A version of this essay appeared in Expat: Women’s True Tales of Life Abroad
For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has stockpiled cans of tuna. She’d run down to Waldbaum’s every time the price of Bumble Bee Chunk White fell below 69 cents a can. There’d be a limit—four or six per visit—and she’d shuttle between her apartment in Astoria, Queens to the store in Forest Hills. She’d load my dad up with a leaning tower of tuna, exacting precise reimbursement from him. The paltry $2.36 or $3.49 he’d dig out of his wallet further underscored the triumph of the expedition.
My grandmother made sense of the world through supermarkets. She followed global weather patterns by the price of Chilean cantaloupe in winter and the plumpness of Jersey tomatoes in summer. When I got my first apartment outside of New York, I tried to explain my surroundings to her: the buildings, the parks, the water. I wasn’t getting through. Then, scrutinizing me, “how is the market there?”
“What?”
“The supermarket. Where you shop.” She put down her dishrag. “Is it clean? Does the butcher wear gloves?”
I mumbled some response, and she drew various comparisons to New York. Then, “and the fruits, are they nice down there? You get peaches? How much do they run you?”
I made up a price, not wanting to lose this engagement with her. When I moved farther away, across and then out of the country, and had that desperate, young feeling of “no one understands” I’ve often stumbled into markets, as if that is either the beginning or the end of the maze.
So it was actually quite a big deal when, several years later, I moved to Japan to teach high school English and discovered my own sale on tuna. Those first weeks in Amagi, I’d spend hours wandering the safe, antiseptic aisles of Maru Shoku (literally, Round Food), the large grocery store in town. I’d stare at the hues of miso and frozen, milky squid. One evening I stayed in the grocery store till closing. I wandered down the sashimi aisle and peered into the freezers full of sliced tuna abed plastic seaweed and Styrofoam. Discount stickers pressed on every package! The day’s sashimi went on drastic discount just before closing. The pink fingers of tuna were a veritable steal.
From then on, I made a simple ritual of walking from my apartment on the edge of the rice fields, through town, to Maru Shoku. I’d have turned on the rice cooker before I left, and cut the large sheets of nori in half. When I returned all I’d have to do is season the rice, squeeze wasabi out of the tube, pour the soy sauce and arrange slices of ginger I’d pickled myself. I’d often take my grandmother along on these expeditions (she was one of a handful of ‘invisible friends’ who I toted around—an embarrassing, but mercifully temporary nervous habit I developed that year in Japan). Nanny, I couldn’t tell you if the horsemeat is Kosher…yes, that melon really is $30, but it’s meant for a gift, see the nice box it’s in?…those noodles are made from yams…I have no idea how much cholesterol is in that fish sausage. Yes, I get it, Wandering Jew…No, it’s still not funny…One evening, I breezed through Maru Shoku, getting fish, a few persimmons, and a Hostess-like chocolate cupcake whose label boasted “Confidence of creating deliciousness. This type of deliciousness can not be carried even by both the hands.”
I took a winding route back, down the narrow alleyways in the center of town.
A maudlin rendition of an old Japanese folk song drifted out of a karaoke bar. I passed a tofu store, a hostess bar and a vegetable stand selling long, bright eggplant and nashi, Asian pears. The street smelled like sake and fish. The town of Amagi, whose written characters meant Sweet Tree, was nestled in a valley. A wide swath of rice paddies surrounded the knotted cluster of stores. Rows of tile roofed houses lined the edge of the fields, and high, cedar covered hills ringed the valley. Evenings like this, I felt like I could stay for years.
I’m finally beginning to fit in here, I thought. It’s not the glamorous stuff that makes the difference, but the texture of day-to-day life. I was shedding my gaijin skin more and more every day. I stopped at the vending machine in front of the pachinko parlor and got a Kirin beer. I almost rounded the corner when I saw the Japanese man on the bicycle, headed towards me.
