably it needs newbatteries but what one of us claims, grabbing it away from its owner and shaking it,

knocking on it with a bent finger joint, is "Ah, it's made in Japan!" and that meansshoddy merchandise. Maybe it is; I have no way of knowing.

My father, before I was born, while he was in the U.S. Navy, is stationed in Japan duringpart of the Korean War. He has favorable things to say about Japan and aboutJapanese people. There are souvenirs which he brings back: sake cups, prints, a jewelbox and other things; these are regarded as decorative items in our house. He does notbring any swords, he brings nothing of military significance. My father never hasanything bad to say about Japanese people.

There are times when we as a family go out to dinner we go to a Japanese restaurant.

As a growing boy who likes to eat, Japanese food tastes good: therefore Japan must bean okay place. That is me as a child, my reasoning ability.

Beginning in high school there is talk of Black studies. In college I hear things aboutWomen's studies, but the only exposure, in a school environment, to anythingconnected with Japan is a haiku by Basho about a frog and a pond. That is back inelementary school or high school. About Japanese Americans, or any Asian Americans,their history, art or culture, there is nothing from kindergarten through graduate school.

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Nor, come to think of it, is there anything connected with the Polish, Italian, Irish,Scottish, or German backgrounds of my classmates. Except for St. Patrick ʼs Day, whenwe all wear green.

Exposed to various images of Japan, it is reasonable to say that I internalize thepositive more than whatever there might be that is negative. The positive translates intoa two year commitment teaching in this country. Two years that stretches into 32 yearsand counting.

*****

It's nice to respect others and to respect other cultures but at times it can be trying. Whyis that? Most immediately this concerns the culture that hosts me, within which my

everyday family life, social life and toil goes on.

Sometimes it is hard to respect a people, a culture, a society.

Given the forces of conditioning, too, that make our own culture the absolute center ofthe universe (MY culture = THE universe), respect and understanding become idealbehaviors that we might read about or hear about in a sermon or lecture, but which aremost often realized only superficially, if at all. There are many potholes, pitfalls. Idealsare better than their opposites.

Too, itʼs easier to appreciate things in another culture from afar, if one doesnʼt have to

live there.

Japanese culture makes it hard if not impossible for many Japanese not to marginalizeme or to go on with their lives as if I or immigrants like me do not exist. In the same way,American culture is not geared wholly to satisfy those who immigrate there. Immigrantgroups historically have had a terrible time in America. Things in both countries arebetter than they used to be, but there is still room for improvement.

A visit to a shopping mall in Japan might illustrate my point. Only about 0.0001 percentof the items for sale are of interest to me. All of it is aimed at selling to Japaneseconsumers. Its shops are filled with things mainstream Japanese might want to buy.

Many goods are things Japanese women might buy, and there is much merchandise forthe young, especially young women. What clothing there is for men is either too smallfor me, or, more to the point, is not my style. Recently we visit a new mall. In the entirefour floors of shops the only thing that I consider buying is a bottle of massage oil.

In the same way that customers like me do not exist for the purchasing agents who fillthese malls with merchandise, taxpayers like me exist only faintly--if at all--for cityplanners and government bureaucrats. There seems to be a monolithic notion that

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Japan is all Japanese. Itʼs that mono-culture thinking that Japan as a whole is prettymuch made of. It is instilled from a young age through the school system. I am ananomaly. The presence of non-Japanese who are not tourists continues to beproblematic here. How does it feel to know that I am anomalous, or that my beingdifferent is viewed as a problem? This is the way things are, and, if I were someone who

for some reason needs a feeling of merit or self worth that is attainable only from thepowers that be or from the surrounding mono-culture Japanese community, it would bemy tough luck.

*****

It is important to note that much of what passes for Japanese culture--the particularundertakings that have been selected, appropriated, advertised, or sanctioned asJapanese culture--are from “traditional culture,” and that the word traditional has been

carefully modulated so that it means traditions of upper, privileged, classes of ages past.

These versions of Japanese culture adopted by the middle class include activities suchas flower arrangement, calligraphy, the tea ceremony, classical dance, etc. At any ratethese are what foreign visitors are shown as being exemplary of Japanese culture.

In this class-directed higher culture there was art going on that goes beyond class andculture and time. Still, while artists were designing exquisite rock gardens for well-endowed temples and painting folding screens for high and mighty patrons, so manypeople at a lower social strata were hard up for basic nutrients. I'm not blaming theartists for not resolving the situation. It seems that some Buddhist paintings do look at

the suffering of the poor; the poor, sick, and suffering appear therein. In Japan, though,is that just a convention of Buddhist art brought over from China? Are the artists orviewers at all moved by the actual suffering of those in their own society?

Many of the finer points of the arts I am too unsophisticated to appreciate. I have noeyes for some things. One of the masses, my orientation in the world focuses me onwork: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay is something my father brings meup to appreciate. (Yet, thinking about that these many years later, it seems that honestyis synonymous with quality) What, then, is so wonderful about a carved bamboo teascoop I see at a department store exhibit? It sounds contradictory perhaps because itmight be thought that someone raised to be work oriented would value such an object

for all the work that goes into it. A tea jar that has 76 coats of lacquer. It's possible theword “work” has different dimensions in different environments. “Work,” obviously, forme at the time, is not a criterion for artistic value. How something lets me feel is what itis all about for me, and these objects simply do not move me.

Tea bowls do. Hand-fashioned, often unevenly glazed or even unglazed, their earthennature is allowed to come through. Holding one feels like walking the earth. To many ofthem there is a warmth, a gentleness that is not smooth, and there is a graceful

13



imperfection of shape, like that of the earth itself with its roughness, bumps, and lack ofperfect symmetry. Tea bowls attract me.

*****

The elegantly curving Buddhist temple roofs in art books I come to see in person.Flowingly outreaching, inviting, yes, but around me are not temples and pagodas.Downtown the buildings are concrete, rectangular, grayish--another aspect of humanheart. These places we go to work in are not all that different from what's to be found inan American city. There are exceptions and special places that exist as kind of an oasisamidst the downtown bustle. To see what feels good to look on usually means goingsomewhere. I am not lucky enough to live within whiffing distance of a temple's incenseor within walking distance to its garden.

The International Style in architecture is popular in postwar Japan. It distresses me thata society which once shows so much taste could now be so, it seems to me, tasteless,but I realize later that it's again a matter money and social class more than lack of taste.We're a democracy now, and, as with America, function matters more than elegance.

*****

An apartment for rent within my income means a tiny cold water flat. Tatami mat livingroom floor. Unfurnished, but with a bath, a kitchen sink and private toilet, it is a cold

damp cheaply built two room adventure in exotic living without insulation. The tatamimats are new, their scent pleasant. They are good to lie on, just breathe. That newness,that pleasantness, soon fades.

The school that employs me is in a new building, its classrooms spic and span.Fluorescent lights are paneled into ceiling board. There are long three-person metaldesks with fake wood-grain surfaces glued over plywood and folding chairs with plasticover just a hint of foam on metal seats.

Through large sideways sliding windows there is a view of a tiny playground below for akindergarten the school also operates for not an inexpensive tuition. Classroom walls

are off white. In the roomʼs front is plywood and filler board lightweight wobbly podiumwith a folding chair for a teacher. A blackboard--still the kind for chalk. Otherwise empty.No decoration. Just this room with metal and plywood furnishings.

With the lack of any decoration the chairs and desks and walls themselves become theatmosphere. It could have been a meeting room at a company office. It makes me wantto go out and find a warm body to hug.

14



Buses are, during rush hours, jam-packed, people pressed tightly up against oneanother for close to an hour; it is too close to a stranger for too long. There are timeswhen an attractive woman boards. As others squeeze in after her she gets pushed backinto me. The warm flesh of her buttocks is right at my pelvis and her fragrant morningshampooed peach scent hair right under my nose. At times pressing back into me is a

balding fellow with dandruff, or a chubby fellow who smells of salami or pepperonisausage, or one unbathed and stinking with the previous day's body odor or previousnight's booze.

