Having a Kid in Japan

So yeah. I promised back when I had my son in August, that I wouldn't be posting stupid pictures of him throwing up with 'awww izznt dat da cutest wittle ting u evr saw' bullshit captions. Nothing is more boring to me than other people's children, and I only really tolerate my job (elementary school teacher in Japan) because I know they'll be going home to annoy the shit out of their own parents at the end of the day. That, and the girls are awesome. I pretty much teach the girls, and if the boys pay attention, power to them. I can't stand little boys, they're such intentional shits all the time that I end up just wanting to punch them in the throat every 12 seconds. God! Anyway... people like hearing about adventures in Japan, and I figure this is a pretty big one, so here's the lowdown on having an inbred half-whitey son in Jap-an.

One of the things about living in Japan (probably the one big thing) I don't really like is the feeling of being trapped in my current line of work. I can't just stop teaching and go get an office job, or even work the drive through at the local Mac Deez. My grasp of the Japanese language isn't as good as it could be (completely my fault, and fully within my own boundaries to improve), but it's good enough to get by, and that's what I do. I get by. As long as I continue to teach school, getting by is sufficient, and doing so actually probably helps my situation in some ways. There's a girl from Australia that majored in Japanese before coming over here, and since she speaks the language fluently, she's somehow expected to know and follow all of their fucked up high, mid, low, mid-low, high-high-mid low, mid-low high-low bullshit systems of addressing one another. Nobody just says "dude" or "sir". There are like 57 ways to address a superior and grovel before them, and lord help you if you chose rank 15b when that guy was clearly an 18f. I just trample all over it, using the 'talking to a child form' with the principal at school, write it off to a general misunderstanding of their wacky culture, and get away with it. Even if I become fluent in the language and customs during my time here, I will never LET ON that I know the drill. It's much easier to exercise the gaijin smash (omfg please read that link, it's priceless) and just be done with it.

Now that I have a kid here, it's become more apparent that I'll be here for some time, or that I should hurry the fuck up and get back to America ASAP. I think having Roy start elementary school here, then getting to about 3rd grade and being like 'yeah, fuck this, let's head back to the states' probably wouldn't be a very healthy thing for a kid to go through, so we gotta kinda figure this out now (well, soon). The final plan is for my wife to open a hair salon over here, and have me do part time lessons in an after school English Juku kinda thing, but that's such a long ways off that I'm not sure I can handle teaching the same 'where are you going? i'm going to the zoo' lessons until then. There's actually a big program underway in Japan to normalize the English curriculum for 5th and 6th graders, so it's an interesting time to be a teacher here, but the new text books they're introducing are at my 1st and 2nd grade kids' level. My district is unique in that we have full time English teachers at the elementary level, and the books are aimed at schools who have never had an English lesson. They're trying to ramp the kids up for junior high, where it's a full time subject. That being the case, teaching my fifth graders "how are you? i am happy" is a huge bore for them. The official program starts next year, so we'll see how that goes...

Children with one foreign parent are called 'halfs', and whether that's a half-empty 'you are only half Japanese' or a half-full 'wow you're half American, cool!' is up for debate. In general, halfs get taunted and tormented during their elementary and junior high school years for being anything other than 'regular Japanese', then everyone jumps on their nuts when they get older, because by then everyone is sick of regular Japanese and wants to stand next to anyone that stands out in a crowd (98.8% of Japan is Japanese). I mean, elementary school kids are shits wherever you go. I grew up in a white neighborhood, and the one black kid at my school was being called a nigger every day by all the retards before they even knew what it meant. While a half Japanese half White kid is run of the mill in America, everyone here spazzes out about it like a giraffe had sex with a gorilla and created some freak abnormality.

After 5 years living in Japan, I still get random people that just blatanly stop and stare at me when I walk down the street, or push a cart in the supermarket. I've had Japanese teachers tell me I remind them of Will Smith. I'm a white guy. I recently bought a pretty big and fancy camera, and after carrying it around for a few days I realized that now, in addition to being a 'foreigner', people think I'm also either a huge fucking tourist or that I want to sell pictures of their daughters to porn sites or something. For the most part, I'm able to just ignore gawkers, but that's because it was my choice to come here; I brought it on myself. Do I really want to subject my child to that kind of shit, though, when he had no choice in the matter? Imagine you are a child with 3 eyes on your face. Would you rather grow up where that's normal, or in some land where everyone is going to stop and stare at you every time you leave your house?

I'm blowing it out of proportion, but only slightly. To say this doesn't exist would be untrue, and like I said, I can ignore it myself because I brought it on myself. I do love living in Japan, and think it's got a lot of things going for it. Random Japanese people have a strong (crazy strong) sense of unity with one another that just doesn't exist in America. But again, Japan is 98% Japanese, so of course it makes sense that they would. They also don't try to sue each other everyday, the police aren't complete assholes, and generally the vibe is that you're free to do your own thing as long as you aren't killing people. There aren't stupid amounts of guns and drugs everywhere, children's playgrounds still have play structures made out of honest-to-god real wood and cement (not foam and pillows), and Japanese teachers are free to drag a kid out of the classroom by his ear.

It's far from perfect, though. The glass ceiling for women is ridicuclous (women in general are still at a heavy disadvantage in many situations), the education system's content is pretty lacking (learning is done my rote, history books conveniently gloss over WW2), and politicians are screwing people over (hardly unique to Japan)... The question becomes one of 'which system would I rather raise a child in?' and more often than not I'm leaning with just staying here.

The question of language pops up again, as Roy will be attending Japanese schools and surrounded by a country that speaks Japanese. As I said earlier, I have the tools at my disposal to learn Japanese, I just haven't bothered... I have a wife at home that speaks English. I intend to continue speaking English primarily to Roy, and have my wife (and the country at large) speak Japanese to him, hoping he'll get a grasp on both. I have this fear that eventually he'll get sick of speaking English to me, and just be like 'Why the fuck doesn't dad speak Japanese?' but children have a huge advantage in picking up languages. It's actually been documented that the language pathways in our brains are formed at an early age, and since we use language so regularly (even talking to ourselves in our heads), those pathways become 'deeper' with use. Common neurons are always firing down the same paths to produce certain word associations, and that's why it gets harder to pick up a language as you get older. Hopefully Roy will develop the bi-lingual pathways at an early age, and while it may be confusing at first that dad says "car" and mom says "kuruma", eventually it'll just make sense. People I've talked to about this say there's nothing to worry about, but it just seems so strange to me.


Blegh... this is a bit of a ramble, and hinging awfully close on that whole "hey this is all about my kid, isn't it interesting" that I despise so much, so I'll cut this short with the promise that if this is something you're into, I can always expound further on the subject if desired.