French Garden Dreams Inspired by Japanese Garden Reality

“Might I," quavered Mary, "might I have a bit of earth?”

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

For years I dreamt of a "bit of earth" and when we moved to Versailles my fantasy was realized, first in the garden of our rental apartment and later when we bought our house.  A decent-sized lot was a requirement (I could care less about the size of the house) as was a layout with possibilities:  small and large spaces, shade and light, trees and shrubs;  and room for fruits and vegetables.  

That was a lot to ask for but the property we purchased has all that if I plan and plant it right.  My time in Japan has both inspired and instructed me.  The gardens here are amazing and they provide clever solutions that apply to my garden at home:  How do I get the maximum effect out of the space I have?

In the front of my is house a small rectangular courtyard which gets sun in the morning and shade in the afternoon.  It was separated from the street by a horrible chain link fence covered in blue plastic and a very nice maroon metal gate. Here is what it looked like back in 2012 after I got rid of the weeds.

The blue plastic went to the dump.  We had the chain link fence painted maroon to match the gate and I also painted the concrete brick walls.  After amending the soil I started to plant a few things every year.  Here is what has been accomplished so far.

Better but still a work in progress.  The house is very close to a busy street and the noise and pollution are a big problem.  M. (our house sitter) planted a row of shrubs along the chain link fence which (interestingly enough) is a plant that comes from Japan: Aucuba japonica.  We chose this shrub because it's an evergreen with lovely foliage and because there is already a row of them growing insanely fast in the backyard and they are lush and green with no hint of disease. The next phase is to plant more small trees like Japanese maples (there is already one on the other side of the courtyard and I'm waiting to see if it does well) and/or alders and/or witch hazel and a few box shrubs (or perhaps azaleas) so that there will be a mixture of tall and short things that provide a beautiful multi-layered screen against the dust and noise. Another idea I have is to pull up some of the flagstones and put a small tree in the middle of the north side for yet another beautiful barrier against the street.  

It was in Japan that I really got a feel for how to place and prune trees for a small space. The rule I have lived by ever since I read Cass Turnball's works  is never plant anything that you can't allow to grow to its full height and width.  Well, the Japanese don't do it that way and their way works and looks fantastic.  I have walked gardens in Himeji, Hiroshima, Shodoshima, Kyoto, Tokyo, Wakayama, Sapporo, and Osaka and have taken countless pictures of how they pruned in particular spaces and what trees were used to create certain effects.  Two books I have read and would recommend to you are The Art of Creative Pruning: Inventive Ideas for Training and Shaping Trees and Shrubs and  Niwaki: Pruning, Training and Shaping Trees the Japanese Way.  Both are by Jake Hobson.

Turning to the backyard garden this is what it looked like when we moved into the Versailles house.

Messy but filled with potential.  A garden with great "bones".  Note on the right side of the photo the diseased shrubs.  In the back right corner what looks like a shrub was actually growth coming out of a tree stump.  But along the back stone wall there were roses and muguet which said to me that this garden was wonderful once.  The first step was one of subtraction - everything that was dead and dying had to go and it took months.  Only then could I amend the soil and start adding.  Slowly.  A few things a year.

Here is what it looks like now.

See what I mean by good "bones?"  So what's the plan here?  See that big bush on left side just after the bamboo?  That one is a conundrum.  There are many lovely varieties of weigelia but this isn't one of them.  This one has spindly boring flowers and has to be cut back fiercely at least once a year. So much work for so little reward.   I want to move it (perhaps to the front courtyard if there is enough light) and place a small pond in its place.  Something that looks like a smaller version of this:

In other words I want to dip my toes into water gardening.  When we were in Brittany we brought back some beautiful granite stones and a small auge which I will use instead of a waterfall.  The effect would be something like this:

So much to do and it's all doable with sweat and blood (I cut myself often).  And affordable if I just spend enough hours on Le Bon Coin. 

But I am so grateful to have spent time in Japan and to have had my old ideas about gardening challenged.  And to be abundantly clear, I don't want a Japanese garden.  What I want is a garden with the best and most locally appropriate ideas from the three countries I've called home:  the United States, France, and Japan.   I want it to be the best "bit of earth" it can be - a transnational garden from an old transnational gardener.

And just for fun (since it's Friday)  here is a short clip about my favorite garden in Japan:  Kokoen Garden in Himeji.  If you have only one thing to see in that city, skip the castle and go to see this garden divided up into nine spaces that are so beautiful that each and every one will make your heart sing.

National Unity and the Sins of the Past

"Dans le passé, un héritage de gloire et de regrets à partager, dans l'avenir un même programme à réaliser ; avoir souffert joui, espéré ensemble, voilà ce qui vaut mieux que des douanes communes et des frontières conformes aux idées stratégiques ; voilà ce que l'on comprend malgré les diversités de race et de langue. Je disais tout à l'heure : « avoir souffert ensemble » ; oui, la souffrance en commun unit plus que la joie. En fait de souvenirs nationaux, les deuils valent mieux que les triomphes, car ils 
imposent des devoirs, ils commandent l'effort en commun."

"A people shares a glorious heritage as well, regrets, and a common program to realize. Having suffered, rejoiced, and hoped together is worth more than common taxes or frontiers that conform to strategic ideas and is independent of racial or linguistic considerations. “Suffered together”, I said, for shared suffering unites more than does joy. In fact, periods of mourning are worth more to national memory than triumphs because they impose duties and require a common effort." (Translation by Ethan Rundell.)

Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (What is a Nation?), 1882.

If you've never read this text, I really encourage you to do so.  It was a lecture Renan gave at the Sorbonne in the late 19th century in which he asked this deceptively simple question.  At a time when people viewed race, ethnicity, language, national borders and even common interests as the elements that make up a nation, Renan argued rather that a nation has a "soul" that is composed of the past and the present:  "One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received."

That is a emotionally stirring and surprisingly inclusive definition.  It's not something that one can prove empirically and the fact that he had to argue for it says that many at that time would have disagreed. Many still would.  Is is possible to conceive of the French or Japanese nations today without the French and Japanese languages? And yet Renan argues against making it a defning feature of the nation for "When one exaggerates its importance, one limits and closes oneself up in a particular culture understood as national. One leaves the open air that one breathes in the midst of humanity in order to lock one’s self away in little freemasonries of one’s compatriots."

