Being Black and Japanese in a Japanese School

Safarii. Vocalist Sophia is half Japanese, half Ethiopian. Image from their website via this this blog.

Allow me to clarify, since the title is misleading. I am writing my observations from one school district in Japan. I am neither Black nor Japanese. I have done no comprehensive survey or research. I’m not claiming that these vignettes represent a universal experience or even a representative one.

A group of thirteen year old girls are standing in a circle, chatting between classes. Another girl walks over and tries to join them, hovering awkwardly over their shoulders when no one moves aside to include her in the circle. “Hey” she says, lightly touching the arm of the girl in front of her. “Ewww, gross!” The girl who has been touched recoils as though burned. The other girls cover their mouths and giggle in a mixture of shock and hilarity. They disperse back to their desks but continue talking to one another, still excluding the Other girl.

Words like disgusting, smelly and dirty are standard bullying weapons between girls here in Japan. This incident felt slightly different though. The excluded girl has a Japanese mother and a Kenyan father. The name on her uniform is written in the Roman alphabet rather than any of the Japanese scripts. She speaks Japanese and Swahili at home. Her figure, facial features, hairstyle, family name and Christianity are the target of considerable negative interest. Let’s call her B. I also taught her older brother, A, who graduated last year, and I have taught their younger sister C since she was in kindergarten. A is handsome, gregarious, outgoing and good at sports. He had a large group of friends and I never observed any nastiness directed at him. When racially loaded comments were made he usually turned them into a joke. He spent an inordinate amount of time in 2009 saying “Yes We Can!” This is not to say that his way is the “right” way to deal with that kind of situation, just to observe the difference that personality (and I think probably gender) can make. B is quiet and shy. She likes art and music. She does not fit Japan’s narrow ideal of female beauty. When she is bullied she becomes visibly distressed, and her loneliness is palpable. I think, given the wolf-pack mentality of the kids at her school, that she would have been bullied irrespective of her race. Those kids see weakness and attack. Even so, the history of seeing black skin as unclean gives her bullies a ready-stocked arsenal. Women in particular go to extreme lengths to protect their skin from the sun so that they don't "become black".

The message is implicit in children’s stories and TV variety shows. This article talks about a Black Japanese child crying in the bath as he tries to scrub his skin “clean” after being bullied at kindergarten. One day when C was in kindergarten the kids were doing a pre-literacy exercise and she made a mistake that many of the other kids also made. The teacher singled her out though, repeatedly asking her “Did your father tell you that? Is that something you learned at home? He’s Black; don’t listen to his Japanese because it’ll definitely be wrong.” From time to time Junior High English textbook feature Black characters (who, as the kids notice, never gets to say anything important). Whenever they see such a character B’s classmates will yell “Look, B is in the text book!” and laugh hysterically. There isn’t much I can do for B, but her situation has made me very aware of the lack of visual representations of Black women (some more detailed discussion can be found here). Advertisements feature Japanese or Korean models, occasionally Chinese, often white and almost never middle-eastern, South Indian, south-Asian or Black models. Sometimes sports magazines or music posters feature Black men, but I don’t recall ever seeing a Black woman prominently depicted anywhere. This is a subjective observation, but judging by the students’ reactions I guess their experiences are similar. So although it isn’t much, every flashcard I make from now until my contract ends is going to feature non-white, non-East Asian faces. They’ll have to get bored of laughing eventually.

*I wonder if the capitalisation is appropriate for non-American people with African heritage? If anyone can advise, please do.

Japanese Kindergartens

Excuse the poor quality photos, I only had my phone camera handy

A couple of times a year I get to teach at kindergartens. It’s chaotic, scary and absolutely amazing in every way. Kindergarten is an invaluable gateway between the comfortable, pampered world of home, which is the only life most children have ever experienced, and the structured, self-reliant atmosphere of elementary school. Children learn to be separated from their mothers, to work in groups and to deal with conflicts with other children. The emphasis is on physical development and social behaviour, with very little attention to academics in the public kindergartens I have experienced.

Stilts, hula-hoops, balance walk and mattress to jump onto. What more could a five year old want?

