Red & White

Heather recently informed me of a striking chromatic difference between Japan and North American/Western society.

In Canada, and America, and likely most of the European nations, it is understood that white and black are binary opposites: chromatically as well as philosophically. Were you to try to illustrate the concept of a binary to someone, it is likely that the first example to come to your mind would be “well, it’s like black and white, really.”

In Japan, however, it is white and red that are opposites, and not white and black. Such a chromatic revelation is not so shocking in a country that had to invent the notion of green—or midori—as the result of foreign influences (before green was just another shade of blue to the Japanese, and traffic lights are still considered to be red, yellow, and blue). However, the fact that red and white are opposites becomes necessary context when you realize just how often the two colours appear together in this society. The Japanese flag, of course, is the most obvious use of red and white. However, there are also the graduation ceremonies in the schools, wherein the rooms are ringed with white and red striped curtains. And in the day to day, my elementary students, from first grade to six grade, all have reversible red/white caps hanging from hooks on the sides of their desks: ready to be deployed in any activity that calls for splitting the class into teams.

One such activity occurred on the weekend of May 29^th at my elementary Undokai (school sports day), which saw the entire student population divided down the middle into two teams: Red and White. Each team had representatives from every grade, and when certain grades were competing, the remainder of the team would form the cheerleading squad: maniacally waving their team’s colours and following along in the pre-set, full-body, preset, foot-stomping, hat-waving red or white cheer routines.

The closest approximation for an Undokai that we have in Canada is a Track & Field Day. And such a comparison would be apt when it comes to the Undokai’s X-meter-dash and relay events for the students. However, such a comparison fails to capture the importance of the Undokai as a community event that sees student’s entire extended families coming out to cheer them on (indeed it seems to be, in a way, mandatory for parents to show up for the Undokai, and they are encouraged to arrange vacation if they usually work weekends). The comparison to a normal Track and field day also fails to capture the rest of the Undokai events, which are best described as delightful madness. There are tug-of-wars, and piggy-back chicken fights, and yosakoi-like dance numbers. There are caveman races and weather races, family races and beer bottle races, koi races and ball races. And—my personal favourite—there were dress-up-like-a-sarariman-and-act-out-getting-sloshed races. It was that last that caused me to exclaimed, when I was finally able to get my laughter under control, “God DAMN, I love this country!”

But coming back to the Japanese binary of Red and White for a moment, I wonder if it might not be a purer binary than Black and White: if it might not be better able to illustrate the notion of a binary: of opposites.

I fear that our own western white and black has been too tainted by the associations with other binaries that we’ve muddied it in. White becomes associated with ideas like light and good and air and life. Black, in opposition, is associated with the conflicting notions of dark and evil and earth and death. Black and White, in western society in specific and, likely, in the English language in general, have become value judgments and no longer a simple chromatic binary. To assign either colour to someone or something is to risk contaminating it with these further binary associations or residual meanings.

In Japan, if you’re not white, you’re red. At the end of the day, those students at the Undokai are wearing white hats that are also red hats, and the others are wearing red hats that are also white hats. To change from one to the other is only a matter of inversion: of taking the hat off, changing it, and putting it back on. And, in the end, it’s just a hat.

To transition from Black to White in western society requires far more work. If you are black then you are the absence of white. You carry all of the negative, unclean associations with the black. Should you wish to change sides, to ascend into the white, so strong are our society’s peripheral associations with these two colours that, even if you succeed in changing, your previous colour will cling to you like a phantom miasma. It is like trying to mix white from black when dealing with pigments: no matter how much light you pour into the dark, all you will ever accomplish will be grey.

This is a theoretical discussion dealing with abstracts and is not meant to be a commentary on race. That being said, with the way that talking about someone being white or black aligns so easily with western notions of race, perhaps the race issue is the purest example of the implications of, and inherent dangers in, western society’s classification of the colours Black and White. Just as the Japanese arbitrary aesthetics decided that red and white would be opposites, so, too, did western arbitrary aesthetics draw race lines in Black and White.

Adventure the Third: Words, words, words

This is the third instalment of the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series. It's about the HAJET winter conference in Furano. However, it's also one for Craig, who asked for his brother to send him some words (“as many or as few as you want”). What I wrote him was far more elegant than any of the stilted, formal stuff I tried to bang together as a summary for an excellent weekend. Call it brotherly love; call it the inspiration that comes from unconditional fraternal faith.

