Life In Japan: Monkeys

Meet some of my neighbors!

Yes, we have monkeys in Japan, right where I live.

There are an estimated 950 in Hyogo Prefecture — a prefecture is the equivalent of a state and Japan has 47 total — and 180 of the critters in Sasayama, Hyogo, my hometown.

Not that we see them that often.  But I have seen them.

Once on a bike ride very close to my house, I spotted one in a farmer’s field, sitting in the midst of rows of beautiful, ripe vegetables, enjoying his own personal buffet. He was very mature, rather large, not a monkey I’d want to mess with.

Speaking of which, my step-daughter got into her car one morning, and a smaller but extremely upset macaque — that’s the variety we have here, pictured above — jumped on her hood, issued all sorts of threatening gestures, screeches, and probably even monkey expletives, about some matter none of us have any clue about.  It might have been related to the presence in the house of my step-daughter’s black labrador, as monkeys — at least our local monkeys — are fascinated with domesticated dogs. The incident ended without any damage to her car, the mirrors and windshield wipers still in place, with the monkey bounding off to its next soapbox to lodge complaints about whatever crises monkeys believe warrant their histrionic objections.

It’s not as if we’re not trying to coexist with our furry friends.  There’s room for all.

There’s a park in Kyoto — the Iwayatama monkey park.  If you’re ever in that city, I highly recommend it.  The park is a short walk across the Oi River from Arashiyama, a must-see district with many interesting temples, shrines, stores, a bamboo forest, the site for a number of wonderful festivals.  For about $100, you can get made up head-to-toe as a geisha, something I would love to do, even if it would understandably put my sexuality in serious question among my Western friends.  Here in Japan, they’re not so hung up on such matters.  There are many celebrities, some of whom regularly appear on television, who are either transvestites or transexuals.

Anyway, getting back to the monkey park.  It’s on top of a modest-size mountain.  The hike alone is worth it, up a splendid trail through the forest which covers the entire mountain until you reach the summit.  On top you’ll find over 200 monkeys, hanging out, looking for food handouts — you can buy appropriate nutritional items from the park station — doing what monkeys on public display typically do.  You are cautioned to NEVER look them squarely in the eyes, as they take that as confrontation, a sign that you are threatening and are ready for battle.

I’ve taken this advice and extended it to all my human interactions, especially with anyone in the West.  I never look them in the eye.  If they’re American, they probably are armed to the teeth and that would be the end of John Rachel.  No more monkey sightings or even my characteristic monkey business.

Banana anyone?

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Life In Japan: Japanese Maples

熊野新宮神社, Kumanoshingu Shrine, is not too far from our house.  It’s famous around here for its spectacular Japanese Maple trees, which in November turn fire red, yellow, orange, brown, and every shade in between.

We make a point of going there every year, as do many other people.

Temples and shrines are everywhere here.  They come in all shapes and sizes, from huge sprawling complexes which take up several hectares, to single buildings sitting on a tiny patch of dedicated land.  There are the obvious ones which are located on main streets but I personally love the ones that are tucked off in a copse of trees, that are at the end of a trail up a mountain, or just sitting somewhere in isolation.

Temples are Buddhist.  Shrines are Shinto.

No Images found.

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Life In Japan: Western Holidays

I admit, at first I had mixed feelings when I encountered Western holidays in Asia.  Wasn’t it cultural pollution?  Wasn’t any place safe from Ken and Barbie dolls, the Easter Bunny, Superman, Santa Claus, Ronald McDonald, Taylor Swift?  Was Western capitalism going to turn the entire surface of the planet into a Universal Studios City Walk?

Gradually, however, I’ve adjusted to the fact that in Asia, Japan in particular, the modus operandi tends to be a sponge more than a condom.  The cultural roots here are so deep, a little cross-pollination in fact reinforces the uniqueness of the region’s distinctive features.

