The Girl At the Shrine

brought to you by Google Translate and doomscrolling

---

If there's one type of content that the Internet has more than enough of, I believe amateur political punditry deserves to lay low for a while. Plenty of bloggers, vloggers and ~unique personalities~ have made careers out of talking over others and sharing passionate opinions without a real destination toward a solution; I'd like to not be one of those people. Plus there are are plenty of professionals who are much better trained to effectively talk about these topics, who are up-to-date on things I've never been able to properly understand. Like foreign relations, or leadership strategies, or war, or the reasons why the leader of the largest country in the world would decide that the beginning of 2022 is a good time to embrace the ideals of manifest destiny at the cost of civilian lives.

I'm tired of being confused. I've shed tears, prayed & sung my heart out to God, and obsessively doomscrolled every day this week looking for a clear answer for why the invasion in Ukraine is happening. No dice. I've been old enough to officially participate in democracy for almost a decade now, and I still don't understand how a tiny handful of adults can rationalize uprooting and ending unknown numbers of lives in an effort to mark their territory like animals, threatening nuclear war in the process.

When big events start to loom incomprehensibly large, I know I'm not the only one who feels microscopic. I often react by trying to rationalize and prioritize, telling myself that this issue is too far away for me to understand properly, but I really never want to travel down that path of thought as long as I can help it.

So I'll use this space to talk about what I know: an experience that happened pretty early in our life here. It was life-affirming, anxiety-inducing, and extremely cute. When I need to remind myself of the pure normalcy of human lives in passage everywhere, from right next door to the other side of the world, I try to dwell myself on this story.

For anyone who would find themselves in Misawa on most Fridays, I'd recommend the Cultural City Tour like I'd recommend having air in your lungs. Ethan and I went in May with about 35 American newcomers piled into two tour buses headed for horizon-broadening adventures.

The first stop was Misawa's International Center, where our group got a quick Japanese lesson from the same woman who has been teaching me on Zoom since we got here. Then we all piled back on the bus headed for the Hasshoku Fish Market, a giant labyrinth of vendors selling all kinds of interesting foods and ingredients, including my first ever Taiyaki filled with red bean paste. If you've never had Taiyaki before, it's a lot like a Belgian waffle on the outside with this lovely barely-sweet, almost fruity bean filling on the inside. There's really no American food like it - if you ever have an opportunity to try it, you really have to dive in. Face-first, preferably.

Our last stop was the Kushihiki Hachiman shrine, which has to be one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to. I realize this sounds trite, but stepping off the bus was truly like stepping into another world; the sounds of the road nearby were completely muffled, and the dark lanky trees covered everything with enough shade to suddenly make the air feel like early fall.

I really wish I had read up on shrine culture and history more before I went, though - there were so many traditions of Shintoism that I had never heard of before. The specific pattern of handwashing, which side of the pathways to walk, the fact that it's customary to clap twice after prayers, and so many more practices were all new to me. It was more than a little intimidating.

But luckily for us, there were volunteers who gave us all a guided presentation when we got there... with the help of a little girl doing her best to hold posterboards of pictures and diagrams that illustrated what they were explaining. It was a pretty unwieldy job for someone whose entire body was smaller than those posters, but she really stuck with it.

Many of us donated money to buy these little plastic bags of fish food, so we ended up hanging out on the bridge overlooking the pond by the Torii gate, chucking little bits at the koi below. And guess who appears to my right! The little girl must have been about six, about sternum-height to the woman I assume is her mom, talking to her and jumping back and forth like six-year-olds do. I barely saw them out of the corner of my eye

At this point I hardly knew any Japanese. Right now I'm many months in the future and I know enough to pick out individual words and ask a stranger what gifts they got for their birthday, if that tells you anything. But from a thematic standpoint, Japanese is pretty cool in that it looks exactly the way it sounds, with the hard edges covering rounded vowels and tapping brushstrokes of syllables. So although this is definitely not exactly what they were saying, the way this looks on your screen is exactly what it felt like to hear them. I've never heard a six-year-old say so many syllables so quickly in my life.

"もっと魚の餌はありますか？" she asked, holding her empty plastic bag above her head for emphasis.

"いいえ、空です。 あなたはそれをすべて使いました" the woman told her, shaking her head. "我慢して。それは大丈夫。"

I stopped. My full bag of koi food burned in my hand. Would it be weird if... should I...?

"もっといただけますか？" she asked. I could hear in her disappointed voice that she already knew the answer.

