nagasaki blues

I went to Cambodia recently, and for the next several days the posts will be concerning that, as I transcribe my journal entries from those weeks.  

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If you’ve never been to the Killing Fields, this is the part where I explain it to you, minus the statistics. We’re supposed to remember the numbers, because the numbers give us the scale. It makes it all easier to process. We need to remember the scale in order to understand why all of this matters. It’s important to label the actions of the Khmer Rouge with the word genocide, because a genocide certainly took place. However, for too many of us, the word genocide sets things apart from the natural flow of history, as if the deaths of a few million in a few short years are a bizarre abberation, some sort of glitch in humanity’s natural programming. Maybe they are. But, then again, maybe they aren’t.So, forget what you already know for just a moment. From the entrance, what you’ll see is a simple field, the kind covered in weeds and wildflowers that you’ve probably seen a thousand times before. In places, the landscape is dotted with wooden signs in English and Khmer displaying background information and, of course, statistics. A beaten path leads you to a wooden bridge, and then the path continues, the dirt trail bending in a slow circle towards a wooded area. In the center of it all is a stupa filled with fractured skulls (8,895 of them) and faded clothing. These skulls belong to many of those whose who were executed here, from infants to the elderly. They were typically blind-folded and placed on their knees. Occasionally they were shot. More often, to save bullets, they were bludgeoned, stabbed, beheaded, or suffocated with plastic bags. Infants were either smashed against trees or tossed into the air and caught on bayonets.

It becomes more obvious as you continue along the path. Large craters that were once mass graves still contain scraps of clothing and shards of metal and bone; indeed, it’s not unusual to hear a crunch beneath you and look down to discover that you’ve stepped on a skull fragment. Further up the path is a glass case containing teeth pulled from the dirt, unbroken, yellow, looking deceptively canine. Soon, however, you’ve left the bones behind, and the path runs along a lily-covered pond. Trees bend outwards from its banks, forming a kind of canopy along its edges, and a gazebo is perched along one edge. Tourists stop and snap pictures. The thought hits you: This place is beautiful.

Before you’ve completed walking the main path, the children are upon you. They’re not allowed inside, but this doesn’t stop them from begging outside the chain-link fence that forms a perimeter. Shoeless and shirtless, they slide bone-thin arms through the fence, palms upward, issuing a chorus of “money please?” And, if you’re like me, you think: Maybe things don’t change that much.

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Everyone who writes about the Killing Fields, the S-21 prison camp, or any f the many other sites at which the Khmer Rouge committed startling atrocities wants you to remember that the executioners were largely children. Scan a few articles about these places and count how many times you see the phrase “ages 9 to 15”. Maybe the first time you read this, it was shocking to you. Probably, you don’t blame these writers for including this detail. Child soldiers! The inhumanity of it is enough to make any of us hate the regime a little more. I don’t blame these writers either. I am one of them, I suppose.I thought like this too, not more than a few weeks ago. And as I stood in front of that skull-filled stupa, I heard someone much smarter than myself say the following:

It is the most unremarkable thing in history to make someone kill someone else.

Evaluate this statement for yourself. Consider that the watchdog organization Human Rights Watch estimates between 200,000 and 300,000 children are currently being used by paramilitary and government forces in armed conflicts in over 20 countries. Consider the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. Consider that, under the right circumstances, anyone can break, just like a heart — quietly and easily.

“I don’t get it. What do you mean, you’re afraid of animals?”

“I’m afraid of all animals. Definitely all of them.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re scary.”

Ayumi and Nana are walking to school beside me, and as is fairly normal, they’ve taken a break from attempting to speak English and have thus mostly forgotten I’m there. In the process they’ve also forgotten that I understand their Japanese.  I didn’t know that Ayumi was afraid of all animals. Because I am bored, I keep listening:

“What about harmless animals, like birds?” Nana is incredulous.

“Unacceptable. If I see a bird on TV, it’s okay, but if the bird looks at the camera, I have to change the channel.”

“What about mice?”

“All girls hate mice.”

“Not me. I love mice. They’re cute.”

