Daily update 1. : Peeking into Japan's past and the nature of humans

Yesterday I said I'd be too busy to write anything on steemit or whaleshares. I knew shortly after that I wouldn't be able to stick with that.

I'll be doing really bare bones blogs to share some experiences and ideas as well as the progress I'm making with my art and with myself. Bare bones means I'll reuse pictures and sometimes not use any and I'm not always going to bother with tags or editing. Quickly typed. I don't want to get distracted from my novel or album both of which I hope I can release sometime during the summer.

I'm up to chapter 7 of my novel. It's really getting exciting. Up until now it was vaguely connected short stories, this is the first time I have 60-70 pages of a longer narrative. Now that it's getting warmer I hope I can work more on my music too. New song up soon.

I had a chance to talk to a really old man at work today. I listened to him tell me about his childhood in the countryside of Japan.

I feel like I got to see a part of the country that few people can see anymore, not just life during his childhood but even life 2 generations before it. His father helped build the railroad so he was constantly moving, always to small villages that didn't have convenient transportation. Having this kind of experience gives him a lot of insight into what life was like before his time, because he lived in some of the least developed parts of the country and he moved around too.

That means all the central parts of that region of, he got to see before they were central stations. He moved 5 times and his parents were always treated like outsiders. Wherever he moved his parents were treated as outsiders. He said he felt people were very quick to ostricize others. He said his parents must have had a hard time but kids were ok to him.

Apparently traditional gets were considered fashionable in the countryside and men were made fun of for wearing Western shooes, but in the city people would treat you like a poor person if you wore geta.

He seemed to illustrate everything as being much more judgemental than it is today. "That makes me wonder if I'm too conservative."

Later we talked about the city, and he said that this fear of being ostricized put a lot of pressure on everyone. Later some of those people moved to Tokyo and ostracized people who came to the city after them, and were ostracized by people who came before them. "You bumpkins, I'm from Tokyo, I'm sophisticated". The real locals were kind of like "Meh, whatever".

I see this same pattern all over the place. Reminds me a lot of the US where people are complaining about immigrants invading their country...as if that wasn't how the country was founded. It reminds me of children who hate how their parents treat them and then treat their kids the same way.

Our problems follow us wherever we go unless we are willing to change ourselves at a core level. We can't run away from the things we don't like, we can only insist on rising above them, which never entails looking down on others. Only when we are full of love and a desire to be our greatest selves can we overcome the ghosts of the past.

Anyway. Fun talk with him, even if he spoke slow enough that single sentences took over a minute.

Back to writing novel.