Saturday, April 15, 2006
Showdown in North Korea, silkworms taste nothing like silk, bloody fangs and mickey ears: Osaka 3 (November 2003)
I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written. A lot has happened, including a trip to Korea, a soccer tournament, and a crazy Halloween. Starting in order of occurrence:
KOREA
I went to Korea in mid-October with my friend Jan Marie, who’s a Kiwi (that’s a person from New Zealand, or ‘Noo-gee-ran-doh’ as it’s known to our students here). We decided to go very much on the spur-of-moment, we had a three-day weekend, which we extended to five days by taking some of our holiday. The flight was really cheap even though we bought our tickets so late because Korea is only two hours from Japan. We flew into Seoul, which was like a breath of fresh air after Osaka. There were mountains all around, and actual trees in the downtown area. Amazing. In Seoul we spent several days touring the city, visiting some beautiful palaces and also cool markets where they sell everything from spices and jade to fake gucci and leather jackets, alongside preserved snakes in giant jars of wine. I bought a real backpacker backpack for $30, which was filled to the brim by then end of the trip with all the other stuff I bought. At the hundreds of stalls that line the streets we sampled strange foods like compressed fish paste on a stick, candied sweet potatoes, and of course kimchee. Kimchee is like Korean ketchup, it’s everywhere and goes with everything. It’s really sour, salty and spicy, which as far as I could tell are the big three flavors of Korean cooking. By the end of the trip I was calling them the unholy trinity because my stomach had started to pickle from the inside out, but in moderation Korean food is excellent. As part of our culinary adventure, we tried to eat “one of everything” from all the vendors we passed, and this included silkworms, which are boiled in huge vats by the hundreds. I purchased a little paper Dixie cup full of them, and we ate them by spearing them on toothpicks and popping them between our teeth. They explode a little bit in your mouth and taste like kind of like dirt (sort of like gushers candy, only infinitely more disgusting.) To be honest we only got through half of the cup. But I’d still say that it was a good effort.
THE DMZ
But the coolest thing that I did in Korea by far was touring the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the border with North Korea. We had to go through a lot of effort to book the tour because there are only two tour agencies authorized to go into the DMZ. There were multiple, painfully-long-and-expensive international phone calls conducted in extremely broken English and Japanese. But it was completely worth it, because at the end we got to cross the border and actually be IN North Korea. (Technically.) (For about 5 minutes.) We crossed the border inside what must be the most heavily guarded empty room on the planet. The guard-posts of the two nations are about 100 yards apart, and the building is located right in the middle and shared by both sides. It’s the same room where they signed the armistice to end the war. Both North and South Korea can have visitors go into the building, but never at the same time. (Because North Korea is a closed society, its people are not allowed any contact with people from outside. There are actually many Korean families that have been split apart, and family members have not been allowed any contact with each other since the country was divided.) On both sides of the borderline, there were guards, all extremely well armed. The most impressive were the sentinels: on the South Korean side there are two at all times. They stand perfectly immobile facing the border line, with exactly half their body behind the side of the building (to provide less of a target) and their arms rigid with hands a few inches away from gun holsters, ready to draw and shoot at any instant. Their North Korean counterparts were similar, though their pose was not quite as dramatic. They have been staring each other down like that for almost 50 years. Inside the armistice room itself there was another guard who was standing like a statue in front of the door leading outside to North Korea. He was wearing black aviator sunglasses, a pith helmet, and big black shiny boots, and he didn’t move an inch or change his facial expression even a tic the whole time we were in there. The soldier was for our own protection they said. I guess some tourists just might be stupid enough to try to dart out the door and grab a handful of North Korean soil or something like that. This would not have been advisable, as these people are definitely NOT messing around: the next stop on the tour was the site of the infamous “tree-trimming incident.” This was the spot where there has once been a tree, located between the two countries and belonging to neither side. Some South Korean soldiers tried to trim it one day, which apparently angered the North Korean soldiers so much that they marched out and hacked the tree trimmers to death with their own axe. The next day the South Koreans put the entire nation’s military on high alert, informed the Americans, the French, etc., and then sent a huge, heavily armed force out into the DMZ to chop down the offending tree. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried. We finished up the tour with lunch in the mess hall that serves the U.S. military personnel who are stationed on the base. Aside from being obscenely excited by the Shakey’s buffet-style carb-fest (pizza! spaghetti! mashed potatoes! macaroni and cheese!) we also got to talk with several of the American soldiers. The most striking thing about them was their age: mostly they were between 18 and 22. We left the DMZ feeling slightly shaken, like we’d just come back from an alternate reality where the normal logic we take for granted in our daily lives didn’t apply. We were quite relieved to get back to Seoul’s city streets and forget that just a few miles away this life-or-death game was being played out by boys the same age as our little sisters.
