Surrounded

Today the payment for my credit card is due, but I don't get paid until the 12th. I have explained this to the company, but not having money at your fingertips and being a foreigner just don't click in their brains. So they, the company, are going to turn my card off until they get their money. They probably already have. I'm not angry. I already bought my groceries.

I've been having strange feelings about Japan lately. It feels like they are surrounding me. With their thoughts and ways and existence. The Japanese seem to like unity. I don't mean unity as in we have all JOYFULLY decided to be on the same page in life. No. The unity of which I speak is forced. It is hammered into the poor fools heads from the moment they are born.

BE THE SAME! THE SAME IS GOOD! THE SAME IS SAFE!

The enlightened ones will tell you. Enlightened doesn't necessarily mean bucking against the system. They are just aware of it.

As a result of all this hammering you end up with people who work the same, think the same, laugh at the same jokes, enjoy the same fashion, who end up being the same. Some times I look into a crowd and see one face. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not gonna go running up to a random man screaming, "Toshi-san, Toshi-san!" That would make Hideki wet himself and only give me and my fellow gaijin something to laugh at. The laugh is a little sad though because we know that no matter what we do we can never be like them. So what do we do as the permanent outsiders. We fuck with them. I like to corner the "smart" ones in my class and ask them all kinds of life disturbing questions. "Why the hell do Japanese do blah, blah, blah? Why do you do it? What is it for? Why? Why? Why?"

If you want to disturb a Japanese person's day ask them "why." They will all but scream the question back at you. Not because they don't understand, but because they are shocked that you would even ask and, as I like to believe, because they haven't.

This country has embraced the uniform. Not for simple economical reasons. Not simply as a way of showing where you work, go to school, or what kind of job you have (you can spot a construction worker's "hammer pants" a mile away), but as a means of defining who you are. You are the uniform. The uniform is your company or school. You are your company, and your company like most things in this country is controlled by someone else. So they mindlessly go along with things because that is the way it is. If they fuck up they fuck up the whole company. They're whole little group.

Peons