The Songs I Already Know

you write the songs I record
on a tape-deck as ancient as me:

its lovers and loves and loveliness
hiss and spit with the magnetic tape
spinning side to side like a chinese scroll.

hour love and the pithy songs thereof
fill a whole side; the other, a muddle
of the Beatles, of Buson, and Battus
mixed like bad wine to taste.

and as we listen to our love replay
we fail to notice how it degrades
and how one day, out of the blue,
the machine is about to eat it.

yet, I put it in to hear
the songs I already know.

This is not related (though with me you always have to question whether it really is related), but as I lay in the tub this morning soaking my skin and tortured sinuses with the liquid and vaporized states of hot water, I began to think about my first few days living in Mito, Japan that is; I remember having a conversation with the lady who ran the bakery near my apartment--the very same bakery to which I always ran whenever I was pressed for lunch--about "American-ness." I was new to the area (and white as the sun is hot), so she, being naturally curious, asked me where I was from, when I arrived... the usual lot of questions. She asked me what I thought was different between Japan and the US; I said, "not much," to which she insisted the two countries must be very different. I responded there are certain superficial differences but at their core, Japanese and Americans are just people, with all the wonderful and frustrating oddities being human entails. Needless to say, after three years and numerous examples of my behavior, she's convinced I'm dead wrong.

I've been toying with the idea of writing a novella about gaijin life in Japan but told, and here's the kicker, from the perspective of a Japanese, particularly one of a growing minority of Japanese who are singled out for their "foreign-ness." It's hard for a whiteys living in the 'Pan, who are generally unnecessarily praised for their exotic beauty, to have a good sense of what life is like for the vast majority of foreigners, who are overwhelmingly Brazilian, Korean, or Chinese. I think it would be interesting to delve into this feeling of foreign-ness from an outcast Japanese perspective (simultaneously inside and outside) to look at how some foreigners both perpetuate and exacerbate Japanese notions of exoticism. For a "Johnny teaches English in the countryside" his position of privilege is entirely predicated upon maintaining others' beliefs in his peculiarity. So oftentimes said Johnny will reinforce and embolden such notions even when a particular notion of cultural uniqueness is absolutely absurd. I couldn't count on my fingers and toes the number of nihonjinron books written by westerners for the consumption of westerners. Hell, Gregory Clark makes his living traveling around Japan telling them how special they are.

Of course, all of this will likely disappear beneath another thousand books on Catullus and Yosano Akiko I have yet to read, but it is nice to muse about wonderful projects that will never come to be.