The White Peril 白禍

This week is Golden Week, a bank holiday, so Atsushi is coming back to Tokyo for five days. I work Saturdays until early afternoon; we figured I'd be gone before he got in from the airport, dropped his heavier stuff off, and went to his parents' place (thirty miles away, which is negligible within the Tokyo megalopolisaurus) overnight. I'd see him tomorrow when he comes back.

So of course, I ran into him near the station. Just enough time to go back to the apartment together and to be told that he has an appointment at the dermatologist's, after which his parents are expecting him for late lunch. C*ckteasing J@p.

Disconnected replies to M[a]me du Toit's musings on how we're socializing teenagers:
I. Activists tend to argue (often implicitly rather than explicitly) that your gay/feminist/ethic-ness constitutes your entire individual identity, so when someone leaves the fold, it casts doubt on everything some people around them think they are. Hence the spazzy accusations of sell-out. My own solution is to begin mentally composing my grocery list when such people start ranting at me (Optional: shamelessly ogle them if they're cute). Pointing out that championing non-conformist behavior has to cut in all directions doesn't seem to have much effect. II. I think one big point that can't be made too often is that we're never going to make anxiety go away. Letting people forge their own identities means that we're all going to feel a tension between the pull of the group and the pull of our idiosyncrasies. At this point in time, everyone's so exhausted by developments since the '60's, a lot of people seem to have this idea that if gays and feminists just shut up already, children could grow up without questioning themselves. I think that's a projection. Developing strong personalities, in nuclearized families, while moving around the country at will, is not compatible with effortless self-assurance that one is always doing what's best. Personal liberty means living with internal conflict, in addition to the external conflict with the values of those who live differently. III. Someone in this skein of blogs referred to our culture as "sexualized" recently. That's not an original locution, but it caught my attention more than it had before, and I saw it as curiously apposite. Like the way Hamlet calls Ophelia "beautified." We have a real tendency to act as if life were intrinsically clean, safe, affable, and pleasant when--boom!--sexual maturation descends on a teenager and spoils the party. It makes life complicated, and man, that just isn't fair. I'm not saying we need to...I don't know...be more like Brazil, or anything. But I do think it odd and sad that when something like the Janet Jackson breast incident happens, you don't have people just expressing indignation at the violation of community standards--that part's justifiable; you have people saying, "My word. How can I possibly begin to explain what just happened on television to my child?" As if tits were agents of disillusion in and of themselves. None of this is to be taken to mean that parents should watch Debbie Does Dallas with their kindergartners, or that teenagers should just be indulged in the guise of nurturing their individuality. And it certainly doesn't mean social-welfare programmers should be feeding school kids prefabricated political agenda. But it's not hard to see how children hit teenage and are completely disoriented by the fact that what's running through their heads isn't always explicable. IV. While parents understandably want to believe that the changes they like in their teenagers are evidence of maturation and those they don't are just passing phases, and while a lot of the teenage personality is in flux, it simply isn't true that they're at t = 0 in terms of identity formation. Encouraging teenagers to experiment when they can't know what could result is ridiculous, especially when it goes behind the backs of parents. But--maybe you have be gay to recognize the distinction--there's a difference in mien between the youngster who just wants to shock her parents and the one who's gained a shaken but unashamed sense of who he is. Since the job of saying, "Who knows? Maybe you'll wake up tomorrow and decide you like girls after all." is already filled many times over, my own inward thought on the matter is, "Good for you, bro. You're already alive to the world."

Pat Toomey, my congressman, won't be the Republican nominee for the US Senate seat that's up for election in PA this November. I have my problems with Arlen Specter, and there are things I like about Toomey. But on balance, I figure we already have one Rick Santorum.

Overall, I find myself in the mood to celebrate: A Philly-centric marathon of Hall and Oates, Todd Rundgren, and the Spinners seems in order....

(Saw it at The Queen of All Evil's)

So I chose saigyo, the name of the priest who wrote the poem I used in my domain name, as the login for something or other at some point in configuring my site preferences (or preferring my site configurations, or whatever tech people call it). Now it's my default e-mail user ID, which is not what I had in mind, but until I can figure out how to fix it, that's the address I have here (most of you who might see this know me through e-mail at my Hotmail address, anyway, which of course can still be used freely).

