Life In Japan: A Not-So-Random Act of kindness

Something happened the other day which really got me thinking.

Actually, there were two things. One was two weeks ago, the other just a few days ago.

Two weeks ago, I read the story behind the Simon & Garfunkel song, Sounds of Silence, in particular the opening lines: “Hello darkness, my old friend . . .” It is a truly awe-inspiring tale and I won’t attempt to capture it better than than Josh Mitteldorf did, author of this extraordinary article. I highly recommend it. It brought me tears of joy and admiration. Art Garfunkel apparently is a saint and saints seem hard to come by these days.

The second thing happened a few days ago on my “long bike ride”. Most of this 28 km pleasure cruise is on farm lanes and narrow, sparsely-traveled roads servicing the rice, bean, potato, and other fields in the areas surrounding my home on the outskirts of town.

But there is one stretch of road (pictured above) which skirts a highly-trafficked secondary highway. What happened occurred along this stretch.

At one point, I sensed that someone had just pulled into a drive I had just passed, and stopped. I turned to look and there was a man, probably in his 30s, getting out of a small truck. He was smiling, had something in his hand, and was waving it at me.

It was a bottle and it turned out to be a nicely-chilled sports drink.

That day, like many recently, was fairly hot. Of course, when you’re on a bike in the direct sun, it doesn’t take much to generate a slippery sweat, exhaustion, and a formidable thirst. No one says keeping in shape is easy.

I backtracked to the truck, he handed me the cool drink, I expressed my sincere gratitude.

That was it.

But think about this . . . I sure did!

This gentleman saw a stranger, an old guy cruising along in the hot sun on a bike, and actually took the time to share something he must have just bought at a nearby convenience store — there was a Lawson’s コンビニ [convenience store] very close to where he pulled over — purely out of kindness.

That’s the bottle there on the right.

Yes, it’s empty. I drank it. And I have to say, it really hit the spot!

At the same time, I’ll confess to . . . hmm . . . I’m not sure what to call it. Cultural flashback? Too-good-to-be-true paranoia? Be very afraid-ism?

After the initial rush of surprise, joy, gratitude, as the guy drove away, flashing a pleasant smile and a friendly wave of parting, doubt crept in. What if it’s poison? Maybe he’s some “sports drinker killer” and does this all of the time to get some homicidal kick? Have I ever known people like this? Would I even do this, wonderful person that I am except when someone makes fun of my nose or yells ‘Rod Stewart!’ at me?

The US is full of incredibly kind, generous, well-meaning, considerate, just-plain-decent folks. People who might do something like this — especially if they didn’t live in America. But there’s a lot of weird, ugly stuff that goes on. I’ve been attacked just walking down the street. I had a friend who was robbed in broad daylight with a gun pointed at his head, as he sat at a red light at a busy intersection in a beautiful, affluent area in L.A. When I was just an adolescent of 13, some of my teammates peed in a soda bottle and gave it to a fellow they didn’t like to drink. Does this kind of stuff happen everywhere? Do cops gun down people for jaywalking? Do punks ride around in cars and shoot up houses just for kicks or because a young man who lives there said ‘hi’ to one of the gang leader’s bimbos? Remember when they pulled bottles of the painkiller Tylenol because someone was going around lacing bottles with a lethal poison?

I know these things are not “the norm”, maybe not even really that common. But they do happen! And they plant seeds of doubt, suspicion, paranoia in everyone who listens to the 24/7 stream of horrible news which we are subjected to in our media-saturated lives.

Hence, my “cultural flashback” moment. A brief jolt of suspicion and fear.

The thing is — and I’m not saying this to give a rah-rah for Japan or claim superiority for my choice to live here — it rarely happens in Japan. There is practically no crime. There are practically no murders. There are few guns and private ownership of guns nearly non-existent. And as I’ve written about before, Japanese are honest to a degree that pushes the limits of believability. This is perhaps the safest country in the world! On every level.

It’s certainly safe to walk down the street or stop at a red light. I never worry about being shot. Or beat up by strangers.

And it’s safe to accept the generosity of a complete stranger . . . and drink a sports drink!

Yes, it sure hit the spot. And all I can say for this man’s not-so-random act of kindness is:

Thanks!

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If you’d like to learn more about what life is like in Japan for an American expat, let me put in a plug here for my book LIVE FROM JAPAN! and alert you to a special ebook sale that’s going on for the entire month of July.