Besides, Japanese are a bit selective, tending to embrace the funner holidays, with a clear preference for those which can be commercially exploited.

That brings into the fold Christmas, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, Valentines Day — which I’ve written about in another article as well as its enhancement with the addition of White Day — and Halloween.

Japanese already exchange gifts at a frenzied pace.  It’s considered rude and unacceptable to visit anyone without bringing a gift.  It’s not just social visits.  I had a lady almost drive into me when I was riding my bicycle.  She barely brushed against my pant leg with her car and I just laughed, smiled and waved, then rode off.  She actually took the trouble to track down “the American” and the next day showed up at my house with an interesting present — it was a bag of fresh eggplants and a note.

As you’d then expect, all of the Western holidays are celebrated with gifts, maybe holiday cards.  But that’s it.  They don’t shut down the stores and banks.  There are no Halloween or Easter parades.  To alert the buying public about these holidays, decorations come out, appropriate to the occasion.  There might be some posters in the windows of a store, and special products display.  At Christmas in our traditional rural town, there are a few large coniferous trees decorated with Christmas lights.  For Halloween candy is put out on sale, as much as six weeks in advance.  But the reality is, these holidays are entirely low key affairs, certainly not the extravagant spectacles we often experience in the West.

Let me qualify that slightly for a some locales other than Japan.  In Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) Vietnam, for the month of December, the whole town goes into a Christmas frenzy.  Tons of decorations, tinsel and gaudy trees, fake snow, fake snowmen — is that PC? maybe it should be snowpersons — and Santa’s helpers (usually cute girls) running around handing out advertising fliers.  And then there’s Bangkok, Thailand, which gives Ho Chi Minh City a run for its money — literally, as it’s entirely about sell sell sell — for Christmas hoopla.

Christmas In Bangkok
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Having said all of this, I will confess that I can’t suppress the allergic reaction I get when I walk into a Japanese supermarket, restaurant, mall during November and December and am subjected to the Christmas carols I typically heard back home in my homeland of birth, holiday songs which cumulatively I’ve heard at least 100 million times.  Maybe more!

The problem for me mostly is the schizophrenia of contemporary Christmas.  Or maybe a better way to characterize it here in Asia is the “disconnect”.

The schizophrenia infects the U.S. and Canada.  What was once a fairly sacred holiday celebration has over the years become an orgy of consumer excess, with brawls and fist fights breaking out over Christmas sale items at Wallmart and other stores. 

Not that the religious version holiday itself didn’t have some problems.  Stepping back from the official story a bit, it all seems rather unsavory and unlikely.  Virgin wife and her presumably sexually-frustrated but stoic husband are traveling.  Failing to have access to Trip Advisor or a good travel agent, they can’t get a room.  To complicate matters, she’s pregnant by God, creator of the entire Universe.  Why did the creator of the Universe choose this particular lady in the first place?  Virginity was “the thing” back then and God certainly had His pick.  Anyway, she goes into labor so they decide to hole up in a manger. Talk about unsanitary!  Cow and goat poop everywhere.  The potential for very serious infection is high.  But no worries.  She spits out the Son of God under these inauspicious circumstances.  Giving birth was that much of a breeze back then that a carpenter — her patient and enduring husband — was able to pull this off.  With carpenter’s tools?  What did they do with the afterbirth?  Being part-and-parcel of the birth of the Son of God, it seems it would have some sentimental value.  Then after the birth, three wise men show up, guided to the mangy manger by a heavenly object we presume wasn’t a helicopter.  They just happen to know the Son of God, halo in place and in full view would be there, thus they brought appropriate gifts to celebrate the special occasion.

The result is that among the enormous piles of “stuff” people shop for starting on Black Friday — how weird a name is that, for Christ’s sake? — are Nativity scenes.  I guess that makes maxing out credit cards more of a sacred, heavenly-endorsed exercise. 

Some folks erect huge, expensive, gaudy Nativity scenes on their front lawns. 

