#32 Japanic Attack
I’ve got a friend out here in Portland; let’s call him J-Dawg. J-Dawg is one of the best people that I’ve met since I moved to Portland, and I’m terribly upset that he has decided to follow a dream of his, and move to Japan to teach English to Japanese people, for one full year. Normally, I’m a big fan of my friends doing their thing, and achieving their dreams, but a not so tiny selfish part of me feels burned, since I’m losing such a good friend to another country! And the more I think about it, the more I wonder; just what does Japan have on Portland, that could appeal to my friend? And furthermore, how could anyone who has lived in Portland for over a year want to leave this urban hippie liberal Mecca? Portland is a great city, full of roses, with a population of barely one million people, while Japan is an overcrowded, tiny country, smaller than the size of California, with a population three times the size of California, featuring 128 million people. But I can come up with more reasons than population density in a last ditch attempt to convince J-Dawg not to move to Japan. So I have once again loaded up on Internet research this week, and I’ve come up with an unbiased, tit for tat comparison of Portland, Oregon, to Japan, uh, Japan. So let the contest begin.
When I was in high school, I had to work part time to earn enough money to buy stupid things like baseball cards, comic books, and other useless consumer goods that my parents wouldn’t give me money for. Working isn’t much fun, but it pays bills and provides one with a self-sufficiency and autonomy in this crazy capitalist world of ours. Well, if I were to have grown up in Japan, I would have been utterly screwed, and never learned to feel autonomous, because it is against the law for high school students in Japan to hold part time (or full time) jobs. Japanese citizens are known around the world for diligently working sixty hour long work weeks, but I never knew that minors in Japan were held to such stringent standards and laws, such as a ban on working. As a proponent of freedom, I award one point to Portland for allowing its children to work. J-Dawg quit smoking this year, and he’s not a huge fan of second hand smoke, so I could see why he’d perhaps want to leave Oregon, for a different non-smoking state. After all, Oregon is one of the last states left on the West Coast that has yet to ban cigarette smoking indoors. But for a non-smoker to choose Japan over Oregon is like taking a gigantic step backward, because Japan has a smoker rate of nearly sixty percent of its adult population, and is known around the world as “the heaven for smokers, and the hell for non-smokers.” I wonder if Japanese teenagers are non-smokers, since they can’t work to earn money for cigarettes, and then when they enter the ‘adult workforce’ if they suddenly become embittered by their horrendous sixty hour work weeks and start chain smoking?
J-Dawg prefers Pilsners to most other beers, and I’m sad to report that Japan is actually a beer-drinking haven when compared to Portland, and most of America. Here in Oregon, all of the liquor and beer consumption is monitored, taxed, and regulated by an incredibly bureaucratic and fascist regime called the “Oregon Liquor Control Commission.” This regime imposes ridiculous standards and laws in an attempt to restrict any and all fun on the behalf of alcohol patrons across the state. So I guess Portland loses, big time, when compared to Japan over the issue of drinking, because Japan actually has beer and cigarette vending machines on the street! If Japan also had chips and salsa vending machines, I would have already bought my one-way ticket to the country, and no one would ever hear from me again. (But you may have read about the ‘pathetic’ American citizen found dead on the street from an overdose of vending machine salsa.)
Japanese culture is pretty antithetical to our American culture. Here in America, it’s pretty commonplace to see young women out in public, wearing bikini tops and short shorts or cut off jeans. It’s also common for men to sport facial hair. But not in Japan! In Japan, women are held to a ridiculous standard of ethics when it comes to their bodies, and all men shave, every single day of their life! Japanese women even go so far as to wear panty hose underneath their one-piece swimsuits when going to the beach, and are rarely seen out in public without fully covering their legs. I’m not saying that women have to show their skin, nor that they should, but as a fan of civil liberties, I think that any culture which coerces its citizens to shave every day and to cover their bodies in public is pretty archaic, and not the best culture for any free-spirited American.
Japan is a fish-based economy. You’ve heard of sushi, right? That’s where you take a bunch of rice, and then throw some raw meat on it, and sell it for the same price as a brand new DVD, and that’s for two to four pieces. Well, as tasty as sushi is, it’s not exactly the best deal, when it comes to eating on an economic budget, since two to four pieces of sushi fills me up about as much as ten saltine crackers do. I’ll take our American culture of half priced happy hour menus with ridiculously unhealthy and over-sized portions of deep-fried food over thirty dollar sushi snacks, any day. But I do have to admit that my curiosity was piqued when I read about the Japanese obsession with eating whale meat, a common food in Japan: “Whale – it’s what’s for dinner.”
