Welcoming White Day through a Mental Wreck: Romance and Struggle to Regain Normalcy
"The earthquake made me feel that my life can end at any moment, so I should just enjoy it to the max right now..." These were the spoken words of a colleague as we walked through the streets of our neighborhood, slowly filling back with people after two days of being deserted. Shops are opening back up and some are boldly trying to convey a romantic atmosphere to the passer-by. Yes, the first "holiday" since the quake was in, and people, in their defiance to the power of nature, are going to enjoy it to the fullest.
This highly commercialized "holiday" is called White Day, a unique concept only in Japan and Korea when males who received chocolates from females on Valentine's (exactly a month ago) are supposed to give back certain gifts. The extensive social hierarchy means that often (rather, mostly), the gifts on both sides were given as social obligations rather than actual liking, and the social burden is especially on the guys to give back most expensive, most elaborate gifts to the females.
Of course, this is not to say that this commercially created holiday is a completely commercial phenomenon. The gifts, even among regular friends, do allow for more intimate bonding and do act in some ways as long-term social lubricants. And perhaps, as people continue to recover from the mental shocks of the earthquake, such positive effects may just be the right formula for forgetting, at least briefly, the emotional pains.
Romantics throughout history have concluded that love, of all human emotions, has the most power to takeaway pain and enliven daily lives. And I do certainly agree that love does indeed bring excitement to our boring daily lives. But as I attempted to express in my extremely badly written post in Korean yesterday, true love requires extensive and deep sharing of cultural values, an element we foreigners have a hard time finding as we are perceived by local to be "temporary long-term visitors."
There is a Chinese proverb that says, "beauty is created by distance." Long distances of separation, rather than decreasing love, may in fact increase it. Yearning generate desires, and desire is the basis of love (as it can also be for friendships). How people with far-away connections reacted to the earthquake is a fine example. Many people in Japan, myself included, received sudden contacts from across the world asking about our conditions, and many have expressed their desires to be here in Japan, lend us their hands, and help us in anyway they can. If that is not considered love, I really do not know what really is.
But, on the flip side, enjoying romance in the midst of a national disaster is not that particularly poetic in the minds of many people. This would not happen in the socially disciplined Japan, but in any other country, a populace faced with the possibility of dying tomorrow in the worst case scenario may easily use the "go for it" mentality in terms of romantic relationships at such a time.
That is, rather than thinking about seeking a happy ending to a long-distance one that seem to have no end in sight, they probably would rather find happy endings closer to home, in a way perhaps more non-discriminant than what is normally required from a mature professional. In fact, in any other country, I would have easily proposed the idea of completely legalizing all the underground brothels (and at the same time, closing down all the stores and deploying more police) to guarantee short-term social stability.
Well, enough of that tangent. The bottom line, really, is that Japan is such a safe country that even in the aftermath of a calamitous disaster like the quake two days ago, people can still think about romance and gift-giving. The economic order of the country is not at all disturbed (no underground black markets popping up, even in disaster zones), allowing people to still economically celebrate a commercial holiday. In this sense, Japan deserves our admiration and the Japanese people all deserve to have a happy, if a bit toned down, White Day tomorrow.
This highly commercialized "holiday" is called White Day, a unique concept only in Japan and Korea when males who received chocolates from females on Valentine's (exactly a month ago) are supposed to give back certain gifts. The extensive social hierarchy means that often (rather, mostly), the gifts on both sides were given as social obligations rather than actual liking, and the social burden is especially on the guys to give back most expensive, most elaborate gifts to the females.
Of course, this is not to say that this commercially created holiday is a completely commercial phenomenon. The gifts, even among regular friends, do allow for more intimate bonding and do act in some ways as long-term social lubricants. And perhaps, as people continue to recover from the mental shocks of the earthquake, such positive effects may just be the right formula for forgetting, at least briefly, the emotional pains.
Romantics throughout history have concluded that love, of all human emotions, has the most power to takeaway pain and enliven daily lives. And I do certainly agree that love does indeed bring excitement to our boring daily lives. But as I attempted to express in my extremely badly written post in Korean yesterday, true love requires extensive and deep sharing of cultural values, an element we foreigners have a hard time finding as we are perceived by local to be "temporary long-term visitors."
There is a Chinese proverb that says, "beauty is created by distance." Long distances of separation, rather than decreasing love, may in fact increase it. Yearning generate desires, and desire is the basis of love (as it can also be for friendships). How people with far-away connections reacted to the earthquake is a fine example. Many people in Japan, myself included, received sudden contacts from across the world asking about our conditions, and many have expressed their desires to be here in Japan, lend us their hands, and help us in anyway they can. If that is not considered love, I really do not know what really is.
But, on the flip side, enjoying romance in the midst of a national disaster is not that particularly poetic in the minds of many people. This would not happen in the socially disciplined Japan, but in any other country, a populace faced with the possibility of dying tomorrow in the worst case scenario may easily use the "go for it" mentality in terms of romantic relationships at such a time.
That is, rather than thinking about seeking a happy ending to a long-distance one that seem to have no end in sight, they probably would rather find happy endings closer to home, in a way perhaps more non-discriminant than what is normally required from a mature professional. In fact, in any other country, I would have easily proposed the idea of completely legalizing all the underground brothels (and at the same time, closing down all the stores and deploying more police) to guarantee short-term social stability.
Well, enough of that tangent. The bottom line, really, is that Japan is such a safe country that even in the aftermath of a calamitous disaster like the quake two days ago, people can still think about romance and gift-giving. The economic order of the country is not at all disturbed (no underground black markets popping up, even in disaster zones), allowing people to still economically celebrate a commercial holiday. In this sense, Japan deserves our admiration and the Japanese people all deserve to have a happy, if a bit toned down, White Day tomorrow.
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