How I moved from Minsk to Tokyo to become a scientist
My love for Japan did not happen because of manga, anime and video games - the industry that helped go the way from the stamp "made in occupied Japan" to the third most efficient economy in the world. It all started with the prose of Natsume Soseki and Banana Yoshimoto, the poetry of Basho and Fujiwara no Teika. At the age of twelve, I first read the Waka compilation, then the haiku, and even then, not knowing the whole philosophical and ideological basis, I understood about the insane beauty in the fragility of everything around - as if the poems were written in watercolor. Conciseness, attitude to time and space, another vision of nature was unusual, but at the same time very cool.
Then there was Soseki with his coming out of age (the moment when you turn twenty and you can no longer be a child) and Yoshimoto with a motive formulated by literary classics as early as the 13th century: that sometimes everything is so terrible that you want to die, and sometimes it's so amazing that you want to live forever. I, of course, represented Ginza and "Burriz" - a bar in the 70s style where I worked, and more often listened to music from records, leaning on the counter, the main character of Amrita. Himself on the tatami, snacking Sambei - not very. The fact that all this will become so familiar to me, then I could not think.
I always liked science, but at fourteen I moved to another city. A new school, harassed by classmates, a poor teacher of chemistry and a biology teacher, who had to retell a textbook in class. As a result, the motivation is gone and I wanted to grow up and become all you can, from a journalist to an environmentalist. It was completely incomprehensible that really mine. I remembered the love of Japanese literature and decided to learn linguistics and Japanese from the position "to know a rare language is always cool." I was terribly disliked by the University of Minsk: the pseudoscientific theories of universal grammar of oriental languages from the head of the department, which were told with confidence of Chomsky's level. A number of unnecessary subjects like "University Studies" and "Labor Protection", memos by heart and a feeling of total bulshit - at the end of the first course I began to earn money, write texts and study for a diploma.
It is worth saying that Japanese was the only cool subject - a charismatic Japanese teacher, hieroglyphics and grammar, through which sensual categories are expressed. For example, in Russian a passive voice does not show a mood in relation to what has been said - we convey this with intonation and emotionally colored vocabulary - in Japanese everything is already clear by the choice of the grammatical form. Nevertheless, I lost my understanding of what I would do with the Japanese: I was thrown from side to side and I wanted to find myself as soon as possible. Everything changed at the beginning of 2014: I poked at the Olympics in Sochi, helped Taku Hiraoka and Ayumu Hirano (2nd and 3rd place in men's snowboarding, halfpipe) understand the doping test and understand how cool it is to understand rare language and how you want to get into the country of this language. Upon arrival in Minsk, everything seemed to have turned into a mosaic: my teacher suggested that I go on an exchange to Tsukuba, "a small and boring Japanese city, where there is nothing but a university and a mountain."
I have never heard about the city, and the name of the university was seen twice in Cell and Nature journals - in articles on iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells) and transgenic tomato. After a couple of hours of internet check, I found out that the University of Tsukuba is the second largest in Japan, and the city itself is 45 minutes from Tokyo - the country's scientific hub, with a huge number of laboratories and the JAXA head office (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency - the Japanese Roscosmos and NASA). For a week I collected the documents, counted the GPA and waited for the result. In August, I received a letter confirming the annual scholarship from JASSO and a stack of documents for a visa. I didn’t plan it, didn’t go to it through thorny thickets - everything turned out somehow independently of me and it felt very natural. On September 25, I flew to Tokyo in an absolutely calm mood. It didn’t storm me, as it happens before changing places, I didn’t imagine how cool it would be, but I couldn’t imagine how terrible it would be.
Then, in a shuttle from the airport, with ears stuffed after a 23-hour flight, it seemed to me that I lost my mind when I saw tiny cars from the window that were “on the contrary” (in Japan, there is left-hand traffic). And even then I was completely without apparent reason, as if not with my head, but with my heart understood: I want to be here. At first, everything was strange: a huge campus, a forest around, a 24-hour combo (Japanese abbreviation from the English convenience store) with vendors screaming loudly for irashaimase (“welcome”), and people who openly consider you. Then there was the first weekend in Tokyo, a music bar and cool Japanese, who, having ordered soba, neatly laid it out on plates for everyone. Not because they wanted to please or get a possible one night stand, but simply because such care is how they live.
My arrival coincided with a time when my good friend from Copenhagen was at a two-month-old art residence in the Tokyo gallery. Every weekend we experienced some incredible extravaganza: skaters from New York, parties with the Kengo Kum bureau, karaoke in Sibuya at three o'clock in the morning, flea markets with photos of naked Japanese women for three dollars, football in the typhoon and views of Akira with Tanya and Roma from Synchrodogs, small galleries on the upper floors of office buildings at Ginza, plum wine at night on a bench overlooking the imperial palace, dancing in the tiny Bonobo bar at Harajuku and hiking at five in the morning to the Tsukiji fish market, while still a little tipsy.
I fell in love with this Tokyo spirit forever - crazy and calm at the same time. The city where it is worth turning from a noisy wide street will be a string of narrow, almost silent, where you can endlessly find new galleries, shops, bars. Across the street from the Sega Center, an eight-story sex shop and girls in cosplay from servants to the erotic version of Pikachu, who hand out flyers of new gaming centers and otaku cafes at Akihabara, one can often hear Stravinsky or Chopin from the windows of an office building.
