Rootlessness and Americanism

While wandering through old Kyoto, Rachel and I were struck with how alive and universal the sense of ritual seemed to be. It feels as though there is a certain way to be Japanese -- to go to neighborhood shrines, to live with your parents after college, to prepare bentos for your children's lunches, to eat certain foods in certain ratios, etc. While this seems very confining (when I talked to Japanese girls who'd studied in the US, they worried they were too "individual" to continue to work and live in Japan, at the same time it felt like there was a common sense of belonging, a united identity.

For a brief moment in the old city, I craved a common history, an external identity accompanied by ritual. I guess some people find this in religion and others find it in culture and nationalism. On a personal level, I've always sort of valued having a level of distance from the divides and limits these identities create, but in Kyoto, I thought about the limits of not having one.

I think it would be so interesting to live in a place where one felt that all the people they saw went home and ate rice just like you, or also woke up at 5 am for the first of five prayers and believed in the same god. The first time I had sex, I spent weeks amazed that this was something everyone did, a common private activity binding me to the SWILies making out in their long capes and the 40 year old biology teaching with the wedding ring. (Whenever I try to explain the way I felt about this relevation, friends stop me at that point.)

When it comes to countries, I'm less divided. I'd much rather live in a country with a plethora of contradicting traditions and identities than a larger, potentially exclusive one. (Even in this, I'm clinging to my own particular idea of American diversity, a part of my own identity.)

I find it much easier to describe what a Japanese person does or what an Emirati person does than what an American does. Clothing styles, food preferences and houseware are easier to generalize. Part of this may be that its harder to stereotype groups one belongs to, but I really do think American identity is more diffuse.

When I was in Tanzania, the questions people asked me about America included "Do girls really starve themselves?" "Where do the cowboys live?" "Does everyone have plastic surgery" "Does everyone own a gun?" When we tried to give correct, narrowly tailored answers to these questions, people then asked us what America was like. If not cowboys with rhinoplasty, then what?

I don't know. The truism that one never feels more American than when they are abroad certainly applied to me, but I still don't know what that means.

(to be finished tomorrow)

As I write, I recognize that everything I characterize as American-- our brand of democracy, our cultural pluralism-- is up for debate. And I like that, too.