I try to keep my blog light and more focused on the quirky or quirkily mundane rather than the issues that face expatriates that are more serious, or at least amplified because we are away from our usual surroundings. But that is part of the experience over here, and while I am not going to dwell on the “downers” it is important balance if I’m trying to explain my life here.

The past couple of weeks have been very difficult. I found out my boss was leaving sooner than I thought and I was working really long hours trying to resolve various issues, and I really didn’t have an option to not work those hours. However, far worse than those complaints is that last weekend one of our expatriate colleague’s children died suddenly.

Certainly in any small office, friendships develop and people in the office care for one another. In an expatriate office, we of course care a lot for each other. But everyone in the office somehow seems a little more like family than when I am in the office in the States. Here in Nagoya, we are all thrown in to this big mélange of new experiences, confusion of how to do some of the simplest things, uncertainty as to the duration of our assignments, and even uncertainty in what our roles are. Although we don’t socialize that much since everyone does have their life here, we do some important things as a group and with families. For example, we do a major community event in May, we have a group Thanksgiving dinner, we had a bowling party / food drive, we sponsor orphans at Christmas time, we have 忘年会 (bounenkai – forget-the-year party), 新年会 (shinnenkai - New Year party), and simple 飲み会 (nomikai - drinking party). We’ve even as a group ended up at a hole-in-the-wall bar and taken over the karaoke machine. My point is we pull together, know each other’s families, and look out for each other.

One of the things I’ve always worried about as an expat is something happening to my family in the States, or something happening to me while I am here. Several members of our team have lost parents or grandparents and have had to travel back to the States. Other colleagues have been traveling back because of parents that are ill. Although I live a long distance from my family when I’m in the States, the distance isn’t so great. Living across an ocean makes the distance feel very far.

Medical care is hard enough to navigate in the US – I can’t imagine what it would be like here to really get what you needed. One time when I had strep throat, I got these pills that looked like children’s aspirin and had to take them forever. It took a long time to remotely start to feel better. How I longed for a Zithromax 3-pack (mind you, I am not an antibiotic pill popper – I can only remember these two cases of antibiotics in the past 10 years. The Zithromax wiped out a case of pneumonia I had picked up after traveling LA – Hong Kong – Kuala Lumper – Tokyo – LA in less than one week).

So of course the death of our colleague’s child was shocking. Without going in to too much detail, the Nagoya media speculate that he died due to complications of H1N1. That can’t really be confirmed though, but his death was sudden and unexpected, and he did test positive for H1N1. He was 4 years old. Many of my colleagues have young children of their own with them in Nagoya, and this news was particularly difficult for them. Fortunately, our company has a program to assist employees in these situations and an American counselor residing in Fukuoka was dispatched to Nagoya to talk to our team.

Over 75 families attended the wake (otsuya - お通夜) on Tuesday night. There was a Buddhist prayer from in the home of my colleague and then a viewing / wake, still in the home. My colleague is Japanese-American and his wife is Japanese, so they had a more traditional Japanese wake than a western wake. Almost everyone from the office went. There’s a lot of mixed information out there surrounding otsuya, so for once I’m not going to make a link. If you are curious, you can do the research on your own.

Once again, I’m not going to dwell on the serious difficulties we face at times as expatriates. My next entry will be frivolous and lighthearted. There is no way that I know to seque from this topic to any other topic, so forgive me in advance.

It seems Japan is now importing mechanical labor. Take a look at this mechanical flagman compared to the other one here. Doesn’t this guy seem a LOT whiter?

This morning I was awakened by blaring loudspeakers. The hate buses were out again. This is pretty typical on the weekend – getting woken up by loudspeakers spewing hate. I’m able to go back to sleep though. What’s amazing though is that I am on the 6th floor, face a side street, have my windows closed, yet the speakers on the buses on the main thoroughfare are so loud that I am able to hear them.

As I was doing my homework at my lokale (my local Starbucks), the buses appeared on the street again, turning from on of the main streets to another mains treet. My local Starbucks is on the corner of Sakuradori and Otsudori and those are two of the main streets in Nagoya. Today was amazing, though. All the variety of hate buses that I have seen were able to congregate and make a hate parade. It reminds me of the time I was teargassed in Zurich when the anarchists appeared to unite for the day (isn’t that contradictory?) to protest the right wing candidate Blocher, which also resulted in a counter-demonstration from a more liberal party. I walked into a cloud of teargas as I was exiting the train station, much to my surprise.

I understand enough Japanese to know that the buses are not blaring words of acceptance and tolerance. There are lots of references in the rhetoric to foreigners and the buses fly the military flag of Japan. The hate buses bother me, and I can’t imagine that something similar being tolerated in the US and in Europe. Then again, in general I am part of the majority in the US and probably less sensitive there. And certainly in the US, we’ve had plenty of demonstrations expressing opinions of inequality and intolerance (read about California’s Proposition 8).

I always feel targeted when I am out walking and the hate buses roll by. I try to make eye contact with the people in the buses, I’m not sure why. I will not be intimidated by their volume. I pay taxes, I pay rent, I purchase products from their stores, I travel on their trains, and I don’t take a penny from their companies. I wonder what they will think as the Japanese population continues to decrease and their relevance is diminished? Probably that is OK – I think the whole idea is about isolation anyway.