Colonel Santa and Christmas in Japanland

Posted on December 16, 2011 by jdovey

Despite three piddling hours of sleep the night before, my students had me jumping and singing on Thursday as if I’d been asleep for months and months, just waiting for the day of the Christmas party. Their energy catapulted me into the stratosphere of manic holiday spirit.
Merry Christmas from 6th grade Santa!
When I ask the kids what they do for Christmas, the answer is almost always, “Same as usual.” In Japanese culture, Christmas is just another day. It’s come to be known as a couples’ holiday, when young people go to parties dressed in Santa hats and, driven by shiny happy (but still strange) commercials, occasionally exchange presents or cards with “Merry X’Mas!” messages scrawled in festive letters.
Japanese Christmas traditions, when held to, are a bit odd. If you mention the holiday here, two foods come to mind. The first is Christmas cake. What better way to celebrate Santa-san’s birthday than a cake covered in strawberries? I suppose this is a tradition borrowed from European countries, but it’s a bit of an oddity in that the cakes are basically strawberry shortcakes which might have bits of chocolate advertising a “Merry X’Mas!”

The massive consumption of cakes on Christmas eve requires stores to stock up for the days leading up to the 25th, and then drastically reduce the prices of leftover cakes on the day of. This has inspired a rather quaint little addition to the Japanese lexicon, whereby girls who haven’t achieved marriage by age 25 are called christmas cakes. The idea is that if they’re still single, they must resort to drastic measures to get snapped up. Being 25 myself, I object.

The other food, I kid you not, is a big Christmas bucket of KFC chicken. After a little digging, I discovered that this tradition probably started when KFC began to notice that foreigners would come to the stores around Christmastime for a meal that was as close to turkey or whole roasted chicken that they could find. Ovens are a rarity here, so it just doesn’t make sense for stores to sell whole birds. I have yet to see turkey sold anywhere but from foreign grocers. Anyway, KFC got smart and began a marketing push that has eventually made KFC synonymous with the holidays. Colonel Sanders looks so much like Santa Claus with a red hat on that I have a hunch most Japanese people honestly believe that the Colonel IS the Claus. Now that’s some smart advertising.

Christmastime in Japan is for lovers. Be aware that a gift to your opposite-sex friend will have deep love-love meaning. My kids enjoy grouping together and asking me where I will go on a Christmas date. If I can understand them through the giggling, I usually answer, “KFC, of course.”

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Dimmer Switch Off

Posted on December 15, 2011 by jdovey

There’s an awful lot going on in America lately. So much so that, even nestled six thousand miles away in a notoriously insular Japan, I am often awake far into the night in an effort to keep up. Six thousand miles away, my heart still races when I follow the movements of #OWS on Twitter, watch the battles for election being fought out over YouTube, or click through the vast web of blog posts dealing with gay marriage, internet censorship, sexism in games (or, well, everywhere), or the weariness of working a million jobs at wages that will never, ever be enough to pay off your student loans.
I used to write a lot, and I used to share it–in snippets on Facebook, in public journals, even in open forums. In the past year, though, I’ve gone through a pretty deep shift of identity. Part of it is a result of sharing a thought that I had reflected very seriously upon, which happened to resonate with thousands of other people. For a few weeks, my painstakingly-worded status update was the virtual embodiment of everything I stand for. So many wonderful people have reached out to me since then, and have in one way or another been listening to what I say. I can’t imagine a more positive spotlight to be placed into. If future prospective employers find articles like this when they Google my name, I am not doing so bad as a human being.
So, in rather threadbare words: thank you for listening to me. I am afraid I haven’t done a very good job of representing myself in the meantime, though. Since this summer I have made ONE status update on my Facebook wall that isn’t a shared link or article. One! To be completely honest, I don’t want to disappoint anyone. I am so afraid of disrupting the sanctity of that one very successful (and personally meaningful) post that I haven’t said much of anything at all. Most of all I want to share what everyone else is saying, and comment on that.
After a bit of thinking, and a little bit of inspiration, I’ve decided that it’s not very proactive to be reactionary. Whether or not any of you are still listening, I still have a lot to share and I suppose the whole point of having a blog themed around letting your light shine involves, well, shining. :)
Here is a bit of shine for you: have you ever heard of the Shinnyo-en Foundation (facebook)? They are a non-profit organization dedicated to nothing less than world peace. Their motto is “Six billion paths to peace,” and they fund leadership, service, and peacebuilding projects around the globe. The idea behind the motto is that everyone can do something unique and compassionate that will positively impact the world around them. One example is a person who decides to wipe the bathroom counter off at work every time she goes in. After a few days, her coworkers begin to notice her earnest effort and start wiping the counter themselves. It doesn’t seem like much, but the woman’s small act was appreciated and duplicated. Imagine if more people said hello, smiled at one another, asked to help, or began relating to their fellow human beings with respect. We are naturally disposed to be compassionate and social beings (that’s an entire post in itself), so it doesn’t have to be a huge leap.

