As American as Baseball and Apple Pie...

Last night, we went to a baseball game. As we were leaving the stadium, I found myself musing: that was one of the most interesting cultural experiences we’ve had in Japan. 

Did everyone hear me on that one? We went to a baseball game—a completely and utterly American sport—and it was one of the most interesting cultural experiences we’ve had here. Yes, they play baseball in other countries. And I understand that cultural phenomena are fluid. They travel. They transform. They are re-appropriated by whatever society happens to pick them up, thereby making the “But what was it originally?” question somewhat of a moot point. 

But what I’m getting at is that because I am an American, baseball feels very familiar. Because I’ve already sat at many a stadium and sung about countless peanuts and cracker jacks, I would not expect a Japanese baseball game to be one of our more interesting cultural experiences. I would have thought that award would go to sumo wrestling. Or puppet theater. Or public baths. But I walked away from that baseball game feeling both jarred and enlivened by the fact that I had just had a true cultural experience. What is that?

We went to that game with confident familiarity in hand, asking a whole set of informed questions. What will they have if not cotton candy? What will we do at the 7th inning stretch? Will there be an organ to tell us when to cheer? I think it is precisely this familiarity that gets at the root of why study abroad is so transformative. You don’t start from scratch when you go overseas. (Granted, it feels as if you do.) You keep your ideas. You keep your categories. You keep your expectations, as much as you may try to lose them at the door. The process, the struggle of study abroad is figuring out how to get all of the newness you encounter to work with the categories of understanding you already have within you. I’m at the grocery store. It looks very similar to a store I visit at home. But it’s not. Why? What’s different? And how different? And because I’m visiting this new store, am I now different, too?

Study abroad is not an abandonment of all that is familiar. On the contrary, study abroad requires a sense of the familiar because it is precisely the search for the familiar that guides the learning. 

Our going to a baseball game was an experience ripe with expectations. In fact, this entire Japan experience has been ripe with expectations. We did a lot of homework before we got on the plane. We researched, we read, we thought about how things would be, we used whatever information we had to try to paint ourselves a picture. If we care to push the boundary further, in this day and age, I would venture that it’s impossible to go anywhere in this world without carrying some sort of expectation with you, even if you don’t want to. Someone, at some point, is going to show you a photograph of your destination. You’ll hear about it on the news. You’ll read a travel guide. You’ll visit a study abroad provider website. The point is that we are not pioneers. We are not charting new waters, even though the waters that we navigate feel unfamiliar and dangerous. Everything we do has been done before. This is both the comfort and the banality of living in the Digital Age. 

And so we went to a baseball game. Nothing felt new when we set foot in the stadium. Yet everything was new when we set foot in the stadium. Why? Because our image of what the experience might be was already crystal clear. Contrast was sharpened. And similarity camouflaged.

As we approached the stadium, we noticed a beer table right next to the turnstiles. This was not a place to buy beer. Just as in the US, you can buy beer after you are inside the stadium. Sellers walk up and down the aisles and you can purchase it from them. (Of course, unlike in the US, the sellers wear the beer in an insulated pack on their backs, and they pour the pour the beer for you from a hose and tap that extend to their front.) Instead, the table was for people who had brought beer from home and happened to have started drinking it already. The attendants at the table take their beer from them. And then they pour it in a cup, and give it back. No cans allowed, but please, bring all the beer you want from home! Nope, we’re not in Kansas anymore…

Just about everyone in the stadium has a set of mini plastic baseball bats that they bang together in order to cheer. But it’s not just a random banging. Instead, there is a distinct chant and rhythm for every single player. (Jeremy actually looked the chants up on line beforehand, and printed out cheat sheets for us. You can take the educator out of the classroom….) A player comes up to bat, and the entire stadium starts singing, chanting and tapping in unison. It’s incredible. What was even more incredible is that I managed to get the rhythms down. I have had enough music education in my life to make this doable. I counted 16th notes, I noted syncopation, and I kept up! After four months of living in a complete linguistic maze, I kept up. Baseball player rhythms. This is a language I can speak.

