|
[Editor's Note: Liese Klein has recently returned from her stay in Japan. As our readers know, she has been providing a picture of what it is like to live in Japan and practice at Aikikai Headquarters. In this column, she recalls some of the challenges and rewards that she experienced in Japan.]. Getting Used to Japan "Hey, this looks just like New York! No problem, the unreserved train will get here My minute and I'11 be on my way. No problem." This is what went through my head in the first minutes after I arrived in Tokyo at Narita Airport. First one train. Then another, and another. Two hours or so went by before I realized that there were no unreserved trains on this track at all. After half an hour of wandering around with a ton of luggage and stuttering through questions in basic Japanese, I figured out that there were no unreserved trains at all, and that "reserved" in this case just meant buying a ticket in a different place. Duh. Frustrating and time-wasting, but I learned a few important lessons about Japan from that experience. First, just because it looks the same doesn't mean you know what's going on. Second, my typical American aggressive attitude may not be the best approach in all situations. Third, no one was going to tell me if I was screwing up, so I was on my own. You would think learning these lessons the first day would make my life in Japan easier, but as many in San Diego know, I'm a pretty slow learner when it comes to some things. So going on my third year in Japan, I still seem to make some form of these mistakes every day. But things have definitely improved from that first year, at least in the material sense. I arrived in the middle of winter, without enough money or warm clothes and promptly got sick as a dog. I found an apartment, complete with a lovely Siberian breeze going right through it and my very own rat under the sink. I didn't mind the rat much at first, and found that my pocket Japanese dictionary made an excellent rat repellent as it was easy to aim and made a nice loud smack on the wall. But I'm not as brave as the late Paul Sylvain Sensei, who according to Hombu Dojo legend chased a rat out of his Tokyo apartment with a bokken. One night the dictionary didn't work, a large paperback didn't work, and even a heavy textbook didn't scare it off. When he started chewing on my cabinet again, I ran out the door in hysterics and ended up shivering and whimpering at the convenience store down the street, waiting for the sun to rise. That was the low point of my Tokyo existence, I thought at the time. Little did I know that my rat problem and my draft problem would be permanently solved a few months later when my apartment was completely gutted in a fire. I lost everything but the clothes on my back--and my gi tops and pants which were hanging on a clothesline outside. Chiba Sensei told me at the time I was lucky to have such a purification, but I sure didn't feel very lucky, especially when I had to buy new shoes and clothes in Japan. Judging by the selection in stores, Japanese women my size must just stay home naked all day or bind themselves up in kimonos. Despite all the disaster and drama of those first months, I was also challenged and intrigued by trying to adjust to a culture different from my own in ways I had never imagined. It's easy to get all gushy about Japanese culture and how wonderful and safe it is, especially after coming from your average chaotic American city. I don't buy that there is anything intrinsically better about Japanese culture as a whole than U.S. society, but I have really come to appreciate how carefully structured and balanced this country is. Everything seems bound together impossibly tightly into a network of obligations and responsibilities such that everyone knows what to do in almost any situation, and deviations from that norm are quickly noticed and corrected. The complexity of structure has really made me think about American Aikido in a whole new way. For example, the sempai-kohai system and sensei-student relationships in Japan seem much more complex and regulated in Japan than they do at home. People are trained from birth both how to fit into this structure and what society expects -- from the family and elementary school on up. Any doctor is called sensei, for instance, even the part-time doctor at my company clinic. On the other hand, at the dojo everyone takes the title sensei very seriously, and the younger teachers get quite uncomfortable if you call them sensei in front of older teachers. It's all extremely confusing. It seems to me that in the U.S. we have taken many of these structures out of context and applied them to our much less formalized society. So you have some American-born teachers using Japanese cultural concepts like "sensei," mixing it up with concepts like "samurai" and "spiritual leader" and ending up thinking they are these god-like, all-powerful figures. In the end it seems to me that these concepts are often used to control people, and the students end up manipulated and abused. The students don't have socially-constructed boundaries either-they start thinking that a "sensei" is a god as well. In general I've come to think that any imported power dynamic like sensei-student or sempai-kohai is potentially dangerous and should be treated with the utmost care. I also notice a big difference in attitude in terms of rank. In Japan it seems that a shodan is really just a beginning step, and no one takes it that seriously except in that the rank brings more responsibilities and expectations. New shodans in Japan often seem sincerely embarrassed in those first few weeks they put on the hakama, and seem to be apologizing for years for their inexperience. Most of the time, people don't even talk about rank, and the old man who is cranking your wrist is in afternoon class could be a shodan or a sixth dan--you never know. The idea of rank is another thing that seems to have changed dramatically in its voyage across the ocean to the U.S. But despite all the cultural differences, it surprises me every day how much I feel at home on the mat and in the Aikido community here at Hombu Dojo. Thanks to Chiba Sensei's kind introductions, I have gotten to know many of the teachers and senior students here who have really made me feel welcome. Often on Friday nights a group of us meets at a restaurant near the dojo called "Kitaichi" and everyone tells stories about the "good old days." The owner of the restaurant loves to serve very strange fish and insists I eat every bite! So it is a constant balance: My homesickness for the U.S. (especially In-n-Out Burgers and Rubios fish tacos) and the thrill of learning something new every day. The frustrations of living in a society where I am a complete outsider is balanced by the wonderful freedom of having few responsibilities and no expectations beyond paying the rent and making it to class. But as interesting as it has been, it seems that as the years go by, being in Japan is teaching me most of all how to better appreciate what I left behind. |