All in all, Korea was fantastic, and I would highly recommend anyone who has the chance to go there. The food is great if you don’t overdo it and there are some amazingly beautiful places to see and great cultural things to do (I don’t have time or space to do justice to the show we saw which was sort of a Korean version of “Stomp” except funnier, and with kitchen utensils). The culture also was a lot of fun for us to experience because it could not have been more different from Japanese. People were much more straightforward and down-to-earth, and their fashion also seemed much more in line with what we are used to in the West. We saw very few women in torturously high-heeled hooker boots, and not even a single man was sporting an orange mullet-perm, the preferred fashion statement of the hip young Japanese male. I really could go on and on about Japanese ‘fashion’, but that will have to be a subject for another email!
ALT SOCCER TOURNEY
The soccer tournament I played in the weekend after Korea was also a lot of fun. The first one was organized by some JETs a few years back, and it’s grown so much there are teams of JETs from all over the country, including people who traveled fourteen hours to get there. We only had to travel seven hours, which was plenty. We actually chartered a bus to transport all of us girls. We had high hopes for this tourney: our boys team won the entire thing last year and this year as well, and we were hoping that our girls team would do the same. Osaka has the highest concentration of JETs in the country; there are 58 of us within the city limits alone, and another 140 living in Osaka prefecture, so it’s easier for us to make teams, and get together once a week to practice. Both our A-team and B-team ended up doing pretty well (I played on the B-team, as any of you who have seen me kick a ball could probably have guessed) but we were both knocked out by a team called the ‘Onnabelievables’. (Onna means woman in Japanese.) Our team name, by the way, is ‘Ohhhh-SAKA!’ which sort of sounds like “Oh….Soccer!” when said properly, though it’s still pretty stupid any way you pronounce it :P. Even though we didn’t win, the tourney was a great chance to get out of the city and see some more of Japan. The matches took place in this tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, and we stayed at a beautiful Japanese-style hotel, and played on gorgeous fields completely surrounded by mountains and trees in fall colors. It was also a great chance to meet other JETs from all over and compare experiences (and conclude that we are pretty darn lucky to be living where we are).
HALOWEEN: THE GAIJIN TAKE OVER THE INSTITUTION or EVIL DEAD MICKEY'S REVENGE
Even though I’m still not even into November, Halloween will have to be the last thing I’ll talk about because this email is already way too long. Halloween in Osaka was… well… let’s just say it may well have been the best and bizarrest Halloween ever! Expats here seem to go all-out on certain holidays, no matter how much we try to assimilate to Japanese life the rest of the year. Maybe it’s a way to assert our own culture and rebel against the restrictions placed on us here, even if only for one night. Then we can willingly return to our normal day-to-day Japanese existence (an example of “liminal time”, for all you cultural anthropologists out there). Whatever the reason, the Halloween celebration organized by Osaka’s expat community is all-out madness and anarchy, carried out against one of the most cherished symbols of Japanese organization and efficiency: the railway system! Osaka’s complex network of trains and subways is a very important part of life here, and most people spend up to several hours a day commuting to and from work (not me, I bike everywhere, but that’s another story). On the train there is a very strict code of conduct that as far as I know is not spelled out anywhere, but is nevertheless easily observable, violation of which will earn you furtive yet disapproving glances (a main technique of Japanese social control… surprisingly effective.). Rule number one is: do NOT eat on the train. But can’t I take just a little nibble of this candy ba…NO! Don’t do it! Don’t even think about it! Don’t even LOOK at the candy bar. And for god’s sake don’t eat anything requiring chopsticks…. Oh no, you didn’t… you didn’t try to eat ramen noodles on the… oh god, you did. Rule number two: don’t talk. Don’t talk to the friends you came in with, don’t talk to yourself, and whatever you do, don’t talk to the people sitting standing or wedged next to you. The reasoning behind this rule is actually pretty logical: Japanese social interactions are governed by a lot of rules about politeness and hierarchy. It would be way too difficult to have to try to apply these rules for every new group of people on every train car. Furthermore, Japanese trains are ridiculously crowded, and people would probably rather pretend that they are not in contact with ten other bodies, without being reminded of this fact by having to make conversation. Being on the train is kind of like