One principal told me that she tries to teach the hiragana syllabry to the children before they go to school, but every other principal I have talked to seemed to think that this was inappropriate. Large picture books are always available and pre-literacy skills are taught, but any specific of reading and writing seem uncommon, as is numeral recognition. Instead the day consists of free play, structured play, crafts, singing and dancing, story time, music lessons and lunch. When it comes time for lunch, the kids are expected to set up tables and chairs. The tables are often the kind with legs that fold down flat. They are too heavy for five year olds to set up alone and the metal clips for the legs are too rigid for their little hands to release. They have to work together as a group in order to erect the table (preferably without catching their fingers in the workings). This is done largely unsupervised because the adults prepare tea or additional snacks during the set up time. The kids have to organise themselves and cooperate, and they do.

The teachers have buried objects in the sand box for the little archaeologists to excavate

Bare-foot play is not a problem

Whenever possible the kids are encouraged to play outside. This inner city kindergarten has various activity stations the children move between at will.

Restaurant corner. The knives have rounded tips but are serrated and cut nicely. 

A kindergarten on the fringes of a remote suburb interrupted free play to put the kids through a sort of obstacle course challenge designed to improve strength and coordination and including monkey bars and pogo-sticks. That kindergarten also had free-range chickens. Every morning the kids would run around looking for eggs and if they found any they got a mid-morning snack. A rural kindergarten I visited once included a stroll in the forest to collect pine cones and acorns to use in craft activities. Many kindergartens have rabbits or hamsters so that children can experience taking care of animals and learn to be gentle. I like pretty much everything about the kindergartens I have worked at (the exception being the expectation that the kids wear t-shirts and shorts all year round).

This is harder to balance on than it looks...

I saw a segment on "super preschools"* on TV the other day. Each of the featured pre-schools had a special focus, whether English lessons, kanji or athletics. Skip to around 3:00 in this video to see the very small children tackling an impressive hill.

My personal favourite was the "playing in the dirt" pre-school http://www.doronko.biz/index.html (have a look, there are some gorgeous photos).

The children are encouraged to test their physical limits playing freely outside: climbing tall trees, splashing in mud, and caring for goats and chickens. Between energetic play the children are taught　座禅、seated zen meditation. The idea is that they learn to self-regulate their emotional arousal, a vital skill for elementary school. Being excited during exciting activities is important, but so is the ability to quickly change focus to an activity that requires calm concentration. The panellists on the TV show talked at length about the tree climbing. Many parents are afraid of their child getting hurt these days, they said, so children aren't being allowed to fully explore their physical capacities. An Olympic medallist observed that children can't come to properly control their bodies if parents and teachers are always controlling it for them, imposing restrictions from the outside (I think that's what he was saying, my Japanese isn't great). They then showed statistics about a massive increase over the past thirty years in elementary school kids injuring themselves and others. I think they were saying that childhood has been getting less physical, and as a result children don't understand natural consequences or their own limits. I find this fascinating. 

I love the way children in my area are free to engage in unsupervised "dangerous play". They learn to assess risks, understand their own boundaries through experience, and if they do hurt themselves adults expect them to take responsibility for whatever stupid thing they did that they should have known better than to try. Yet, while I like it in theory, I know with absolute certainty that I couldn't control my own fear enough to sit back and watch my five year old climb an 8 foot tree. After decades of removing anything that could cause a boo-boo from playgrounds in Australia and the US, it seems that the pendulum is swinging back and the advantages of letting children take risks are being promoted again:

After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools, being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision. The most common is climbing heights.
“Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.”
Sometimes, of course, their mastery fails, and falls are the common form of playground injury. But these rarely cause permanent damage, either physically or emotionally. While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/science/19tierney.html

In Japan this is just common sense; but in Japan, too, there seems to be a tenancy for contemporary parents to be more risk-averse in their parenting style than previous generations were.

When we asked Director Kumagai if she thought that families and children have changed in the past twenty years, she responded: 'Yes. Everyone is running scared. Parents overprotect children and themselves. They fear the world. They fear forming relationships with others, fear that a relationship they might get into will become strained, so they don't form relationships, and as a result are isolated. They fear germs, so they keep their children away from others. They fear dirt, so they keep their kids away from dirt, sand, and nature. They are afraid of encountering problems in life. But if there were no problems, that would be the real problem. Life is full of problems. Our job as early educators isn't to protect children from problems, but instead to put them in situations where they can experience problems and struggle to find solutions.'
Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited, Joseph Tobin, Yeh Hsueh, and Mayumi Karasawa, 2011.

