1 December 2000 (4 Kislev 5761)
I consider it part of the healthy intellectual etiquette to question from time to time the very legitimacy of what is considered common practice in a given society. In quite a few cases it turns out to be nothing but a result of inertia. A good example of this is the custom of sending New Year's cards as is practiced in Japan these years. An average adult prepares dozens of cards printed with highly ritualized sterile messages and sends them well in advance before the so-called New Year's Day itself. After questioning the raison d'être of this custom, I was left with no other option but to stop it several years ago.
I am well aware of at least two arguments in defense of this custom. The first is that New Year's cards help reinforce communication and relationship with the addressees. And the second is that it is considered impolite not to write them (back).
First of all, it will surely be rather superfluous to send these cards to your close friends because in any case you are in touch with them constantly. What is the use of writing something rather impersonal, imagining that it will be read a couple of weeks after it is posted? If you are really interested in sharing your joy of celebrating the New Year with them, you can be more spontaneous and less ritualized by emailing them or telephoning them. To put an exaggerated emphasis to handwriting seems to me like a kind of fetishism. What is really important is not the form but the content.
It is often maintained that New Year's cards are the only opportunity to keep in touch with those who are less close to you. But if this should really be the only chance to communicate with them, what kind of relationship is this? You cannot convey even the summary of what happened to you internally and outwardly in a few lines. If you really want to communicate with someone, you do not have to wait one whole year just to write a few lines. Besides, in many cases people do not take the trouble of adding anything personal to precomposed printed messages.
Secondly, if your main motivation to send New Year's cards is the fear of being ostracized from the society where you find yourself, you are making yourself a slave of the custom. In principle, customs are originated to serve us, and not vice versa. If you find that a certain custom is hindering your spiritual freedom, you should stop following it without sanctifying it out of blind faith and inertia. Furthermore, if you feel obliged to communicate with someone, it is a sure sign that your relationship with him or her is not genuine.
As far as I am concerned personally, there is one more reason why I stopped this custom altogether. I simply could not find any spiritual meaning in celebrating the so-called New Year according to the mechanically decided Gregorian calendar. The first of January is just like other normal days for me. I just watch as a bystander all the fuss surrounding it, often stirred up by commercialism. I would like to stress, however, that all this is my personal opinion and I am not urging people to follow me if they can find enough convincing reasons to continue writing New Year's cards. Unfortunately, I for one cannot find any such reason.
8 December 2000 (11 Kislev 5761)
Almost every time I spend more than half an hour in a bookstore in Japan, my pleasure of strolling among books and browsing them is interrupted by the sight of the following two types of neurotics: those who put their bags on displayed books while they are browsing them, and those who spend such a long time comparing all the copies of the same book or magazine they intend to buy and look for the copy which seems to them the most impeccable one physically.
The first type of neurotics irritate me. I simply do not understand the psychology of people who dare put their bags on books. The fact that they are in general well dressed makes me feel all the more that they do not deserve books. For me this is nothing but a blasphemy not only against books but mainly what they symbolizes. How can real lovers of books care more about their bags which are nothing but physical containers than intellectual and spiritual receptacles in the form of books? The sharp contrast between their nice looking clothes and bags and their minimal respect to books is an eloquent witness to their inability to discern things.
The second type of neurotics scare me. Although it seems a barbarious act to put a bag on books or to throw them to the floor, one does not buy books or magazines for their physical value but for the intellectual or spiritual value of their contents. Do they have no better ways of spending their time for themselves than looking for copies which satisfy their high "esthetic" standard? Interestingly, they are always males in their twenties, thirties or forties. I do not know whether all of them look introversive and gloomy with frozen facial expressions because they are preoccupied with these physical trifles or vice versa. The seriousness with which they look for their perfect copies really scares me, and they are the last ones I want as my neighbors. I even wonder if they open the books or magazines they purchase at all.
Although I have visited bookstores in some ten countries, I have never seen these two types of neurotics outside Japan. This may have much to do with one of the hallmarks of Japan as the society where much higher value is attached to form, sometimes with total neglect of content to such a neurotic degree. If you happen to find these kinds of people in countries other than Japan, please let me know. But then please make sure that they are not Japanese tourists.
15 December 2000 (18 Kislev 5761)
On the occasion of the birthday (according to the Gregorian calendar) of L. L. Zamenhof, the "initiator" of Esperanto, I would like to examine some deceptive slogan repeated naively and uncritically even by some bona fide Esperantists. It is rather reminiscent of the way new religions recruit new members by promising immediate profits which are not so easy to come by in reality.
The slogan that Esperanto is easy to learn must be taken with a grain of salt. When one says that a certain language is easy, this generally means that its morphology, especially inflection, is easy to learn. It is true that Esperanto is easy in this respect, but the difficulty of remembering inflection concerns only the initial stage of learning, which varies from language to language; in the case of Esperanto it is much shorter than that required for ethnic languages. Once one has passed this initial stage and does not have to worry about the correct forms, every language is, in my opinion, more or less equally difficult. It takes a lot of time and patience to reach the advanced stage of being able to express one's thoughts and feelings fluently in a new language. Esperanto is no exception. So the slogan is liable to disappoint many new "conscripts".