taking a break from socialization. People mostly just go into auto-pilot: they stare straight ahead with blank expressions on their faces, or they sleep. For a Japanese person this must be a relief, but for a westerner it can be stressful. Because while no one will talk at you, or even look at you directly, you are still being observed. You are interrupting the normal flow of the train routine by your very presence (and you are probably unwittingly committing some horrible social faux pas on top of that). There is a lot of pressure to conform in this situation, but conformity is often impossible because of the very fact that foreigners are bound to stand out, no matter how well we try to behave. Anyway, maybe because this is one of the places where we are made most conscious of our foreignness, on Halloween night, Osaka’s gaijin community completely takes over the city’s most famous train, the JR loop line. This is a train line run by a private rail company that makes a complete circuit of the city every 45 minutes. On the big night we turned up at 8:30 to the Osaka Station JR platform. The platform was already completely packed with revelers dressed in all manner of outrageous costumes. There were the standard fairys, witches, mummies, princesses, etc, and also many Japanese-inspired outfits: ninjas, samurai, power rangers, geisha, and Japanese school-girls, along with some Western-themed costumes: santa claus and elves, beauty and the beast (a Japanese girl and her gaijin boyfriend…) plus some costumes that expressed social commentary, however tastelessly: the child-molesting priest was a big hit. I went as “evil dead Mickey Mouse”. I made the costume all by myself for about $5 with materials purchased at (where else?) the 100-yen store. I had the white gloves, the little red shorts (with big yellow buttons pinned on), black tights, ears cut out of cardboard and taped to a headband, and the crowning glory: giant yellow slippers I was lucky enough to come across the day before, after having almost given up in despair. I also cut fangs out of white plastic, circled my eyes in black powder, and liberally applied blood to my face, mouth, and teeth. I also found a plastic Mexican “day of the dead” skull rattle, to which I glued little mouse ears, and I carried a plastic retractable dagger in my other hand. There was actually some logic behind this costume, however strange it may seem. Mickey Mouse is seen as a symbol of America, but he is also completely Japanese. He is the epitome of “genki”: the Japanese term for all that is perky, spunky, cute, and wholesome. Therefore he has been embraced in Japan as much if not more than he was ever loved by America. So why not have a little fun perverting this cherished cultural icon beloved by children and middle-aged single women everywhere? Back to the station platform, where several hundred gaijin, plus quite a few Japanese, waited in anticipation of the arrival of the 9:00 train: there were quite a few harried police officers there as well, who had obviously been advised in advance of the situation, but who seemed to have given up on all but the most basic crowd and damage control. The platform was packed. Peace was not maintained. Orderly lines did not form. People drank freely from beer cans, whiskey flasks, and various other colorful mixtures in 2 liter coke bottles. With the arrival of the train, everyone pushed and shoved their way onto the cars, inside which the chaos only intensified. Flasks were passed, strangers kissed, people were lifted into and out of overhead luggage racks. At every station great masses poured out of the cars, the goal being to get oneself and one’s friends, out, around the platform, and (ideally) back in the train again before the doors closed. My friends and I (about 10 other JET’s as well as three Japanese girls who play on the soccer team) rode the rails for about an hour and a half before retiring to a club, and a very good time was had by all. I usually don’t enjoy being one of large group of people behaving very badly, but I would not have missed this event for the world. It was a truly unique cultural experience! I’m here in Japan mostly to learn about Japanese culture, but it’s really surprised me how much I’ve been able to learn about my own culture here as well. There are some things you that are brought into much higher relief in the context of a foreign society. ¶ 9:32 PM
KOREA
