Expatriotism

For the intro music, click here

It’s Christmas Day 2008. I’m sitting alone in Starbucks in Mikage, a suburb of Kobe, Japan, having just dropped off my son Seán for his last day at school here. This is about as dyslocated as an ex-patriot could wish for, supposing that I had indeed wished for it.

Over the last few years, I’ve had occasion to think a lot about national identity, and self-identification. Not just because of the almost embarrassing number of citizenships available to me—and even more to the children—but also because of the time spent away from the country for which I feel the greatest affection. Love, perhaps. Christmas stirs up this pot, as no other time in the year.

As a British/Irish/Canadian[1] citizen, I am one of the few trial citizens I know: to my knowledge my children, Seán and Julian, are the only people to have the right to four passports each, though they will have to choose between Japan and everything else unless Japanese law changes between now and their age of majority. Having being born in the Netherlands, Seán might have made it to five, if the Dutch based citizenship on country of birth, as Americans do, rather than on blood-lines.

With so many options, it would be reasonable to be flippant about nationality. In some ways I am, of course, shuffling through passports to get into the shortest queue at airport immigration counters (“EU citizens only/”Returning Residents only/”Canadians this side”), or filling in that too constraining box near the top of a job application form. Flags of convenience.

Convenience matters, though. Being Irish, or Canadian, rather than British, might offer protection against ill-treatment overseas, or simply a warmer reception. (Being Irish one day got me a free Guinness in the pub in Kobe, which is worth something—well, 700 yen, as I recall). Our countries may not take much responsibility for us abroad, but we have to shoulder all their recent—and not-so-recent—sins: if the Brits have it bad, spare a thought for the American traveler (not to mention the citizens of other, even less fortunate, former imperialist powers.) I am no more responsible for British intervention in Iraq—or, come to that, the bombing of Dresden, or the Chinese Opium Wars—than is my American counterpart for the actions of George W and his Neo-Con handlers over eight appalling years, or for the My Lai massacre or the whole sordid episode that was the Vietnam War—the American War, as the Vietnamese call it—or Slavery, or the genocidal campaigns against the American First Nations (to use a historically accurate piece of Canadian terminology). The list goes on. Nor, as a Canadian, can I take any personal credit for the liberation of Holland, or the protection of the Dutch royal family during the war years, yet the these facts still simmer on the back-burner of the Dutch national consciousness, and Canadians are held in great affection as a consequence. No less gratitude is shown by many French people, as a visit to the towns around the Vimy memorial will confirm. I am not responsible for the seal hunt in the Canadian Arctic, or for Canada’s execrable record on meeting climate change targets, any more than my wife Ayumi should take the rap for commercial whaling, the rape of Nanking, the Burma railway or—much more trivially—for Japan‘s stubborn and intolerable refusal to get rid of Muzak in public spaces (long after it was successfully eradicated in most parts of the developed world). Finally—and just to be absolutely clear—the Northern Irish Troubles were nothing to do with me...

Given all this guilt by association, as undesirable as it is undesired, one would be justified in handling all strains of patriotism as a lab technician might handle bio-hazardous waste: like institutionalized religion, excessive love of country has caused just shit-loads of trouble—there’s no nice way to put it—especially when exported from its native environment. And growing up in Belfast in the 1970s was certainly enough to inspire a profound ambivalence about chauvinistic flag-waving, which had lethal consequences for activists and by-standers alike. Though it is in virtue of the territorial dispute in that part of Ireland that I hold two of my three nationalities, both are irremediably compromised, corrupted, for me, by this same fact. The Northern Irish are—to me—neither flesh nor fowl: not British, as other Britons might accept; nor yet truly Irish, in the eyes of most Southern Irish or the rest of the world. (I know that my family members will disagree with this, and will many others from the province, and no doubt their view is correct for them: self-identification is hardly an exact science, there is no shared truth-of-the-matter. If there were, history would be a much less bloody affair.)

It is perhaps because of this experience that I am so happy to be an ex-patriot. Ex-patriotism affords the necessary focal length for a clear view both of one’s own country and that of one’s host. Terrestrial telescopes perched on Chilean mountaintops give us great pictures of the solar system, but are useless when it comes to charting the Earth; navigating a maze is child’s play if you’re hovering above it in a helicopter. This perspective of estrangement has other mental health benefits: for example, one becomes much less exercised about local and national politics, local education policies, mortgage rates, house-prices, the relative merits of Tesco and Sainsbury’s, and much else about the social fabric of England that so preoccupies its citizens, when one realizes that 99% of the world’s population neither knows nor cares about such objectively tedious facts, being only concerned about the equally mundane trivia of their own locality.

