When you're busy making other plans...

It's hard to live overseas, anywhere.  But it can be very isolating to live overseas in Japan without good friends or without a sense of purpose outside of your job.   So you have to try to make it work.  Sometimes your life here comes together perfectly without much effort or resistance.  But usually, you have to work hard and also be as flexible as possible.  You have to try to make the life you wanted fit reality.  If you come with too many expectations, things aren't going to go the way you wanted and you'll end up disappointed.  I've had to flex quite a bit, so much so that I am beginning to wonder...I am not certain if the JET program was the right thing for me to do, to be honest.  Ok, before anyone says that I'm a Debbie Downer or not positive enough, I will say that I've had fantastic experiences on JET.  I think it's a great program and I think you can do quite a bit of good on it helping your students and fellow Japanese learn more English and more about your culture. It is a built in system that offers a network and support.  It pays generously and you don't have to do much in terms of relocating (usually).  I say usually because I actually had to relocate twice and that was expensive and not very easy.  The reason I am uncertain about  my choice to come to Japan on JET is because I came with the intention of studying and seeing Japanese performing arts.  I specifically listed my interest in these things in my application and stated it more than once in my interview.  I thought this would give me a very good opportunity to have access to live theater and dance such as Noh, Kyogen, Kabuki, Bunraku and even more underground forms of performance such as Butoh or the current avant-garde performance.  Unfortunately, the island I was on last year had very little of this.  It did have Ryukyu Buyo, which I studied and took every opportunity to see the live performances.  

Dressed before the performance

My dance teacher (left) adjusts my costume.

楽しみにしています

I've been recently on this regret kick.  I have noticed I develop a nostalgia for supposed missed opportunities when I am not enjoying the present very much.  A friend of mine wisely asked me recently in an email if I was having enough fun in my life.  I am uncertain if I am.  Yes, at times I feel very happy here.  I feel like I am always learning about new things in this culture, new words, new people.  But sometimes I get morose.  I've even analyzed this particular habit of mine.  It's almost as if I'm pushing at the recent bruises on my psyche, just to reinvigorate the pain:  the pain from heartbreak, the pain of feeling alienated and without a decent support system in Japan, the pain of sometimes feeling unsatisfied with my job, the pain of feeling lonely.  Is it normal to do this?  Is it part of culture shock?  Is it part of my artistic sensibility?  It's not like I'm down constantly.  Absolutely not.  But I don't laugh enough like I used to do.  I don't have anyone to laugh with really on a regular basis. That being said, I have had some really great moments recently and throughout the day I feel very grateful to be alive and enjoying every moment.  But I also feel like I need more stimulation.  So am I, out of boredom, poking at myself to feel something deeply?  Am I bored?  Or am I just reminding myself of my longing to feel exhilarated, to openly engage emotionally with the world.  Or is it that my subconscious is still dealing with things that I, on the surface, have pushed inward somewhere.  Do they bubble up to catch me by surprise in a memory or a thought about another time in my life that no longer exists in the present?

Uchinaa-guuchi wakai miseemi?

Do you understand Okinawan language?  Yes, language...not dialect.

Most Okinawan people who live in Okinawa do not speak the indigenous languages of these islands.
Sadly, it is a part of their heritage that is passing from the present into history.  With the elderly population on the decline, the last generation of fluent Uchinaa-guuchi speakers will disappear.  There is a small percentage of people from the post-War generations (as well as those born after 1972 -- the year of Okinawa's reunification with Japan) who do speak it with their family members. But when I asked some of my students in the Yaeyama islands if they spoke Uchinaa-guuchi, they would laugh and act like that question was ridiculous.  When I have asked people older than that, people in their late 30s and 40s they have looked disdainful about that idea or have sort of brushed it away as silly.  Sometimes people feel sad about not knowing it, but they also think it's not useful in this era.  At a conference on Singlish (Singaporean-English and Multiculturalism) I attended at Okinawan Christian University last fall, a man in his late 50s/early 60s, made a comment about how when he uses Uchinaa-guuchi, he feels ashamed.  The language has been marked as inferior and second class for so long that it now is deeply ingrained in the people.   In the articles in the Japan Times that I've linked below, you can read about Meiji era policies towards Uchinaa-guuchi. There is so much to say about the legacy of these policies on Okinawa, but it's pretty much been thoroughly examined by others.

