Member-only story
Notes on The Other
by Craig Mod
From the Tokyo issue of Mas Context
What right do I claim? None. No family, no blood ties, no citizenship. Friends, yes, but nothing legal. A visa, up for renewal yet again. Nothing binding. Nothing strict.
And so you come. You, too, who (probably) have no lay of claim to this city. Come eyes wide open, knowing nothing. Arrive at this place that will not accept you. You, The Other. Always, The Other. Always pushed to the outside, only an insider in being an outsider. Forever asked in broken English if you can speak the language, can use chopsticks, can eat sushi, forever asked where you come from, to which you eventually answer — having lived here over a decade — “Down the street,” and they laugh and say, “No, really, where do you come from?”
Disembark your plane at Narita, the airport that shouldn’t exist, the airport that suffered protests, the airport thrust into the countryside, the airport rice farmers attacked with bombs — bombs! — the airport in which a small rice paddy was left in the middle of the tarmac because one farmer simply wouldn’t relent. You hear this — this story of the tarmac rice paddy — about this airport so far from the city proper, and you believe it (why not?) because you can imagine far stranger…