Japanese people have invented some pretty ridiculous dishes! For a culture almost entirely devoid of stoners, I’m surprised that a marijuana-free society could invent a dish like Okonomiyaki, which is a mixture of pancakes and pizza. Okonomiyaki sounds more like the type of meal that my college roommates would have invented when experiencing a bad case of the munchies. My favorite example of a stoner meal creation comes from the time that my college roommate invented Pop Tarts n’ ice cream – one of the most bizarre yet delicious entrees that I’ve ever consumed!
I don’t know how many of you like weddings, but I’m not a huge fan of them. Don’t get me wrong; I love the party that occurs after the ceremony, because it’s full of good friends, good food, and good, free booze! But the ceremony part of a wedding, depending on the couple’s religious orientation, is usually long, boring, and full of sermons and rhetoric that make me roll my eyes. (Luckily, when I roll my eyes, it looks like I’m emotionally moved, so most people mistake my boredom for a sense of genuine appreciation at their weddings.) But if I lived in Japan, boy would I be one happy camper! This is because it is a Japanese tradition that only immediate family members can attend a wedding ceremony, and everyone else is only invited to attend the party afterwards. I have to give my accolades to Japan when it comes to wedding policy.
I don’t know how many of you recall my seventh column, titled “personal hygiene,” but I’m pretty rigorous when it comes to my standards for cleanliness and bathing. I think I’d last about ten minutes in Japan, if I were sharing a household or apartment with anyone. This is because in Japan it is customary to change bath water only after every person living in a house has used the same bathwater to bathe in. I don’t have anything witty to remark about this, I just find this fact disgusting, and so I award one point to Portland, and due to the disgusting nature of this fact, I’m actually subtracting one point from Japan’s overall score. This means that Portland is beating Japan, five to one.
I love to hear funny sounds and accents. As a matter of fact, I love to make up words, since I find the English language rather boring, when it comes to how boring most of our words sound. Conversely, the Japanese language has always sounded really exciting and fun to me. My current voicemail is the recorded sound of me impersonating my best chicken squawk, which frightens half of my callers, and makes the rest laugh. Well, I found out that in Japan you answer the phone by saying “Moshi Moshi!” in a really excited and hurried tone, and I’m quite envious of this aspect of Japanese culture. So I have to award Japan yet another point, but for the record, I’d rather say hello on the phone, if it guarantees me my god given right to be extremely lazy when it comes to shaving my facial hair.
I hate most television programs, with the exception of a few HBO dramas, “Twin Peaks”, and of course, the ‘as-addictive-as-heroin’ ABC drama, “Lost.” Based on what little Japanese television I have had the opportunity to watch, I must give Japan a giant nod over America when it comes to television. In America, our television executives seem to award unoriginality and so-called ‘reality’ television programs with key time slots, whereas in Japan, most of the shows feature real people doing ridiculously strange and often dangerous stunts for a chance to win cash prizes. These shows are far more clever, realistic, and entertaining than almost any program you’ll find on American TV, and for this reason, I have to concede to Japan on the issue of television.
I’d love to research more, and come up with a larger composite comparison analysis of Japan versus Portland, but time is short, and I only have two days left to hang out with J-Dawg, so I’m going to cut this article a bit short. But suffice it to say that I think I understand why someone might go to Japan for a year, to check out the culture. I mean, televised Sumo Wrestling has got to be more exciting than televised golf, Legendary Samurai’s are far cooler than Cowboys and Pioneers are, and there’s something oddly appealing about a culture inundated with rice snacks, fish cakes, beer vending machines, and of course, wasabi-flavored ice cream! I just don’t think that I would want to permanently live there, since I like to see women in bikinis at the beach, I like my NFL games to occur when I’m awake, and I’m more of a fan of pancakes for breakfast, and pizza for dinner, as opposed to both at once, anytime of the day. But the next time I’m bored out of my mind, and watching people wait in line to eat wafers at a wedding ceremony (that I’m not allowed to eat), I’ll think of my friend J-Dawg, and say to myself—“I wish I lived in Japan.” So best of luck, J-Dawg; you will be missed!