(Rumor has it that Jeff Bezos has live humans in his Nativity scene.  They’re, of course, given occasional bathroom breaks and the chance to run down to 7-11 to buy food.  Their families are allowed fifteen minutes on Christmas Eve to visit them as long as they don’t attempt to cross the electric fence surrounding the charming, real-life action portrayal of the birth of Jesus.  This is, of course, just a rumor, one I’m starting right here, because the beauty of the internet is that you can say what ever you want and people will usually not question it.)

Anyway, what was considered over the centuries by Christians as a defining moment in time, inaugurating for eternity a new era for all that is and will be — the birth of the Savior of Humankind — has in the U.S. mutated into the most defining moment each year for the consumer economy.  Around 1.9 billion Christmas cards are sent out annually and the average person does 25% of all their discretionary spending during the holiday, even though it’s questionable how much discretion they show.

Christmas is less schizo and for me here in Japan, as I mentioned, more of a ‘disconnect’.  Being a Buddhist and Shinto country, there is no attention paid to the virgin birth and the epic arrival of Jesus on Planet Earth.  It’s strictly a commercial enterprise, though not on the scale of the U.S. and many other Western countries.  It’s an excuse to buy stuff and give gifts with pretty wrapping. 

It’s also an excuse to eat fried chicken!  Yes . . . fried chicken.

In a stroke of marketing genius, several decades ago KFC embarked on a campaign to convince the Japanese that fried chicken was the preferred meal at Christmas in the U.S.  No one apparently bothered to ask any Americans or they would have found out that it’s either turkey or ham at Christmas and no one in their right mind would eat fried chicken.

The campaign worked and now people place orders with KFC, of course, sometimes as far ahead as a month in advance — can’t risk having no fried chicken on December 25th — for buckets of the Colonel’s unique blend of herbs and spices.  Honestly, it’s such a novel idea, this year I may try it myself.  Why not?  How does the expression go?

When in Tokyo do as the Tokyoans!

Something like that.

One recurring incident which never fails to amuse me is when people who should know better — friends who know I live in Japan, not in the U.S. — ask me something like . . .

“How was your Thanksgiving?”

Now I’m not an expert on Japanese history, but I feel safe in saying that in spite of the fact that navigation was touch-and-go back then, the Pilgrims never made a stop here.  And if they had, they wouldn’t have had fried chicken for their welcoming banquet with the local folks.  Maybe sea cucumbers?  Or sashimi?

For related reasons, the Japanese don’t celebrate Independence Day, Memorial Day, or Martin Luther King Day.

So don’t ask.

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Life In Japan: Persimmons

I confess.  I never saw, much less tasted, a persimmon until I came to Japan.  I must have heard the term before.  Maybe I read it in Walden Pond or some Emily Dickinson poem.  Persimmon trees definitely didn’t grow where I lived in Michigan during my formative years.  Actually nothing much grew at all in Detroit other than racial tensions and poverty.

You have to be here the right time to see persimmons.  Meaning, my first time in Japan, consisting of a month in July 2007, I certainly didn’t spot any.  The fruits come out in all of their orange majesty late October.  So it must have been 2008, when I was here for the entire year.

I find it very difficult to describe the flavor of a persimmon.  It’s completely unique.  Of course, as a fruit it tastes like a fruit, as opposed to pork ribs or licorice.  But even as a fruit, it’s different, delicious in its own special way, with a waxy skin and a crunchiness to the meat more like an apple than a banana.  Until they are very ripe, at that point turning to slime, they aren’t very sweet, which is probably why Japanese people like them so much.

What I truly love about persimmons is the way they decorate the landscape.  Every tree becomes sort of a Christmas tree but with only orange bulbs, and obviously no flashing lights, tinsel, or star on top.

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Hmm . . . usually I talk politics, philosophy, metaphysics.  And here I’m carrying on about a fruit.  Does that make me sound like a fruitcake?  