He was young and wore a white polo shirt and thin gray slacks. He had a wiry build and intense eyes behind large squarish glasses. I groaned inwardly as I saw that all-too-familiar look: a slight squint (the cartoon bubble reads, “Do I—do I really see–?”). Then eyes and mouth stretched open, (“Holy shit, a gaijin! Right here in Amagi.”). I averted my gaze, bowed almost imperceptibly and flattened my lips into a slight smile. It was my best ‘I come in peace’ look. He continued staring even after we passed each other. I suddenly got feisty and annoyed. Couldn’t I have had a few more moments of self-deception that Amagi had come to accept me as I had come to accept it?
I looked back at the man as he craned his neck toward me. Then I spun my head away in a subtle but distinct huff. I was in front of the rice store when I heard a clattering crash and a muffled yelp. Oh no, I thought, he didn’t, he couldn’t have—
Oh yes, he certainly did—the man was so absorbed with the wandering gaijin that he crashed his bike into a telephone pole. Bam! He lay in a heap under his bicycle, his slacks torn at the knee.
“Are you OK?” I asked in Japanese.
Grinning sheepishly, he told me not to worry. He’d be fine. And, by the way, where was I from? And isn’t it true that in America there is a lot of crime?
Movie star, freak-show-escapee, zoo animal, alien…as much as I tried, and as earnest my intentions, I never blended in, never ceased to draw attention to myself during the year I lived in Amagi. Families I had eaten with for months still conveyed their shock at my facility with chopsticks. Nursery schoolers in sailor uniforms giggled and pointed as I passed. “Gaijin, gaijin.” Students in the high school where I taught English whispered it behind me in the hallways. Gaijin is the Japanese gringo—the slightly derogatory, but guilty-as-charged term used for foreigners. Literally meaning outside person, gaijin is a terminal diagnosis. There’s no amount of time or good, assimilationist tendencies that smoothes its edges. Like gringo, it’s hard to keep a sense of pride about the label, like “well, there are inside people and outside people, but we’re all equal.”
According to the Japanese, I was presumably cut from the same (hilarious, odd) cloth as all the other gaijin they encountered, and I met many gaijin who took solace in their similarities with other Westerners. Although I had my share of easy, feckless friendships with other foreigners, and tried my darndest to dim the sense of alienation by making fun of our Japanese hosts, something else was at play. I made sense of my outsider status not only as Westerner or English teacher or tourist, but as Jew.
I wish I could (in good faith) wax poetic about my Jewish identity and the unmistakably Jewish strength and wisdom I drew upon that year in Japan. I wish I could give a pithy speech on what it means to live in the diaspora and how this wisdom helped me survive and thrive in the wilds of Southern Japan. But at that point, much of my sense of Jewishness was tangled with a fear of persecution, a post-Holocaust paranoia that warned against feeling like an insider anywhere. In Amagi, where I could count the entire Jewish community on one finger, it was easy to feel like an outsider. However, in that environment of cultural and religious isolation, I forged a stronger and more intense relationship with Judaism than I had ever done before. I took it on as my own, and eventually did find some strength in it.
I come from a family of reluctant Jews—I had no Hebrew school Sundays or Bat Mitzvah, no mezuzza on the door, no Shabbat dinners. My folks ate cheeseburgers, shrimp and ham without a second thought (though not generally at the same time). When my grandmother was a kid, she ran to play tambourine for the evangelical Christians that proselytized on the Lower East Side. My father met a pastor who he wanted to officiate when I got married (“but I thought you’d like her,” he said, genuinely surprised. “I mean, she’s a feminist, she works with the homeless and she’s a painter…”). In New York, we didn’t need to actively observe to be Jews, Jewishness was everywhere. It was a fact, one that I wasn’t supposed to hide from (even if that meant persecution), but it never occurred to any of us to embrace it either. In Japan, both the familiar feelings of paranoia and a new, awkward desire to celebrate Judaism developed side by side.
But I didn’t gain this now-nostalgia-tinged understanding without suffering through a lot of good ol’ culture shock first. Everything seemed strange and I felt incapable of describing how weird everything was, and felt like I’d die if I couldn’t convey this weirdness to my friends at home (who, meanwhile, had the nerve to continue their own lives, and didn’t fill my mailbox with long, heartfelt letters about how amazing I was for dealing so amazingly with all this weirdness). My letters and journal entries from this time are filled with lots of capitalization and exclamation points. Like, “you wouldn’t believe what I ate last night—A SQUID LOLLIPOP! It was so TOUGH AND BOUNCY I thought I wouldn’t be able to get it down!”
