The Flowers of Keiwha
Page 4
inflict such tortures on the weak, but of course they deserved it; they should be grateful they were taught such vicious lessons.
In reviewing the events of the first week, we must begin by examining the basics. Five days of morning classes 9 to 1pm, broken up by two breaks of ten to twenty minutes each, taught in succession by two different teachers (including ROLLER). Total class size of ten to fifteen students, in our particular case the six principals, plus LINGLING, TABUN, MIKI, RITSUKO, DEADBOLT the uninvolved Irish girl, and three older ‘ajummas,’ or middle-aged women. Attendance was roughly between 80-90% and overall the students were fairly similar in ability, although MIKI and JOHANN were probably a little better and TUSK, LINGLING, and RITSUKO perhaps a tad worse. Language was taught through examination of a two-person interaction, drilling of the grammar point in question, and practice modeling the interaction in front of the class. Students were expected to improvise a little off the model script and homework is assigned each day.
To begin to understand the processes requires some brief introductions of the girls. Set-piece MIKI KAWABATA introduced a girl who was probably central to the first week, but unimportant thereafter; a girl of average responses if abnormal height, pro-Korean, slightly more clever than average. Middle-class in background, responses, dress, she provided a good “first glance” at the psychologies/personalities in question. Yet far more possibility existed in the outliers; these were the ones who drove the process.
AKEMI came from Shiga-ken. Home of Japan’s ninja clans, she herself was not a descendent of the ninjas, but nevertheless small and quick in her movements, a graduate of a Super English high school, and then a current student at a lower-middling international university. She was cute without being overwhelmingly stunningly cute, a fair ‘8’ on the scale of 1-10, 22 years of age, and the “girl of Firsts and Lasts.” She was the first girl hit-upon; by QUARTERBACK as it were; the first girl to go on a ‘date’ (with KANYE), and the very last girl to be involved in various romantic situations/farces. Bright enough without being stunningly intelligent, the most unusual psychological feature to notice was how different she was in Japanese and English. Surrounded by Japanese, she was quintessentially the cute Japanese girl, squeaky voice. Speaking English, she became a bit more forward, womanly, aggressive. One might think that she was almost two different people in the two languages.
ERI was a graduate of Ritsumeikan, a Fukuoka girl who was about to start a job at the Japanese Ministry of Defense. Also proficient in English, ERI had distinct right-wing, Japan-independence beliefs, yet she seemed to be attracted solely to foreign men. Eri lacked finesse in that she couldn’t quite read men as fast as some especially cynical or clever ones could read her. Had she been a little less intelligent, she probably would have been quite promiscuous. Her family background, like Akemi’s, was not very high; possibly even lower and her grandparents were originally from the mountains of North Korea.
SHINO came to 2/1 later; this point was later a minor point of issue with TUSK, who believed SHINO did so because of TUSK’s behavior in public. With dyed blonde hair, SHINO at first sight appeared to be cheap and easy, but in contrast to this outside impression, SHINO was completely sexually sadistic/dominant. She loved nothing more than to watch some hapless male attempt to seduce her and then soundly reject him. She was not tall but varied her wardrobe interestingly. She used a sexually tinged email address.
TABUN, half-Korean, came from Osaka. A rock-musician by hobby, she was small and not especially creative in her work, but she was overall normally-adjusted and under certain circumstances could be quite endearingly cute. She was a little darker-skinned than the others, the so-called ‘Polynesian’ type rather than the classical pale-skinned ‘Yayoi’ type Japanese. TABUN lacked English, but understood it on a spoken level.
RITSUKO played little attention to the little social games. From Nara, she was previous friends with Lingling and went to a few lunches at the beginning but never concerned herself with the others thereafter. RITSUKO spent her evenings at museums or other cultural places; she might have come off a little slow for her complete lack of social involvement, but was in fact not significantly less capable than the others.