Strangers in a Strange Land (or "How to Be Alone")

Last year, I made a dance piece in Ishigaki called "How to Be Alone."   (I had been reading Jonathan Franzen's essay First City in his collection "How to Be Alone" in which he discussed privacy in public spaces and how a city provides anonymity more than the American suburbs/suburbia-cities do.)  I started my dance piece at my home, where I often felt most alone and took it out into the streets of Mizaki-cho (the mizu shobai/水商売 district, which is where my apartment was) where the majority of snack/hostess bars are located.  I then took it to my Yaeyama Buyo class and then back out where I sort of wound my way through the city to a street corner where I felt totally invisible.  Of course, I was hardly invisible in Ishigaki (being one of 10 noticeable foreigners on the island).  My performance had more to do with the internal pangs of loneliness I had been experiencing for most of my time in Ishigaki.  The irony of the performance was that I had conceived it before I met my then bf and had performed it after I met him, when I felt least alone.


In Naha, I rarely feel alone or lonely.  I don't know why this is.  I mean I guess part of it had to do with being in a relationship until recently, but I still feel surrounded by others and often in touch with more people than I was in Ishigaki.  Maybe it's the rhythm of the city itself or the fact that I have one or two reliable friends who I can often count on to check in with me or me with them on a regular basis.  Maybe it's because I am no longer suffering from extreme culture shock.  Either way, I've learned how to be alone and how to be okay with it as well.

Learn Ryukyu Buyo and you too can wear this costume!

Strangers in a Strange Land (Part I)

This is one of a two part series. 

The divide between people can be so vast sometimes. We can appear to look the same, act the same, speak similar (or the same) languages and yet all of our experiences, our perceptions and the matrix of our personalities through which these perceptions and experiences are funneled through amounts to infinite differences. But despite all of this, people can connect to each other and can understand that most human beings seek certain things in life: sex, food, shelter, water and friendship/love. Now, what if we don't look the same, act the same, speak the same languages or grow up experiencing the same, collective histories? That's when the divide is even more apparent. 

What's going on?

Golden Week is over already. Time flies when you're having fun. Or even when you're not, I suppose. Since March, I've gone through a veritable amount of change, some of it good and some of it not so good. Or rather, some of the changes were easier to deal with than others. For one thing, April marked the beginning of a new school year, with new students and (mostly) new teachers that I co-teach with. They are all pretty fantastic teachers and I've been enjoying my time in the classroom with them. It's completely different from last year, so that is a positive change. I also have a new set of students and they are all so genki and happy to be in their 2nd year of high school. They haven't yet reached the state of exhaustion (or boredom) that I felt the students were already at when I arrived in August (half-way through the school year, I might add). Also, I have had a chance to completely structure and design my class this year. That being said, I really wish I understood Japanese better. It would help me function better on a daily basis, establish deeper connections with my co-workers and would enable me to enjoy my time in Japan much more. I've started to put myself on a 1-hour per day mandatory study session (but I've decided, it cannot be all book work, or I will just end up quitting. So I've added listening to Japanese music, watching Japanese movies, listening to some of my Japanese on CD programs that I have, and trying to write to my former Japanese teacher in the US). Ultimately I need to start speaking it more often and with more confidence, especially with my students (not in the classroom, but outside of it). I really do enjoy teaching the students at my school. They are incredibly friendly and often (surprisingly) outgoing. Not all of them, of course. We do have the requisite shy Japanese students. It's mandatory when in Japan.