Roads here, in this city, are narrow and congested, though now there is work going onwidening some of them as well as new roads that are under construction. Commutingby motorized vehicle takes a lot of time to go not such a long distance, and in this city,Sendai, public transportation is expensive compared to larger cities like Tokyo or Osaka.

I am unable to imitate those who stand reading squeezed on a bus as it heaves to andfro. Someone lends me an old bicycle. I mean old, like out of a bicycle museum. It was

quite an experience riding it. Smooth, it is an old Cadillac of a bicycle.

*****

Many people can be warm and friendly, human, even though surroundings might bedecrepit or dingy (places built long ago, before the war). Some of the buildings are--asbecomes painfully obvious--built for smaller people: door jams are too low for me; I getdizzy bumping my head until ducking becomes habit. Even with all the inconveniencesand discomforts such as wearing those one-size only slippers--provided everywhere for

guests--that are always too small (would it be impossible to have some made in largersizes?), many here who live or work in dilapidated places are warm and friendly.

Thereʼs an elderly couple who run a ramshackle bicycle shop nearby that has sincebeen rebuilt. One day the old fellow brings over mountain vegetables he and his wifegathered by hand (and we, in time, reciprocate with something). Even though where Icome from letting things in a such a state of disrepair--as it was--connects with lowmoral character (= low real estate value), these are fine people and they can go out oftheir way to be helpful. It's possible that instead of sinking money into repairs they use itfor their children or grandchildren. The various childhood observances all seem to becostly, as are the extracurricular lessons that many believe are necessary for

advancement. Too, it's hard to keep up with tremors and quakes.

There can be a flip side to all the geniality--people can be arrogant or mean-spiritedhere as they can elsewhere.

Is this a tea bowl in its "wabi" simplicity (poverty)? The tea artists absorbed the lifearound them, human and non-human.

15



There are individuals with sensitive gentle minds. Beautiful people. Much gentler thanI'm likely ever to be. (I need to accept the me I'm unacceptable to.)

Do I come to Japan hoping for something somehow qualitatively different in people,something not in the spectrum of individuals in my native land? Or is it that there is no

way of knowing what to expect, not really, and is that point itself an attraction?

*****

Problems with respecting and appreciating life in Japan begin for me at work. It is not somuch a problem with individuals. Some people, while fine in their own person, whilemaybe good natured enough, make it their daily business to try to thwart me with theirtrivial rules. Japanese come across this too, though many Japanese seem to morereadily accept it all, possibly because they grew up with it. I do not like it. They do not do

this intentionally: for them it is a matter of doing their job.

Still, people here carry on in a way that seems more humane than the nasty-facedclerks in my home country. Are there fewer sour puss crabby clerks and officials here inJapan? Someone should conduct a survey. There seem to be enough uptight stress-faced Japanese who go by the manual, rule by little rule, maybe while going evenfoaming at the mouth.

They, the Japanese in the workplace, would like me to respect their way of doing things,but isn't respect a two-way street? There is and has been, up front, a certain politeness,a sense of respect from the workplace Japanese towards me, which may be just

formality. (“Polite” conversation can be extremely anemic, prudish, and boring.) On theother hand it seems that more and more busyness arises that requires me to fill out andturn in more and more forms; more and more trivialities pop up, nuisances, that in alltruth I cannot interpret as signs of respect. Alas, bureaucracy.

People bow, speak in polite formality, act with respectful attitudes towards each other,but then we are saddled with many truly irksome tasks. What, then, is "respect," really?Just a face people put on?

Someday someone will write a book that will let us see the forces, largely under surface,at work in Japanese society, the submerged customs that still shape personalities and

behaviors. When that book comes out will we see that the Japanese--like peopleelsewhere--though wanting to think of themselves as being modern and forward-lookingare in some ways still tied to taboo and superstition?

Or:

16



Will a time come when we discover that our sense of who we are is fixed in a societythat is organized and conducted by people who cannot be honest? With themselves orwith anyone.

Honesty is a way of seeing, one that is genuine, that comes from a place in us that is

beyond value. As such it has no place in our world. People who see and say honestlyare always outsiders.

Mostly the Japanese I live among consider me a “special” member of some sort, anextended-stay guest, but only to the extent that I play along with their social games,comply with their rules, or in general fit in with their culture.

*****

It is not that I shy away from work. I can dig in. If I feel motivated. But I have never

learned to appreciate what seems to me to be meaningless, unnecessary work, whichthere is a great deal of here in Japan (the department store elevator girls even thoughthe lifts are fully automated, or the ones who stand before an escalator bowing tocustomers) and which everyone seems to accept as elegant manners. Or filling outforms--in Japanese or English--that no one is likely to care about, just because it's seenas “duty” to fill out that form. I have to turn in the same form every year certifying thatmy educational status is unchanged. (Yes, I graduated from the same schools I reportedtwenty-five years ago.) There are oodles of examples. Too many annoying irrelevanciesand things that defy common sense. This is not written about any one particularcompany or school; this is a review based on 33 years (at this writing) of workexperience at various places in Japan.

Someone from India tells me that Japanese like to make things difficult, more difficultthan they need be. His is an opinion I share and it is comforting to hear it from someonefrom Asia, someone who is not American (or European).

*****

The idea of not thinking of myself, that at the workplace one should selflessly manifestobedience and conformity, may be a ghost from Japan's feudal, Zen, or samurai

militaristic past (or combination of them all) that haunts educational institutions evennow. Many schools are what if not preparation sites for an authoritarian paternalisticcorporate sector?

The daishu ichinyo notion ("all acting as one") is administratively the easiest—which, tomany, seems to mean “the best”--approach to some, or many, tasks, most of which noone really wants to do.

17



Is there anything to the Zen sense that carrying out tasks selflessly will bring usenlightenment (that merging oneʼs mind with a Buddhaʼs mind will pull us away fromalways focusing on ourselves), or is this an ideological addendum imposed on Zen inorder for its institutions to receive state recognition, land, or special financialconcessions? It seems to me that in work we are each inwardly moved to do--as

opposed to being assigned something by someone above us—there is more chance forindividual growth as well as real social benefit.

But does the male-dominated corporate nationalistic state really want people to grow?Or do they want people always children thinking, living, playing inside the box?

*****

Meanwhile, back in the beginning, the schedule awaiting me at an "English conversation

school" was Monday through Friday. My classes are all in the mornings and evenings.There is a two-hour class beginning at 10 a.m. and one beginning at 6:30 p.m.Afternoons are more or less open, though I am supposed to sit at my desk and makelesson plans or just sort of hang around the workplace making pretend Iʼm doingsomething. I don't; I go off to study Japanese or walk around getting acquainted with thecity's downtown. My Japanese workmates may resent my several hours of freedom. Ifthey do they keep it to themselves.

What a "conversation school" is, here in Japan, or is at the time, is a for-profit entity thatemploys teachers of spoken English, teachers who come mostly from English-speakingcountries, and I've heard that it helps if one is white. A white face, according to an article

I read (written by a dark-skinned American of Hungarian ethnicity), has a higher marketvalue as a teacher of English. Though native Japanese English speakers and peoplefrom other countries who are somewhat fluent in English occasionally turn up. Backthen, most of the teachers in this city are from America, but now there are many fromAustralia, Canada, and the U.K. These teachers, with some teaching materials andusually at least some background preparation for language teaching, go into classroomsat their respective schools and try to do something with the Japanese people who arepaying money to learn to speak English.

English conversation here, or eikaiwa, is "real," or practical, English, supposedly aimedat actual communication. There is another kind of English, called Eigo, which is what is

taught in most schools, public or private, within the educational system provided for inJapan's constitution. This is "English" that prepares a student for entrance exams.Juken eigo, exam English, is another way of saying it, but it isn't really language at allsince no one can use it to communicate.

The blur, again. Why must the English language be one of the tested subjects forentrance exams. Why is it there with math, social studies, etc.? The reasonable answerthat comes to me is that in this age the English language is in widespread use all over

18



the world and that for economic reasons some Japanese people would have some needto be able to communicate through English. If this is the case, then, why is the examEnglish education so insistently not training people to be able to communicate? How doall the practices and drills done in preparations for entrance exams translate into actualcommunication ability?

