Life in Japan
I've been here since '91; and, barring a major
upheaval, I'll probably still be here in '24 ( I got a house and kids in
school).
As far as 'How's life?' what are you looking
for? The day to day trivialities? Politics? A white guy
as the 'damn foreigner'?
I don't get much of that last personally I hear
about it a lot at parties and meetings though.
Schools? I have three in the system and have taught
at every level from preschool to adult 'returned student' classes.
Health care? I'm not up on the stats. but
I've had several experiences with doctor's offices, hospital out patient
care,
dentists, and a couple specialists. Driving
and transportation? (getting a driver's license was a trip). TV and
Radio?
(one of the dubious benefits of being fluent
is understanding commercials).
How about culture.
Christians make up between 1 and 3 percent of
the population here and most folks treat buddhism as something noticed
only for two holidays a year and funerals.
It's essentially a Buddhist country full of agnostics. In my experience,
serious
Buddhists make up only about 10% of the population.
As a result, everything is subtly but profoundly different.
A historical aside
Non-japanese like to talk about Japanese Animism.
That's a distortion. Shinto is a variety of Buddhism. Most
of the gods
of the old religion were rehabilitated as buddhist
saints over a thousand years ago. The emperor as godhead stuff was
an
artifact of the 19th century thought up by a
couple of nationalist history professors. Beyond the worship
of the emperor's
person, the animist aspect of this religion never
caught on with the general public. With the exception of a handful
of isolated
shrines (unfortunately including the one that
houses the ashes of class one war criminals in Tokyo), nearly all the Shinto
shrines
returned to their Buddhist roots after the war.
Japan's original Animist religion (which superficially resembled greek
mythology)
was an oral tradition that was never recorded
in writing by believers.
The earliest records of it are from centuries
after the introduction of Buddhism recorded by priests trying to reform
the animist
practices of the peasants (the ruling class had
already been completely converted for over a hundred years by this time).
All this seems to have occurred between the 4th
and 10th centuries AD. The estimates still vary wildly between 'experts'.
Those 19th cent. profs. I referred to earlier
claimed the oldest dates. Genuine recorded history barely has 1000
years here
and that has major breaks of decades in length
in the eleventh and fifteenth centuries in the aftermath of civil wars
that destroyed
the central government. Chinese records
claim that buddhism (and writing) were introduced in the fourth and eighth
centuries
and that the Japanese requested a mission in
the tenth century. But all that survived from before the eleventh
century in Japan
are a few pottery shards (and the like) with
names written or impressed into them. No continuous text whatsoever.
Basically, the Buddhist context of Shinto means
that the culture isn't as close to nature as Japanophiles and some Japanese
would like to believe. Although it's more
abstract than the Judeo-Christian concept, Buddha the 'cloud being' is
held as being
separate from the world in much the same way.
As such the soul exists on another plane and people don't think of themselves
as being an integral part of the world around
them. Rather than the Christian world as a 'testing ground of the
soul' you have a
Buddhist world as a place contaminating the soul
with 'shadows of distraction' feeding the 'arrogance of selfdom'.
Shinto is no
more an impediment to environmental holocaust
than Catholicism. ( ha
ha )
Anyway, back to the point. Disinterested
agnosticism is the Rule and the Norm. Piety is considered odd when
viewed most charitably
by society at large. Generally, the pious
and the righteous are censored as nut bars and isolated --in fact, righteous
bombast is very
nearly taboo. The result is a profoundly
secular society that indiscriminately lumps UFOs, alien abductions, ghosts,
monsters, gods,
and good luck charms into a gray zone somewhere
between a baptism and the scary stories told at summer camp.
Beyond that, like sex, religion is not for public
practice. Prayer and ritual are believed to require privacy in proportion
to the
seriousness of the act. Religious
activities are often practiced alone or in very small groups in a cubby,
small room or even a tent.
For atheists it's a refreshing change, but for
devout christians and muslims it's an endless source of culture shock.
For a couple
christians I've known here the violent clash
between their expectations and the reality they saw around them was insurmountable.
They couldn't accept that an agnostic smorgasbord
produced such a peaceful and polite society. They were always looking
for
'hidden evil', and often resorted to describing
Japanese people as mask-wearing automatons filled with evil ulterior motives
that
they couldn't even list.
Hope you found that useful.
--joe in Japan
Joe, that was cool.
Odds are this will be the closest I'll ever make it to Japan,
Thanks, and who else has an opinion or a story about your daily life vs "normal" American life?