Stress and Excitement

I am too busy to blog guilt-free these days. (I'm stealing time to write this in an awkward half hour between classes). I'm really too busy to do much of anything except write papers, but you know what? I have A's in all classes right now. And I'm not going to be here next year. So I need to take at least some personal time, say goodbye to friends and to Missouri. I'm going camping this weekend despite the nagging - no, threatening and trembling - voice telling me I'd be better off staying home and locking myself in. I also need to pack and blah blah blah. Luckily I am at least one step ahead because my room is cleaner than it's been most of the semester, and I'm going to really try to keep it that way.


So yeah, stressful times, but it's mostly good stress. I like most of the papers I'm doing - especially the Nihonjinron one. This can actually be sort of a problem - as much as I'd love to shut myself up for a week (or longer) with it, do field work even, come up with something publishable - it's not in the cards, it's not in the schedule. And that's okay, I guess. :) I kind of wish they would give me June to keep working on it, but less as an extension because I procrastinated and more because I want to devote my full attention to it and make it as good as it can be. And so I can procrastinate, too. ;)



The other two papers are the one for Catalan and the one for Spanish. I think the Catalan paper is going to be about Andorra - perceptions of Andorra from within and without and what it means to be Andorran and how it's shown in media and what people think about it. Again I could go much further with the topic, but in the end I'm just going to read a few books and put together 20 pages of a beginning. The Spanish paper is a bit yucky... we'd only read two plays in class when we started working on it, and I wasn't very enthusiastic about either of them. Two plays later and if I switch topics now I have more work, plus I'm only mildly enthusiastic about one of the plays out of four. I guess drama just isn't my favourite genre. If I don't switch topics, I'll be writing about The Man Who Turned into a Dog and what this means about professions and castes and blah blah blah, especially in a down economy. I'm not excited about it at all, but I could do research about how the current recession and the Great Depression were dehumanizing. If I do switch topics, I'll write about how drama is a more realistic medium than prose or poetry. Not that it's better, just more realistic because it shows us communication - and communication is all we know of people in reality. I'm more interested in that topic, especially for a shorter essay, but I actually think the first one might be easier. There's one more informal essay coming up, so I might write the informal essay about my new idea and see how that goes.



Anyway. I need to say goodbye to Ju and Prite in a manner of speaking, and I'm not going to be seeing any of the others - Zahra, Laura, Tabi, etc for another year as well. Thus the camping. It's going to be awesome and I'm very excited. I'm excited about other stuff as well - Liisa's visit this summer and Scotland and Spain. Still, it's planning and money and stress, however nice. Lucia and Allan and I got together in a three-way chat and started hammering out the 'details'. I'm a bit nervous becuase I'm not 100% when I need to report for my VISA or even what the EU entry requirements are... what if by some awful chance I won't get the VISA until late August and can't enter the EU until then? Honestly? I'd seriously consider hopping to Norway and back or something like that. What are the other non-EU countries that are close by and cheap? Ooohhh... what about Iceland? Not that it's cheap, but I'd actually love that. Well, jk, ideally I'll have the VISA tucked away neatly by the time I take off.



I would tell the details of the plan but this is an ugly stresspost and I don't want to put the details in now and create a redundancy when I repost them with glee later on. Suffice to say that it's all going to be awesome... we've booked the first element (hostel in Valencia for Tomatina)... we've planned an epic six day walk across Scotland... and Lucia won't shut up about Nessie or dressing up as Vikings. Liisa and I have a Skype Date set for tomorrow morning and I should have some idea about what distance we're heading in at that point. :)



So, basically lots of excitement and also a lot of stress. What else is new? :)

Nihonjinron - Breaking Ground

Palmer liked my idea about Nihonjinron as a religion. We discussed it this morning and he kept apologizing for not knowing more about Japan, while asking so many questions I didn't have the answers too. He's very helpful like that - sort of prods me into exploring new areas without making it obvious that he's doing so. Sunday I went to the library for an hour and picked up some books for research. I came home with 11 that look like a good starting place. I've found out about three-four other books I really want based on Internet Research, so I'll try to get those through inter-library loans as well, and I also want to pick up one or two books on standard Japanese religion, to put things in perspective.

The ones I picked up were:

Rice as Self, by Ohnuki-Tierney
Japan's Minorities (the Illusion of Homogeneity), edited by Michael Weiner
Multiethnic Japan, by John Lie
Wrapping Culture, by Joy Hendry
Unmasking Japan (Myths and Realities about the Emotions of the Japanese), by David Matsumoto
Japanland, by Karin Muller
Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan, by Kosaku Yoshino
The Japanese and the Jews, by Isaiah Ben-Dasan (translated)
Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan, edited by Dick Stegewerns
Nationalisms of Japan, by Brian McVeigh
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture, edited by Yoshio Sugimoto

I've also still got David Mura's Turning Japanese sitting around, and one or two perhaps marginally useful books at the lakehouse.

