Japandamonium!!!

Hooooooooooooooooooooooooly crap.

Places I am include: Tokyo. Also, the Keio Plaza Hotel. Also, in the middle of a typhoon. Also, in extreme panic mode. Ahh! Ahhh! Anyone who knows the sound of me screaming (ie: anyone who knows me) should know the sound I'm making in my head right now. It goes: Ahh!

It's 4:00 in the morning on the 27th of July, 2005 and in a few hours I'm supposed to wake up, check out of my hotel room, and fly from Tokyo's Hanada Airport to the city of Matsuyama, capitol of my new home state: Ehime prefecture, on Shikoku. My new home. My new home.

...

It's about 5:30 now, and I just spent the last hour or so talking with a guy named Rob, one of the other new JETs headed to Ehime. He walked by and looked like he was in quite a state, so I flagged him down to see if I could help him talk it through. I think it went pretty well; he was a lot more relaxed and sure of himself now than he was when he walked by, and he doesn't look like he's about to cry, so that feels like progress. Man, I thought I was nervous. Mountains and molehills. I think I helped Rob realize that he's got great skills and experiences to help him succeed with the challenges he's scared of facing right now - he's scared of being isolated and alone and of not knowing Japanese, but in talking to him we uncovered all these great things he's got, like really good people skills and friendliness and a good head for language, and apparently he's had some substantial living-abroad experience as well. And we talked about developing some coping strategies for trouble spots, I passed on some good specific things I've come up with or been given.

A short time ago a great tea master in New York interpreted a proverb for a group of us soon-to-be JETs, first translating it from a scroll on the wall as something like, "like the tiger from the mountain, so too the dragon from the river bed;" he said that when the tiger becomes seperated from his mountain he loses all his feralness, cunning, and strenght, his tiger-ness: the dragon (who lives in the river) dissapears if the river dries up. He said, "the mountain is what makes a tiger a tiger, and the river makes a dragon a dragon. You are about to leave your home for something very new and very different, and perhaps ask yourself, what makes you, you?" We all sat a bit stunned and more than a little afraid, and the tea master said, "contemplate that for the next two, maybe three hundred years."

It's been running circles in my head since that meeting, but talking to Rob has freed up my thinking a little. Earlier in that night with the tea master he had told us about a wealthy connisseur who had purchased a National Treasure tea bowl for some millions of dollars, and how the thing that he, the tea master, loved about the story was that the man used the bowl frequently, whenever he had tea. A delicate cup, so paper thin that it was almost transparent; ancient and irreplacable, it was valuable almost beyond belief. But the man used it happily and unworriedly for tea. It gave him pleasure, and if it should drop one day and shatter to a thousand pieces, well, then as the most wise say: so it goes. Like all things go, it would go the way of all things. We often allow, or perhaps it is better to say we force ourselves to feel too attached to things when really we are not so attached at all: neither the vessel nor the money he spent mattered to the connosseur; neither were as significant as the aesthetic pleasure and contemplative ease he got from drinking the tea from the bowl - so the tea master suggested to us. Contemplate this for the next two or three hundred years.

Like the tiger to the mountain, so too the dragon to the river. If the cup shatters, so it goes. What makes you you? Contemplate.

When you take the tiger away from the mountain it loses it's tiger-ness, but it can't be the mountain that makes the tiger a tiger. The mountain is just a thing, and as surely as the tea bowl will one day drop and shatter (even though it's now, after the connisseur's death, locked in a museum where it takes on a different kind of public value), the mountain will surely fall itself. Perhaps the earth will shake it, perhaps a typhoon will come and topple it with rain, or maybe it will simply be time itself that grinds the mountain down; so it goes. So what makes a tiger a tiger?

Rob, it turns out, had spent a year in India but he was with a larger group of people; he always got to feel at home - surrounded, that is, by familiar things, people he could understand. Now though, we're about to be cast adrift, or so it's been feeling to Rob. He's terrified not of being away from home but, so it seems to me, of being seperated from the things that make him who he is - he's scared, like all of us only more so, that in giving himself to this adventure he risks losing himself entirely, losing touch with his identity.

I told Rob the same thing I told my interviewers back in February when they asked me about just this kind of concern. They wondered, "what do you do when you've been in Japan for 3 months, you know you've got 9 more to go and you're so homesick that you'd rather get yourself deported back home than go through another day away?" What I managed to tell them and Rob both was this: the surest way not to feel homesick is to feel at home, so that's what you've got to work on. It's nice to have the sigils of your old home around you - get your peanut butter sent over, get your cheetos and some punk rock, have your teddy bear and your funky socks. But don't leave it there: these will end up just being symbols of a jerry-rigged familiarity, signs of your own alienation as much as reminders of where you belong. Instead, work on making the place you live in feel like it truly is your home - get to know people, find a beer you like to drink at the end of the day, find a place to watch the sun go down, find a pub, meet your neighbors. I told Rob that he could do all these things - if he's been able to do things like teach himself Patois and get invitated to a reggae festival in Hiroshima and tour with a band and live in India for a year, then he's got all the skills he'll need to make his new place into his new home. When the tiger leaves the mountain it loses its tigerness, its snarl and cleverness, its suppleness and great strength - but we can go so much further than that! Detaching ourselves from material things, from places and mountains and buildings, we can discover that the human personality doesn't have to depend on external signs to mirror and reaffirm the beauty of its internal substance. Whatever makes Rob 'Rob' is something he has with him already, and will always have and never be apart from: it's whatever skills and personality it takes to be the kind of person he is, the kind that plays bass guitar and doesn't comb his hair and goes on JET even though he's terrified. Like the tiger from the mountain, so too the dragon from his river, but not so the adventurous human spirit, who can learn to rise past materia and be at home anywhere in the universe.

I can make Japan my home for the time being, and as for the tea master and his question, I will say I'm not sure what makes me me, but I'm not worried that I forgot to pack it.