Hot Tubs > Onsens

I love Japan, but I don’t know if I like Japan. Of course, I love skiing powder and eating ramen and sushi and mountains and forests and amazing space-age toilets and rivers and ancient buddhist temples and cheap ski areas and safety and order and good cheap whiskey and so there’s all that, we’ll just get that out of the way. But Japan also makes me feel weird and uncomfortable.

After a winter there, I understand less about the place than I did when I arrived. Obviously it’s a unique and interesting place. It is both very ancient and very modern. It is orderly but opaque. It’s just a profoundly different take on the hows and whys of being the world. In no meaningful way does it look to America or western culture for guidance. While they are duty-bound to be helpful and hospitable to me in their place of work, outside of that, in my experience, people seem insular as hell, and let’s just say they don’t seem to hold outsiders or people of other races in much esteem. Like, it seems self-evident to them that they’re just better than other people. It is a supremely orderly place, and that order begets serenity and quiet and peace. Everything has been thought through, and set forth, and everybody follows the rules, so everything works pretty much perfectly all the time. It is a zen rock garden at landscape scale.

But then I imagined Japan personified. And I imagined that that person would be calm, serene, and together – but being around them wouldn’t necessarily be. They’d think they came off as inspirationally disciplined and centered, but really they’d be fucking exhausting. They’d have a system for everything, and it’d be sensible and well thought out, but if you don’t know it or you mess it up or you just do it a different way, they’d get all bent out of shape. You’d be like, OK, man, that’s a good way to do it, but how about you get the stick out of your ass and quit being so goddamn particular.

And then I was like…shit I’M THAT PERSON. I choose a way of doing things and then become incapable of deviation therefrom. I scoff dismissively at people who take a different approach, or – god forbid – don’t even dedicate an inordinate amount of time to pre-determining the proper approach and then executing it, they just, like, do stuff.

And THEN I was like, is Japan the worst place in the world for me to be? Does the culture incubate and normalize – even celebrate – the most douchey and annoying aspects of my character? OR…is the best place in the world for to me? When I’m in Japan, I’m a gun-slinging,  give-no-shits renegade who won’t be oppressed by your rules, man. Less relatively, does it offer a me a path to self-improvement by keeping me mindful of the fact that I can be insufferably fussy?

And THEN I was like, ugh, whatever. I’m going skiing. Dang it, who moved my pack?!