Inner escape

This is a little bit off track but I like Peter Barakan nonchalant manner although I don't know much about him. I also like his approach to living in Japan. There is a recent article about him in the Japan Times. You can read it at different levels, as an innocuous piece of journalism you'll forget next minute, or as a standard piece of cliché on the relationship between foreigners - of Western extraction in priority - and the Japanese language. The writer - a Japanese journalist - introduces Barakan as a "a long-time Tokyoite fluent in Japanese, husband to a Japanese woman". I dare say that being the husband of a "Japanese woman" is the central identification feature, the pedigree of the foreigner who is and always will be a never-to-be-perfect Japanese speaker. Language competence and wife's nationality are melted into sameness. The first live comment of Barakan is followed by yet another standard stereotype in the expression "he said speaking in near-native Japanese". And the issue at point is not "near-nativeness", nor the pavlovian awe of the journalist at the achievement, but that the very topic of Barakan fluency - which is near as in near-miss - is worth a comment. Barakan has been living in Japan for 35 years. I would have interviewed him about music, not about his near-missed Japaneseness - that unreachable star. Closeness to Japaneseness as a near-miss event will follow him in the grave just like me although he is closer to near-missness than I am. As the expanding universe, local expectations for the foreigner to be superlatively competent at Japanese and anything Japanese even more than the Japanese who are superlatively Japanese by genetic + having been born and raised here always goes further away. You always miss something.

But it should not be important. Unfortunately, it is superlatively important and nagging on a daily basis. What makes life at times totally boring here is that your near-missing state tends to be the central explicit or implicit subject of the dialogue with others. In a thematic group at some online professional community network where the dictatorship of blind positivism is self-infliged as in fashion magazines copy style, some members have been swooning on Barakan's "humility", his lack of affection and the sincere downgrading of the self when he reckons that he cannot follow TV news unless he really concentrates, nor can he fluently read newspapers. I think everybody is missing the irony when that same journalist goes on with a "but doesn't blame it on a lack of ability". "Japanese newspapers are difficult to read because the way it is written is too formal, whereas English papers are written in a more conversational form," he said. "Similarly, I cannot follow TV news unless I really concentrate. The NHK news, especially, is too formal. The way they talk suggests only salary men are interested in news."

I don't much follow him on the meaning of "salary men" for that instance, but what Barakan is probably suggesting - and the journalist is out of tune on the implicit side of this - is that your average Japanese may be in the very same position as a 35 years resident of Japan. It definitely requires concentration to follow the news in any language, including your native lingua franca. Japanese newspaper regularly lament - as in any other country - at the growing incompetence of the locals at their own language, which doesn't make a foreign any more clever. You proportionally loose competence together with the average sliding down of the majority's competence because you are at the margin, clinging with one finger to the Japanese mothership (tongue in cheek).

Fuming about "these Japanese" always pointing at the competence of the foreigner in the mysteries of Japaneseness is a standard subject and source of malaise of life in Japan as a foreigner. Dipping further into it, you start understanding as with the swooning crowd I mentioned that foreigners in their way to cope with the fact tend to do nothing but amplify the local mantra of us versus them. A 27 years resident takes a bow to state that "I found this quote quite encouraging, actually. I have lived in Japan for 27 years now, but still need to concentrate well to understand the news. I always attributed it to an insufficient knowledge of Japanese. My Japanese friends also tell me that they find the news difficult to follow, but I figured they were just humble and wanted me to feel better. Reading that Peter Barakan still needs to concentrate after 35 years in Japan is therefore very encouraging. It is like a reality check informing me that there is nothing wrong with my brains, and it makes me want to sit down and study again. " Another lachrymal individual mopping his eyes lets go with a "I really liked his humbleness. 35 years on and Mr. Barakan refuses to acknowledge that he is bilingual."

Here in full swing is your extreme knee-jerking and throwing bows all over the place type of utterance that makes me feel like calling it quit altogether and escape to Australia. I still have another three years to reach that gentleman's knee-jerking competence and reckon that I will never be native. The next step for mental healthiness is to be able to say and believe that "I don't care".

Because, what if Peter Barakan's "humility" was a wrongful appreciation of an "easy-going" attitude nurtured over time to cope with that small neurosis imposed and self-imposed by the cultural milieu and über-fantasy, dream and onirism surrounding Japan?

Inner escape. I think it has something to do with inner escapism and I see something similar between Barakan and let's say Donald Ritchie when it comes to the public attitude toward the stupid questioning of stupid journalists focusing on your ever missing competence at this and that, checking your knee-jerkyness competence instead, and in the end being totally oblivious to what and who you are. Peter Barakan is a passeur of non-Japanese music to Japan first of all, or at least that's the way I perceive his activity when listening to his extremely good radio show on NHK FM. His focus on foreign music is probably a major self-applied pharmakon to sustain his competence at living in Japan. It's a way to escape while being there. Donald Ritchie too is an escapist but with the within, be it Japanese cinema or local sex life. You need something to escape which helps cope with the stupidity, lameness of journalists when they want to gear the conversation after being here for 35 years or more on your imperfect competence, a reassuring subject to readers from all shores.