Spirit

In Japan, non-conformity is a sin.

It's your duty to be the best you can be, at any given time. To follow the rules to the letter. To shoot for the stars, to go above and beyond.

Failure to meet these standards gets you the glare of disapproval, the crack of the metaphorical whip, the ostraciziation of those in authority.

It's not just Japan. I noticed this in America, too, although it manifested differently. There is a large amount of pressure to do well and make a name for yourself, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, to follow the Baby Boomer's legacy of pursuing the American Dream.

A husband/wife, a house, a dog, kids, and a place to grill food and invite guests over. I guess you're "supposed" to have these things, although it's a fading narrative these days.

The Japanese Dream is startlingly similar, although the key difference is that there's less room for those within it to become disillusioned with it, question it, or come to terms with not being able to reach it. In America, the fading dream has been a narrative slowly gaining steam, leaving a little leeway for people to accept finding alternative paths in life. In Japan, those alternative paths retain a certain stigma.

Of course, I'm generalizing. Of course, I'm being slightly reductive. But this is my personal impression of the larger picture of Japanese society.

It makes me mad.

Of course, it's good to shoot for the stars. But not everyone is capable of reaching every star in the sky. Sometimes people need to take another route to get there. Sometimes people have their own special stars that nobody else can get to, and that nobody else even notices are there.

I will use myself as a personal example. I am horrendous at math of any sort. I have never been able to work with numbers well. As such, I was never good at math or science class. Any job in programming, medicine, or accounting is likely closed off to me forever because of this.

Does this make me a lesser person than those who can do these things?

No, it doesn't.

At the risk of sounding like I'm patting myself on the back, I'm pretty good with words, I have a decent sense of humor (I think), and I'm good at public speaking. Can I ever be a rocket scientist with those skills? No, but I can be other things that the world needs. I couldn't write this blog if I didn't have these skills.

Not that the world needs my blog, but I digress.

Spending time in Japan, where saving face and pretending like you are good at everything is extremely common, has only made me realize how important it is to recognize people's individual strengths and talents, and not to view what they can't do as a form of personal weakness or failure.

Working as a teacher, it's your job to nurture each student's strengths and help them find their path in life. In a society so focused on test scores, however, this is a bit more difficult to do.

I work at an art school once a week, which I love dearly. This school is a bit of a black sheep, because A) it's a liberal arts school in Japan, B) the number of students is staggeringly low, and C) it exists specifically to cater to student's individual talents, with curriculums in architecture, metalworking, painting, etc.

I absolutely love that this school exists, and each student there seems very content with themselves, very happy with their choice to go there. But it, unfortunately, has a bit of a stigma to it. When I tell others I teach at this school, I hear things like "I hear the kids there are a bit odd," or "I wonder about an art school."

It really is a shame.

That notion of different social castes, people who fit in and people who don't, never really goes away, in any society. This is from The Breakfast Club, by the way, so if the reference is lost on you, I suggest you go watch this movie ASAP.

I know all about pursuing the social zeitgeist. It doesn't end with high school or college. I've even experienced it here on JET. I've spoken at length about how other JETs seem superhuman to me, constantly travelling, speaking multiple languages, picking up Japanese much faster than me, easily finding niches in the community, possessing interesting hobbies like skiing or hiking, having colorful backgrounds from all sorts of fields (including crazy ones like neuroscience).

My first impression of the JET community I got while at a block meeting in another city, watching my senpai JETs give enthusiastic and in-depth presentations with gusto and charisma, was that these are the kinds of people who will go on to do TED talks. I was just a guy by comparison. Did I even belong here?

Other JETs, as seen through John-o-vision in the year 2017

For a long time on JET, especially in my relatively close ALT community, I felt like I was a man living among giants.

At some point, I realized that that sort of thinking was making me miserable. I'm never going to be like them, because I'm not them. I have my own aspirations and hobbies and talents. The comparisons I was drawing between myself that nebulous blob of "the others" was an imaginary line I had created, a perception that those same others likely didn't even share.

You heard it a lot, at least growing up when I did in the U.S., that everyone is unique. You hear a lot from people my age that that narrative doesn't hold up in the real world, that we're not as unique as we were told we were, that our individuality doesn't matter as much as we were led to believe.

Living in Japan, the land of conformity and social zeitgeists, has only reinvigorated the notion of personal strengths for me. Watching the faces on my students light up as I tell them what they did right instead of reprimanding them for failing to meet expectations is one of the best feelings in the world.

I had a teacher in high school once comment on how the absence of one student entirely changed the atmosphere of the classroom. She was right - that one kid DID affect the atmosphere in a very strong way. That's the indescribable human spirit, I think, the underlying soul that can't be quantified. And that's what we can give to the world, that unquantifiable gift and power that only we have.

It's good to fit in and contribute to society. But it's equally as important to recognize that the way each person contributes to it is their own. Whether it's understanding rocket science or simply making other people laugh, each person's spirit is valuable in its own way, I think.