24 de setembro de 2011

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...