Notes from the japan trip

[rambling about random topics/musings/experiences wandering around tokyo/seoul the last 10 days]

Japanese society is FULL of polite fictions.1 This really irks me! Some examples:

• Setting up any gambling room/casino for real money is illegal, very much so. But you are allowed to operate little gambling rooms, called pachinko where people buy little balls from you, gamble with the little balls, to earn more balls. You are then allowed to open a second establishment, where you happen to buy these balls for real money

• Sex workers are allowed to be paid for basically any sexual act, except penetration. Yet the sex worker is allowed to consent to penetration after compensation. In practice, penetration is almost always had, and it’s definitely not because the woman was really into the guy.

• This one is particularly insane: women were so embarrassed about “bad sounds” from the toilet (this literally means the sound of pissing) that they started permanently flushing the toilet to cover up the sound. This got so bad that many toilets in japan now have a Sound Princess. A button you can press that continously makes the noise of flushing, to save on water!

It’s like society is fine permitting these things, but it can’t bear to not look away. There must be a little scene, a little performative show. Everything is farting at the table.

Once you notice this, you will see it everywhere in Japanese society, and it’s very much not for me.

Every interaction in society just seems to have so many frills too: an Uber is 25 bucks for someone with leather gloves and a fancy self-opening door, perfectly quiet and clean.

Contrast this against the South Korean national ethos of ppalli-ppalli (quick-quick), where everything just has to happen fast. I strongly prefer my 5 dollar Seoul Uber where the driver is shouting at me to close the door again in korean, and probably insulting my mother.

I could never live in japan.

I found it particularly interesting how displays of, what would in the west be so extreme as to border on caricatures of femininity, were fully embraced by society, and very popular.

You know, 90% of what I saw worn in this context is shit I would look horrible in, and that, when I reflect deeper, really don’t want to wear at all, but I thought it was interesting that this is stuff that is actually worn in the first place.2

I saw a relatively wide variety of presentation too, and was happy to find out that this choice of presentation is an explicit fashion statement rather than a default.

It’s plausible that confidence that you won’t get judged for dressing in a hyperfeminine manner.3 has been largely lost due to civil rights pushes for feminism, but this is probably worth it on net.

I just think it’s interesting that I had totally written this off as an anime trope, but it didn’t seem to far from reality.4

This is all making me wonder, if I can form my social contract from scratch, what would my ideal society actually look like.

What is celestopia?

I can try to pick out cultural attributes of cultures I love, and fuzzily define it that way

• First of all, if I’m not living in a big city, it just feels like I’m actively dying.

• I love how honest, raw and to the point dutch people are.

• I dislike how tit-for-tat stingy dutch people are, I generally like abundance-coded society where people gift each other things expecting nothing in return

• I really fucking like how in Korea everything needs to happen immediately, they even have a name for it

• I like when vegan food is good and readily available, Berlin and Ghent have been best for this5

• I really like how in Berlin, everyone just presents as aggressively themselves, and it’s the one place where “clothes aren’t gendered” has not been a mere woke-ity.6

• I like the ambitious atmosphere, proximity to tech, and liberal drug policy7 of SF

Celestopia doesn’t exist, though SF is probably closest.

I rewatched kimi no na wa (your name) on my way back from Japan, and noticed so much more that I had previously missed.

This movie holds a pretty special place in my heart. I watched it as a young egg and felt uniquely understood by the perspective of a guy waking up in a womans body.8

It feels like a distinctive Japanese story, the sort that is hard to execute well from a western angle.

But it’s a story that really resonates with me emotionally. One of eschatology, finding yourself and and a synthesis of love and admiration towards the feminine, with a red ribbon through the knots of time tying yourself towards that destined other.

And as I write this from my airplane seat, an hour to go to SFO9, I can feel a similar sort of pull, that it doesn’t really matter what I do, the timelines will arrange themselves such that this is the place I will end up calling home.

Where I shall build my heaven on earth10