Friday night, I met up with Brett and three of his colleagues at a restaurant in Naguro in Tokyo. The set-up was really nice-- each booth was curtained off by a hanging bamboo panel with a space at either side for the waiter to put the food in and clear dishes. The tables each had a bell you rang for service. It had a much more private feel than the typical restaurant, sort of like eating in someone's home.
Brett's colleagues ranged in age from about 23 to 28, and they all spoke English very well, which was nice for me. We ordered the way people seem to do everywhere but the US--lots of small dishes that everyone shared and that came out bit by bit. (I'm completely sold on this, but our Greek friend Theo complains he prefers eating the American way. "I want a big steak that I know is mine and that no one else can touch.) Highlights included bamboo shoots in chili powder, fish intestines in chili powder (ok, this wasn't a highlight, but I wanted to mention it for bragging rights), chicken meatballs rolled in raw egg, yakitori, okonomiyaki, and sashimi. I've been a little bit scared of sashimi throughout my trip-- fish is a newly acquired taste in and of itself, and raw fish just seems wrong--but last night I discovered how good it was when dipped in soy sauce mixed with ginger and wasabi.
It was also the first time I'd tried sake (believe it or not, I never drank ouzo in Greece), which tasted a bit like white wine and was very good. We also had something that everyone wanted me to believe was tea, but Brett eventually told me (much to his colleagues' dismay) that it was Japanese whiskey mixed with tea.
We talked a bit about places I ought to visit in Japan, and then they asked me about the front-runners for the 2008 election. I asked them what they thought of the new Prime Minister, Abe, but it was generally agreed that Japanese politics was too boring to warrant discussion. Two of Brett's colleagues, Taku and Nobu, had lived in the United States, and we discussed the unfairness of the fact that American men like Japanese women, but American women are usually uninterested in Asian men. Nobu said that he was extremely sick of American women patting his head and calling him cute. Yeah, ouch. I asked what they thought of American women, and they said that we dressed terribly but had nice proportions and long legs.
Nobu said he believed American society was inherently contradictory because of the tension between liberal democratic values and Puritanism. I think we discuss this a lot in the States, but it was interesting to hear a foreigner express this, because I've wondered what side of America comes across more. In the UAE, where I was so careful not to show too much leg or arm, I felt like American was loose and wanton in contrast. Still, in some ways, we seemed like an early-to-bed country, with speed limits and smoking bans.
I sometimes feel like young American women walk a tightrope between seeming like nice girls and like sexually comfortable women. (Is this a self-imposed dichotomy rather than a reflection of other people's views? Yes, to some extent.) Social success is about getting the balance just right. I think the only way to erase this dichotomy is to act like it doesn't exist, but, honestly, I can't let go of wanting to come across as a nice girl. In Japan-- and in a lot of Europe-- I get the impression these two things aren't in tension at all.
I was going to tell Nobu that I saw a similar tension in Japanese society-- the culture of shame, the six day work week, the extreme politeness and formality as opposed to the binge drinking and sexual liberation. So many Japanese businessmen pass out on benches on weekends that you can buy ties and boxers at almost every train station. Sex is openly part of public life and provides another venue for commercialization. However, I realized that it was a reflection of my own lens that I saw these two elements as dichotomous.
I think Japan has a great social formula-- people are judged on how they treat others and how hard they work, not their personal decisions. If allowed to pick and choose, I think I'd import Japanese attitudes about sex but leave the binge drinking. However, I'm finding it much more of a challenge to my self-conception of myself as personally socially progressive than Swarthmore ever was. It does everyone a disservice to label sex as "bad," but I think there is a lot of value in classifying it as "serious." Are the two inseperable as a social message?
I'm curious what I'll think about all this in a month. I've read some people accuse Japan of having sexual liberation without sexual equality (fodder for Catherine McKinnon), but I haven't talked to enough people to even comment on this.
Anyway, after dinner, we all went out to a karaoke place. I imagined an American-style karaoke bar with a stage where one person got up at a time and everyone else watched. My ability to sing is, well, on par with my ability to use hashi, dance, drive, and write in cursive. I tried to see it as an essential rite of passage.
The karaoke place we went to had small rooms that each party went into. The rooms had a table facing a screen, and a circular booth around the table. Someone picked a song and then we all sang, passing around the two cordless microphones. The singing was more like shouting, except for Brett, who was pretty good--or practiced. Favorites included "Complicated," "Hips Don't Lie," "It's My Life," "American Pie," and a Japanese song with an English chorus that went "You're got to be lucky and you've got to be strong." Eventually, we all started dancing. It was really fun.
It's been a really good weekend, and Rachel just got back from her trip to Ottawa, so the week ahead will be less lonely than this one. Tomorrow, I'll try to write about Harajuku, a funky So-ho-like shopping area in Tokyo, bizarre store concepts and terrific buildings. It made me feel like there's just more imagination in Japan than anywhere else I've ever been.
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3 comments:
1.) That's what the kareoke place in Little Korea in Upper Darby, PA is like. I used to go there with swimmers.
2.) I think the tension between sexual puritanism and liberal democratic traditions doesn't need to be talked about as "sex is bad" verses "sex should be taken seriously." The best way to think about it is "sex is shameful" verses "sex should be taken seriously." Sex should be taken seriously not because it is shameful but because you can't have sex in a vacuum-- feelings are potentially involved, STIs are potentially involved, pregnancy is potentially involved, etc.-- and the consequences can be extremely good, extremely bad, or somewhere in between. If you're smart about it, you can avoid almost all the bad results and focus on the good ones, but that only works if you take it seriously. I know you know this (eek, this sounds like a sex lecture... sorry). But the discrepancies come in not when we talk about scales of "bad" but when we talk about scales of "shame." Shame is the Puritanism, the holier-than-thou, the idea that only sex within marriage is serious and all other sex is, by definition, shameful. And this, for me, is what it comes down to: you and I (and basically everyone else we know) aren't the ones who should be worried about the discrepancy between serious and shameful. It's the crazy wing nuts who think that morality has anything to do with sex who need to be worried about it. The ones who hide their sexuality or desires or identity are the ones who get on the cover of the NYT or end up dead with two wet suits next to them, because they never learned that sex isn't shameful and thus they hid themselves until it was too late. So, yeah, take sex seriously-- but serious and bad don't exist on the same scale.
I annoy even myself.
Oh, Allie, your comments make me so happy. I should have gone karaoke-ing with you. I think Katie would have loved it.
Do you think "sex isn't shameful, but is serious" is a hard message for a society to send, or to be written into a moral code? It seems to me like individuals 'get' this, but places tend to tip towards either 'sex is serious and shameful' or 'sex isn't shameful and isn't serious.' I can sort of buy that's a harder (although not impossible) message to send than either extreme.
On the other hand, learning to drive is serious and exciting but it isn't shameful. (This analogy=weak.)
I think we can get a better sexual moral code out there, we just have to try a little harder. If individuals "get" it, why can't it become a societal understanding? Why are societal (all societals in quotes) moralities so far behind common individual conceptions of morality? And why are we generally okay with that?
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