The inevitable new year's post

I'll enjoy some of those rare moments in which I'm not drunk enough to say "I wrote that only because I was drunk" and I'm rational enough to have a nice look at my messy life. So, 2011, hun? I can't explain how wrong, mistaken, confusing and delightful was this year.

I've started it oficially as researcher! Revising a book, writing articles, revising articles and finally coming to Japan as... Research student! And now the last thing I want to be is a researcher. I'm pretty sure I'm not disapointed only with myself, but also with Japan. I love living here, but it's quite hard to study here when one is into social sciences. I had taken the challenge to come, but I didn't know that this was going to affect so hard my self-steem. Bad bad Maybi.

I should be fair and say that I met a whole new world! It's very different to see the world from Asia. I have friends who study Taiwan, North Korea and know to read kanji in different ways, while in Brazil people are proud of speaking 2 foreign languages... Really, I know 400 kanji and I can't do almost anything with that!

Meeting amazing people is one of the main features of Japan. Alhtough I listen pretty often the Brazilian saying "they don't know what's 'human heat'", "they don't show their emotions", I'm pretty sure I learnt how to express myself better and about showing my good side here than anywhere else. I have more people here saying "thank you for being here, you're special" and giving me a true a hug or saying "please, don't hate some small things here, because we love you" than anywhere else.

Japan is a whole curious place that intensifies your life, your feelings, your decisions, your perception. I can't remember how many times I hate so much a lot of things only because they're the way they're. I can't remeber why I act somehow... Why I feel like a love a completely improbable person.

I've said goodbye to many of the good friends I've made here... And in some 3 or 4 months many of them are also leaving. And, tell me, where am I going to put that big part of myself that misses everyone? We learn to kinda supress it, but that's not good neither... So what? Well, it's gonna be 2 more years and I don't think about changing my life... Even if I change my profession, the plans I have in mind are not gonna be much different of the current ones: moving out, moving in, moving out...

Kissing is banned!

Spring semester is completely finnished: I got all my grades, next week fall classes start and, after the typhoon, all I've had is sunny windy days with average temperature of 20º and leaves falling... It's just perfect to wake up in a fall day: the sun rises at 5:30am, not at 4am, and not in front of my window anymore; yesterday I put my long pants pijama for the first time since April... Everything is blue, with tones of brown, and slightly cold! It seems that I'm in a different country, that I got a different life. I am also impressed with how I got much better mood to the point of riding my bike yesterday for 2 hours having none of the planned things done.

There's poetry in all those things, of course. But, although I love the way colors change (specially if there will be more bluuuuuuuue) cultural and daily life aspects atract me more. I'm more and more impressed with the extent Japan changes according to the seasons: food at restaurants, the supermarket and combini; decoration items at DAISO; celebrations; festivals... I was also going to mention "people getting closer". But this assertion may be related to many other reasons not necessarily connected to the seasons. Well, most of people start school on April (when officially starts the school year in Japan). So, I guess that it's more probable people get closer during fall semester. Maybe fall helps, because we can think more often about celebrating life not necessarily under the air conditioning and drinking hot beverages (I drunk hot coffee at home today for the first time in months). But I might be right... 

All this reflexion about how close Japanese people may be and reminded me of an excert of a text I read last semester: "kissing had been banned by the militarist régime as decadent Western practice, and like public displays of affection in general, such intimate embraces offended the traditional Japanese sense of decorum" [Takemae Eiji, “The Cultural Reforms,” The Allied Occupation of Japan (New York: Continuum, 2002), 398].

So, my question is: to what extent this traditional Japanese sense of decorum has been avoiding Japanese to become more globalized and welcome foreigners as part of their society? I shall be fair and say that I have been meeting so nice Japanese people around here that I feel very lucky. But it's still not so easy not to feel gaijin. It's still pretty common to be surrounded by gaijin most of the times. And I confess that isn't so bad... I mean, there's a glamour of feeling foreigner to the point that sometimes I was envy of my foreigner friends living in Sao Paulo when I was there. Well, let's see...

About Weber and Kropotkin

Some days ago, I saw a video shared by a friend on facebook that showed a group of undergraduate school (those Brazilian private school of very looooow quality) students (some girls and one boy) making a presentation about Weber. But it wasn't a formal presentation, such as a traditional seminar. They were making a new version of a famous song in which they changed the lyrics for stupid things like "Weber, German Sociologist", using weird clothes and dancing. It was kinda disaster, what we name in Portuguese "vergonha alheia", something like feeling ashamed by the other. 

I was about to comment on that video when I suddenly remembered  my semminar about Anarchy and Kropotkin on the far 2004, General Theory of State was the name of the course... It was me and my 3 (do you want to be named?) best friends (by the way, we can't remember how and when we did became BFF, but I think all of us are sure that this seminar was remarkable for the begining of our friendship) and we had been feeling bored with the previous presentation on that semester. Always long 45 minutes talking about Plato, Socrates, Kant, etc (I could barely guess that 7 years later some 20 minutes at a course of grad school would be much worse). We wanted something different. And here we go! 

We planned a short piece to explain Kropotkin ideas. I don't remember which character I played, but one of us was the punk, the other the professor (and I remember we borrowed the apron of N's mother, who was dentist) and we also had narrators. Actually, I just confirmed with N2 and she also said she kind of deleted this of her mind and can't remember very well how was the screenplay, but it was "vergonha alheia" for sure. It was the punk trying to affirm Kroptkin ideas and the repressive professor; there were shouts and everything else. Gosh! Embarassing. But I think at least we didn't just sang around "Kropotkin Anarchist". 

In any case, two antithetical questions remain in mind. Why, why, why on earth we thought it would be a good idea to make something completely different from the others? But at the same time, if the content was not that bad, why we are still so conservative at Law School? Maybe if we were at journalism school, that wouldn't be a sooo bad idea. And I just thank at that time cell phone with camera didn't exist in classrooms and we didn't have youtube.

Japan-Brazil: discourse or real relations?

Yesterday, I completed exact 3 months in Japan, but I realized that only after I started this post. Maybe this "anniversary" is one important point for my crisis relating to my research project yesterday.

Since my arrival, I've been thinking about and elaborating an interesting and culturally anlytical text to post here, as one of my ambitions was the transformation of this space in an experimental virtual place for cultural exchange and experiences with traveling around East-Asia. But many things refrained me from doing that. One of them was to come with the conclusion that, in cultural aspects, Japan is more relevant for us in São Paulo than Brazil is for Tokyo. Of course that I was not expecting that the average imaginarium about Brazil would be very different from any other foreign, but I expected at least that at my university or in cultural manifestation Brazil would have an important place or at least would be very visible and exposed. I was wrong. While sushi and Japanese festivals spread around São Paulo and Paraná and the J-Pop culture acquires more and more adepts, I don't see any Brazilian cultural symbol with the same role around here, except for some friends going to Barbacoa sometimes... On the opposite: the complete ignorance about my country is the rule, with questions like "you speak Spanish, right?", "you learn to dance salsa in school, isn't it?". 

I got very disapointed with this general rule and I even don't go further to try to talk about the new era of emergent BRICS. I keep asking myself what is this relation of friendship Brazil and Japan supposedly have. For me it's more and more clear that it is more on discourse level than in the real world. I hope that at least at diplomatic level my opinion changes as I develop my project. But to be honest I almost changed it yesterday to start studying China-Brazil relations.