Whole lotta xenophobia going on.

I've always had a sort of love hate relationship with the summer - it's wierd, I know, coming from Panama you'd expect that I'd be one of those sun-worshipping types: running about with my head in a tizzy at the slightest hint of heated rays pouring down through cracks in the clouds, going on and on about beaches and sand and surf and sports, barbecues and road trips - all that mess. And while being half-panda I'll take a long lazy shady nap over running about on beaches or getting all sweaty playing basketball in the blazing midday sun, on the other hand, I'm all about barbecues and road trips and while I was loath to admit it at the time, summer camp was always a great bit of fun -

(though I should add that I always got sent to those "special" summer camps for "Minority and Disadvantaged Children" which actually wasn't as bad as it sounds, since the government often tried to assuage what I presume was some sort of guilt over oppressing non-whites or socio-economic stratification, etc. by being quite generous with stipends, housing and whatnot when it came to these type of summer camps. In accordance with my somewhat long-running but subdued quasi-defense of the establishment (or as I like to refer to it in more casual conversation "White people ain't so bad") I should say that the government never really did that much to "keep me down" as it were. Sure, there were a few times back when I lived on an Army base when we first moved to the states that still sends a few shudders down my spine, but other than that, America was pretty good to me. Better treatement than I could expect in most places in the world, Japan most definitely included.)

- Nature it seems was somewhat unsure about what tact to take with me as well: on the one hand my "Panamanian heritage" -

(and I put that in quotes because it just strikes me a so cloying to use talk like that. "My heritage". Phrases like that get bandied about far too much these days I feel, no doubt because, as J-Wo once put it - "being plain white just ain't cool these days". Which helps explain why Christina Aguilera has suddenly decided she's "latin", or Cameron Diaz is apparently trying to get in touch with her "Native American heritage", I suppose. On need only take a quick look around some of the more "progressive" blogs out there to witness the widespread disparagement directed at white folks by "people of color"

(another phrase that has suddenly experienced "mission creep" and for reasons that remain inexplicable to me, has now ballooned to include Asians, Hispanics, Pacific-Islanders, Eurasians, Middle-Easterners, etc. (read: all non-whites) as well as blacks, despite the fact that most of these groups have relatively little in common. Let this Panda stand up (alone if need be) and say this as a Chinese-Panamanian: if myself, a latina and a black man were driving along and each of us got simultaneously pulled over by a police officer, you'd better believe each of us would get treated a lot differently - and you know who would end up getting the short end of the stick, right? So here's hoping the well meaning individuals commandeering my dear left stop trying to force-feed this ill-fitting artificial sense of solidarity down all our collective throats and start recognizing the uniqueness of each individual's experiences and situations.)

- don't get me wrong - I'm not defending the right by any means or exonerating white folks of the injustices they did do, however it pains me to see formerly innocenct adjectives like "vanilla" or "lily" (as in "Lily-white") used as harsh perjoratives laden with unspoken indictment and heavy with borderline-racist detestment. Of course we each have the right to our own opinions, but it fills me with sadness to recognize the fact that such sentiments are hardly rare - so many of my contemporaries seem to be identifying with an increasingly militant and polarised left that has long ago lost touch with its roots (and corresponding philosophies of open mindedness and acceptance) and has instead become fixated on "combating the right at all costs", a decision which I am convinced will doom us to increasingly irrelevance and marginalisation, since when it comes to self-rightous indignation and scapegoating, I'm afraid we're no match for the frightening passions of the right. At any rate, this is another topic for another time, so back to the entry at hand.

- has provided me with a rather hardy external constitution seemingly well suited for summer frolick - I do not, for example, get sunburned* and my hair unwaveringly handles the worst abuses I care to hurl at it (it doesn't change color in the sun, shrugs off the chlorine used in pools like it ain't no' thang, etc. - though my advancement in years may ultimately prove to be a more difficult foe to conquer. Is it too early to start taking Propecia, I wonder, glancing at ambiguously receding temple areas with a worried expression in the mirror.). On the other hand, being part panda I also tend to overheat rather easily and get all sweaty to boot (but not in a gross way. In a cute panda way). So what to do?

