Autumn, garbage and other stinkiness

I've always been very sensitive to my environment - the people, places, noises, smells, things and sounds that surround me have had a direct effect on my disposition and well being since I was very young, though I supposed I only really figured this out a few years ago. In university, I noticed a direct effect on my "performance" - whether meaning productivity, academic marks or workplace efficiency - depending on the multivaried temperments and atmosphere of my roommates, friends and housing situation, something that seems to be a forgone observation in retrospect, but a significant revelation at the time. What can I say? I wasn't the brightest of pandas back then (errm... or now...)

A beautiful fall day outside a seminar building in Shiga.

Of all the environmental factors affecting my disposition, one of the most influential is the weather - or more to the point, the season. Being of the panda-like disposition, I am rather averse to hot weather, which means that summer for me - especially in Japan - is a long, drawn out, sweaty, muggy 4.5-month marathon of torture and barely moving from my resting place directly in front of the precious, precious life-giving air conditioner. Heaven have mercy on me whenever I have to teach, as it's always a tossup as to whether or not I'll make it for the full 50 minutes without passing out in a quivering, sweaty lump at the front of the un-airconditioned fourth floor classrooms (which is actually not an exaggeration, as students routinely pass out from the heat in Japanese schools every summer, a disturbing trend that the normally meticulous Japanese seem to be rather non-plussed about, preferring to just sort of move the body out of the way and then go back to the staffroom to talk about how kyo wa atsui desu ne...! (today's so hot, isn't it!?) with each other, occasionally going back to check to see if the poor victim has recovered consciousness or not so they can tell them their assignments for the next week).

Winter is little better, though coming from the northern Wisconsin wilds and having a significant amount of natural panda insulation I tend to fare somewhat better than the 50kg anorexic j-girls who walk around shivering under 17 pounds of scarves, jackets, mufflers, tights, pants, skirts (sometimes the last three all together at the same time, which is somewhat fascinating to observe) and what not with an intensity that makes me worry if they're not going to shiver an (impeccably plucked and shaped) eyebrow right off their faces or something. The fact, however, that the preferred method of clearing snow off the streets is to pour river upon rivers of water onto it and not stop until spring comes does sort of make things a whole lot more asinine and troublesome than it really has to be (though it really wouldn't be japan if it was any other way...).

Fortunately, for those lucky pandas who manage to survive summer, and as sort of a "compensation" for the rapidly approaching winter, Japan is kind enough to toss my way Autumn, which as you might be able to tell from my very toasty warm and leaf- bespeckled fall themed website (and umm, the silly flashing "AUTUMN 2004" logo in the upper right), is most definitively my favorite season.

These mountains, unlike the ones in my town, actually looked beautiful.

While I'll save the pithy adjective laden stream of consciousness gushing extolling the virtues of the Autumn season (which will undoubtedly use words such as "quintessential" and "transcedent" and favorite panda phrases such as "(leaves) slowly spiraling to the ground in rotoscoping symphonies of color" and "amber sheaves (of sunlight) filtering down in liquid cadences in the dust filled air") (as an aside, when I was younger (in middle/high school), my teachers would always praise me and my classmates look on enviously as I pulled such retardedly obtuse Faulkner-esque descriptors out my panda bum on the spot. Unfortunately, the older I get, the less such things sound like profound glimpses into a noble vision of a trascendental moment, and the more they sound like what might result from the bastard mating of a thesaurus with a vat of Hippy sugar (I don't know what that is either, I just made it up, so don't bother ask), or, for example, any given page from Jewel's self-described "introspective" book of poetry "A Night Without Armor" (what more can you expect from a woman named Jewel or Moonbeam or whatever?) *sigh*) (as a further aside, Jewel's debut CD "Pieces of You" (a recording described by Amazon as "expos[ing] an unfortunate tendency to present trite, hackneyed sentiments as if they were oracular visions from a young prophet to a jaded world") was the first CD I ever actually bought brand new from a store, or rather, as a sign of what a loser I was at the time, had my mother pick up for me at the local Wal-Mart (Asda, for you british viewers). Ahh, truly, who will save your soul? (that's the first track on the CD for those of you who are currently pretending you were too cool never to own it, by the way). Fortunately for myself, some of my "fly- er", more "dope" (ahh, 90's slang, how I love you so...) soon set me straight by introducing me to the lyrical styling of the deadly trio of 'Pac, Snoop and Dre, along with lesser members of the West Coast gangsta parthenon (what more can I say / I wouldn't be here today / if the old school didn't pave the way...), which explains why today I have a copy of Pac's remarkable (especially given his age at the time) "The Rose that Grew from Concrete" instead of Jewel's latest literary foray "Chasing down the Dawn" sitting on my desk next to my copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry (which, as an aside, is not a particularly good anthology of poetry. seemingly designed more to satisfy "politically correct" sensibilities about being "all inclusive" in the literary world than actually present a comprehensive overview of the most influential and significant poets of the time, but in my defense, my high school teacher gave it to me as a graduation gift (see, writing bad adjective laden hippy poems in the margins of your homework sheets does have its pluses!), so bleh! *sticks out tongue* ))