And through all the countries I’ve spent some time in—England, Germany, Canada, the United States, The Netherlands, Japan—I’ve never once felt homesick for that “stroke country”—to adapt the broadcaster Gerry Anderson’s label for Northern Ireland’s second city—however much I might miss the part of my family that lives there. I still don't. Northern/Ireland is like the United States to me, a very familiar foreign country.

Japan, of course, is an unusually pleasant place to practice ex-patriotism. Due to, or perhaps in spite of the post-war reconstruction by the MacArthur administration—I’m not a historian, or political scientist, and even they can’t decide which is the case—the Japanese treat most Westerners inordinately well, in some respects much more favorably and tolerantly than they do their own citizens.[2] And, it should be added, I’m a “weird foreigner”—a hen na gaijin, my father-in-law calls me, with no intended flattery: I love almost all Japanese food, eating things that many Japanese would turn up their noses at—if nose-turning-up were a culturally sanctioned response to disgust, as opposed to the polite smile and peculiar glazed expression that is their translation-equivalent; I live for a day at the onsen, and can go for months, years probably, without a cup of English tea or pint of bitter. Moreover, I feel no particular kinship with other foreigners I meet in Japan, who, for reasons I understand but cannot relate to, feel obliged to make eye-contact, smile, and even engage in conversation for no other reason than that we share the same ex-patriot status. This response doesn’t seem to be triggered by ethnic affiliation: I get the same hopeful glances from South Asians, Central and South Americans, African Americans and North Africans. The physiognomies may vary, but the implication of the facial expression remains constant: you are not Japanese, I am not Japanese, let us be friends... Unfortunately, I am immune to this amiable supplication: I am not Japanese, it’s true, but my family is, and the most I can generally muster is the kind of polite smile and nod that would not look out of place on a Japanese face. Unless, that is, the stranger happens to be Canadian...

Click here for the next track

The official record shows that I became a Canadian citizen at—as is said of other such occasions—“a private ceremony” in September 2000, five months before Seán was to be born to his Canadian father. Like most naturalized citizens, the objective reasons were pragmatic rather than patriotic: certainly the timing was, for I wanted Seán to enjoy the right to live and work in Canada (or in the US under NAFTA) if that should be his choice when he grows up. But unlike many refugees and economic migrants, becoming Canadian was not an end to a means, but the end in itself: the end of my search for a home.

I love Canada. This is no light statement. It is not the love in the ubiquitous slogan where a happy pink heart substitutes for the word “I ¤ NY/ London/ Amsterdam /put your city here". I love Canada as I love my family—not in quite the same way, of course, I wouldn’t abandon my kids for eight years and more!—but in the sense that we are inextricably attached ("in my blood like holy wine"; see below). When the plane touches down in Dorval—do people call it Pierre Elliott Trudeau now?—or Pearson, and I pass through immigration, I am home. When I listen to As it Happens on the Internet, I am home. Even the thought of returning to Canada immediately evokes the kind of clichéd total physical response that informs every tacky romcom or sentimental drama. I rejoice in Canada’s too occasional victories, whether artistic, political, intellectual, or sporting...Hockey, I care about hockey! The defining moment in my appreciation of the patriot I had become came in Winter 2002. Seán had just turned one, and we were living in Ottawa on that night during the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City when Canada beat the US in the Hockey finals: 5-2 Men’s final, 3-2, Women’s final, in case you’ve forgotten). Ottawa is, some might say, the most boring city in the world, especially in winter—which means about 5o weeks of the year—but not that night. As we all poured out into ice and sub-zero temperatures to scream with excitement and joy and congratulate each other—on the cumulative effort of sitting with a six-pack in front of a tv, you might surmise, if you weren’t Canadian—I knew then that I was part of us. Of course, this victory was special: it means so much more to beat the US (twice!) than to beat Finland, and yet I felt none of the triumphalism or schadenfreude that is the downside of the patriotic reflex, rather, “We beat the Americans: we were that good!!” In a line from another Tragically Hip song on the album you’re hopefully listening to by now—did you click the link above?!—Gordon Downie sings: You said you didn’t give a fuck about hockey/I never heard someone say that before! This pretty much sums it up. And I do. I miss Tim Horton’s, too...

