Binary
There are more than two planets in the universe
In my last entry, I mentioned how narrow my worldview was.
When I went to Japan for the first time forty years ago today, I met some distant relatives who had just returned from living in the Netherlands for several years. At the time, my world revolved around the sun - Japan. To use a conflicting metaphor, I was caught between two poles - Japan and Hawaii - and nothing beyond those poles really concerned me.
I was vaguely aware of the rest of the world. I had learned geography from puzzle maps of the USSA and the world that I had assembled many times as a child.
I grew up reading The World Book Encyclopedia, including its articles on countries, and National Geographic. The October 1978 issue of Ranger Rick on the USSR made me realize that there was more to that country than Russia.
I was surprised to learn there were Asians there too.
I didn’t know what to make of the decorative Cyrillic in the issue.
I would have been surprised as a child if I had been told I’d be reading Russian someday. Even though for some reason I taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet long before my first Russian class.1 I never expected to get beyond the thirty-three letters:
АБВГДЕЁЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯ
I usually learn a script before a language.2 Getting the former out of the way enables me to focus on the latter. I’m aware of arguments for learning both at the same time, but that’s what works for me.3
My younger self would have wondered why I’d bother learning languages other than Japanese. Yes, there were other languages and cultures out there but … they didn’t matter to me. They might as well have not existed.
I’m horrified by my narrow-mindedness now. I see myself as being like the Time Trapper in The Adventures of Superman #444 (September 1988). He tore away “a slice of the cosmos” …
… “pruned” it by “removing” everything he wasn’t interested in …
… leaving only Japan Krypton and Hawaii Earth …
… to set a convoluted trap for the Legion of Super-Heroes4.
I had set a trap for myself.
In my binary mindset, Japan was Good and Hawaii was Bad … just as the Time Trapper’s Krypton was a utopia compared to his Earth.
I wanted to escape from one world (Hawaii) to the other (Japan). A world that did not actually exist. A literal utopia. Utopia is from Greek for ‘no-place’.
Cartoons like Megazone 23 made that nonplace seem so real. This clip from Megazone 23 Part II captures the look and feel of Tokyo in the eighties. I have never seen any other cartoon with so much attention to realistic detail.
It was a bit surreal to buy a book about that movie while I was a tourist in Tokyo forty years ago. Self-referential.
My body was in Japan, but my mind was somewhere else - a phantom I mistook for the real thing. A phantom I chased for so many years.
What happens when you realize your pursuit of the Better Other was in vain?
Yesterday I found this post by lily357 via a Note by Dr Livci:
If you sit in any specialty coffee shop in the Vračar or Dorćol neighborhoods of Belgrade on a Tuesday morning, you will witness a profound sociological theater. Amidst the hum of espresso machines and the glow of Apple laptops, you will find them: the Russian expats.
They are, by almost any objective metric, the best of their generation. Highly educated, polyglot, technically brilliant, and culturally deep. They fled the hot war in Ukraine and the creeping authoritarianism of their homeland, seeking refuge in Serbia. But if you listen closely to their conversations, beneath the cosmopolitan veneer, you will detect a profound, suffocating melancholy. They are deeply cynical, paralyzed by nihilism, and trapped in a cognitive dissonance so severe it borders on the tragic.
[…]
The true tragedy of the modern Russian intellectual in exile is […] that they are suffering from a profound, unrequited love for a West they fundamentally misunderstand—a misunderstanding that eventually shatters, forcing them into a deep, domestic retreat.
I had “a profound, unrequited love for a Japan” that I “fundamentally” misunderstood. I experienced the shattering. The retreat.
When you speak to the Russian expats in Belgrade, you quickly notice a psychological tic. Their entire framework for self-criticism is predicated on winning Western favor.
My entire framework for self-criticism was predicated on winning Solar favor.
They ruthlessly dissect the flaws of their own society, their history, and their culture, but they do so using a strictly Western moral rubric.
Hawaii does look so backwards from a Japanese perspective.
They are trying to prove to an imaginary Western jury that they recognize their sins, that they are “self-correcting,” and that they are therefore worthy of being welcomed into the civilized fold.
I was trying to prove to an imaginary Japanese jury that I recognized my sins of un-Solarity, that I was ‘sunshifting’, and that I was therefore worthy of being welcomed into the One Civilization.