As long as I'm misappropriating a major name in Japanese literature as my username, why not spread the pretentiousness around? Another of my favorite poets is Akiko Yosano, who wrote a century ago. At her best, she's so sexy you can't stand it:

やは肌のあつき血汐にふれも見でさびしからずや道を説く君

与謝野晶子

yawa hada no / atsuki chishio ni / fure mo mide / sabishikarazu ya / michi wo toku kimi
Yosano Akiko

Having never felt
the hot tide of blood that throbs
beneath this soft skin
even you who seek the Way
must know what you are missing
--Akiko Yosano

I can't seem to get my English to surge and sweep forward between caesuras the way her Japanese does--Japanese poems have a reputation for stillness and contemplation, but Akiko is often all sensual force coming at you. The fact that tanka are usually printed in one vertical line down the page accentuates the effect. She also married another of the brashly innovative poets of her age. His talent dried up early, so she spent the rest of her life bearing about a hundred of his children and making money to move them around the world to try to get his muse talking to him again. A fascinating woman.

I've come to the conclusion that Mr. Norton is not as interested in providing my Internet with Security as he led me to believe. The IT-geek friend who went with me to get my new laptop warned me that XP has its problems playing well with other programs, but jeez. I'm starting to understand why all my Mac-loving friends guffaw whenever they hear the word "registry." Norton can't uninstall, can't reinstall, and when installed, tells me (the Administrator!) I'm not cool enough to get into my firewall. Not even when I widen my green eyes while making them go hard and mineral-y, which always gets what I want from a man. This is why my favorite medium is still the fountain pen and linen paper. There's the occasional ink blot to contend with, but at least there's none of this "Installation failed!" malarkey to contend with.

Paul Varnell doesn't break new ground in his characteristically sensible IGF article on queer theory, but he does iterate a point that needs to be made over and over: "None of this seems very coherent. To the extent it is coherent it seems simply wrong." On the one hand, even taking the energy to point out how contentless and irrelevant these people are as scholars is a waste. On the other hand, they do have plenty of influence in the campus gay culture that's the backdrop for a lot of people's coming out. I daresay that most gay students, even when their entire sense of themselves and the world is being broken down and remade, are together enough not to buy full-on into the laundry list of pomo beliefs. But those who do are those who most desperately need what a humanities education traditionally provided: lots and lots of information that took you outside yourself.

Planned Parenthood is not an organization toward which I feel any loyalty. I can understand why religiously devout people would object to a good deal of what it represents. But Nathan quotes a Suzanne Vega-lookalike rock critic who provides an object lesson on why so many gay and lesbian people regard even well-meaning conservative Christians as nut cases. Here's how Dawn Eden summarizes the Planned Parenthood GLBTXYZPDQ page she links:

"Find "lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender" sex partners online.

"Let me repeat that.

"If you or someone you know is sending money to Planned Parenthood, that money is going to some adult sitting at a computer, who writes detailed instructions for underage teenagers on how to pick up lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender sex partners online.

"I would be offended if they were inviting 14-year-olds to meet heterosexual sex partners online. But the thought of this organization, which claims to be protecting teenagers, instead inviting them to meet sexual predators who may steer them into homosexuality at a time when they are most impressionable, is truly disgusting."

Being a trusting sort--I really have to cut that out--I was expecting a page full of lascivious detail about safe sex techniques and how to get around having your parents find out you're a dyke or poofter. Such a thing wouldn't surprise me, when there are educators who seem to think that elementary school students need to be taught fisting.

But, um, unless I missed something, the linked page assumes you'll be working overtime to screen out lecherous 45-year-olds and having a chaste first date with another high school sophomore over Cokes at Chick-fil-A. Half the page is devoted to obsessing over the inability to verify that on-line correspondents are who they say they are--with good reason, of course.