However, where I definitely part ways with Renan is when I read these passages (the ones most often quoted):   

"Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent in their consequences." and "However, the essence of a nation is that all of its individual members have a great deal in common and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth. Every French citizen has forgotten St. Bartholomew’s Day and the thirteenth-century massacres in the Midi."

Renan argued that forgetting was a good thing: A collective memory of the past is what makes it possible for members of the nation to envision a common future.  This is an appeal to national unity which should, in his view, override historical accuracy.  

This argument is still with us;  you can hear it in the US, in Japan and in France.  Some say Why do we have to keep talking about the history and legacy of slavery and colonialism?  Let us all instead indulge in a collective act of selective amnesia and just move on. There are many answers to that suggestion written by far wiser people than I.  But my belief is that this simply can not be asked of people whose recent ancestors suffered great injustices and who are still feeling the weight of the past in the present.

This proposition also offends my own honor:  Am I so small a person (so delicate a flower) that I need lies or erasure of facts in order to think well (or badly) of my or any other nation?  Nor would I like to think of myself as so lacking in intellectual integrity that I decide to accept one pleasing and palatable version of an historical narrative and sweep all others aside.  "You can't handle the truth!" was an insult, not the wise words of a venerable warrior.  The truth certainly can elicit all kinds of emotions but it is not for someone else to say whether you or I can "handle" it.

In the context over these thoughts about forgetting, I am following debates over the Confederate statues in the American South and the shrines to the war dead in Japan.  I confess that I have never been to that part of the US but I have been to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.  (And I went with full knowledge of the controversies surrounding it.)   The arguments for and against them are not so far apart though the existence of the shrine is a recurring national debate and an international cause célèbre in Asia.  

Are they memorials or monuments?  Are they recalling events to which Renan might counsel forgetting in the name of national unity?   Do they promote an historical narrative that is one-sided and based on principles like imperialism and white supremacy?  What does it mean when a Japanese prime minister pays a visit (or for that matter, Jean-Marie Le Pen) or when American politicians argue against the removal of statues?  Do we accept that "Yasukuni Shrine was established to commemorate and honor the achievement of those who dedicated their precious lives for their country" and Confederate statues and flags as simply a part of the "heritage" of the region?* Or do we reject those arguments and ascribe far more nefarious motives to those who built them, visit them, or support their continued public existence?

National tragedies are not so forgettable as Renan seems to suggests, nor is it obvious that a people necessarily see themselves as united in suffering.  Akiko Hashimoto had this to say about the nation and the past in The Long Defeat:   "Memories of difficult experiences like war and defeat endure for many reasons: the nation's trajectory may change profoundly as it did when Japan surrendered sovereignty in 1945; collective life must be regenerated from a catastrophic national fall; and losers face the predicament of living with a discredited, tainted past." May I suggest that if people perceive that those are the stakes, then efforts to explore the past together in order to come to a place where there is that desire to move on together will be a Sisyphean task.  Because anything that smacks of Sin without the possibility of compassion and redemption leaves people with nowhere to go but Hell (in which case they will fight like devils just to get into Purgatory.)

I think these debates are necessary, however acrimonious and painful they may be.  It may very well be that what we are experiencing now in so many places - the angry debates, the culture and identity wars and the never-ending arguments over "the moral character of heroes, victims and perpetrators" (Hashimoto)- is a form of Renan's "suffering together."  Like all things under the sun, it will be over one day and how it will end, I cannot say.  But I do think that Renan is right  and national unity (and better international comity) may actually come to pass once we have learned  to sincerely regret and to grieve with and for each other.  

*This connection has been made before by others.  Just google Yasukuni and Confederate Flag.

The Festival of the Gods

Last night I met the younger Frenchling at work and we walked for a time with the gods.

Yesterday was the Osaka Tenjin Matsuri festival.  It starts at a local shrine with a procession through the city streets.  There were dancers in Heian era costumes, Shinto priests on horses, and mishoko, portable shrines that carry the gods.  At the river they piled into barges and the procession continued up and down the river. There was one boat that resembled a penteconter and it fascinated me because it was powered by master oarsman who could turn on a dime.    A spectacular sight.

According to the Japan Guide: "Tenjin Matsuri is the festival of the Tenmangu Shrine and honors its principle deity Sugawara Michizane, the deity of scholarship."

How fitting, I thought.  And if I had not already given my heart and soul to the Lady, this is one deity I would be honored to serve.

Here are a few pictures:

Some Musings about History

"The sources of collective memory range far beyond personal recall, but these sources too resist correction by others.  Since we alone understand the legacy that is ours, we are free, or even bound to construe it as we feel it ought to be.  Those who share a communal legacy must accept some mutual notion of its nature.  But each sharer treats that corporate bequest as his own; like personal memory, it remains barred to outsiders." (page 314)

The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited by David Lowenthal


Americans sometimes fall into this seductive trap when they go abroad and marvel at ruins.  They exclaim with admiration: "How wonderful! We have nothing as old as this at home."   Statements that are both true and false.  True in the sense that the Parthenon is unique to a particular time and place but false because it utterly erases the history of the first inhabitants of North America who migrated from Asia anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.  To accept the argument that "civilization" on the North American continent only began with the arrival of Europeans is a lovely fable which may please Europeans and European-Americans alike but is utterly without foundation.

History as the subtraction of facts which do not fit the narrative.  Well, no nation is exempt from such attempts to shape and sanitize the past.  Not only does the past as we feel it ought to be confer legitimacy on the present day inhabitants of a territory, it makes us feel as if we own something that is beyond the reach of the tourist or migrant. History, says Clifford Geertz, is one of those "primordial loyalties"  along with "[a] sense of the "givens" of social existence -- speaking a particular language, following a particular religion, being born into a particular family..."  I do not doubt that such things are felt by millions around the world. It requires considerable effort on the part of the state, communities and individuals to sustain a common language, culture or history when one has only to talk to one's elders to learn that the taken-for-granted "primordial" is an invention of the present.

My sense is that we seek the "primordial" at times when we realize that we were born in the middle of a moving river and we would very much like for someone to close the floodgates so we can float for awhile in this moment.  Since that is entirely outside our capacities, we instead attempt to anchor ourselves in the past against the current.  We may not know where we are being taken but surely we can find something in the usable past that will slow us down.