“Only Mickey is okay.”

“And Pokemon? They’re not really animals.”

“Pikachu is cute.”

“Is Pikachu supposed to be a boy or a girl?”

“Boy.”

“And what about Anpanman?”

“His name is Anpanman, not Anpanwoman.”

“His head is made of bread. What’s his body made of?”

“Plastic. Just a guess.”

High school students are high school students wherever you go. Not much changes as you cross oceans, and students still have the same wandering, pointless conversations they always do regardless of place. They speak for the sake of filling silence as much as anything else. There is no need for personal breakthroughs or deep meaning. The day before:

Risa: “Do foreigners get acne?”

Mika: “No.”

Shiho: “Of course they do. That’s why that weird Jessica Simpson lady is on those Proactive commercials.”

See? Mostly indistinguishable from American conversations, only with different cultural cues. That’s what makes today interesting. Today was the presidential election. Ayumi and Nana humored me about this and pretended (I think) to be interested, asking once an hour, “Obama win yet?”

When it was all said and done, they asked a more intriguing question: “Now, do you want to go back to America?” I told them I was here for now, then asked them if they wanted to visit sometime. Both shook their heads ‘no’, and when I asked them why, they made gun shapes with their hands and little gunshot sounds. “Don’t want to get shot,” said Ayumi, and the entire time that I was explaining that TV is sensationalist and that it’s perfectly safe to travel to the U.S., I was embarassed.

You can’t blame them, really. They have always known a country with a remarkably low violent crime rate. America’s murder rate is nearly 9 times higher than Japan’s, and it doesn’t help that some of the more popular American TV shows are things like 24, Prison Break, CSI, etc. It seems that the average person I talk to thinks we’re pretty bloodthirsty. They might be right.

A few times a week, strangers ask me where I’m from. I tell them I’m American, and every time I do I’m aware that I’m donning the fabric of these preconceptions. I say, “I’m from Tennessee, in the United States,” and I know that I’m simultaneously admitting to whatever preconceived notions they may have about us. This bothered me more a year ago than it does today, but I can’t say I like it.

The entire point of this is that an hour ago, a man waiting at the car shop beside me asked where I was from. I told him. He replied with: “I have hope for America. I think good days are ahead.”

I agree.

Oh man, things have gotten busy.

Believe it or not, I have plenty to write about. I just don’t have as much time as I’d like, nor the will.

I will do better, I will do better. Videos to come as well:

Tomorrow in class I’m trying to bring Halloween to Japan by teaching the kids how to light dog crap in brown paper bags on fire and how to conduct prank phone calls.

I don’t really like you. You have made a select list of groups of people that I generally dislike by default, which is admirable in a way, but as I get older I find that people irritate me more often, so perhaps it’s me that needs to do a little soul searching. Either way, I find hypochondriacs to be a drain on society for two primary reasons: 1) The whole self-pity thing is a bit played. 2) It’s manipulative. It’s the domain of those who want to be fretted over, who want to be worried about. It’s a way for people to blame every little miscomfort on a dramatic health crisis, and it’s a waste of about 20 million dollars in unnecessary medical expenses each year.The advent of WebMD.com, Yahoo! Health, and other sites has given these people more misinformation to arm themselves with than I originally would ever have thought possible. Back in the day, the whining of hypochondriacs was mostly limited to the realm of ill-defined but terribly exaggerated phrases like “horrible, awful migraines”, which is not very specific, meaning they couldn’t take it much further than that. Now, those same headaches can chalked up to an arteriovascular malformation, one of the harsh realities of the technology age that fills me with sadness.Exhibit 1: A woman I worked with in an office who would complain of things like “lumbar-vertebrae displacement” brought on by her substandard office chair.

