Saturday, May 11, 2024

Japan

This was written a couple years ago—9/25/22 and not posted. Having just finished a nice walk thru Osaka, I guess I’ll post it now.

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I'm on a weekend layover in Osaka.

(Every single person on their phone--one woman working 2 phones!)

During my years on the MD-11, we never visited Japan except to make an hour-long fuel stop on our way to Anchorage.  When I moved to the Boeing 767 six years ago I began to have layovers both here in Osaka and outside Tokyo at Narita. But I never managed a layover of any substance before Covid confined us to our hotel rooms. So this business of free time in Japan and approval to use public transportation is something still relatively new for me. Yesterday I took the train into central Osaka and spent a couple hours on the hoof.

I feel so privileged that I'm able to regularly visit these far flung places, but I'm not very food adventurous and I don't sit around a bar and talk to the bartender. So I never really get the inside scoop on any of the places I visit. I feel lucky to see all these things that are outside my comfort zone, and surely impressions seep in. But it's kind of standard practice to find myself struggling to integrate my observations of these places with my larger view of the world. This is especially true when the US is in such a tumultuous, dysfunctional state and when I hold such strong opinions as to the causes of it. Our meltdown colors everything I see elsewhere, I fear. And perhaps I'm a bit too eager to make my observations fit into a template that filters so much of the rest of my life's experiences.

That caveat aside, from my wanderings around Osaka here are a couple thoughts. 

1. The subway system is pretty extensive, and it seems heavily used by young and old alike. And maybe unlike any train system I've been on this one is clean and completely graffiti-free. They even have fabric-covered padded seats. Imagine that on the trains in NYC or Chicago! In Osaka, nobody has scratched their mark in the glass or defaced the advertising inside with a marker or tagged the outside of the trains with spray paint--let alone urinated in a corner nor taken a dump on the floor nor left their fast food wrappers strewn about. And the sense is that the folks riding the train would find that behavior insulting and infuriating--and self-immolating! They're riding the train to get around! Harming the train is like trying to hobble the horse pulling your cart in the middle of your trip. It's almost like the adults are actually in control here. (In America trains and buses are often trashed.) There are security / police in many stations, but they are not heavily armed (let alone carrying riot gear)--there to keep order and assist with directions.

2. People are almost invariably quiet and non-disruptive. Even noisy children are rare. In several hours of train rides and walking around I saw nary a cross moment nor heard a raised voice. That is such a HUGE contrast with, say, New York or Chicago or L.A., where so many people act like they're engaged in a public performance. American airports are noisy and chaotic. Many Americans are loud and crass, and those who aren't are used to those who are. This is "rugged individualism" I guess. 

From a visitor's perspective, Japan feels like a much more functional place than the US. People seem responsible and civic-minded and not cripplingly stupid or addled by propaganda. That's as it looks from my distant perch. Not everybody has a big house or a nice car, but they're all scrupulously clean and everybody has their cell phone and nice clothes.

I intended to go to a baseball game over the weekend--both major teams here in Osaka are playing (the Hanshin Tigers and the Orix Buffaloes)--but decided that with Covid on the rise it may be inadvisable. But I watched a bit of last night's game on TV (where I understood nothing!) and did some reading about the differences between American and Japanese baseball. And those differences seem to slot into my burgeoning sense of the larger country. The teams are much more important to the sport than the individuals on the team, and nobody makes much money--because it would be selfish and greedy to look out for yourself when it's the team that matters. That seems maybe a metaphor for the whole country: it's the team that matters, and the individual's job is to support and assist the team. It's the Common Good in the entertainment sphere. 

And that seems what's conspicuously missing in America. I'm reminded of an Atlantic article I read a year or two ago by political theorist George Packer talking about how America has splintered into four distinct groups (which notion deserves its own post--indeed, the article was a condensation of a larger book on the subject which I bought and haven't had the stomach to actually read). But for our purposes, the takeaway is that NONE of the four groups holds their responsibilities as CITIZENS as primary--indeed, the whole notion seems to have fallen from our collective consciousness. We've stopped caring about each other, and have let our antipathy take the place of civic duty or any kind of social contract. (What does not align with my preconceptions is that most teams are named after a major company in the region--even if the team is the darling of a community. The local Hanshin Tigers are named after the electric utility company of this region. Also, one naturally wonders if the teams generate anything like the same money an American team generates, and where that money goes.)

Maybe the America of Leave It To Beaver was always an illusion. Certainly it was a racist, misogynist place where "good behavior" was a thin layer of cheap paint hiding the ugly mechanism. But we don't even have the pretense of that now. Republicans are hell-bent on harm and obstruction and grievance, and Democrats are consumed with damage control. Maybe this kind of stuff is hard at work here in Japan as well, but I certainly don't see it. As I walked around the city, and fully aware of all that I do not understand, I couldn't help thinking that this would be a fine place to live. The people I see appear to be living fulfilling, rewarding lives as community members and citizens of a vibrant, functional place.

I wonder if anything I learn going forward will support or weaken this impression?

This trip with its swirl of observations coincided with my listening to the audiobook of Richard Lloyd Parry's People Who Eat Darkness, a true crime book about a British woman in Tokyo 20 years ago who went missing and was found murdered. The investigation and the workings of the police and legal systems were all put under a microscope, which details added to my embryonic sense of the country. Serious crime--even petty crime--is really quite rare in Japan. It's one of the safest countries on the planet. But we're all still human beings after all, and the Japanese are not immune to bigotry and racism and misogyny and greed and strife--like all of us.

But from my vantage point it seems a more functional place than present-day America.

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