Seriously, what’s up with Americans?

They’re freaking everywhere.

How often I hear droning, cosmopolitan liberal-by-age-not-by-choice American college students speak of foreign perspectives of Americans.

It is just so gosh darn negative, they say.

They burn flags in Afghanistan. The subject of U.S. foreign policy brings laughter to businessmen in Germany.

Understand. Internationally, there is overwhelming criticism of American foreign policy. Great power rarely evokes indifference; it is either great respect or great antipathy, sometimes both. Ask most Americans, they tend to criticize that government of theirs as well. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the last round of polls, taken in mid-September, put President Bush’s approval rating in the low to mid 40s.

Indulge me in some expansive and irresponsible generalizing.

They wear anything Nike in Ghana; Mexican children want to touch Americans in Tijuana.

Here in Tokyo, Paris Hilton is loved, Madonna has a week of sold-out concerts, Richard Gere, yes, Philadelphia-born, Julia Roberts’ costar in Pretty Woman Richard Gere appears on billboards at major intersections. And his last movie was “Bee Season.” Yeah, I haven’t heard of it either.

My point is that both Americans and the global environment that is snickering at, and terrified of, U.S. diplomacy delineate between the American government and the American people.

Don’t let someone tell you that they hate Americans in Iraq or that Pakistanis or Lithuanians or the 9 million citizens of Bolivia do. You want to say Venezuelans hate the American government? Well, the Venezuelan president has taken to calling President Bush “the devil,” and I’ve never been there, so I can’t much argue it. But, Hugo Chavez does not hate Americans. It has been called political grandstanding and maybe it is, but the man has come to the United States to offer subsidized oil to poor American families. I know. I was there when he did just that in North Philadelphia.

And why shouldn’t the 200 or so countries of this world divide Americans from their government? There are Americans everywhere, and, damn it if some (I’ll hesitate from saying most) of them aren’t trying to help, or at least just trying to live their lives peacefully.

I am struck by that again and again here in Tokyo.

Temple University-Japan, where I am taking classes this semester, is the largest and oldest foreign university in the country and remains home to a handful of Americans who are now longtime Tokyo residents and influential Japanese academics.

One of the first weekends I was here I went to a lecture on sake, Japan’s historic rice-based alcoholic drink. Its featured speaker? An American. Ohio-born John Gaunter is known as leading the push for popularizing sake outside of Japan, as well as for his books and columns on sake. He also managed to become the only non-Japanese member of countless government and sake-industry organizations.

My fourth episode for JYA features a legend of Asian cultural studies who just happens to be an American. Donald Richie is as famous as an academic can be. He has lived in Tokyo for six decades and pumped out more than 40 books. He has written thousands of newspaper columns and reviews and found time to be a reporter, tour guide, film critic, director, actor, novelist, editor, professor, lecturer, actor and more. He also happened to be born in Ohio. (I don’t know what that coincidence is about.)

The United States is 150,000 births from the 300 millionth American, according to the Census Bureau. Do enough of us have the opportunity and the interest in traveling abroad to get a tour of another culture? Probably not. But, there are those that do, and, fortunately, some of them represent the United States well.

Tanks are not often appreciated as signs of friendship. But, luckily I believe the majority of this world knows that most Americans don’t drive tanks, and those that do don’t have much choice. There are Americans and there is the American government. That duality is unspeakably important.

You can support our government – I encourage that. You can agree with our government – I can respect that. Just don’t believe that others can’t recognize that duality, because I find that more Americans than non-Americans have difficulty seeing the difference – as if Americans living abroad tend to be hypercritical of their country out of embarrassment for their government.

Forget all that. I am as blindly patriotic as they come, but I see nothing difficult about traveling with an American flag while also trying to remain critical of my government. Dissension is not un-American. Indeed, rather I see nothing more patriotic than just that.

Mark it down as another reason to travel: show this world how beautiful and kindly and brilliant Americans can be.

Jaa mata,
Christopher

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On Sunday I trekked on that bicycle of mine six miles to the Tokyo American Club – think a fancy country club without the golf, but with a pool, restaurants and ballrooms – for an academic symposium on the foreign diplomatic issue in northeast Asia: Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine.

I mentioned it in a previous blog, but, in short, Yasukuni is a Shinto war memorial with a right-wing taste to it, from the pamphleteers that walk the grounds to the adjacent revisionist history museum. A great deal of foreign nations, particularly the Asian states who suffered from 20th century Japanese imperialism and fear Japan is trying to ignore its past, are deeply opposed to the shrine’s existence and the recurring trend of Japanese prime ministers visiting the grounds. If you want to hear more, check out any legitimate news source and you’ll be able to find plenty.

The symposium was five hours of academic presentations and a lot of me drinking water and going to the bathroom. The topic, to be sure, is a fascinating one, but, while the panel featured a couple of professors from Temple whom I both know and respect, it also hosted a few of your garden-variety stuffy, ultra-dry, out-of-touch intellectuals.

I found the symposium to be one-sided and, well, I found a lot of it boring. Don’t think for a minute anything educational has to be boring. I see my yawning at the symposium less a reflection on my political awareness and interest than on some of the speakers, but how can I judge?

So, instead of thinking of more excuses to get out of my chair, I escaped for an hour to ride my bicycle around bright orange Tokyo Tower, 1,100 feet tall, nearly 50 feet taller than its model, Paris’s Eiffel Tower.

