Paranoia and racism.

On Sunday my girlfriend and I went to see a play put on at the Canadian Embassy in central Tokyo. It was a very clever one-act about a self-centered ass of a nephew who has come to visit his aunt in her final days and wait for her to die. It'd been a while since I'd seen a play, and it was a pretty good one. Even if I didn't like the music they chose for the scene transitions.

But since it was an English play that was staged in the Canadian embassy, the audience, which wasn't that big, only around 40 or 50 people, was overwhelmingly non-Japanese. And with the exceptions of a neatly-groomed middle-aged Japanese guy, a Bohemian-stylish Japanese woman and me, they were all white.

It took a few minutes to work out what was so unsettling about the audience. It was like stepping into one of those trick rooms where all the furniture is painted with a pattern that makes it look too large and the wallpaper lines make the room look like it shrinks towards one end. My mind wasn't processing some bit of input data properly and it was skewing all the results. Then it hit me. All those round, watery, blue eyes. That weird, irregularly pigmented pinkish skin. The noses: ships prows and cathedral arches and great cavernous icebergs, paused in the act of calving off of glacial faces. There was so much meaty, pale bulk in that room. The heavy set people seemed saggy and soft. Living versions of those craft-store dolls made of cleverly stitched pantyhose stuffed with cotton. But even the few slim people seemed somehow unnatural-looking and out of proportion.

Have you read the original Planet of the Apes? I recently finished a good translation of it, and the protagonist suffered a similar predicament after living in ape society. His former surroundings, his former peers no longer seem normal to him. He becomes acclimatized to the apes, and is unable to relax in human company.

But I can't say I ever felt like a human among apes here. Then again, there were precious few times I felt like a human among humans in America. Race always threw an irregularity into things. And there in that theater, where I should have been able to suspend disbelief and feel like I was actually observing a man hoping his elderly aunt would kick off, I kept flashing back to the fact that I was surrounded and outnumbered by white people. Homogeneous, fleshy, white people with Midwestern American and Canadian accents.

White western-hemisphere people, you don't all look alike to me. But in groups, you make it nearly impossible to relax in your presence. The vast majority of you, by default and without realizing why, treat me differently than you treat each other from the moment you lay eyes on me. It's not that different from Japan, but they've got centuries of isolation and a limited level of interaction with other races outside of the context of war.

But growing up in America, where we were supposed to be rubbing shoulders with everyone regardless of race, creed or color, has left me with this kink in my vision that I can't turn off. Some, hell, most of my best friends are white Americans. But I can't get past this issue yet, and it was surprising to have it pulled up here in Japan.