The more I move around, the more I question the history of my home country and what is being presented to me as history by the various host countries I've wandered through.    I have learned to be skeptical of their "primordial" narratives both for what they have left out (a lot) and for what has been invented (also a lot).  To accept the US as a English-speaking country or France as a Francophone one since time immemorial requires that I ignore the distinctly un-French accents of old Breton farmers, the tales my mother-in-law tells of hearing languages other than French spoken in her village, and the stories of my German and French-Canadian ancestors in the US who happily spoke French and German across generations.

But it's not simply about debunking the facts, it is also about holding an awareness that the past is indeed a foreign country and that a 21st century French or Japanese or American is born into exactly the same place with regards to their own history and that of other peoples.  No, there is no gene for history or language or culture and the past not a personal memory.  On the contrary,  we all start from zero in terms of language, culture, and history when we are born and then what we acquire as we grow up is what people in the present think we ought to know.

Going beyond that (questioning the "givens") means grappling with more complicated and less ethnocentric narratives that call into question the "ownership" of things dear to the heart of the locals.

Is Notre Dame a symbol of French architectural genius beloved to the French of our time or is it  an edifice among many in a worldwide network of Roman Catholics and a concrete example of the universality and longevity of the faith?  A symbol of France?  Or a symbol of a multinational living faith that has existed for thousand of years and still serves the faithful in the same way as, say, St. Patrick's in New York or the Grand Cathedral of the Virgin Mary of Osaka?  To see it as one and not the other would be to leave quite a lot out.  Better, I think, to know both and to seek out other interpretations to see how it has been incorporated into many narratives over the centuries.  For is it so hard to imagine that the people who constructed it were as unlike a 21st century Frenchman or woman as we of different nations are to each other today?

As we travel and marvel at the wonders of different places my modest suggestion would be to be extremely cautious about the historical narratives being trotted out for your edification.  Consider that the locals may not know any more than you do.  They had to learn the facts and narratives just as you do, and unless they are highly inquisitive it is doubtful that they will do more than parrot what they were taught in school or on their own guided tour.

Be aware that there are other narratives foreign and domestic (and the latter is not necessarily superior to the former) and that viewed from another context their cultural ownership of something may be highly questionable.  They were not there when the event occurred or when the edifice was constructed and their relationship to it is as distant as yours. If these things are the reflection of any genius, it is limited to the people who lived and breathed and built then.  What their supposed ancestors think of them now is all about how they feel about the present and may simply be another manifestation of trying to stop the river of time.

And then go back and apply all of the above to the past of whatever country you call (or once called) "home."  I guarantee you'll find there is a lot more there there than you ever dreamt.

The Bac 2017

Oh yes, it's that time again.

High school students in France are taking their final exams for their "Bac" (le baccalauréat).  It is a grueling exercise that is stress for children and their parents. I lived through it twice and I am so glad I am done.   The elder Frenchling passed in 2011 and did so well that she was accepted by McGill University in Montreal.  We were and are so very proud of her.  The younger Frenchling passed in 2013 and also went off to Canada for university. We've been singing O Canada ever since but there are some days I wish we were all back in France playing on the beach in Brittany.

Le Monde has published the subjects for the June 20, 2017 exams for the Bac S, ES and L:  Physics/Chemistry, Economics and Social Sciences and Literature.  Have a look.

Bac 2017 : les sujets de physique-chimie, d’économie (SES) et de littérature

Could I answer these questions?  Not a chance, but perhaps some of you might do better.

The Twilight Express

I was awake at 5 AM this morning thanks to the crows.  One bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios in me and a cuppa coffee in front of me, I am easing into the morning.  Having finished my morning reading, I'm ready to write something that you can peruse over your breakfast.  This one is for my stepfather, the man in my life who has a passion for trains.

The Japan Times reports that the new Twilight Express Mizukaze, a luxury sleeper train that leaves from Osaka, is finally on the track and taking passengers.  "The train accommodates only 34 passengers in 16 rooms. A one-night tour with a room for two costs between ¥250,000 and ¥1.25 million ($225 and $11,300), with suites starting from ¥750,000."

The last time I saw a train this luxurious it was parked in Train World, a train museum in Brussels. Just goes to show you how little I know - luxury trains are not solely a 19th/early 20th century form of elite travel.   This site has a list  of  elegant 21st century train travel possibilities from the Al Andulus in Spain to  the Tsars Gold Trans-Siberian (China, Mongolia, Russia).  Pick one at random and dream a little on a Monday morning.

And then, if you like, you can go to the Twilight Express website and watch their video (a nicely done advertisement). But, personally I much preferred  this bit of reporting from Japanese television (February 2017) which not only takes you on two tours of the interiors of the cars but has reactions and commentary.  You don't need to speak Japanese to share in the appreciation and pleasure.  Enjoy.

In Defense of Costco

One of two Costcos in Osaka http://www.costco.co.jp/p/?lang=ja

Ellen put up a very thought-provoking post the other day about Costco, that huge warehouse/store where one can buy all manner of things cheap and in bulk.  Costco is about to open its first store in France and that has evoked strong reactions from some Americans living in the Hexagon.


Costco is an export from my homeland - the Pacific Northwest of the United States - along with Microsoft, Amazon, RealAudio, and Starbucks.  Yes, the land of sea, salmon, and cedar also produces a healthy crop of capitalists.

That is one reason I can not pretend to be neutral on the subject of their products on distant shores.  There are good jobs in Seattle because of the success of these enterprises.  In 2017 the unemployment rate in the city hovers around 3%.

But there are other reasons I simply can't get too worked up about the arrival of Costco in France.  Frankly, I would have loved to have had one around when the Frenchlings were young.  We were a dual-income family with kids living in Suresnes at the time and we usually shopped for the week on Saturday morning at a French chain called Champion. But more often then we both liked,  we would run out of something during the week and one of us would have to make a run after picking up the Frenchlings from after-school care.   It was a cauchemar. A tired adult with two tired, cranky kids who just wanted to go home pushing the cart through crowded aisles, waiting at the checkout, and then having to bag the groceries herself.  Now there was a market in the center of town in addition to the chain stores but neither of us could frequent the market during the week and, in any case, whether we shopped at one or both, we had to carry our purchases back to the apartment.   We tried to buy staples in bulk (milk, for example) but we were limited to what was available and what we could carry.  (This was years before I took up weight-lifting.)

