I just arrived in Osaka today, was in Tokyo for a week before this. I don't really know what to make of Tokyo (or Japan in general, I guess). On one hand, I find everyone behaviorally to be very relatable. I'm convinced a good portion of the people here are likely on the spectrum: awkward behavior, quiet, isolated, stimming, smart, anxious. But also I feel the mirror and in Tokyo, anyway, it felt brutal. A cold distance, an unwillingness to look at me for more than a moment, a feeling that I did not belong and when I do not belong anywhere, that is rough.
Last night I was in Shibuya at an izakaya and met another American who was thrilled to find another solo woman traveler. Her name was Nira and she said it was her life-long dream to come here and she asked me why I was here and I didn't have a good answer. I often do things without a conscious understanding of why and this is one of those things. I usually figure it out months, maybe years later. I think that's part of the whole autistic alexithymia, delayed processing of emotions, logic, reasoning. I tell people I'm here because I am writing a book, but that explanation doesn't stand alone. The book isn't about Japan--so why Japan? I told Nira that I sometimes need to immerse myself in another culture to process the things about myself--it's all part of the same throughline. So maybe for me, that's witnessing another culture that is steeped in its own alienation, its own problems, its own dopamine-chasing culture, trying to. fill some void that it doesn't understand... or does it?
One thing I have noticed profoundly here is how verbose Japanese is. I'll see/hear an English translation for something and then it'll take three times as long to say it in Japanese. I wondered why that was and Googled it and someone explained that the language is actually really efficient but Japanese has so much more complexity to it that the way they say things is vastly richer than however it could be communicated in English. And like... sometimes I wonder if that's the difference between the way that I talk and the way that I am understood. I think thoughts in a fluent prose and yet when someone asks me what's on my mind, I summarize it to a succinctness that doesn't match what's in my head at all.
While I've been here, this right-wing political "activist" named Charlie Kirk was killed while speaking favorably for gun ownership rights, claiming that mass murder is necessary to protect the second amendment. Much like literally everything else happening in America right now, a day-by-day shitshow, it's turned into another lynchpin moment of modern history. It kind of feels like the analogy of the frog being in the boiling pot of water, not noticing that it is being boiled to death. Every day, there is some new escalation and I watch as everyone just sighs and accepts it. And I wonder who saves us?
I asked Asami, a woman I met last week, about Japan's prime minister resigning. She laughed and said they get a new one every month it feels like. This one, she said, was a dirty man. I told her that was a familiar subject to me as an American because of our president, and she said, "Oh but he's rich and that's respectable. This man is corrupt and dirty, like no one likes him, he eats dogs."
And I was kind of surprised to hear this. All of the Japanese news outlets, the way they depict American politics, from what I can see, is headlined as "Make America Great Again" but it's unclear if there is negative or positive bias. Kt, another local I met, was talking to me yesterday about the similarities between Japan and America's economies. We came to the conclusion that they are very similar--the divide between the wealthy and the poor is growing, but to the Japanese, all they see is the stock market pricing and think that's representative of overall American prosperity. And then a magazine I was reading on the Shinkansen mentioned that there has been a downturn in foreign tourism in Japan recently but they don't understand why.
And how can anyone understand why when the global media is oligarchical in nature? At what point will the media become so owned by the rich that free thought becomes extinct? This isn't the first time this has happened... and I can't imagine when Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 were written, that they were just prophesying a fictitious future from nothing... it's cyclical and surely at some point in time it was just this bad... pre-Internet, when no one had access to anything... so, I guess, what outlet replaces the Internet for free-thinking and freedom of the press? When it's no longer safe to be here, where do we go next?