The Box

Ren decided to post about this issue on his blog, so I guess I will too. I've been sending emails out to various people I know retelling this unfortunate incident, but maybe blogging about it would be better... assuming anyone reads this thing anymore. I certainly don't update it as much as I should.

I have a serious love/hate relationship with this country. There's a lot of good in Japan, but there's also a lot of negative, uncreative, monotonous homogeneity here too. The education system is socialist to the extreme, and as a result, the development of individuality amongst this country's youth is surprisingly low. Everything is planned out for this country's youth. After school activities, school uniforms, academic promotions (every academic subject has a certification system that students are encouraged to take to beef up their academic record), school lunches (which are still on the same system designed by the GHQ after WWII, which is why milk is served with fish and miso soup), even the bags they carry are strictly regulated by the Ministry of Education. The list of things children are not allowed to do is triple the length of the list of things they are allowed to do.

In short, Japanese people love "the box." This is the same "box" from the proverbial expression, "Think outside the box." Japanese people more often than not do not realize that "the box" is prohibitive; a barrier that needs to be felled, not reinforced. Unfortunately, "the box" is warm and cosy, a nice place to curl up and live in your own little sheltered world. This is usually why Japanese people are surprised that foreigners can speak Japanese, use chopsticks, and have more than a passing knowledge of Japanese culture and history. For the average Japanese person, leaving that zone of comfort - "the box" - can be frightening and down right unthinkable, so why wouldn't a foreigner think the same? That's unthinkable! "The box" is what gets in the way of many Japanese people's attempts at creating what they refer to as "an internationalized society." There are so many universally accepted beliefs about foreigners and foreign countries that most Japanese people are too confused by it all to even make an attempt at learning something new. Why? Because they would have to knock down the walls of "the box" to have a meaningful conversation with someone from a different society.

A lot of people in this country are so overwhelmed by foreign cultures that they do what anyone would do in a position of fear: they hide and/or hate.

Despite being raised in the southern United States, most of the racism I've encountered has been what I call "passive racism." That's the racism that's been left over after generations of socially acceptable racial barriers have been erected. Black housekeepers working in upper class white neighborhoods, the painfully obvious socio-economic divide ("the projects"), integrated-yet-still segregated schools, etc. These problems will take decades to fix. Thank God for milestones like Obama's election to the presidency, right?

Being in Japan gave me my first taste of true racism. What is so shocking about it though, is the lack of awareness from which this racist mentality springs. "You can speak Japanese? But you're not Japanese. You're white!" "The box" at work. Occassionally, however, the racism that I've encountered here has been truly out of hate. A down right dislike of anyone non-Japanese. On Tuesday night, I encountered just such a situation, and rather than hash out the details here, I'll let my main man Ren fill you in. http://www.giveyourmeat.com/2008/11/racist.html