Teacher-san: Crutcher in the center of class photo courtesy of kathy crutcher

uring my last month in Japan, I bought my first Japanese T-shirt from a store in a crooked alley in Nagoya. The shirt has a die on the front, with three faces visible: two boasting the stars and stripes of America, the other bearing the proud red dot of Japan. America covers the front and side; Japan is on top, slanted. Across the back, in forty-eight-point Times New Roman type: "I played at some game of chance." I scooped it up and walked to the cashier without even stopping to finger the fabric.

Moving to Japan had definitely been a gamble.

I spent one year teaching English in a small town in central Honshu as a participant of the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. I knew almost nothing about the country before I arrived. In fact, the one thing I knew was a sense of mystery: Japan is different. Not merely that they eat raw fish and remove their shoes, but that their judgments, their values, are different. I craved the unfamiliar. One may think this an escape from one's self, but I saw it more as a search for it: What are my beliefs? What are my assumptions? These things go unnoticed until they are cut out and held against a new background--a lone red dot on a sea of white. I went to Japan to learn what it is to be an American.

	Crossing Boundaries
More Information Official JET Homepage JET Alumni Association Homepage The Japan Times Online

Of course, the first thing I learned was that America was everywhere. In my town of 38,000 people, there were two McDonald's, a Big Boy, and four Circle K's. The video stores rented almost exclusively American movies. Two nights a week at eleven o'clock, I could watch Beverly Hills 90210 or ER, and either the NFL, NBA, or pro baseball was on every night. Even our alma mater was everywhere: I taught four different students wearing Duke T-shirts, and once saw a businessman riding his bike home in a Blue Devils windbreaker. I might as well have been in Hoboken, New Jersey, instead of Hozumi, Japan. Except that one child thought Duke was a rock group, 90210 was listed as Bebiri Hiisu, and Circle K served hot grilled octopus next to the cash register. This was not home.

English, too, was everywhere, but in a similarly distorted form. Vending machines encouraged us to "Refresh Up!" and promised "eminently drinkable flavor extravagance" within. A popular drink was called "Calpis," a name far too close to bovine urine to be enjoyed. My ATM card had a picture of Paddington Bear on it and proclaimed: "He will eat marmalade on its own or more usually in a marmalade sandwich. He usually keeps a marmalade sandwich handy in his suitcase or under his hat." When I pointed out to my supervisor that neither Paddington nor his peculiar eating habits had any bearing whatsoever on my financial matters, Hattori-sensei responded, "But English means good image." The meaning of the English, of course, was left to the imagination.

It could be said that the essence of Japan is the ability to import outside influences and transform them into something uniquely Japanese. This is not a new phenomenon. Throughout their history, the Japanese have "borrowed" and Nipponized ideas from other cultures. From China, they acquired the foundations for their political institutions, their writing system, the Confucian code of ethics, and Buddhism, to name a few. Yet the borrowing is not quite robbery--it's more paraphrasing than plagiarism. For instance, in the ninth century, the Chinese characters were simplified into kana syllabaries to represent the Japanese language phonetically. Also, Buddhism eventually lost its otherworldly focus to recognize more religious significance in daily life. Things were imported, but then altered according to Japanese needs.

This borrowing continues in full force today, though often from the West instead of Japan's Near East neighbors. Katakana is a syllabary used entirely for imported foreign words, like erebeta (elevator) or aisukurimu (ice cream). The average Japanese knows more than a thousand such words. However, they are often so distorted or shortened that they become new entities entirely: radio-cassette player becomes rajikase, and so on. As one Japanese friend pointed out, when she writes "McDonald's"--Makudonarudusu--it's not English anymore, it's 100 percent Japanese. Is it okay then for them to call it their own?

My parents came to visit me and their tour guide in Kyoto told them, "We Japanese are best at taking ideas from others, make it better." I guess so. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and DoCoMo made it into a six-inch mobile that sends e-mail, plays MP3s, and takes digital photos.