I found a new word for family this weekend:

HAJET.

It describes a force that pulls you out of your cold little corners of the countryside and forces you into warm spaces with people who were only mere acquaintances before. It feeds you and it entertains you and it makes evident your commonalities so nothing can stand in the way of meeting and greeting. It describes a degree of responsibility as you are elected to the role of Social Coordinator in this family, and it falls to you, now, to make sure the reunions happen, to make sure that all the distant relations are invited and attending. In the end, it describes a support structure for when you’re in distant lands, living in the future of all you used to know—when all of the people you once counted on now seem to live only behind windows in computer monitors.

I found a new word for beauty this weekend:

Furano.

It describes a sunny, blue-sky day, where the blizzards from yesterday have assured that all of the trees in the alpine have come to curves under bulbous, weighty clouds of snow. It describes taking in the width and breadth of a grid-paper agricultural valley from on high in a ski lift, climbing the back of a mountain you’d prematurely decided wasn’t worth it. It describes the thick grey of snowclouds just skirting before the sun, enough so that they can release the first crystalline trailers of their vast loads of snow, and yet they can still let that sun shine through to gild the flakes as they fall: vibrant stars on a sea of blue mountain shadows.

I found a new word for grace this weekend:

Snowboard.

It describes a condition of having your feet securely fastened to a plank of metal and fiberglass and plastic. It describes how you hook the thing into your very bone structure at the ankles, making it one further extension of your spine, so that you can eventually control it like an appendage of your self. On this thing, you ride mountains with control and ease unlike anything ever accomplished on two planks, and should you hesitate and fall it is only the beginning of your next rise, your next ride. It is a word that provides so much confidence as to be consummate; a word that avows that your only obstacle is yourself.

I found a new word for inspiration this weekend:

Yoichi.

It describes a place that is so void of people and spirit on the surface as to be the perfect hiding place for dreams and ideas. It is a terminal for words, and ethereal, Ghibli-esque cat-trains pull up to disgorge walking, talking metaphors and smiling similes. The ghosts of poets and philosophers haunt the rafters of it and call forth images from your weekends with phantom voices. As you sit, immobile, in such a place, if you have eyes enough to see them, the ideas pile in around you: standing one on top of the next so thick that they eventually have to suck in their guts to squeeze a few more in through the sliding doors. In this place, you feed on all of them like a verbiage vampire: typing them all into that little touchscreen keyboard in a way that builds momentum until your fingers are firing across it at the speed of thought. As your bus pulls up outside, and you’re forced to leave the place, you hasten to cram all the words you can into your Tupperware containers and your Ziplock bags, trailing them out behind you like cigarette smoke as you bolt through the doors.

And I found a new word for affection this weekend:

It describes a book that is all illuminated with bright illustrations of kindness and caring and love for all things, and yet you can’t make out the text worth a damn. It describes fingers that will crawl over and entwine with yours like tarantulove, seeking out your prints and lifelines with a dexterity and dedication that only you yourself ever seemed to espouse. It describes unexpected revelations, set in formal, theoretical languages that only amount to so many arbitrary letters when you’re speaking in tongues. This new word speaks of voids between arms and the forms that fill them; of the earthquake, gooseflesh shivers that can be set off by the most tentative of brushes; of soft, butterfly kisses that resound with the force of avalanches.

But that’s the word I can’t share with you; not here, not yet. For you see, brother, these words of ours, they have power. The Allfather hung, and died, and was reborn on The Tree, a sacrifice to himself, for but a handful of words.

So some of these words I’ll give you, but some I keep for myself. Regardless of whether I share them with you or not, these words are my words, and if you ever tried to use them, they'd be my words still. However, if you need words of your own for these things, then take heart because they’re out there, and you’ll find them.

Mountain Days 5, 6

...and Grace, too

Today one of my students came to me and asked what “Grace” meant in Japanese.

I had to do a double take. I paused so long before asking him to repeat the word that it may well have been a triple take. You see, I’m used to the students in this class asking me to translate words like “masturbation.” And when I refuse, they take vengeance by screaming the word at the top of their lungs in class and in the hallways, knowing only that it’s something they probably shouldn’t be saying.

