Stranger in a Strange Land

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

For breakfast I enjoy some combination of asparagus cookies or 'chlorella biscuits,' chaperoned by what is here known as Royal Milk Tea. For lunch I go to a convenience store around the corner, where all the goods of England and America are on sale, yet nothing is quite as I would expect. Little old women are photocopying Chopin scores to the sound of piped-in Clash songs, and teenagers with safety pins all over their faces are consulting magazines with titles like Classy, Waggle, and Bang.

Usually, in the afternoons, I go to the post office next door. All the clerks look up as I enter, as at the arrival of their daily soap opera. My principal means of communicating with the world is fraught with hazards: The envelope I am using is too large--measured against a green post office ruler--or I have neglected to attach a Par Avion sticker. Once I was rebuked for including too long a P.S. on the back of an envelope, and another time, during the holiday season, I was presented with an invoice for $30 when it was discovered that my New Year's greetings exceeded the five-word limit. Afterwards I walk around the local park, past the 'bad boy' son of the electrician, polishing his Corvette until it is as red as his waist-length hair. And at one street corner, in this placid neighborhood, I pause before a set of vending machines where I can buy 49 kinds of cigarettes, 36 alcoholic drinks, and 92 nonalcoholic drinks.

Perhaps the way in which my neighborhood most solidly uplifts and steadies me, though, is its tonic blend of cheerfulness and realism, measured (as I see it) with the wisdom of a culture that has been around long enough to know how to mete out its emotions.

In practical terms, this serenity--some would say complacency--may be what gives an air of pink-sweater innocence to protected neighborhoods such as mine. Much of this can be regarded as hypocrisy, but it can also suggest a prudent drawing of boundaries in a world where they are in flux, and a sense of which illusions can be serviceably maintained and which cannot. Japanese society urges its members to conceive of a purpose and an identity higher than themselves. Even punky nose-ring boys and scruffy Indians are implicitly urged to tend to responsibilities beyond their mortal bodies. I find myself picking up stray pieces of trash as I walk down the street; getting up from my seat in the bank, I stop to brush it clean as I would never do 'at home.'

The homes we choose, in short, deserve a tolerance we might not extend to the homes we inherit. In a world where we have to work hard to gain a sense of home, we have to exert ourselves just as much to sustain a sense of Other. I choose, therefore, to live some distance from Kyoto's eastern hills, which move me like memories of a life I didn't know I had.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print