I like it here in Japan.  I pay attention to different things.  Most of the people around me are farmers.  They know things I didn’t even know I didn’t know.  All this is still quite new to me.  How many people at my age can say honestly that life is still full of surprises and wonder?

Three times a day, I hear the ringing of temple bells at a local Shinto shrine.  How do you set your watch?  I don’t even own one.  When I hear about some horrible incident going on in this chaotic, increasingly hostile world, I can honestly say:  That’ll never happen on my watch.  The worst thing that could happen to me at this point is, late in October, I might get hit on the head by a falling persimmon, as I ride my bicycle to town to buy groceries.

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Life In Japan: A Lost Wallet

Every year in October, we have here in Sasayama — my hometown — the Festival of the Portable Shrines.  It’s one of my favorites!

It coincides with the black bean harvest.  Soybeans are called black beans because if they are left on the vine, they turn black and harden, making them easy to store and use over the coming year.

The town is famous over much of Japan for the quality of its black beans.  This means that the weekend of the festival, Sasayama is flooded with tourists.

A gentleman arrived here from Kobe, which is about an hour away.  He came to purchase black beans, but when the moment came to pay, he discovered his wallet was missing. 

There are no pickpockets here, so obviously he had dropped it somewhere in town.

He went to the nearest Koban.  There are many here in Sasayama, as there are all over Japan.  A Koban is a mini-police station.  In the U.S. there is much lip service given to community policing, having friendly cops in the neighborhood to address problems which come up in the local area.  In Japan, it’s a reality and an integral part of a functioning community.

The policeman on duty — considering Kobans are, despite being extremely useful and efficient, very limited affairs, often just a two-room building with one parking space for a patrol car, there was probably only one or at the most two officers there — took a report, then got on the phone.  He called all the other Kobans in the immediate area, anywhere close to where the gentleman had parked his car, then walked into the main part of town.

He passed along the man’s name and a description of the wallet.

Now get this . . .

While he was on the phone with another Koban, someone walked in with the wallet and handed it to the policeman on duty there.

The gentleman from Kobe walked the short distance to the other Koban, and retrieved his wallet.  The contents — credit cards, ID, cash — were intact.  Not a single item had been stolen.

I’m not going to moralize.  Draw your own conclusions.  Imagine dropping your wallet wherever you live and decide how the story would have ended.

I’ll say it again . . . I love Japan!

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Life In Japan: A Morning at the Clinic

The clinics here vary in size. Some are like a doctor’s office. Some are facilities attached to hospitals. When you need medical attention, unless it’s an emergency, you go to a clinic.

I rarely have problems with my health. But I’ve been a permanent resident here now for over eight years, and I have used medical services in Japan a few times. One time a very bad fall from my bike required some very extensive care. I broke my collar bone — I don’t recommend it as it’s very painful — which involved several sessions with an orthopedic doctor and physical therapist. Other occasions were more typical: one time I had an extremely sore throat, another time a kidney infection. Common types of things.

People back in the U.S. are always asking me what it’s like to have universal “socialized” medical care. They’ve been fed all the propaganda by the inefficient but certainly very profitable health care industry there: expect long waits, impersonal care, low standards, lousy doctors, etc. These stories, of course, are generated by the insurance companies, the for-profit clinics and hospitals, the mega-wealthy specialists, rock-star surgeons, all the vested interests who are beneficiaries of the windfall of hard cash that the current system in the U.S. generates for them, and who selfishly but predictably want to keep things the way they are.

I have one story that accurately represents how it works here, straight from my perspective as a patient. Let me say up front, I’m completely blown away by health care in Japan, but I’ll let you judge for yourself the merits of centrally organized and controlled health care.

My wife, Masumi, and I were planning on spending three weeks in the U.S. starting the last week in July. We’d be visiting some of my friends back there, staying at a couple B&Bs, camping at the national parks, even couchsurfing with a retired music teacher in Seattle.