There is a line that gives instructions "in case things don't go as you hope and you want to make an early exit," and while I wouldn't exactly be floored if Planned Parenthood types just used that as the most explicit reference to potential sex they dared include, it could refer to nothing more than not banking on a ride home from a blind date. In any case, neither it nor anything else I could see qualifies as "detailed instructions for underage teenagers on how to pick up lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender sex partners online" as any thinking person understands the phrasing.

I don't believe, needless to say, in encouraging teenagers to disobey their parents. Where I grew up, "You can do what you want when you're eighteen, but while you're living under my roof, you'll do what I say" was the rule, and unless the household is abusive, I think it's a good one. But teenage is when children are, if anything, most susceptible to the idea that they should fit in with their friends at any cost. The idea that being "impressionable" is the only reason a sixteen-year-old would be looking for a same-sex date simply doesn't pass the smell test, however comforting it may be to people who cherish the belief that we're all fixable.

Dolly Parton has always been one of my favorite celebrities. Yeah, I know, big surprise. But seriously, while she did that whole what-was-she-thinking? all-around entertainer routine for two decades, she also made some extraordinary music--I could listen to "Down from Dover" on repeat for hours--and she shows the very best American earthiness and self-deprecating humor:

"There's not going to be no wardrobe malfunction this evening," she said, referring to Janet Jackson's infamous breast-baring during the Super Bowl halftime show. "There's not supposed to be, it's not planned.

"But as tight as my clothes are there's no telling what will happen. If it does happen, I'm going to wipe out the first three rows," she said.

She still has that amazing ability to do bawdy humor without making it seem cheap or brazen. Incredible. (I do have to say, though, that the fact that the show is called the Flameworthy Awards made it sound like a joke at first. Apparently not.)

I adore my friends (obviously, or I'd go be friends with different people), but I wish I could get them to stop treating me like a terminally-ill patient. I know that Atsushi's being transferred out of Tokyo won't be news for much longer, now that he's been gone a month today. I'm also genuinely grateful for the support.

But I swear: I've dealt with and oriented myself toward the fact that I'm not going to be seeing Atsushi more than twice a month for a year or two. It abrades me, but it isn't the end of the world. What will most assuredly make me lose my mind is spending another night out being asked every ten minutes whether I'm okay. My four or five very closest friends know that I like to deal with my hurts in my own way, but "the guys" in the larger sense don't seem to, and saying so in response to an offer of concern would sound as if I were telling them to buzz off.

When these things come up, I never know whether the problem is cultural (in that my Japanese is good but not perfect, and understanding people's expectations is frequently much harder than just learning to speak colloquial Japanese) or individual (in that even people who grew up together can misinterpret each other). Often, that's kind of freeing. Having grown up in Oprah-era America, I know how crazy people can drive themselves when trying to analyze every batted eye and stray tossed-off remark as the key to one's soul. Here, I more or less have to assume that a specific perceived slight from someone who overall treats me with kindness and respect isn't worth fixating on.

Not that clapping someone on the shoulder and wishing him well is a slight. It's just that knowing that people are going to spend the evening feeling sorry for me makes me not really want to be around my own friends. And that makes me feel like a kvetchy ingrate who doesn't deserve them. I don't seem to have much choice but to smile and say, "Well, he's coming back for Golden Week; that's only a week away. I hope we'll see you around so he can say hi." I only wish people knew I meant it.

Wow. Two trains containing inflammable materials have collided in North Korea near the Chinese border. Both the CNN and the Nikkei (Japan Economics Journal) articles report that the DPRK news agency hasn't broadcast the incident. This is not just some little sideswipe in the middle of nowhere that's going to cause a government energy agency to lose (even more) money. There may be up to 3000 casualties. Those poor people. Given that the accident involved fire and industrial chemicals, the injuries are probably pretty nasty.

It isn't hard to imagine the combination of mismanagement and substandard equipment that might have brought this kind of thing on. It also isn't hard to imagine the quality of medical care people will get, even with China's assistance. The proximity of "self-sufficient" North Korea, with its news blackouts and constant leakage of refugees (not to mention those missile tests), is one of the creepiest and most depressing things about living in this part of the world.

I don't plan to say much about politics here, assuming I keep it up, because...well, there are already plenty of sharper and more knowledgeable people commenting on it. I like joining conversations in people's comment sections, but that's different.