That this student, in the midst of such a hellish class, would come to me and ask me about a word as delicate and nuanced as “Grace” is evidence that he has not yet succumb to the cruelty, racism, or, possibly worst of all, indifference that the majority of his classmates currently espouse.

My own grasp of Japanese being only moderately more advanced than his grasp of English, I had no idea how “Grace” translated, so I tried to build it out of the words I did know: kireina, jyozu, yasashi, but for all my listing, they weren’t “Grace.” I tried to relate it to something I knew he was into: baseball. I told him that if he was all these things when he played, then he would know “Grace.”

The exchange really struck me, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the danger of asking a completist English major to translate a word for you. Maybe it’s my affection for this particular student, for his obvious brilliance beneath a defeatist attitude that has been built up around him by the real troglodytes in his class.

Or maybe it’s the words: the perspective created at the place between two languages, wherein the deep, attenuated meanings of a word can explode in your head like a box of kittens. And there’s you, surrounded by their magnificence, and utterly powerless to round them all up and push them through the door into the next language.

Omiyage

Omiyage is one of those Japanese words for which there is no equivalent in English.

The uninitiated would tell you that it translates as “souvenir.” But that equivalency will start to fail you the first time your Japanese mom tells you that she’s brought you a souvenir from Shikoku and it’s made of sweet potato. If omiyage is souvenir in Japanese, then la souvenir (to remember) in Japan is to forget. It is to share a place by returning from it with pieces of it to cannibalize. It is to experience a place by devouring it. La souvenir lasts for only as long as it lingers on your tongue, and the memorable places visited become those that ensconce themselves in the flavour centres of your mind.

Omiyage is something different.

Omiyage is a transferable flavour memory. Despite its stick-thin, rice-reverent surface, deep down Japan is a nation ruled by its gut. From metropolises to fishing towns, every place in this country seems to have a signature food item. When the Japanese travel, the consumption of these regional dishes seems to be as important as visiting a region’s physical attractions. And, just as the Japanese take pictures of these attractions, preserving them and carrying a part of them home, so, too, do they aim to capture the flavour of a region by returning with its omiyage.

Omiyage is a food act. It is thoughtfulness made manifest. When the Japanese travel for business or pleasure, they return to their offices with boxes of omiyage from wherever they’ve been. To give omiyage is to prove that you were thinking of your coworkers; to prove that you care about them. To neglect omiyage is to be heartless and indifferent.

Omiyage is a self-perpetuating cycle. Though undoubtedly once founded in something profound, the notion of giving omiyage today seems to exist only to create demand for the production of more omiyage. So ingrained is it in the culture that you are judged if you are not generous with your omiyage, but the background justification for this judgment has been long lost. Omiyage shops thrive like mushrooms at attractions all across this country: a massive industry sustained by a point of Japanese etiquette.

Omiyage cannot be the Japanese equivalent of a souvenir because a souvenir is permanent. It is a bauble or a trinket or a chotchkie. It is a material piece of something likely destined for the bin. You hang onto a souvenir for a time, you may put it on display in a place of honour, but, eventually, all but the very best souvenirs degrade into clutter. Omiyage is temporary. It is given with emotion and it is consumed while that emotion is still fresh in it. As it is meant to be eaten, it does not sit around; it is—by definition—incapable of collecting dust.

What it comes down to is the cultural weight behind the words. When you give someone a souvenir, you are being thoughtful, and they’ll likely appreciate it. It will hang around on their desk, and they’ll think of you fondly when they look at it, but, eventually, the wonder will go out of it, and it will become just one more thing. In Japan, however, when you bring omiyage, you insert yourself as an observant member in an existing cultural framework. You become part of a web of significances, and it serves to magnify a simple sweet beyond the realm of thoughtfulness.

I’d do a better job explaining it, but I must admit that it’s something I can more feel than truly understand. I’ve just learned that, when you go somewhere, you bring back omiyage for the teachers back in the office. I’m told that they don’t really expect it from foreigners such as myself, but when I see how very grateful the teachers are to receive it, their reactions seem to far outweigh any difficulty in buying and transporting the stuff home.

EDIT: Leave it to Sarfaraz to pick up on the French in something. Actually, I was kind of hoping he would and am now glad that he has done so.

Also, thanks for the proofread ;)

Logofusion

One of the things that landed me in Japan—a thing that has sustained me through some of the harder stuff I'd had to adapt to over here—is my love of language.

