One of the best parts of being gay, as I experience it, is that you have the rich emotional responses of a woman and the insulating obtuseness and detachment of a man. One of the worst parts is that you can’t always choose which is ascendant at a given moment.



I didn’t actually make a spectacle of myself when I took Atsushi to the airport yesterday; I just kind of felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. Since I had to get back to the office, I couldn’t wait until his plane took off. I had to content myself with leaving the observation deck before his flight was scheduled to leave the gate. Haneda Airport, which handles most domestic flights in and out of Tokyo, is actually in the same galaxy as the city (unlike Narita, the airport where most international flights go, which is way the hell out in Chiba Prefecture). It was just turning to night from dusk. You could see part of the incomprehensibly vast lit-up Tokyo skyline across the bay, and under it in the foreground, the planes docked at the departure gates. Two of my favorite sights in civilization (rendered with my appalling, amateurish digi-cam skills in the banner). The rain had stopped, but there was a lot of mist. It flattered both the lights and the JAL and ANA planes (which look a bit cheap to me in strong sunlight). Jets drifted down like big moths and shot into the sky like spears.



This was one of those vacation weeks that are busier than going to the office. The only meals we didn’t have at restaurants with friends who wanted to find out how Atsushi is doing in West Buttf**k, we had here with friends who wanted to see what the apartment looks like now. (“Like there’s finally a fag living here” was the verdict. I’m not sure how I feel about that.) Too much food, too much drink, and endless assurances that everyone’s looking after me while he’s working in the provinces. I wished I didn’t have to leave him at the airport, but we’d been surrounded by people so persistently since Sunday that a part of me was relieved to head home to the apartment and not have anyone to look after except the plants. Just another month and we’ll be leaving for Bali together. Not that long to wait.

My favorite fellow Asia-Pacific Island-based blogger, Amritas, responded to one of Joanne Jacobs’s frequent commenters, one Stephen, who characteristically took the opportunity to use this thread about race relations at UCLA to talk about how wonderful his wife’s traditional Asian femininity makes their domestic life. Joanne has already done her usual, wonderfully motherly throwing of cold water, and Amritas is great as always when he gets fired up.



And yet…Stephen’s comments (he shows up a lot) always frustrate me because there’s usually a very good point buried beneath the self-directed ego stroking: that gay promiscuity in urban areas has been very destructive and that lots of people who reject traditional femininity in a jeering way are insecure about their own life choices seem to be the major ones.



A point that no one in this conversation seems to make is that in a free society, traditional femininity requires both parties to be willing to hold up their ends of the bargain. Since I don’t know the gentleman personally, I can only assume that his wife, like most American women, would quickly make her latent female power overt if he started treating her poorly–no matter to what degree she identifies with flowers. That’s not always an option women have in countries in which sex roles haven’t been liberalized as they have in America. Japan is politically one of the most free countries on Earth. (We just celebrated its Constitution Day yesterday, and while it’s mostly treated as just a bank holiday, I found it very moving, as a proud American partial to constitutions.) But the status of women here, while it certainly facilitates “femininity,” can be appalling. The median age for marriage has been pushed up to near 30 in the last 20 years. It’s not just that women want to spend their free time shopping instead of taking care of children; they don’t want to be forced to look after men whose idea of a “helpmeet” is a combination of maid and brood mare.



All of which means that if it adds frisson to a middle-aged couple’s relationship to imagine a ring of vaginismus-afflicted harpies detesting them for their delight in tradition…well, good for them. But it’d be nice if students at a major research university, who are supposed to be in the process of forming their view of the world, could talk about their differences and assess why and in which contexts some attitudes work better than others.



BTW, the name I officially use in Japan is a transliteration of Sean:



紫苑 (shion)



It means “aster.”



Japanese women’s names sometimes do use flower kanji, but only occasionally does one see a name with a stem pronounced Yuri- (“lily”) or Hana- (“blossom”) or Fuji- (“wisteria”). Japanese women’s names can have any number of kanji, but many pronunciations cluster around a handful of meanings: Mari- (“truth”), Nori- (“law,” “order,” “constancy”), and Aki- (“light,” “clarity”). None of these seems to make their bearers more stern and sententious than those named after flowers or jewels.

The news programs keep talking about a Janis Karpinski who’s a high muckety-muck in supervision of prisons in Iraq. The first time I heard her name, it rang a bell, and I wondered whether she was the woman Geraldine Brooks profiled as having trained the women in the Kuwaiti armed forces during the Gulf War. (Don’t ask me why I remembered the name–there’s a rational reason that’s too personal to recount here.) I can’t find a link that confirms that they are the same person, but there can’t be that many Brigadier General Janis Karpinskis with a decade or so of service in the Gulf.



Added 05/04 13:25: Sheesh. You’d never know from this pixellated rag that I get paid, in part, for clear prose. Geraldine Brooks’s book has a chapter on the training of Kuwaiti women in the armed forces, in which Janis Karpinski is quoted several times; the book overall is about the lives of women in Muslim countries, not Karpinski.