As in every language only a handful of learners can shift from the initial stage of learning paradigms by heart to the advanced stage, and for this shift a lot of practice in reading, writing, listening and speaking is required. I do not think it sincere to stress the easiness of Esperanto too much. There is no doubt that it is intrinsically easier than ethnic languages and actually this is exactly the way it is planned, but in reality the opportunity to practice it is extremely limited by its very nature as no one's mother tongue and hence the lack of any geographically continuous speech community which uses it. Unless you make a conscious effort of participating in conferences and less formal meetings of Esperantists, you generally have no other occasion to use Esperanto orally. The quantity and quality of pedagogic material for Esperanto and literary and scientific material written in it are rather miserable, compared to what is available for and in other languages used for international communication such as English. This must also be conveyed to potential Esperantists before they actually take the trouble of learning the language.
As far as I am concerned, I find the conversation with a typical Esperantist rather boring, especially in Japan, compared to the intellectual and spiritual pleasure I have in shmoozing with Jews with traditional Jewish background, whether in English, Hebrew or Yiddish. I may be too inactive in the Esperanto movement, but I remember no conference or meeting of Esperantists after which I felt no intellectual and spiritual emptiness. If the typical context of communication in Esperanto is where two Esperantists having two different mother tongues meet for the first time and repeat the same shallow questions and answers for the 100th time, I am not so enthusiastic about such communication. Even among Esperantists, those whose language is rich both in form and in content are few and far between, probably far below the proportion observed in other languages according to my own experiences.
What is funny about the Esperanto movement in Japan is that in conferences and meetings I hear Esperantists speaking with each other mostly in Japanese. And what is even funnier is that the monthly bulletin of Japana Esperanto-Instituto, the central organization of Esperantists in Japan, is written mostly in Japanese. This is one of the main reasons that had kept me from joining it until January 1999 - 13 years after I started learning Esperanto - but today I decided to leave it after two years of membership as I cannot find any reason that can justify the continued payment of a rather expensive membership fee for receiving a rather content-poor bulletin written mostly in Japanese once a month. Of course, this does not mean that I have lost my interest - mostly theoretical from the very beginning - in Esperanto, and actually I continue to be a member of Universala Esperanto-Asocio, the central organization of Esperantists in the world, since I jointed it right after I started learning Esperanto in January 1986.
22 December 2000 (25 Kislev 5761)
If I am to single out one month when I really wish I could escape from Japan, it is without doubt December. It is the month when the shallow and greedy commercialism assumes almost unbearable dimensions, reaching its top - or to be more precise, its bottom - on the 25th of the month. Actually there are not many countries in the West to escape to, probably except for Israel. But what seems to distinguish Japan from the rest of the countries where this day is commercialized is that in Japan the believers of the religion associated with it constitute only about one percent of the whole population of the country.
I have nothing against any particular religion and its festivals as long as its followers find spiritual meanings in them and celebrate them among themselves with a decent degree of inevitable commercialization. But this festival in question as "celebrated" in Japan by non-believers of this religion is more conspicuous in its extent of shallow and greedy commercialism and more symbolic of the spiritual void of the society than any other festival or holiday. No attempt is made in public or in private to delve into the deeper spiritual meaning of any festival or holiday in Japan.
On the one hand, stores never fail to take advantage of any chance to make more money by inventing an illusionary market cunningly. I am simply aghast at their greediness. On the other hand, most consumers are taken in by commercialism with the illusion that spending money can make them happy. Many of them even seem to believe blindly that this is the way it should be from time immemorial as they are not trained to have healthy intellectual skepticism not only through the school years but also later in life in Japan.
In recent years even hotels have made inroads into this lucrative market with a plausible modern myth that lovers have to spend the eve of this festival together in hotels, and what is absurd is that on this evening quite a few hotels seem to be packed to the full with young couples who believe that this is the surest sign of their love to their partners. You do not have to be a prophet to foresee the future of the country which will be populated by the children of such couples. To use the commercialization of this festival as a social gauge, I am afraid that the gap between the materialistic affluence and the spiritual poverty seems to be widening more and more in Japan.
It would be rather naive if you claimed that I have only to neglect all this if I do not like it. Wherever I go, I see and hear all the visual and auditory manifestations of the shallow and greedy commercialism unless I seclude myself physically from the society. It is really painful to walk around the street or enter stores during this time of the year as I am strongly reminded of the spiritual emptiness of the Japanese society. And it is more painful to see that people are too preoccupied with their illusion to notice this void.
29 December 2000 (3 Tevet 5761)
Like every year I am now visiting my parents living in Akita in the north of Japan, where I spent the first 18 years of my life, from the end of December through the beginning of January. I can visit them only once a year precisely at this time of the year because I live too far from them physically and this happens to be the only time when I have enough free time. This has nothing to do with the celebration of the "New Year" according to the Gregorian calendar, to which I lost any emotional attachment many years ago.
Every visit here gives me material for thought about fundamental questions about life in general as I am strongly influenced emotionally by the sight of my aging parents and the severe physical environment of the winter here.
I cannot help feeling sorry for my parents about my being unable to think and behave in a manner typical of people in this country. Socioculturally, I have drifted too far away in thought and behavior from the majority of the people in Japan even including my parents in spite of the fact that I happened to be born in Japan. Big cities like Kobe, where I live now, and small towns like the one where my parents live pose different types of sociocultural difficulties for me, but the core of the difficulties is the same all over Japan and I will remain an alien in the country where I was born. Professionally, what I major in seems to have no demand in Japan, even in big cities, so much the less in small towns. But I am not ready to barter my profession with something else as it has even become an integral part of my identity.
Therefore I do not always succeed, especially during my visit here, in silencing the cry from the innermost part of my soul that I may be wasting my time in the society whose fundamental values are foreign to me and whose demands have nothing to do with me. On the other hand, however, I do not know whether I should think exclusively about my own life and have the courage to decide finally to relocate where my soul seems to belong.