*There is a distinction between day-care/preschools and kindergartens, but the lines is very hazy, with many pre-schools offering a kindergarten year for the older kids and some kindergartens offering day-care services for younger kids. Consequently I'm not bothering to make a distinction, although I am aware it will annoy some people.

Love from Myriad Places

I had a pretty rough week last week. I'm sure I'll write an emo post about how terrible the world is shortly. But then, I was surprised by a lovely comment from an internet hero of mine, Brittney.  Brittney blogs at http://pagesonadoption.wordpress.com about life with four children adopted "older" and from foster care. She doesn't shy away from writing about the hard times, and I love her for her honesty and her great humour and generosity of spirit. So obviously I was delighted to see that she has "passed on" a Liebster Award to me. The Liebster is kind of like a chain letter, designed for small blogs to connect to one another. It's a really sweet idea, and I am insanely happy that Brittney thought of me.

Now, the thing about the award is that you pass it on... and I read a really eclectic mix of blogs on widely divergent topics. My list is going to be a little random, but I hope you all enjoy linking up as much as I have. With no further ado and in no particular order, here are the bloggers I'm passing the "Liebster baton" to. Let's send the love to myriad corners of the world, and embrace it as it returns.

https://maplewalnutmama.wordpress.com
http://nihonomnom.wordpress.com 
http://voodoobii.wordpress.com
http://eigoinnihon.blogspot.jp
http://dustinandlaura.blogspot.ca
http://puneetas.blogspot.jp
http://gaijinexplorer.blogspot.jp 
http://gaijinesse.blogspot.jp
http://squggly-inkblots.blogspot.jp/
http://alwayslookingforsomethinggood.tumblr.com/
http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com/

Here are the Liebster Rules:
1. List 11 facts about yourself.
2. Answer the 11 questions given to you.
3. Create 11 new questions for the bloggers you nominate for the award.
4. Choose 11 bloggers with 200 or less followers to nominate <-- I have no idea how many followers you all have, so I just went with blogs with lower numbers of comments. I hope no one if offended ;)
 5. Go to each bloggers page and let them know about the award.
6. Thank the person who nominated you and link back to their blog.

11 Questions from Brittany

1. How many drafts do you have waiting to be edited, finished, or posted? 13 on my computer, a few more in notebooks >.<
2. Would you rather ride the subway with Mahatma Gandhi or pull weeds with Kristin Wiig? Gandhi all the way. I'm fascinated by contradictory people. He did so much for equality and justice, yet espoused such harmful beliefs about women and sexuality. It would be an interesting conversation. Also, I don't like weeding.
3. What is your ideal birthday? Camping, preferably near a beach or good swimming river.
4. What do you do wish you would stop talking about and start doing? That's a long list... probably eating more nutritiously is the most urgent thing.
5. What children’s book describes the meaning of life best in your eyes? The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan
6. What’s your stance on gun control? Haha. Just kidding. Is your house decorated the way you want it? No, it really really isn't. When we first moved here we couldn't really afford curtains. I just bought the least offensive ones I could find in the discount bin, so none of them match. We have three different designs in one room! But now that we have curtains, it seems frivolous to buy more curtains just so that they match...
7. Clear the air about misconceptions you think people have about you. People think that I am a bossy perfectionist who spends a lot of time being angry about how stupid much of humanity is. In fact, I am a bossy perfectionist who spends a lot of time being angry about how stupid much of humanity is AND I really like long walks.
8. Will you link this to a video of you singing happy birthday to my daughter? Her birthday is in one month. Bonus points for doing a birthday jig. I don't think the world deserves to have my singing inflicted on it... but give me a bit of time and I will try to film a jig for her ;)
9. If a hawk landed on your house, would you look up the symbolism of hawks? No, I would double-check the whereabouts of my smaller dog. She looks a lot like a piglet. I'm pretty sure hawks think she looks delicious.
10. Who is your favorite fictional character? Why? Can I have fifty? No? Two? OK then, but I am limiting it to books because otherwise I couldn't choose ;) Hermione Granger, because. Ender from Ender's Game, because [SPOILERS] he is the only human who can destroy the aliens we are at war with, but also the only human who sees the aliens as beings with value.
11. Do you think blogging is important? Yes, I do.