I went to Korea in mid-October with my friend Jan Marie, who’s a Kiwi (that’s a person from New Zealand, or ‘Noo-gee-ran-doh’ as it’s known to our students here). We decided to go very much on the spur-of-moment, we had a three-day weekend, which we extended to five days by taking some of our holiday. The flight was really cheap even though we bought our tickets so late because Korea is only two hours from Japan. We flew into Seoul, which was like a breath of fresh air after Osaka. There were mountains all around, and actual trees in the downtown area. Amazing. In Seoul we spent several days touring the city, visiting some beautiful palaces and also cool markets where they sell everything from spices and jade to fake gucci and leather jackets, alongside preserved snakes in giant jars of wine. I bought a real backpacker backpack for $30, which was filled to the brim by then end of the trip with all the other stuff I bought. At the hundreds of stalls that line the streets we sampled strange foods like compressed fish paste on a stick, candied sweet potatoes, and of course kimchee. Kimchee is like Korean ketchup, it’s everywhere and goes with everything. It’s really sour, salty and spicy, which as far as I could tell are the big three flavors of Korean cooking. By the end of the trip I was calling them the unholy trinity because my stomach had started to pickle from the inside out, but in moderation Korean food is excellent. As part of our culinary adventure, we tried to eat “one of everything” from all the vendors we passed, and this included silkworms, which are boiled in huge vats by the hundreds. I purchased a little paper Dixie cup full of them, and we ate them by spearing them on toothpicks and popping them between our teeth. They explode a little bit in your mouth and taste like kind of like dirt (sort of like gushers candy, only infinitely more disgusting.) To be honest we only got through half of the cup. But I’d still say that it was a good effort.
THE DMZ
But the coolest thing that I did in Korea by far was touring the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the border with North Korea. We had to go through a lot of effort to book the tour because there are only two tour agencies authorized to go into the DMZ. There were multiple, painfully-long-and-expensive international phone calls conducted in extremely broken English and Japanese. But it was completely worth it, because at the end we got to cross the border and actually be IN North Korea. (Technically.) (For about 5 minutes.) We crossed the border inside what must be the most heavily guarded empty room on the planet. The guard-posts of the two nations are about 100 yards apart, and the building is located right in the middle and shared by both sides. It’s the same room where they signed the armistice to end the war. Both North and South Korea can have visitors go into the building, but never at the same time. (Because North Korea is a closed society, its people are not allowed any contact with people from outside. There are actually many Korean families that have been split apart, and family members have not been allowed any contact with each other since the country was divided.) On both sides of the borderline, there were guards, all extremely well armed. The most impressive were the sentinels: on the South Korean side there are two at all times. They stand perfectly immobile facing the border line, with exactly half their body behind the side of the building (to provide less of a target) and their arms rigid with hands a few inches away from gun holsters, ready to draw and shoot at any instant. Their North Korean counterparts were similar, though their pose was not quite as dramatic. They have been staring each other down like that for almost 50 years. Inside the armistice room itself there was another guard who was standing like a statue in front of the door leading outside to North Korea. He was wearing black aviator sunglasses, a pith helmet, and big black shiny boots, and he didn’t move an inch or change his facial expression even a tic the whole time we were in there. The soldier was for our own protection they said. I guess some tourists just might be stupid enough to try to dart out the door and grab a handful of North Korean soil or something like that. This would not have been advisable, as these people are definitely NOT messing around: the next stop on the tour was the site of the infamous “tree-trimming incident.” This was the spot where there has once been a tree, located between the two countries and belonging to neither side. Some South Korean soldiers tried to trim it one day, which apparently angered the North Korean soldiers so much that they marched out and hacked the tree trimmers to death with their own axe. The next day the South Koreans put the entire nation’s military on high alert, informed the Americans, the French, etc., and then sent a huge, heavily armed force out into the DMZ to chop down the offending tree. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried. We finished up the tour with lunch in the mess hall that serves the U.S. military personnel who are stationed on the base. Aside from being obscenely excited by the Shakey’s buffet-style carb-fest (pizza! spaghetti! mashed potatoes! macaroni and cheese!) we also got to talk with several of the American soldiers. The most striking thing about them was their age: mostly they were between 18 and 22. We left the DMZ feeling slightly shaken, like we’d just come back from an alternate reality where the normal logic we take for granted in our daily lives didn’t apply. We were quite relieved to get back to Seoul’s city streets and forget that just a few miles away this life-or-death game was being played out by boys the same age as our little sisters.