* For the record, I am aware that it's technically impossible to be sunburn-proof and I suppose that if I laid on a metal roof spread eagle in the middle of a desert, besides being incredibly painful, it would also mean that I'd turn a bright bright unpanda-like shade of red (red pandas don't count as "real" pandas, so don't even get me started on those rat-faced racoon imposters) that would most definitely constitute "being sunburned". I'm just saying that to this day, even canoeing on the hottest, brightest days of the summer, blazing sun beating down on me from above and thermal radiation reflecting up at my from the glassy river below, sans sunscreen*, I have never ever been sunburned in my life. Pleasantly tanned? You'd better believe it. But not sunburned.

* For the record too, kids, you should never go out with sunscreen - it'll lead to skin cancer (which Americans suffer from in disproportionately high amounts) and Thymine-dimers, the latter of which is about one of only three things* I can still vaguely remember from my Genetics 565 class, one of the most horrible classes I have ever taken.

*The other two were "you should never eat a strawberry poptart in class on the day you will cover genetic disorders with high rates of fetal-mortality if your professor is a professional genetic counselor who is not averse to using graphic slides to illustrate the clinical manifestations of said diseases" and the most confusing sentence I have ever read in my life, during the population genetics section of the course:

Now how do we find the variance of ṗ? According to MLE (Maximum Likelihood Estimator) theory, we get the large sample variance of our estimator by calculating the reciprocal of minus the average value of the second derivative of the log of the likelihood.

To this day I still have no idea what the hell that means.

So where am I going with this rambling set of quasi-summer themed musings? (by the way, for those of you wondering what the hell is going on with the formatting in this entry, it's because I'm reading Mark Danieleweski's excellent "House of Leaves", an engrossing book that has awakend in me my dormant passion for footnotes, a terrible trait that my university English professors thought they had long ago banished. Man, I love me them footnotes. If I could put footnotes in a webpage, I would.) I guess what I'm trying to get at is the ambiguous perch that summer currently occupies in my subconscious. Formerly, when asked to give a ranking of my seasons, I inevitably put Autumn first, followed closely by Spring, and then, a bit farther out, Winter. Summer always came dead, dead last. While the first was always an event to be celebrated - the Mt. Everest of my circadian rhythms, highest, brightest point of my emotional cycle - the second a period to be peacefully enjoyed and the third even having its moments of laconic pleasure, summer, it seemed, was always without redeeming merit, a terrible, glaring, torturous doldrom on the other relatively smooth-sailing waters of the seasons where one was damned to languish for months on end without any hope of escape or slightest glimmer of respite. In fact, in a particularly angsty entry earlier on, I believe I wrote the following:

... the summer in Japan is like a tireless, oppressive, heavy blacket that drops heavily on you one morning, grasping leadenly on your eyelids, forcing its way into your nostrils with every wet, humid breath, cramming its way down your throat as you open your mouth to gasp the thick, molten miasma, wrapping around your body then snapping shut in a skin tight coat of sweat and oil and dampness, glistening moisture off the sides of your nose serving as ever-present reminders of the extreme discomfiture that causes the very inside of your t-shirt or pants to stick, tear and rip at your raw skin as if it was torture personified - dull, leaden pain in the back of your neck and head as your brain struggles to focus on whatever now seemingly insurmountable task is at hand and through it all, the blinding, painful glare of the over-exposed sun beating down relentlessly on the concrete all around you - tin shack roofs reflecting glint and whiteness into your cowering pupils as yours eyelids strain to narrow and close against the onslaught and your view of the world narrows into two myopic circles of heat and light filtered through clenched eyelashes, and your tongue sticks against the roof of your tongue as the acrid, burning taste of summer chokes down and swirls around it with every pant and breath, washing down your throat until it invades your very gut and from that moment, all you can do is lay down and stare up at the cloudless yellow sky and wish desperately that autumn would just come and put you out of your misery.
[Link]

The angst-iness not withstanding, however, recently summer has started to undergo a bit of a shift for me. Nothing major, mind you - the hierarchy of seasons still stands as firm this year as the last - but ever so slowly, I've noticed summer start to iiiiinnnncch its way up the charts, for lack of a better term, and even catch myself on the most fleeting of occasions thinking about - dare I say - almost looking forward to...! summer. Or else, how to explain the itching in my legs for a long extended cycle trip up in the mountains? Or my sudden preoccupation with putting some color back in my pale skin, to exorcise the sallow, pallid spectre of winter with the healthy warm glow of sun-induced tan? Perplexing, to say the least, or so it seemd to me, formerly accustomed to greeting the rapid warming of the seasons with groans and belaboured sighs of put-upon-ness, grim resignation painted across eyes that would tighten and furrow in preparation for the merciless beating rays and glaring white overexposure of the unfiltered sun.