There was nothing particularly romantic about this aspect of French life.  It was "métro boulot dodo" like all the other families, French or foreign (or both), in our community.  My neighbor who had Wednesdays off took her children to McDonald's that day.  They liked it and she could relax and not have to cook on her day off.  I completely understood where she was coming from. And, in fact, when the Frenchlings began to spend their Wednesdays (no school that day) with my mother-in-law in Paris, she would often take them to McDonald's as well.

To those who find the presence of these things disturbing because, as Ellen says, "they see the arrival of Costco as importation of the worst of American consumerism, American products and so on. ."  I sympathize.  If these things bothered them in the US, than, yes, I'm sure they don't care for them in their adopted country. As for those of you reading this who do not live in France, perhaps you are feeling a bit disappointed at what I've written so far because that doesn't fit your image of a bucolic, unspoiled country and its "we work to live, we don't live to work" people.  However pleasant my French management was, no one was going to give me a morning off to hit the farmers' market.

Is it really so difficult to acknowledge that today an "authentic" French life includes things like chain stores and a struggle with issues like childcare and dual-income families?  The more traditional French life where the children came home for lunch every day, someone was available to shop in the market in the morning, and few families needed daycare was predicated on the fact that many women didn't work.  That has changed and I think this is a good thing.  No, my neighbor didn't have to take her children to McDonald's  but consider that four days a week she pulled a double shift and that we all had to get up early on Saturday to take the children to school. I'd say that anything that made her life (and mine) was greatly appreciated.  Would it have been better if she had taken them to Quick (A French hamburger-fries-shake chain)?

And what really is the difference between a Champion and a store like Costco?  The answer is simple:  the possibility of buying staples in bulk at low prices.  If Costco (or another chain) had existed we would still have bought the bricks of milk but in large quantities so that no one had to shop during the week.  And the threat of the cheaper stores like Costco (and other from the UK, Spain or Germany) has meant that the French supermarket chains offer more services like home delivery at reasonable prices and shopping via Internet - all of which would have been a godsend for me and my spouse when the Frenchlings were little.

As for "American consumerism"  I'm not sure such a thing really exists as a national export.  Can one country, however powerful it purports to be, force another nation to change its habits and mores against its will?  There is something in that accusation that implies that the French themselves are too foolish (or too cowed) to resist.  And that is simply not true.  The French show great powers of resistance and are not be riled because they will protest in ways that make Americans with all their guns look like petits joueurs (small players).  Perhaps even more threatening to Americans are the Japanese who take in a product, flip it around, make it better, and then sell a better version to American markets.

And lastly let's consider that the French are gifted capitalists inside and outside of France.  As Ellen notes in her post: "The fact that there are so many "hypermarkets" in France is a purely French phenomenon, not imported from anywhere else, and they have drained the life out of many town centers."

 I would add that there was a Paul's (a French bakery chain) here in Osaka right next to my spouse's office.  When I went to Shanghai I toured a Carrefour (French supermarket chain) and listened to a presentation on how they intended to conquer the market in China.  All over the world one will find French businessmen and women selling software, carbonated beverages, chain bakeries and supermarkets and even garbage pickup, all ably supported by the French Chambers of Commerce and Business France.  I should know because I worked for French companies that did those things and exported them quite successfully.

For consistency's sake, those who dislike the idea of a Costco in France should surely be equally aghast at a Carrefour in China.  I echo Ellen's question, "Anyone complaining about the imperialism?"  If you happy to be one of the complainers about "imperialism," then please explain the difference between the French and American versions and why you are not writing to Business France to tell them to cut it out.

Societies change for reasons that has something to do with the importation of foreign ideas, good, and services, but that's not the whole story.  Foreign companies don't succeed in a market unless they have something local people want.  Fundamentally, I think deeper societal changes make societies more receptive to imported things that solve genuine problems.  Costco will please them or it won't and it is up to the French to decide that.

But I will not cry for Carrefour or Champion any more than I will shed tears for a more traditional era when women were told to stay home whether they liked it or not.  And anything that makes life easier for working families has my vote.

Know Before You Go?

"This desire of travelers not to be seen as tourists is at least in part connected to an interest
in how they are perceived by the local population of the places they visit. This interest
forms another aspect of the tourist/traveler distinction: travelers try to be culturally sensitive
in a way that they believe ordinary tourists are not. tteehee describes that a tourist
'goes to a place and want everyone to know that they are tourists,' whereas a traveler
'spends time knowing about the place they are going prior to departure. Knowing the
culture, history, customs and way of life' (15 October 2009)."

Week, L. (2012). I am not a tourist: Aims and implications of “traveling”. Tourist Studies, 12(2), 186-203.

There was a comment from a few days ago that had my brain buzzing.  And I cannot thank the reader enough because while I think that she is fundamentally right, I wasn't sure why I agreed with her.  But I like a good puzzle.

There is something really irritating about  watching ignorant travellers who could not be bothered to learn some basic information about a place before he/she carelessly meanders into it.  Case in point:  Donald Trump's recent foreign adventure where he explained to the Israelis that he had just got back from the Middle East.  Note the reaction of the gentlemen on the right in the video.  That is a cringe worthy moment from someone who at the very least should have asked for and got a better briefing before going to the region to represent 320 million Americans.  Israel is in the Middle East, Mr. Trump.  Just look at the map:

Now we all make mistakes but you don't have to be one of the "over-educated eggheads" to find this really troubling of a "world leader."  At the very least it was rude - a signal that he could not be bothered to know where in the world Israel is.  At worst, not understanding the geography means that he doesn't understand what drives much the of politics of the region.  (See The Revenge of Geography by Robert Kaplan.) And that simply will not do.

Trump is a leader and normally we expect better from our representatives.  But what about the traveller/tourist?   How much basic knowledge should be acquired before arriving as a guest in a foreign country?  "Should" I think is the right word because a certain judgment of ourselves and others is at work here

The answer to the first question surprisingly enough can be "None."  Some people travel purely for leisure.  It's a vacation, not a "back to school" experience.  How many French tourists on the beaches of Brittany care about the history of the small towns and beaches they appropriate in the summer?  My grandmother used to go every year with her friends to Maui.  What were they looking for?  Fun.  And you have not lived until you have watched a group of middle and working- class senior citizens living it up outside the continental US:  Sex, Drugs (alcohol) and Rock 'n Roll," on those beaches, baby.

