Sociology Babble

Listening to my host mom and host dad go back and forth at each other is basically the funniest thing ever.
I don’t know if they know that I understand them because I try to hide the fact that it makes me giggle so as not to be laughing at them or anything.
Like,
Okaasan: “Why didn’t you eat your shiso leaves? They taste good.”
Otousan: *mutters something about not wanting to and then tries to give them to my host mom*
Okaasan: I don’t need them! *Otousan keeps pushing the plate towards her* I don’t need them! I already ate all mine! I told you I don’t need them! I said I already ate everything.  Here you go. *passes leaves back to Otousan*
Otousan: Fine. *eats one*
Okaasan: What about the other? Eat it with your salmon and it’s good.
Otousan: You got fish bones on it...!
Okaasan: Bonus. :P

They’re basically like that a lot.
It’s kind of adorable.

My host family isn’t typical of Japanese couples, though.  For one, they’re both retired.  For another, they have no kids, so they’ve gotten to reap the benefits of the “dual income, no kids” lifestyle.  This includes some extensive-sounding world travel.  The house we live in, while small by American standards, is perfectly adequate, if not excessive, for two people, and definitely large by Japanese standards for a house with only two people (well, now three) living in it.  I think normally a family living in a house like this would have a couple of kids, and I’ve read that it’s only recently that upper middle class Japanese families have been able to get houses where kids each have their own bedrooms.

I didn’t fully realize how spoiled I was (though I had a vague idea from all that my host parents have talked about the traveling they’ve done, and from the size of the TV in our living room) until I went to my friend Alisha’s host family’s house today.  Her family’s younger: a couple in their 30s or so with two little kids, a girl and a boy who are, I want to say, four an seven, respectively.  I could easily be wrong about those ages.  Today Alisha invited me over for lunch because her host dad was having some people over and he told her she could invite a friend and I was the one who lived closest.  (Alisha and I take the same train in the morning and after school.) 
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or how formal the get together would be so I brought a package of some greeting cards I’d brought from home to give because I know the Japanese way of doing things is to bring some kind of gift when you go over to someone else’s house as thanks for their hospitality. 
I agonized about it for a while because I had no idea what was proper or if it should be something wrapped more nicely or less cheap-seeming.  But I’m glad I didn’t buy anything else.  Turns out, nobody else brought anything over.  I got the impression that the young guy and young woman who were invited over were both family friends.  The woman in particular acted like she’d been over before.  The man worked with Alisha’s host dad, teaching English. 
It was a little awkward, until Alisha’s little host brother roped us all into playing Mario Kart and told us about how good he was and how he unlocked all the characters and stages because he beat the Grand Prix.  He also beat us all soundly, while Alisha’s little host sister flounced around with her Ariel light up wand saying there were four people! One, two, three, four people! And that the pink controller was good for me because I was a girl, and talked about my skirt, and did curtsies in hers, and told us all the family was going to Disney Land in the winter.  Basically she was adorable.
At one point while Alisha and her host mom were fixing lunch I heard her telling the woman that I lived with a rich family, up in a wealthy area.  That was a little awkward.  She also apologized to me for the size of their house, which, really, didn’t seem that small, but I guess it was probably about the size of my host parents’ house and housed usually four, now five (with the addition of Alisha) people. 
I felt a little bad because my host parents definitely don’t seem like snooty people at all, unlike when someone else was telling me about how she wanted to go to Book-Off (a huge used book, CD, DVD, and game store where you can buy manga for 105 yen -- excellent for we foreign geeky people) and one of her host parents said that it was “dirty.”
Alisha’s family also has different things that my host family doesn’t have, like air conditioning,  multiple video game systems for the kids, a car GPS, and a newer computer.  But I’m sure a lot of that is a reflection of age as much as class. 

Class is an interesting thing in Japan.  I don’t know much about it yet.  But here in the US, all we really talk about are salarymen and office ladies, and occasionally Japanese athletes, idols, and celebrities. 
If we read manga or watch anime the range of Japanese jobs we know about expands, but only a little.  We talk about teachers and doctors, manga artists and writers, budding musicians and chefs and high school and college students working part time jobs.
We don’t talk about the janitors and street cleaners and garbage collectors, the 100 yen store clerks and parking garage attendants, the woman who, every week at around 8:30, changes the posters that hang from the ceiling of the subway.

And I’m embarrassed to admit that when I first saw some of those people I was surprised by their presence.  Of course, someone had to do these jobs.  For the Japanese streets and subway stations to be as clean as they’re fabled to be, someone has to clean them.  That’s just obvious.  Or at least it should be.

But it’s interesting how the view of itself a country exports changes outsiders’ perceptions of what exists in that country.  There are some things that, without already knowing what to look for or experiencing them first hand, we as foreigners just don’t know exist in Japan.  When I think about Japan, I certainly don’t think of struggles for women’s rights or gay rights, because challenging the status quo is frowned upon, so the people who do it don’t exactly make international news.  I had never even thought about a feminist movement having happened in Japan until someone else mentioned it in conversation.   With the international image of Japan as a tech-savvy nation of polite and helpful, though perhaps somewhat strange and camera-happy, people, a nation where friendly police officers are willing to help lost foreigners with directions and help old ladies cross the streets, it’s easy to forget about Japan’s reputation for police brutality and forcing confessions after holding people for indeterminate amounts of time, or the Rape of Nanking, or the troubled relations between the Japanese people and the native Ainu people. 

I’m rambling, but I guess my point is a simple and obvious one.  The information we get about a country, or anything really, is never bias-free.  Working at a textbook warehouse this summer, I found so many fascinating-looking books I’d never heard of before, about topics I didn’t know anyone even wrote about, because I’d never seen them at my local book stores before.  I’d never seen them at my public library.  And that’s just within the US.  So much of what we can know about foreign countries and cultures is limited by language barriers.  Going back to the Japanese feminist movement example, I’ve never heard it talked about before, but there is apparently a lot about feminism written about in Japanese that just hasn’t been translated or distributed in English.  From an English-speaking perspective, it’s as if the Japanese feminist movement never existed! 
I have never felt so illiterate as in that conversation.

All of this is probably obvious, and probably should have been obvious to me, but some moments just crystallize things we think that we already know and understand.  These are my thoughts as I’m having them, and that’s what a blog is for, right?