Or, “I was at Mr. Matsuura’s house for a kind of fancy dinner and I went to the bathroom and on the toilet there were so many buttons AND I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO FLUSH IT! And I pressed the wrong one and water sprayed everywhere!”
Or, “You’d never guess what the regional specialty is here…OK, I’ll tell you. It’s called basashi. It’s RAW HORSE! People eat it with SOY SAUCE, just like sashimi!”
Or, “I got sick and Mr. Yokota took me to the clinic. They tried to give me a shot and when I asked what it was he just told me it was the FEEL GOOD SHOT and I made him ask the doctor exactly what was in it. So Mr. Yokota and the doctor jabber away for like two minutes and then Mr. Yokota turns to me, and in this complete monotone says “THIS TYPE OF TECHNOLOGY CANNOT BE EXPLAINED!” So I refused it and I hope that Mr. Yokota isn’t mad at me…”
In some ways, this first wave of culture shock was the easiest one to deal with—adjusting was my full time job. All my energy went into learning how to send a letter at the post office and to read the bus schedule. If the Japanese folks who spotted me in Amagi thought I was an alien, I was equally convinced that I had landed on Mars.
Which made it more difficult when I had my first paranoid Jewish moment. I felt like I’d already adjusted to life in Amagi. On the day-to-day level, life was easier. I’d begun to develop habits–such as making sushi on the cheap—which helped me feel settled. Letters from friends and family started arriving with more regularity. However, at this point, when a friend told me how gross and sad it was that they served horse sashimi in Amagi, I hinted back to her that she was narrow-minded and xenophobic. Oh, the self-righteousness of it all! But then something off-kilter—like Sports Day–would happen and keep my bad attitude in check.
Sports Day was a yearly homecoming-type event at the high school where I taught English. I sat with the Japanese teachers on the sidelines and watched the students do fencing and judo demonstrations, play taiko drums and form human pyramids in an impressive array of geometric shapes. I was quickly lulled into a spectator stupor. The September sun was strong and I had only brought one can of iced barley tea. Hours passed. I found myself staring at my nails and forced myself to look up and at least feign interest. It wasn’t difficult.
I saw rows and rows of boys in matching gymsuits marching in a lazy goosestep, right arms extended. The boys looked as bored as I had felt a minute before, but they seemed to be mimicking the posture and motions of Hitler Youth. My breath caught. I spent several minutes watching them circle around the dusty yard. Trying to sound merely curious, I turned to Mr. Yokota. “This marching,” I began, “It looks a little strange to me.”
He bit into an onigiri, a snack which translates inelegantly in English as rice ball. “Oh this one?” he threw off casually, “It’s a formation left over from World War II. They do it every year. They’ll have races afterward, much more exciting.”
I fought competing urges to run onto the dusty play field or off the school grounds. I compromised by excusing myself to the bathroom. I stood in the stall, one foot on each side of the squat toilet. With the sound of flushing all around (women flush as they go to cover the trickly sound of their peeing), I counseled myself to breathe deeply. A mistake in a bathroom, even a clean Japanese one. I was upset, but also relieved. The old cliché “I might be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me” elicited a grim chuckle. I was sick of people telling me, “no, that’s not a swastika, it’s an ancient Buddhist symbol,” making me feel foolish for remarking on each and every one. I pegged this marching as Nazi in origin, and I was right.
Soon after I left the bathroom, the moment passed. A group of girls surrounded me. Their giggles and questions helped me feel like a regular ol’ gaijin once again. One girl braided my hair as another examined my rings. They all asked me questions. For once I was glad for the litany of, Do you like the Japanese food? Do you have a boyfriend? Can I show you my (200) pictures of my trip to Australia? In English, can you say ‘keep early hours is good for health’? Do they have the same traffic lights in America as they do in New Zealand? Do you think Japan is nice country?