I took a deep breath and my body turned itself to make eye contact with Mom for nonverbal permission and a shot of bravery. I smiled with my eyes under my mask and bent down to offer my bag to her with both hands, trying to get my head lower than hers.

I was trying hard to mimic the cultural body language for gift giving and gratitude that I had read circles around, but there's so much I wish I could have said in Japanese. If I somehow had access to a real-life Babel Fish in that moment, I would have sold an organ for it.

"This is for you," I would have said, flawlessly and impeccably. "I'm so happy that I could come visit this beautiful place, and so thankful for your hard work in holding up those ginormous posters earlier. I wish I could give you and your mama more than an almost-free bag that smells like cat treats, because you've helped give a busload of people an experience they'll never forget. I would love to hear about all the fun stuff that you like, and I'd love to be your friend today."

But because I of course just so happened to forget 100% of the Japanese and about 83% of the English words I knew in that moment, the only thing I could squeeze out of me was a guttural "...mmm?" You know, like some Baltic cavewoman.

She squinted a shy, tight-lipped smile at me and carefully took the bag, using her flat palm to push her wispy bangs out of her face. Transaction complete!

I gave them both a deep nod and a wave as they walked further on, which they both copied back to me. In that moment I was absolutely on top of the world. I couldn't think of anything better.

But then not even two minutes later, they both came back up to the same spot on my right. That's understandable, I thought as I gave them a little wave. It was getting pretty crowded around this koi pond, so there's not a lot of space to feed the - wait, what was that in her hand?

Mom gave the little girl's shoulder a squeeze. "どうぞ、私が教えた言葉を言ってください。" she said.

The girl took the object in both her hands and held it up to me and quietly sang:

"てんかゆう" ("Tenk-a yoo~")

I've never experienced a level of cuteness that immediately short-circuits your entire brain before. I'm really grateful we had tried snacks at Hasshoku with plenty of electrolytes a couple hours before arriving, because otherwise I definitely would have collapsed instantly. I just barely managed to squeak out a "ʸᵒᵘ'ʳᵉ ʷᵉˡᶜᵒᵐᵉ" while she handed me the treat in her hands. Jeez.

I gave her mom the biggest, most polite "Arigato Gozaimas" that I could muster and she smiled under her mask, nodding back to me.

"I hope you like!" she said. I heard that silky kindness in her voice that only a mother could have. "It's a very sweet candy; might be too sweet, ne?"

And I was like "Oh don't worry, I'm American; nothing is too sweet for me."

Google Translate called this "Downtown Brown cake" (lol), a bar of deep brown sugar honeycomb toffee with a dark chocolate layer coating the top. She was absolutely right - compared to the Taiyaki and other Japanese desserts we had tried, this little guy was a loud proud punch in the mouth.

And I ate the whole darn thing in like three minutes. 'Murica.

I don't know about you, but I've noticed that when I visualize what's going on in particular countries, my brain automatically puts a specific filter on everything depending on where it is. It's like the way every movie nonverbally tells you the setting is in Mexico by sticking that infamous sepia filter on their camera lens.

Before we were stationed here, my sepia filter for Japan looked a lot like the filter from a spy movie. Perfect, streamlined, sparse, calculated, judgmental, and ready to analyze your every movement for deeper meaning.

But every time I get out of my head and get the privilege to interact with the outside world, I get a chance to take off that filter and smush it for good. Every corner of the world is filled with so much more normalcy than my fears give it credit for, filled with moms and older brothers and coworkers and Xbox Live friends. People squinting from the sun in their eyes, itching their bug bites, focusing on backing the car out of the driveway without running over the grass. Thinking about the chores they still have to do, what their dinner plans are going to be, how their mama's doing, about their crush in science class, about that story they saw on the local news channel the other day, about what their government is up to. No matter how far away they are, all they are is neighbors. You feel me?

Take a look at these neighborhoods and farm plots that we drove past on the way back home that day. Doesn't it look just like the area about 20 minutes away from where you are right now?

I know it's so cliché to say we're all alike but it's easy to forget when conflict feels so far away, especially when those affected by conflict don't look like you. Even through the dome of culture and media or government influence, there are people in Ukraine (or Palestine, or Iowa, or Uyghur communities in northwest China, or even Russia) just going about their lives that are willing to go out of their way to be genuinely kind to strangers, even for a baggie of koi food. We have to remember that. I hope we remember that.