One sort of examination exercise, to give a brief example, is making a meaningfulsentence out of a jumble of words. It's like putting together pieces of a puzzle.

Starting from: John _____ _______ ________ into ________ _________ and______ _______ was _______ ________ __________ it.

We must fill in the blanks from a jumbled word list [the, able, woods, to, hit, find, ball,

the, one, no]

And, if we do so correctly, we arrive at:

John hit the ball into the woods and no one was able to find it.

This exercise seems to involve the ability to construct a meaningful sentence from thefew words given and from a list of mixed up words, and there is nothing so very wrongwith that, but what communicative ability is engaged by this exercise? Whatcommunicative ability is developed? If a student does enough of these he or she wouldno doubt become good at doing this sort of language puzzle, but is doing a language

puzzle the same as communicating? How does this puzzle play translate into readingskill or writing skill, or into listening or conversational ability? When we are reading abook or a newspaper are we mentally recognizing meaningful syntactic patterns fromrandomly scattered words? Doing such puzzle piecing exercises, will a learner becomemore able to read a newspaper article and make justifiable inferences from what iswritten? Will a learner become sensitive to a writerʼs tone, etc?

Maybe at some level there is some connection between the exam exercise and actualreading skills, but reading, it seems to me, is a multidimensional act that involves muchmore than puzzling, and to reduce reading to that one dimension for teaching or forexamining does not seem valid.

Wouldn't it be more effective to just engage in communicative acts?

(From what I'm told, entrance exam testing now is better than in the past. It used to bethat an entire passage from a British writer such as Somerset Maugham had to bememorized verbatim.)

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The blur: how much of a person's communicative ability can be viewed through thedimension of a paper test? With such tests we are necessarily limited to what can bedone with pencil on paper, to what can be arranged to fit a format: written languageworked while sitting at a desk. We create an artificial environment and reduce languageto whatever dimensions we think are measurable. Then we observe performance and

make evaluations.

I'm wondering if such artificiality and reduction isn't more a matter of convenience, ofhaving some (supposedly rational and therefore justifiable) method of keeping somepeople out while letting others in.

Language is not there on the paper. Paper, printing--the text you are reading now--ismachine technology. What is happening is that machines--and those who controlmachines (which ultimately points to those who direct our societies--if indeed there canbe said to be direction)--are determining for us, dictating to us, how we evaluate ourlanguage behavior. People with machines determine our way of learning. Marx is right

about that.

Language is in us and is inextricably entabernacled in our lives. Yet in academia, that"church of reason," we aggressively ignore language's inalienability. We are unable tolet go of our treasured examinations. Why?

Why don't the Japanese do away with English on the entrance examinations? I don'tknow. It seems reasonable to assume that if there is no more English on entranceexams, teachers at lower levels will be able to focus on English for communication.

Like societies of the past with foot-binding and notions of evil left-handedness, those

who control Japanʼs English education seem addicted to certain irrational behaviors.

*****

My arrival here seems to mark a transition. Before me is a time when just about anyonecan be hired to go into a classroom with any popular magazine, Sear's catalog, orChristian Bible, show some pictures, and come up with some sort of language learningactivity. Instructors rely on ingenuity--not on readymade texts and drills.

Statistically back then there are supposedly four jobs for every one gaijin teacher. It isaround this time too that people begin talking about credentials. Certification is comingon the scene. A credential of some sort eventually becomes a power instrument, ameans of getting in and at the same time a means of keeping others out. It is a statussymbol too. People begin arriving with certification in TEFL. They presume to know agreat a deal about language learning; I notice that few of them speak any foreignlanguage. Once here not many acquire much Japanese. They can say the buzz words

20



about language acquisition that they learn in classrooms, in texts, and in workshopsback in their home country, but they have no personal sense of what they are doing.

Can it be said that these certified "experts" are more effective than, say, a missionaryteaching English with a Sear's catalog? Certainly edubiz [sic] is making money selling

all those degrees.

It is not as a specially trained language teacher that I come to Japan and to my new job.The course work I'd just completed at graduate school is in language (linguistics) andliterature (British and American). Adventure spirit is in me. Life somewhere else has itsappeal. Greener grass. It isn't as a motivated teacher I come.

Teaching is something to do, something to try to do and do well if possible. As work, ithas a beginning, it has an end.

Back at Delaware I earn my tuition plus a stipend working as a teaching assistant (T.A.),

teaching classes in remedial writing, or working with small groups of ESL students in alanguage center. I take a course in TEFL methodology. Otherwise my language studiesare a course in grammars (structuralist, transformational-generative), a course insemantics, and a course in history of the English language. I am not a specialist inlanguage teaching, but I am not completely ignorant of the current scene and its issues.Before leaving the U.S., I send off to myself by surface mail a box of teaching materialsI collect at Delaware. In it there are sample lesson plans, activity sheets, a course book.

Also in it is a book is about applying counseling learning, which is new on the scenethen. It is by a man named Stevick. It is something that makes intellectual sense. Iconsider myself fairly up to pace with what is happening, in America at least. Other

methods and approaches coming out at the time are the Total Physical Responsemethod and the Aural Comprehension method. I am more up to date than most who areteaching here. Hot off the press, so to speak; new from the factory. Neither theadministrative staff at the conversation school nor the other teachers have heard of anyof these.

The difficult if not impossible thing for me is trying to actualize any of these newapproaches in a classroom of individuals who are in no way prepared for anythinginnovative, anything different from the routine classroom experiences they have sincethey start school as children. Each comes to a room with a preconceived--albeitpersonalized to some degree--notion of what a teacher is and what a student is, what a

teacher does and what a student does. A teacher stands, often fixed in one spot at apodium, moving only to write on the board. A teacher instructs the students to repeat, toanswer. A teacher corrects. A teacher gives examinations, and a teacher thoroughlyprepares students so that they will be able to answer the questions on exams.

In one class I try Stevick's technique of using different colored rods of various lengths.Some learners make fun of them. They are like a child's toys, one adult claims.

21



Starting up work here is walking into a world in many ways--on the surface at least--quite different from my world at graduate school. In my head are new language teachingapproaches that seem logical and wonderful on paper. People here, though, areconditioned already by an educational system and by their own culture. The theories Iknow from school are all by and for minds trained in Western thinking. Those theories

required--though none of my readings state this point--an extending or widening oflearnersʼ behavioral patterns to include those new dimensions the new theories proposeto open. The task is not unlike that of a missionary, it seems, trying to convert someoneto a different religion. I am not prepared for any of that.

After that one methodology course at Delaware, my image of a learner is abstract: alearner is an object projected by a theory, a stick figure that appears in a textbook ormanual, a fictional entity whose existence and behavior is authored by educationalpsychologists and learning theorists. A learner is a construction of a 20th centuryscientific modern Western mind.

If that mind is wholly or in part insane or violent or greedy or jealous or racist, along witheverything else, what then of that mind's constructions?

In my training it is true that brief mention is made about a need to make languageteaching theory and methodology culturally sensitive, which means that the theories andmethodologies themselves are insensitive. They are things concocted in a laboratory, soto speak, in metaphorical test tubes. They come from Western academia (and all itencompasses, for better or for worse), and they are based on a particular mode ofconceptualizing things. The theories are abstract, purposely made that way, and are,supposedly, relevant anywhere, anytime, and in any circumstances. Such theories arecalled universal.

A human being is a speck of dust in a universe.

Theories move across boundaries. That fact might be a kind of intellectual imperialism:one mode of knowing and living spreads over the earth: oil rigs at the South Pole, trashin outer space.

At grad school we are lead to believe that this is all very heady stuff we are taking in. Itis intoxicating to think how intelligent and wonderful we are, knowing so much. But, whoknows, someone looking in from outside our Western curtain might dismiss our

knowledge scene as sterile, stuffy, racist, and dangerous.

