He's sick of getting spam!
It`s Jean Claude van Damme!
After passing through the rather drinksy oriented feast of Halloween, we have now tentatively taken our first steps into the Christmas season. The only change that that brings for me is that now Meg will not allow us to pass a 1 euro store without detouring in to purchase some kind of Christmas paraphernalia.
If I hear one more "Traditional Canadian Bandito Trumpet Solo"
I think I'm gonna puke.
Apart from that though, Christmas spirit will remain thin on the bloody ground here all the way up until I begin my biannual pilgrimage via bullet-train and intercontinental flight to the aul shebeen back home.
As for the weather we are still on the shorts wearing side of 20 degrees, though the daylight here is spent by before 6 o'clock, if there is any wandering around and apologising to everybody to be done here, it needs to be a pre-dinner affair. A big problem for foreigners here is that compared to the monumental importance of the holiday back home where a good sixth of the year is dedicated to working up to the 4 hour orgy of booze, meat, varied potato dishes and familial passive aggression, the Japanese are very much just playing along.
On basically any topic, Christmas included, you could well be regaled with how much the Japanese like so and so and how so and so is such a frightfully big deal over here.
Well... yes and no.
Japan is nation of enthusiasts and you probably couldn't think of something that a Japanese person hasn't dedicated his/her (usually his) adult life and every waking hour to. Furthermore there are legions more Japanese who only let the psychotic brown bear of their passion out to play once they've punched out of work and slipped their black suit onsey over their heads.
This leads to a situation where individuals end up ignoring large swathes of world culture for their exclusive obsession, while at the same time paying lip service to everybody else's obsessions just so we in the rest of the world don't think they're a mentalist shut in. Which they almost definitely are.
So even though your image of the Japanese Christmas might be balls-out festivity and more Christmosity than one could shake a bell covered stick at, the real Japanese christmas is limited to strawberry cake and the ubiquitous KFC Christmas bucket.
Ready. Steady. Kill me!
Oh, excuse me "Party Barrel." <shudders>
As ever I must stop myself from continuing onwards in this ranting manner before this email degenerates further into me bighting down on a leather belt while emitting furious hissing noises. A neutral anecdote then shall we?
A week or so ago we were playing a game as part of one of my classes in Junior high. I say "my" classes but for the most part in JH I have to do only occasional planning and even then the teacher usually will stay there throughout for translations and to join in with whatever it is I'm at. Usually when I'm in control this is a game designed to punish the weak, humiliate the slow and generally make as real as possible any inner secret fears the students may entertain in the darkest corner of their soul where only God and their mother is meant to ever see.
So the teacher made up this game which for all intents and purposes was an English language version of the game "Go Fish." For those who don't know it, everyone gets five cards and if you have any pairs you put them down in a pile of your own. On your turn you can ask another player if they have any of a kind of card e.g. "any 2's?"
They either give you a 2 of their and if they don't have it they say "Go fish" and you take one out of the communal pile. Winner is the one with the most cards.
A game so simple it makes Poker look like threading dental floss through your ears.
Anyway, in the Western version, it is a simple winner take all system. Survival of the fittest. If you're crap, there'll be no one crying for you Sonny Jim when you're out on the slag heap with all the other human meat and me and all the other Go Fish success stories shoot straight to the top of the pile building our grand legacies on the bones and crushed skulls of those who used to be our peers.
So much the better for the winner, but there can be only one.
Cause he says it in the film so he does!
In the Japanese version there is only one LOSER where the person who is left with the unpaired Joker at the end of the game. If you'll indulge me...
This is a pretty sweet microcosm of the groupwellness/anxiety quality of Japanese life. Even though, life is basically pretty good for everybody as in case you haven't checked the markets lately Japan is kicking all our asses even with about 10% of it getting decidedly soggy, irradiated and razed like Carthage last March(never heard of Carthage you say? Kinda my point.). Employment, quality of life and all those things are pretty darned good and as the Japanese are all about group harmony (or "wa") it seems that everything will be good forever.
Butawaitheresmore!
With the general assumed happiness of everyone comes an implicit fear of being that odd one out who for whatever reason gets dealt a shit sandwich by fate and is expected to chow down on that for approximately their whole life.
An ever present anxiety monkey sitting on your back whispering in your ear, "It could be you any day now." Furthermore this anxiety feeds into the Japanese obsession with luck which links to Buddhism, slot machines and a waving cat statue. The game is a terribly rich metaphor indeed.
In other news, I have repeatedly forgot to mention the high occurrence of midgets in Kyoto a few weeks ago and shall do so here. Midgets ahoy!
Midget the first: was riding a mini-motorbike in full mini-leathers.
Midget the second: feeling bad after cackling loudly at the motorcycling midget, I decided to just look straight ahead as another midget approached me in the street. Walking in the opposite direction, they seemed to be trying to not look at the foreigner and promptly tripped face first onto some stone steps.
Muy bueno.
Yes Pecan!
Exclusive Obsession in Japan