*whew* Okay, so where was I? Oh yeah, going about how I wasn't going to go on about autumn ;). Anyway, the thing is, in Autumn, I'm at my best - happy, never depressed, uber productive (well, for a panda at any rate) and basically in tip top form - doesn't matter what comes at me, how many things I'm juggling, in Autumn, I feel untouchable amidst the showers of brilliantly colored leaves. Nothing can steal my sunshine (as it were), and I feel like I can handle the world. At least until winter comes and grasps me in its icy, cold, dark clutches, but anyway...

So that having been said, you'd think I'd have a lot more to write about on these pages - trips to far off exotic locals, pictures of assorted, fascinating panda adventures, paragraphs upon paragraphs of badly mangled improvisation verse harping on about the beauty of nature's masterpiece swirling on all around me (such as the titilating excerpts previewed above). But instead, you get no panda love for almost two weeks at this point, and I know the singular thought going through all your collective, panda- starved minds and hearts is "WHY...!!!? "

(or possibly "I'm hungry, I think I'll go microwave a burrito". But let's pretend otherwise.)

The fact of the matter is, I've been having a really rough go of it lately. In addition to all sorts of private stresses you need not concern yourselves with, the empire of panda is literally SWAMPED with work - school is hammering non-stop (dispel all notions you may have of JETs as lazy, overpaid slappers with nothing to do all day but sit and twiddle their thumbs - the reality is, while some of our jobs are that way, some of us actually have to do A LOT of work to earn our keep), I seemingly have a business trip every other week (I just finished a grueling week long seminar over in Shiga prefecture) and as the excessively underpaid and overworked (I might be a little biased ;) ) person in charge of coordinating all the official JET conferences in the prefecture, I literally have my little panda panties (that's a disturbing image...) in a bunch over the upcoming midyear seminar - and by upcoming, I mean next freaking week! - that I am rapidly coming to realize will be little more than a resounding cataclysm of comedic mishaps and not-quite-so-comedic disasters. (as an aside, I usually make it a rule not to single out 3 week old infants as a subject of my considerably withering panda rage and anger, however, one of the reasons why I am so busy is that the individual who is supposed to be assisting with the planning and implementation of the conference has conveniently gone off and had a baby, leaving me cowering behind truly awestriking mountains of towering paperwork and innundated with a frightening number of phone calls whilst silently cursing to myself "stupid newborn baby...!! " Grrr...)

My coworker, without whom I would never survive my piles of work.

I can only imagine what an unrecognizable train wreck of a nerves I would be if it wasn't Autumn and I had all this coming down on my head, but as it is, at least when I leave the office (sometimes at 9:30pm, only to go home and do more work), I can feel refreshed and invigorated by the deliciously brisk breeze and that damply wet and earthy, but somehow brilliantly colored layer of leaves that blankets the grey concrete and softens every step and dulls every noise until the world becomes a muffled cocoon of sleep and hazy, obscated colors filtering in and around all sides of the periphery of your vision. (cue bad poetry).

That having been said, Japan still finds ways of "quirking shit up", as one of my more linguistically "creative" friends once so aptly put it, and the recent weeks have not disappointed, as the forces of the House of Panda were called upon to do battle with the evil minions of yet another stunningly idiotic division of the Japanese bureaucracy - the garbage system.