*****

22



What those Japanese who gather with me in classrooms are exposed to since juniorhigh school when English language instruction begins for them, the standard fare theyall are required to undergo, focuses on learning for entrance exams (juken eigo).

As mentioned earlier, here in Japan English is one of the subjects tested on entrance

exams for high schools and universities. English language for these exams is notauthentic; it is "adjusted" (adulterated) in ways that makes it into a power instrument: ameans--with test scores and all the connected rigmarole--of keeping certain people outof the establishment, away from sources of social, political, and economic power.

My students--at the conversation school they are mostly adults--come from a learningenvironment in which English language learning difficulties are fabricated. Englishlanguage learning for them is more a social rite of passage than an attempt at learningto communicate with other human beings.

The individuals who come to my class have come through the ozei takamashiku

uniformed regimented experience that standard education is in Japan. Most maleschool kids--junior through senior high--when I come to this country wear uniforms thatare black and which seem to me military in style. Others are in neckties with blueblazers and gray slacks that make them look like aspiring company drones in theirsarari [sic] man suits. Even their belt's color is predetermined. Girls wear sailor girluniforms modeled, I hear, on schoolgirl dress in England. These remind me of thoserequired by catholic schools back in the U.S. School children do not appear unhappy. Most seem bright-eyed and cheerful. Somemope around looking gloomy, or as if they are burdened by some weighty emotionalmatter. The cheerful countenance may be the way children are taught they are

supposed to look: a face to put on. On an elementary schoolʼs gate, a sign reads (which

I render in English): It never fails to refresh, a "good-morning" and a smile.

It is considered unsocial to look as if you are bored or disgusted or down or gloomy,even if you are. That's the way street punks look: angry, down, disagreeable. One issupposed to "perk up" and appear genki (good, up, happy, cheerful, energetic), to notbring everyone else down. In a way that's true about where Iʼm from too. We learn toovercome whatever is bothering us and put on a smile for everyone. Or at least that wasthe case back home, in my family and to lesser extent at school.

Why all the dullness, the concrete, the walls painted gray, the dark uniforms, the rainy

day surroundings? Maybe it doesn't seem drab to them. Why arenʼt there big yellowsmiley faces painted on walls?

A scene from a movie comes to mind. It is set in Calcutta and there is a local oyabun, orchief thug, a Mr. Big who controls everything in "his" part of the city. He is explaining tothe main character, played by Patrick Swayze, how to keep the locals obedient, docile,easily manipulated. He uses chickens to get his point across. Left unfettered thechickens run all around and get into different things and make mischief, but if you put a

23



heavy weight around their necks--in the form of small sandbags--they remain peacefullyin one place.

Is this connected at all with the social practice here of keeping young people uniformlydressed in drab clothing, of keeping them busy almost every day--including Sundays

and summer vacations--throughout the year with school club activities? Just to keepthem off the streets, out of mischief? Teenage crime is certainly much less than where Icome from.

*****

It is difficult to register these Japanese who are with me in a classroom as "other." To bein such close physical proximity and then to have to step back and think of them as likeme yet also unlike me, different, from a different scene: it isnʼt easy. It is natural to think

of others with us at a certain time and place as "WITH ME," so "LIKE ME." I do that,project myself onto a scene and cast the various elements there according to my liking.Bad habit.

Is it helpful to regard those we live among as "other," separate, different, distant, and torespond to them from that removal? Is there any choice? Does an appreciation ofdiversity require me to step back and hold my own personalized reading on a leash?

Much of their behavior--all but what touches me deeply--I am unable to respond to;there is no conditioning in my native environment. Mothers, housewives, would tell metheir son or daughter is taking entrance exams that year. I think to myself "so what?"

What I don't understand is that in telling me about their child's exams the mother istelling me that the situation in their home is taihen (strained or difficult). Other Japanesewould immediately respond in sympathy since they already are geared to what happensin many Japanese households when children have to sit for entrance exams. Suchexams don't exist back home apart from SATs, but no one I know prepares much forthem. I don't, and it isn't a taihen situation in my family. Life goes along as usual, no bigadjustments.

This Japanese mother is telling us she cannot attend our year end class party becauseher child is studying for exams. Another tells me she had to give up her part time jobbecause her child is studying for exams, so she can be at home. It is difficult to

empathize with someone in a scene I have no sense of. She feels a motherly duty to gothrough “examination hell” with her child.

Those I live among, am still living among, theirs is a world in which their thinking andbehavior runs more rather than less in line with grooves that are laid out long ago.Custom. In some ways people are connected with age old tradition and in some waysconnected with what is called modern.

24



Not yet completely divorced from a vaguely Western/American view of things, my socialand cultural origins are still with me, for better or for worse. That Western view of thingsitself has been shaped by events and by the various conditions that lead to whathappens. Widespread changes that come with science, exploration, modernization,industrialization, with their various psycho-social repercussions (i.e. a nuclear family

mode of living instead of an extended family atmosphere). These create isolation. Beingperipheral in Japan is an exclamation mark on all the conditioning--often painful--thatcomes before.

These large scale happenings--of which Perry and the black ships are one instance--impact the Japanese too though not always in the same way. That story's narrativeincludes an underlying racist superior/inferior agenda. The people in my classroommaybe look at me from an isolation, but was there the additional distinction that they arelooking at a person belonging to a group of “white” Western people who long ago castthe Japanese and others--because of their non-whiteness--in an inferior role in ourhuman drama?

Although "race" (skin color-based ideology I mean) never appears on the surface of myinteractions with people here, the fact of my foreignness does. That foreignness though,in my case, means Westerner, and is the fact that Western is “white” a matter that isbest left unsaid, for fear of losing face? Or is just that Japan--unlike America--is nottraditionally a skin color driven culture?

As well as being set off by foreignness, it may be that here too--as in my home country--I am stuck with a particular color and the world wide web spun for that color long beforemy birth.

(Why is it that in order to learn from those I live among I must learn of my own life? Whyis it that self knowledge and knowledge of the other occur as one? Is it because theseer is the seen, the observer the observed?)

*****

It's not that the Japanese are totally without a free flow of spontaneous behavior, but, inJapan, ceremony, formality, and custom occupy a much larger dimension of socialexperience than they do in the America of my youth. Perhaps it is because my life in

America is as a young person that makes it seem so free of formality. As an adult mydevelopment in America is negligible: I am 26 at departure.

Many, like the mother in our class, are--in our group situation at least--not locked in butattached to their custom-governed way of life. Some are attached more strongly thanothers.

25



What--to me--is tedious conformity to prescribed behavior is accepted and important tothe way of life here. Still, many Japanese don't seem to like cold formality. They likeformality--authority--with a warm, smiling, big-brotherly face: mama and papa the stateideological apparatus.

They like formality and officialdom as a structuring force, a social reference, and thatforce seems to put them at ease, make them feel at home and secure even if to mefeels uncomfortable: tense and unnecessary.

It is interesting, too, that even though on the one hand people revere officialdom, on theother it seems it is a source of humor that verges on ridicule. This is privately, though,and quietly.

*****

A British teacher once tells me that the students who come our way (non-Japaneseteachers) are already "educationally damaged," by which this person means that theyare conditioned to be unimaginative, unoriginal, and verbally unresponsive "learners" (orperhaps "non-learners" would be a better word), that they are trained to function withinthe comparatively narrow parameters of standard education, parameters whichthemselves are the disabling force. What the person seems to be saying, ironicallyenough, and no matter whether I agree, is that our Japanese students have beenconditioned in ways that are inconvenient to "us" (non-Japanese Westerners) but thatare convenient for the powers that direct Japanese society.

*****

Is education an attempt to convert someone, to train another to accept certain thingsabout themselves (identity, career, patriotism and other such corporate-state sponsoredbrainwashing) and their world? Or is it to allow a person to come to a wider, deeper,fuller appreciation of the Unknown, of life itself?

