The Elbow In My Side

It was a relatively sunny November morning when the man standing next to me on the train unintentionally dug his elbow into my side. Truthfully, it really didn't even hurt that bad. It was more of an eye-opener—a chakra of sorts—something to kind of shake me out of a complacency that had been troubling me that morning, one that I couldn't put a finger on. I guess it took an elbow in the end.

The man was wearing a black suit, with sharp and shiny black shoes. I was, too. And come to think of it, everyone else on the train was dressed in the same attire, which I suppose becomes a uniform of sorts when people en masse endorse the same appearance. This was the Legion of the Japanese Salary Men (which also includes women but given the patriarchal pulse of this country, the apothegm remains gender exclusive), a ubiquitous wave of workers who cram themselves into trains every morning to journey to their place of work, and then do the same thing 10 to 12 hours later when returning to their homes. On that day, I was a member of the brigade.

I usually don't have to take the train to work because I live across the street from the university who hired me to sit at a desk in the English Lounge, which sounds mysterious (in an underground and smoky kind of way) but it is not. It is a student union-type area on the 2nd floor of a newly constructed building on campus, where I have a desk from which I can look out the window and see my white apartment. I have a phone, a computer, and a business card which claims that I am a "Humanities and International Relations Specialist," which qualifies me to offer English conversation practice to anyone who wants it. So, luckily, I avoid the riptides of Tokyo, the ones that suck the workers in every morning and send them back out into the shadows of the city once the moon is high.

The morning I caught the accidental elbow to my side was a morning when I was riding the train into Tokyo for work. I was called to the Imperial Hotel—Tokyo's most luxurious and pricey hotel—to attend a ceremony held in honor of my university's Forty Year Anniversary, a very prestigious and formal event I found out. Until now, I had never held a job where I was required to wear a neck-tie, let alone one that brought me into a big city's morning rush that unvails the busy-ness and self-importance of the Real World's patrons. In short, I wasn’t fond of it, and it set off a chain reaction of existential questions that still remain in my head at the present moment.

Since my very first year in Japan—and I'm on my fourth one—I’ve struggled with the question of when it will be time for me to leave this country and go back to my own. I've held two jobs since I've been here, and both require that, once a year, I make the decision of whether or not to extend my contract for another year. I never fail to find this decision difficult, and Japan and America have been playing an amusing game of tug-of-war with my whereabouts from the second I got here.

As far as foreign countries go, I imagine Japan is one of the easiest places to live and, paradoxically, one of the most difficult. The foreigners role here is one of novelty, a sort of exoticism that for Japanese people represents an otherness that inspires both interest and apprehension. I am unique, but also a source of nervousness. I am physically inside the country and culture, but held outside of it at the same time. Of course, to say that it is this way with every single one of my Japanese friends is untrue. It is the relationships forged with the exceptional people of this country, the ones with whom I have transgressed cultural and environmental boundaries, which keep me here year after year. But, how long can these relationships assuage a feeling I have in my gut that tells me I am, ultimately, a fish out of water and will remain one as long as I am here?

Metaphorically speaking, the elbow in my side represents a certain claustrophobia I feel in Japan. In addition to physical claustrophobia, I also experience a lack of emotional space that causes me to second-guess whether or not it is appropriate to express certain feelings or opinions. It represents the tightening of my jaw after I come to work in the morning and my “Good morning” to a stranger is not returned with more than a split second of eye-contact and a nod so infinitely small I would not have noticed it had I not been trained to look for it in my four years here. But, still I stay because then I am shown such a simple and heart-warming ray of kindness that makes all of the ignored smiles and averted eyes seem like water under the bridge of humanity.

Should I stay or should I go? A friend of mine once said that the teens—which are a notoriously uncomfortable and unsettling time in a person’s life—are a walk in the park compared to one’s mid-twenties. Amen.