However.

I think I seriously just heard a straight-faced Hillary Clinton tell Larry King that the problem with the Bush administration is that it's too insular, with a secrecy/insider complex that keeps out the sunshine of opposing points of view. Either I've had too much Scotch or too little.

I don't mean that I'm in love with the Bush administration or think that HRC is definitely wrong, either; I only mean that for either Clinton to make such a criticism without appending a hearty, "and we know how easy it is to succumb to that temptation!" is pretty rich.

And Hillary, for Pete's sake, not that shade of aqua. It gives your skin an iced-mackerel cast, which can't possibly have been the idea.

I do have to say, though, that while I think I'm past the ability to like her at this point, she's learned to project warmth and ease of tone (leaving aside the truth of what she's saying). Her voice used to have this chilly, impatient, I-know-something-you-don't-know edge--like tape hiss. Her eyes used to narrow and look flinty. But now she comes across as thoughtful and self-deprecating. Maybe she even means it.

Agenda Bender is accusing me of exploiting the AB Tokyo bureau for my own gain and then cutting and running. A case in which messenger and message are equally inverted. Someday, I'll tell my story of struggling to keep an office going with no capital, a product that couldn't be localized, and endless screams of "Profitability! I need to see profitability!" during conference calls with HQ. But it's just too painful right now.

On the other hand, he did usefully ask whether I'd seen the parallel father-son interviews with the Terrys linked to later by Andrew Sullivan. I had. They aren't likely to change many minds on either side. My only point was that, even if we took Randall Terry's statements at face value, the strict Christianity of Jamiel's upbringing was not the most plausible explanation for his alleged problems.

Joanne Jacobs posts on education, so it's not surprising that the Japanese public education system comes up in posts and comments pretty frequently. Many of the advertisements on commuter train cars here are for cram schools, and one of the big ones...amazing that I forget which, since I've been seeing its ads for a fifth of my life now...uses its space to give sample questions for tests at its various program levels. This week's is for the grade-school kids. I didn't take a photograph of it or write it down, but the content of the problem is as follows:

In this exercise we will use a simple experiment to estimate the value of pi. Assume a square piece of paper, 20 centimeters on a side, with a circle inscribed in the square. You have sprinkled 50 sesame seeds evenly and randomly over the paper. If there are 39 sesame seeds inside the circle, estimate the value of pi to two decimal places.

Two things jump out at me about this problem that I find hard to articulate when commenting at Joanne's and other places: for one thing, in its math education, Japan doesn't emphasize creativity any more than it does anywhere else. What it does emphasize is resourcefulness and learning how to be "good with numbers" even if you're not naturally gifted that way, in addition to demonstrating how to set things up formally.

The other thing is that Japan is not afraid to use unforced-sounding Japanese situations in its story problems. Granted, things can get kind of lunaticky in the opposite direction. If I recall correctly, a textbook was edited to remove mention of pizza a few years ago, since Ministry of Education (as it was then) bureaucrats didn't deem such a foreign food item suitable for young minds to be exposed to. But having come of age in an era in which every word problem about welding pipe identified the pipefitter as female, I find it kind of nice to see questions about boiled rice and paper lanterns all the time.

Today was the day to quake-proof the bookshelf; there's a brand of hardware called Magnitude 7, for the kind of earthquake it's supposed to last through (that's the Japanese scale, not the Richter Scale). Precisely because so many people object to nailing and drilling holes, you can get fittings that work by pressure between the ceiling and the top of a piece of furniture. I sounded for joists and didn't hear anything solid--wood or metal, though it wouldn't surprise me to learn they're made of PVC in Tokyo these days--for a good two yard * two yard square of Triscuit. This raises the disturbing possibility that I live in a joistless building, but I'm ignoring it. What is this life without some risk?

Also finalized the placement of breakable objects by fixing them with Anchor Wax. We can't go beyond risk into rashness, after all. No angry earthquake goddess is taking the Baccarat away from this household unchallenged!

(Darn. I keep forgetting that I haven't published this.)

