Date

2022-11-15, Tuesday

Distance

41.32 km biked (2046.83 km in total)

One of our hosts is Pauline, an American of full Japanese descent who used to work in San Francisco. Even though she got to Japan only in recent month, she has had past working experience in this country a few years ago as an English teacher. According to her, Japanese people’s mastery of second language is not very good, because they generally lack practice for fear of making mistakes. They tend to understand more than they can speak, and they will insist on speaking Japanese to foreigners despite being able to speak some English.

As a result of growing up in a fairly cultural diverse urban district of United States, Pauline has never experienced particular act of racism that is a major problem in her home country. In Japan, since she looks visually similar and speaks Japanese with a fairly authentic accent (no complicated keigo though), she never feels being treated as a foreigner. She feels at ease calling Japan her second home. I find her case interesting, because Japan has the reputation for being a country that is, for want of a better word, xenophobic — meaning that there is a cultural gap between the native Japanese ingroup and the outgroup composed of resident of foreign origin, however long they might have stayed in Japan already. My classmate who is half Japanese and half French Canadian feels being a different person when she is in Japan, as if living two lives. It’s the first time I heard someone with foreign upbringing claiming to be comfortably integrated into the Japanese society.

Today’s unfolding is mixed with lucky and unlucky happenings. First, we were fortunate to have the broken bike largely fixed at the first bike shop we walked to in the morning. Out of caution, the shop owner recommended getting the part replaced in Morioka if problems re-emerged. On the road, while my friend was slowly gaining control of her bike, a second puncture occurred to the same wheel, probably due to the same tiny pin that we neglected to remove yesterday. Then a third puncture — or explosion to be more accurate — happened right after we finished pumping up the new tube. In total, we have replaced the tube 3 times in 2 days!

Nevertheless, the most unfortunate happening today is without a doubt the re-encounter with the lady we met yesterday. She messaged me to express her desire to see us again, saying that she had something to hand over us. At that time I was still hoping to interact more with the locals, so I happily agreed to meet up with her and her Morioka friend in a tiny restaurant of my friend’s choice. However, during the whole meal her intention remained obscure: she appeared to be wanting to say something but never actually touch the core subject, leaving us guessing what she might been holding. In the end she suggested ‘Why don’t you come with us to have a chat in our car?’ We felt strange that something could not be said under the public’s eyes, so we found an excuse to leave them.

Once we finished pitching our tent in a park, the lady and her friend came again to give us two envelopes containing some documents — part of which written in Mandarin. She asked us to go to a temple (in Morioka) for something I couldn’t quite comprehend, saying that our bike problems were not coincidental but were the consequences of our not following the religious movement she adhered to. If we keep refusing to go with her, she said, we will suffer from worse punishment. Seeing that I wasn’t impressed by her appeal to divine punishment, she switched her tone to start talking about all manner of benefits we would get if we should accept her invitation: becoming healthier and wealthier, etc.

At this point I got vexed, not by her persistence despite my repeated decline, but because all that she’s interested in telling me is bounded to oneself. I feel offended that she should think that all of these self-centric motives are of much importance to me. One of the main reasons why I had harboured much resentment against Christianity until my trans-Canada bike tour is because the (self-claimed) Christians with whom my mother tried to be associated with once upon the time were constantly praying (to their God) for their own success and benefit. That’s not the kind of person I want to be. My giving is — or at least I try as hard as I can to make it so — unconditional. I have no desire to get anything back for myself beside the tremendous gratification I get from serving others.

Upholding a different set of values from that of the lady who now appears to me as a very aggressive missionary, I am utterly incapable of communicating with her. In the end I cut her speech short by saying that I needed to sleep to recover from the fatigue resulting from one-day-long biking. She and her friend finally left.

Then the rain started at night.