For research’s sake, I went to WebMD and decided to see what (if anything) is wrong with me. You’re given a picture of a human body to click “where it hurts” and a list of symptoms to choose from. It’s hot as hell this afternoon, so I immediately checked off “Excessive sweating”. No problem. I then moved on to “Hunger” and “Food cravings,” as I have almost an hour left until lunch. Because I’m doing this instead of working, I went ahead and added “Easily distracted” and “Poor concentration” as well, then rounded it out with “Difficulty staying awake during the day”. Finally, I realized how depressing and profoundly cynical it is that I’m doing this at all, so I finished with: “Inability to care for self”, “Low self-esteem”, and “Sense of impending doom”.

I would diagnose myself this afternoon as a workplace slacker with a poor attitude towards humanity, but imagine my surprise when WebMD broke the news to me: I have supraventricular tachycardia. Son of a bitch, a potentially fatal heart condition. I saw this on Dr. House.

This is going to be problematic.

This a compilation of my notes from the last week:

Monday, 10:42 PM

The Japan-to-Tennessee jet lag has decimated my biological clock. It is Monday evening, but I have been asleep for the past six hours, waking to a house empty aside from my father, sitting alone in a darkened living room, hands folded in his lap.

He’s waited to tell me that there’s been an accident, that my uncle was riding his motorcycle home when drag racers overtook him on a quiet stretch of highway, sending him flipping across the well-manicured lawn of a local church. He’s dead at 46. He is dead, and my mother has already gone ahead to be with her family. My mother has been mourning the loss of her brother for four hours while I have been asleep in the guest bedroom, dreaming of girls, beaches, and other things that suddenly seem less important.

“Can you believe it?” he asks me. “That it happened on a motorcycle?”

I can’t.

(more…)

To those who have recently left Nagasaki or are leaving in the upcoming days:

Thank you.

When the cold is awful or the heat is unbearable, the mosquitoes are out in full force, and all the vice principals of the world have teamed up to make things a problem, you’ve kept it worth it. Homesickness ain’t a damn thing when people make you feel at home, you know?

I don’t go out of my way to spend time with people I don’t like. I just don’t waste the effort on it. I spent time with you all because you have made life here better in innumerable ways.

Please keep doing what you’re doing. Good luck.

To those of you who have just arrived in Nagasaki:

You’ve got big shoes to fill.

Don’t blow it.

Fish are dying.

This, in and of itself, is not entirely special, but the specific circumstances are. In one Japanese river in particular, 2 tons of dead fish (including 2,000 eels, if I read it correctly) have washed up in the past few days, and nobody seems to have a great explanation for this. News channels are running footage of men with nets in rowboats shoveling fish carcasses into styrofoam containers and scratching their heads.

In other news, the Iwate-Miyagi Earthquake tore mountains apart and caused massive landslides, blocking the flow of rivers and causing lakes to rapidly form, resulting in extensive flooding.

In Akihabara, a man drove a truck into a crowd of people. Armed with a knife, he then set upon the crowd, killing 10 and injuring more, including one police officer. Another cop attempted to stop him with his baton before apparently remembering that police are armed. He eventually drew his gun, at which point the attacker surrendered. Too little, too late, isn’t it?

I’m hearing an awful lot of talk about why things like this keep happening. Kids spend too much time on their cell phones. Video games are violent. We’re too reliant on technology.

As if disasters ever needed a reason to occur.

Occasionally, some switch in my head goes off and I can’t stop watching television. I could ride a bike. I could get some work done. I could, theoretically, do my laundry or pull the weeds from the garden. There are any number of things I could be doing instead of watching five hours of House a day, but none of them are quite as satisfying as allowing my brain to degenerate into a state pliable enough that I diagnose myself with encephalitis caused by toxoplasmosis, then Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, before finally accepting that all that is actually wrong with me is that I’m housing a parasitic Ascaris worm.

At the very least, my excuses for taking sick days will probably become more interesting in the upcoming months.

Plenty of people are quick to villainize TV as a soul-sucking black hole that makes you stupid, but this is a dramatic oversimplification. These are the same people that believe that aspartame causes cancer despite the fact that no legitimate medical evidence exists to support this theory. The fact of the matter is that television is an intricate window into society. More than that, it’s a great way to take a mental vacation for as long as you might need to.

