Hunkabutta Archives
12.04.02

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Did I ever tell you about the one Japanese food that I can't stand? It's called natto. I'm sure that some of you have already come across this horrid excuse for a food. It's a source of endless debate. People either seem to love it or hate it, both Japanese and foreigner alike.

natto is a gooey brown paste made from fermented soy beans (at least I think that's what it's made of). People here tend to eat it for breakfast on top of rice, although you can eat it throughout the day.

natto has the dubious distinction of being the only substance on Earth that is both sticky and slimy at the same time -- you have to see it to believe it. It smells like something out of a 14-year-old's school locker and tastes like wet cardboard.

Some people say that natto is good for you, but I don't believe it.

Have you tried natto? What do you think of it?

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12.02.02

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You must be pissed off because, as one commentor pointed out, I left you in suspense on Friday by not telling you what happened to my neighbour who we thought was being murdered.

She survived.

Of course there's more to the story than that, but unfortunately it's pretty pathetic.

The neighbour, let's call her 'G', actually let the abusive boyfriend back in to her place after Karen helped her escape from him earlier. He came back to her door pleading and apologizing and she let him right back in, and of course he started to beat her up again.

That police visit that I told you about on Friday, when the cops came and took off their shoes before 'raiding' the place, was actually the second time that they had come that night. Both times they came because we called them. The first time the guy had slipped away out the back window and they couldn't find him.

When the cops came that first time we heard, through a third neighbour (a Pilipino girl) who could speak Japanese to the cops, that the couple had had a run in with the police earlier that day. The boyfriend had been beating her at a train station somewhere and somebody called the police. They put him on a train going one way and her on a train going the other.

Later that night he came to her apartment, she let him in, and that's when he started to beat her up. When we heard it (through the paper thin walls), Karen went over there (against my advice), and banged on the door. I hid nearby and watched. The boyfriend opened the door and a tear-streaked G ran pass him into Karen's arms, she was sobbing hysterically. Her face was all red and swollen. The boyfriend looked like something out of a bad Mexican drug-bust movie: Short, stocky, greasy black curly hair, sweaty and wearing a stained 'wife-beater' tank top. Karen told him off and he tried to tell her in mixed Spanish, English and Japanese that G was crazy.

Karen took G and walked away into the nearby busy shopping street. After a minute the asshole boyfriend started to secretly follow them. After thirty seconds I started to follow the asshole boyfriend. Karen and G had disappeared, and the boyfriend couldn't find them (turns out they actually hid behind a nearby telephone pole.)

While the asshole boyfriend and I were out walking around the shopping street Karen brought G back to her apartment and told her to lock the door.

Of course, like the idiot that she was, G let the guy back in yet again at around 2:00 a.m., and as you would expect he really started to lay into her then. There was choking and head banging, gaging and screaming. That's when we called the cops the second time and that's when they caught him inside the house and made their daring shoeless raid.

At the end of it all nothing really happened. I think that the the cops just took him away and let him go somewhere else, or they might have even just left him there. I can't quite recall, by that point I was seriously pissed off about the whole affair and had lost all sympathy for G, who, incidentally, was a shitty neighbour to us for a long time after that even though Karen risked her safety to rescue G.

So there you have it, and it all started off with seven cops taking their shoes off.

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11.29.02

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I think that we need a bit of a change of pace from the serious topics that we've been talking about lately.

So, in the spirit of lightheartedness I offer you the third installment of my occasional 'Japan Tips': Never, under any circumstances, leave your house wearing socks that have holes in them.

The reason for this is simple. You just never know where you'll end up with your shoes off and your holes exposed. And you don't want to be the only one with an old yellow toe nail sticking out for the world to see. This always happens to me at after work dinner parties.

You may have heard that the Japanese are pretty serious when it comes to shoe etiquette, I've even heard it described as a 'religion'.

We once called the cops on our neighbour, a woman from Guatemala. It was 2 a.m., she and her boyfriend had been fighting for hours, then she started screaming and we heard choking noises. When the seven police officers eventually showed up on their bicycles (I don't think that domestic violence is considered a crime in Japan) the boyfriend turned off all the lights and wouldn't answer the door. We told the police that there was a drunken Guatemalan guy in there and we thought that he killed his girlfriend. So, after trying to coax him out, the cops decide to enter the still pitch-dark house. They opened the main door, stepped into the entrance hall, and... bent over to take off their shoes. Yes. That's right. The cops all bent over in a dark room with an accused murderer lurking around to take off their shoes.