About two months before we were to leave, I started noticing tightness in my chest, and a feeling like my lungs were being compressed. Not a good sign. Red flags immediately went up! What if I have a serious problem while we’re on vacation? I have no health insurance in the United States. And I had serious doubts about the availability of emergency services, based on the stories I regularly hear about the inadequacies and outright failures of health care back in America. Scary!

As the symptoms persisted for a few days, I became certain my discomfort had something to do with my heart. Back in 2010 when I had my back surgery in Seoul, South Korea, they discovered one of my ventricular valves was only functioning at 68% efficiency. Maybe it had fallen apart and was now flapping like bedsheets in a summer breeze!

I decided to take action. The best place for this was a ten-minute bike ride from my house.

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Are you ready for my harrowing tale? Because here’s exactly what happens when you have to depend on “socialized” universal health care.

I showed up at 8:45 am with no appointment, bearing a note in Japanese describing my symptoms and suspicions. Twenty minutes later I was interviewed and examined by a heart specialist. He scheduled testing.

Another fifteen to twenty minutes later, I was taken to a special room and wired up for an electrocardiogram. My heart was monitored both as I rested, and as I did “stress testing”. That meant going up and down a small set of steps, which made my heart work harder. The entire procedure took maybe twenty minutes.

I went back to the waiting area for maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Then I was taken into another special room where using ultrasound echocardiography, they observed my heart function in real time, its rhythm, contraction, the operation and efficiency of the valves. This was put on video. After being edited by Stephen Spielberg, scored by Hanz Zimmer, it is now available on Netflix. Okay okay . . . I made up that last part. But the ultrasound of my beating heart was recorded and entered into the system as part of my medical record.

Back to the waiting area. Within no more than thirty minutes, I was escorted back to the office of the heart specialist. He had a printout of my electrocardiogram spread out on the desk before him and was watching my ultrasound as it played on his computer monitor.

Would I need an artificial heart? A transplant? Or maybe it was simply too late!

Actually, my heart was in great shape. The doctor explained there was absolutely nothing that I should be worried about. This, in fact, turned out to be accurate. Whatever the weird symptoms were that I had been experiencing went away after a few days — maybe I’d been eating too many marshmallows or my t-shirts had shrunk — and since then I’ve never had any problems with my heart. Knock on wood, as they say.

Now . . . the part that can often truly give a person a heart attack.

[ Cue dark tremulous scary cello and trombone music. ]

THE BILL FOR MEDICAL SERVICES RENDERED!

Summarizing . . .

At least twenty minutes consultation with a heart specialist. A complete electrocardiogram including a stress test with a nurse. A recorded ultrasonic echocardiography session with a nurse and a technician. I’d been in their clinic for over two hours.

OMG! Will I have to get a job? Get a second mortgage on the cat?

I heard my name called and walked with great trepidation to the payment window and was handed my invoice . . . 3600 yen . . . 3600! THREE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED YEN!

Why that’s . . . that’s . . . $33.

Unbelievable, eh?

$33 for the entire thing.

No appointment. No waiting. Qualified heart specialist. Comprehensive testing.

$33. No tipping.

Any folks out there who want to offer an estimate of what this would cost in the U.S.?

One last side note on the horrors of socialized medicine. When I tell Japanese people that an ambulance trip in the U.S. can cost $2,000-5,000 . . . they look at me in total shock. Ambulances here are completely free.

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Life In Japan: Onsen

Granted, it took me sixty years to figure it out. But yes, it was worth the wait. I say . . .

The onsen is the greatest invention in human history!

Salad Shooter™

Okay . . . okay . . . maybe that’s a bit extreme. After all, there’s the wheel, the combustion engine, the computer. The salad shooter!

Having said that, the onsen still has to be somewhere up there in the Top 20.