Some small part of me allowed myself to feel a bit of hope - at what exactly, I'm not sure, but I suppose I might term it something like "maturity" or "progression", whatever word you want to give to the notion of having "gotten past something" - in this case wondering if I've actually managed to get past my (distaste?) for summer, become "normal" or whatever, as if before I was a small child and summer was the brocolli I would eventually come to love to eat. Maybe. A small hope, but who knows? Maybe I could become one of those sun-worshipping, beach dwelling individuals bouncing about all happily on the television. A smooth, unencumbered transformation into something "better", or at least walking back up on the path to embracing the light and the heat with kinder adjectives and a more relaxed mind. A more open individual?

I suppose that it wasn't quite summer the other day when Tennis and I headed out of my apartment to grab some breafast at a nearby restaurant. Nonetheless, with the sun shining down and the temperature in the high 20's with nary an ominous grey cloud in sight, it felt close enough and so our spirits were jovial as we headed out the door and started to get in her car for what was intending to be a relaxing 5 minute drive.

Parking in Japan tends to be a rather bipolar issue, like so many things. If you live in a big city like Tokyo or Osaka, parking fees can end up running into the several hundred dollar range per month - and that's just if you live on the outskirts of the city. On the other hand, if you are fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your perspective) enough to live in the deep countryside inaka, you could literally park an entire fleet of cars all all around your house for free and still have dozens of fields available for rice/daikon planting. Unfortunately for me, the city I live in - despite being most decidedly anything but a Tokyo or Osaka - seems to suffer from the delusion that it should be considered in the same breath as Japan's major metropolitan areas and parking fees are priced accordingly. As a result, despite the fact that my rent is already a rather hefty sum, I don't have a parking spot to call my own, which is actually okay with me for the moment, since I don't own a car. And it turns out - or so we thought - that this wouldn't be a problem for Tennis either when she comes to visit via car, since the Japanese tend to take a rather lax approach to what consitutes "an acceptable place to park".

Having lived in Panama City (Panama, not Florida) before, home to what many refer to as "some of the worst drivers in Latin America", I can safely say that it doesn't hold a candle to Japan when it comes to frightening disregard for traffic safety. One hasn't lived (or perhaps: run the risk of dying in a spectacular accident) until they try to drive in Japan: streets lined with unguarded 6-foot deep ditches on both sides, gasoline tankers filled with explosive fluids parked double wide across three lanes of traffic, careening single-lane mountain roads with 200 foot drop offs on either side, massive semi-trucks darting out around blind corners over sidewalks and into perpendicular traffic without so much as a toot of a horn - the list goes on and on. But of particular concern to the story at hand is the aforementioned approach to parking: if a spot looks remotely large enough to fit a car into (and even if it doesn't), then it's fair game to park there. Even if you're double parked. Or covering someone's driveway. Or jutting out into the street. Whatever.

In our case, there exists an open area in the parking lot before my apartment building that is not designated as a parking spot. Consequently, many individuals who are either just visiting a resident (as in Tennis's case) or else to cheap to pay for a real spot (as per certain other residents) occasionally park there from time to time. In Tennis's case, she usually just parks there overnight - arriving late at night and since she's got to work, she's usually out of the spot by 7:30 in the morning. The point being, she's far from the only person who does it - it's a rare day that I don't pass by at least one or two cars parked in this spot on my way out the door.

As we head towards the car and start to get in, I look over at a taxi cab which is parked across a few spots to the right of us. A Japanese man - perhaps in his 30's - is heading towards the cab. Spotting us, he turns towards me and starts shouting.