My love for Canada works in times of adversity, as well. I share in its shortcomings, am saddened by natural, political or social crises afflicting any of its citizens. Canada rarely lives up to its ideals, though like the US, and some other new countries—or reborn ones like France—it at least has ideals and publicly-stated aspirations, as laid down in the belated Charter of Rights and Freedoms and reflected in the oath of citizenship. Arguably, the failure of Britain to achieve the kind of integration its politicians claim to want stems from its complete lack of national purpose: at any rate, I have no idea what it means to be British beyond right of abode, or of what Britain really stands for. Japan sidesteps the issue of ideals by holding to racial purity: see note 2. I suspect the same is true of less pluralistic European countries. Canada—and the US—shows that patriotism can be decoupled from ethnicity. This is not to trivialize the many serious social problems that remain: for example, in the relationship between old and new Americans (Pre-/Post-Columbus), or between black and white, especially—but not exclusively—south of the 49th parallel. Nor am I oblivious to the failings of multi-culturalism, Canadian–style. Yet, just as I may be disappointed if Seán flunks a school test, or irritated by his refusal to practice guitar, while still demanding to go to the lesson, or driven to distraction by Julian’s tantrums and apparently manic desire not to leave his brother in peace, yet still I have a parent’s profound conviction that my children are fundamentally great and good people. The best, in fact. And so it is with Canada.

I'll end this piece, as it should have started (if you followed the instructions!), with another Joni Mitchell song. It’s not about her love of Canada, I think: if you read the lyrics carefully, the association is only incidental. But for me—and perhaps for other Canadians—it is virtually a national hymn. (Nearly as good as Bobcaygeon, in fact.)
Just before our love got lost you said
I am as constant as the Northern Star
And I said,
Constant in the darkness — Where's that at? —
If you want me I'll be in the bar.
On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue tv screen light
I drew a map of Canada, O Canada
With your name sketched on it twice.
You're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter, and so sweet
I could drink a case of you, oh darling
And I would still be on my feet, I would still be on my feet.
From A Case of You, Joni Mitchell (Full lyrics here)


[1] The sequence reflects the order in which I obtained passports, nothing more.
[2] At least this is true for all the things that don’t fundamentally matter. True integration is another issue entirely. It is reported that third- and fourth-generation Korean Japanese still face powerful discrimination, due to the way the Japanese have of defining nationality, which is, certainly to North Americans, deeply offensive and highly racist: if Japanese blood runs through your veins, you are Japanese: if not, you are foreign, no matter Japanese is your own language and sole culture, no matter when your ancestors came to Japan, no matter—in the case of the Koreans—whether you are physically virtually indistinguishable from “true Japanese”. You don’t belong. Since I have no special need or desire to become Japanese, the fact that I couldn’t if I wanted to is moot. I do worry for my children, though, and hope they are Japanese enough to pass.

PS. Canadians will notice that I use American spelling: no idea why, other than that I get tired of fighting with the Spellchecker...

Between a Rock and a Hard Place?

One of the great things about Google is that it lets you know quickly when the work has already been done by someone else. Trouble is, this is almost always the case: no matter how arcane or perverse the topic may seem to be, it's odds-on that someone will have got there first. They may or may not have made a better job of things than you would, but there is very little under the sun (or anywhere else) that someone has not published an article about. And so I suppose it is unsurprising that a topic as close to life as suicide in Japan should have been well researched and reported.