Coming here as a young man largely ignorant of the numerous forces--besides home,school and to some extent religion--in my own society that condition me, there is next to

nothing that helps me gain a sense of what happens to these Japanese people in theirworlds. What else is there--at a loss confronting these others--but to fall back on, tograsp hold of, my own Western background and its various attitudes and imaginings.Even though I do not know where these come from, they are what there is. Do I thinkthe Japanese and their ways of doing things are somewhat backwards, not as efficientas, not as developed as, not equal to, Americans'?

26



There for me in my backgroundʼs cultural tapestry is the idea that liberal morality andindividualistically democratic society are things the Japanese want or need, that theywant to raise themselves to America's level. (Some Japanese do look to America as amodel and see it as being "ahead" of Japan, if only a materialistic superiority. Some.)

*****

The ones who come to my classroom—back in my early days at the English languageschool--are looking for novelty more than anything else. Only it is not novelty in learningstyles they are after. Is diversion a factor in their presence? Are my foreign face, myforeign voice, my foreign attitudes entertainment? For some, being there is an escape:an "educational" excuse to get away from the house and its endless things that needdoing. It may be liberating for some. For others it is a chance to keep active, to studysomething, to polish and improve, to gain merit. That is what they tell themselves, or

what their society tells them. Many Japanese are always studying something.

Diversion is partly why they come. It's partly why I am here too. Here we are:housewives young, middle age, or older, retired businessmen, grandmothers andgrandfathers, a college kid here and there, a few college professors. Some do havesome degree of interest in English and pursue English study as they would a hobby.Some are planning a trip abroad or planning to study abroad and want to brush up theirEnglish. Some are there after taking classes in ceramics for a few years or are intowater colors before. What is frustratingly obvious to me is that few who come to myclasses are willing to put forth the effort needed--and it is a significant effort--to attainfluency or anything like it. Please remember that I am just out of graduate school where

I worked in a language center where students from abroad are mostly highly motivated.Not to be judgmental but, compared to the students back in America, those in thisconversation school are out for a picnic, a leisurely drive in the country.

Mostly they come--if there is no other event that interferes (PTA meeting,etc.)--take part in that day's two hour activities, and leave off English until next weekʼsclass. English study for many of them is closed within a space and time.

It might prove helpful if we understand certain things about our students. Many teachersproject students who are ideal motivated learners. That is how our theories andtextbooks have them. Our expectations, assumptions, and frustrations stem from that

illusion. Illusions come with the territory. Else how would one even make a textbook orplan of study, one that recognizes that many of the "learners" are really not interested?What would such a textbook have in it: so many blank pages? Now it can be understoodwhy we, in our profession, distance ourselves from the sometimes dismal reality. It'slikely that we need to. Distancing may be a survival skill.

Likewise we want to think of ourselves as ideal motivated teachers because we arecertified and we are professional and we attend conferences, go to workshops, publish

27



and keep abreast. Yet many of us don't really want to know what it is we teach. Few ofus have a good sense of words ourselves. A “sense of language" is not one of therequirements we need to get certified.

There is a workshop, one presentation at which is billed as a technique to be introduced

that will “force students to think creatively.” During the question and answer sessionsomeone asks the presenter--not in a flippant tone--if she thinks “forces" is the rightword. “Well,” she replies, “I was in a hurry.”

*****

Observing actual performance, looking for possible improvement, very few practice thewords, the pronunciations, the expressions or phrases that are introduced in class; veryfew practice them at home, repeating them the many times that is necessary in a

fabricated learning environment (in which they are not immersed totally in the foreignlanguage-culture). Almost no one understands the kind of commitment languagelearning requires.

There is little or no sense of language as an art. Where is the Samurai spirit? The movieThe Last Samurai is playing at the cinema now. Where is the quest for perfection, thediscipline? Few care whether they become good at it or not. Nor does their school caremuch. Individuals coming to my classes are neither artists nor samurai. Are any trulydedicated or devoted to any particular pursuit in life? Maybe they are devoted mothers,loyal sarari men, or whatever.

*****

There is one fellow, Mr. Abe, whose limbs are crooked, whose legs and arms are inbraces. He needs crutches to get around. His jaw is deformed too so that even hisnative speech is hard to understand. Mr. Abe decides to study spoken English. ManyJapanese would applaud Mr. Abe's gambaru spirit. The classroom on the day he enrollsfor is on the third floor; there is no elevator. Up the stairs he goes on his rear end usinghis crutches to push. Then down when class finishes.

Privately I wonder why Mr. Abe does not choose something his particular condition will

allow him to do. No protest or complaint comes from me, even though he needsintensive speech therapy. Maybe the garbled language he comes out with is the resultof years of speech therapy. There is no such background information available and I amtoo timid to ask.

It is possible that psychologically Abe-san needs the empowerment (supposedly)attainable from challenging something so utterly impossible for him as spoken English.

28



The group that day--a Thursday morning--is an intermediate class. Class level is a fairlymeaningless designation. Mr. Abe has no English. He's been to a special school atwhich English is not offered. That doesn't matter to the conversation school. Theydisregard ability whenever it is convenient, and it is always convenient to get someone'sfee (= accommodate their wishes).

For that matter, the school's administration doesn't have too many principles when itcomes to education. They are obviously interested in making money and keeping thecustomers happy so if a student stops by the office to complain that my class is toodifficult the manager summons me, tells me to keep the level low.

Students truly interested in language learning would not come to this school. They'd goto some special foreign language school in Tokyo or Osaka or go abroad into anintensive course. My own expectations are mistaken, misplaced; I wrongly assumestudents will be motivated and try hard. It's best to have no assumptions at all; thenthere will be no disappointment.

*****

It cannot be said that I am a highly motivated teacher. I do not spend much timepreparing classroom activities. Mostly itʼs so simple no preparation is required. I pursuemy own interests. I tell myself that if students are not really going to try, why go to allthat trouble.

One aspect of my coming to Japan is diversion. My intention is not to be a zealous

English teacher 24/7 but to do a decent job and then let it go. I want to look aroundJapan, absorb it, drink it in (literally and figuratively), learn something different, flirt withZen, talk with people, check out the women, frolic in nighttime neon--not spend six daysa week in a classroom doing rudimentary English conversation. Teaching English is notsomething I dream of doing, but something to do while I dream, some way to make aliving. Even so, I am expecting students who really want to learn.

If the goal is not fluency or functionality or some greatly improved degree ofcompetency, then why bother with language learning? Why do we gather in aclassroom? (There are some, it's true, who are already quite good at English, who justwant to keep their skills tuned up.) If we're not going to try to be "good" at it then what

are we doing? Are such thoughts my own Protestant ethic corporate state socialtraining: always looking for results? Have I forgotten my own youth, the way I go out to afriend's backyard to shoot hoops or play a pickup game, lightly playing just for fun--notnecessarily trying to “excel?” I am not paying to be coached, though. Money as criterion.Am I blaming students for just wanting to enjoy themselves? To do that should they bepaying someone to coach them?

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Proficiency in another language is not essential here, not for living in Japan as aJapanese. Not now anyway. People can get along fine without it. Otherwise they'd find away to better acquire a foreign language. Maybe Japan will find a way to do away withall the hard work and commitment and let it all be just fun and Mickey Mouse.

Why would any school--public, private, university, or for-profit conversation school--offerlanguage classes in which the ultimate goal is not proficiency or becoming "good" at it?Is it because there is money in it? The less students learn the more they're told theyneed to study the more courses they will enroll in, the more materials (CDs, DVDs,textbooks, dictionaries paper and electronic) they will buy, the more English educationalTV programs they will watch, the more money comes in? Is a school training peopleNOT to be good at something? Are schools and teachers getting paid to undermineactual learning, getting paid to NOT do a job well?

Government propaganda regarding English language learning can give conflicting cues.Some politicians push it. One, condoning it, at the same time cautioned youngsters not

to learn it too well because their soul is in the Japanese language.

