I don’t like rules. I mean, I really don’t like rules. Particularly stupid rules or rules I don’t agree with.

Now, I’ll be clear: not all rules are stupid, and not all rules I disagree with. “Don’t kill someone or take their stuff” is a pretty good rule. In fact, the Ten Commandments have pretty good rules that I don’t really disagree with or think they’re stupid. I think they were directed at a different, more primitive and agrarian society than ours, but we coud do much worse than to follow them.

But there are other rules I really chafe under, and the worst thing is, most of these rules are unwritten. Some aren’t – there are a few rules that are on the books in my country that I think are utterly boneheaded, and the only reason I follow them at all is because there’s a virtual gun pointed at my head in the guise of law enforcement. But there are others that no one tells you about, and you’re still expected to follow. I don’t generally follow those, and it pisses people off. I don’t care, and all that really does is make me not like people. I think this is one of the major reasons I am as much of a misanthrope as I am.

As a side note – “violence inherent in the system” is a real thing. It’s just not necessarily a bad thing, if used properly. It’s rarely used properly.

An example of rules I think are stupid – always having to respond something like “well” to “how are you”. I don’t. I always answer honestly, or at least noncommittally. No one knows how to respond to that, it seems. Another rule is having to acknowledge strangers who accost you in front of the grocery store. I completely pretend they don’t exist. The fustered looks on their faces are gold, but it makes me look like a jerk. I don’t really care about that, but it’s yet another rule that doesn’t really make any sense. Why should I be forced to respond to strangers accosting me in front of grocery stores?

But, in a sense, I am lucky. There is a social cost to my refusal to follow rules, but it’s, at least so far, not crippling. I may not like following rules, but there are some you just have to in order to survive in a culture, and in my country, at least, those rules are pretty minimal and not too invasive. I am single, and I think that’s mostly because I refuse to follow the unwritten rules of a relationship. But I’d rather be single than follow stupid rules imposed by someone else’s expectations of me. So I think I will continue to be single for the rest of my life. This is okay. Not ideal, because of certain biological drives, but okay. I can deal with it.

I think, though, that this is why I’m so torn on Japan. I chafe a little under the rules of written and spoken Japanese, as they are in some ways kind of stupid, but I accept that as far as language goes, that is the nature of the beast. I can ignore the rules, and even do so willingly, but at the end of the day this will just mean people can’t understand me . That defeats the whole purpose of a language, so it’s better to just suck it up and follow the rules rather than trying to change an entire culture.

But there are other rues that are more…. difficult… to follow, for me. Conformity is, to me, the very definition of a “stupid rule”, so I conform as little as I possibly can, even in my own culture. But in Japan, conformity is very much prized. I will sometimes break rules just for the sake of breaking them, but Japanese people consider this, seemingly, the ultimate of heresies. I feel awkward bowing in greeting, so I wouldn’t do it. I don’t like rajiotaiso, so I would refuse to do it. I would choose who I used polite language with, rather than letting the social strata of the person I’m dealing with determine that. Of course, sometimes, there may be good reasons for going along to get along, but not all the time. Some of the rules, of course, make sense, like being generally pleasant and not making a mess, so I would, of course, follow those rules.

But if I think my interactions with Americans are a little strained sometimes, imagine how the Japanese folks would see me.

I think this is one reason why I’m so… conflicted… about learning Japanese. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to learn about a culture with so many written and unwritten rules if I have no will or intention to follow most of them. I guess learning about them is its own reward, but it’s not going to be of a whole lot of use to me in the long run. I don’t get along with people well, and if it means following stupid rules, I don’t want to get along with people well.

Perhaps this is a personality defect on my part. Or perhaps I’m just unusually free. Who the hell knows, really. But it just is how I am, and I’m learning to deal with it.

My last post was an eye-opener. It was the single best single-day performing post I have ever had, and I think it gained the most likes and followers of all of the posts I have ever written. And it had nothing to do with Japanese. In fact, near as I can tell, the only reason this was the case, was that I tagged it with a “blogging” tag. I guess that’s how the WordPress platform works. Doesn’t matter what you say, doesn’t matter what you blog about, only matters what you tag, who you follow, and who follows you back.

If I had a lot of posts about Japanese and I were passionately blogging every other day about one thing or other, this wouldn’t bother me, but that’s not the case. I’m posting very little right now, and that’s because I just don’t have anything that I want to share about Japanese. But I have things I want to share about other things. So screw it, I’m going to do that, because obviously it doesn’t matter one way or another. If you don’t like it, oh well. Better I post about random things than nothing at all, I guess.