I've now been in Japan for over a month, which was previously my longest period of stay, and recently my thoughts have been turning increasingly to suicide [PLEASE DO NOT BE ALARMED BY THIS! I am not thinking personally, but more abstractly]. This is a country in which almost everyone has a level of material security, well-being, and personal convenience considerably in advance of anything in the UK or US, let alone in such awful places as DR Congo (which just happens to be in the news today). It could change of course, but at present Japan's average citizen — and there are a lot more of these people in Japan than in England (where median rather than mean income is the more informative measure, and where there is more like a bi-modal distribution) enjoys a very good life in material terms. It is a safe, secure, and comfortable place. And yet the suicide rate is one of the highest in the world. This might seem strange until you think about it more deeply, when it starts to make some sense. For it is only in a society where every material need is met that the conditions are right to face the devastating emptiness of most human existence. By contrast, suicide rates are comparatively low in developing countries where people face a daily struggle for physical survival, also in wartime in developed countries, where again, such effete metaphysical concerns tend not to rank as highly as finding food and safe drinking water for oneself and one's children, and staying away from bombs and bullets, or machete-wielding neighbours. [The exception is where conditions are truly atrocious: I've just finished reading Antony Beevor's Berlin: 1945 The Downfall about the Soviet capture of Berlin at the end of the Second World War, where many Germans, especially women, killed themselves in advance of what they believed was a fate worse than death. But even here, or in Nazi death camps or the Soviet Gulag, most people seem to have clung on to life past hope, past worth]. Paradoxically, then, a half-life may be better than a full one, not because hopes are unfulfilled but because people have no time to appreciate the emptiness beyond material well-being.

That said, the UK is not that much less comfortable, nor less developed than Japan, and yet the suicide rate is considerably lower: 7.05 (UK) vs. 24.20 (Japan) per 100,000 people (according to World Health Organization figures). Which got me to wondering what Japanese citizen has or doesn't have compared to their British counterparts. My hunch is that it's religion ... but before you think I've been born again, read on. So in preparing this pronouncement, I checked the Internet. And Lo! (:-)), I found a report, which both confirms and—on closer reading, see below—contradicts my not-so-original intuition. This Gallup poll compared suicide rates in 67 countries with an index of religiosity in each of those countries, and found a reliable negative correlation between the two: r (65) = -.64, p<.001: in other words, the less religious the country, the higher the suicide rate.

Before reflecting on this, it is important to understand how religiosity was defined:

Gallup Polls asked respondents whether religion was an important part of their daily lives, if they had attended a place of worship in the week prior to polling, and whether they had confidence in religious organizations in their countries. The Gallup Religiosity Index reflects the percentage of positive responses to these three items. A nation's index score speaks to that nation's overall level of religiosity.

There are several points to note here, the first of course being that correlation does not necessarily imply any causal relationship. (There a clear negative correlation between wealth and obesity in the UK, but that doesn't mean being poor makes you fat, much less that being slim makes you rich). It is nonetheless interesting to discover from the report that though there is also a positive correlation between wealth and suicide rate—proportionately more people kill themselves in richer countries than in poorer ones—the correlation with GDP was much weaker than that with religiosity). So let us assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a causal relation. Why should it be that being religious keeps the suicide rate down. The editors of the Gallup poll offer three possible interpretations:

...It is thus possible that religion serves as an antidote to the lack of purpose that can make a desperate act such as suicide seem appealing. Believing in something bigger than oneself may allow some people to hold onto life in a world where people without such a belief sometimes give up all hope. Another possibility is that some religious people may believe that committing suicide jeopardizes their security in an afterlife. Alternately, the human connections that people typically forge in religious groups may serve as a buffer against suicide.

Perhaps because of my cultural background, it is the second of these interpretations I find most plausible. Whenever I give time to such thoughts, I am so nearly suffocated by dread of Death and the Hell that will follow—at least according to bogey figures of fundamentalist Protestantism—that I want to cling to this side of the abyss for every second left to me). Without such sanctions, and in the absence of the distraction of baser material needs, and crucially feelings of love and moral responsibility for others, suicide would seem to be an entirely rational and reasonable option. In a sense, the wonder is that the rate isn't even higher, among young adults with no dependents. I suspect that it will only increase in Japan, as young people become more like Westerners, devoid of a sense of obligation to their parents and grandparents.

More anon (especially, on how the correlation, though it works overall, may not in fact explain much about Japan vs. UK, whose religiosity indices are quite comparable).

PS. I should stress, for anyone who reads this but doesn't know me, that it was not my parents who inculcated this Old Testament dread of the afterlife, but the surrounding culture. Wherever it comes from, it's damned hard to shake (forgive the pun!)

PPS. I also want to say that this should not be construed as an anti-Japanese comment. This is truly a wonderful place to live, as I'll talk about in another post. But that's just the (puritanical) point, I suppose...