These brief descriptions will serve as useful introductions to the personalities involved. What the girls shared, other than the fact that they were almost all university students, (SHINO and TABUN both 19, but SHINO looking older whereas TABUN looked perhaps a year younger) was that they had grown up in a society that prized female coquettishness, trickery, submissiveness, and absolute training to an ideal of service and humility. There were no angry American personalities in this group; none of the girls ever raised their voices during all of three weeks. It was about seduction: that eternal, elusive quality, and one that only cynics could long endure. Did QUARTERBACK go after five girls his first week? Of course he would; he had to. Did KANYE try to slip in a little something three or four times? Exposure to such female perfection would only elicit such reactions. The girls were brought up in a sea of female beauty and quickly learned how to apply it themselves. All were fit; all disciplined. The outcome would depend on initial motivations and the randomness of social interactions themselves.
"I liked TUSK the moment I met him,” commented ERI, whose behavior would later illustrate to socially-center individuals what kind of girl she was. “I’m just surprised that every girl doesn’t like him.”
"I came here to learn Korean,” commented RITSUKO. Naturally both girls would have different experiences during their three weeks, but sometimes things got so uniquely awry that even the persons involved recognized that something fantastically wrong had occurred. But here we go, we are in the first week, the situation has unfolded.
Start with the assumption that there is some baseline “third culture,” a compromise between the Japanese and Western, on in which speech is required at certain times but not at others, an extremely formal etiquette that also holds total formality as itself wrong in itself, keeping in note intonation and accent more than just words stated as they are. With this premise, the girls walked in (as did TUSK; he had attended the Japanese orientation), and they proceeded to write merely their first names on their namecards. This was exceptional; notable; we might give credit to the beaming teacher ROLLER, a natural fixer of things; we might say that QUARTERBACK, TUSK, KANYE, DEADBOLT, JOHANN’s presence there (a statistical abnormality; this is more than a full third of the foreigners at the program) softens the normal East Asian culture, we had a UN here; we had true internationalism.
The time for introductions came. LINGLING was revealed as Chinese; JOHANN spoke a German-accented Korean; CAROLINE’s accent is a bit harder to place; the surprising American TUSK spoke up—except that he spoke up oddly enough first in Mandarin ‘Ni Hao.’ This was odd; in the hierarchy of things, Mandarin Chinese were not higher than Korean Americans; the twist of presentation was also a beginning philosophy of things; an absurdist touch that would mark TUSK as a games-player, a mind-twister. JOHANN commented shortly thereafter, “I knew you weren’t Chinese; you didn’t walk that way, but I couldn’t tell what you were.” And the week showed German, English, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese all being spoken; the points given, according to JOHANN, were those who spoke the most. (And ROLLER knew Chinese; this capacity was never revealed at all.)
It is mentioned: QUARTERBACK was here. He was here for two days, just enough to miss the entry on the third of SHINO, who arrived, and who TUSK claimed he ‘fished out’ of the crowd, attending the Japanese orientation and striking various poses. “I figured out of three hundred girls there would be one, and not more than one, would be sufficiently intrigued/amused to actually switch classes for this; one who played social games all the time rather than concentrated on her studies. Day 4 confirmed this guess.”
Possibly. Thursday TUSK discovered out of the corner of his eye that SHINO was looking at him and rather than ignoring it on the one hand or shooting the stare back
on the other, he instead moved his eyes just enough to continue to look at SHINO without alerting her—at first—to what he was doing. It was only by holding his eyes just offset that he managed to stare back at her—slowly. A look of horror began to cross her face, and then suddenly abruptly realization! she realized it was exactly that look of horror he was trying to elicit. She immediately averted her eyes, trying ten minutes later to play the trick back on TUSK, but he had invented it; he would not be caught by his own trap.
With the exception of this odd moment, it becomes a bit more of a reach to declare that any particular happening deserves especial mention. As stated, if the assumption of baseline Third Culture infinite politeness is a simple and rational stating of things, perhaps TABUN seemed to make a bit much of the point that she was half-Korean during her self-introduction. Was this directed at JOHANN and/or TUSK? She would not, repeat, not be making any plays for KANYE. But in her little girl narcisscism, she surely considered herself the best of both worlds, Japanese refinement and Korean hot-blooded passion on the other, the clear