When a leader--at a national level--makes a statement saying that Japanese shouldlearn English but not learn it too well because their Japanese soul is in their Japaneselanguage it is easy for an “educated” person to dismiss it as atavistic, rear guard,ethnocentric rubbish. Looked at another way, though, it makes me curious as to justwhat is ethnocentric and what is reaction to Western racist cultural imperialism (whichcomes now in a new, softer version, with a more color-friendly packaging). Because itdoes appear that with language comes culture, and that if learned effectively Englishlanguage will implant Western assumptions into a learner's head. What a learner doesor might do with those acquired ways of seeing I cannot say, but since those Western

assumptions traditionally have contained beliefs about skin color values and much othernasty business, concern is understandable. Will learning English result in a colonizationof mind?

On the other hand, it is likely that Japanese young people are exposed to enoughethnocentric conditioning from native sources to counterbalance any perils in Englishlanguage learning. Young people are stuck between a rock and a hard place, pulled bysupposedly opposing forces.

Society itself is a culprit. It conditions us to acquire knowledge in a personal, egocentricdimension. “Intelligence” is seen as being for “my god,” for “my country,” for “my family,”

or for “me.” In that way any amount of knowledge doesnʼt help--it warps us, twists us.Instead of being an aid to our survival, knowledge becomes ignorance as it helpsperpetuate our worlds of division, conflict, and destruction.

Is, then, the whole enshrining of Nihongo the national language--by TV scholars,nationalist linguists and intellectuals—with its glorious beauty and total uniqueness--thedwelling/telling place of Japanese souls--in fact a retreat--in the face of Englishlanguage/Western culture's onslaught--into pride?

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*****

Let's have a good time then. That is my conclusion at the time, back then at theconversation school. Picking up more Japanese language, I am gradually able toconverse in the language my students speak. Basic conversation. I begin usingJapanese with classes; I am now like Japanese teachers who teach English throughJapanese language. It is much easier that way. Trying to conduct a class using Englishonly is a very frustrating experience. I tell myself I am not being paid enough for all thatfrustration.

There is a teacher named Robert, young like me. He is sitting one afternoon at his staffroom desk with his head in hands and when he looks up at me I see that his eyes arewatered. “Why can't they understand even simple basic English . . . elementary school

stuff! They've all had English for at least six years! They all sit there as if they're deafand dumb!”

Robert; he left after one year.

Such is the scene. It is my discovery (contrary of course to what my training teaches,which is that it is unprofessional, unscientific--not beneficial to my students--to use theirlanguage) that students become more lively if I mix Japanese with English, and if Irespond to Japanese if they chose to use it. Their listening ability is not enough to letthem listen to a several minute stream of English giving them instructions about anexercise. Even if instructions are in print in a textbook, some students do not get what

they are supposed to do.

I say things in both languages, and let them use their own language. Then I tell themhow to express what they have on their mind in English. Mostly though no one bothersto write down what I tell them or write on the board. One fellow does. One day he tellsme that he has twenty-four notebooks filled with what I've said in class. Yes, there is ablessed one once every so many years, someone committed to learning. God bless Mr.Murayama.

At the conversation school we aren't supposed to give exams or grades or any of thetraditional schoolroom fare that demands an amount of student (customer) work or

preparation. It is all for "fun," and to make it seem rigorous would get in themoneymaking way.

*****

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How do the members of our groups view me? Do they see me, Scott Watson, that whichmy name labels? Do they see AMERICAN (= superpower, supernation, superman)? Dothey see a young white male, a foreigner-possible-crime-perpetrator, a non-Japanesetherefore possibly dangerous evildoer, possibly one of the dregs of humanity who haswashed up on Japan's shores, a foreign devil bringing bad culture to their sacred land?

Are they afraid of foreigners? Would they approve if their daughter wants to marry one?Do they have some insular inbred fear of foreign people? Are they appreciative that I'vecome this long way to help them learn English? I can't answer for everyone. Back then itnever occurs to ask them what they think of me. If they don't like me they will not paytheir fees, they will change classes, drop out, take up bird watching? Some attend a fewtimes and are never seen again. A few who improve I advise to move up to a higherlevel but they do not want to change; they enjoy my class.

“My” class: class atmosphere is an important thing, more important than progress withthe language, and it does not really mean they like ME; it means the environment is onein which they feel comfortable. I am just one element in creating a group scene--not the

prime mover. Whether there is someone friendly to sit next to is just as important aswho the teacher is.

At times there are class organized social gatherings. They always bring me into these.We go to English movies. We go sight-seeing and cherry blossom viewing. There areyear end parties and home barbecues. There is even a dance party while the movieShall We Dance (the original Japanese) is at the cinema.

*****

People constantly ask my advice on how to improve their English. It is sort of a stockquestion. There are superficial signs of motivation but not much actual improvement.Eventually my own disappointment--though it doesn't bring me to tears as with Robert--moves me to try to understand my students' backgrounds, especially as related tospoken English. The first item I find is an article in an encyclopedia outlining theJapanese government's policy on education and its statement of the purpose ofeducation. About English I read--in Kodansha's Encyclopedia of Japan--that since theend of the war (WWII) the focus in Japanese schools has been on spoken English. Thatis very interesting because every day I am in contact with people who haven'tprogressed very well in their school studies in spoken English. If that is what they have

been doing those six years, three in junior high and three in high school. Whathappened? How much can we trust what an encyclopedia says?

So much for the bushido spirit, the pursuit of perfection? Maybe it is unfair to mentionThe Last Samurai, all that Hollywood stuff up on the silver screen. Maybe perfection issomething else here, if it is anything at all. There are tea bowls that are bent, lopsided,not smooth, so you might think they are made by a physically challenged person, butthese are appreciated as art in the Japanese tea bowl world.

32



I recall arriving in Sendai the first time. There is a family I stay with for three weeks, myhomestay host family. It is very kind of them to have me. There is a daughter in juniorhigh school and a son in high school. One evening son brings out a textbook for hisEnglish course. Indeed there is "spoken English" there on the page. Yet Hide--who has

already three years of English in junior high--cannot, as a second year high schoolstudent, say very much of anything in English. There it is. The language is still there onthe page.

Here is--so far as I recall--a dialogue from Hide's text:

Taro: Hello. How are you?

Hanako: I'm fine, thank you. My name is Hanako. Please tell me your name.

Taro: My name is Taro. I am a boy.

Hanako: It's nice to meet you, Taro.

Taro: I have a dog. My dog's name is "Gen."

......

The youngsters must be fascinated with such fare. This, remember, is the fifth year ofEnglish learning. Then there are drills on using the possessive case and on intonation

for forming questions, which is why many come away with, if they come away withanything at all, an artificially high pitch at the end of a question, following the upwardpointing intonation arrow in their books, like a jet taking off into the sky.

Glancing at the new vocabulary list for that lesson, each English word listed is followedby its pronunciation, but the pronunciation key is in the Japanese katakana script.Katakana is used mainly for transcribing foreign words into Japanese. What makes itabsurd for use as a pronunciation key is that a word that is for example one syllable inEnglish might be pronounced as two or more sound units in the katakana system. Myname, Scott, becomes four units through this katakana rendering: SU-KO-(tsu)-TO.

People come into my classes having learned that the "official" school and government(Education Ministry) approved pronunciations for even simple words like "and" "if" "but"are AN-DO, I-FU, BAT-TO. They are never even required to try to learn the targetlanguage pronunciations.

Years later, with a family of my own and one son in a Japanese junior high school, I goto a "parent participation day" and sit in on an English lesson. A paper is passed aroundon which the learning objectives are listed. It is all very professional and efficient-

33



looking. Itʼs done on a computer. One objective is to introduce "Do you like ___?"Various words are to be substituted to fill in the blank. One is be-su-boh-ru. Theirteacher does not teach them how to say “baseball.” The pronunciation is ignoredbecause that teacher cannot pronounce it correctly?

I sit in my little desk watching as my son and others do this "conversational practice" bygoing around the room asking each other "Do you like BE-SU-BOH--RU?” No onerequires them to do it right; they just go on and on from one grade to the next withoutever having to pronounce the words the way a native English speaker might. It is clearwhy so much of the language that is supposed to be English is so utterlyunrecognizable.