Those of you who have never lived in Japan before might not realize the sheer horror and scope of the uneccesarily complex and nazi-like garbage disposal system - consider yourselves lucky. In Japan, one never just "throws away" trash. Rather, what one does is subject each and every component of any object being considered for disposal to an intense and complex analytical process that includes recursive algorithms, organic chemistry, material analysis, consultation of several rule books (or "guides to waste disposal" as mine cheerily declares in crayon-colored letters on the front) and a healthy dose of voodoo. Afterwards, said "waste" is then disassembled into its core components which are then separated into appropriate bins and then, after further extensive consultation of rulebooks, various calendars, at least three different maps and quite possibly some brief telescopic observation of the current phase of the moon, said garbage is tentatively set out at a designated location marked only by cryptic coordinates on a GPS, and if you're LUCKY - if you remembered to pray for divine assistance and made a donation at your local shrine earlier that week - then your garbage MAY of MAY NOT get picked up.

Lest you think I'm joking, my current workplace has no less than SIXTEEN..!!! separate garbage bins:

To make things worse, these things are all picked upon DIFFERENT DAYS - WHICH CHANGE EVERY MONTH...!!! One actually has to consult a chart to see what trash can or cannot be disposed of and where one must put it at that time.

Now at this point, I could enter into a long and rather protracted rant about how, in reality, this uneccessarily complex and pointless garbage "separation" system is, like so many things in this country, a complete and utter waste of time, designed more to generate busy work, employ people who by all rights are unemployable (so as to prevent social "disruption") and most importantly let Japanese "feel good" by allowing them to delude themselves into thinking they're actually "doing something" for the environment. Of course, if they were reallyinterested in doing something for the environment, they could stop wrapping each and every goddman thing you buy in 17 layers of unneccessary wrapping, use paper bags instead of plastic bags, stop dumping garbage into the sea, stop paving over literally every single meter of nature with concrete, start paying attention to carcinogenic toxins routinely dumped into the water supply and stop cutting down trees to make millions upon millions of utterly useless and pointless "official" government documents, such as the 30 page "Guide to Waste Disposal" (with accompanying charts and appendices) sitting on my counter right now - but, that would take too long and I'd never finish, so instead, let me just state that faced with such an utterly obtuse and mind boggling system, it's natural that one might occasionally make a small mistake or two.

For myself, the mistake came a few weeks ago. Because Jupiter happened to be parallel to Saturn's orbit while Pluto was ascendant the night before, "recylable plastics day" happened to coincide with a "burnable trash day" that month. It so happens that that morning I was very harried, so in my rush to get to work, I accidentally placed the bag containing the plastics in the "burnables" pile. Off to work I went, unaware of my mistake.

About two days later, my supervisor leans over to me.

"Michael" she says

"Yes?" I reply between mouthfuls of a riceball.

"I received a phone call from your landlord about your garbage. They say I need to explain the rules of garbage separation to you."

At this point, I already knew what had transpired, so really, there was no point in protesting - nonetheless, I decided to pleade through to the end.

"Well, you see, I already know the rules of garbage collection. See, what must have happened is, the other day I was in such a rush that by mistake I -"

"They found a piece of paper with your name on it in the garbage"

"anyway, so I made a mistake and - WAIT WHAT!!!???" I don't know why I was suprised - I had heard stories of ridiculous shit like this before, but even so, like so many things in this country, when you get smacked directly in the face with the staggering idiocy of the Japanese way, you can't help but be momentarily stunned.

"They found something with your name on it in the trash, so they know it's yours."

Forgetting for the moment that I wasn't even trying to claim it wasn't mind, but rather explaining what had happened (which never works here anyway), I asked her, my voice tinged with incredulity:

"You mean to say that what happened is that - instead of just picking up the bag filled with plastics trash and moving it to the "plastics" pile that was literally just 10 meters away, they actually took the trash to the collection center, OPENED THE BAG AND WENT THROUGH IT UNTIL THEY FOUND SOMETHING WITH MY NAME ON IT AND THEN LOOKED UP MY NAME AND WORK FUCKING PHONE NUMBER THEN CALLED YOU - MY SUPERVISOR - TO COMPLAIN ABOUT IT......!!!!!!!????" I feel the deep bile and rage rising up inside of me.