It's difficult to follow exactly what he's saying, because his speech is slurred and lazy, rife with dialect and filled with the missing particles and rough edges that characterizes most Japanese men's speech. His voice undulates up and down in a way that's instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever spent any extended amount of time in Japan - it's irritation, aggression, perhaps even anger, but expressed in waves - I don't know quite how to describe it - it's like waves washing up and down valleys, not quite sing-songy in nature, but with a definite rythemic pattern, the pitch increasing with intensity and height as the aggressive notes of each sentence builds, finally cresting at the end before dropping down and trailing off with the sentence final particle. The gestures that accompany are also instantly recognizable - the dismissive flinging of fingers in-beat with the syn-co-pah of the crashing aural waves of irritation, a passive-aggressive manner of establishing alpha-male-dom, I suppose. With Western men, I've noticed, anger is very direct - challenges are frank, put forwards - there is no cresting see-sawing between sentences, no trailing off into laconic dismission - the build is directional, the pitch increase constant, the accumulation insurmountable - the only break comes in that crack as the vocal cords switch over across the boundaries from "speech" to "yelling". Hand motions are direct - jabbing of fingers at opponents, aggressive intrusions of personal space, vectors speared off unseen from pointed fingers and gesuring fists designed to provoke, antagonize and dominate. All very directed towards the addressee, and instantly recognizable as the traditional method of sussing out the alpha-beta heirarchies.

It's funny, I think, that when we as western men encounter the "normal" Japanese version of aggression it stirs in us something primal, something fierce, some desire to pounce or dominate or subjugate. I say it's funny because it's different - at least for me - than how I would react when confronted in a "western" fashion. I am cautious and not particularly aggressive - years of study as a geneticist have made me painfully aware of the delicate and most disposable position we men occupy in the vast mechanistic schemes of population genetics. I have no desire to serve as the exploitable vessel for natural selection and so I am glad to leave the brutal horn locking, peacock feather strutting, flesh-rending bloodbath that is the distilled essence of masculine existence to those more willing. As for me, I'd like to live to see tommorrow, if that's okay. DNA and selfish genes be damned. Yet in the moment as I watch his posturing, receive the crashing sonic assault of his undulating tones, note his clipped sideways stance so different than the full fronted chest beating posturing of "western" aggression, the way his hand sweeps away in wide irritated arcs like a parent scolding a child - away, but never, ever towards me - in this moment I feel a deep and pervading sense of anger, his words reaching down inside of me and making me want to leap out and rend them from the air and swat them with what I can only imagine would be verbal dominance of that most english of english phrases, the fierce fury of the "fuck you" that has absolutely no equal in the Japanese language - so much more predisposed to clever wordplay and indirect threats than out and out "fuck"-slinging and I have this sort of moment of "recursive self awareness" - for lack of a better word - so strange to feel these things, this surge of alpha male fight aggression and emotions!!

And in this introspective aside in the gap between syllables, I find myself wondering if I'm not falling into that trap of Orientalism, the myth of the dominant Western man and the "emasculated asian male" which provides countless fodder for gender studies majors casting about for thesis-paper material, I, who try to be so careful about these things, am I slipping into my very own dismissive stance vis-a-vis Japanese men!? Of course I will not fight him - despite my best attempts to prove otherwise to myself, I am simply not an aggressive individual -

- I remember once when I was much younger - in middle school, if memory serves, or perhaps even younger, I forget - I got it in my mind that as a boy I should know how to fight. Or at least be a bit "tougher", I forget, and the transient thoughts of 12 year olds are hardly coherent at the moment of their conception, let alone suffer kindly the harsh passage of later attempts at recollection - but at any rate I remembered wanting to take up taekwondo or karate or something to that effect. Perhaps it was a fascination with ninjas, I don't know - to this day I wonder why I didn't consider something more "mainstream" like boxing - but at any rate, simply "wanting" to take up a sport - let alone one filled with violence - was hardly going to cause anything to get done in my house - my parents - mother in particular - were of what could kindly be termed the "anything but progressive" mindset, and "extracurricular" activities - that is to say, anything besides going to school and coming straight home after school and studying until bed time - was considered to be wasteful and unneccessary.

