Thanks Marshall Plan
I am in Kyoto right now. Really I am! this is my second time in this city. It’s the 3rd if you count the time came through just to eat Anago at the Nishiki market.
I am here for an imaging conference, but I am taking the opportunity to stay at a ryokan and absorb the culture as best I can.
Japan is generally a pretty foreign place to the likes of people like me, but the extent the people here go to ameliorate the alienation. Here I am the only white person in this little okonomiyaki place but there is a helpful english menu all the same.
Of course this isn’t remarkable. I am attending an international conference conducted in English. The scandanavian girls who stopped and asked for directions, which I was patently unqualified to give, started in English. If the greatest generation fought and died for anything it was to establish English over German or French as the international language.
I am not entirely comfortable with that fact. I took Spanish and Mandarin and do my best to pick up what Japanese I can, but in the end the native speakers I interact with will be better at English than I will ever be at their languages because they have to be.
And for what honestly. True the US publishes more scientific papers than the rest of the world but we as a culture reach so much farther than we as a people.
Or so the complaint goes. But wait, isn’t that a inherently racist statement? Who are the American people? Certainly not all native English speakers and obviously not all white. It is this truth alone that helps me accept the decades of cultural imperialism. Our only claim to our global language is the sheer number of people who learn our language in order to live in America.
epilouge:
On the flight back I caught myself again. I was one of 10 white people on the plane, but not until I lined up for entry did I realize that 1/4 of the passengers were Asian Americans.