some new colleagues and friends

The cast of characters here at Shikoku is colorful. My closest friend so far has been Hideki, the young man from the Office of International Programs who was assigned to help me acclimate. He has taught me to make yakisoba and Japanese-style curry and provided entrée to the school’s touch rugby team. On weekend evenings Hideki and I get together and debate about what movie to watch: I want to watch Japanese movies, he wants to watch American. I’ve also become close with Okada sensai, the head of the OIP office, who is as warm and gracious a host as one could ask for. She is cut out perfectly for her work, never letting a conversation lag even in her second language. It has been said that embarrassment is contagious so we all have an interest in avoiding it; this is especially true in Japan. Okada sensai is thankfully magnanimous when faced with potential embarrassments. When we eat together she studiously ignores my awkward deployment of chopsticks, even when I resort to pulling apart chicken wings with my fingers American-style. The office next to my own is occupied by Tanaka sensai, a Blake scholar and martial arts expert who coaches the school’s kendo team. Tanaka is sixty five but looks forty five, with a full head of jet black hair and a naughty glimmer in his eye. Charismatic to the point of being almost certifiable, Tanaka likes to humbly remind newcomers of his age and then challenge them to grab his wrist (the tighter you hold on the more it will hurt). He brought me out for dinner and drinks (a lot of both) and I eventually found myself eating raw horse meat and other unmentionables.

Then there is Nagao sensai, a Shakespearean who joined Shikoku’s faculty after reaching the retirement age of 63 in his previous post at prestigious Hokkaido University. Nagao has a keen sense of humor that is shot through with Anglo-American influences even as it turns back upon his own culture and upon himself. His laughter focuses on two principle objects: the physical pratfall, and the momentary social death of collective embarrassment. For the latter he turns to the late-19th century British humorist Jerome K. Jerome. “A German Comic Song,” Nagao’s favorite set-piece from Jerome’s classic Three Men in a Boat, tells of British partygoers who are led to believe that the dirge sung by a visiting German musician is actually a comic song; in short it’s a tale about the risks of laughing without knowing what one’s laughing at. “Japanese people do that a lot,” Nagao tells me. He notes how when he recites English classics by Sterne or Swift in the classroom, his less fluent students often laugh in a rhythm that follows his own laughter rather than anything in the book. Nagao admits to having carried on the same pretense while studying at Cambridge in his younger days, before he’d mastered English. The fear of having one’s polite reactions exposed as false—or worse, as utterly impolite—seems to loom large in the Japanese psyche. It points to the possibility that their sacred social rules to behave politely and to avoid embarrassment might run headlong into one another.

The other primary source of Nagao’s laughter is physical comedy, and for this he resorts to Chaplin. He takes particular pleasure in the factory scene from Modern Times where Chaplin is rigged up with a feeding machine in lieu of a lunch hour, which Nagao takes as an allegory for the creeping domination of workers and bodies via scientific management. “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing,” wrote Henri Bergson (whose philosophy happens to be the expertise of Taniguchi sensai, a young professor who earned her Ph.D. at the nation’s top university in Tokyo and who occupies the office directly below Nagao’s). The Chaplin factory scene is iconic in the U.S. and has been imitated endlessly, most famously in the role-switching episode of “I Love Lucy,” where Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance hopelessly try to keep up their wrapping duties on a candy factory’s assembly line. Nor can it fail to resonate in Japan’s service economy, where “bowing machines” are used to train department store employees to bend their bodies to the exact number of degrees when bowing.

The behavior of consumers can seem as regimented as that of the workers who serve them, yet it’s hard to complain about such regimentation when one is so patently benefiting from it. Saginaw really seems to get the better part of its sister-city deal with Tokushima. To take one instance, we don’t have a decent bakery at home, yet here in a culture that I’d always assumed got its carb fix from rice and noodles, there are several excellent bakeries with all manner of breads and pastries. It’s striking just how smoothly the gears of consumption turn here; it must be awfully hard being a Marxist in Japan. This can get a little oppressive, as they seem to emulate and even surpass us nowadays in terms of compulsory consumerism. Japan has a sort of potlatch mentality to begin with; there is definitely status in who can spend the most on himself and others (which presents a challenge to my own deeply ingrained propensity for freeloading). As this mentality dovetails with a more modern brand of consumer-driven hyper-capitalism, the result is a pervasive pushiness to eat, drink, and spend more than the next guy. The other night after eight or so hours of imbibing and engorging I headed home in a taxi with Tanaka sensai and he proposed a stop at the ramen shop. I am usually the first to jump at a 2 am snack but I politely refused, fearing it would put me over the edge. “But you are American!” he protested, as if this endowed me with superhuman powers of expenditure.