They believe that if they just speak perfect English, drink oat-milk cortados [I had to look that up], read the right post-colonial literature, and loudly denounce the Kremlin, the West will eventually tap them on the shoulder and say, “Ah, our mistake! We see you are one of us now. Welcome to the club.”
I waited for that shoulder tap in vain.
I blamed myself because I couldn’t speak perfect Japanese. The depressing thing is that my Japanese plateaued in my teens at the level that enabled me to function at university. To read textbooks and write term papers … poorly in terms of grammar and style. (I still stand behind the substance of those papers, though they weren’t profound. OK content, faulty form.) I empathize with immigrants struggling their way through college in the USSA because I was in their shoes.
Only tonight, decades later, do I realize that in theory I could have asked a native speaker to correct my papers. But the reality was that I wrote all my papers at the last minute. There was no time to have anyone look at them. And I made no Japanese friends in Japan.
Even though a bunch of Japanese girls did follow me around on campus. Because I was hawt? No! Because I was exotic. Japanese could tell I wasn’t really one of them from my dress and body language. (Similarly, we Japanese in Hawaii can easily spot Japanese from Japan.) Once the girls finally cornered me, they were disappointed that I could speak to them in Japanese.5 I was no longer exotic enough. They never bothered me again.
I can understand how these Russian expats who finally made it to the Waste feel:
Finally, they pack their bags and move to Lisbon, Madrid, or Berlin, expecting the utopia of meritocracy, justice, and belonging they had spent their lives trying to prove they deserved.
My whole life had been one long training session to prepare me for university in Japan.
And then, six months later, they are back in a Belgrade café, staring into their coffee, utterly broken.
I returned to Hawaii broken.
It took me a long time to understand how superficial my heliophilia was. Genetics aside, I was no more Japanese than these Goodthinker Russians were Waste-rn:
They left Russia because they felt it was backward and suffocating. They believed they were “Westernized” minds trapped in an Eastern autocracy.
But in exile, the truth is laid bare. Their “Westernization” was never a deeply held cultural identity; it was merely a consumer preference. They liked Western aesthetics, Western technology, and Western convenience.
I wasn’t Japanese in any meaningful way. I was - and am - just a consumer.
Last night I preordered 仮面ライダーストロンガー Masked Rider Stronger (1975) on Blu-ray.
Tonight I’m writing this post to Panzer World Galient (1984-1985).
When I see Waste-rners go gaga for K-things, I see myself in them.
An American on Facebook friended me because they love K-stuff - and they knew I had studied Korean, the key to the new One Civilization. Which it wasn’t when I took my first steps in Korean in the eighties.
I never got as far as a White guy whose passion for K-pop was so extreme that he moved to Heavenly Hanguk6, mastered the language, and broke into the music industry. I last saw the dude flexing on Quora about how hard he worked, and how big the payoff was. I got a ‘doubt you can ever be as awesome as meeee’ vibe from him. K-fans must see him as a role model.
When Russian Goodthinkers go into exile, do they have similar role models? Stories of people like them Who Made It Big Over There?
I had no such story (myth?) in my head when I ‘came to the sun’. My binary trap was purely of my own devising.
I had locked myself in.
Next: How I got myself out … with some unexpected help.
I’m not sure when this happened. It must have occurred after I got the Ranger Rick issue because I don’t remember being able to read the Cyrillic in it. Maybe it was in my early teens when I started to use a big dictionary that had a comparative table of alphabets in its inside front cover. I learned the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets from that table, but the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets were too alien for me at the time. I would learn those two years later as an adult.
The exceptions to this rule were Sanskrit, Tibetan, Manchu, Mongolian, and Old Turkic.
I have difficulties with all aspects of languages, but reading and writing are much easier for me than grammar and speaking, and listening is almost impossible. I just realized that I do what’s easiest first. Maybe that builds confidence for what comes next. Confidence that crumbles when I struggle to make sense of speech.
I may explain this trap when it turns forty next year.
It may have been around that period when I heard a story about a Japanese guy on another campus who pretended to be from the USSA and deliberately feigned ignorance of his native language to attract girls.
한국 Hanguk ‘Korean Country’ is Korean for ‘Korea’.
This is very interesting. But Japan became your mirror, and the only reason you have these insights now. So basically, the whole process made you grow both spiritually and intellectually.
The bikers in that video look like the cast of streets of rage :)