The Japanese have a very, very dry sense of humour. I can wholly relate to this sense of humour (which seems impermeable to Westerners) because I also come from an extremely authoritarian (and somewhat collectivist) society. For instance, they think that any departure from protocol, especially when it is unintentional, is remarkably hilarious.
When I began writing my memoir, I began writing it with this kind of sense of humour. I wrote, for instance, of a situation where my friend and I began gently rocking our school desk (we shared one old fashioned wooden desk between two). This was in a classroom where students were actually beaten with a wooden bat for inadvertently dropping their pencils off their desk, or some other very minor crime.
So, we began rocking our desk very gently and then we looked at each other through the corner of our eyes and saw a gleam, which was a dare to rock the desk to more extreme angles. As we increased the extremity, suddenly the desk slipped through our fingers and fell over. Naturally, we were flabbergasted at the possible punishment that would be extracted for our “crime”.
In my narration of this story, I drew a loose parallel between the “irredeemably falling desk” and the political situation of the time.
I would say that this was so subtle that even many of my compatriots would not have grasped it. It makes sense whilst one is still in an authoritarian context, but less so when one has entered a liberal democracy.
Still, if I were to narrate the story to any of Japanese, they would be in hysterics. So, it just goes to show.
STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism
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