There is another group that prefers not to know and these are the ones seeking an authentic adventure.  Tourism/travelling (and even migration sometimes) is "mediated" by blogs, guidebooks, expatriate autobiographies and the like.  As for the historians, geographers and sociologists they are not neutral (or even honest) in what they write about other countries and people and so they cannot be entirely trusted.  True adventure is avoiding all of them and relying on direct experience which is superior to secondhand information even from the locals.  One participant cited in L. Week's article above said:  "Your signs of authentic this or traditional that don’t blind me into believing these are the real things in your world. No, I know better." (p, 188)

Finally, there is the "Did you know?" syndrome.  This is where a traveller/tourist turn to a local and says, "Did you know that in your [insert country/city/region]...?"  Think about that one for a minute. Is the purpose of all that study to educate the locals about their own country and culture?  One would hope not but, alas, it happens.  I had lunch with a friend today who described listening to a North American teacher explaining Japan to his/her Japanese students.  She was torn between hilarity and mortification as he/she filled the entire English lesson with this nonsense.  I think the intention is good - showing the locals that you have taken to the time to learn something about them.  However, it can come off as rude and condescending.

In Week's article she used this quotation from another article where a  local in Indonesia gave his thoughts about the tourists versus the knowledgeable travellers:

''The traveler thinks they know everything about the local people and the country. But it’s usually
because some other traveler told them before. But they do whatever they like—some travelers
are good, but 90 percent are not, they can be very impolite. With the tourist, everything is
organized, so they don’t destroy as much. The traveler wants to see something new, and wants
it to be cheap then tells others about it. I prefer tourists; they go to specific places, it is more
professional. But the traveler is uncontrolled—they won’t go to the places already prepared for
them; they want to go to other places and then they spoil it—and don’t spend any money!'
(quoted in Mowforth and Munt, 2009: 142)" (p. 197)

Is what I've written thus far an indictment of the knowledgeable traveller who spends some time learning something about the destination country and how not to offend as a guest?  Not at all.  Frankly, I don't think any knowledge is useless, but not everyone agrees that this is a high priority.  If I had told my grandmother that she should stop partying on the beach with her friends and spend more time reading about and interacting with the local culture, she would have blasted me off the island with a lecture about the lot of working-class people, the Great Depression and World War II.  And, yes, I would have shut my mouth.  Such is the power of a grandmother.

Aside from the whole question of values and "shoulds" I can think of a very important reason to learn before you go (if you don't happen to be the president of the US who has higher and more important  responsibilities) and that is safety.  Some of the most important things that aren't talked about in guidebooks or expat autobiographies is that, like in nature, some of the mammals are predators.  You may know that it's dangerous to go off the beaten path in the forest because of the snakes, but be realistic cities, towns and even rural areas have their own reptiles that slither on two feet.

There are neighborhoods in many places where you would not want to go at night, if at all.  A friend of mine in Paris has a chilling story about an American woman that she and her husband helped after she had been raped. They called the authorities, got her to a hospital and called the consulate.  The consulates in Tokyo issue warnings about certain bars in Roppongi where foreign men and women are lured away, beaten and stripped of their wallets and purses. In Thailand, a place I was clueless about and where we went for our 25th wedding anniversary, the guide came with a driver: a really big guy with really big muscles who told us he did martial arts.  I didn't "get" why he was there until we stopped at an ATM in a small town. I stayed in the car and the guide stayed with me while Mr. Driver accompanied my husband to the cash machine.  And I remember a trip to Central Washington, USA which has the most beautiful scenery around and there was dog that came up to us begging for food.  The dog had been beaten and starved.  Looking past the dog was a house where the owner of the dog lived and he looked like one scary SOB. None of us were willing to confront him even though the poor dog broke our hearts.  It's one of the few situations where I really wished I had had a gun.  Problem is, I was pretty sure the owner had one.

In Deep Survival Laurence Gonzales said, “Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion.”   That is just as true in "civilization" as it is in the "wild."   It can be deadly to focus too much on the fun, the adventure, and what other people think of you because you might forget that getting back in one piece with your knowledge is just as important as going in the first place.  And so I humbly suggest that the most important qualities you can take abroad are as Gonzales says: "Gratitude, humility, wonder, imagination and cold, logical determination..." And, yes, knowledge.

The Roots of My Status Insecurity - the Sum of All my Fears

"Perhaps the most popular way for the anti-tourist to demarcate himself from the tourist, because he can have a drink while doing it, is for him to lounge - camera less-at a cafe table and with palpable contempt scrutinize the passing sheep though half-closed lids, making all movements very slowly...Any conversational gambits favored by lonely tourists, liked "Where are you from?" can be deflected by vagueness.  Instead of answering Des Moines or Queens, you say, "I spend a lot of time abroad" or "That's really hard to say."  If hard-pressed, you simply mutter "Je ne parle pas Anglais," look at your watch and leave."

"Tourist angst like this is distinctly a class signal.  Only the upper elements of the middle classes suffer from it..." It is the middle-class that has read and heard just enough to sense that being a tourist is somehow offensive and scorned by an imagined upper class which it hopes to emulate and, if possible, be mistaken for." Fussell, P., 1982. Abroad: British literary traveling between the wars. [Kindle version] Oxford University Press, Oxford.

When I first read Fussell a few years ago I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.  He is pitiless and often unbelievably arrogant and yet, I have the sense that he is on to something.  The above passage from his book Abroad both fascinates and repels me because one way to look at my migration journey is through the lens of class.  And that is a mighty uncomfortable exercise.

But I'm going to take a stab at it today. I need some clarity.  I feel as if I am foundering as I try to analyze my experience and how it came to that I was, for a time, I was one of the anti-tourists and even an anti-migrant.  I believe that how that came to be has its roots in where I started.  I struggle to explain it because social class is not considered a topic fit for polite company where I came from which I would describe as "anti-class."  It was downright rude to imply that anyone you met was anything other than the generic "middle-class."  It was a fantasy of social equality that didn't exist in my childhood and doesn't exist now.  