11 New Questions for the Newbies

1. What is the most important thing you read online this week? Links please!
2. Which country that you have never visited do you most want to go to?
3. What is the worst movie you have ever seen?
4. What song do you listen to when you are most in need of a pick-me-up? 
5. What children’s book describes the meaning of life best in your eyes? Ahh, you noticed that wasn't a new question, huh? Glad that you are paying attention. I still want to ask it anyway, because I think it is a fantastic question!
6. Can you name a movie adaptation that was better than the book?
7. What obscure piece of trivia are you most impressed with yourself for knowing?
8. What if your favourite vegetarian recipe? Again, links or post in full please ;)
9. What was your very first pet's name?
10. What is your "guilty pleasure" TV show?
11. Tell me about a book that changed how you see the world.

 11 Facts about Me:
I left this for last because I'm not really terribly interesting, but hey.

1. When I was a child I lived in an ex-ambulance with my dad and my little sister for around a year. We drove all around Australia so dad could interview home educating families for his PhD. I never let my sister ride in the front seat. Ever.   
2. Despite this horrible treatment, my little sister got me the autograph of Eric from Subway to Sally.
3. I wrote a thesis on Gundam, and was awarded first class honours for it.
4. If it were up to me, I would have a minimum of six children.
5. When I was younger and thought the I would be giving birth to my children, I planned to have a daughter named Ælfwynn. I know, I know, she is from a royal line famous for repelling the Vikings and my heritage is more Norse than Saxon. Whatever. It's a pretty name.
6. I am 99% sure that our children are actually going to turn out to come to us named Tiger and Cocoa (those are the readings, not the meanings: They are actually spelled 大翔 and　心愛 respectively).
7. I first met my husband when I was 12, and we got married when I was 24, so I had known him for exactly half my life. 
8. I hand made a Battlestar Galactica uniform for my husband to wear for our wedding.
9. My favourite poems (click the titles to read) are Dylan Thomas' And Death Shall Have No Dominion and Kate Clanchy's Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell.
10.  The first novel I ever read, aged around five, was The Queen of the Pharisees' Children by Barbara Willard. It's about the forced removal and separation of a group of siblings from their 'gypsy' (Ramani) parents after they are arrested for vagrancy. It affected me profoundly.  
11. I often put my foot in my mouth. Literally.

Love Hotels: From Bridal to Jurassic

You can't tell, but the wheel of the Jeep is spinning...

Our first experience with a love hotel came about as a result of a poorly planned trip during peak season. After an excruciatingly long time on public transport and very little sleep in the proceeding few days we found ourselves wandering through the outer fringes of Nagoya desperately looking for a neon sign advertising “Crayon Coloured Dreams” or “Coconut Palms” or some other similarly love-hotel-esque name (this was before I got a smart phone). We eventually found a dank looking place beside the train line that was probably supposed to look like a fantasy style castle or European chalet. Expecting something vaguely medieval themed we ventured inside. The reception was fully automated, with a selection panel with pictures of rooms to choose from. Instead of medieval the theme seemed to be bridal. Mannequins wearing white wedding dresses filled the lobby and hallways, entombed in glass cases. Their hands were primly folded in lace gloves but, perhaps in order to prevent any idea of “accusing eyes” for those visiting the hotel with someone other than their spouse, all the mannequins were headless. In the dimly lit and hushed space without really knowing what we were supposed to do or how anything worked, the atmosphere was intensely creepy. We pressed one of the pictures on the panel and a series of green lights lit up down a corridor. We followed, pretending to be characters from Ender’s Game, and came to our designated room. The room itself had no mannequins, thankfully. 

Image from this blog, attributed without links or details to AFP/Getty Images/Daylife/Diez Minutos/Daily Mail/Reuters

The trouble was, we had just selected a room, not said how much time we wanted. We weren’t sure what to do. After a shower we thought we might go down to the lobby and try the interphone, but when we tried to leave our room the door was locked from the outside. Then we freaked out. Was it locked because our time was up and we were supposed to be out? Would someone else come it, push the same button and unlock the door, walking in on us in the night? We spent a less than restful night jumping out of our skins at every loud noise. Being so close to the train tracks there were plenty of loud noises, of course, so we didn’t get much sleep. We found out later that the doors always lock until you indicate your intention to leave. I assume they have a failsafe for emergencies, but it was scary (especially with the headless brides outside). We couldn’t figure out how to pay using the automated system the next morning, and eventually got a rather flustered and grumpy man to accept cash through a small barred window in the lobby. After all the stories we had heard about Japan’s wacky, amazing love hotels with their waterslides and Hello Kitty décor it was a big let-down. We had no plans to repeat the rather traumatising experience. 

