Start with the spirit of the Sun God festival. Add a high school homecoming queen, elected beauty-pageant style. Subtract Sun God’s large-scale public drunkenness. Add the public drunkenness of a guy in a Pikachu costume. Throw in some pro-wrestling re-enactments, poorly imitated Mexican food and a bunch of nearly naked men banging on a 10-foot drum, and you’ve got the Shirokane Festival at Meiji Gakuin University.
We get a week off school for this crazy thing. If only UCSD got the same privileges for Sun God. Too bad we can’t get our festival to coincide with spring break; that would really bring in the crowds. San Diego could rival South Florida as a college spring break destination, pump up the local economy and bring many beautiful people to UCSD.
Just as UCSD sometimes books festival bands who no one’s heard of, who no one likes, or who stopped being cool in 1996, the Shirokane festival booked some supposedly famous comedian whom everyone despised. Just like at UCSD, a huge crowd gathered to watch this hated man. As one student explained, “He is a very famous comedian, all over Japan. He is on TV all the time. But he is not funny.” The comedian was Carrot Top.
I visited the festival on Nov. 3, Japan-time — Election Day back in the United States. I relied on e-mail updates from friends in America and the crappy Web browser on my mobile phone to keep track of the polls. No one around seemed even vaguely interested in the election, and neither did many of my Japanese friends I spoke with afterward. Only a couple people knew that the United States was holding an election on Nov. 2. Those who cared about the outcome universally supported Kerry, but only because he was the only non-Bush candidate that they had heard was running. Of the students who knew about the election, none were more than mildly concerned about the result. The anecdotal political apathy of Japanese youth that I noticed when I first arrived, which is confirmed independently through their dismal voting habits and political partici pation, was confirmed again by their indifference toward this election.
The lack of outlets for political expression might contribute to this apathy. There are no campus political clubs and there is no student government at this school. The only thing they vote for is the “Stairway to Queen” beauty pageant at the Shirokane Festival, and they vote on that based on who can cook hamburgers the fastest — I am not making this up. The only student newspaper is a one-page, photocopied sheet of paper called “MISH Weekly,” produced entirely by one student from UC Santa Cruz. That paper is censored, and has to pass muster in the eyes of the International Center’s administrator before access to the photocopy machine is granted. A story about professors on sick leave was almost cut for being “too negative.”
There is a national obsession with “saving face” that has been long documented in history books and journals about Japanese society. For example, I was playing volleyball with eight Japanese friends yesterday, and we had to pick teams. They are completely unfamiliar with the concept of “First captain! Second captain!” Picking teams makes me nostalgic for my elementary school back in San Jose, but the bottom line is that some poor soul will always be picked last. We picked teams here by thrusting out our hands on the count of three either in the form of a fist or open palm; open palms on one team, fists on the other. The random selection avoids the awkwardness of choosing individual players, but also makes unevenly matched teams a possibility. One team could wallop the other, as happened in our case, when most of the good players were randomly grouped together. I guess it’s better to face group humiliation than individual shame.
Saving face also applies to interactions with one’s superiors in Japan, be they the elderly, senior club members, or professors. The students allow professors to get away with extraordinary bias, and sometimes outright academic dishonesty, because they do not want to make them lose face.
I sat in on an “English language” class where the admittedly socialist professor — a man from Pennsylvania — had the class listen to a CD of speeches delivered by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky at socialist rallies. The students fill in blanks in a transcript to help them with their “vocabulary.” I’m sure “military-industrial complex” and “capitalist machinations of oppression” will come in handy during conversational English. Every student hates the class and realizes that they are listening to propaganda, but only one has bothered to complain: a Japanese girl who attended British school in Singapore for eight years. When she talked to the dean last semester, the professor was forced to change the format of his class. This semester, he’s back at it again.
Students have no real outlet to complain. If classes like that were taught in California, the media outlets would swoop down on them like those chickens in Zelda swoop down on Link if he beats them with his sword. Maybe if the student newspaper — oh wait, there’s no student newspaper. Or the student-run television — oops, no SRTV. There’s always the radio — no, none of that either. Hopefully this class will inspire these students to get active. They should be thankful that they have a professor so bad that he leaves in the middle of class to drink in the hallway after pressing play on the CD player. Even if they end up accepting the propaganda, at least they’ll have an opinion. People don’t protest unless there’s something to protest against — and the students in Japan have plenty to protest.