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[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Life In Japan: A Not-So-Random Act of kindness | John Rachel

Clouds of Pollen in the Spring

"The awareness is spreading like clouds of pollen in the spring."

That was a comment I made on a progressive website about the worldwide demonstrations, street protests, and rallies celebrating this year's Earth Day.

I must confess that until two weeks ago I had a highly prejudiced understanding and appreciation of pollen.  I associated it with red, runny noses, puffy, squinting eyes, an annual epidemic of misery among a sizeable chunk of the population.  This limited and highly negative view was shaped by thousands of ads for over-the-counter remedies which had been embedded in my brain, probably from my first days of watching TV as a child.

Of course, a little basic biology is a powerful corrective.  We find that pollen is the delivery mechanism of male sperm cells for plants.  Pollination is about reproduction.  It's how vast landscapes are turned into breathtaking fields of flowering plants, a floral explosion that here in Japan transforms the whole country into a beautiful garden stretching sea to sea.

My awakening, however, did not come from a text book.  It came -- as is quite common these days -- from my lovely and truly brilliant Japanese wife.

 

Masumi and I were on our way to an outdoor market in a nearby town.  It was at the peak of the cherry blossom season.  Cherry blossoms here are not confined to parks or community malls.  Tens of thousands of cherry blossom trees line roads, rivers, canals, and crisscross fields of rice and other crop plantings.  It's absolutely spectacular.

However, I mentioned casually to her that is seemed a little hazy that day.  We're downwind from the China mainland, which hosts many coal-fed power plants, heavy-industry factories, and the like, so I just assumed it was the usual dust and smoke blowing our way from our Chinese neighbor.

"No, that's pollen," explained Masumi.  She directed my gaze to the face of a forested mountain we were passing.  There was a huge puff of what appeared to be smoke, but not really the color of smoke, or the way smoke looks rising from burning debris.  No, it was a cloud of pollen, which was being released in that section of the forest, I assume from the floral undergrowth beneath the trees.
Thus began my quick education and new respect for pollen.  That cloud was the promise for the continuing regeneration of the awe-inspiring bouquet we and others across Japan were now enjoying.

Okay.  I believe in balanced reporting.  So let me explore the other side of this story.

Some folks are allergic to pollen.  Those ads for over-the-counter remedies turn their misery into cold, hard cash for the manufacturers of these palliatives.  Point taken.

 

But there are others who don't have this excuse.  These are folks who choose to seal themselves up in an artificial cocoon, stare at flat-panel displays, thus have no idea about clouds of pollen, pollination, flowers, or anything that doesn't conflate with living under artificial light, being captive of a hermetically sealed environment; no concept of a reality which doesn't adhere to and reify the rules of commerce and commodification of everything.  This is the model embraced by an economy-fixated society, which exclusively views humans as components of monetary mechanisms, consequently only values them as producers and/or consumers. 

I would surmise the notion of beauty for such champions of greed is skyrocketing returns on investments and a bulging portfolio of winning stocks.  I seriously doubt either of those has much of a fragrance though I may have on occasion heard someone say: "That person smells of money."
For these individuals, flowers are "beautiful" depending on how marketable they are and what sort of profits they produce.  With no sense of irony, they would deem the distress of those allergy sufferers as an opportunity to turn a profit.  The more misery these folks have to endure, the better the prospects for some fat returns on pharmaceutical stocks.

We're told that this is the new way to look at the world.  Those old valuations -- meaning just the basic use of our senses, and gauging the world around us by the joy and delight we feel in our hearts -- are passé, and have been replaced by the new tools of capitalism, the free market, and the now dominant neoliberal paradigm.

Yet, the Earth day protests and celebrations convincingly offered a very different message.  That message was loud and unambiguous.  Treating the Earth as a factory for man-made goods, narrowing the contribution of human beings to merely producing and consuming those goods, subjecting everything from happiness and love to the value of a human life, only to the metrics of economic worth, reducing all of the potential for human creativity, ingenuity, compassion, nobility, vision, altruism, excellence, and achievement, to mere numbers on a spread sheet, is suffocating the human race, exterminating the human family, eviscerating the human spirit, and destroying the planet.

I've made my choice.  It took me a while to come around.

I'll take my chances with the clouds of pollen.


[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]



Clouds of Pollen in the Spring