The Importance Of Failure

Let's be honest. No one likes to fail.

Stereotypically, Japanese have a huge stigma on failure. This constantly shows up in my third-year middle school English courses. 90% of a classroom can know the correct answer to a question, but not a single student will make a sound. Sometimes this is just a symptom of shyness present in any classroom, but sometimes it springs from a fear of failing. Not only would you be sticking your neck out in class by speaking English, but if you gave the wrong answer on top of that? Humiliation.

To tear apart a stereotype, does this sound specific to Japan? My memories of 6th grade Latin bellow a resounding "NO".

The fear of failure is not limited to my Japanese classrooms. Being a resident in a foreign country is fraught with the same kind of fear. Is this shirt OK to wear? Is it OK to not drink the milk with my school lunch? Can I talk about my girlfriend with my supervisor? Am I holding this rice bowl right? I have rice on my hand! Do I eat it off my hand or get a napkin?!?

This fear can literally be paralyzing. I found myself with two grains of rice stuck on my left thumb unsure of whether to eat it off my hand or to throw it away. It took me about 30 seconds to finally walk to a trash can and flick it off. Being ignorant of your resident country's customs can leave you feeling like an oversized 5 year-old - one who should really know better. C'mon.

But get ready. Here's the big news.

WE ARE MEANT TO FAIL!

Failure should NOT be limited to primary school and childhood.

The moment you stop failing is the moment you stop learning. The moment you stop learning is the moment you stop growing, and the moment you stop growing is the moment you stop truly living your life to the fullest.

Sometime in my first month here in Japan, I forgot this important fact.

In my life, I actively seek situations that set me up for failure, and coming to Japan was my biggest step to failure yet. In a foreign country, you cannot help but fail in some way. It is inevitable. As the internet kids say, you are bound for an "Epic Fail" of some sort. It's just a matter of when and where and how embarrassingly you will screw up. But the instinct to avoid failure is one of our strongest ever. Without it, you'd walk off the edge of a cliff without a care in the world and plummet to your death...

...but how can we hope to fly without taking that step off the edge?

My fear of failure kept me from being myself here in Japan. In my effort to seamlessly fit into Japanese culture, I gave up what made me, me. I was physically and socially reserved. I found myself only talking about what I thought other people would care about, instead of what I loved. It was stifling, and I wasn't even aware of it.

I needed some failure.

Please note that I am on a different foot than everyone else in this picture.

Clowns are the personification of failure. They are not limited to failure, but a clown that does not fail is not truly a clown.

When my Board of Education asked me if I would be willing to juggle for the town's "Matsuri", or festival, I jumped on the opportunity. What's more, I went to the primary school where I heard children learn how to unicycle. With the principal's permission, I borrowed their tallest unicycle, donned my red nose, and began practicing in a parking lot near my house.

On the day of the festival, I dressed in converse, leather motorcycle goggles, a suit vest with a necktie and shirt left untucked, and I biked to my town's baseball field for the matsuri.

The clown's name? "Dai Joe Boo". In Japanese, "daijoubu" translates to "alright" or "no problem".

Examples:

A: Do you need help?
B: Daijoubu-yo! (I'm fine!)

or

(person A approaches person B puking in a gutter)
A: Daijoubu?
B: *BLARGH*

Where Nate was paralyzed by a fear of failure, Dai Joe Boo the clown was fearless. Wear mismatched clothes in public? No problem, daijoubu. Perform in front of hundreds of people who expect you to be God's gift to juggling? No problem, daijoubu. Be the only foreigner to do the town's traditional mining dance on stage with the best dancers in town perfectly dressed in expensive Yukata? Oh yeah, and you only got to practice the dance for 3 minutes EVER? Daijoubu! No problem!

Needless to say, I failed. A lot. I dropped juggling balls probably 5 times by accident. My dance was atrocious. But you know what? It felt great! After about a month of being a perfect employee devoid of mistakes of any kind, the matsuri was an oasis of fail.

It was time to embrace myself as me, as I've had to do so many times before, failures and shortcomings included.

Children in Yukata will never fail being cute...