Thanks to Dean Esmay for setting this up for me.
I have a feeling that I'm going in and doing shoemaker-type coding by hand when I could be using a template somewhere for a lot of things, but that's my problem. At first, I was thinking that I'd just leave it plain and unfussy. But in the course of navigating templates, I started to think, I want a gimmicky title! and smirky in-joke link categories! and open comments! and way too many colors from the hexadecimal HTML wheel sprinkled all over the place, too!

There, I've said it.

The name, for anyone who wonders, is of course adapted from the phrase "yellow peril," which is what a dear Japanese friend of mine was going to name his bar when it was about to open a few years ago. Apparently, one reason he chose another name was that he and I became buddies in the interim and he didn't want to offend me. But I would have thought it was hilarious, so I'm expropriating it.

The domain name is the first line of what may be my very favorite Japanese poem:

岩間とぢし氷も今朝はとけそめて苔の下水みちもとむらむ

西行法師

Iwama todjishi / koori mo kesa ha / tokesomete / Koke no shita mizu / michi motomuramu

Saigyou-houshi

Even the ice that shackles the rocks has begun to melt this morning--the water under the moss will be seeking a pathway.

the Priest Saigyo

It's the seventh waka in the "Spring" section of one of the court anthologies. April is a bit late in the year for it to be strictly appropriate to the season. But I've always, since we were first assigned it in graduate school, loved its economical way of combining ice, moss, and nurturing water--new beginnings that are so fresh they're not quite ready to occur.

Susanna Cornett has nearly settled into her new digs in Alabama. She doesn't miss New Jersey. (Duh.) I'm glad (and sorry I didn't tell her that this here site is up and running). I basically finished the apartment today--the spare room is still the trash room for a few more days, but they don't pick up recyclables like corrugated cardboard and fiber packing sheets until Friday. I love the place, even if the most important part is missing.

Despite the basketweave-embossed beige wall vinyl that makes me feel as if I were living inside a giant Triscuit, I've been able to integrate the rest of my stuff with what Atsushi's left over to make it look as if we both live here but I use it more. Most couple's houses look that way, anyway. It was tougher than I thought, though: for a few hours today, it was starting to get that creepy death-shrine look. You know, as if there were a chair and a side of the bed and a shaving brush at the sink that were waiting for someone who's not coming back. But we're okay now.

I do wish, while I understand that bland beiges and greys are probably the best bet for builders who are kitting out apartments to be acceptable to a variety of buyers, that someone in their design departments would bear in mind that not all neutrals go together. Our bathroom has a cool-toned grey floor and warm-toned beige bathtub, a combination that can only be pulled off if done with a lot more cheeky wit and confidence than was the case here. I'm going to try to brazen it out with a collection of glass bottles in odd shapes and a spectrum of intense colors, but I'm not sure it's going to work. I have extra throw pillows and throws, of course--one acquires such a lot of them by ten years into adulthood--but you can't use those in the bathtub.

My, my, my. So much for my not, as a friend remarked to me recently, turning out to be yet another "gay blogger." Just wait till I put all three of you who might read this to sleep with my agonies over houseplant selection. The magenta-and-yellow orchid I bought the day my stuff arrived is getting lonely.

So my boyfriend gets packed off to darkest Kyushu, and I seriously need the sensible, even-keeled advocates of gay acceptance to remind me that all the shit you go through is worth it because we're collectively getting our act together, and they pick this week to be slipshod and waffly.


Their slipshod waffliness is even accessible all in one location: a day of posts over at Steve Miller's Culture Watch on the Independent Gay Forum. Miller inexplicably approves of Andrew Sullivan's swipe at Randall Terry, whose adopted son (1) is a messed-up parasite and (2) is gay. He also implicitly praises Jonathan Rauch's performance in a debate with Bob Enyart, conservative Christian radio host out of Denver. Sullivan says of Terry

Christian right leader, Randall Terry, has a troubled gay son. Dick Cheney has an untroubled gay daughter. Anti-gay crusader Pete Knight has a gay son. Charles Socarides, the chief proponent of reparative therapy for homosexuals, has a gay son. Phyllis Shlafly has a gay son. When will these people begin to understand that being gay is not a "choice"; it's a fact of human nature?