I have, recently, been fighting a very existential depression. It’s the kind of depression that just kind of sits there and colors everything one does. I guess it could be categorized as “major” or “clinical”, though I am talking to my doctor about steps I can take on that side. But I don’t want to go too far into that. I do want to talk about some of the things that I’m thinking about, though..

Recently, here in central Texas, the nation’s largest waterpark resort opened. I’m not going to tell you how close it is to me because that would make finding me easy, but let’s just say I could easily drive there if I wanted. It’s the first waterpark of that chain opened in a metropolitan area. The other three locations are The Poconos, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, and Sandusky, Ohio. Every single one of those locations have incredible meaning to me, as they were a large part of my childhood. I spent last night finding each location on Google Maps, and am struck by how much the have changed in the forty or so years since I was last there.

I’m not going to go into the specific memories each of those places bring back, or why. But what I will say is that every single one of those locations have very powerful, and in many cases, pleasant, memories of my childhood. I have not had much joy in my life at all, but if I were to add maybe one other place, these are the places where I would say the most joy was to be found.

What happened to the joy?

It seems as life continues on, all of the joys recede into a blur of memory, the details mostly forgotten, but the feelings not. But it’s just a memory, and I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to say that right now my entire life is either chasing after the memory of a joy that will never be recreated, or distracting myself from the dawning and cloying realization that the joy is gone and it will never return. It’s all gone, and everything that ever made my childhood happy (which was not many things) is gone as well, never to return, and all I’m left with is the emptiness where the joy once was.

Japanese was, and is, a distraction. That’s all it ever was and all it was ever intended to be. I find no joy in it, I find no happiness in it, all I find is toil for little tangible reward and much cost. But the distraction is valuable in its own way. As with playing on my phone and transporting myself into the worlds of different, stupid games, until my brain is numbed and I’m bored, and I move on to the next thing. I have so many different hobbies, and they are nothing but a distraction as well. There is no joy, but there is distraction, and forgetting, if even for just a little while. I have no intention of going to Japan because I don’t want to be there when the distraction wears off and I’m slammed once again by the emptiness left by the joy that once was and is no longer.

This is not a happy post, but I’m not in a happy state of mind, and as I’ve said, this blog is for what I want to share, and I want to share this. Maybe, if nothing else, I know what to pray for now, and in that vein, maybe it has been helpful. Till next time, I suppose. Maybe next week will have some good news.

As I have mentioned before, I was raised in a religious cult. Music was an important part of the cult, but it was treated more as a ritual than a celebration. We had our hymns which we sang (some were beautiful, some were depfressing, all were treated inexpertly), there was “special music” (which was nearly always performed by inexpert musicians who half the time didn’t know what they were doing), and I was starving. But I didn’t realize it at the time.

See, I have the heart of a musician, but my growth was stunted. It’s like a language to me, no different than English or Japanese, and it has dimensions to it that are only teased out with training and experience.

I was watching a couple of episodes of AKBingo recently, where a number of girls from different AKB groups were being auditioned for the role of “Dorothy” in a Japanese production of “Wiz”. The guy doing the auditions was looking for something specific, that going in I just didn’t understand – I still don’t completely understand. But the interesting part was that I knew which girls he would pick. The girls who won had a quality to their singing and dancing that I couldn’t describe if I wanted to, but it was the difference between a boring and uninteresting performance and something special.

In the finale episode, there were six girls. The first three did not do well. The last three did progressively better. When the fourth one sang, I said “she did well, but there wasn’t a lot of control.” I thought the fifth one was better than the fourth, though the auditioner said something about her expressions not fitting the role. I’ll have to look at that more, because I didn’t see it. But the sixth one was a girl named Masuda Yuka. She was not perfect – she lost a bit of vibrato control on the last high pitch. She was certainly better than the others. But she had people – including the auditioner – crying. And after she finished, so was she.

The auditioner said “You let it all out, didn’t you?” And she nodded, thanked him, and ran into the hall where she sobbed it out. She won the audition, and she deserved to.

That, in my opinion, is the difference between someone who makes music and a musician.

I haven’t known many musicians, but I’ve known a lot of people who play an instrument or sing. The difference is jarring when you finally see it.

I think that’s why I like J-Pop, J-Metal, anime music, etc. They’re not distracted. They’re not making the music because it’s going to make them a lot of money – I think most of the artists who are idols, etc., actually don’t make much money. But when they do it, at least the best one, aren’t distracted. They aren’t thinking of other things, they don’t phone it in. They sing their hearts out and put everything they have and are into what they’re doing. Even to the point where they make themselves cry.