I still remember to this day my briefest forays into manipulation - the brilliant plan was hatched to tell my parents that I had been "beat up" in school, this, despite the fact that I had nary a mark on my body (no doubt I had probably considered smacking myself in the face a'la Edward Norton in Fight Club, but had chickened out. The movie, obviously wasn't around at the time or else it may have served as an impetus to my courage). I forget the particulars of the actual implementation but it worked - I wonder if on some level it affected the perverse sense of pride they took in "our family" (I often got the feeling that the "outpost mentality" that one occasionally reads about in 1st generation immigrant families - you know, alone in a strange (hostile?) country, determined to hold on to "the traditions, religion, morals and beliefs of our heritage (there's that nettlesome word again)" and all that jazz - didn't pervade all aspects of our family's decision making, whether we - they? - were cognisant of it or not) - I am certain that I must have embellished the details just so to invoke some sense of outrage or ill-expressed parental concern, or perhaps some thought that "no child of mine is going to get beat up in school...!" (read: "There's no way we're going to lose" - whether "lose" in the literal sense, or more figuratively as in "lose face", I suppose I shall never know and I doubt my parents do either) - but at any rate, the plan worked. Following an extremely awkward attempt at male bonding wherein my father - his discomfort plainly visible on his face, even to me at such a young age - attempted to "teach me how to fight" (an incident I tend to look upon somewhat more kindly in recent years as the full sense of "fatherly knowledge" I shall be required to clumsily impart on my children at some point in the future beings to impress itself upon me), some short time passed and eventually my brother and I were enrolled in taekwondo class - while the credit cannot be given entirely to myself (the desire to be a ninja is suprisingly strong amongst all young boys) I do recall this as one of my first attempts at willful manipulation, which I suppose I ought to apologise for at this moment. But I'm good at it actually - especially with older people - old women in particular (don't read that in a perverse way you sick bastards) - a skill which my bosses at a distributing company I later worked at tried to exploit, trying to use me to bilk old grandparents in retirement homes out of thousands of dollars for overpriced vacumme cleaners they neither needed nor wanted. But I digress...

- Anyway back to this J-fool, his posturing and my borderline-existentialist examination of self. I don't know what it is about his approach - the lack of direct confrontation, the irritating sing-songy qualities of his tone, his dismissive attitude that reeked of barely concealed racism and arrogance, the orientalist meme that suggests western men are alphas and japanese men are betas - I don't know, but I feel this anger welling up in me and I'm about to trip - want to start hauling out the fuck-yous, the "who the fuck is you", the "you wanna start something"'s, the whole nine yards.

I suppose it'd be a good time to mention what he was going on about in the first place - while I couldn't understand the details of his dialect laden country-man-speak, essentially he was pissed because we were parking in this unmarked area and he thought we should buy a spot - that our car obstructs passage in and out of the parking area (which it does not) - an accusation made all the more suprising by the fact that this man was getting into a taxi and so obviously did not own a car himself...! I think this must have been one of the primary things that incited such rage in me, since basically he had no vested interest in telling us where or how to park - none, save that smug self-satisfaction and feeling of arrogance that Japanese (men, usually, I'm sad to say) get when "putting the foreigner in their place". It's ironic, I should mention, that this post which I originally started writing intending to defend the Japanese against vehement Chinese and Korean accusations of arrogance and xenophobia should actually culminate in me recounting my very own encounter with ingrained Japanese racism on a bright, sunny, almost-summery day.

Now, I don't intend to get into full blown discussion of how it is that I picked up on the racist/arrogant undercurrents to this man's mush-mouthed berating - suffice it to say that you know when someone's hating on you for something neutral and when someone's hating on you for something racial. At any rate, after my little gap into self-introspection closed and the foreign feeling of wanting to start hurling "fuck you's" across the parking lot faded as rapidly as it had appeared, I still felt indignant, mostly at the racism streaming across the lot at Tennis and I. I wanted to defend us - to point out the fact that lots of Japanese park here everyday and he never says anything to them, the fact that she only parked here overnight after everyone else was already in bed, the fact that we were actually on our way out the driveway right this second, the fact that he would never have taken such an arrogant, racist tone if we were Japanese and not foreign, to hightlight the rudeness and arrogance in his brusque, aggressive tones of speech, point out that a simple polite request would have sufficed, to ask what kind of human being starts their very first encounter ever with another by screaming, yelling, berating and threatening, to drag out the painfully obvious fact that when the Chinese and Koreans are burning Japanese flags on the street and hurling bottles at the embassy walls, they are not, in fact, protesting textbooks, but rather this man - and all his arrogant, uneducated, racist ilk - right here standing in front of me screaming obscenities across the parking lot with that haughty dismissive glare iand upturned nose and air of elitist superiority (vis-a-vis the gaijin "dogs") that so many Japanese secretly harbor.