And Miller adds, linking Sullivan, "Growing up gay in the Terry household, it's no wonder the kid is 'troubled.'" Yeah, sure, that's probably part of it. Maybe not, though. My parents made it clear emphatically and often that they thought homosexuality was disgusting and sinful. But they were also the ones who taught me that each of us has the responsibility to weigh the lessons of history, the counsel of our elders, and the cause-effect relationships we can detect in our own experience to determine what we believe the right path is. My decision to come out didn't thrill them, but they know that I didn't just fall into it because I find it easier to chase orgasms than to live a responsible life. Unless Sullivan or Miller has inside information on what went on in the Terry household, isn't there another more likely environmental factor in his son's behavior? To wit:

In March 1988, my then-wife and I took Jamiel and his younger sister as foster children. He was 8 years old. We adopted them when he was 14. He came to us a wounded boy, from an incredibly troubled home. He was literally born in jail. By age 8 had learned a lifestyle of deceit and been a victim of treacheries that would mar him for life. [...] Jamiel was adopted when he was nearly 15, not 5. To gloss over the tragic events of his youth is deceit. Many homosexuals want to ignore the causes of their sexual behavior; they want us to believe it is genetic, not behavioral.

We're not talking about a child who spent all his formative years in Terry's household and ended up screwed up in the head. His mother was jailed (unless her water broke during a visit to her incarcerated husband/boyfriend). Who knows how many foster families he saw before the Terrys? And the delay in adopting him means either protracted proceedings or a wait-and-see position on the Terrys' part. Isn't that a likely enough explanation for why--gay, straight, or hermaphroditic--he's turned out be an untrusting and untrustworthy manipulator? And don't untrustworthy, manipulative, immature people use every weapon at hand to stick it to people they resent? Not all of them have their homosexuality to use against a parent who founded Operation Rescue, but I daresay they all think of something to capitalize on. The Sullivan/Miller line ("Them socially-conservative Christians fucked him up!") strikes me as no less sententious and questionable than the Terry line ("His mental problems are part and parcel with his homosexuality!"). Jonathan Rauch wasn't being sententious in his radio appearance, but he also wasn't answering the questions very well. It frustrated the hell out of me, because just about everything he was challenged on was covered--and covered well--in Gay Marriage. I can only assume that he figured it was a good idea to stay on message and say over and over that marriage will help keep gays from behaviors that are destructive to themselves and others, but the effect was that he sounded evasive. Sincere and well-intentioned, but evasive. There was a particularly strained point at which Enyart was trotting out the usual figures about suicide rates, mental disorders, crime, and domestic violence among gays. In fact, he didn't even bring up figures; he just pronounced that rates are higher among homosexuals. Rauch didn't point out the self-selecting nature of sample populations when gays are studied. He didn't point out that the urban areas that are more accepting of gays also have higher crime for reasons that may be unrelated. He didn't point out that (given how many gays are still closeted) committing a sex or domestic crime is a great way to pack the books with known homos who are criminals. When Enyart came up with the bumper sticker-worthy "Heterosexuality produces life; homosexuality produces death," Rauch didn't point out that what produces death is promiscuity, or that what makes us a human civilization is that we have people who are stewards over the production of artifacts, not just new people. Okay, fine, Rauch was giving the interview, not me. Monday morning quarterbacking, and all that. But still: these questions have answers, and Rauch knows them. I wish he'd spoken them as well as, for the most part, he writes them.

Well, the Iraqi insurgents who have been offering to demonstrate the superiority of their way of life to ours by burning to death the three Japanese hostages they snagged six days ago have taken four Italians (assuming all the culprits are in the same or related groups). I hope they're all safe (the hostages, I mean). Koizumi and his Foreign Ministry appointees have been accused up down and sideways of kissing American ass, but when they talk about how we can't back down in the face of threats, they sure say it with conviction.

