Ben

Allow me to go out on a bit of a flimsy limb, please.

Granted: It’s only been a week but coming back to from my four years in Japan to America is proving to have its both its comforting and unsettling features. To dive too deeply into the high-powered reflection needed to observe the ways I have or haven’t changed, the ways America has and hasn't changed, and the way my friends and loved-ones fit into all this would be, quite honestly, too much right now. So, I’ll stick with my dog, Ben.

Ben is an Australian Sheppard, and has been part of our family for five years. I usually wince when hear other people refer to their pets as family members because it seems to be a bit ridiculous in that pet-rock kind of way, but the moniker is quite appropriate in Ben’s case. To briefly illustrate this point, a short story:

Once, in the middle of a wildly intense game of basement foosball with my brother, my Dad asked us to take Ben for a walk. My brother and I responded with grumbles meant to explain that this was not the time for such requests, as sibling rivalry cannot, by definition, prioritize the needs of an animal over the insatiable appetite of competition between brothers. Or so we opined. Five minutes later, though, our rather irritated Dad came down and further informed us that such negligence would not stand, as, “Ben is your guys’ younger brother!” My brother and I exchanged quizzical looks, but after glancing past my Dad at the hurtful and heartbroken expression on Ben’s gray face, my brother and I realized that the game would, indeed, need to be put on hold in order to attend to the emotional and physical needs of our “younger brother.”

I love coming home and seeing Ben for a number of reasons. Along with my understanding parents and best friends, he is one of the few people who does not ask me “How was Japan?” I understand that the people who ask me this question are simply making an attempt to express welcome-home-like salutations, but still…

“Hey, how was college?”

“Oh, you’re home! How was Iraq?”

“Wow. How were your years spent changing, working, growing, learning, and basically becoming a different person?”

“Uh…good?”

I think we can all take a lesson from Ben here, and just be quiet, sniff the other person to assure recognition, and then let them be until they are ready to relate. What Ben does that I like so much is that he stays around me, sometimes not even paying attention to me. I’m sure this is part of his sheep-dog instict, but he keeps his compassionate tabs on me, without directly interacting with me. He doesn’t ignore me (unless I ask him to do something he’d rather not do), but neither does he smother me. At this very moment, I am sitting in my backyard typing, and he is lying close by, occasionally looking up at me and grumbling about some foreign sound he heard, but he is not bothering me whatsoever.

Ben is a sensitive dog, and he does not like conflict. He hates loud voices, rough physical contact, and sharp utterances. My surprisingly large younger brother (who is now referring to me as “the little guy”) and I had our inaugural wrestling match in the back yard last night. Ben was, to say the least, non-plussed. He circled nervously around us, barking as if to say, “C’mom you guys, let it go! Can’t we all just be peaceful and loving to one another?” Of course, Ben’s kanine-ness doesn’t equip him with the understanding to realize that this is our way of showing brotherly love, but Ben’s urgency to maintain harmony struck a metaphorical chord that can be found out on that flimsy limb I spoke of earlier.

Japan, has an abstract concept known as WA. WA can be loosely translated as “harmony” or “peace,” and the Japanese, like Ben, are akin to always keeping the WA intact. My first and fairly justifiable observation about Americans in general is that we like conflict, especially if it involves an opportunity to express our opinions. This has both its good and its frustrating merits, but this is juxtaposed to the Japanese way of forgoing personal points of view in most situations in an effort to keep the WA.

I used to play soccer with a group of Japanese men, and we would divide into four different teams every week, would alternate playing games, and it was always guaranteed that each team played an equal amount. I was new and foreign, and one week my team somehow got skipped and where we should have played a game another team got put on the pitch, and we were forced to sit out. At this point, I stated in front of everyone that it was actually team 2’s turn—not team 3’s—and I was met with the blank and nervous stares of 25 Japanese men. My friend standing next to me kindly shushed me, and whispered, “Don’t worry about it.” Now, if I had started yelling and throwing shit around and screaming how unfair it was that my team got overlooked, I could have understood their reaction. But, since I had diplomatically and calmly informed them that they were mistaken, I was confused as to why they looked so bent out of shape and hurt. It was only until a year later that I understood that I had dropped an American wrench into the engine of the Japanese WA, and this breach was not something to which they were accustomed, hence the blank stares. The same thing happened with Ben last night when my brother and I were wrestling—we dropped a wrench into Ben’s idea of familial WA, and he did not like it.

We are now to my last and shaky point. The Japanese word for “dog” is inu but the more common nickname is wa-chan. Chan is usually just an apothegm attached to the end of one’s name to express familiarity and affection and the wa stems from the way Japanese interpret a dog’s bawl (“wa wa”), the American equivalent being “ruff ruff,” or “bow wow.”

From here, perhaps an unnecessary but altogether interesting move would be to look at the relation between the two Japanese words WA and wa. History and our world today have no trouble proving that humans don’t exactly have an affinity for keeping peace or promoting universal harmony. War, genocide, and destruction of our natural world are just a few pieces of evidence to support this premise. But, on the other hand, Ben and other dogs like him, seem to embody the words that humans have so much trouble in giving substance to: peace, love, and harmony.

In other words, Wa-chans are the only earthly creatures who consistently work to perserve the greater WA.

There is a sad part to this, though, and it is that I’m fairly certain Ben gets his heart broken every day. Whether it’s not being able to play soccer with my brother and I, or getting left in the garage while we do errands, or not getting to go on a walk when he thought he was going to be able to go on a walk, or getting told to stop barking when he is barking only to protect his family, Ben has become no stranger to heartbreak. However, if I somehow had a way to get into Ben’s mind and translate from dog-language to human-language, I think I might find something similar to this prayer by Mother Teresa:

“May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”