richord pryor live on the sunset strip
while this article is almost six years old, it's still interesting. i'm reading invisible man again. i saw it on a friend's bookshelf and so it made its way back into my consciousness. i hadn't thought about it again until last week. i was driving around oxford thinking about things. i spend a lot of time thinking about my time in japan, but in a much different way than when i first returned to americatown. at first it was all nostalgia and desire, but not too long ago my thoughts shifted to one of experience and insight.
i was thinking about what it was that i liked so much about being in japan. there are many different answers to this questions including friends, culture, language, environment, etc., but those are all external things that affected me. i was looking for more of an inward answer. comparatively, life here is very different for me, and after some hard thought i had a bit of a personal revelation. i'm not sure what it says about me. it may be bad, it may be good. but it's true. to me that is the only important thing.
i don't know why, but coming back, i felt very exposed in some way. i still do, actually. i can't explain it too well but it has something to do with community and race. that may sound obvious, but what i'm getting at isn't so perceptible. i feel some sort of unspoken expectation to participate in life in general here. in japan it was always optional. sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad, but overall, i really enjoyed having that option. of course the novelty of other wore of quickly and was replaced by feelings of resentment and paranoia, but i always had the option to turn off the outside world. no one bothered me and i bothered no one. it was great. at will, i could essentially become an invisible man.
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two things
1) i feel like im just scratching the surface on this subject. i hope to get into it more deeply, time permiting. but thats not right now. richard is on fire and my sparks can is almost empty. the subject deserves my full attention and sparks isn't going to help.
2) i've put off posting about the job situation on purpose. im waiting for limbo to end before i write anything down. i find re-reading less depressing that way.
posted by sean @ 5:35 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I have no doubt that the feeling you've described was intensified by the fact that you were living in the middle of a fairly alien culture that distinguished itself from you both in terms of cultural artifacts and, more basically, by how you look. But I wonder if a similar effect isn't achieved in any urban setting. Did you find this ability to descend into invisibility present in Columbus? Perhaps not--that's a bit of a different situation with OSU providing you with a smaller community within the city. I've found, however, that I also have the ability to temporarily disappear simply by virtue of living in a big city that doesn't really know me. Like I said, I think the effect was probably intensified in that you were living 1) in one of the biggest cities in the world, and 2) in Japan, but I also think this effect can be described as a function of city life vs....well, Oxford life. I find it interesting since I think it was in a relatively recent post that you were talking about deciding that you're a city boy, now.
on the surface i completely agree. there is something to be said for anonymity in an urban setting. having 12 million people around absolutely will make anyone feel like they can be invisible.
in no way am i trying to depreciate your comments, but it is impossible to ignore two things here: 1) part of the culture around tokyo - specifically the tokyo area - involves people ignoring everyone around them. osaka isn't like that. kobe isn't. nagoya isn't. etc etc. so part of what i felt was absolutely due to being near that specfic city. 2) its hard to feel invisible in a small town, but i am talking about how i felt at all times. this especially includes the place where i spent 90% of my time: in niiza. not tokyo.
its somewhat hard to explain without really going into a lot of detail and providing concrete examples.
i'm not sure if it's a subject i can necessarily tackle. but i might try to anyway.
I hear that. My sister was in town last weekend and she asked me if it was tough to be around so many panhandlers all the time (Central Sq., the neighborhood Joe and I live in, seems to have an unusual amount of them for Cambridge). I remarked that, as much as I thought my good old Midwest self would never be tainted, the city-tendency to just ignore people had definitely set in on me. I don't like that it has, but I think it's a defense mechanism that people HAVE to develop in order to live in the tremendously unnatural and oftentimes wildly fucked up setting of a city. That's probably augmented by 1) Tokyo being one of the largest cities in the world and Boston being...well, Boston; and 2) something about the Japanese culture that I don't understand.
It sounds like you weren't really in a position to "Turn off" the anonymity, though. Was it bothersome ever? The grass is always greener, and everything, so I can see how in the glass house that is Oxford you're yearning for that anonymity, but did it ever get to you?
there were quite a few places in the city i lived in where i couldn't go down the street without being stopped by someone who knew me. the area i lived in was full of my students. any area within 100 yards of one of the seven junior high schools. the local yoshinoya beef bowl joint. the local grocery store. the even localer soba shop by my house. city hall. etc.
it was very much like oxford on the surface. the difference is that despite these people knowing me and stopping me on the street to chat, no matter what situation i would be in in that scenario, i had the ability to seem invisible, or uninvolved. not a part of the plan.
i could have a ten minute conversation with a fellow teacher about work, but then the moment my plans for the weekend would come up, i would become this mysterious stranger with inevitably wild plans and practices. one of the things most people found surprising about me was that their lives weren't that different than mine. not like a wild foreigner.
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