Miscellaneous

I'm having a harder time than usual getting over my jetlag, and I'm reluctant to write too much in here until I'm more coherent, but two smallish things have been tickling my brain and making me feel writey:

Packaging in Japan is completely out of control. For lunch today I bought two rolls. At the counter, the lady put each roll in its own separate plastic baggy, then put the two plastic baggies in another plastic baggy. And everything is like that - candy is individually wrapped. Ritz Crackers tubes contain five-cracker mini-tubes. Give Japan another ten years, they'll invent a nano-condom that individually wraps the sperm.

And there is this: Someone once referred to "the soft bigotry of low expectations," and more than anything that is the form of racism that one experiences as a conspicuous foreigner in Japan. This has given rise to what my friends and I in Kyoto used to refer to as "playing the Gaijin card." This refers to any time we would accentuate our accents or even pretend to speak no Japanese at all simply to get away with something on account of our foreignness. My favorite example was a guy I knew from Seattle who had the testicular fortitude to demand film admission at the child's price every weekend under the pretense that he didn't realize he didn't qualify for that kind of ticket, until the staff heard him speaking accent-free to his Japanese wife on his cell.

There's no common thread here, and no point. Just my brain juice, leaking all over Teh Intarwebz.