But I didn't do any of that. Instead, I just listened. My words, my protestations, my self-righteous smackdowns, indignant accusations and impassioned defenses curled up in my throat and staring across the parched parking lot - the black concrete already reflecting the slightest shimmer from the glaring overhead summer sun, I swallowed each and every one down my throat, as my girlfriend sat patiently in the car beside me and the taxi driver looked on with an impenetrable face at the scene unfolding before him. I mumbled an apology, and the man, swatting it away, continued on with his diatribe before finally, I sank into the car and close the door, his vitrolic stream cut abruptly short as the rubber gaskets mated with a metallic slam and accompanying gust of hot, stale air. The taxi drove off and out the parking lot as the man shot us one final dirty glare, no doubt rattling off about all the foreigners in Japan and how they are the root of all evil to a driver who I can only hope against hope - most likely a futile hope - is more open minded that the pontificating passenger in his back seat.

We drove off to breakfast after that, determined to salvage the rest of the day, but for me, the day was already ruined - the spirit broken, the mind rent asunder, spinning, tumbling pieces and fragments tossing jagged and crumbled glinting reflections off that beating, ceaseless acrid summer sun, and just like that, this one man destroyed all the carefully thought out and plotted gains that summer had made with his careless words and once again my soul became heavy with dread of that glaring, vomit inducing harshness, the all-revealing acid wash of thick yellow heat invading creeping and pouring into every last ravine, crook and cranny, banishing all shadow and velvet security blanket to place everything in sharp, unbearable relief.

I said nothing to the man because there was nothing I could say. To speak up in Japan is to invite the full force of societal repression to land squarely atop your unsuspecting face* and to speak out as a foreigner - no matter how grave the injustice - is to akin to committing suicide. You have less rights than a dog really and they know that - and hopefully so do you, as well. The naive and the and optomistic - those that still hold on to the great lie of Japan as a place of peace and the Japanese as inherently nice folks - they suffer the greatest of all when their closely held beliefs are laid on the alter of their pale, helpless gaijiness and smashed into countless pieces.

*As the saying in Japanese goes: deru kui wa utarareru - "The nail that sticks out will be hammered"

What could I have said to him? All he had to do was complain to my landlord - anything, nothing, whatever - he could have literally made it up and it wouldn't matter - and they could evict me. This is, after all, the same landlords who automatically blamed the solitary two foreigners in their building for the mountains of mis-sorted trash obviously left by the other 68 japanese residents of the building, the same sort of people who would rather scapegoat a 23 year old girl than face the possibility that a Japanese child might be a delinquent, the same sort of people who refuse to extend a friend's lease because his bar tends to attract a lot of foreigners. And what recourse would I have? None, sadly. To be a foreigner in Japan is to have no rights, no protectors, no allies - least of all the incompetent police - the same police who expressed amazement at my ability to write my address and quizzed me on my ability to eat raw fish when all I wanted them to do was find my goddamn bike. (Stolen, I might add, by Japanese teenagers). In fact, should I have caused too much trouble, said man could simply have walked over to the police station and told them I assaulted him - or anything he wanted - and regardless of proof or evidence, I - as the foriegner - would have been in the wrong. I would be lucky to avoid jailtime, let alone escape with my visa.

To be a foreigner in Japan is a difficult thing. It means you are vulnerable and alone, without rights and hung out to dry in a society that is openly hostile and dismissive of you. It means abandoning any notions of "justice" or "fairness" and it means accepting a system that is the very definition of corrupt and inefficient. It means to exist essentially at the whim of racist overlords, to slide between the twin razors of xenophobia and arrogance, to occupy a precarious perch over a steep cliff from which there is no escape. It is to embrace vulnerability and helplessness as a way of life, to give up all basic dignities as a human being, to lose bits of yourself and your soul and to abandon your dignity and subsist as a bottom feeder, the lowest of the low in a hierarchy that never ceases to stop putting you in your place blow by bloody blow, to take the jobs that they decide are beneath them (if you're a non-white foreigner: factory work), that they decide to permit you to work (if you're a white foreigner: eikaiwa) or that they force you to work (if you're a non-white foreign female: prostitution). It's to be kicked in the teeth and dimissed as if a dog and to be forced to struggle, claw and scratch for whatever scraps happen to fall from the table in order to have something to eke out a miserable, hopeless existence on. I suppose one might say that it means to sell pieces of your sould that you may very well never get back.