I'm not sure why I'm watching Louis Freeh testify before the 9/11 Commission. Probably mostly because he's cute. With the sound off, you can just read the two-line caption that summarizes what he's saying. Let's see: need for restructuring, limitations on preventive measures imposed by lack of resources, and a call for better staff guidelines. There's a shocker: anyone who's been in a supervisory position in an organization larger than Mabel's Corner Bakery has used that routine to explain why Things Didn't Get Done. I include myself. And a lot of times it's even true. But these hearings aren't about getting at truth. They're about demonstrating to America that things are being taken seriously by Washington in the best way it knows how, namely by coopting several hours of live television so that higher-ups in the government can look worried and ask grave questions. You can't really complain--they're only filling a psychological need that the public clearly has. But as a citizen who takes at least eight long-haul flights into and out of major US cities per year, I'd rather see someone explain why security at airports right now is still so flipping farcical. I'd even watch with the sound on.

I love most things about living in Japan, but here's one that I don't: if you work for one of the stodgier companies, you can be informed in March or September that you're being transferred to another office, effective in a week or two. It's kind of an extension of the practice of having new management track hires do rotations through sales and operations in their first few years; you belong to the company as if it were your clan, and it gets to tell you what to do. Depending on your organization, you can be moving every two to four years until you're middle aged.


And so it is that Atsushi was told on 10 March that he was leaving Tokyo for the far end of Kyushu on 24 March. He'd worked at the same office for four years; he's still single in his mid-30's; he's already done a two-year stint abroad. We knew he was an obvious target for relocation somewhere outside commuting distance from Tokyo. Like a lot of people who've been stationed here for several years, he owns an apartment. There was no question what had to happen: I moved into his place from my pied à terre three stations away so we've got a household for him to return to on monthly visits. That we couldn't live together while he was here because his parents and colleagues would have started to wonder what was going on, but it's perfectly fine for me to live here now, in the guise of a helpful friend who's sparing him the necessity of letting his house to strangers, precisely because he's not here, is not one of life's little ironies I'm inclined to find humor in right now.


But trust me--lots of others have it worse. There are married couples with children in this very situation twice a year. The opportunities for education in Tokyo (the power center in politics, economics, and culture for Japan--imagine DC + New York + Cambridge in one megalopolis) are superior to those in the provinces. Also, it's hard to unload an apartment in an existing building--partially, I think, since the construction industry is still building as if the bubble hadn't burst 15 years ago, but that's a topic for another day. All of which means that a number of couples have husbands who are off working in Sendai, or Sapporo, or wherever, while the wife and children hold down the fort in Tokyo and see him once every six weeks or so when he flies back. It's such an unremarkable thing that there's a word for it: 単身赴任 (tanshin funin), or "going unaccompanied to one's assignment." Perhaps it's not as difficult as we'd imagine as Americans: a lot of childrearing here is done by the educational system, and the friend/closest companion model of marriage isn't traditional. But for couples who think of themselves as a team, even if romance isn't part of the psychological support they rely on, it has to bite. It sure sucks plenty for me, and I have a flexible enough job that I'll be able to see him twice a month or so.


This kind of thing happens all the time. I don't mean my boyfriend's moving away to Ultima Thule; I mean simultaneously admiring the way the Japanese subordinate themselves to collective goals and thinking they're crazy for doing it. What I've described is certainly not as hard to bear as what military families go through when the enlisted parent is deployed somewhere, or what poor families go through when Dad has to spend months out of the year up in mining country to keep everyone clothed and fed. The thing that makes it so...weird...both in the conversational sense of "strange" and in the original sense of "spooky"...is that this is what graduates of elite universities, the people with the most mobility and choices in the power center of the second-largest economy in the world, think perfectly normal to sign onto at the end of college, knowing exactly what they're getting into. Yes, things are changing somewhat--switching jobs is much more common here than it used to be. And people who feel stuck are far from unknown in America. But the distribution of such attitudes among people with the resources to choose is very different. If I were a sociologist, maybe I could write the millionth book trying to explain Japan to a Western audience.


***


Flamin' Norah. Interrupted by the nightly call from the man himself: he left the office at 11:45 for the fourth day in a row. That's another thing about being transferred: you get to spend quality time getting to know your new clients during the first few weeks. What that poor darling goes through to keep me in the style to which I've become accustomed. Time for me to get back to devising saucy new color combinations in decorative fabrics so he has a beautiful apartment to come home to.

For three days in May.