"Yes. So if you have time later, I would like to explain the system of -"

I walk away, disgusted.

I get home late that night to find this sitting outside my door, position in such as way that virtually EVERYONE who lives on my floor had to have seen it:

The bag of trash that started it all. At least DAPAN, the inverse panda, helps make it better.

That, my friends, is the offending bag of trash. The sign affixed to it, with my full name at the top in big, bold letters for all to see, informs me of my "grievous" error in garbage separation, and informs me that the next time this happens, I will be fined 20,000 yen (~$200 US)...!

This is the sort of b.s. which is pulled in this country - calling my WORKPLACE to complain to my supervisor about something they should have contacted me about directly, leaving the bag of trash sitting in the middle of the hallway outside my door with my name on it pronouncing me error to everyone on my floor - the sort of things that people here do in order to make you "lose face" and apparently, "socially embarass you" into correcting whatever utterly meaningless mistake you may have made. I suppose that to the average Japanese it must be thoroughly mortifying and cause them to reflect on what a worthless and evil human being they are for having dared to break a rule (or whatever it is they were trying to achieve with this sort of negative reinforcement), but as for me, it just made me incredibly angry. Pissed, really, and infuriated with the unbearably oppressive "paternal state" nature of Japan, where human beings are equals to be talked with directly, but rather helpless children that need to be humiliated and corrected by those "who are wiser" every second of every day.

Nonetheless, while I briefly considered flying into a rage and going down to my landlord's building and hurling it all over them and their carefully starched and calculatedly bland uniforms, or perhaps sending them pictures of the piles of shit (like, literally, human excrement) I sometimes find on the staircase, empty convenience store tv dinners, vomit and urine puddles that routinely fill the elevator every night (my apartment is filled with "hosts" and "hostesses" who work in the nightime sex industry downtown, so it is somewhat charitable to say that they really don't have the finest respect for the normal rules of decorum, especially when coming home pissed every night at 4 am) and suggesting they maybe do something about THAT instead of harassing me for my solitary garbage disposal offense, in the end, I decide against it, and swallow my rage, because, after all, I did make a mistake (however slight and inconsequential it might have been), and if it takes making three people waste countless man hours sort through my bag of garbage to find something with my name and look my workplace up and complain to my employer about it to make Japan run smoothly, then, what the fuck, I'll play this game for a while.

So I left it at that, and figured that I'd just be extra careful about where I put my trash in the future.

And that was that for a few weeks, until yesterday, as I'm getting ready to leave work for the day. RRRIIIINNGGG goes the telephone. I pick it up as there's hardly anyone in the staffroom (lazy bastards).

"Hello?"

"Hi, this is such-and-such landlord. Is Michael Panda there please?"

I feel my stomach tensing.

"This is he."

"Hi Michael. This is your landlord calling. We have received some complaint from the garbag company about PET bottles (plastic drink bottles) being disposed of on the wrong day and in the incorrect place and they asked us to call the foreigners in the apartment building and ensure they know the rules for garbage collection."

At this point, I begin to lose it (because, as you will soon see, there is no way in hell these could have been my bottles), but, through some miracle of providence, manage to swallow my rage and speak to her extremely politely.

"Listen. There is no way this could be my PET bottles, because at this very second, as we speak, ALL of my PET bottles from the last two months are literally sitting in my kitchen waiting to be disposed of, because I keep missing the PET bottle disposal day. Furthermore, I have been on a business trip to Shiga prefecture for all of last week, and as a result, I have not thrown away ANY garbage for the past TWO weeks."

"Ahh, yes, well, I see. Well, anyway, as you see, the garbage company called us and asked us to call the foreigners living in the apartment building to make sure they -"

I cut her off

"Wait. There's only two foreigners in the apartment building, including me. You called both of us?"

"Well, yes of course, I called the other foreigner as well!" Her tone was that of "why but of course...! Why wouldn't I do such a thing...!?"

"So you called both of us. Did you call anyone else?" I ask. The bile is rising again.

She seems a bit taken aback by the question.
"Well... no. See, the garbage company said there was a problem with the PET bottles and told us to call the foreigners to see if they..."

