I couldn’t sleep last night.  I was up 1:45 or so reading and I probably didn’t fall asleep until 2:30 or so.  Meaning I’ve been running on 3 1/2 hours of sleep or so.

Addendum: after reviewing this post a bit, it feels more like essay material; like something I could use in class, rather than blog post material, but I’m posting it anyway to make you think.

I’ve been thinking about a lot of things lately, most of them Japan-related.  I think these thoughts were instigated by this book I’m reading.  It’s called Villain.  It’s by a Japanese author and it’s about a murder.  It’s not a murder mystery though, or at least it’s not structured like one; it’s more about the people involved in a specific murder case, and through the narrative that describes these peoples’ existences, it presents a very interesting view on Japanese society.

I hesitate to say that it presents a critique on Japanese society, but I guess that’s what it does.  The novel paints such a bleak picture of life for these people that you can’t really help but criticize the system that forces these people to live that kind of life.

One of the things that the book has made me think about was mentioned in my cinema class the other day was the idea of “gaman.”  The definition of “gaman” as it shows up in my iPod japanese english dictionary is “perseverance, self-control, self-denial,” the last definition being the most pertinent.  The sense that you get from Japanese people and from society in general is that people don’t complain; it’s considered rude or unseemly to do so.  As with any generalization there are exceptions to this, but for the most part it’s true.  You almost never see people flaunting authority, getting into heated arguments, or anything like that, because the idea is that you deal.  You deal with whatever you’re going through, and you might complain a little, but you never really do anything about it; just wait until it’s over or learn to live with it.  Again, there are exceptions to this rule and I haven’t taken any sociology courses, so I could be wrong, but you do get a sense of this feeling of “gaman” after watching dramas, movies, reading books, and looking at how Japanese people act in everyday life.

Which leads me to this book.  This book seems to demonstrate the effects of “gaman” on Japanese people.  You have a person who puts up with so much and seemingly has no emotions at all.  You have women who stay in dead end jobs because they’re waiting to get married.  You have spoiled rich kids living in their own high-end apartments going to school because it’s something to do.  And then you have someone who doesn’t seem to adhere to this lifestyle, and ends up getting killed.  To be fair I could be reading too far into things and I could be completely wrong about this concept of “gaman;” it’s a definite possibility.

Maybe it was this crushing sense of enduring whatever fate handed out to you, whatever you barely managed to create for yourself and not being able to complain, not being able to do anything or to change your station in life that was imparted to me by the book that kept me up, kept me reading.

But this is just one book, which paints a bleak picture of the lives of a very few Japanese people, and a fictional one at that.  Not being Japanese, I can’t comment on how true to life it is.  Maybe only a few people lead lives as portrayed in this book.  Maybe no one does.  Maybe many people do.  Hard to say.

Another thing to take into account is that I’m looking at this from the perspective of an American.  I’m used to the idea that you have the ability to do what you want if you’re willing to work for it.  To me it seems natural that you deserve to set out your own goals in life and lead the kind of life you want to.  I have no idea what the ideal is in Japan, what values they’re taught or how they view their own lives.  Maybe Japanese people are perfectly happy with their lifestyles, and I’m certainly not one to judge them for that: to each their own.

I feel like I’m about to start stringing together random thoughts, so I’ll sign off here.  I’ve got a bunch of work to do anyway.

~Shimon