Letter from Sendai

I was in London three weeks ago when I woke up to hear a commentary on the quake on the radio. There was an uncanny week of hearing familiar British news reporters like Jon Snow talk about districts of Tohoku that I actually knew of, while being unable to really discover what had happened to the city itself. There was also a very odd moment of discovery to learn (form the London Evening Standard) there are apparently only 14 British nationals living in this city of 1 million people; can that be right? I'm back in Sendai now, and cannot speak about the immediate shock, or the blackouts and communication breakdown that happened that first weekend. Happily, everyone at my work is accounted for. To have not witnessed what your neighbours and colleagues have experienced is a peculiar and uncomfortable status in itself, but for now it might suffice to record a few observations of Sendai. The western and central parts of the city are intact, give or take the odd building under wraps and, most conspicuously, the railway station, which seems to have partially collapsed and so closed down the main rail links. Otherwise the main  difference is in terms of shopping, and in such a consumer driven society as this, the shortages of food and energy seem striking, even if they do not amount (in Sendai at least) to an acute danger. There are longer than usual queues for rather empty shelves; bread and dairy products are especially scarce. Petrol is limited for drivers and there is no gas at all in my side of the city which makes my flat a chilly, cold water living space. Most shops are closed or only partially open, especially the ubiquitous kombini which have mostly packed up. People are up and about and going about their business. The biggest difference for me is the total absence of any students from the campus, as they have been advised to stay away for the next few weeks, and what a forlorn place it then looks. And then again, from the ninth floor of my campus building, with its view of the Sendai coast, there is a greyness on the shore where you expect to see the reflection of the city...
  Today is of course the first day of the working year and the media are presenting suitable resolutions about what is to be done in the coming months.Young men and women have appeared on NHK pledging to  help rebuild Tohoku. I, who am not a citizen of Japan, genuinely admire such a sentiment to make this wonderful but impoverished part of the country a decent place to live in rather than let it go into a mournful decline. The difficulty, and fractiousness, of this will no doubt become clearer shortly. At least one English blogger in Sendai has speculated about a positive change in human consciousness resulting from this catastrophe. I'm less sure about such religious answers, but perhaps an event like this can bring people to recognise each other as, at the very least, citizens who share a well-being in common.
 

Englit in Japan (Part One)

  Time was that it made perfect sense to say I was studying 'English' because everyone understood what that involved; literature. English as literary study was so inate to secondary education that no one expected otherwise in higher education. Of course the discipline was self-questioning and critical (some said too much so); I was in a fairly trendy department of English and American Studies in the middle of the 'theory wars'. Suffice to say that English or English studies was the agreed ground on which battles commenced. Alan Sinfield has called it 'Englit'; that institutional combination of inherited literary tradition, progressive social idealism and cultural capital that uses the reading of literary texts to postulate aesthetic or cultural claims.  Linguistics, as I now ruefully recall, was left to the psychologists.
  Working in Japan, professional definitions necessarily shifted. 'English' very obviously denotes a language and university English is generally assumed to be TEFL/TESOL and this of course makes perfect sense (although I must admit I have never joined JALT because I have no curiosity in applied linguistics-sorry, but there it is). Anyway, I eventually found myself hired in the 'British Literature' wing of a English department, which leads to my quick observations about what happens to an idea of  'English' as 'Englit' when it becomes 'British Literature' in Japan.
  Firstly, a pragmatic and geographical device that acknowledges that in Japan, American Literature and culture (or, to be accurate, the USA) is the first choice of many students. Consequently, British culture becomes the outlier of a modern US literary sphere. Secondly, the proposition that literature is contingent to the study of the language rather than inate to it or its apotheosis. Thirdly, and most interestingly I think, the divorce of Literature in English from any automatic assumption to a social mission or cultural project. When Englit is no longer the best of what the tribe has said, but a type of British area studies, then it acquires a further sense of contingency as a local knowledge. This is an educative point for anyone who studied English/ Englit as it should make us ask again to what extent the discipline assumes a faith in its own socially transformative potential as criticism. Furthermore, if that potential is nothing other than a romantic nativism of the British Islanders, then what has ever been the point of learning British Literature in Japan?

From Tokyo to Sendai

Is Sendai the Edinburgh of Japan?

When the British poet James Kirkup was persuaded to come to Japan as a visiting professor of Tohoku University, his new colleagues promised him that the northern city of Sendai was the Japanese equivalent of Edinburgh; presumably Tokyo was London. It's a nice line (and it worked on Kirkup, who loved the city)  but I wonder what they had in mind. Did they mean the proximity of the hills to the centre, the access to the sea bay, or the cultural status as the premier city of the north half of the map?
  Britain  and Japan, not only island nations off the coasts of continents, but two archipelagos that have had to identify themselves. Sendai, was never the capital of a kingdom, but has been the major city of the northern part of Honshu (the Tohoku region). Population, capital and influence has been steadily moving to the south (or, more accurately, the west) of the island and Tohoku can seem to be out on limb, all the more so as the development further north of Hokkaido, particularly Sapporo, has left this district looking quiet.  Moving here after some years in Tokyo requires some adjustment. Some Tokyo friends assume Tohoku is a backwater, and the city would be very cold. Colleagues in Sendai are generally very proud of the city, and its 'temperate' climate, and have tended to remain here out of choice. With a million people it is technically a big city (317th in the world apparently) but geographically it is compact, small even.  Over the years I have come to see Japanese cities as rather formulaic spaces in terms of urban planning, and there is much of Sendai that feels familiar: the shopping malls, the dozens of Starbucks, the city centre skyscrapers that still impress a former lo-rise British town dweller like me. On the other hand, the quiet spaces of the city are a great attraction: the forestation that reaches into the west side of the city and the Hirose river that winds around the centre. And I am convinced the air is better. It must be said that Tokyo's consumerist 'shock and awe' is in shorter supply here. Trips out to rural Miyagi and Iwate uncovered small towns with abandoned pachinko parlours and derelict drive-in centres, and even in Sendai the closure of some big hotels over the past six months is a reminder that Japan is an economy in trouble. I hope to write about this some time soon.