I cut her off again, curtly.

"Yeah, yeah. To make sure they know the rules of garbage collection. Right. There are over 100 people living in my apartment complex, and yet you think nothing of automatically blaming the only two (TWO MOTHERFUCKER!!! ....TWWWWWWOOOOOO!!!!) foreigners when someone puts some PET bottles in the wrong place."

She's confused.
"Well, yes, I see, well, I just want to make sure you understood the rules, but if you say it wasn't you, then I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience and blah blah blah"

"Right. Well thanks for your call, then." As I hang up, I silently add "chickenfucker" (Ahh, Super Troopers... what a great movie...)

Some of my lovely collection of PET bottles. Pay no attention to the rather unhealthy nature of the drinks, but rather to mah supar cute panda oven mitt! Now if only I had an oven...

And that brings us to the present. I have a million things to do tomorrow, but I have made up my mind to dedicate a portion of the day writing a letter to my landlord, stating in no uncertain terms, exactly how I feel about such racist bullshit. It's not so much that the garbage guys automatically assume that if there's an error in garbage collection, it MUST be one of the two foreigners, instead of the other hundred plus Japanese living in the same apartment complex. But rather it's that the landlord can receive a phone call requesting that they call to "ensure the foreigners aren't fucking up", and instead of using the miserable withered excuse of an organ between their ears and going "Hmm, maybe there's a slight chance that in an apartment filled with over 100 young Japanese punks (male and female) who steal bicycles, shit on staircases, piss in elevators and come home drunk every night after a long shift in the sex and entertainment trade to kick holes in the glass doors, that maybe, just maybe it might be one of them instead of the two solitary meek foreigners who basically just stick to themselves and try not to bother anybody."

No. Instead, they pass on such a blatantly racist request without a thought, and wilfully ignore the utter mathematical improbability of it all. When I came home that night, I looked in the garbage cage containing the offending bags, and discovered there were more than 6 huge OVERFLOWING bags stuffed to top with PET bottles, glass bottles and aluminum cans. My face flushed with anger, because if even we had wanted to, there was NO WAY the two of us foreigners could have ever drank that many beverages in the first place...!!! There is no way that anyone who looked at that pile, sitting in front of an apartment block filled with 100+ Japanese and only 2 foreigners, could every deny the fact that very obviously, Japanese people had to be responsible for most, if not all, of those bags. But yet, no one calls the Japanese. No one looks up their employer's work numbers, attaches signs to their front door, threatens them with $200 fines. Because, hey, they're Japanese, right? They couldn't possibly do anything wrong! It must all be the foreigners...!

*sigh*
There are times when living in this country makes my heart heavy with the pressure of it all. The omnipresent xenophobia, the perpetual racism, the chronic insularism, the system idiocy, the innate wastefulness... it all just crashes down on me as dark and dense as the gray, rust stained concrete block buildings towering above on either side of the street and more and more I wonder if some essential part of me is not being permanently crushed under their weight. The saddest part is, they don't confront it, or acknowledge it - rather, any and all criticisms are met with a blanket "That's just Japanese culture. You don't understand it because you're foreign.".

The truth is, and this is a message as applicable overseas as on this island - "culture" is not, has never been, and will never be, an excuse for racism. It is not an explanation for idiocy, for xenophobia, for sexisms, for stereotyping others, or for doing retarded shit without regard for all the people who are hurt as a result. "Culture" is not a magic band-aid, it is not rose colored spectacles and it is not a lead brick with which to hammer into submission those who might question the reasoning and intrinsic merit of thing which rightfully deserve closer scrutiny. It is just a word, and at the end of the day, regardless of how many times you shout it out over and over again at the top of your lungs, you still must face reckoning and bear responsibility for your choices and actions, and the way you treat others.