Phrased like that, it sounds airy and fairy and very much like something a scholar would say. But that ain't me. I love language as a user and not as an academic. I get high on the communication. I see the words as valuable tools that slot into an overarching problem solving mechanism.

I love language when it allows for exchanges like the ones I had this weekend at the international festival that was hosted in Lindsay's town of Ishikari (just outside Sapporo).

Though Lindsay and Mark landed in the Canadian booth, my proposal for an Estonian booth was turned down as too eccentric, and I was assigned to the France booth. Apparently my fetal visit to the country and my French fluency qualified me. And according to Akemi, the festival organizer, my blonde hair and blue eyes make me the spitting image of a frenchman. So I threw on the closest thing I had to a beret and tried to class up my attire in a suitably Parisian way. To complete the package, I busted out my terrible French accent (terrible as it is accurate in a TERRIBLY creepy kind of way) and rolled my R's to Lyon and back for the perplexed Japonais. That had to be the best part as a potent, guttural, rolled R is pretty much the most linguistically foreign thing to the Japanese (with their R's coming out as a kind of limp fusion of an L and an R).

When I wasn't verbally terrorizing the Japanese, I delighted in conversing with some visiting scientists and researchers from a number of African nations. Their group had been invited to the festival through the same zoological impulse that inspires the Japanese to parade us whities around on stages and call it internationalization. But, when you start dealing in Gaijin (foreigner) currency, I'm pretty sure that the Japanese assign a little more exotic value to blacks than to whites (racist but true). Having a whole gaggle of African professionals show up, most of them sporting their traditional garb, must have felt like winning the internationalization lottery to the festival organizers.

For me, they were just an excellent opportunity to get back to using some of my French, which had started to wither somewhat over here in J-land. Though I was fortunate to have started studying a second language in kindergarten, when my mind was still young, supple, and a sponge for language (thanks mom and dad), I sometimes feel that I've only got so much storage space in my language-enabled mind. When I got over here and started using Japanese 24/7, my Estonian was the first to atrophy. I would boast about knowing Estonian to my students, only to have them ask me to speak some for them. I'd reach into the language-y parts of my mind, I'd try to switch tracks (the change from one language to another feeling almost that physical), and when I again opened my mouth I would utter linguistic abominations like "ma raagin nihongo keel."

Japanese had started to colonize the Estonian centres in my brain. When I tried to recover from these slips, I got a real sense of logofusion about it—feeling lost in the spaghetti of languages and words in my head. To get anything out in Estonian, I'd have to prefab the sentences in my head and deliver them carefully, assuring I didn't stray from my intended grammatical geography.

I worried that, given enough time, my French would start slipping away in a similar fashion: a casualty of my increasing Japanimation.

But, as I opened my mouth and spoke to these Africans, I just fell into the French. It was natural like swimming—instinctive like breathing. And, before I knew it, I was using words I'd thought I'd forgotten and phrasing sentences I didn't remember knowing. The change didn't seem laboured or physical at all as the kernel in my mind that allows me to dream in French just took charge. I fell so deep into the rhythm of it that when a particular man from Senegal couldn't speak English to the Japanese woman beside me, I had to consciously remind myself that I was speaking French, and I had to make a near-physical switch back to English.

Now, I don't know what that is, but there's a kind of power in it. Call it bilingualism or fluency, but the non-theoretical reality of it is understanding and communication. Such a cardinal thing was so powerful when fully realized at Babel that God would rather sunder the tower than allow man to achieve the further evolution beyond the barrier of language.

Ok, so maybe that's just me chasing down the myths that move me, but the tangible in it is the power of language. When you make a child bilingual, or trilingual, or quadrilingual, you only make it better. You give it a greater opportunity to problem solve and translate. You broaden its horizons and open up new worlds to it. When you give a child language, you change it's brain, and you make it powerful. I believe that because I have lived it. I will never be able to thank my mother and father enough for it.

And, should you ever be blessed with children, you should empower them with language, too. If you're in Canada, make it a priority to put them in French immersion. It doesn't matter if they have to take an hour-long bus to get to it. It doesn't matter if you can't French your way out of a paper bag (for all their touching effort, my parents couldn't!). It doesn't matter if they hate it and you have to force them to complete it. I guarantee you that, one day, they will thank you for it; thank you for the doors it opened for them—even if those doors are only in their minds.