It’s my mother’s fault we ended up going to the bondage hotel. Really. Almost a year after the horrible Nagoya experience, we visited Kyoto with my parents during Obon. We rented a very nice and affordable little apartment/room, with space for the four of us to sleep Japanese style on the tatami. Having not shared a room with my parents for quite some time, I had not realised how big a problem this was going to be. My mother, through no fault of her own, has the most incredible snore. It isn’t just that it is loud; it is also irregular. Sometimes she won’t make a sound for four or five minutes, then suddenly a snore so deep it rattles the windows explodes out. It’s extraordinary. After a couple of hours I whispered to my husband “want to get out of here?” and we snuck outside. The thing that makes a Japanese summer so unbearable is the humidity, and unfortunately that doesn’t diminish at night. We thought we might try an internet café or a love hotel, but we were in what seemed to be a business district with nothing of the sort to be found. We thought we would try a park bench, but they were all occupied (we hadn’t seen many homeless people by day, but you seea very different scene at night). We spent as long as we could in the blessed air-conditioning of convenience stores, and eventually went back to the room around 5 am. My parents told us to get some sleep and went out for breakfast on their own, so we got an hour or two in, but the sleeping arraignments clearly weren’t going to work. We asked at a couple of hotels but everywhere was full up. It was the day of the okuribi festival, and town was packed. There was nothing. It had to be a love hotel. After the festival finished I called a friend who went to university in Kyoto and asked her what neighbourhood to head to. We made some mistakes with buses and directions and didn’t end up finding a hotel until close to 1 am. 

 

Sleep-deprived husband failing to appreciate Kyoto

What a difference from the anonymous, seedy, creepy place in Nagoya! This love hotel was tucked behind a temple. An old lady in a pink headscarf was mopping the lobby floor, chatting and laughing with a couple in their fifties who were choosing a room from the display. The three of them turned to us with a cheery “Ha-ro!” when we entered. Feeling almost as freaked out by the neighbourhood association atmosphere as we had been by the headless brides, we hastened to select a room. The prices were steep. We didn’t even look at the pictures; we just chose the only one we had enough money for. We understood why it was so expensive when we got to the room (suite). It was huge, with gorgeous décor reminiscent of Sakuran. We were feeling pretty good under we headed into the bedroom section and noticed the flogging frame… and the wrist and ankle cuffs on the bed. Thanks Mum! 

Since then we’ve become a bit more confident about using love hotels as a convenient and cheap holiday accommodation option. It’s still a little nerve wracking paying, because every single one we have been to has had a different system. My personal favourite was this pneumatic tube.

Anyway, having become reasonably proficient in the ways of the RabuHo, we felt we were ready for Jurassic Park.

No copyright infringement, see? It's Jzauuruss, and that's a crocodile not a t-rex. Totally unrelated to any movie.

It was supposed to be a birthday treat, and the website promised a bottle of wine and ice-cream as complementary birthday gifts. In preparation we watched Jurassic Park the night before (I’d never seen it). Feeling inspired by the film, I even pulled together a Laura Dern inspired outfit for our trip. The first question was, cage room or mummy room? 

Image from http://www.skyclub.co.jp/jzauruss/index.html

Closely followed by, why is there a mummy room?!

Image from http://www.skyclub.co.jp/jzauruss/index.html

We settled on cage room (since the velociraptors were obviously the best thing about the movie) and headed out to Beppu. The exterior was promising. Maybe even amazing.

When we neared the doors lights began flashing. The door opened with that sci-fi hIIISSSssss. 

The lobby was dark except for a red hazard light. We were in a narrow space between caging, with a crashed jeep and foliage visible through the wire. There were ominous rustling noises and I was afraid something was going to jump out, haunted-house style.

Image from http://www.skyclub.co.jp/jzauruss/index.html

I’m very very bad with haunted houses. We edged over to the selection panel and… there was a sign taped to it stating that special prices were in place for golden week. Special, 3x the usual price prices. We couldn’t afford it. So we had to turn around and head home again. Damn having a birthday in the middle of consecutive public holidays!

But we’ll be back Jurassic Park. We’ll be back. Probably at night, when you look even cooler.

Image from http://www.skyclub.co.jp/jzauruss/index.html