I’m not sure if this exactly fits in with our theme of global issues or not, but I am still absolutely astounded by all the people I see when I go to Osaka. I mean, there are people everywhere. I have never seen anything like it in my entire life. Maybe the sheer numbers of people are almost like the crowds you can find in a suburban Canadian Mall on Boxing Day, but even on Boxing Day in Canada I don’t feel the same soul crushing anonymity I feel when I am surrounded by thousands of people I don’t know as I ride the escalator underneath the giant fiberglass whale in HEP Five. I wonder if my Japanese students feel the same oppressiveness that I feel in these huge crowds, or maybe they are used to it. After all, I am the foreigner, and I come from one of the least densely populated countries on the planet. It is obvious that I am going to be affected in some way by the huge numbers of people all over the place, but still I can’t help but wonder if my students sometimes feel lost as well when they are surrounded by so many people they don’t know.

I just finished reading a short story by Haruki Murakami. It is called “The Window”, but I am not sure of the Japanese title. It left me feeling incredibly sad and empty. It is about this guy who has a part-time job in a company called “The Pen Society”. People joined this society to learn how to write better letters. The guy in the story would answer letters that people wrote, and give them corrections, comments and guidance on how to write better letters. The thing is that all the people who wrote letters to this society actually probably didn’t really need to learn how to write better letters. They were lonely, and they had no one to actually write to. That seems so sad. I mean, here we are in one of the most crowded places on the planet, and there are people that are so lonely that they have to join a letter writing school to find someone to connect with. I wonder how people can live in such huge crowds, but not really know anyone. I also wonder if that isn’t the reason that some people actually join English conversation schools like Nova or ECC. It has nothing to do with learning English, and everything to do with the fact that they don’t know how to meet people or connect with anyone around them. Suddenly, by joining a school they can belong to something and connect to someone, even in a small way.

Anyway, is this sense of alienation that people suffer from in modern society a global issue? I’m not sure, but I do feel that it dehumanizes us all just a little bit. There must be better ways to connect with people than joining letter writing societies. The question is how do we connect. The point is we must. It is what makes us human. As E.M. Forster said “only connect!” Human relationships are what are most important. Hmmmmmm, maybe if we can get rid of the sense of dehumanization, we can start to empathize more with our fellow humans. By empathizing with others, perhaps we can escape the sense of alienation so that we can start to think beyond ourselves . . . . who knows?

That’s enough! So long for now . . . .

I mentioned the issue of child labour in class the other day. Here are some articles that I read about this issue:

Gap Reports Labor Violations at Factories

Gap Reports Worldwide Labor Violations

This is the last week we are going to be concentrating on peace and conflict issues, so I thought instead of writing a normal blog, I would let you guys read a poem that I wrote when I lived in Israel. I think many of you are confused by the Arab Israeli conflict. It is very difficult to understand. I don't understand it all all, even myself. I hope this poem will help you to understand some of the emotions people feel when they are in Jerusalem. If you have any questions about the poem, please don't be shy - you can email me!

Jerusalem

I never asked to love you
With your stones soaked in blood
And fantastic dreams of peace
That can only cause war

If I had known
That your embrace
would have destroyed me
Perhaps I would have refused the bliss
That blinded my reality
Clouded my consciousness
With unrealized fantasies
Of temples and rocks

That mean everything
That mean nothing
That are now part of me
The part I cannot get rid of
The part that clogs my heart

With choked disappointments
That suffocate its beating
With exponential intensity
That increases with each torn body
The mangled wrecks of lives
Sacrificed again and again
On an alter of madness
To which you have compelled me to worship
With a greed that belies your beauty

The beauty that drew me in
And now will not let go
Until we are all destroyed
Or your promise comes true

by Scott Douglas, 2001.

I just finished helping one of the groups in my class get ready for their presentation about the Israel-Palestine conflict. They are doing a really good job out of making sense of this complicated issue. I guess it’s because I was just helping some students attempt to understand the situation in Israel, that I feel like writing about Israel again in my blog.

While I was living in Jerusalem in 1999, I was a bartender at a cool little pub called “Strudel”. As a bartender at Strudel, I met a lot of people. This especially helped me when I found out that I had to move out of my apartment in the German Colony area of Jerusalem. I didn’t know where to go, and soon I was going to be homeless. Luckily one of the customers in the pub had a really big two bedroom apartment that he lived in alone. He heard about my problem, and he told me that I could stay with him for as long as I needed to. I felt very grateful that my friend could help me out, but there was only one problem, he lived way in the northern part of Jerusalem in an Arab village called Shu’afat. However, I decided that a place to stay is a place to stay, and I moved in with my friend.

