Random Freewrite 1: Week of 3/14/11

This is the light outpouring of some pent-up emotion that just keeps building up in me about Japan and Americans' perception of Japan. It spilled out into my poem about Hiroshima, into my story about my Mom, my stories that I haven't posted, more poems. In any case, in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, there was a lot of talk about "stoicism" and such. I have a lot of friends in Japan, all safe but it has been exhausting to deal with the unending daily worry, and I don't know if it was a way of dealing with this stress, but I found myself thinking in anthropological ways about the impressions people have of how calm and dignified the Japanese people are in this crisis. People have criticized Japan many times for having such a high suicide rate, for the oppressive nature of proverbs like "the protruding nail must be hammered down," but the very same influences that create that statistic and such proverbs are reflected in how they are responding in this crisis. It makes me angry that they are even positively stereotyped as being better suited to handling stress. It feels somewhat as if they are being dehumanized as "closer to earth" or even somehow machine-like in their response, when they aren't biologically programmed to be any better at handling stress than any other member of the human race. The internalized controls of their culture are deeply rooted and very rigid, the "community before self" mentality that permeates every corner of their lives, but I think people glamorize it from a distance and forget that it's just as difficult for an individual in Japanese society to be courageous and selfless and patient as it would be for an American individual. We brush off the fellow humanity of other people in so many different ways, groups and individuals all, even in glorification. So many people become Other and Else.