Sports Day and Yom Kippur fell within two weeks of each other. Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, is known as a somber holiday at best, so I was surprised at how celebratory the whole thing felt that year. Observant Jews fast on Yom Kippur and spend much of the day in synagogue, reflecting on their wrongdoings and asking forgiveness from God. In New York, public schools shut down on Yom Kippur, though as a kid I just watched cartoons and ate fish sticks or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—much the same as I did on Veterans Day or Teacher Training Day. My family had a dinner to end a fast only my grandfather kept. He fasted every year, and this was seen as a sweet, but kind of odd thing for him to do. It was explained to me that he did this in honor of his mother, who died when he was 12.
Remarkably, Yom Kippur fell on Respect for the Aged Day, a Japanese national holiday. No school! I decided to fast that year—I think that being so far away made me want to connect with “my culture.” Though it was more than a bit of fantasy on my part (I’d have to skip back a generation or two to find “my people” doing “my culture” sorts of things), fasting on that bright and warm September day I did feel part of a larger community. I wandered through the rice fields and out to an old shrine. I passed groups of old women singing and dancing, schoolkids chasing each other, heard the dull echoes of housewives beating the dust out of their futons. At the shrine, I met an old monk who talked to me in broken English. This is the Long Life Shrine, he explained. The original caretaker of the shrine outlived his entire family. When he was 124, he built his own tomb, lay inside and began to chant. He figured that when he stopped hearing his own voice, he’d be dead. He chanted for a week.
“That’s amazing,” I said.
“Yes, but you know that in Japan, there are many—more than 5,500—who are over 100 years old. It is difficult to live without your people.”
It smelled like incense and oranges. “Yes, it is,” I agreed. I said something to the monk about Yom Kippur. Though it was quite clear he didn’t understand a word of it, his calm face and reassuring smile comforted me nonetheless. I bid my farewells and continued on.
I spent most of the afternoon writing truly awful poems about the trembling rice grasses, dragonflies, farming, God and New York. I read poems by Mary Oliver and Yehuda Amichai out loud. I marveled that Jews around the globe were fasting, just like me (though I tried not to dwell on the fact that I was thirteen hours out of sync with many of them in the US). When it came time to break my fast, I called up two other foreigners who lived close-by. We met at a restaurant. They made gentle fun of me for fasting all day and I chafed at the criticism. After a couple of beers, they started comparing the differences in British and Welsh slang for dick and fuck. When they asked me for the American equivalents, I supplied the information, not wanting to seem too earnest or serious or weird.
Time passed. I didn’t light candles every Friday or read the weekly Torah portion. But something was shifting nonetheless. That January, I got a strange call. It was a cold Sunday afternoon when the phone rang. I’d come to fear these rare afternoon phone calls—when it was night in the US—and the caller was most likely Japanese. And would most likely chatter to me in Japanese. I’d mumble “I don’t understand,” “Oh really,” and “Yes.” Then ten minutes later someone would appear at my door, all ready to take me bowling or to a flower arranging class.
So it was with more than a little trepidation that I lifted the receiver and began with my timid “Moshi moshi.”
“Moshi moshi.” A male voice, who then asked in Japanese, “Are you Karen Rosenberg?” His Japanese sounded flawless, but so did his pronunciation of my name, no pinching of vowels or blurring of consonants.
“Hai,” I assented.
Then, in perfect English, “Are you Jewish?”
I shifted uncomfortably on the tatami mat. I must not have replied, because he soon repeated, “Jewish. A Jew. Are you?” It sounded like a slightly sinister nursery rhyme.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Well, that’s great,” the speaker announced. “I thought—“
“Who are you?” I stammered. “And why–”
The story came out quickly enough. Paul originally hailed from Pittsburgh and spent the past decade in Japan, as a Buddhist monk. But he was a Jew, too. “Buddhism isn’t a jealous religion,” he explained, “it doesn’t demand that you give it all up for Buddha.” The more he got into Buddhism, the more he got into his own Judaism. He currently served as the sole caretaker of a Buddhist temple a few hours south of Amagi. He got my name from the organization that hosted the foreign English teachers. And, he concluded, “I’m calling to invite you to a Passover seder I’m planning. It’ll be in Beppu, three months from now. You in?”
