Getting lost in the forest

This is not the blog post you were supposed to be reading. Last week, I was supposed to go to Yuki Matsuri, the annual snow festival in Sapporo. This was going to be a regaling of beer soaked adventures, epic snowball fights and making out with inappropriate strangers.

Unfortunately, my digestive system decided it was going to hold me hostage in my apartment, only allowing me out for a series of doctor and hospital visits. I have been prodded and poked - not in the slightly disconcerting Facebook way, but rather in the highly regimented and very disturbing Japanese way.

I won't bore you with too many details of my medical adventures. It might upset your stomach as much as mine and, considering that privacy regarding health issues means something different here (read: expect to have none), you could just call up my board of education and get all the details of my bowel movements.

One of the biggest frustrations has been in the extreme specialization that seems to pervade the medical community here. I have yet to come across the equivalent of a GP. When I first starting having symptoms, I was taken to a doctor who kinda seemed to be a GP-ish type. However, his job seems to be to take care of easily diagnosed viruses and bugs, hand over the antibiotics and send you on your way. Should the medicine not work, he pokes you a bit more and then hands you over to the Internal Medicine department of the closest hospital.

Here I underwent a battery of the standard tests and still nothing concrete showed up. I was sent on my less-than-merry way with a "maybe it's stress". No "the stomach might be a symptom of something else", not even a proper discussion of my eating habits or possible allergies that might be causing weeks of debilitating pain that make it very difficult for me to eat, let alone walk. So, yet another batch of drugs are handed over and my exit from the hospital reverberates as a wave of relief that the gaijin who insists on crying is gone.

Over-specialization seeps into all areas of life here. Walk into a 100yen store and you will be bombarded with special lunch boxes for your banana and do-dads to hold the lid of your instant ramen down while it's rehydrating. Quaint, but hardly necessary. At first, it deludes you into thinking that people are really, really, really good at what they do and are all perfectionists. You think that because the streets are really clean and your Internet is fast that people know what they are doing. But, try and order a filter coffee with real milk and you will be met with complete incomprehension and possibly an anxiety attack that results in a blubbering mess, at which point you just concede to shitty fake cream (even though you can see the milk they use for lattes behind the counter) .

On one hand, specialization does make sense considering you have a relatively large population living on a fairly small cluster of islands. Then, you take into account a culture where societal pressure to conform is it's greatest control mechanism. You also need to create jobs for everyone. So, you get people to do a few things very well and are content to just keep the established systems running. If you aren't content, there are plenty of people to replace you. Before I came to this island, I had this grand idea of "Japanese Efficiency". My post might be delivered quickly, but it also takes six months of humming and ha-ing for me to get the teachers I work with to try a new exercise in class.

In the 100 yen store, this is mostly a harmless waste of your disposable income, but in fundamental systems, like education or political reform, one is so focused on the bark on the trees that one forgets one is even in a forest at all or why one is in the forest or what a forest is in the first place.

It's been an enlightening ride in the grass on the other side. In South Africa, we complain about service delivery, government corruption, the police force that we less faith in than the criminals. At least the criminals are getting their job done. It becomes easy to forget that everything is a system of checks and balances. Yes, it's wonderful to be able to walk home safely at night and to live in a country that boasts a low crime rate. However, Japanese people are not inherently better than South Africans. They are brought up to follow the prescribed norms of society and are effectively cut off and shut out if they choose to deviate. As a foreigner, I am routinely out of the club and I know how lonely it can be even when the only crime you've committed is not eat kyuushoku. (Kyuushoku is the school lunch that all junior high school students and teachers eat and not the way I chose to spend my calorie allowance). The glorious civil obedience comes at the cost of the individual and innovation. While I am willing to accept that the individual over the collective is a western value that causes just as many problems as its opposite, it is the individuals that go out on a limb that help us to progress.

Japan faces it fair share of problems: its stalling economy, declining birthrate and its aging population being high up on the To Do List. Without gutsy individuals who are willing to make concrete and unpopular decisions, it may very well recede into Wikipedia as a has been. In the meantime, I fantasize about House coming to the rescue - after he has nearly killed me a few times, as per the series structure.

My hope for you is that, no matter which country you live in, despite crime statistics and the value of your currency, you can take comfort in the evidence that suggests we are all fuck-ups in one glorious way or another and all that you can hope for is to find a place where the benefits make the fuck-ups bearable. Or, at least, ignorable.