Japan Trip Report/ Part 3 of 3/ “Living in Japan”

May 6, 2024
By Kevin Harrang

“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have [been] altered.” ― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

After skiing in Hokkaido and touring the sights of Tokyo and Kyoto, we head south to Miyazaki where my friend Margaret has a family home. I am looking forward to this final part of our trip in part because we’ll get out of the big cities, but mostly because I’ve been collecting questions about Japan—and Margaret, who I know because we worked together as fellow in-house attorneys for years, is the perfect person to ask.

Our Hosts
Growing up, Margaret spent time in both America and Japan. In her words, Margaret’s father was an Idaho farm boy who met a Tokyo city girl at a Quaker college in Oregon in 1951. After being ‘Made in Japan’, she grew up in Indiana, but spent her second grade year at a Japanese elementary school in Tokyo—while her father conducted research for his PhD. Later, her family again moved to Japan, where Margaret completed her last two years at a local Japanese high school, resulting in a full immersion in her maternal country and culture. The experience, which Margaret and Jirka replicated with their own two boys, was to be thrown into the deep end of a foreign culture and left to swim. (On a lesser scale, this is what we did with our kids when we moved to Barcelona and enrolled them in school for a year abroad.) This jarring form of parenting has grown out of fashion, it seems, but I’m hoping after our kids finish their psychotherapy from the trauma, that they’ll in turn do something similar to their own children.

Our home stay with Margaret and her husband, who snowbird at her family home in southern Japan part of year, is filled with the lots of wonderful sightseeing, e-biking, convenience store food shopping, and of course, daily onsen bath soaking. But it’s also a chance to experience real life in Japan, such as witnessing local children at a nearby primary school sweeping and cleaning their facility before being dismissed (we are told that there are no janitors because the students do the cleaning). Gratifying to me, even part time Japanese residents occasionally run afoul of local norms, such as when Margaret was approached by a worker at a deserted museum we were touring to alert her that someone in our party who will remain nameless was…gasp!…chewing gum! (The offense was discretely remedied, and no charges we leveled—which is a good thing because in Japan, criminal defendants can be held for weeks of interrogation after arrest without access to legal counsel, and subsequent conviction rates exceed 99%.)

Lost In Translation
A highlight was a dinner hosted by Margaret and Jirka in their home for their Japanese acquaintances, seemingly in our honor. Invited were a number of their friends, including a high school classmate of Margaret’s whose friendship goes back many decades. Several were eager to try out their English on us, and Margaret served as a real time interpreter for the rest. In spite of the language barrier, this seemed like a typical dinner party like we would have at home, except that we were told that such an event is fairly uncommon in Japan, owing to their smaller houses. Everyone was exceedingly gracious and polite, but I got the feeling that we seemed to them like visitors from a strange, distant planet. I asked one of Margaret’s friends if they told jokes beginning like, “So this guy walks into a bar…”, and after considerable offline discussion, was advised that, “We don’t do that.”

The elephant in the sushi bar, at least for me, was what it would be like traveling in a country that was not so long ago a sworn enemy, and on which America dropped two atomic bombs—but is now a thriving democracy and key international ally. In Tokyo, we had a pleasant dinner with a friend’s in-law, whose father served under General MacArthur as an attorney for the infamous “Tokyo War Trials”, which made me wonder how deeply buried was the trauma of the Imperial period. But if there is any national PTSD about this history, it’s not something accessible to an American tourist, unlike say, the Nazi period of Germany. Margaret told me as taught in her local high school, Japanese history abruptly ended in 1930. (This made me wonder what American students are taught these days about the Iraq Wars.)

Home?
In any event, at this point, now several weeks in Japan, I began to reflect like I always do when traveling about the concept of “home.” This usually starts with the question whether I could really live in another country without feeling like a permanent expat—someone forever in exile in some sense. Maybe this was amplified by how foreign my own country is beginning to seem at times, or maybe it was that amazing hot dog I got at the Japanese 7-11. Although Japan feels wonderfully welcoming and gracious as a visitor, it’s hard to imagine it as “home.” Even my half-Japanese, linguistically and culturally fluent friend Margaret is still regarded by locals as a foreigner, as was her father despite living there for 32 years.

My most positive patriotic sentiment about America is that, despite its many faults, at least it’s a nationality that’s possible to join. But even at home in Seattle, we now begin many public meetings and concerts by acknowledging that we are standing on somebody else’s land. I wonder if all the world’s fighting about who got where first would lessen if we realized that we’ve all come from somewhere else, and that we’re all foreigners (or at least travelers) in some sense. Maybe what we really fear about the “other” is the uncomfortable truth of this commonality, not our differences—that none of us truly know where we came from or where we’re going in this fleeting life. And if so, maybe “home” is more illusory than we’d like to admit.

To Go Or Stay?
Perhaps William Adams realized this, and so chose to stay and live out his life in Japan in the 1600s. But unlike Adams, I have only one family, which seems enough, and so I boarded another bullet train to Tokyo to catch our plane. Still, waiting for our flight in the luxurious Delta airport lounge, I was already dreading shopping in an American 7-11, much less having to use the restroom in it.

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