Working notions

Visiting Dachau Concentration Camp outside of Munich is sobering and quiets you down quickly. When there recently I saw had the horribly cynical and false phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” – Work Will Make You Free – welded into the iron of the gate, as it was in the camp gates throughout Eastern Europe . And shouldn't it be to the contrary; if we are free, we can pursue livelihoods as makes sense to us. But then, the Nazis weren’t known for their exploration of the finer points of emancipation, or dignity.

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Today in my in-box I received my bi-annual note from the “Iwate Prefecture Ambassadors Association.” They are always hoping to hear about –or alternatively generate— news about what is probably the most sparsely populated prefecture in all of Japan. Of course, when you get attention, it isn’t always the preferred kind…. This time it looks like my former home was curious (and somewhat worried) to know whether any of us saw the article in the Wall Street Journal a couple months back about using the “Ganbaranai” slogan to promote their northern province.

To “Ganbaru” is to try hard and give it your utmost effort – a phrase as “Japanese” as you could get that embodies a sense of cultural identity not matched by our own slogans like “Be all you can be” etc. To “Ganbaranai,” however, is to precisely NOT “Ganbaru.” (!) Shocking for country like Japan, that like other first world cultures, often enforces hyperized notions of how working constantly and at haste will provide freedom (above all, freedom to go into debt buying shrink-wrapped Stuf. It seems that the mountain air gives the people of Iwate that little clarity to see somewhat differently.