Still, it’s not really normal behavior for me. I watch TV, but not usually in huge blocks. One might diagnose this as a self-preservative need for a temporary form of escapism. That would certainly be a fair conclusion, something that Dr. Foreman or even Cuddy might agree with. But not House. No, not a chance. Because House knows there’s something bigger going on. House will call you on your bullshit between mouthfulls of Vicodin. This is because House knows (somehow) that you have nothing worthwhile to escape from. Everything is going well. The weather is outstanding. Work is fine. The students are fine. Why not enjoy the beach for a few hours?

Because I’m only on Season 2, that’s why.

I’ve broken my unspoken promise to keep updating at least once a week, and I can’t say it’s because I’ve been busy. Quite the opposite, for the most part. The last few weeks have been very eventful, but at least during the afternoons I’m plenty available at work. I suppose I’m just slacking.

The good news is that I have ambition.

All great men become great through conquest. This may be an unfortunate fact, but it is a fact nonetheless. Whether it’s conquering people, nations, ignorance, or societal norms, there’s always a usurper and the overthrown, and if you think I’m wrong about this, consider this point: I’m not.

The point of this is that I’m going to conquer the ocean, or at least a small part of it. The pirate in me is rearing its eye-patched head, and I feel the call of the sea. So we’re building a raft. We’re sailing this raft across the Ariake Sea to a small area of Kumamoto Prefecture. Actually, you can see the exact path we’re taking if you happen to use Google Earth; just search for “Kuchinotsu, Japan” and look across the bay to Futae. It’s not so far, but I’m pretending it’s a huge victory in the hearts of men because it makes it more enjoyable all around.

As far as names go, I’m leaning towards the S.S. Sussudio. I’m considering this name for the following reasons:

1) Instances of the letter ’s’ make up more than half of the name.
2) It sounds kind of poetic.
3) People might ask about it, which will afford me the opportunity to explain that I think Phil Collins sucks.

I didn’t say Genesis sucks. I said Phil Collins sucks. There is a huge difference here. “Sussudio” is not a word despite the fact that he uses it as one in the song by the same name, and Phil himself explains it thusly: Apparently, he was sound checking and just using a made up word as a place holder, but no actual word sounded right after the fact. So “Sussudio” became the name of the girl in the song, and later became the name of his daughter’s horse. In an interview, he apologized to all the people of the world who are now named Sussudio. I thought that was rather arrogant, assuming that adoring fans had named their children after your song title all over the world, but a quick search on Facebook and Myspace reveals that, unfortunately, there are people named Sussudio out there. If nothing else, Phil has dicked them out of the opportunity to have a respectable first name.

This is mostly about not liking Phil’s music, because for all I know he’s a nice guy. I do know he left his wife for someone half his age and completed most of the divorce proceedings by fax.

My point is, it’s my raft, and if I want to call it Sussudio then who’s going to stop me? You? I don’t think so.

The crew is assembled, and it is a sturdy crew indeed. We’ve begun preparing materials. I hope to set sail in the early summer, though as of late new dangers have come to light. For one, the waters in question are reportedly shark infested. To me, this is a non-issue. Essentially all ocean water has the potential to house sharks from time to time. This seems like a silly reason to be afraid.

Not a silly reason: deadly whirlpool. I just heard about this, though all the fisherman know to avoid it. Nobody felt the need to point out the existence of the whirlpool to me until last week, which seems a bit late in the planning stage. Apparently it’s about halfway between our start point and end point, and I’m imagining something huge and frothing and vicious and inherently angry despite being unable to feel human emotion. I can already tell I’m going to personify the hell out of what amounts to moving water, but I can’t help it.

Updates to come. Any suggestions for alternate names or any tips for sail construction?

Today I have lost my finest students to graduation.

Out the window, they’re holding big boquets and failing in attempts not to cry and generally making a big mess out of their parents’ attempts to take pictures, and I’m not going to see that again. Acknowledging the fact that there will be more students (even equally special ones) in the future doesn’t actually help.

They’re still in the parking lot, but they’re already gone. I’m only writing about this in the first place to keep them here a bit longer, to pretend that they’re still happening to me.