Anyway, remember what I said about the holes in your socks.

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In my self-portraits today I'm having a bit of fun with my eye infection -- making lemonade out of my lemons, as they say.

However, if anyone else would like to do an impression of the Orwellian laws and policies now being legislated in the U.S., send them in and I'll post them on the site.

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11.26.02

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People have expressed a lot of interest in Thursday's post on the quirky nature of Japanese racism. I'd like to take some time now to elaborate a bit on what I said that day, and to respond to some of the points made in the comments section.

Racism is an interesting topic that affects most of us in one way or another but it's generally not talked about enough because it's such a sensitive issue.

I love a philosophical debate for its own sake, but one very common problem is that people have slightly different personal definitions of the same word. This is especially true with regards to abstract concepts that are often used in a rhetorical manner (e.g., freedom, democracy, and racism). The topic of racism also breaks down into other loosely understood words such as 'race', 'culture', and 'ethnicity', which is something that was brought up in the comments.

In order to explain my observations of Japanese racism I felt that it was necessary to slightly redefine the term 'racism.' My working definition went thus:

"...racism [as defined here] is a habit of generalization. It's a way of thinking vaguely about individuals in terms that you ascribe to their racial/ethnic/cultural group. This is not always a negative thing, and in many cases is unavoidable."

It's problematic to redefine a word for use in an argument when that word already has a commonly understood meaning, and generally this practice should be avoided. Readers can't forget the original meaning and the word stills carries all of its connotations and this taints the argument that you are trying to make. This was illustrated in the comments by a reader who, in a well-meaning way, felt that it was necessary to point out that by my own definition my post, and indeed my whole site, was racist. This is of course true, and is something that I'm very well aware of, but as I said, not something that I think is intrinsically negative.

One of the major problems with the subject of racism, as well as many other issues in social science, is that there is a tendency to moralize rather than to analyze. Designations such as 'good', 'bad', 'evil', 'should be', 'ought to' generally serve to obfuscate a subject and simplify the context in which it is to be interpreted. It also makes people hesitant to express their true feelings for fear of condemnation.

The best way to come to understand racism and correct the social ills that are associated with it is to embrace the idea that racism, because it is found in every culture and has been around since the beginning of recorded history, is a fact of the 'human condition' and must be accounted for in the design and maintenance of our society (i.e., in our legislation). It must be accepted and worked with rather than moralized, ignored and denied.

I'll give you an example of what I mean by 'work with' a human vice: The role of greed in American capitalism verses the role of greed in communism. Most people are greedy and selfish to some extent, and most human populations of any size will have a few individuals who are really greedy. In many cultures (including our own) this is considered a vice (sin). The brilliance of the framers of the capitalist system is that they accepted the fact that people are greedy and used that knowledge to construct a system that coralls and controls greed but nonetheless uses it as a driving force. Communism on the other hand is idealistic and moralistic in regards to greed, it doesn't work with it, it ignores it and hides it.

There are many facets of racism that need to be addressed in any meaningful debate on the topic.

For example, everybody tends to view racism in terms that reflect their local environment. This is only natural. The American racism debate tends to focus around the black and white issue and addresses the problems of economic inequality and discrimination. The Canadian racism debate centers on immigrant integration and First Nations issues. Racism in South Africa centers around colonial class divisions. In Nigeria it is tribal and religious competition. My point is that racism means different things to different people in different places.

Another interesting facet of racism is the role that the perspective of the person making the racist statement plays. For example, it's okay for a Jewish person to make a joke about other Jewish people, but if a gentile makes a Jewish joke it's assumed to be "racist/anti-Semitic". This 'insider' rule seems to hold true for most racial/ethnic groups, with the notable exception that it's generally okay for anyone to make fun of white people.

What this tells us is that 'intent' is very important in racism. A black person making generalizations about the black community is assumed to be benevolent. However, if a white person makes the same generalization, it can be perceived as racist. The veracity of the statement is not what's at issue, the intention of the speaker is.

This raises some interesting questions. For example, if an East Indian factory owner in Canada won't hire other East Indians because he believes they aren't fast workers, is this racism? It's certainly discrimination.

There are several other issues that I'd like to touch upon, but this post is becoming a bit too long for comfort. I think that I'll leave you with what I've said so far, and maybe I'll continue this discussion in a few days.

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