I can speak the language of happy-baseball-fan, too. On a good play, you tap your baseball bats against those of the fans around you. You high five everyone you see. You enthusiastically tap out a rhythm. I know that there is always bonding among fans at a sports match. That’s universal. Was the fan bonding that I experienced last night actually more intense? Or did it just feel more intense because I’ve grown accustomed to being the oddball foreigner here, always one step out of the loop? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. But it was cozy. So comfy cozy. At one point, I turned to Jeremy and said, “I have never felt more at home in Japan than right now.” 

The seventh inning stretch was less of a stretch and more of an experiment in group performance art. Balloons! When you first come to the game, you buy a pack of large balloons. As the top of the 7th winds down, the crowd starts to get their balloons out. You hear balloons inflating all around you. Every once in a while, one pops, or a random balloon floats over right field. Middle of the 7th, everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) stands up and lets their balloons go at exactly the same time. There’s a big squeak, and then you see a flood of balloons over the stadium. In true Japanese form, 30 seconds later, a very efficient cleaning crew emerges to pick up all of the spent balloons on the field.

A second balloon performance happened at the end of the game, probably because our team won. We, the oddball foreigners, hadn’t purchased enough balloons so were going to content ourselves with watching, much to the kids’ dismay. Not to fear! The man behind us had extras and promptly offered balloons to Eli and Mikki. And when Mikki’s popped by accident, he gave another. “Arigatoo,” she said. (The “thank you’s in Japanese are coming more frequently these days.)

At the end of the night, more familiarity: a large, drunken, mass of humanity heads to the train station at the same time. It reminded me of walking in New York City on July 4th, 1983, the 200th anniversary of our constitution. Huge fireworks display. Wall-to-wall people. Me hanging onto the back of my dad’s shirt so that I wouldn’t lose him in the crowd. A memory of yet another quintessentially American experience. And this memory, part of the extensive package of familiarity and expectations that I brought with me to Japan. And part of what made last night’s game one of the most interesting, and revealing, cultural experiences we’ve had here.

Finding My Own Way

There’s nothing like coming to Japan with a husband who is a Japan scholar. Jeremy studies Japan professionally. It’s his job. This country is what he does. And regardless of how long I’ve known him, during our time here I have found myself repeatedly blown away by his insane amounts of knowledge about this place. It’s not just a matter of language skills. Yes, he can read the public library guidelines to ensure that our books are returned on time, and he can understand a bus schedule at a glance. But it’s his depth of knowledge beyond the language that amazes me. The legend behind the statue that we’re seeing in front of the shrine. The reason a food has a fancy nickname. How the painting on a billboard actually includes a reference to a poem that most passers-by will miss. How a certain part of the city has changed in the past quarter century. It’s not just that he’s well read. He’s well experienced. He’s been a student in Osaka. A teacher in Osaka. A guide in Osaka. And a 20-year old in Osaka. (Yes, that last one is its own category.) 

The kids and I benefit from Jeremy’s knowledge. Because of him, we get to skip over some of the stumbling that usually comes with living in a new place—any new place, not just a foreign place. We don’t show up to a museum only to learn that it’s closed every other Wednesday because Jeremy read that on the website in advance. We don’t offend everyone by eating while walking down a busy street because Jeremy already told us that walking while eating is typically considered rude. We don’t receive dirty looks from a bunch of naked elderly women because we dove into the hot springs without bathing first. Jeremy saved us from that faux pas, too.

Having stumbled through many a situation in China, there’s a part of me that absolutely adores this short cut. (And for the record, I still stumble in China. As appealing as the tidy categories of Japan as Jeremy’s and China as Jocelyn’s are, they are simply not valid. I never even came close to the breadth of knowledge in China that Jeremy has earned in Japan, and I never will.) You mean I can try out my sentence on a real, live Japanese teacher first before heading to the ticket stand? You mean I don’t have to cringe in embarrassment two days later when I realize that I should have taken my shoes off but didn’t? You made sure I would do it right the first time?! Sign me up.

I raise all of this because, and I’m sure you saw this point coming, this kind of stumbling through a culture is part of the learning. As wonderful and comforting as it is to have Jeremy there as our cultural gaffe safety net, it robs us of the experience of figuring things out on our own, and learning things the hard way. The kids and I need to be able to understand by observing, order food by pointing, and figure things out by trial and error. Eli and Mikki, too, have picked up on this dynamic. For her birthday, Mikki has requested a family experience: “I just want to get on a train and go somewhere that no one knows about…someplace Daddy has never been.”