Years after my experience at a conversation school, teaching now at a university, Irealize how much time and effort it would require--the one-on-one work that would beneeded--to correct all the language damage each individual has sustained during the sixyears of compulsory "education." There just isn't time and that there aren't many--

students or teachers--who really want to make the effort. They need language "therapy,"pronunciation rehabilitation clinics, etc. There are spoken English classes at someuniversities with seventy or ninety or even more students.

*****

It is amazing how complex conversation is. A conversation classroom, you would think,would be just as multifarious, at least more so than the standard academic lectureswhere an instructor explains things a, b, c. There's the psycho-social dimension, one

aspect of which is how to help students overcome fear--hence lack of confidence andshyness; there's the mind-spirit dimension: how to "read" the underlying intent of what isbeing said, the sense of the language and sense of the person; there's the culturalbackground (the humor, the irony, the sarcasm, the code of manners...); there's the totalunpredictability of a spoken event, not to mention the more traditional aspects such aspronunciation and sentence structure. Plus, there's the dimension of what is a sort ofacting ability (it might be called) when it comes to a student learning to convey feeling ina foreign language. Conversation is rich. It's a jungle of diversity: all that is going on in aspeech act.

Regular academic classes might seem one-dimensional by comparison.

*****

The school scene reflects the way the land itself is uglified [sic] while undergoingindustrialization. Japan is not the only such country to be made ugly by its inhabitants inthe name of progress, or profit. Nor is Japan the only country where the learning act isco-opted by a corporate state, which is what all the statistics and grading systems feedon and into.

34



We breathe devastation every day. Many Japanese tell me "Japan is a beautifulcountry." In a way it's precious that they think it is. It is, in many places, still, beautiful.

Yet would one want to hum “America the Beautiful” on a walk through one of its slums?

Babbitt way back in a Sinclair Lewis novel by that name goes by train on a trip from theMidwest headed east and, at one point, looking out his window, marvels at the scenery;Babbit thinks the factory-blighted landscape he sees is beautiful, inspiring. All thefactories, all the production going on! Flames from tall stacks! Smoke.

It is true that there are places of fine scenic beauty still around in Japan, though often,as tourist destinations, they're covered with hotels and inns, with souvenir shops and,lately, with fast food restaurants. Such places are buzzing with busloads of jabberingsightseers.

Do I care about any of this when I am younger?

It is true that leaves turning yellow, orange, and red in the mountains are a gorgeoussight but these places are not what most of us see every day where we live and work.We see power boxes, transformers, power lines. Our ears are filled with trucks rumbling,sounds of engines and rubber on asphalt. Besides that, the mountain roads are bumperto bumper during foliage time; many view what they do from a car's window, or from acharter bus with it's uniformed tour guide's ceaseless microphoney [sic] narration. Whatwe, most of us, are exposed to is advertisements all over everything everywhere. Ridinga public subway means we must look at ads all over the walls and ceilings. We are acaptive audience; itʼs as if our eyelids are taped open for this forced viewing.

People have been "taught" to think their country is "beautiful" without being given achance to develop their own sense of what beauty is, if it is anything at all. In the sameway, many, if asked, will praise Japanese schools, particularly the ones each attended.This comes from school pride no doubt.

I have pride in my old school too. That is honest. It is honesty restricted to a particulardimension. On the whole, I'd have to say that it is a poor excuse for real learning.

Asked what education is for them, many students here respond that it is a chance. Yes,education--if it is really education--is a chance, but the fact that so many respond in thesame way, often with the same words, suggests that this is a conditioned response, like

the way people answer at job interview questions: always with an uplifting retort. Itbecomes a matter of telling people in authority what they want to hear. That's the safeway. Say one thing in that place, something else in another setting.

*****

35



In learning about the Japanese, one comes across the "samurai ethic." Parts of thatethic are appropriated for the convenience of the powers that be--all the "morality" thatis needed to legitimize all the moneymaking teaching going on. The buzz words are"responsibility," "pride," "loyalty." All the greed, needless destruction, and uglification isdisguised as order, harmony, and morality. "Honorable" work.

At the conversation school I ask for a raise. The answer is "no": my contract does notencompass the possibility of my getting married and needing more money. The attitudein which this reply is given, though, is that I am a selfish American who doesn't in theleast understand the Japanese cultural principle of being a loyal teacher who servesand sacrifices and does what's best for the school. It is that old "serve the feudal lord"samurai spiel. Meanwhile a school takes money from it customers, gives them little realeducation, and puts Mr. Abe in an intermediate class. They are happy with that becausethey are behaving in a Japanese way. The medium is the message? Mcluhan came upwith the expression after a visit to Japan.

There is obvious satisfaction in being a "good Japanese," which is something like a"good person" in English, or "a good Christian," which seemingly is what life's really allabout and which brings it all in line with what it's all about in the West as well. It is allabout suffering in illusion, the mess of notions concerning our own goodness that weproposition ourselves with and mostly come to accept because without a potential beliefin our own goodness what's the point of being who you think you are?

*****

My own schooling is all about absorbing Western/American approaches to life. "Life"

means the commercial-religious way of life Western civilization prescribes, or, in somecases dictates. One acquires a belief system to spiritualize the territory, the eating andkilling field. We bow our heads, say grace before we chow down. We construct a God-backed work ethic before we "do good" by consuming a river or a forest.

A "good American" is supposedly patriotic, which strangely always connects withsupporting our nation's military enterprise ( = racket). For God and country. We aretaught the Boy Scout virtues. I remember the army-looking uniform. There is much saidabout good citizenship.

What is meant by “a good Japanese"? Is it someone who does what he or she is told?

Someone who serves the power structure? Someone who doesn't cause trouble,doesn't rock the boat except when there is group support--labor unions and that sort ofthing?

My schooling was about acquiring ways to perpetuate a Western way of life throughWestern attitudes and modes of being. Knowledge is part of it. "Logical" thinking isanother. "Validity"--all these are ways to worship the system.

36



The alumni offices at each of the three universities I make my way into all manage totrack me to the other side of the earth. They send me envelopes hoping for my annual"pledge" of financial support. Words like "loyalty" and "gratitude" appear in their letters. Iremember how long it takes one of those schools--when I am a student--to sendsomeone to fix the plumbing in my dormitory, how much care there is for me as an

individual or for anyone else. At our dormitory at William & Mary, called James BlairTerrace, there are cock roaches all over the place. Rat shit in the halls. Plumbingbacked up, toilets that won't flush, communal showers and baths so filthy I donʼt want tobathe, afraid of contracting a disease just stepping in a stall. Few clean up afterthemselves. Immature, still. There is a permanent crew employed. What do they do? Anold black man mops a floor, takes trash out to a dumpster. Everyone says it's a goodschool.

I call the dorm the James Blair Terror. Blair was the founder of W&M. It was financed bytax on tobacco and duty on furs and animal skins.

It is education of the masses out of which I come and into which I enter here. Masseducation. We learned the mass, the secular mass, the masturbation of the civ-dot-comwe grow up to work in and worship and warship.

To endure. That's supposed to be a good thing. It was in the samurai movie Morie,Jimmy, and I recently see. Endure hardships. Good for the character, good for the spirit,good for being a good Japanese, a good person. Goody goody goody.

I'm becoming a samurai. Iʼm becoming Samuel Beckett. Samurai Sam. I don't knowwhich. The school scene at one level is about knowing but leaves me often at a loss asto what it's all about, what it's supposed to be for. There are students who take an

interest in things. That makes it good, otherwise it seems so often a waste of time.There are students who shut down, complaining that the learning environment, theclassroom atmosphere, is uninspiring; they come to class and go to sleep. They'rebored, they complain, the teacher is not stimulating; the student talks to a neighbor,does work unconnected with the lesson, puts on mascara, or texts a friend.

What students mostly see of a teacher is his or her back since many teachers spend agreat deal of time writing on a chalkboard, or a teacher lectures, drones into amicrophone; the students passively receive the package of talk. There is little or nodiscussion.

Yet I go on doing my job, even trying to do what I do well, to make a sincere effort eventhough I know it may be futile. Will anyone benefit?