All in all, Korea was fantastic, and I would highly recommend anyone who has the chance to go there. The food is great if you don’t overdo it and there are some amazingly beautiful places to see and great cultural things to do (I don’t have time or space to do justice to the show we saw which was sort of a Korean version of “Stomp” except funnier, and with kitchen utensils). The culture also was a lot of fun for us to experience because it could not have been more different from Japanese. People were much more straightforward and down-to-earth, and their fashion also seemed much more in line with what we are used to in the West. We saw very few women in torturously high-heeled hooker boots, and not even a single man was sporting an orange mullet-perm, the preferred fashion statement of the hip young Japanese male. I really could go on and on about Japanese ‘fashion’, but that will have to be a subject for another email!
ALT SOCCER TOURNEY
The soccer tournament I played in the weekend after Korea was also a lot of fun. The first one was organized by some JETs a few years back, and it’s grown so much there are teams of JETs from all over the country, including people who traveled fourteen hours to get there. We only had to travel seven hours, which was plenty. We actually chartered a bus to transport all of us girls. We had high hopes for this tourney: our boys team won the entire thing last year and this year as well, and we were hoping that our girls team would do the same. Osaka has the highest concentration of JETs in the country; there are 58 of us within the city limits alone, and another 140 living in Osaka prefecture, so it’s easier for us to make teams, and get together once a week to practice. Both our A-team and B-team ended up doing pretty well (I played on the B-team, as any of you who have seen me kick a ball could probably have guessed) but we were both knocked out by a team called the ‘Onnabelievables’. (Onna means woman in Japanese.) Our team name, by the way, is ‘Ohhhh-SAKA!’ which sort of sounds like “Oh….Soccer!” when said properly, though it’s still pretty stupid any way you pronounce it :P. Even though we didn’t win, the tourney was a great chance to get out of the city and see some more of Japan. The matches took place in this tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, and we stayed at a beautiful Japanese-style hotel, and played on gorgeous fields completely surrounded by mountains and trees in fall colors. It was also a great chance to meet other JETs from all over and compare experiences (and conclude that we are pretty darn lucky to be living where we are).
HALOWEEN: THE GAIJIN TAKE OVER THE INSTITUTION or EVIL DEAD MICKEY'S REVENGE
Even though I’m still not even into November, Halloween will have to be the last thing I’ll talk about because this email is already way too long. Halloween in Osaka was… well… let’s just say it may well have been the best and bizarrest Halloween ever! Expats here seem to go all-out on certain holidays, no matter how much we try to assimilate to Japanese life the rest of the year. Maybe it’s a way to assert our own culture and rebel against the restrictions placed on us here, even if only for one night. Then we can willingly return to our normal day-to-day Japanese existence (an example of “liminal time”, for all you cultural anthropologists out there). Whatever the reason, the Halloween celebration organized by Osaka’s expat community is all-out madness and anarchy, carried out against one of the most cherished symbols of Japanese organization and efficiency: the railway system! Osaka’s complex network of trains and subways is a very important part of life here, and most people spend up to several hours a day commuting to and from work (not me, I bike everywhere, but that’s another story). On the train there is a very strict code of conduct that as far as I know is not spelled out anywhere, but is nevertheless easily observable, violation of which will earn you furtive yet disapproving glances (a main technique of Japanese social control… surprisingly effective.). Rule number one is: do NOT eat on the train. But can’t I take just a little nibble of this candy ba…NO! Don’t do it! Don’t even think about it! Don’t even LOOK at the candy bar. And for god’s sake don’t eat anything requiring chopsticks…. Oh no, you didn’t… you didn’t try to eat ramen noodles on the… oh god, you did. Rule number two: don’t talk. Don’t talk to the friends you came in with, don’t talk to yourself, and whatever you do, don’t talk to the people sitting standing or wedged next to you. The reasoning behind this rule is actually pretty logical: Japanese social interactions are governed by a lot of rules about politeness and hierarchy. It would be way too