They often say that living abroad helps you see your life back home in a new light, and sitting there at breakfast in glum silence, overchewing my food into a tasteless mush as if through my zealous mastication I might somehow reclaim the sparkle and vivrance I had initially felt this morning when the first rays of light teased their way through my curtains and danced across my sleeping face, snuggled so warm and comfortingly in the futon, before leaving the house, before that man, before those harsh, bitter words, I began to think about just how true this really is.

I never really thought all that much about the immigrant experience back home - sure, technically we were immigrants, but that experience is tainted too much the personal trappings of having lived this particular example - plus we were relatively fortuitous in so far as we had good jobs, good educations and a good shot at life, even if we were a bit poor initially. I got the standard "diversity" "horizon-broadening" spiel during the course of my education as well of course - migrant workers, farm workers revolt, assimiliation issues, ingrained socio-economic limiters, discriminatory health care, slave labor, phillipine sweat shops, all of that. I mean, I Had heard it - had it filter through my mind and sit in my brain and regurgitated it on tests and essays and in erudite soundbites inserted at appropriate pauses in the conversation - but never before had I really understood what it must be like to be a foreigner in another country - strangers in a strange land, illegal or not, precarious, vulnerable, scared - at the whims of the majority and stripped of the legal protections afforded the "native" masses. To be forced to scrape, struggle and scrap for a "living" that could hardly be termed that and to fear that you will be deported from the country you struggled so hard to come to if you dare stand up for yourself.

I don't have anything profound to say on this subject and I'm afraid that after typing so much my fingers are beginning to fail me, but sometimes it's the simplest statements that are the best, and all I can say is that suddenly I am looking back at people trying to make it America - the "tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free" - as the saying goes, in a new light and with a new sense of compassion - I suppose I should thank that man, the screaming spittle-spewing insolent racist middle aged j-man who ruined summer for me - in his harsh words I suppose this most obvious of understandings which I had previously overlooked was suddenly brought into the sharpest of relief under those unflinching beating heated rays.

I think we should all be required to spend a few years living abroad - I mean everyone - Japanese, Americans - definitely all our leaders. Then again, it is a thankless undertaking 0 you bring those pithy mantras and lofty catchphrases - "globalisation", "internationalization" - "cross cultural exchange" and you give them form, manfest them into things, realities all about you, screaming J-men, corrupt systems, racist landlords and all that - you start to think that you have to be a special sort of stupid to keep going back to a place that keeps kicking you in the teeth.

I suppose the line between "stupid" and what - I don't know - whatever it is those proponents of globalisation and internationalisation and post-modernism envision as the fuzzy warm hearted chewy core that makes moving abroad and giving it a go such a noble undertaking - is rather thin. Somedays you're on one side, somedays you're on the other. That's just the way it goes, I guess.

My pessemistic ramblings aside, I think this would be a good opportunity to cue off of the "globalisation" and "internationalisation" bits (along with my propensity for including extraneous footnotes and meandering tangents my inability to construct a decent transition between topics was one of my greatest weaknesses as a writer - or so claimed one of my English teachers way back in the day. I should add to this, I am utterly incapable of being concise to save my life.) of the paragraph above and get to what I promised to do last week, which was translate the textbook at the center of the controversial mess between China, Korea and Japan.

Below I excerpted the parts that I thought were relevant to the discussion - namely the pages dealing with Japan's actions in China during the war, particularly in Manchuria and Nanking, the two areas where China accuses Japan of glossing over the facts. I'm going to refrain from commentary and just give it to you as is. I apologize in advance for my translation - I did my best, but I was very busy this past week and didn't have a lot of time to devote to translating the book. I am certain there are some errors, though the gist of it is more or less correct (I hope) - I am including the Japanese text afterwards for those of you who are interested in original source material.

Of course, if you find any errors, please don't hesitate to contact me and let me know.

The following is my english translation of "Atarashii Sekai no Rekishii" pages 168-170. Areas enclosed in [brackets] are passages for which the exact nuances of the translation escape me.

The following is the original Japanese text from pages 168-170