An onsen — 温泉 — is a hot spring for bathing. And I have to say, I had no idea what I was missing until my first visit to Japan in July 2007. That was in Nagano Prefecture, where I was a WWOOFing volunteer at an organic farm/restaurant called Canadian Farm.

A little history: My first introduction to the onsen was a chapter in a hilariously funny book by one of my favorite humor writers, a volume called Dave Barry Does Japan. I can still feel his discomfort, his utter humiliation, sitting in a pool of steaming hot water with a bunch of strangers, naked except for folded towels draped over their heads. In fact, I can still recall my discomfort and humiliation my own first time in Nagano! Of course, that was purely the result of my own narrow conditioning, my being uptight, self-conscious, squeamish, and completely ridiculous, the product of growing up a pathetic urban hick in the hypocritically Puritan anti-culture of the American Midwest.

But enough about me and growing up in the shaming buzzkill of Detroit, Michigan.

In 2007, I quickly discovered that onsens are as much a defining characteristic of Japan as sushi, geishas, tofu, Mt. Fuji, and sumo wrestling.

There are hundreds — maybe thousands — of onsens scattered across the volcanic landscape here. Americans go skiing. Or to the beach. Or Disneyland. Japanese go to onsens, often for an extended holiday. There are whole towns full of resort hotels catering to this ritual.

Onsens come in all shapes and sizes. Some indoors, some outdoors. Some are spartan. Others indulge in lavish aesthetics and connecting with nature.

Our favorite local onsen — there are three relatively close to town — is on the way to Kyoto, maybe a twenty-five minute drive. It’s called Rurikei. While the attached resort is relatively fancy, the baths themselves are purely functional. Mostly indoor but a few outdoor pools.

Rurikei has no stunning mountain or rocky river rapids vistas. But it’s very functional, with a decent-size swimming pool, steam baths, saunas, refreshments, even massages.

One of the main reasons we really love this place is that, unlike 99% of other such facilities, it’s co-ed! Yes, it’s a family affair with males, females, moms, dads, kids, all ages, all sizes. Of course, everyone wears a bathing suit. On the other hand, if a person prefers a more traditional setting, each dressing area has bathing pools, men only and women only, where everyone lets everything hang out as they hang out in the hot water together. There are even huge flat-panel televisions, so there’s no excuse for missing a favorite sporting event or cooking show.

I marvel every time I go. I leave feeling renewed, relaxed, refreshed. And clean! I’ve never ever felt so clean, as when I walk out after an hour or so at a Japanese hot spring.

By the way, it’s not just us humans who are totally enamored with relaxing in the steamy hot, therapeutic water of an onsen.

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Life In Japan: Festivals

Masumi at the Daikokuji Tea Festival

While Japan is called The Land of the Rising Sun, my personal preference actually would be The Land of the Festivals.  The entire calendar is littered with fascinating, extremely entertaining, family-oriented festivals.

I can think of no equivalent in the U.S. to what goes on here.  Yes, we have rock festivals and various other extravaganzas.  But they are very specific to a type of event and usually local.  Here in Japan, the festivals are both a local and a national phenomenon.  

Festival of the Portable Shrines

Some local festivals are unique to a town or region.  Here in Sasayama, we have the Wild Boar Festival that fits into that category.  Not really too many wild boars running loose in Osaka or Tokyo that I know of.  We also have our Black Bean Festival, because Sasayama is renowned across Japan for the quality of its soybeans (black beans are soybeans which have ripened and dried on the vine and are black in color).

Cherry Blossom Festival

The big festivals are national.  Yes each locale or region has a celebration.  But the festival being celebrated usually is being celebrated across all of Japan at the same time.  Examples of this are the Cherry Blossom Festival early April and the Festival of the Portable Shrines in late October.

Obon is yet another national celebration, actually an annual Buddhist event first half of August, commemorating one’s ancestors.  It is one of the three busiest times of the year in Japan for travel and taking a holiday break.  Everywhere in Japan, there are Obon festivals being held.

