That Time of Year Again

It's that time of year again. Halloween passed recently so we get to hear news stories about a Japanese university exchange student who was shot dead in Louisiana more than 10 years ago. When I meet someone the conversation usually goes like this:

Kirk did you go to any Halloween parties?
Usually I love Halloween parties but this year I was really busy, so I didn't go. Too bad.
Yeah, I saw that TV show the other day about that poor boy who was shot...

Either that, or if it's a group of people, someone might blurt out that they don't like Halloween because it's dangerous and then mention the poor kid who got killed. Then the whole class gets real quiet and the body language shifts like you brought up some sore point like the time a Boris Yeltsin set fire to the last remaining copy of an old Buddhist scroll, a national treasure, in a drunken fit of revenge for his chicken being overcooked. After some deep thought someone might say "Mmm, but we must respect other people's cultures and be thankful we live in such a peaceful society."

Of course it was a tragedy and I'm sure his parents miss him every single day, but I'm always taken a little back by how it comes up every year and the intensity of some people's reaction. People seem really hurt by it. Like the governor of Louisiana put a bounty on the head of Japanese visitors. A visitor to Japan from another country that doesn't celebrate Halloween would get the impression that Halloween customs in the USA include:

carving pumpkins and putting candles inside
wearing silly or scary costumes
gathering candy from neighborhood houses
killing young Japanese people

I've even had to teach classes about this story. It's textbooks sometimes or else teachers drag it up like it's an integral part of American culture.

Kirk, you're American.
Yep.
American's like Halloween don't they?
Yes, it's a fond part of my childhood.
Ok, here's today lesson plan. I'd like you to explain about trick or treating, bobbing for apples, and the exchange student who got shot.

I've probably said this before but, there was a young British woman working in Japan who was stalked, drugged, raped and dismembered by her customer around 10 years ago. A similar thing happened about 2 years ago with a young woman who was an English teacher. Hear me out. I'm not trying to say that Japanese are all sickos -- just that wouldn't you find it odd if year after year there were TV specials on the BBC about it, and if textbooks for British people learning Japanese had a chapter about haiku, one about kabuki theater and one about a young hostess who was drugged, raped, and dismembered. And Japanese teachers had to devote a lesson to it every year. I've had teenage girls cry in class when it comes up. Or if when you went to driving school, the section in the manual about parallel parking had a section about the American in his twenties teaching English in Japan a few years ago who got in a fight with a Japanese guy about a parking spot, and the Japanese guy turns out to have been a mobster who went and got some buddies, came back, forced the American guy into a car trunk and killed him. And if you brought it up in a bar everyone in the bar would know about it right away and get sad and wonder why Japanese people do such things to British or American people. I mean come on... I sound silly bringing it up, right?

When I try to explain this people usually tell me "Japanese people like peace," or "We are a confucian society that places great value on filial piety," something like that, which is a worthy notion, but it kind of means you're not hearing my reasons for not wanting to make a lesson out of the subject.

Another thing about it that also refuses to go away is the "freeze - please" story. You can't have the Halloween ritualized conversation without the freeze please conversation. As the story goes, the guy who pointed the gun at the kid said "Freeze!" The kid, being unfamiliar with the term, thought the angry man he didn't know pointing a weapon at him was saying "please" as in "please enter my home."

Folks, the kid is dead, we don't know what he thought. In his dying moments he didn't tell this to doctors in the ER. Not that it changes things, it's still a tragedy, but for me the persistence of this factoid is a sign of shoddy reporting, uncritical reception by viewers, and collective myth construction. Year after year a reporter finds it necessary to drag the story up and repeat the freeze -please line as if they've done their research and it explains things.