A public apology

I feel I must apologize for my part in the recent “discussion” in the comments of the January 15th and 20th entries, and letting it get out of hand.

Anything on the web is going to attract some kind of unintentional attention. Even though I started and still use this site as a method of first keeping track for myself of my life in Japan, as well as keeping friends and family updated without having to send out a mass email every other day, it would be ignorant to pretend that other people aren’t reading it.

This initially unexpected attention is most welcome, even from those who share different points of view than those that I espouse. Life is not a monologue, and we learn through conversing with others, exploring, defending and rejecting various opinions. All well and good.

I draw the line at flame-throwing, despite whatever vitriolic language I may use in my entries. I should have put an end to the personal attacks days ago, and for that I am most deeply sorry. Insults in jest are of course appreciated, and I expect them to continue. Others, fugghedaboudit.

Part of writing a blog that does reach the public means conveying personal experience. If conversation is a war of words, then I’m essentially giving you a large cache of W.M.D.s to use against me.

Anyone who writes a blog of personal experience is doing the same, and that’s where the success in this genre lies. You are all voyeurs, looking in on my life. When I write for the blog, there’s a bit of exhibitionism involved in opening up my life to public scrutiny. These roles are of course mutable, changing as I go to read about someone else’s life, and vice versa. Maybe I’m reading about yours.

I try hard to not make blogging a pseudo-event. The point here is to record as much of my life in Japan that is appropriate for public consumption, not to blog about blogging (although there are very useful blogs out there that do just that, with excellent tips on how to make these damn things work.)

Getting back to Japan, I think in the past 15 months I’ve had far more positive experiences in Japan than negative. I hope I’ve conveyed this to you all. It’s true that some things that happen here make me very angry, but they’re no different from the things that anger me about America. If I was writing about America, I’d be getting cranky about the same shit.

I also try to keep mention of work to a minimum, since the job is not my life. It is, however, part of my life, and so when something worth mentioning happens, take a wild guess where I’m going to talk about it.

To my Japanese readers, please understand that I’ve got a dry sense of humor, and there’s a lot about your country I find strange. And wonderful. And utterly bizarre bugfuck terrible, and simultaneously perhaps the most perfect innovation on the planet. To not write something down because I wanted to portray how much I loved Japan would disingenuous, to say the least.

If one good thing has come out of this little recent tete a tete, it’s an excellent article from the Online Journalism Review on the portrayal of Jews in the Japanese media, and how they encourage and react to anti-semitism.

Alright, ’nuff said. Time for bed.