"To err is human..." Alexander Pope, 1700's AD

"errare humanum est" Seneca, 0's AD

My First Cold

Remedy for a Weekend Cold:

-Sleep
-Play Halo the video game with a brother
-Have a Skype date with a loved one
-More sleep
-PANCAKES

Do yourself a favor.
Make some pancakes.

Displacement

Have you ever thought about "displacement"?

It's been on my mind a lot lately. This goes a little deeper than "moving something from its natural environment", which has obviously happened to me.

Another kind of displacement came to mind as I entered my apartment's "furo", or bathtub.

I had left the tub running a bit long, so the bath was entirely filled with water. In Japan, you customarily shower sitting on a small bench (lower left corner) outside of the tub. Only after thoroughly cleaning yourself, leaving no soap suds at all, may you enter the tub.

I stepped in.

As I sat down, the water flooded over the edges of the tub and temporarily filled the room. As the steaming water swirled down the drain, I thought to myself, "this is the total amount of water that I have displaced". It was actually surprising how little water there was. In a 4 square meter room, the water only came up about 1.5 or so inches up the pale, green-tiled walls.

Have you ever had thoughts of your death that were neither morbid nor suicidal? When I'm at the edge of a cliff, I often wonder what would happen if I were to take a single step off the edge. I have also thought, "if I ceased to exist in this immediate moment, what would happen next?" Who would be the first to know?

I had a similar thought in my overflowing tub: not as exciting as the first, and not as selfish as the second. I simply thought, if my body was to liquify in this moment, turn instantly into bathwater, those 1.5 inches would be my entire being. Not only that, but it would effortlessly be carried by gravity and the city's pipe system to join with the rest of the water system, perhaps out to the sea, or eventually into the atmosphere.

It didn't seem right.
We displace more than the cubic volume that our bodies inhabit.
There are more than 3 dimensions.

Every day that we live on this planet, we are displacing space and time. We are altering the world around us in ways that we aren't even aware of. Simply by existing, you are changing the course of the world, whether you like it or not.

It's enough to give someone an inflated sense of self.

And yet, the question I had next was, how am I changing the world? I am only given a certain number of minutes to live on this planet. As long as 100 or so years may seem at first, it is a fixed amount of time. I can still only displace that 1.5 inches of water (or a little more if I take a deep breath in the bath).

These thoughts of displacement were a driving force bringing me here to Japan. How can my presence in this community change it? Can I possibly be proud of the change I affect?

There are some that travel abroad without thinking twice of the space in that foreign community that they are displacing. Whether you think of it or not, though, you are displacing that 1.5 inches, and it's not always appreciated.

This simple thought of displacement is helping me form my plans on a daily basis here in Japan. I'm not here simply to see the sights. I'm not here to simply have a good time. To sum it up, I'm here to change the world, and hopefully for the better. (See? I told you. Inflated sense of self.)

A fellow ALT Peter. Not me, but I jumped down this same waterfall...

Time to jump in.

................................................................................................................................

How much water have you displaced in your life?

ようこそ - Welcome

(This post details events of July 28th/29th)

Welcome to Saga!

After a whirlwind of a week in Tokyo, we were awoken in our hotel rooms at 4:15am. Our mission: bring our tired selves and over-sized baggage downstairs to board a bus, to board a plane, to board another bus, to arrive in a Prefectural Government Building, to immediately attend a meeting hosted by some of the most important people of our local governments. Be sure to wear your best suit and tie. Maybe you get time to pee.

Nate sporting green Prince bag, lower left.

Luckily, I am an actor, trained in the art of not freaking out in high pressure situations. Something that I knew in my head and quickly learned in my soul was that this was not an opportunity to be taken lightly. JETs are government contracted workers, paid a very large salary from the people's meticulously spent tax dollars. The people know JETs are expensive, and they watch very closely to see that their investment was not made in vain.

That being said, due to lack of sleep and hurried shaving practices, I nicked the mole on the right side of my neck shaving that morning. After changing out of my well ironed, perfectly white shirt with a bloodstained collar in an airport bathroom, I applied an American-brand cure-all: Band-aid.

To avoid embarrassment, I removed the aforementioned bandage immediately prior to entering the conference room, only to discover that I had ripped off any form of a scab that my hard-working collection of cells had nervously created in preparation for my Japanese rite of passage.