Later, I returned and learned a bit more about one of the world’s more complex controversies. I don’t have the space or the energy to recount the words of perspectives from a former Japanese ambassador, a professor who formerly lived in China – one of Yasukuni’s greatest opponents – and more.

What I was hoping to remark on was what the event led me to think about as I tried to keep my eyes open. The symposium gave me access to a socioeconomic class of people to which I don’t often have much access and therefore, about which I tend to forget.

I have written before about the world of academia, a world that I certainly don’t understand yet whose members I more often consider pretentious than praiseworthy (though glaring exceptions certainly exist). In addition to hearing one blather on about his research, the Tokyo American Club also brought me shoulder to shoulder with wealthy expatriate Westerners, who almost entirely populate the club. The symposium itself, which was held in the club’s “Grand Ballroom,” featured more than a few questions from people who seemed egregiously distant to anything familiar to my sense of common lives.

Their language and demeanor, the man who wore a scarf in September, the woman who seemed to imply that idiot-Americans were the only devoutly religious people in industrialized states. These are strange things to my eyes and ears.

My life’s travel and work in North Philadelphia has graciously afforded me the awareness of the privilege with which I was born and the undeserved gifts I have been given. Some in the symposium’s audience managed to make me feel a bit more earth-bound and a little more concerned about how the richer, better educated of us see the world.

After buying my discounted student ticket for 1,000 yen ($8.50 USD), I wouldn’t let my boredom or discomfort with my fellow symposium-goers discourage me from attending the reception afterwards. While the uppercrust chatted about international affairs, I chased down roving waiters and gorged myself on assuredly pricy, but delicious appetizers. I figured it was another clear signal that I am simply terribly uncultured. You see, I wear no stylish scarf, my bosses are plumbers and carpenters, and I tend to be more proud than embarrassed by that.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

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I made a series of pledges in a blog post a few weeks ago. One of those pledges was to travel somewhere every weekend. I am glad to say, with another weekend having come and gone, I haven’t forsaken the writer/reader relationship. The pledge is in tact.

On Saturday, I took an hour of train hopping down to Kamakura, which was Japan’s capital until 1333. While it suffered from the 1923 Kanto earthquake, Kamakura was spared Allied bombing during World War II allowing for the hilly residential district to house more than 60 intact temples and nearly 19 shrines.

I began my tour by stopping at Jufukiji, one of the five most important Zen temples of the Rinzai sect, which together are known as the Kamakura Gozan. Jufukiji had been rebuilt, as all but two of the five had, but, I decided, if I were to visit any of the 65 temples in Kamakura, why not make one of the five most significant my destination?

So, I slid up the gravely path, tucked in from the tiny, sidewalk-less Kamakura streets, and met Jufukiji’s entrance. Guarded by a rickshaw, which had been parked by its driver who was entertaining two young Japanese girls, I walked past and marched down Jufukiji’s 100 foot, narrow stone path.

There was nothing unusual here. There was the same tree canopy that I found at other temples to which I had been and other gardens in which I had walked. There was a pond and small buildings, all of which had spiritual meaning lost on me and architectural meaning ignored by me.

Yet, I hadn’t lost my appreciation for the stillness and serenity and spirituality hidden just moments from honking cars. I was brought back to a Philadelphia rain storm that sent me umbrella-less into one of the city’s countless historic and beautiful Christian churches a year or so ago. A calm and a meaning for people in a place not known for either. It may all be wasted on me, but I am not without an admiration for those who understand it earnestly.

From there I walked south to the open-armed Yoigahama Beach. There was nothing white-sanded about the brownish granules or exotic about the empty glass bottle that my first step onto a Japanese beach found. There were hundreds of wetsuit-clad Japanese surfers who appeared to be waiting for a wave that never came to Kamakura’s Sagami-wan Bay, which meets with the Tokyo Bay on its way to the Pacific Ocean.

I walked down to the water and fell into the same game of my childhood which I had perfected on the sands of the Jersey Shore. I followed the water out and scurried backwards as it chased me back. I bent down, scooped up the warmish Japanese ocean and let it fall. I walked back to the street, pausing only to break my ardent adherence to the maxim ‘take only pictures and leave only footprints,’ by pocketing a small stone intended to be a present for a friend who has the curious habit of collecting things with origins she’ll never see.

I snaked my way along the curvy, hilled streets of the plush, residential community of Kamakura and came to what most come to see. Daibutsu. Daibutsu, the Great Buddha of Kamakura. More than 40 feet tall and pushing 121 tons, I have no meaningful appreciation for why I was accompanied by 100 or more others left staring into his closed eyes.

It is one of the two largest pre-modern bronze Buddhas in Japan, the other resting in Nara. This well-visited personage was cast in 1252, survived a tidal wave that took its home in 1495, years of rain, snow, sun and wind, and a number of memorable earthquakes.

I didn’t mind the 200 yen ($1.80 USD) entrance fee, and I even dropped the 20 yen ($0.18 USD) to walk inside the hallow Buddha. Inside I found, aside from a ladder that stretched to his shoulders, that I was alone in a large bronze closet with fifteen or so Japanese tourists.

I walked outside, passing a couple that gave an offering and said a prayer at Daibutsu’s feet, and carried my camera to the exit. I took one last silly photo and thought about how often I had seen his face in nameless history textbooks from my primary schooling. Daibutsu has a lot more meaning now, to be sure.
Jaa mata,
Christopher

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