This year, my wife Masumi and I headed north to Tohoku for two weeks of camping and attending some of the most famous of these Obon events in the country.

Everywhere we went, there were fireworks, parades, singing and dancing.  Here are a few of the highlights.

Aomori

This is reputed to be one of the most spectacular festivals in Japan.  The giant internally-lit paper floats are astonishing.  The crowd is rowdy — well, as rowdy as it gets here in Japan — the drumming tribal.  Quite a show!

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Yamagata

This was my favorite festival.  The participants sang and danced.  I loved the song they were singing.  The costumes, the choreography, the town itself … superb!

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Sendai

Sendai — famous for its proximity to Fukushima — was more of a gallery affair than a rollicking good-time festival.  Hanging in the promenades which are ubiquitous in urban settings here in Japan were beautiful hanging paper sculptures, literally thousands of them.

We returned from our excursion just in time for the Dekansho Festival, this one unique to our town and one of my favorite local annual events.  The music is traditional and live, and everyday folks perform the Dekansho folk dance.  The event celebrates the harvesting of the rice and is hundreds of years old, representing the long agricultural roots of this community.






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Life In Japan: Passion For Reading

Does anyone in the U.S. read anymore?  I mean read something longer than a tweet, or a comment on Facebook.  Do people have time to read a book?

Recent statistics tell us that literary reading in the U.S. is in steady decline, despite the fact that the number of people with bachelor degrees or higher has almost doubled since 1982.

To the chagrin of those who think the revolutionary introduction of digital books — ebooks — may make these numbers skewed, these stats include ebooks.

What are people reading?  The ingredients labels on their protein bars?

I can also report that, much to the detriment of the forests in the world, printing on paper is very alive and well here in Japan.  Japanese love their books, magazines, travel guides, self-help owners manuals, printed and hand-held.  People regularly pack bookstores the way Americans flock to Walmart for Black Friday — on a regular basis!

I’m not sure what any of this definitively says about Japanese culture vs. Western culture.

I do know, as a person who used to never go anywhere without a book, and used every spare moment waiting in line, between this something-or-other and that something-or-other, on a coffee or lunch break, traveling, during awkward silences in a conversation, to read, I feel right at home here.

Everyone’s different.  If you feel good about carrying a soccer ball everywhere . . . just do it!






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Creativity: Two Existentialists Walk Into A Bar . . .

Professor Phyllis Dornberger – my PhD thesis adviser – and I certainly had our share of disagreements.  About everything.

I could have been intimidated.  I mean, here was a lady who read the dictionary on her lunch hour like it was People Magazine.

But I was confident and stood my ground, with naïve posturing that was equal parts youthful impudence and iconoclastic exuberance.

Dornberger was a logical positivist.  I’m an existential relativist.

It should have been no contest.

Indeed, it wasn’t.

Yes, in the end, she got the best of me.  The price for my impatience, my lack of self-control, my smug display of tactlessness, my colossal tactical faux pas in the requisite art of jockeying for advantage – which is really all philosophical discourse is about anyway – was asymmetrical in the extreme, with no room for negotiation, no room for remediation, no recourse or appeal.  Philosophers don’t mess around.  Especially logical positivists.

My comment was innocent enough.

But what floats frivolously in casual repartee bubbles like the caustic acid of vitriol and mockery on a page – especially an intra-departmental memo.

What can I say in my defense?

Too much bubbly spirits is sometimes a good excuse.  But in this case, a roll of duct tape with the Kölsch pale ale would have helped to mitigate my infantile error in judgment.  Hindsight is so powerful but ultimately useless.

I now know . . .

I never should have called Professor Dornberger an insatiable proof sucker searching for the perfect syllogism, if only she could figure out how to deep throat a syllo.

Yes, this was the shameful closing scene of my career as a philosopher . . .






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