This constant borrowing from other cultures made me, and many of my fellow JETs, uneasy: Are we losing the real Japan? A friend of mine wrote an article for our local JET publication in which he quoted Matthew 15:26: "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Another friend, who taught at a low-level technical high school, lamented that his students were forced to take English class every day but didn't have a single period of Japanese history. And one day while on my way to a Japanese language and culture class, I stopped dead in my tracks to read the back of a rain poncho worn by a twenty-something Japanese woman. It read, "HEDONISM: It's just that I don't agree with Japan tradition anymore. It's the way to life." It's hard to know how to accept such a statement, as it's quite possible the wearer had little idea what it meant. That night in my journal I wrote with the heavy heart of a missionary whose mission had gotten out of hand: How did this happen? Is it happening everywhere?

I sent an e-mail message to a friend of mine, a Japanese woman who lived in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, for four years and then returned to Tokyo. I contacted her often for cultural comparisons, since she was so good at poking holes in my generalizations. Her response this time was no exception. She wrote, "Oh yes, invisible things can be strong features of culture. The States is a new country, and visible things are from all over the world. But 'independence' and 'freedom' are really strong features of American culture. We have invisible 'spiritual' culture too, in Japan. We value it more. Even though [in America] there are many Chinese restaurants, and many kids are wearing Pokemon T-shirts, that's not intruding American culture, I think. Don't worry. Japan never die!"

The pattern of Japan's interaction with the outside world is perhaps best characterized as a series of pendulum swings: eager openness followed by conservative closed doors. In the seventh through ninth centuries, rØugakusei (overseas students) were highly respected as "bearers of enlightenment from the lands beyond the sea." In the seventeenth century, any Japanese caught trying to visit the outside world was sentenced to death. Underlying these changing attitudes is a deep sense of ambivalence and insecurity about Japan's place in the world that can be felt clearly even today. I wrote in my journal of my discomfort at being placed upon a pedestal for being foreign, while simultaneously feeling looked down upon for the same reason. It was as though the pendulum swings spanned historical centuries, and modern nanoseconds as well.

Often I am asked what it was like being an American in Japan, and I find it so difficult to box the daily contradictions into one neat little answer. It would be much easier if they would ask pointed questions: Were you treated like a celebrity? Yes. Were you discriminated against? Yes. Did they admire Americans? Yes. Did they think Americans were arrogant, or dirty? Yes, and yes again.

The dichotomy of attitudes toward America did not escape the children in my classrooms of grades 1-9. Some days I saw my students as being trapped in an "internationalization" tug-of-war, never sure which way they should be pulling. I worried: Would they just remain caught in the middle, fraught with tension, soon to snap?

One day I asked a little girl in the fourth grade to stand up during class. She was very shy, but smiling, and glanced around nervously as she pushed back her chair. From this position I could see her entire T-shirt, and therefore the entire statement printed upon it: "Americans do it better." The word "Americans" was in bold, and sat atop a boxy version of our flag. I asked her, in Japanese, if she knew what it meant. She shook her head "no," but pointed to the ribbon in her hair: red, white, and blue. It matched her bow. She grinned wider. I looked back at the Japanese homeroom teacher in the room with me, and she too smiled proudly, thinking I was pleased.

Later that same day, I taught a sixth-grade class, one that always gave me trouble. A group of boys in the class were particularly stubborn and refused to cooperate when we played our simple English games, like "'When is your birthday?' Bingo." This day was no different. While the rest of the class broke into groups, an angry-looking boy in the corner played with his pencil case. He was zipping and unzipping when I approached. "Why don't you join your group?" I asked. He only stared. "Come on, it's a fun game," I tried again, pointing to two girls laughing. He said something to a boy beside him in Japanese, and I said back to him, "No Japanese in English class, remember?" And this time he spoke to me, though still in his native tongue: "I am Japanese. I live in Japan. I speak Japanese." He turned away from me then, and I let him.