I believe that we take our class baggage with us when we go abroad.  It's not just social capital that we carry, but attitudes.  In some cases it is a sickness of self-loathing - a sense that our roots in the home country are something we have risen above, something from which we need to disconnect or disavow.  Human beings are, I think, hierarchical by nature.  The search for recognition and status are universal.  I don't think we can help ourselves.  Those who argue that it doesn't matter are either those who bring their class or "anti-class"  sentiments with them or those who have so much social and economic capital that they need worry far less about it.  Wherever you're from and wherever you landed, there are class systems into which the migrant/expatriate integrates and if that weren't bad enough, add a third and fourth which are:  the migrant hierarchy in that country and the hierarchy of whatever particular migrant group you are associated with (whether you like it or not.)

What follows is how I see that class "baggage," where I think it took me, and how I came to see it for what it was.  The overall lesson?  Time wounds all heels.

I was born near Seattle in the 1960s in what is called unincorporated King Country.  The family moved to Olympia (population about 30,000) just before I started school.  My father was a fonctionnaire (civil servant) and my mother was a college student.  Very middle-class, you might say.  And yet there were signs that we were not living in the top levels of that class.  There was the big truck and camper parked in the driveway.  There was the fact that we painted (badly) our house, ourselves in one color (white).  The house was heated by a wood stove which left the upper floors very cold in the winter.  Across the street from our house was a family where the main breadwinner was a lawyer.  To our left another house was occupied by a college professor and his wife, a nurse. 

 I remember that money was an issue and it remained one until I went off to college. Saving money was a top priority and arguments about money were common.  My father once yelled at me because he had given me my allowance and I went straight to the bookstore downtown and spent every penny.  He said I was "irresponsible."    What is almost as bad as being poor? Being told constantly that the family is close to it and that your actions might tip the family into it.  Was it true?  Were we really that close?   I have no idea.  But I'm over 50 years old now and I still have a complex about money and saving and a strong sensitivity to being told that spending money is somehow a very bad thing.

It was also the start of status anxiety.  In a nutshell, we were definitely not working-class but we sure weren't upper middle either.  The pick-up, the guns, the dog, and the hunting, fishing and camping made us a bit out of place in our neighborhood.  I grew up with the uneasy feeling that we were not like our neighbors and that some of them really didn't like my parents.

My parents divorced when I was 12 and my mother moved to Seattle.  I went back and forth on the Greyhound bus for years.  Seattle was a different world.  It was the closest big city and it was full of things to see and do.  My mother and stepfather's house was filled with visitors who were well-educated, well-read, well travelled.  Some had talents that approached genius:  music, art, editing, cooking.  Some were self-educated, others had gone to universities, even Ivy League ones.  There was a huge bookshelf in the living/dining room and me and my siblings were encouraged to read anything we liked.  There was no television.

Two very different worlds.  In one, buying and reading a book was "frivolous" ("Get your nose out of a book and go outside to play.  I mean, Jesus Christ, kid...."), in the other not reading books was unthinkable.  When I went off to college in Seattle, I made my choice and I never lived in Olympia again.

In retrospect there was a lot to be thankful for and to remember with fondness.  I always had a roof over my head.  I went to good schools in Olympia.  Camping was downright fun.  The Nanny Noodles daycare (an intentional community of LGBT women) was wonderful.  The Evergreen State College was cool.  The wood stove always smelled nice and I loved the dry heat.  I still miss that dog.

I went to the University of Washington in Seattle.  At the time it wasn't a top school (it has a better ranking now).  I started as a business major because my father paid the very modest tuition for a few years and he argued that it was really the only "practical" major to have.  I hated it.  I skipped class and was on a downward slide to failure until I discovered something I liked and was good at:  Political Science. Murmurs of "impractical" and " where will you find work" and so on. I stopped speaking to my father. I got a job to pay my tuition.   I brought my grades up and started enjoying school.  And there I met an exchange student - the Frenchman who would later become my husband.  

So when I left the US in 1989 this was the sum of my capital.   Financial capital was zero.  In fact I was in debt.  Social capital?  Precious little.  I had a degree from a university that the French had never heard of.  My major was a liberal arts degree that had questionable status since some French knew that a US Political Science program was not the equal of the French programs.  I had excellent written French but I couldn't speak it.  The only connections I had were my husband's family. I was badly dressed and socially awkward.  I was scared out of my mind. Leaving the house provoked enormous anxiety.  For the first few months the only trips I made were to French conversation classes at the Alliance Francaise.  Some of my spouse's friends liked me well enough, but others made it very clear that they didn't. I looked for work and found a job as a secretary at an NGO in Paris where I had no status and very little pay.  But it was a job.

At that time insertion into the social world of the Parisian expats was a nightmare for me.  My French mother-in-law found an American club and a sponsor (yes, at the time you had to have someone vouch for you).  I was intimidated by the "ladies who lunched."  Sleek, well-dressed women with degrees from prestigious US universities living in posh Paris apartments and whose husbands were captains of industry.  They were higher up the social ladder than me before they came to France and were comfortably settled in the upper levels of French society.  Their French sounded perfect and their children appeared to be effortlessly bi-lingual.  The worst moment came when I went to some event and they were encouraging me to come to some tea in the mid-afternoon.  I replied that I couldn't because I had to work and they all stared at me.  If I had stayed longer, I might have met more American women in the same situation.  As it was, I fled that club and only returned after many years.

So even after I settled in and integrated more or less successfully (I even found a job in IT with a French company),  those insecurities just wouldn't go away.  That is when I really became the anti-tourist/anti-migrant.  I didn't want to be around other Americans and I passed that off as good taste on my part (under the guise of "the truly integrated don't need the crutch of other Americans.")  Truth is I didn't want to meet anyone who was more integrated, more travelled, had a better job, owned their own home, had bi-lingual children in an international school, and had lived in France far longer than I had.  In my own way, I created my own "bubble" where I could be the Exotic Beast - the only American at work or in my social circle.  Stepping out of it meant confronting the fact that there were about 75,000 other Americans in Paris alone and I was hardly a special snowflake.  Only in my "bubble" could I pretend to be a higher class than I really was; an "expat" and not a "migrant."