That’s the Japanese way. That’s the majime way.

And you can tell.

All told, I think this is why I prefer Japanese music. No one in the entire chain of musicians – from the lyricist, to the backing track, to the featured performers – no one has phoned it in. And at the end of the day, that matters.

Living in America, I like my country. But, apart from things such as the constitution and our predilection for freedom, as fragile as it might be, I don’t like my culture. I don’t think I ever have, honestly.

The music we come up with as a country is, generally, stupid. Songs such as “Anaconda” – which is, frankly, an ode to the male organ and thinking with it – are popular. Songs are almost always about love and sex, and generally some puerile idea of what it is anyway, In fact, as a culture, we seem frankly obsessed with sex, have equated love with sex and pretty much allowed it to take over our entire idea of identity, and seem uninterested in – in fact, actively hostile to – anything which might even smell of intelligence.

Of course, it’s a big country. I’m mostly referring to popular culture. I am, after all, a part of the country, and the fact that I am so critical of, and disgusted with, popular culture here means that it’s not homogeneous.

Japanese pop culture is different. I’m not going to make a value judgement and say it’s objectively better, but I like it a lot more. The popular music – such as from AKB48 and other idol groups – has thoughtful and sometimes even profound lyrics. Anime runs the gamut, but can be well animated and thought out (contrast with Hanna-Barbera style cartoons, which are classics but are, to a one, poorly animated). There is a general focus on cuteness and innocence that is very much contrasted with the western focus on sensuality and eroticism (though I will grant that Japanese porn is messed up sometimes – when they let loose, they really let loose!). It’s no wonder that, for those from a western culture that disappoints at every turn, Japanese pop culture, in most of its forms, is so attractive.

A part of me doesn’t like to focus on any country’s pop culture, as I know that said culture rarely represents what makes a country special or great – including my own. But pop culture in any country both follows and leads the other, more intrinsic, aspects of culture, so there are things to learn from it.

Many of the entries on this blog have been me trying to reconcile the fact that I don’t like pop culture with the fact that I like Japanese pop culture. Perhaps it’s only the vacuous and puerile American pop culture I am not a fan of. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with liking Japanese pop culture. Enjoying a song such as sakura no hanabiratachi is not quite the same as witching Nicki Minaj and her rather disgustingly and likely artificially voluminous bootie twerking around while they sing about a man’s phallus. All told, I’d rather watch cute teenage girls dance around and sing about graduating from school than caked-on makeup clad women presenting themselves as prostitutes trying to arouse men for money.

One has a certain youthful purity to it The other is just disgusting.

I am aware, as I’ve posted before, of the seamy underbelly of Japanese idol culture – and in a broader sense, Japanese pop culture in general. Their cute and innocent facade is probably just as manufactured as America’s “house of ill repute” facade. And by no means do I want to minimize the potential impact on the lives of the girls I have come to admire so much. Some don’t make it. Some are almost certainly abused in one way or another. And some make the best of their situation and circumstances and make a name for themselves even past graduation from whatever idol group they may have been a part of. I know I follow the YouTube channels of both Kojima Haruna and Takeuchi Miyu. I don’t follow them because they’re former idols. I follow them because they earned it. They’re beautiful, but they’re talented.

I admire some of the idols I follow or at least have been aware of in a way that I wish I could admire in performers of my own culture. But I can’t. I can’t admire them. I can’t admire Nicki Minaj, or Britney Spears, or Rihanna, or pretty much anyone else who have a small seed of talent which they water with their own… I’m not going to follow that train of thought any further. It was a reference to Cardi B, who is perhaps one of the worst offenders, and exemplifies everything wrong with my culture.

I’m particularly sensitive to being thought of as a weeaboo. Which is something I don’t understand, myself, because typically I’m utterly unconcerned with what people think. But perhaps I’m unconcerned with what people of my culture think because I generally have no respect for them. But I respect the Japanese people – at least more than I do my own. They value and foster things that are missing in my culture, and perhaps I am as hungry for that as I am anything else. To be thought of someone who thinks of them as something they’re not would pain me greatly. But it would be the greatest compliment, conversely, if they understood that I see them as they are – warts and all – far more than most western people, through education, experience, and exposure, as fleeting as it may be, to their culture and people. I don’t respect every Japanese person. But I sure respect them a hell of a lot more than I do most people in my own country.

Do I go off the deep end? Maybe sometimes. But I guess I’d rather do that than try to find something in my own culture to respect. That ship sailed years ago.