One Day, I Woke Up in Japan

Change is a ninja dressed in a grey pinstripe suit. It has a way of just going about its business as stealthily as carbon dioxide feeding a forest or sunshine tanning skin.

One day, I woke up in Japan. It took a minute, though. For the first couple of years here, I was blind, deaf, and dumb.

I could read neither signs nor the atmosphere. I couldn't understand what people were telling me or even what I was telling myself, and I saw what I wanted to see, what others wanted me to see, or nothing at all. Life was like that snow that used to be on channel 8, between ABC and UPN, that channel that picked up random signals occasionally but displayed a steady stream of static noise for the most part.

I spoke a lot with my hands and body, facial fustian, fluent in gibberish, like a hearing-impaired DJ or an undefeated punch-drunk boxer stumbling around in a stupor. I acted and reacted on instinct, efficaciously following my nose and hands around in the dark.

And, believe it or not, I was cool with that. It was like a vacation from the bombardment of reality.

I’ve been blessed with great hands, though, dexterous and perceptive, and my olfactory glands are not easily outdone, so life in Japan became this Darwinian proving ground, an environment ripe for evolving senses and sensibilities and enhancing intuition. I lived in the Japanese archipelago, but culturally and socially, I was a rare species in the Galápagos.

Apparently, these are traits the natives found attractive, perhaps out of a lofty sense of propriety. Maybe they were impressed that I would even attempt to navigate perilous social and cultural terrain that even they, with all their native faculties intact and fully functioning, often find to be a chore at best and treacherous at worst.

It was an exciting adventure that would eventually lead to my seeing, at least partially, what I was truly made of, unbeknownst to me. Hell, I was too busy having fun with the surface shit to take note of the changes going on below the surface. I was supposed to be learning something about myself — something other than the lies I told myself about myself or what, over the years, I’d let others convince me was true about me. But, I was more like The Who’s Tommy, a pinball wizard in my own mind.

But change is a ninja dressed in a grey pinstripe suit. It has a way of just going about its business as stealthily as carbon dioxide feeding a forest or sunshine tanning skin.

They say people don’t change. Perhaps some superficial stuff does, but short of some traumatic circumstance, that deep-down core shit rarely, if ever, is disturbed. Before coming to Japan, I had bought into this theory wholeheartedly. So much so that I was blinded to what was happening to me. And even when I’d notice, from time to time, that something was amiss below the surface, I refused to acknowledge the changes underway to my core being.

It’s like that first grey hair in your whiskers. You yank it, and it's gone, and you’re back to living in that reality where you found comfort, where you’re not old enough to grey, where at least most things made sense. A week or two later, that grey strand returns. You tweezer it this time, trying to get at the root of the matter. Pretty soon, it returns, this time longer and more prominent, as if it has an agenda of its own.

So you let it go, let it grow, and naturally, people notice it and comment on it. You, or they, blame it on stress, blame it on diet, blame it on whatever makes you or them feel better about it. You laugh it off. It’s nothing, you tell yourself. I’m still me. Before long, another pops up in some random location, like in your pubic area, or springs from an eyebrow like a sunflower protruding from a lawn of manicured blades of green grass.

Nothing happens while you’re looking, though. Only when you stop looking do those changes we constantly undergo reveal themselves.

What I couldn’t fully appreciate, for its mode of stealth was so obvious as to be inconspicuous, like a lie hidden behind a sneer, was that life in Japan for non-Japanese is a constant traumatic state. To survive here requires one to fabricate normality in, at least for me, an almost entirely abnormal circumstance, like voluntarily living in an artificial environment, isolated from the greater environment by all kinds of apparatuses and life support techniques.

The upside is you’re protected from many (but not all) contaminants, the distasteful and damaging elements of that system, by a semipermeable membrane. The downside is you’re a spectacle every day of your life, constantly under surveillance by the camera-like eyes of the curious and fearful locals and often ostracized, subject to being labeled whatever the greater society, in all its wisdom and ignorance, deems appropriate to you.

And though this wasn't significantly different from the “black” experience in America, where you're essentially a non-American in America subject to some of the same exclusionary tactics used against actual non-Americans by "real" Americans, even worse at times, being a non-Japanese in Japan has this way of elucidating the trauma of that experience. There's no illusions to distract you like in the US. In Japan, it's in your face and every face you encounter daily.

It takes time, but eventually, you begin to see things more clearly than ever. Listen to what's at the heart of what others are saying and what your own heart has been telling you all along. And your voice — your all-important voice buried beneath all that static — well, your circumstances aid you in unearthing it, in unleashing the you buried within it.

And your senses, ignited by the trials and trauma of everyday life, now operate at a level they've never reached before and likely wouldn't have achieved otherwise. No longer a somnambulist on a tightrope, you're more aware, alive, and engaged than you've ever been, spurred by these enhanced faculties.

They want you to succeed and conspire to position you to do so.

So, yeah, I woke up in Japan, and I thank The Creator I did.

Baye