How long did it take for me to get my head out of my own behind?  A long time.  The big blow was finally admitting I was an alcoholic.    The seeds were there before I left the US but the progression of my addiction played out in France.For years my anxiety and insecurity was calmed by endless glasses of wine.  No one is responsible for this but myself but I would say that under the guise of "integration"  and "When in Rome..."  I escaped detection until the day I just couldn't do it any more.  
An alcoholic builds a house of lies and my "bubble of integration" turned out to be exactly that - a cunning bit of architecture that only existed in a delusional mind.     I was not better than the tourist - for crying out loud, my working-class grandparents were tourists and happy to have the opportunity to just kick back and enjoy the ride.  I was sure not better than my fellow migrants/expats.  In fact, we had a whole lot in common and since getting sober I have met a lot of people like me with roots in small towns or cities holding next to useless liberal arts degrees from lesser-known schools who nonetheless found a way to go abroad.  

Just as tourism became something attainable by the middle and working-class, so, too, has migration come to be within their reach.  In my study of Anglophones in Japan most came to work in the education industry - mostly English teachers.  There was a brief period in the 1980s to 1990s in Japan when these jobs had some status and good pay.  That's pretty much gone but they still come to Japan from the US, Canada, the UK and Australia to work in the conversation schools, public and private primary and secondary schools, and sometimes even the universities.  In France they come as au pairs (domestic work) or as the spouses of  French citizens.  Think about that for a moment because it's huge.  

The roots of tourism come from the "Grand Tour" where Englishmen and women (and later some Americans) headed off to the Continent for a few years accompanied by a private tutor with all expenses paid by parents.  Once upon a time that was what going abroad meant - it was a personalized educational experience for the upper classes where they did, in fact, learn languages and culture and so much more. Some even stayed. Look around you, my fellow Anglophone migrants, and you will see very few of your fellow migrants/expatriates who could even dream of such a thing.  
Would I have liked to have such an experience?  To have gone to France with a guide and immersed myself for a couple of years in French culture and language?  To not worry about getting a job until I was ready?  To forgo the anxieties about money?  To send my children to bi-lingual international schools?  Hell, yes!  Was it within my reach?  Hell, no.

I and others could only go in the first place because there was a spouse waiting on the other side or a job.  We were not the products of prestigious schools with degrees that would have propelled us into the upper classes of our home country societies.  We did not have parents with the financial resources or connections to help us migrate and insert us into the host society at a high level.  We had to finance our travels ourselves and that meant work which might be poorly paid, have few benefits and confer low status.  I think it is entirely justifiable to have a sense of pride at what we have accomplished.   Luck had something to do with it, but so did effort and persistence.

This is not the picture our home country citizens have of "expatriates" but I think it's a truer one than the stereotype of the "rich expat drinking by the pool."  And that is why I rage when I hear the latter.  It is inaccurate in most cases and can even be a lie as evil as any delusion that came out of an alcoholic mind.

Today I am still conflicted about all this.  I still have residual resentment toward people I perceive as having had an easier time.  I wish a lot of my experience abroad had been different. Going with some money would have improved things, not to mention a lot more therapy.   I feel a deep sense of shame at how badly I behaved. The temptation to join in on the bashing of tourists and the less-integrated migrants is still there - that old game of building myself up while tearing others down.  As Fussell points out, it is popular sport and fun. However, it's a little like taking a drink; feels great going down, but the morning after is something else.

Over the years I have also made progress in acceptance of my home country experience.  For all that I have said here about it, there was a lot to like and be grateful for. There is nothing like the taste of fresh salmon or a trip over the pass to Eastern Washington.  My great-grandparents were lovely people and I miss them.  My working-class grandparents were fun people - conservative but genuinely curious about the world and they made the most of their years after retirement.  I miss them, too.

I have a wood stove in my house in France.  I don't think anyone in my family in France understands what it means to me:  the smell and the heat bring back good memories from my childhood.  It makes me feel safe.  Sometimes I still miss Seattle with its public market, and wood houses.  Some days I would give anything to be back in my mother's kitchen with her making pancakes and me sitting on the couch with a coffee and a paper copy of the New York Times.   

What a relief it was when I finally admitted that my life abroad was not necessarily better than the one I left behind; it was just different.  And I am losing that fear of failure and that constant comparing of myself to others that caused so much anxiety for so many years.  However, when I go back to the West Coast and we speed down the freeway toward the farm in the Willamette Valley I watch the Olympia exits go by and I think about stopping and showing my children where I spent part of my childhood - where the roots of my fears about people and class and status began. 

It never happens.

A Day at Kansai Gaidai University

This morning the younger Frenchling and I got up early and took the train to her university here in Japan for an end of studies ceremony and reception for the international students.

I was very impressed by the university and her professors and the Kandai Gaidai University campus had the most beautiful landscapes.

For the ceremony the students were invited to wear a kimono to the ceremony. (Please, please appropriate our culture absolutely positively with our permission and under our supervision.)  With some urging on our part, the younger Frenchling agreed to this and that is how we found ourselves in a classroom at the school at 7:45 in the morning.

There was no putting on of the kimono by anyone - this was not a DIY project.  Instead each young woman chose a kimono, had her hair styled and was dressed by a very charming and meticulous older Japanese woman.  It took about 20 minutes to dress each girl.  There were undergarments and ties under the kimono to make it just just right.  And then there was the folding so they would lay just so.  Clips were added to the collar to make it stand out from the neck.  The obi was then wound firmly around the waist and tied into a bi-colored pattern at the back.  Next came the socks and the sandals.  The final touch was a purse.  Everything was, of course, beautifully color coordinated and, needless to say, there were no (and no chance of) wardrobe malfunctions.

What a wonderful day it was.  The younger Frenchling looked lovely, the ceremony went off without a hitch with her very proud mother watching and loving every moment of it.

Here are a few photos before I get a much-needed coffee.  Enjoy your weekend.

The Boundaries of Belonging

I went to lunch the other day with Ellen and as always we had a fine time and a good chat.  I am happy to report that wherever we went we spoke French and everyone spoke French right back at us without blinking an eye.

