That one time we decided to survive, together
Americans could learn a lot from our international community about what it means to survive together, in community
CW: SUICIDE, DEATH, TRAFFICKING
In August of 2008, I landed at Narita International Airport, where my host family (also named Narita), would on a rainy day, help me to navigate the Tokyo rail system to our home in Saitama, two hours away by train. This would be the first time I was ever allowed to leave home without the supervision of my m*ther. Mind you, I had never: gone to a sleepover, sleep away camp or any other activity in which my m*ther could not carefully surveil me.
With the help of my college guidance counselor, I took a semester and a half worths of time off from college and instead, turned into a semester abroad to study Japanese in Japan. I’d just completed my first sociology course with a focus on linguistics and decided I’d take my remaining electives abroad instead of going back home to Florida for any significant period of time.
I chose to study Modern Japanese History: 1945-to present-day and Social Deviance and Youth Subculture.
After reading Hiroshima as a tot, I’d become really interested in what residue was left behind from US occupation of Japan during WWII and as an avid fan of manga and anime, I wanted to contextualize the media I’d been consuming by way of studying cultural phenomena like gyaru fashion and ganguro culture and the rise of hip hop music but I landed in a Japan that was in the middle of some deep struggles: mainly an economic bubble burst, a struggling economy, and as such, humans struggling to live. If any of this sounds familiar, even on its head, it’s because we are living an uncannily similar reality to that of Japan in the mid to late aughts, and like Japan, we’ve been startled into the recognition of our mortality due to an unforeseen, impossible to ignore, natural disaster — a pandemic.
I turned twenty years old a few months before moving to Japan.
There were lots of things to be excited about, including, being old enough to drink; not having a curfew because my host parents were able to view me as an adult with a life outside of our family space and, most importantly, not having to take any art classes and being able to learn to make photographs on my own terms. My favorite course, hands down, was Social Deviance and Youth Subculture. I met and befriended musician, Suzi Analogue, in that class. She was working on launching her own music label and shooting a documentary on Japanese women at the forefront of Japanese hip hop in Tokyo. Suzi often walked to the train with me and my friend, Hayleigh, who was also taking the course with us and was my neighbor in Saitama.
Part of the reason I loved my sociology class so much was that we three were consistently probing our professor, whom we all lovingly called Sensei Deshou (‘deshou’ is a phrase often employed in Japanese to confer agreement or disbelief, depends on the context of the conversation), into giving us the good stuff.
This white dude, who spoke all of three licks of Japanese, had witnessed Some Wild Shit™ in his twenty years living in Japan. Or rather, a majority of the responses to what was happening in Japanese culture, be those responses through fashion, participating in informal economies, joining gangs or even planning group suicides, Sensei Deshou could verify for us that these responses were occurring rapidly and shifting the direction the culture was going because he, at some point, had witnessed the phenomena in action. The primary architects of cultural shifts in the country were adolescents and young adults. They were lashing out at things like lack of individuality in a homogenous society; having to work themselves to the point of death because their jobs, they were told, were their identities and thus their sole purpose for living; xenophobia against neighbors in South Korea, the Philippines and China were a daily occurrence; the right-wingers, Ukokyu dantai, were becoming a fixture on the daily news as they drove a propaganda bus into the Korean Consulate, just a few blocks away from our school in Minami Azabu; group suicides were becoming popular as the populace sank deeper into despair due to the recession and isolation.
We learned of the Bosozoku, or ‘violent running gangs’ that started in the 1950s and were fairly active in Saitama (where I lived) even into the early aughts; a generation of Japanese women were labeled 'parasite singles' because (like millennials here after our first recession), many of them stayed at home with their parents for reasons as varied as saving up income, attempting to bypass a fractured economy and limited prospects (get married, have children, become a housewife, become an elder, die isolated) or to just ball out of control while they could, meanwhile their male counterparts, the hikikomori, became agoraphobes living with their parents, either entertaining 'relationships' with inanimate objects or becoming tools for the ultra-right-wing steadily regaining popularity, most times they succumbed to both.
There were the worst denials of the Japanese governments’ comfort station program during World War II, in which Korean and Chinese women were forced into systemic, coercive sex as employed as a strategy of war by the Japanese, by attempting to purposefully erase these histories out of Japanese history books while concurrently forcing foreign women from obtaining entertainer visas to enter the country to work, setting off a chain of exploitation when organized crime decided to provide these visas instead. Women were indebted indefinitely in order to pay for their visas, many of whom were trafficked out of the country in order to “square up” with the yakuza. On our way to catch the train, we often bumped into yakuza posted up in front of konbini and pachinko parlors in the evening, and watched them bring swaths of women -- primarily Russian and Filipina -- as we commuted to class into massage parlors in broad daylight as salarymen followed quickly behind the flock.