difficult to have to try to apply these rules for every new group of people on every train car. Furthermore, Japanese trains are ridiculously crowded, and people would probably rather pretend that they are not in contact with ten other bodies, without being reminded of this fact by having to make conversation. Being on the train is kind of like taking a break from socialization. People mostly just go into auto-pilot: they stare straight ahead with blank expressions on their faces, or they sleep. For a Japanese person this must be a relief, but for a westerner it can be stressful. Because while no one will talk at you, or even look at you directly, you are still being observed. You are interrupting the normal flow of the train routine by your very presence (and you are probably unwittingly committing some horrible social faux pas on top of that). There is a lot of pressure to conform in this situation, but conformity is often impossible because of the very fact that foreigners are bound to stand out, no matter how well we try to behave. Anyway, maybe because this is one of the places where we are made most conscious of our foreignness, on Halloween night, Osaka’s gaijin community completely takes over the city’s most famous train, the JR loop line. This is a train line run by a private rail company that makes a complete circuit of the city every 45 minutes. On the big night we turned up at 8:30 to the Osaka Station JR platform. The platform was already completely packed with revelers dressed in all manner of outrageous costumes. There were the standard fairys, witches, mummies, princesses, etc, and also many Japanese-inspired outfits: ninjas, samurai, power rangers, geisha, and Japanese school-girls, along with some Western-themed costumes: santa claus and elves, beauty and the beast (a Japanese girl and her gaijin boyfriend…) plus some costumes that expressed social commentary, however tastelessly: the child-molesting priest was a big hit. I went as “evil dead Mickey Mouse”. I made the costume all by myself for about $5 with materials purchased at (where else?) the 100-yen store. I had the white gloves, the little red shorts (with big yellow buttons pinned on), black tights, ears cut out of cardboard and taped to a headband, and the crowning glory: giant yellow slippers I was lucky enough to come across the day before, after having almost given up in despair. I also cut fangs out of white plastic, circled my eyes in black powder, and liberally applied blood to my face, mouth, and teeth. I also found a plastic Mexican “day of the dead” skull rattle, to which I glued little mouse ears, and I carried a plastic retractable dagger in my other hand. There was actually some logic behind this costume, however strange it may seem. Mickey Mouse is seen as a symbol of America, but he is also completely Japanese. He is the epitome of “genki”: the Japanese term for all that is perky, spunky, cute, and wholesome. Therefore he has been embraced in Japan as much if not more than he was ever loved by America. So why not have a little fun perverting this cherished cultural icon beloved by children and middle-aged single women everywhere? Back to the station platform, where several hundred gaijin, plus quite a few Japanese, waited in anticipation of the arrival of the 9:00 train: there were quite a few harried police officers there as well, who had obviously been advised in advance of the situation, but who seemed to have given up on all but the most basic crowd and damage control. The platform was packed. Peace was not maintained. Orderly lines did not form. People drank freely from beer cans, whiskey flasks, and various other colorful mixtures in 2 liter coke bottles. With the arrival of the train, everyone pushed and shoved their way onto the cars, inside which the chaos only intensified. Flasks were passed, strangers kissed, people were lifted into and out of overhead luggage racks. At every station great masses poured out of the cars, the goal being to get oneself and one’s friends, out, around the platform, and (ideally) back in the train again before the doors closed. My friends and I (about 10 other JET’s as well as three Japanese girls who play on the soccer team) rode the rails for about an hour and a half before retiring to a club, and a very good time was had by all. I usually don’t enjoy being one of large group of people behaving very badly, but I would not have missed this event for the world. It was a truly unique cultural experience! I’m here in Japan mostly to learn about Japanese culture, but it’s really surprised me how much I’ve been able to learn about my own culture here as well. There are some things you that are brought into much higher relief in the context of a foreign society. ¶ 9:32 PM