I’m curious to know.. What is your path to peace? What have you done recently to make a positive impact on someone else? If you can, please share in the comments. If you can’t think of anything, make it a point to go do something nice.
I’ll start: this morning I said good morning to a guy with a bike and a huge backpack who had obviously been traveling around for a while. He was a foreigner, like me, so I said “Good morning!” My friends and I tend to look at foreigners suspiciously, as if they are somehow invading our unique territory of foreign-ness. We can be defensive about it, maybe because we fight pretty hard to be accepted and feel like a part of this culture, even if it is in the role of “outsider.” I hope that makes a little bit of sense. We often see tourists who make no effort to blend in with society, so for me there’s a fear that the image of foreigner in Japan is one of a bumbling, loud, outrageously-dressed (and amply-built), demanding to be heard but not knowing a word of Japanese, silly tourist. Unfortunately my hostility toward other foreigners is probably just wasted energy that could be used to offer a helping hand instead. From now on I’ll make an effort to say hello to them instead of looking at my phone.

How about you?

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So What About Love?

Posted on May 12, 2011 by jdovey

It is one thing to refuse to rejoice in the death of another human being. I might wish a man dead but not dance at his funeral. What I’m suggesting—and the significance of that Martin Luther King, Jr. quote—is that to truly achieve meaningful change in this world, we have to meet our enemies’ hatred with love.

Love isn’t a wishy-washy hippie emotion. It is a real, driving force that moves the world. Love is that thing which makes us seek companionship, raise children and die in defense of them. It is something that causes deep and worthwhile pain. Love is always seeking—for ourselves, for justice, for meaning, for a voice. Wars are fought because we are unwilling to allow our homes, our economic prosperity, and our families be destroyed—because we love those things, we are willing to live and to die for them. It is instinctual and it is undeniable.

Likewise, hate should be considered as more than a single-minded force of evil. It is aversion and it seeks to destroy, yes. It can arise instinctively from a desire to protect the things one loves. It is social, political, and economical. It is desperate and it is self-loathing and it is greedy for power. When I talk about hate I mean the hate that seeks revenge instead of a solution, wealth instead of happiness and power instead of social good. That’s a broad definition for hate, but humor me.

So when Dr. King—and Jesus, and Gandhi, and Gautama Buddha—talk about loving your enemy, it’s not only about refusing to dance on your enemy’s grave. It’s about looking at your enemy and realizing yourself in his eyes, even if he refuses to look into yours. It’s about holding out our hands to help him to his feet. Most importantly, though, it’s about setting an example of the kind of love that we want him to show us in return.

I believe that every human heart possesses humanity and is capable of love. When I think of America’s wars in the Middle East, I think about the children who are growing up as orphans, living in fear of the next raid from land or air. No population on earth is inherently predisposed to believe ideas like Osama bin Laden’s or Hitler’s. I think that children strap bombs on their backs because they believe there is no other way out—because they want to die fighting for what they love, and because they see America as a force of hatred and injustice. How else could they see us, when we shoot their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters and their teachers? Who else is left to look up to except the system of hatred that is al Qaeda?

The ideas that we should be willing to die for should not be ideas of destruction. What is our goal in this war? Is it to seek revenge for 9/11? If, in seeking revenge, we create more terrorists (as we inevitably have) that lead to more 9/11s, that lead to more revenge-seeking, then how is that accomplishing anything? Is our goal to eradicate terrorism? To do so, we have to end our own terrorism which we have employed with our weapons, our economic strong-arming, and our displays of arrogance (dancing over graves) and power.

The harder idea to swallow is that, in order to achieve peace in the world, we have to be willing to start with ourselves. Loving your enemies comes from tolerance: for the woman who parks in your space, for the guy whose dog won’t shut up at 3AM, for the person who calls you an idiot online or tells you that you aren’t good enough, even and especially for the people who you feel threatened by. That kind of peace starts with a single lit candle in the form of a facebook post, a smile from a stranger or a hello in the elevator and has the power to light a billion other candles. I can vouch for that!

To say that I am not good at this kind of love would be an understatement. It is a struggle every day just to keep my cool, but I think it’s worth keeping at until I get it right—until we get it right.

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A Billion Little Lights

Posted on May 12, 2011 by jdovey

There is a concept that can be found in the hearts of religions and peace-lovers everywhere. In the words of Buddhism, Christianity, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Dr. King, to name a scant few, humanity—and by humanity I mean things like justice, love, and truth—is a light that shines forth from within each of us, however dimly. A single light can lead the way for many others, so we’ve got to let our lights shine as much as possible.

There is a quote that is tenuously attributed to the Gautama Buddha which goes,

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Just as the candle won’t be shortened, one’s happiness never decreases by being shared.”

I feel that by whatever means or merits, my own little candle has lit a lot of others this past week. Millions of people have read my post and many of them have shared it with their own friends. In a single sentence, I’ve somehow been pushed into the spotlight and, like it or not, people are considering my words.

The original post read:

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” MLK jr

People have asked me a lot of questions about that post, and a lot of people disagree strongly with it. That is okay, and I hope that people will continue to reflect and debate on issues like this in the future. The arguments that sparked across Facebook walls and message boards have been, on the whole, constructive and healthy. As long as people are willing to discuss the options, there will always be hope that our world can become a better place. It’s also worth noting that things that are true at their core—things like love, justice, and mankind itself, will win out at the end. Everyone is searching for happiness, and true happiness as an end cannot come from things that are unjust or inhumane.

I am starting this blog as a point of debate. I hope that you will not believe every word I say, and that when that happens, I hope that you will express this in the comments. Feel free to discredit me as a peacenik, but explain why my ideas won’t work. I’ll try to keep my comments constructive and based in fact, so please do the same.

More to come on lights, monsters, mass-murderers, and love as a tool for meaningful change. Look for more quotes and less misattributions in the near future.

 

 

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