People

So far, in my short time here in Japan, I have noticed many different things about people. The largest thing that I have noticed is the ability of Japanese people to co-exist. By co-exist, I am not referring necessarily to differing opinions or different ethnicities living in and among the Japanese and their ability to integrate those facets into their daily life; I am referring to the ability of the Japanese to maintain both tradition and modernity at the same time. In the photos that I have chosen for this blog entry, you will notice that one is a ceremony held before a Dashi parade, and the other is a group of Japanese tourists taking in the tourist attraction of a lake while others above them are visiting a shrine.

My experience in pulling a Dashi float was extremely interesting. Here we were, this huge group of people tugging this gigantic float around the city, and yet, nothing really seemed to stop for us. We had a couple of police officers that would direct traffic around our little bubble, but that was pretty much it. I made it a point to look at the expressions of all of the people in their vehicles as we were passing, and they seemed to wait patiently until they could pass through. Some of them took in the sight, while others remained focused on the police officer or the person in the car with them. When it actually came time for the parade, we traveled down one of the main streets and things seemed as though they were normal.

However, after we finished the main drag, we had to return the float to the beginning position. What this entailed was circling back around to the starting point. In order to do this, we had to pull the float up hill, at night, on a really busy four to five lane street. Here you have a group of at least 100 people pulling an extremely lit up float by rope, with the sound of taiko drums, flutes, and chanting, down a busy street, up hill. The whole thing was quite a sight.There were countless ways that drivers could have reacted to this. I thought back to a time when I had gone to Chicago, and drivers seemed to honk at every little obstruction in their way. However, we made it to our destination without a single honk. If the busy street didn't bring you into the modern, then how about the fact that we stopped at every single red light. We acted as one gigantic car, yet what we were doing was traditional.

When my host family took me to visit a local tourist destination, I was immediately surprised by what I saw. You had all of these people walking around and taking in this beautiful lake. There were Japanese people taking photos with the statue close by, there were people looking into the water and feeding the fish, and their were yet others sitting on rocks and talking about the view. What I feel this picture captures is extremely interesting.

You have a group of Japanese people who are here to visit, looking into the water and watching the fish, while in the background there are people visiting a sort of shrine. I suppose that my Japanese is not good enough to know for sure if what I took a shot of was a shrine, but if that isn't enough, then we can go into the fact that on the other side of the bridge, there was a soft-serve ice cream shop. To me, this was fascinating. From what I could tell, the vast majority of the crowd there was Japanese, but they were their for extremely different reasons from what I could tell. Some people would walk to the shrine like location, and walk back without even taking into account the statue or the view. Others would snap photos right beside that same location.

In conclusion, I feel as though Japan is a place where tradition and modernity is not something that is so dichotomized as we might think in the West. What if both modernity and tradition can co-exist with the same level of importance? What if they depend on each other to really exist? What is tradition without modernity? These are all questions that I feel have come about from these two seemingly small events. However, they are questions that, in my opinion, can teach us a lot about Japanese culture and how it differs to that of the West

Neighborhood

I asked my host sister what she thought about the word "neighborhood", and what it meant to her. When she answered me, I gathered that she saw it as those that lived around them, and that she had different feelings for all of them. I began running this idea through my head. When it comes to the idea of "neighborhood", it is part of the life of an individual that exists outside of the home, "uchi". In essence, it is relationally built "outside" the individual's home. This being said, neighbors might know very little about the "inside" lives of many of their neighbors. There is a distinct barrier that exists that keeps the neighborhood close, but not inside.



This doesn't necessarily differ from my concept of neighborhood. Living in the country, I very rarely, if ever, see my neighbors or interact with them. I have noticed that the neighborhood I am living in, as the pictures depict, is not very lively. I have seen very few people, especially children walking around the neighborhood. I chose the picture of the garden to show that my neighborhood is rural enough to be able to have a decent sized garden. I asked if this was a community garden, but I found that it was only maintained by one person.


The second picture was chosen to represent the outside and how dead it seems. There is very little life on the streets, but you can hear conversations going on; a couple laughing with their children; or a piano being played inside most houses. The "uchi" is very much alive, and seems to be the central hub of life. The "neighborhood" acts as sort of a genkon to the genkon of each house in the area.