A few months before I arrived in Tokyo, a massacre occurred in the Akihabara district, known primarily as the epicenter of Japanese cultural exports: manga, anime, video games, otaku culture. 7 people were stabbed to death in the middle of the day at a large street crossing, the sort you often see Instagrams and videos of. The perpetrator was described as having been recently informed he would be laid off his temp job at an auto factory and had attempted suicide unsuccessfully just two years prior. It was news of possibly losing his job that may have set him off. This massacre was a part of a growing response --referred to in Japanese as kieru, from alienated youth. Kieru loosely translated means a sudden outburst of violence when the final straw breaks the camel’s back. A stress response, so to speak.
When I got back home after my five-month stint in Japan, I had to reckon with my glimpses into the culture I spent so many days attempting to participate in. That is to say, by participating actively in a culture, something’s rubbed off on me and has become habitual. I made the decision to adopt these changes for one reason or another, primarily because what rubbed off, helped me to navigate my world better. By spending time with other people, people ‘different’ from me, I gained a deeper understanding of collective humanity -- that what we do here, people also do there and vice versa. In that way, culture sort of acts like a yawn: you’ll ‘catch’ a yawn eventually. We are creatures who learn socially and who mirror behaviors we see in our world as a result of this social learning. A lot of my habits changed for the better thanks to that participation: I wore masks when I got sick so I wouldn’t get others sick. I did my groceries every couple of days, just getting what I needed for the week, the way I’d done with my host family. I sat on my legs in front of the shared coffee table in my dorm because I’d gotten so used to that.
I also had to confront the fact that cities can make people feel lonesome. Potential isolation was a part of what we decided to accept when we live in sprawling, urban centers. I also had to accept living in these spaces could sometimes be detrimental to our well being as creatures of the collective because we really like being around one another — especially when we don’t harbor the ideologies that tell us only some people are worth being around while others are meant to remain distant to and from us.
The prior October while still studying abroad, after discussing the recent phenomena of group suicides organized on Internet message boards and their recent peak, I found myself commuting one morning feeling a particular sense of dread I couldn’t quite place. I was undiagnosed and unmedicated at this point in my life so a particular sense of dread I couldn’t quite place was stasis for me. But, the vibe was so particularly wrong that morning, I even mentioned to Hayleigh, my everyday commuting buddy, that I was Feeling A Way. She, a blunt Brit, told me I needed to calm down and not worry about it.
As I was adjusting my iPod, an elderly woman to the right of me, ignored the yellow queue relief that we all stood behind, single-file line, every morning. To this day I still remember so many details about this woman: most particularly the black paisley dress she wore and how she held her two, worn hands gently behind her back, as if contemplating existence. I wondered if she was anxious to get on the train to meet someone, because she kept peering over, her feet too close to the ledge. She wasn’t doing what we were all doing and in a place like Japan that was enough cause for alarm. As the train issued a warning horn for its impending arrival, she leaped and landed on the tracks, making her body the shape of infancy; all limbs curled into a child’s pose. I hadn’t realized what was happening until Hayleigh pulled me away from the queue, screaming.
I walked into my Japanese language class, stunned. When my professor finally wiggled into my reality, I told her I had witnessed a suicide on my way to class. She asked me calmly if I needed to call the police and I told her I needed to talk to someone, actually. Her eyes bugged out of her head. Asking to speak to the school therapist was more of a taboo than telling her I’d witnessed a woman commit suicide on my morning commute. And there I was, in therapy, a few years later, talking about how haunted I felt by that experience, that I wasn’t sure why I had been there to witness a suicide and how eerie it was that just a few weeks prior, I was studying the phenomena and then, just like that, it happened in front of my face.
What I needed to know, at the time, was how I was meant to process this specific moment? What the fuck was I supposed to do with the night terrors, the sheen of death still slick on my psyche? What was I meant to learn, here? In ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, Susan Sontag says of suffering, “It is a view of suffering, of the pain of other, that is rooted in religious thinking, a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.”
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Everyone here is always in a rush, and this is another thing we share in common with Tokyo. Cities are created for activity, we humans bring this activity to urban centers and imbue our centers of capital with a sense of aliveness, of supernatural sentience (even though we are the ones who bring spaces alive, literally — we work, we play, we study, we go to grocery stores, etc) We talk about Cities the way we talk about The Market™ -- these big giants of almost cosmic intelligence which we are taught are infamous and omnipresent, as though they were the old gods we’d almost forgotten.
We’ve forgotten why we revere them but we know we must, lest there be Problems.