Shu’afat is north of Jerusalem, and it took me about an hour to walk to work. There were no direct busses from Shu’afat to the pub where I was a bartender; however, I could walk through the village first to get into a Jewish part of the city, and then take a bus. It was a hot and dusty walk to the bus, but I didn’t complain seeing as I was living with my friend for free.

Anyway, one day, I was walking through the village to catch the bus and there were two little girls with walking ahead of me on the road. They must have been about 10 or 11 years old, and at that age when little girls have an intimate best friend with whom they share all their secrets. They were walking slowly, arm in arm. As they walked, their heads were bent closely to one another, and their shiny black hair fell forward to cover their faces. You could see they were chatting about all the things that must seem so important to little girls all over the world. As they were chatting and walking they would giggle from time to time, and they were wandering slowly from one side of the road to the other as they moved they way forward, dust rising with their soft footsteps. I was walking quickly up behind them. They must have heard my heavy footsteps because they looked behind them, saw me, and started to giggle. I could hear the soft Arab lilt of their speech as they began to whisper together in earnest. I must have been a sight that they didn’t often see in that Arab village. A big tall guy with sandy blond hair, light skin and green eyes.

They started to walk even more slowly as they became more and more involved in their animated conversation. I soon overtook them. Once I was a little bit ahead of them, I suddenly heard a tiny little voice squeak from behind me.

“Shalom.”

At first I didn’t really believe my ears, and I walked on a couple of more steps.

“Shalom. Shaaaaaalom.”

It was one of the little girls. She gave the word shalom a high pitched musical quality. She was saying hello to me in Hebrew. Hello in Hebrew is the same word as the word for peace. I was a bit surprised that they were speaking to me, and I stopped a second and turned around, mustering as big a smile as I could. “Hello,” I said in English. They didn’t say anything, but they smiled back at me. I turned around and kept walking to the bus, feeling strangely hopeful because a little girl said hello to me in Hebrew.

I was walking to the Keihan Station the other day in Hirakata City when I saw a man selling watermelons on a bridge. Suddenly, I started to remember another time when I saw a man selling watermelons. I was living in Jerusalem at the time, and it was one of those hot days in the Middle East when you start to sweat profusely every time you move. I was with my friends Adam and Oscar, and we were just wandering south along King David Avenue when we saw a man selling watermelons. He was driving a donkey cart along the road calling out “watermelons, watermelons”. Behind him on the cart was a pyramid of beautiful green watermelons. They were green and perfect. We just had to buy one. I ran up and got a watermelon from the watermelon man, and my friends and I went to a park to eat our watermelon.

There is a large park south of the King David Hotel, and we found a tree to escape from the sun, and we sat down with our watermelon. We couldn’t wait to eat it! It was such a hot day, and each of us could picture in our minds how delicious and thirst-quenching this watermelon was going to be. The problem was that the only one of us to have a knife was Adam, and his knife was one of those tiny Swiss army knives popular with backpackers. Adam stuck his knife into the watermelon, but the blade of the knife was maybe only three centimeters long while the watermelon must have been at least 30 centimeters wide and 60 centimeters long. We didn’t know what to do. Just as we were losing heart, a man started chuckling off to our left. He must have been in his fifties, and he had short grey hair and about three day’s stubble on his chin. My first reaction was to feel uncomfortable and to wonder why this man was laughing at us. I guessed that he was an Arab from East Jerusalem, and I figured he thought we were stupid American Jews. Then, in Hebrew he said he would open the watermelon for us. I still felt a little bit uncomfortable with the fact that he was talking to us, but Adam gave this man the watermelon and the Swiss army knife. The man then opened up the watermelon like magic using a few swift strokes with the knife and then cracking it open so that we could eat the juicy flesh inside. We were amazed, and thanked the man profusely while Adam offered him some of the watermelon. The man declined our offer and wished us a good meal. He then walked off smiling.

Inside that watermelon we ate in the park that day were the seeds of peace. If only I knew how to plant them and make them grow so that they could bear fruit and make more watermelons.