I have a feeling that "racism" is just a word to Japanese - a vague, floaty concept of some nebulous idea that must occur "over there", "over seas" - in ill defined places like "South Africa" or "Los Angeles", and carries with it the conviction that as "global citizens", it is something the supposedly "peace loving" Japanese must firmly oppose. So they hold all sort of pointless token events like the "World Love March" and take part in such ludicrously expensive things like "The Peace Boat" and they shout out of megaphones at people eating outside of mister donuts utterly asinine slogans like "Let's world peace NOW!!" (as if all the evil doers in the world would suddenly drop whatever heated sharpened instrument they're currently using to excruciatingly cut off the fingers of whatever poor fuck they're torturing or bloodthirsty warlord would suddenly order his troops to stop hacking limbs off of innocent Tutsis, bayonetting Albanian men, or raping Sudanese women and be like "Holy Shit, Ichiro Tanaka is calling for world peace NOW!? Wow, I better call of the dogs then, I guess! I love you, fellow brother of a different skin tone and/or facial complexion!" and they go home feeling all good and righteous about themselves and the lie they live.

My army of Panda-Z robotic minions serve me well when I launch an attack against my landlord.

But the truth is, racism isn't all exotic bullshit. It's not apartheid, and it's not Zimbawian solider executing white farmers to steal their land, and it's not blunt nosed Hutus eviscerating aquline nosed Tutsi's with sharpened hoes. That shit is human rights violations. But rather, racism is this - it's ignorant, uneducated, insular Japanese salarimen, xenophobic immigrations officials, prejudiced police officers, wary shopkeepers - land lords wrongfully accusing you of something based on your skin color. This is the real - this is the racism that is a blight on all of us as people, and the Japanese, far from being at the forefront of enlightenment, are rather one of the chief architects of this oppressive institution.

As a JET, they will tell you in the literature that your ostensible job purpose is to "teach english". Any JET who has been here more than 3 months will tell you that that's bullshit, and that honestly speaking, the only possible justification for hauling thousands of college age kids into Japan and sticking them in the middle of the deep deep backwater is that vague and slippery concept of "internationalization". To expose the Japanese kids to "the world that lies beyond their borders" and to "cultivate in them a deeper understanding of the world and other cultures".

In a way, I suppose that's as close to the truth as anything, since really, there can be no justification in using us as English teachers. But the thing is, they got something wrong - it's not the kids that need internationalization - they already get us - they understand that Japan is not alone in the world and they eagerly open their minds and their hearts to cultures, societies and people outside of Japan. Rather, it's the adults that need internationalization - the salarymen, the housewives, the politicians, the office ladies - the garbage men and the landlords...! They're the ones who perpetuate this fucked, xenophobic, wantonly destructive system and in the end, unless they change, then really, Japan will remain the same as it ever was, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of 20-something year olds they bring through here.

I wrote a while back about the various stages of "adjustment" to Japan foreigners go through, and how, at the time, I was in that third stage - the critical stage of coping with the disillusionment wherein one decides whether they will ultimately accept Japan and stay, or reject it, and go back home, to their previous lives - to the "real" world.

At the time I thought that to "stay" would ultimately mean having to accept Japan with all its failings and shortcomings and reaching some sort of internal equilibrium wherein one could make peace with all of that and still continue on. But I realize now that there is another way - that just because one is foreign need not mean that one must stay silent and accept all the injustices that are perpetuated onto them, ignore all the idiocy and evil surrounding and continue on without comment. Rather, one can stand up for themselves and fight. They can shatter that fiercely held fallacy of "culture" and call a spade a spade - stand up for themselves and say once and for all what desperately needs to be said - "This is wrong, and culture is no excuse for it."

In a way, I wonder if this is not the "internationalization" that ostensibly I'm supposed to be here for. Who knows - I've stopped believing the company line ages ago. But what I do know is that regardless of whether they really want it or not, some Japanese are going to get a taste of "internationalization" tomorrow - it may not seem like a big deal, writing a letter to protest the way I was treated by the landlord. But in reality, it's a first step, and more to the point, it addresses what must seemingly be a slight insult which others might readily ignore. But it's these small, seemingly matterless affronts that pile up and pave the way down that long slippery slope that is racism and precisely these that conspire to make life in Japan outright hostile for foreigners.

When I think on it, there's a long line of foreigners who have chosen to tread down this path of daring to stand up for themselves and telling the Japanese to their face that what they're doing to us is wrong: Alex Kerr, Karel van Wolfren, Iris Chang, David Arudou, Alan Booth - just to name a few. While my letter may be small, it is my hope that I can live up to the example which these brave few have set.