Won't Miss #496 - fixation on blue eyes

Surely, the tears of angels fall from blue eyes.

I had many discussions with students about their preconceptions regarding Western people, and, to them, "Western" (occidental), meant "white". It meant not only white, but mostly blue-eyed white people. In fact, I was told on more than one occasion that they believed most of us have blue eyes. I learned a long time ago when I studied basic genetics in junior high school that blue eyes are recessive and therefore less likely to be present. The ever handy Wikipedia says 33.8% of the U.S. population has blue eyes. That's certainly a lot more than the number of Japanese who do, but hardly a majority.

The incorrect notion that most occidental people have blue eyes isn't really something you can "blame" Japanese people for believing. After all, most T.V. shows have a stunning imbalance in terms of eye color. I've watched shows in which 80% of the cast are blue-eyed, and it is frequently the case that the main cast are blue-eyed. The thing that annoyed me in Japan was the fixation on blue eyes as something that is incredibly positive and worth noting. Students would tell me they wanted my eye color. Some actually preferred teachers because they had blue eyes and felt that they were getting a more "authentic" experience in learning if their teacher's appearance matched their stereotype.

Undoubtedly, I benefited from this fixation on blue eyes (and light hair), but it always made me feel objectified and uncomfortable. I think the worst part though was knowing that people who were dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and dark-haired were being rated lower in desirability for arbitrary reasons. This fixation made me acutely aware that I was given a benefit for something that I had nothing to do with, and I won't miss it.

Won't Miss #489 - "I have black eyes."

If his eyes look black, it's because I have a crap camera, not because they actually are.

One of the most common types of English lessons that I taught included asking students to describe themselves. This type of thing may seem a little silly in this day and age of digital phones with cameras and displays capable of showing pictures, but it is something that can come in handy if you're meeting someone for business and have to tell them what you look like or listen to a description of what they look like. Over the hundreds of times that I was conducting a lesson that required a student to tell me what he or she looked like, I probably heard them say, "I have black eyes," 95% of the time. I realize most Japanese people have quite dark brown eyes (irises), but no human has black eyes (except the pupil). I would explain this to students, along with the fact that saying your have a black eye means someone punched you in the face and your eyes are now surrounded with a bruise. Unfortunately, I was generally greeted with skepticism about the true color Japanese eyes. They were black, and my gaijin eyes couldn't possibly see this truth. They might patronize me by switching to dark brown, but if we repeated the exercise in the future, they'd say they had "black eyes" again.

Sometimes, I felt this insistence that Japanese eyes were black was another form of expressing the absolute uniqueness of the Japanese physiology and the skepticism I was greeted with when I said they were dark brown was about asserting a racial feature rather than a difference in color perception. I won't miss people insisting to me that they had "black eyes", particularly in light of how it sounded in English as if they'd been in a savage bar fight.

Will Miss #478 - the lighting

One of my former Japanese coworkers was forever running around turning on extra lights in rooms that I happened to be in at work. I always told him that there was enough light for me to see, but he insisted that it was too dark. I don't know if there is any sort of difference between brown eyes and blue ones in terms of the need for light, but my blue-eyed boss also had a similar issue. Whatever the case may be, the lighting was always ample in Japan. I can't say the same for my experiences in America.

I've stayed in three different homes since coming back to America and one thing I never realized is that it's hard to light a large, open space well. Yes, there are multiple lighting sources centered in areas of the greatest activity, but there are always dim spots that branch over into various spaces. In my tiny Tokyo apartment, I never had an issue with the light covering all of the room, even when it was only a single bulb or fixture. Since coming home, I feel like I'm perpetually living in twilight without a bright, central source of light for the spaces I'm in. I don't think this is because things have changed, but rather because I grew accustomed to the manner in which small spaces were lit in Tokyo.

I miss the lighting I experienced in Japan.