That pleasant experience brought up a theme that I return to often which is the idea of belonging.  I had some negative reactions to a previous post where I described the same situation in two countries: the non-native tries to speak the local language and the native adamantly replies in the foreign language. I construed this as a negotiation where one party tries to assert that he or she belongs and the other contests that assertion.  Some of the critics made very good points so I thought I would revisit the topic today and try to do better.

Belonging has two sides.  The first is the sense of comfort and safety we feel when we belong.  We are part of something larger than ourselves.  It can be a nation or a neighborhood. It's the ability, even the right, to say "we" and to speak and act as a member.  The other side is the acceptance of the group. The other members have to acknowledge our claim and that is contingent on our meeting the requirements for membership.

As migrants we are usually (but not always) from a place where we take our belonging for granted. Perhaps we have those "primordial ties" to a culture or a community: we were born here; we speak the language; we are citizens because our parents were citizens.  Belonging to a political community was our birthright which Ayelet Schacher in The Birthright Lottery likens to inherited property and privilege.

This is the base upon which we go out into the world.  And what do we find there?  Places where we don't just belong as a matter of course.  Rather, we must negotiate our right to stay and belong.

My sense is that we underestimate the kind of existential crisis we go through when we are confronted with how out of place we really are. Through not fault of our own we are not like the people in our new place who were born there and have their own sense of taken-for-granted-belonging.  In the beginning of our settlement, our claims to belonging are very weak or even nonexistent.  We reach for anything that links us to the new place however tenuous: marriage to a national, language studies, professed love for the country and culture.  Over time we can point to other things like mastery of the language and culture, success in our chosen profession, children, how long we have lived in the country and perhaps our citizenship status.

Nonetheless, our claims to belonging on those and other grounds can be contested because we weren't born here, our parents were not citizens, this language is not our first language.  And where the boundaries to true belonging contain one or more of these things, our efforts to achieve the taken-for-granted-belonging that we had where we came from will be frustrated. It is perhaps unachievable, anywhere; even in the home country once many years have passed.  How many times I have heard return migrants talk about how their former country no longer feels like home and how they don't really belong there anymore?  Many, many times.

I think that many of us have this deep sense of insecurity in our host countries: a constant need to signal that we really truly belong here.  It manifests itself in comparisons. Some of us hold ourselves up as models of integration: we live in the "real" [insert country here] while those others live in an expat bubble and make grammatical errors when they speak the language. Over the years I have become very suspicious of this distancing and dramatic assertions of belonging.  What would happen, I ask myself, if I talked to their neighbors, spouse, co-workers and friends?  What would be the group consensus about their/our degree of belonging? How many of us, however long we have lived in our host country, would be comfortable being subject to such scrutiny?

Something like that happens when we are in public and a native refuses to speak the local language with us or when someone consistently refers to us as their [insert nationality here] friend (even if we have citizenship).  I agree that it is not necessarily nefarious.  But what it does is burst our bubble (if only for a moment) about finally getting to a place where we are again able to take belonging for granted.

Why Do You Stay?

Yet another email that asks, "Why do they [migrants/expats] stay?"  That's a deceptively simple question that never has an answer.  Twenty years ago, I had a few answers that I dutifully and even happily pulled out whenever the question arose.  Today,  I have a completely different set of answers because I'm 50, not 20.  I changed, the US changed, France changed.   For that matter the world changed.  Go figure.

There are answers and there are rationalizations.  We are all frogs in a pot and someone else is controlling the heat.  But we can jump out and go elsewhere.  Maybe.  Never underestimate the power of inertia.  Nearly 97% of the people on this planet never pack up and leave their country of origin.  Is it because they are happy?  Or is it because they are risk averse?  One way to answer the question, "Why do you stay?" is to turn it around and ask the native-born-never lived anywhere else, "Well, why are you still here since you don't seem all that happy ?"  Is that a fair question?  You bet it is. If someone is going to ask me why I stay abroad, then why they stayed put is fair game.  

But recently I've started asking another question because I've met more and more people who move and move again (those Serial Migrants Ossman studies).  These are not the assigned expatriates (people who are sent by a company and rotated to subsidiaries around the world) but true nomads that move from one place to another, settle for a time, and then decide to try something else, somewhere else. Some even become citizens before they leave because, you never know, they might want to come back and who needs the immigration hassles?

The native-born citizens and other immigrants react very negatively to this.  Why come to a country, settle, and then leave?  Is there something wrong with our country or is there something wrong with you?  We still have this model in our head of immigration where the immigrant arrives, puts him or herself on the path to citizenship and then happily stays in his adopted country until the end of his days.  That's what immigrants are supposed to do, right?

It's never been that simple.  Entire papers and whole books have been devoted to the topic of return migration.  A substantial number of immigrants to the US in the early 20th century stayed long enough to become citizens before they packed up and went back to the home country or to a third country.  Immigrant does not equal "I plan to stay here forever."  Here are a few examples that I've encountered:

• A refugee family who escaped the Soviet Union and landed in the US.  They stayed just long enough to get US citizenship for the entire family and then they left a year later to live in Europe where they stayed.

• A young couple with different nationalities living in Northern Europe.  Prior to that they had lived in Asia for years. When I talked with them, they were exploring their options and were thinking Eastern Europe, Middle East...

• Retirement migrants who immigrated once in their lives and when their working days were over, found a third country (or went back to their country of origin) to retire in.  The adopted country was a great place but wasn't necessarily their ideal place to grow old in

• A young woman who goes from one global city to the next because after 5 or 10 years she gets bored. She wants the thrill of discovering a new place and she wants to be around people like her:  people who have lived and worked in many countries, not just one or two.  As for the immigrants and stay-at-home citizens in the countries she's lived in, she finds them equally uninteresting. (And, yes, that shocked the hell out of me. I sure never thought of it that way.)

So the question the global nomads ask the stay-in-the-adopted-country-forever immigrant is "Why do you stay?  The world is your oyster.  Especially if you are a citizen because you can always go back."

It's the same question asked by the stay-at-home citizens but it's coming from a very different place. They aren't arguing that we should go home and there is something wrong with us because left our home countries; they are saying that we should get out more.  The adopted country is not all there is.

So why are we still here?

Damn good question.

And for an interesting and eloquent look at how people make move or stay decisions over the course of a lifetime, have a look at this post by Iris Kapil over at her blog Iris Sans Frontieres:
Transitioning into old age from a life lived across cultures — Part IV