Selling the Earth for the Moon
12月1日 (火ー水) 1:10am JST
I once wrote on a post-it, “Would I sell the Earth for the Moon?”
At this point, I’m feeling at yes.
12月17日 (木ー金) 1:52am JST
It’s entirely too warm for it to really be the middle of December and the start of the winter. True, Mt. Tate has been snow capped for a while, but down here on the plains, one drizzling day is nearly as warm as any other.
Would I sell the Earth for the Moon? Would I trade the actual for the imagined? Blyth said, “one flower is the spring” (Haiku v. 1, pp. 9). But I’m not sure that my rain is even 時雨 shigure, let alone winter. I stew a bunch of ideas and feelings, but since I can’t even agree on the names of these thoughts, nothing ever comes of it but rain slicked pavement and frosty grass in the shade. This is winter?
Tonight, the JETs had a minor shindig to commemorate the passing of the year and the seasonal scattering of ALTs to the far corners of the globe.
12月18日 (金ー土) 1:45am JST
We spent most of the evening asking different people what they’d be doing during the break. Some tackle Thailand. Others man the fort here. Still others will be roving other uncharted parts of East Asia. I shall be returning home. Home is where the heart is, and since I’ve long since abandoned the heart as a guide to action, I wonder how things will turn out.
I suppose my problem with life is, it doesn’t transform magically. Japan, as it turns out, is not magic. The Ginkaku-ji is just a pile of boards and rocks. It may be called the temple of wabi-sabi and the heart of Higashi-yama culture, but sadly, whatever transformative magic is locked inside of it, must be unlocked by the active cooperation of the observer’s brain chemistry. Coming to Japan is not enough to make one’s life ideal.
Sorrowful, sorrowful.
I have a lot of ideas, a lot of dreams, but when what I imagine doesn’t match up with what really is, it just leaves me more confused. On the one hand, I feel a strong pull to make peace with what is. On the other hand, I feel a strong pull never to abandon what should be. The earth has everything we need, but the moon has everything we want.
12月19日 (土ー日) 1:11am JST
Living in Japan has, at various times, been likened to living in the future. I think the truth of this observation extends beyond truisms of time zone differences and the consumer electronics gap. The heart of it lies in the truth about the future itself.
On Star Trek, on the Jetsons, and on just about every other show set in the future, there is a certain “gee whiz” factor to all of the characters’ interactions with technology. In terms of plotting, Star Trek may just be “Wagon Train” in space, but it is also something else. Technology has changed the very nature of life for the protagonists. Shatner may try to hide it, but Kirk smiled a little every time he used his yet-to-be-invented mobile phone. George may have been temporarily angered by his malfunctioning gadgets, but the idea of life without them is inconceivable to him. They are what make him go to the sprocket factory every day.
But that’s not really how it is. We’re all living in the future, all of us, even the Amish, with their fancy non-fur clothing and non-cave dwellings. The rest of us, we all send messages around the planet with our magic boxes, cross the continents in our metal birds, buy our foods wrapped in plastic and soaked in chemicals. We drive our cars. We read and write. We have all these unnatural machines and motions and lifestyle— but no one even notices anymore. It’s not a big deal. You get used to it. The first time you used the internet was a miracle. The last time was a bore.
That’s what’s wrong with Star Trek and the Jetsons. The future took some adjusting, sure, but once you get settled in, the future is just the present.
All of which is to say, Japan too has become the present for me. I was thinking about coming home the other day, what I needed to pack, and how I’d do the trip, and then I thought about the drive from Greenville to Rock Hill for some reason. Why? Because, that’s how I get home. Oceans and mountains and miles are nothing. It’s always the present eventually.
Somewhere high above the Pacific, where time has no meaning
I sometimes wonder if I’m actually a very good teacher. Or “Assistant Language Teacher,” even. I’m thinking of staying on a second year, but I’m also wondering if it’s really such a good idea. A year is just such a long time. Still, they want an answer by February. (The timing for all things JET is fairly funky. Whoever is in charge of the program must be aware that most grad schools don’t send results until March at the earliest.) The job is enjoyable enough as it goes, but not especially fulfilling. It’s hard to really observe much change in the English ability of my students thus far. It seems like the good ones are always good, and the bad ones are always bad. There’s only so much that any high school language teacher can do. Heaven knows that my high school language experiences were hopeless.
Ideally, a JET teacher should be fluent in Japanese and English and have a teaching degree. But there’s not a very large pool of such people. Of course, when I say, “ideally,” I mean from the perspective of teaching students English, one tiny facet of the JET project. Clearly, one large part of my job is to not endanger the jobs of Japanese citizens. Which is why team teaching is so emphasized. It’s not as though having one person be the good cop of Japanese and one person be the bad cop of English is the greatest pedagogical innovation of our era. It’s just that even if people qualified to do my job existed in the numbers necessary to replace me, it still wouldn’t be in local school board’s interests to do so, since it would mean firing all the existing “English teachers” whose knowledge of English is textbook, at best. These Engurishu tiichaazu have experience and pensions and gray hair that make them all but untouchable.
Then there’s the whole, hidden objective part of the job. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs clearly cooked up JET, in part, as means of foreign outreach and indoctrination. One part of my job is to go back to America and promote Japan. I’m supposed to trick my economically desirable friends to work low paying jobs in Japan and my well connected friends to give Japan better trade concessions. Already, at least two thirds of my salary is disposed of in the country on daily life. If they can just trick me to bring in two or three groups of friends as tourists, then on the whole the trade balance for Japan won’t even budge.
And then there’s the part of the job where we’re supposed to teach the old women on the trains not to fear the round eyes, so that when it becomes necessary to import thousands or millions of Filipina nurses to take care of the graying population (and it will become necessary), this can be done with a minimum of distress for the existing population.
Yes, it’s a multifaceted job. But, I’m beginning to think that the ultimate significance of my job is the same as the significance of the “English” sprinkled into pop songs and advertisements.
We’re just supposed to make the user look cool.
We aren’t supposed to mean anything.
So, if my job is just to make my school cool, how can I fail? (This after last night, when my host mother told her other former host student to “be more fashionable!” using the motherly imperative form as we drank together.) And yet, somehow, I feel that I’m not doing enough.
Maybe part of it is just a natural reaction to the transition from being a student to being a teacher. I’m still used to taking orders and not making them. Which is part of the contrast between my coworker and me. She’s always trying to rock the boat for sensible education strategies, instead of going with the flow of the books and whatnot.
And then there’s that I don’t have many close friends here. I see people when there’s a JET party, but no one calls me to make plans for the weekend. That’s just sort of the way it is, and I’m not bothered by it, but it might be nice if things were otherwise.
So, all of this is just to say, I don’t know what I want to do next year. It’s so much easier just to stay in Japan and keep drifting along. Heaven forfend, I could end up like H-sensei’s friend, a former JET from before JET existed, now fat and happy to be teaching Harry Potter to students at a tech school in Toyama.
It’s a pickle, all right.
Meanwhile out the window, it’s clouds below me and stars above me. Orion hangs off the moon and engine hums everything into pure, white noise. I always thought World 5’s second half was everything there is. Now, I wonder how much further the tower might have to climb to see it all. If 120 stars can yield to the outrageous 150, why can’t 150 yield to even more? Who knows how much further the staircase might reach!
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