Please understand that it’s not that Jeremy tries to serve as family teacher all the time. It’s his mere presence that does it. I have found that I am much more willing to speak Japanese my way—a loose series of nouns and non-conjugated verbs—when Jeremy’s not around to hear it.  And from his perspective, Jeremy admits that he feels a constant pressure to guide his family through this experience. He loves having us here. But in the past, he’s only ever done Japan on his own. He amassed his extensive knowledge through living here independently. Autonomously. Anonymously. And I think we rob him of that.

All of this musing stems from the kids and my exploring of Kobe on our own last week. So let the reflection serve as introduction to this story:

The four of us vacationed on Awaji Island last week. On the last day, Jeremy needed to get back to work, but the kids and I were in no rush. Prompted by the notion that we needed to explore more of Japan on our own, sans tour guide, we decided to stop off in Kobe on the way home. Without Jeremy. We were equipped with Japanese and English maps, and a vague notion that Kobe had a cool harbor and a Chinatown that might be worth checking out. I told the kids that we would be navigating everything together, as a team. They were delighted.

When we first got to Kobe station, my heart sank. Gawd, all big stations in Japan look exactly the same! They are overwhelming. And everyone else always knows exactly where they are going. I started desperately looking around for maps and signs, only to be interrupted by Mikki, who declared, “I’m hungry.” Rule #1: Never try to navigate a new area with a hungry child. In the middle of the station, there was a food stand with a woman selling traditional sweet snacks. We bought some, but get this: Eli ordered his on his own in Japanese. This was the first time he’s ever done that. Maybe he, too, is nervous to try out his Japanese in front of Jeremy? We then proceeded to eat our snacks while walking around the station. Yes, we ate and walked at the same time. Declaration made: Today, we are doing things Mommy-style.

With tummy-rumblings gone, we stared at maps for a little while. It was Eli (who, gratefully, has inherited his father’s sense of direction, not his mother’s) who noticed that we needed to get to a different station in order to transfer to the subway, and it was the subway that would take us to Kobe’s Chinatown, our first destination. Once we knew where we needed to go, the signs just sort of fell into place. This is where Japan is unbeatable—relevant, helpful information where you need it to be. So we started walking, each of us finding signs one-by-one. Surprisingly, what worked in our favor was the concentrated attention to detail that usually causes Mikki to zone out to what a parent is saying while she is head down focusing on her bead craft. We told her we were looking for purple arrows, and all she found for the next 15 minutes were purple arrows. Eagle eye. Destination found.

We landed at a restaurant in Chinatown. The server was Japanese, but spoke some Chinese and understood some English. Rule #2: Always use all languages at your disposal in order to get your point across. The server and I soon developed a sort of trilingual form of communication. 

a. Chinese food names are expressed in Chinese. No translating these.

b. The order itself happens in Japanese, the most polite of the three languages.

c. Kids’ questions are in English, with Chinese translation from me when necessary. 

d. The server’s responses are in slow Japanese, with translation from me when necessary.

Food ordered. Needs met. Done.

After Chinatown, we hopped back on the subway to the main train station, and from there, walked to Harborland. Harborland is a large, fancy shopping area right on the waterfront. It’s good for window-shopping, strolling and snacking (though not at the same time, of course). But we did no shopping, and once we got to the harbor, we walked around for all of five minutes before snapping a quick selfie and then turning back. For us, this was not about the destination. It was about the getting there. The kids led the way…the entire way. They looked for signs. They studied maps. They tried paths, and when those paths led to nowhere, they turned around and tried others. They did all of the navigating, and on different occasions, with absolutely no prompting from me, each looked at me and said, “This is fun!” 

We got home later that night, with “navigation day souvenirs” in hand, plenty of stories ready for Jeremy’s curious ear, and for my part, a vow to do this more. Be brave. Make mistakes. Break some rules. Embarrass yourself. And then go home and laugh about it with your Japan scholar husband.