*****

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How much emotional contact is made in school? What contact is there with a field ofknowledge? Is it all mostly shadows with no real substance?

A good teacher--one who feels the experience--would he or she even be allowed intothe system? Things are set up to keep open-eared open-eyed openhearted individuals

out. People geared to the system are wanted. No one else.

On the other hand, what truly sensitive being would want into the dull, company-likegrind? Too many rules. Too much bureaucracy. Too much knowledge covered with thedust of state or corporate or social sanction. Too little that is fresh and alive.

It is interesting that when the need for change is sensed, when the Japanese feel theyneed to renew or update their ways of learning, the changes that do occur comethrough the educational bureaucrats--the ones who are at least part of the problem tobegin with, who, with all their possibly well-intended planning and governing, killspontaneity.

*****

Teaching-learning is best and naturally done as we interact with others. There is life inlanguage. Language is for life.

If we can't feel them they're just words, words on a page, words in the Taro and Hanakotalking text. One dimensional. Without substance. There has to be some feeling in them,some plea. For life.

These are my personal observations of the scene. The happenings the memories theinconsistencies and my own egotistical twistings. I'm not a perfectly objective observer ifthere can be such a being.

Martin Buber says a teacher needs to learn from students. What if the scene is one inwhich we are not allowed to be fully human? What if it's an overall scene in which wedon't see each other as humans? There it is: the point exactly, that the seeing act andall it arises from is what makes us human. To not have this vision dehumanizes us.

Language, ultimately, comes from life--the way our species came to live it--and isn't thefeel of life loveʼs? Aren't my students life's too? They are but many don't see it. Nor do I

see all. Our concerns are routed elsewhere, away from essentials. It is all life, butdepending on each individual's path it is seen in various ways. Some choose to focuson what grade is received. How many points. How many words we know. Howprestigious is the school we attend--all the socially and scientifically reinforced ways ofbeing. Those people are able to look at things that way. It's just that some ways aremore destructive than others, and some ways preclude others. People walking along,eyes riveted on a cell phone text: how is it they cannot hear the grasshopper at theirfeet?

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*****

Can learners invent and create on their own with English, a language which exists forthem solely within the confines of a textbook, as a schoolroom's predeterminedexercises? English for them is so much chalk on a blackboard. So many structuredactivities. A teacher's voice directing lessons at them. More recently a computer screenis added. English is something programmed at a distance; English is problems to besolved on a test. It is a personless dimension, a faceless, voiceless, void; a deadlanguage. Who kills it?

English in their lives means--beyond the entrance exam complex--getting a certainscore on a TOEFL test or TOEIC, for being employed; English for them exists forcommerce and economics. It is banished from the realm of living and dying beings. It is

not felt. It has no weight.

The intelligence that organizes our education comes mostly from monoculture, which isthe same culture that mass produces hamburgers. Teachersʼ thinking too tends to beconditioned by corporate-bureaucracy directed monoculture. Its tentacles reacheverywhere. Bureaucrats determine the way teachers are trained. This is reflected, forexample, in a freshman composition classroom (at an American university), how we aretold to keep to the point in writing: "Don't meander!" Another rule. Or how we are taughtto structure our writing according to main topics and supporting details with all theRoman numeral and letter outlining as if our writing is a Greco-Roman edifice. It's as ifthe only possible form writing can take is that which is sanctioned by bureaucrats: the

essay that compares and contrasts, this kind of essay and that kind of essay. That is theway writing is taught in universities.

No serious writer I know of works like that. (Granted, there aren't many serious writerswith us.) Genuine writers mull things over; their writing comes from long gestation. Thenthey cut and change, they revise and revise and revise until it feels right, until it isfecund. They don't organize their writing the way students are taught in collegecomposition classes. Professors, though, do often write as they were taught in school towrite, they write to please bureaucrats and to please other professors. They write fortheir own little closed circuit academic worlds. Their writing touches no one deeply.

Whom else would academic writing interest? That is a matter best left to a reader'staste. In the same way that some people don't seem to mind living among grey concretebuildings or breathing stale air, there are those who don't object to a certain kind ofwriting.

Maybe they don't know any better. Our senses have been dulled.

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*****

How much do these youngsters really want to know? There are quite a few who don'ttake notes who don't practice or review or prepare who come ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty

minutes late to class chronically and those who don't come at all who aren't seen andschools are being blamed, blamed by society, blamed by the media, blamed by thegovernment, blamed by parents, blamed by the kids themselves when they graduateand travel abroad only to discover that they never really learned enough English tocommunicate and can't speak in a way that is recognizable to anyone. It's all theschools' fault, supposedly. People on TV, university professors even, perpetuating theNihongo Myth, explain to viewers why Japanese people have trouble speaking English.It's because, one says, of the structure of the language center of the Japanese brain.

English--Japanese fumbling with English--is ridiculed on T.V. Kids and adults make funof each other, their "broken" English, their Japanese English. It's something to play with,

as well as a form of social leverage, something to snub others with--even adults, even"educated" people. "I can speak English and you can't." "I can't speak English and youcan." Something to mark out a territory, to identify who belongs to what clique. Exclusionor inclusion.

There are psycho-social dimensions to English language learning in Japan that do notexist for other languages.

Does anyone in a school know, really, what language is for? The students, theadministrators, even the teachers: do they know what it's for? Corporate Japan seemsto provide a master narrative, one that is in line with an international corporate

totalitarian goal of control without responsibility, though it isnʼt yet clear to me whether

anyone or everyone who works in a corporation is fully aware of the psychological andsocial outcome of their activity.

Corporate Japan needs more effective English speakers to more effectively do businesson an international scale. For example, the Japanese govt. + pharmaceutical industry +medical school complex wants their doctors to better be able to present their researchpapers in English at international conferences, acquire more international patents,which translates into huge profits. It's all about competition, and money.

These are commercial concerns which, despite their being connected with the "real"

world, do not address the language issue AS language at all. A school, yes, is partly acommercial entity within a commercial culture that long has been--since civilization itselfappeared on the scene--all about how economics is the only approach to survival since,to be civilized, we've sacrificed abilities gained through long evolution to survive innature. Our sense of sight, hearing, smell, etc.--all are weakened by our living withincivilization's walls for millennia).

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Outside those walls, though, in each so-called savage community, all aspects of life arecharged with spirit. Within what we call their primitive culture even utensils, for them, arealive. In a highly developed culture like Japan's, though, I cannot appreciate a lacqueredtea jar or bamboo tea spoon, maybe because they are not--as I am not--in their livingbreathing environment, but are on display in a museum or department store gallery as

something worth a lot of money. Places where we are cautioned “Do Not Touch.”

Neolithic cave paintings likewise are infused with life. As are words. As words are nowdespite our disinterested posturing.

A tea hut in a garden (where those utensils actively participate in creating a cosmos) isalso a part of an economically oriented world, but it is also apart and different from thatworld. So is a school. A place to learn, as well as the learning act, refers to somethingelse the way some Japanese gardens open to--let in--what's outside or beyond. So thatthe unknown--mystery--comes into making the garden how it is.

When money and power are not harmonized with spirit, things gets blown intosenseless abstractions. There's no denying that jobs, earning money, advancement,accomplishment, and so on are all aspects of the world as it is. I must live among otherswho believe in these as their religion or whatever.

Realizing—by which here is meant not an intellectual comprehension but with our livingletting something be--that schooling is mainly all about power and money, getting jobs,getting a certain social status, being “successful”--is not going to make money andpower go away. Still, education that is for and about such inherently emptymanifestations does not even get us looking.

Seeing clearly IS the knowing, the intelligence, of Odysseus. His knowing is not booklearning; his knowing is how to react, knowing what to do, in each different situation.Knowing for survival, for life. Knowing, for us now, need be no different. It is learning tosteer away from illusion, away from the knowledge factory; it is learning how to walk thatpath between the real and the unreal, is learning to live a life. That is our Odyssey, andthat gives our lives, our learning, vitality.

Scott WatsonSendai, Japan

essay in a language seeking life

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