Japan E-mails: Aug. 22, 2001

(retrospection)
Sorry its been a while since my last e-mail. I don't have e-mail access during the weekends, and then this Monday-Wednesday I was at another orientation. This time around it was the local orientation for the prefecture. We went to the town of Beppu, which was a decent sized city, so that was nice after the past week and a half of hanging out in a small town. At the orientation I hung out with some of the same people I met in Tokyo, and I even got to meet a few new people. It was a lot of fun, but my inbox really filled up and now I'm really behind on correspondence.

School hasn't started yet, but I manage to occupy myself all right. I get taken out to dinner a lot by the people in my town, so there is fun to be had around here.

I got a car today. (Actually my predecessor left one for me). It's a stick, and I only know how to drive automatic. But I think this is all for the best, because learning how to drive a stick is one of those skills I would have had to pick up eventually. Still, this is a hell of a place to learn. I mean, it's all these windy mountain roads, so I'm constantly speeding up and slowing down and shifting shifting shifting.

The food you ask? Well not to bad. When I first got here, everything was an adventure, and I really got into the fun of eating exotic stuff even if it tasted a little funny to me. Then, I got sick of it, and yearned for a pizza, or even a little Debbie snack cake. Now, my body is going through a bit of an adjustment, because it's not used to all this Japanese food, and not everything is moving through the old system as smoothly as it used to. (If you know what I mean). They say this stage usually hits about two weeks, and it was almost two weeks to the day when I got hit by it. So for the time being I'm eating Western food when I can find it, but once I get back to normal I think I'm going to jump back into the whole "eat whatever they put in front of you" adventure.

Things are going good here. My supervisor is helping me find Japanese history books in English. I indicated to him that I was interested in the Japanese student movement and the Japanese peace movement (which are both subjects I had trouble finding decent English sources on back in the states.) He got really excited and took me to meet a lot of his friends who had been in the student movement. It turns out that Tokyo University had dormitories organized by prefecture, and the Oita dormitory had so many radicals in it, and was so strongly controlled by the Zengakuren (The SDS of Japan) that the Governor ordered it dissolved, and they all had to find new dorms to live in. (One of his friends told me, "It was always us versus the govern er.") My supervisor wanted to study in the United States, and apparently only 3 people were chosen each year for the program, and so he was not able to get involved in the Student Movement, but he was sympathetic to its goals. He spent a year at MSU in 1969 and he said students in Japan were much more active than students in the US at the same time.

Then his wife wanted to talk to me about the peace movement. She had gone to Okinawa with a choir group back when she was in college (back when Okinawa was still under US control) and she saw young American soldiers on their way to Vietnam. She was so affected by this that she joined the Peace in Vietnam Committee when she got back to Tokyo. (Which was an interesting group, started by Japanese novelist Oda Makoto, run according to anarchist principles, and they even took out two full page ads in the New York Times encouraging American soldiers to desert and offering to hide them in Japan). Anyway, I asked her if she had ever been involved with the Zengakuren, and she said that she went on marches organized by the Zengakuren where students threw rocks at the police. Then my supervisor added he also used to march in Zengakuren demonstrations when he could. Those were all the details I could get. Their English is not perfect, and my Japanese is non-existent. (Oh, if only I hadn't wasted all that time this summer when I could have been studying).

Anyway, apparently since the Oita prefectural dorm was so radical, a lot of people working in Oita have a history in the student movement. Like I think a couple of the principles at schools I will be teaching in were quite involved in the student movement. My supervisor even indicated he had a couple friends in the Japanese Red Army faction. Hopefully I'll get to meet them someday.

Needless to say this is very exciting for me. Just a couple of years ago I was reading about the Japanese student movement, and it was all an abstract idea. And now I'm actually meeting people who were involved in the events I was reading about. Unfortunately there is really no good English source on this whole movement, which I think is a shame because there are so many English sources on Japanese wartime aggression, but not on the Japanese peace movement. I would love to collect some stories from some of the people around here and bring them back to the US (maybe post them on the Media Mouse website, or something like that), but I'm going to have to learn some Japanese first, so this is all a bit down the road.

[Editors note--Aww, the early days when I thought if I just put in enough effort I could be speaking fluent Japanese in 6 months. After 5 years I'm still no where close to speaking the level of Japanese that this kind of project would require.]


Link of the Day
How the Democrats Blew It in Only Eight Months