Simply put, every 10-20 seconds during the meeting, my finger was placed on my neck as if checking the pulse on my carotid artery in an attempt to not bleed out in front of everyone.

Eventually, my poor platelets were able to re-coagulate the blood and stop my neck from dripping in front of my supervisor.

The meeting was a good combination of Japanese and English, basically welcoming us to Japan and reinforcing our responsibilities while in Japan: teach English as a foreign language in our respective classrooms, encourage and participate in international exchange, and basically be an active member in our Japanese community.

The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme aims to promote grass roots internationalisation at the local level by inviting young overseas graduates to assist in international exchange and foreign language education in local governments, boards of education and elementary, junior and senior high schools throughout Japan. It seeks to foster ties between Japanese citizens (mainly youth) and JET participants at the person-to-person level.

Here I am shaking hands with my supervisor, Ishida-san.

After about an hour of stress, terror, and wonderful anticipation, my supervisor quickly gathered me up, helped carry my luggage, and loaded me into a skinny government van bound for my host city, Omachi.

a blur of Japanese conversation

a few confusions of translation

frantic typing into my electronic dictionary

the repeated relief of successful human communication

Eventually the calm silence that settles over any good car trip hovered over the van's cabin like a warm, blanket.........

.............. we arrive in Omachi. My supervisor drives me to the local shops and important locations. Every so often, his supervisor, Chijiiwa-san sitting on his left, chimes in with something he thinks is important, and tells Ishida-san where to go. Little do they know, there is no way in HELL that I will remember any bit of this car trip. I am in a special kind of shock, and my brain is not operating at 100% capacity.

What I do have, though, is the prickly feeling that these strange, foreign, vacuous locations will, at some unforeseen future, be filled with some thread of experience, story, and life in my mind. It's like being driven through a ghost town in a half-waked dream.

A view of Omachi fields from the main road, 2 minute walk from my house.

お帰り！WELCOME HOME!

Welcome home. More like welcome mess. 200 lbs. of baggage, 3 closets full of old books, food, appliances, and useless folderol, and two large bags of gifted towels, toiletries, and toilet paper.

My supervisor helped me load in my luggage, and told me he would return in about 20 minutes to take me to work. That's right, work.

You know that feeling of unpacked luggage? Kind of like an unopened piece of candy? I'd have to bring that feeling around for another 3 hours that day. Torture!

That's where I'll leave you all. I hope this blog can be your unopened piece of candy.

Welcome to Purikura.

How to Make Purikura

Take a run of the mill photo booth.
Add bright lights and space for 9.
Add
-graphic manipulation software
-the ability to send pictures via e-mail/wirelessly via IR connection to your cell phone
-silly clip art

Stir vigorously with a spritz of alcohol (optional)

Add a bit of
-spice
-that one-of-a-kind Japanese adorableness
-4 Americans fresh off the plane to Japan

Bake for approximately 1-2 minutes.

This is what you get!

Frightened? You should be. Or you should just join us in the Purikura booth! But careful, 2 girls = OK; 2 guys = no-no.

It Begins!

It’s been really difficult to start this blog.  The past 11 days have been a blurred roller coaster of ups and downs, literally and emotionally. From leaving those I hold most dear, to boarding a plane bound for Japan, then spending 13 hours awake on an American Airlines jet, to spending 3 days in Tokyo; it’s been a rocky adventure from the beginning. 

JETs (Japanese Exchange Teachers) waiting to board the plan. You can almost smell the fear.

I think it will help me to start this blog if know why I’m writing it. To be honest, I am writing this for you, the reader. This is a way for me to stay connected to my family and friends whom I already miss terribly. I’m not sure what this will become, but I will be sure to include plenty of pictures, stories, and hopefully some thoughtful insight.

If you are reading, please comment! Even the smallest “hello” makes all the difference to know that someone is reading what I put out. This is not a personal diary! 1/3^rd of my job here in Japan is to encourage the exchange of culture, and this blog can hopefully serve as a portal to a culture on the other side of the world for you. You will surely be surprised at the many differences, but even more so by the similarities.