Maybe that’s why so many people are reticent to stay indoors during this pivotal time in our understanding of what it means to live in a society. If our cities shut down, doesn’t that mean, we too are shut down? If our cities are closed, aren’t we closed too? The resounding answer is no. You are not your city (or any other space/place you inhabit) just like you are not your job. Our society is more than movement and busy making. Part of stepping away from our centers of capital causes us to question why we are constantly in motion, always seeking to be busy. What does the busyness add up to, really? If you are constantly in motion, what are you gaining when you take a moment to observe?
I found out a few years ago that a dear friend’s partner discovered many years after the 2011 tsunami, that all of his father’s remaining relatives had all perished in the disaster. Neighbors had found some of their bodies near the train tracks in town, some still haven’t been found, to this day. They lived in Fukushima City.
The father felt it was his singular duty to grieve this extreme loss of family, so as not to upset the surviving family. For almost five years, this man thought the best thing he could do to handle his own suffering was to carry it all by himself, so as not to disrupt the flow of life for his family. It set off the wave of grieving he thought he had been sparing his family from. Instead, he created a burden for himself he could hardly carry alone and prolonged the suffering he thought he could save his loved ones from.
Grief is a strange beast, and impossible to tame without aid.
We are not meant to be spared from grief and yet, we are already attempting to mitigate our collective grieving for the lives we once lived by attempting to live those lives at great risk to our species. Species. This is a global pandemic and people are dying in numbers we haven’t seen in wartime, ever. As of writing this, 3,415 people have died in the United States from COVID-19. We are tasked with a great challenge which is to preserve life and at the very small cost of what we’ve been told was normal. In order for us to preserve human life, we are being forced to call into question if the lives we were living before this pandemic were actually normal, which is to say were we living humanely?
We were not and as such our lives were abnormal, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t grieve what little we had. We should be sad not to see our friends in restaurants and coffee shops, on group vacations and at professional conferences and networking events, in malls and other halls of capitalism. We should also feel some relief that we never needed those things in order to connect with other human beings! This time is proving that when it comes down to it, we just want to be with each other, in whatever capacity we can: on the phone, on a video conference, by sharing art and thoughts and writings that evoke the essence of a person we love — connectivity isn’t limited to spending money together, it can be as expansive as our needs require. And in grieving what little we had, we can spend our time, imagining together, how much more we could have.
What could we give to each other, so everyone around us could suffer the human condition a little less alone?
Would it be so bad if, after we emerge, you’ve built systems of mutual aid, extended kinship to include all of your neighbors? If you have challenged yourself to give up the yoke of solitary misery and instead, find communal ways of living and suffering? It’s cruel that we have to suffer as a species but it might be best if we start looking at this plague (and others like it), and likewise our capacity to suffer, as challenges that might better us and bring us to newer ways of understanding our humanity. We live in a country, where just two weeks ago it was perfectly fine for poor people to suffer, to go without food or water, or a roof over their head. If any sort of unexpected precariousness befell them, we chalked it up to their lack of morals or intelligence or both.
Now that we all find ourselves suddenly down in the dregs, we are coming to the agreement that it is not okay for poor people to suffer if, in fact, the masses are poor. We are now the masses in a way none of us could have ever anticipated. We’ve realized we need help and that we can get that help from relying on one another! With this swift brush of what it feels like to have the bottom fall out, we are deciding, collectively that we’re going to do this -- survive a plague -- together.
After the earthquake and the following tsunami and nuclear disaster, Japan also had to make a decision: we survive this together, or we don’t survive this, at all. When I returned back for the first time after a decade, something had changed. People were openly embracing one another, couples stole kisses on the train, parents held their toddlers on their shoulders and made goofy jokes with them. It used to be that friends would excitedly stand a few feet apart from each other, signing enthusiastic waves of joy to express the want to touch each other, but it was taboo to be overly affectionate in public. People were socially distancing themselves as a form of self-control and cultural restraint. Even though they were spending time together, physically, culture dictated a form of relating that actually made people feel less connected to each other.
In practice, that longing for connection morphed into group assisted suicides, xenophobia, collective denial and hysteria, agoraphobia, and other pathologies that often stem from trauma. What we are experiencing now is incredibly traumatic. When we rely on touch, especially, to feel connected and grounded and tied to other human beings, to have that taken away for an undefined period of time will cause emotional ripples through our culture that will take decades to upend and we already have a lot to upend as it is. Give room to your suffering, make space for your grief. Right now, you need it to access your compassion, which Susan Sontag posits, is 'an unstable emotion'.
Compassion she says, “needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”
“The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated [by a photograph]. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do--but who is that “we”?--and nothing “they” can do either--and who are “they”?--then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”
It’s time for action, don’t you think?