WARNING : Like my man Shogo says. the following may forever alter how you see the people of Japan.
It did for me.
Where’s that comforter? I feel cold.
He and I. understandably, have very different definitions of “collectivist”.
Mine is the warm, sunshiny Western version, I suppose. To me, collectivism means everyone looks out for everyone. We are all crazy hopped up monkeys clinging to a rock that is hurtling through space. None of us know what we’re doing. We are all imperfect, mortal, and fragile, and our only hope for making it through this whacked out drug trip of a life is if we love and support one another as much as we possibly can.
Knowing deep in our souls that we are stronger together than we could ever be alone.
Well okay. That’s just humanism. Feels good to write it out like that, but not one hundred percent relevant to my point.
How unlike me.
My point is that to me, collectivism is about unity and wholeness and humanity, and is therefore incompatible with the coldness described by Shogo.
I guess that’s how a left leaning individualist from the West would see it, though. After all, I am far more familiar with the excesses of individualism and its form of coldheartedness. which looks a lot more like Ebenezer Scrooge than a monolithic oppressive All that you must serve.
This is depressing me. I need some humanist music, stat!
That will do.
This fresh vision of the Japanese people as coldhearted people who would let someone die on the street rather than get involved is, ironically, very individualist to me.
I imagine that our friend Shogo and I see the world through very different lenses, though. Hence our opposite (but not opposing) points of view.
It knocks some of the fairy dust out of my somewhat rose colored picture of the Japanese as a people of elegant order and civilized ways.
I think high population density plays a role. The more tightly packed we are, the harder we have to fight just to maintain our individual integrity amidst all that bio-pressure.
Past a certain point, that becomes pathological. It’s no coincidence that most civilization’s period of human sacrifice comes right after the population explosion that comes with the invention of walled cities.
Perhaps there is balancing act between seeing your neighbor as a friend and a part of your community, and seeing them as a rival and a threat to your own ambitions.
Us products of well established individualist societies inherently understand that keeping things on the friendly side of that equation requires giving each other space in every sense of that word.
So we have a whole dictionary of ways in which we do this, from living in “apartments” to knowing not to take groceries from someone else’s cart to being able to sit in a subway car full of people, facing all different directions, and somehow still not make eye contact with anyone.
More after the break.
Not too happy
Not happy with how the above turned out. It feels muddy and vague. For whatever reason, I was having trouble concentrating when I was writing it, and it shows.
Perhaps I should have given my thoughts on Shogo’s video more time to percolate so I could develop clearer points to make.
I only watched the video yesterday, after all.
But oh well. Part of art as a process is making art you don’t love but can learn from as you ponder what went wrong.
That’s a hard thing for budding artists to take. They subconsciously expect their own work to please them as much as their favorite artist’s work does, and when it doesn’t even come vaguely close, they get discouraged.
But as everyone knows, you shouldn’t compare your beginning first draft work with the final product of the top professionals in the world.
I mean, duh.
Moving on. Today’s been rather hazy, as appears to be the new normal. Seems like along with this chronic sleepiness comes a dreamlike blurring of consciousness and hence a similar blurring of memory.
Did the wound care thing in the morning. It was uneventful.
I liked my nurse. She had a pleasant Eastern European accent and was both friendly and briskly efficient, which is a heck of a combo as far as I am concerned.
If I had to choose, I would choose a briskly efficient nurse over a friendly but kind of sloppy nurse every time.
In medicine, competence is more important than user friendliness.
Plus I managed to spit out the question I had been formulating for a couple of weeks : last November, one of the nurses said I was almost ready to stop coming, but now I have a huge freaking nightmare wound – like a bunion with a crater in it – so what the heck happened to me?
The answer is obvious in retrospect : I failed to take care of myself so it got worse.
Plus, the thing honestly needs the attention of a podiatrist., and patient readers know they leave us poor people to pay out of pocket for those, so…. yeah, no.
But this thing is getting pretty gnarly. So I might have to save up for one..
I’m sorry, I though this was Canada. For-profit private health care is best left to uncivilized and barbaric lands like the USA.
So whatever. It gets better, it gets worse, my foot rots right off my leg, who knows.
What else…. well, as usual, my life doesn’t have many events per se. Mostly it just rolls along on automatic, the days and weeks and months and years blurring together into a uniform undifferentiated haze of meaningless and mangled ticks of the clock.
All this sound and fury and power and insight and intelligence and creativity and straight up magic powers, signifying nothing.
But hey, at least I was super cute for friendly strangers.
That must count for something, right?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.