2001-08-03 - 6:07 p.m.
all that you can't leave behind (iii)

i don:t need your heaven, i don:t need religion

We drive up to the hotel, which is the wrong hotel, then drive up the next driveway to the right hotel. I turn to my mother and say, "Remember, this is all just samsara."

"You:re right," she says. We have both built up a little familiarity with the local religious custom. "We:re creating all of this... I wonder why we would do such a thing."

someone you can lend a hand in return for grace

We are greeted and shown to our room. We are supposed to have two rooms. We discuss this with the nice gentleman who helps us to our room, who is the only person in the place with good English. We are grumpy and do an imperfect job of keeping in mind that it is not his fault.

We have a very nice room. We figure out that by "2 rooms" the itinerary means the front part and back part of the room, which are separated by those Japanese window things whose name I can:t remember off the top of my head. We are all to sleep on futons in the larger section of the room. Over the next day we will try multiple times without success to apologize to the English-speaking guy for our grumpiness at our arrival. We do manage to explain to him that we misunderstood and will not be needing a second room.

A very nice woman with a traditional kimono and almost no English at all shows us around the room and we tell her when we will be having dinner, breakfast, bedtime. We get settled in. I try to read my book on Tokyo, but it doesn:t hold me. Instead I start one of my other books, Compassion in Action by Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush (Jay, you should read this book at the earliest opportunity).

The nice kimono-clad woman comes and serves us dinner (sitting seiza at a low table, natch--everything here is very traditional). There is a lot of meat in it, and virtually nothing that does not contain meat, so when she comes with the second set of dishes, I ask very nicely, saying I:m sorry for the trouble, if I could just get a bowl of rice or something, because watashi wa saishokushugi des, no meat, no seafood. She gets the picture, goes out and comes back fairly promptly with some rice and a small plate of pickled things. I thank her for going to the trouble.

After Kimono has done her level best, English-speaker comes back and sits seiza in the doorway to tell me he has told the kitchen about this, and confirms again that I do not eat meat, "So, you only eat the, the raw vegetables, yes? and cooked vegetables..." and so on, and I give him the same explanation. No meat, no beef, no chicken, no fish, no squid, thank you, sorry for the trouble.

(Inside, my irritable samsara-attached mind, which has gone through this an astounding number of times since getting here, is saying, "I! AM! A! VEGETARIAN! This means that I do not eat animals! It would be GREAT if I could find one person in this goddamn BUDDHIST country who could get their mind around that concept without needing it explained three or four times and then bringing me meat anyway!" Dear reader may think I am overreacting, but after all this, they brought me a whole fish for breakfast.)

He then goes on to tell me that they can:t make a salad without meat in the kitchen (?!?!?) and so they have to send down to the hotel down the road for one, and it will be fifteen or 20 minutes. I tell him thank you very much, but I:m fine, I have rice and vegetables and will not need that. He looks me right in the eye while I say all this and then says, "Anyway," and finishes telling me about the special salad they:re getting me. I tell him again that that:s not necessary, I:m sorry for all the trouble, and I:m fine with what I have. He looks at me almost as if he were listening.

"Anyway, will be about 15, 20 minutes for your salad. OK?"

I talked about this later with my dad--how this man who was supposed to be making our stay more pleasant had in fact just made me feel guilty, angry and frustrated. He explained that this had something to do with why some places don:t want to serve gaijin; they can:t figure out what we want, how to make us happy, it:s easier to stick to their own countrymen.

I had a suggestion for those places. One strange quirk that Americans have is the desire to be heard. It:s such a major part of public and private concern that we don:t even think of it as a cultural thing. But it looks like it is. So here would be my advice for people who don:t know how to make Americans happy: If an American says something to you, trying to communicate information or emotion, and you act like they don:t exist, that American will be upset. For an American, the proper response to "Sorry, "Thank you," or "That:s not necessary" is not "Anyway." We like you to act like what we say matters.

We:re weird like that.

[Time's up. further uppity ranting tomorrow.]

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