I want to get:

Hegemony of Homogeneity, by Harumi Befu
Japan's Modern Myth, by
and
Dogs and Demons, by Alex Kerr.
(I find it odd that this seems to have two choices of titles: Dogs and Demons - The Fall of Modern Japan, and Dogs and Demons - Tales from the Dark Side of Japan. Are these the same book?)
A book or two on more traditional Japanese religion

So far I like my book sources. Hegemony of Homogeneity is going to be of crucial value as it seems like the closest anyone has come to writing about my topic - extremely close, actually. I've got to get my hands on that one, one way or another. As far as the others go, some are going to be more relevant than others, although I think all of them would add something to my understanding. It's just a matter of time and organization. I like that a healthy percentage of the books are written by Japanese authors. (Surprisingly this semi-includes Ben-Dasan, who wrote the Japanese and the Jews - he grew up in Japan and wrote the book in Japanese).

At a surface glance, it seems like the books roughly fall into these categories:

Nihonjinron as Religion:
Hegemony of Homogeneity

Japanese Nationalism:
Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan
Nationalisms of Japan
Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan

Japan as a Heterogeneous Society:
Japan's Minorities (The Illusion of Homogeneity)
Multiethnic Japan

Japan from Outside Perspective (General):
Japanland
Turning Japanese

Criticism of Japan:
Dogs and Demons
Japan's Modern Myth

Specific Cultural Elements:
Rice as Self
Wrapping Culture
Unmasking Japan (Myths and Realities about the Emotions of the Japanese)
The Taming of the Samurai

General Culture:
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture

---------------------

I'm thinking I need to get Hegemony of Homogeneity ASAP. Some of the cultural books seem like they might not fit the topic super well, but they may surprise me. From what I've read of Rice as Self so far, for example, it surprisingly has a lot of specifics to lend to my research. I'm frankly totally confused about Wrapping Culture but can't wait to read it. Modern Japanese Culture is a pretty dense and frightening book despite it's cheery anime-style cover. Nevertheless I think it might be the second most useful book to me other than Hegemony of Homogeneity, because it is pretty comprehensive.

Unfortunately most of the primary sources, and the Nihonjinron writings, my sacred texts so to speak, are in Japanese, so most of my sources are secondary or from a different angle (aka the foreigner reports like Turning Japanese and Japanland).

I want this book too!

The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan, by Alan Booth
At first I thought I wanted it only for pleasure, then reading reactions I realize that even this would contribute to the project.

I'm not limiting myself to books, either, especially at this point. The topic was born from wikifrolicking and blog crawling, and I'm still messing around with that. I never realized before how much anger towards Japan and Nihonjinron there was on the internet. Anger, and just plain disillusionment as well. There are entire blog and forum communities that I'm finding, full of bilingual expats in Japan who are fighting rather viciously amongst each other about all things Japanese, with opinions all over the spectrum. Of course, these people are choosing to live in Japan, so they don't exactly hate it, but I'm finding that there's one of these people who are eager to reveal the 'dark side of Japan' for every, say, 500 Japan-crazed gaijin.

I wonder suddenly if they'll ever read my paper. It's a funny thought. Actually it freaks me out a little bit. Is this real stuff, more than a school project? A little bit frightening. Anyway, I love Japan and I hope that shows in the final product, however it turns out, and even during the processing stages.

Mutsu, Japan - 7/09

Brainstorming - Nihonjinron

I'm thinking about Japan. Just letting the thoughts drift into my mind and float on the surface of my thoughts, letting them come together and apart again. The Anthropology paper is very vague now and still far away.

I'm thinking about 5 yen coins and fortunes that come out of drawers.
About the horrors of giving gifts in 4s and 7s.

http://family.jrank.org/pages/85/Ancestor-Worship-Ancestor-Worship-in-Japan.html

About syncretism.
About Shinto, Buddhism, ancestor worship, and Santa Claus.

http://patrickmccoy.typepad.com/lost_in_translation/2008/03/japan-has-four.html
http://overoften.wordpress.com/articles/myths-in-modern-japan/
http://japanlost.blogspot.com/2007/10/nihonjinron-and-baka-gaijin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron

About Kisetsukan and Nihonjinron.

http://blog.japundit.com/archives/2006/09/14/3503/
http://junana.com/CDP/corpus/GLOSSARY18.html
http://www.jstor.org/stable/836924?cookieSet=1
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/japan-beyond-the-tamagawa/d55e3578829cf55946c46fc1b49419e9

About Bakagaijin and Nihonjinron.

http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/japan-beyond-the-tamagawa/8bd8816303d9ecd5fdc77fbf11fc2122
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/japan-beyond-the-tamagawa/8223a3d99ca23369344151e7ecdca6bd
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/opinion/29tawada.html?_r=2

About Cherry Blossoms and Nihonjinron.

http://quotejapan.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/nihonjinron/
http://blog.digihotaru.com/2005/10/re-evidence-used-to-support.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A571565
http://www.justjapan.org/japan/popculture/japan-nihon.asp
http://www.librarything.com/work/511765

About Nihonjinron.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20010624a3.html

About Nihonjinron...

Interesting...

Takayama, Japan 7/09