Passover was the one Jewish holiday I’d celebrated more or less traditionally as a kid. My mom and I would take the Long Island Rail Road to Great Neck or Oakdale, where different branches of the extended family held seders. Seders are ritualized meals that commemorate the exodus of Jews from Egypt. These Long Island worlds—with the endless reading of the Hagaddah, chorusing of Hebrew songs, homemade gefilte fish, sweet tzimmis, the hiding of the afikomen, the kid’s table—were full of life and activity, but felt so foreign. Yet Passover was the only Jewish holiday I could honestly say that I had celebrated almost all my life.
“You’re really hosting a—“
“Seder. That’s right. There are synagogues in Tokyo and Kobe, but nothing on the whole island of Kyushu. I’ve done some research and I have reason to believe that there hasn’t been a seder held in southern Japan for over 200 years. You in?” he repeated.
I wanted very much to be in. I also wondered if he was some freak-psychopath devising an elaborate plan to lure me to his so-called temple which even he described as “terribly remote.” But that seemed, well, paranoid. Besides, I could always back out later.
My social calendar wasn’t exactly full in Amagi, so I had ample time and energy to build up a real anticipation for the seder. The journey to the seder was great—the train passed through beautiful farmland and past clusters of cherry trees. The seder itself, however, disappointed me.
Though I would have never admitted it at the time, I think I anticipated a homecoming of sorts, to slide open a rice paper door and step into a room that smelled like sweet potatoes and pot roast, with a bunch of New Yorkers arguing politics and a fleet of grandmothers pressed into a hot kitchen. My presence would be both essential and incidential—the guests would give me a strong hug or a kiss on each cheek, then continue arguing as if they had always expected me to show up. What took you so long, they would chide me later, and then, with a wink, it’s good to have you back.
What I found was a mix between a chaotic dinner party and a UN conference. Five tables were arranged in a giant ‘U’ and tourists from around the globe sat in tight plastic chairs. It took twenty minutes to do introductions. The lingua franca was English, which the Eastern Europeans spoke with intense difficulty, the Brits with snooty precision, the Israelis with bellowing confidence and the Americans with a jokey sloppiness. It was a sobering moment, looking around this room of strangers.
It only made it worse when I discovered that the guy sitting next to me had gone to high school with a friend of mine from college. “Isn’t this great?” Doug kept insisting, and, putting my fragile hopes into words, “We’re really like one family here, aren’t we?” Hearing it out loud, having it feel so untrue, made me cringe and hate him. How could he have a sense of irony about his state of origin (“C’mon,” he prodded, “New Jersey. Aren’t you going to ask me what exit?”), but not about this Japanese Jewfest? He really seemed to find a feeling of kinship amidst this mélange of imported foods and guests.
The seder dragged on, in a few languages, with whispering adults and crying kids. Paul—bald, draped in monk’s robes, and looking a bit like my cousin David—supplemented the Haggadah with musings of his own. Like the seders of my youth, I worried that perhaps it would never, ever end. They had all the ritual foods, making a big fuss about each one. Wasabi was the bitter herb, and I took too much, appreciating the pain and the excuse to cry a little.
But then, by the third cup of wine, I looked out at this group of strangers with more humor and something akin to affection. Doug was telling me about his synagogue, and asked about mine. “Nope,” I said, “no synagogue.”
“I mean, growing up,” he clarified, “when you were a kid.”
“Yeah,” I repeated. “No synagogue.” I told him some about my family, how my grandmother resented shabbus, the day of rest, because she couldn’t iron her clothes or do her hair in time for her dates on Saturday nights, how she had only kept a Kosher home out of respect for her mother, and her mother had passed away long ago. My mother refused to let me go to Hebrew school, because her post-Holocaust education had been racist and mean-spirited. Doug looked confused.
Paul began another speech. I only heard the words “Jew,” “Jewish,” “Judaism” strung together again and again. How funny the whole thing seemed to me then—this chasing down of Judaism to find a sense of family, when my family seemed to be running the other way. The group then broke into an energetic, if off-key round of Daienyu, the familiar Hebrew song whose chorus translates roughly as “it is enough.” This would have to be enough for now—this clumsy yearning, the object of which seemed to shift and flicker and change as I tried to move closer. I looked around at Doug and the others, singing and rapping their fists on the table. With the keen sense of my family close-by—snickering, shaking their heads or smiling, I wasn’t sure—I joined in.
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