Happy September, dear reader. It's been a busy one settling down into Tokyo normality. Just as expected, the rose tint has started to lift. Though my personal life is becoming better and better by the day (exciting new relationships, brilliant sights, and pretty bloody oishii food), the cosmological elements of existence continue to grump me right off. News stories and social media posts constantly remind me of the greater corruption that runs our world, which as always adds a tinge of extra dampness to my humid days.
Living in a city where elegance and lightness (of all varieties) are viewed as peak beauty, I've been thinking recently on how my students navigate growing up in parallel with images of idealised femininity. Skin bleaching, hair plucking, flesh-starving - sometimes I wonder how much we expect those who identify as women to remove of themselves before we view them as whole. So I wrote a poem about it. It translates as 'Swan':
白鳥
Oh how elegant, you call me.
Mellow white bird.
Beacon of beauty and serenity,
Quiet strength and soft tradition
reflecting light wherever the water touches.
Is this how you see me?
So cute, so sugoii.
So representative of the gentle majestic femininity
You assume all creatures should aspire towards?
Obsessing over my milksop delicacy, you excitedly ask
If I know the queen.
I can’t tell you how evil I am
My long-necked machinations at work beneath
All this feathery beauty.
Diving into my mind you would see
Thoughts, feral and rushed
As the flurry of my bare legs
Beneath this cool veneer.
Fans flock to me, and you gain nothing
But my leftover crumbs from their crusts of bread.
Just as intended, you see yourself through my golden eyes.
Tiny dull duckling, feel how plain, how ugly,
how completely insignificant you are.
And shed down to nothing in the knowledge that
No matter how furiously you paddle,
There is no way you will ever keep up with me.
And so it always has and always will be,
Seeds of wholegrain jealousy burrow deep like ringworm, you
Start to pluck out your own down, right
To the quick, goose pimpled and raw
State of disgrace you know to be true.
Yet everyday as I glide by,
I remind you of the elegance you could only achieve
If you just wait, smooth as a baby’s bum,
Ready for the day your feathers sprout out perfectly white and
Bleached in the sun.
So everytime you start to see the stubble
Of your natural grayness
Your downy, dowdy shame,
I must remind you that the pitiful inadequacy of your previous existence
Is surely a thousand times worse
Than your present painfully plucked reality.
At least now you have a hope
To one day become just like me.
So you keep plucking, keep scrubbing, keep going
Until you exfoliate into flesh.
Right the way down until your nerve endings fray like edges of a life buoy.
Until your bones expose and bleach in the sun
Craning your neck over in my direction to see
If our colours finally match.
Oh how elegant, you call me.
Mellow white bird.
Beacon of beauty and serenity,
Quiet strength and soft tradition
Reflecting your flaws right back to the centre of your soul.
Brilliantly deceptive.
Dazzlingly effective.
You see me and assume I am who you’re meant to become.
And it works too,
For we all know what assuming does:
It makes a swan out of me and you.
(Author's note: I am white. This was written from my own experience growing up in the UK, and in Japan my skin lightness will always make me at least beautiful in part to many people. This is not right. Because of this, please know my words only have a place on the very peripheries of any discussion surrounding beauty linked to whiteness and thinness. If you're at all interested in the themes explored in this piece, I would encourage you to seek out other voices who speak with different, more immediately relevant experiences. For example, check out the work of Mieko Kawakami or peruse some of the readings suggested by the Asia Art Archive at https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas-journal/ideas-journal/shortlist-the-defiant-fringed-pink-feminist-art-in-japan .
For those more audio-visually inclined, there are countless YouTube videos on this topic. Check out Kat Blaque (https://youtu.be/Fkx-lXYenu0?si=QxQv286SC5_ocVWt), Shanspeare (https://youtu.be/55MshtmGsP0?si=DD6CFTa6zFFttQ4h) and Evasion (https://youtu.be/cRlnYnbv8ao?si=kWzOZwZrzcteW5Dp). Then please do your own research, and find the spaces that help your education the most. As always, thanks for your support.)
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