Pikachu n' stuff

As something I've resented for years, well before I attained the legal bar-hopping status of adulthood, I resent being made to feel like a child. Like when the project class spends hours having us discuss the difference between です・ます体 and だ体 (for the non-Japanese speakers, that's a topic mastered in first year Japanese). Or when we spend hours of class time to learn how to input data into an excel file, with Mori sensei hawkishly watching over our shoulders and telling us how 上手 we are--when we're given instruction sheets in Japanese for a skill any student whose ever touched a computer could figure out, there's no reason we need our hands held. If anything, doing the same task on our own would be a valuable exercise to read Japanese and follow practical directions.

In many ways, though, I'm limited to the speech of a child. While from certain perspectives, I've learned the particular vocabulary to play through a text heavy videogame or read an article on Japanese politics or take a stand on a nuclear nonproliferation treaty--ways of receiving and analyzing information--my adult perspective on these things is limited by how naturally I can string together words to sound like I'm actually speaking Japanese. My skill set is like I skipped a couple developmental stages- I'm trying so hard to run before I can walk steadily. So I'm increasingly realizing the importance of small and seemingly unimportant conversations, the kind that are totally everyday and trivial, as a step to master all the little things like intonation and smoothness and accent that no amount of high level textbook study will teach me.

And now to backtrack on this whole "I'm an adult wah wah wah" theme: I went to Pokemon Center Osaka today and it was the cutest thing ever. I bought a Pikachu plush toy. I chose this particular size and pose of Pikachu (over the other 5 bajillion options) because of his expression. Its a dumb sort of vapidness, having no idea whats going on but its okay because everything is easier when you're cute.

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

I can relate to Pikachu.

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

Please appreciate that this is probably the creepiest t-shirt design I've ever seen. The front says "Slumber Party". Stop stealing children, Hypno!

Even though its beyond my ability, I'm trying to stretch myself to tackle complicated topics: for the project class, I'm investigating a topic that I hope would prepare me for my senior thesis, which will somehow pertain to the the topic of gay rights and identity in Japan.

In brief, Japan is weird about the gays. Its not an active or violent discrimination like in American history, but the adult and professional worlds tend to remain super closeted and passively discriminatory through corporate job structures and marriage pressures. But then there's all sorts of contradictions, aside from the way popular male fashion screams out fey to a western perspective. Drag (both cross-dressing straight comedians and transgender celebrities) is everywhere, and it seems like its not treated as a big deal. So though its among the topics that polite people don't ever talk about, drag has a privileged place of respect(?) (fame?) (notoriety?) in the media world.

My (as-of-yet-unsubstantiated) theory is that gayness in Japan is acceptable so long as the individuals involved still fall into clearly defined masculine and feminine roles. As in, a transgender relationship wouldn't be perceived as bad, so long as a man made a clean transition to a female role and avoided that gray space of two masculine men together. So even if you have transgender beauty pageants and Oprah-style talk shows where cross-dressing Miwa Akihiro tells straight celebrities how to handle their feelings, the man-as-woman persona can be safely compartmentalized into existing gender roles, a benign place where it doesn't challenge the definition of straight men and their expected relationships. That way it can be enjoyed purely for its entertainment value without considering it too seriously.

For the project class I'm conducting some research into how people feel about trans and cross-dressing on TV, including whether they think this kind of gender performance in the media world has any connection to sexuality, and whether its appropriate to label this stuff as "gay" or "unusual" or something else altogether. Distributing surveys to random students during lunch was awkward because...
a) intruding on randos to take a survey is worse than the usual ostracism of being an outsider in a lunch room that already resembles Mean Girls, and
b) because my topic is more challenging(?) (off-putting?) (outside these students' frame of reference?) than other topics, and
c) people will inevitably make assumptions about me and my interests based on the questions I ask.

So I distributed a bunch of surveys today, and there was only one table of people I actually knew somewhat. The guy I knew best at that table, one of the other Japanese roommates for the program, gave me a cheerful "はい、お釜” as he returned the survey. I think my friend said "here you go, fag". I don't know how he meant it, and I certainly don't get the subtleties of many terms. I think he said it jokingly with the assumption that I didn't understand? Granted, I often mishear things, plus it was one of those moments where you don't entirely hear what someone says at first but your brain replays the sound clip two or three times and then comprehends it once the moment has passed. So really I'm no more than about 40% sure that was even the word he used. I don't know how I feel about this vague event. Am I bothered? Am I creating an incident out of what was probably nothing?

Either way, the Japanese Senseis have been obnoxiously glib about it when I tried to discuss it with them. The first teacher's reaction was 「それだとしたら、ひどい！」 (if it were that, that's mean!" and then the second didn't respond much beyond 「ああそうですか？」 ("oh really?"). I would've imagined they'd be a little more righteously indignant on my behalf. It's not as if this a damaging experience, but maybe this indifference says something about the broader lack of awareness towards gay subjects in Japan.

And now a number of unrelated (but pretty!) pictures. Blogger's been hatin' recently and won't let me upload photos through its own interface, so I'm resorting to increasingly ghetto methods of getting them to show up in the post.

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

At HEP 5, we found a wall for hanging little 短冊 cards for 七夕祭り (Tanabata Festival, 7/7). I enjoyed that these two wished for "world domination" and "to grow to 170 cm", respectively.