On the one hand, incredibly stylish people, on the other - those who manage to wear crocs with everything from a dress to a business suit (I recently even saw fur croc). In Japan, the feeling does not leave - people do not judge you. You can sprinkle glitter, stick stickers on the forehead, do not know something or do not want to understand. As my roommate says, "all freaks in one country". This was terribly lacking in Minsk, Moscow and the entire Russian-speaking part of the world. Probably, this was partly the trigger of what I was afraid to think about last year - a cardinal change of the path to science.
My program allowed me to choose any subjects at the university: from molecular biology to traditional archery. I dwelt on all the first and year biology and chemistry options at the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, in English at 10 major Japanese universities. It was difficult: the forgotten school curriculum, the terminology in a foreign language, the teacher was Korean, whose zero sounded like "jero". But for the first time I began to enjoy the process of studying, sitting out of the clock in the library with textbooks and realizing that this was the way I had been looking for so long. Probably, even the first love, the first orgasm and the first time I saw the sea at seventeen, can not be compared in strength with this feeling, like the light inside the lamp was lit and you see that the tunnel is incredibly long, but finally you are convinced that it everything is just like that.
Tsukuba is a science center, where stem cells, algae biofuels and the prospects for quantum physics are more often discussed in bars than politics and economics. The university has three Nobel laureates - two in chemistry and one in physics. The feeling that the world can really be changed only through science is spread in the air. In addition, I accidentally met a 25-year-old Mexican who writes a doctoral dissertation about plant cryopreservation — she became my closest friend in Japan and helped to believe that my crazy idea — to enter the biology department and start anew at 22 — can be realized. Then there was my professor of biology, who believed in me, tests, documents and an interview with six professors, whom I honestly said: "Yes, I taught completely different things, but they led me to my real dream. Now I know what questions I really want to know the answers. "
I was enrolled in the second year since September, and I went to Minsk to deduct from the university at the moment when I could only write a diploma. Everyone — from deputy dean to librarian — looked at me as if it were insane. I was shining because I was able to overcome my fear and do what I wanted. Now I am studying Biological Sciences and I want to do molecular biology - viral immunology or neuroscience. I work in a bar in the style of the 70s - just like from Amrita, where in the unsociable time we listen to all the records from the owner’s collection - though not the old hippie, like Yoshimoto, but Hiro, who owns the car company club. The bar is located near the JAXA office, where partners from NASA constantly come. Now I’m friends with NASA engineers who talk about flight control and water on Mars. Once, Wakata came to the bar - a Japanese cosmonaut who speaks excellent Russian and nostalgically recalls Mozdok, where he went to one of his friends.
At the same time, in the bar you can see a cut and another life - office workers (salarymen), who four times a week, literally throwing ties over his shoulder, drink at the bar until two at night, then go to karaoke and at seven in the morning start working. The same salarymen in similar costumes stand with schoolgirls in standing-bars in the Tokyo district of Sinbashi - the age of consent in Japan is 13 years old. Prostitution in Japan is always surrounded by - legalized in the form of kyabakur (Japanese hostess club) and pink salons, where you can buy all the sex services, except for vaginal sex. There are salons only for hugs or those where a cute Japanese woman can clean their ears for $ 80. By the way, the ear brushing is broadcast on TV in prime time: the leader lies down on the couch, his ears are cleaned, a device for this is shown in close-up.
Everybody watches TV in Japan, and if the institution was shown even briefly, the next day there will be a queue. People stand in queues all the time - to the cafe, where they draw funny faces on the cakes, for the autographs of actors from soft porno popular among girls and at Dover Street Market the day before the collaboration starts: they buy tickets on the Internet and spend the night at the store with laptops and cup noodles, while the cops patrol it all. As in the rest of Asia, clothing with inscriptions in English is considered cool - most do not even know how the inscription on their t-shirt or sweatshirt is translated. I once decided to conduct a mini-study among my friends, and the results were from the series “I don’t know, but I bought it because the brand is cool.” There is a big trouble with English: ten percent speak it well, for example, only three people from my Japanese acquaintances, one of whom works at JAXA and the other PR at Japanese Disney.
It seems to me that because of this, many foreigners feel isolated from society and idiots, constantly nodding their heads. To feel here, you need to speak Japanese, and it takes a lot of time and effort. But only here, probably, you can feel the loneliness that Coppola showed in the “Difficulties of Translation”. In this opportunity, too, fall in love forever. The Japanese work a hell of a lot, and Karoshi has become a well-known concept already outside the country. I remember how I was initially surprised when they told me about a two-day vacation.
Then you turn yourself into this rhythm of permanent employment: as a result, on Saturdays I teach Russian, and recently I worked as a model for a hair show - pay $ 200 a day, feed me with organic food and take a taxi. Almost all newcomers earn by teaching English, German or Spanish. Teaching Russian is almost like making a profile in a marriage agency. For example, I came across those who came to the lesson, just to look at me and shy to learn "hello" and "thank you" - this, of course, is a bit creepy.
My Minsk acquaintances often say that I will never be here for mine. I agree, my eyes are unlikely to become almond-shaped, and my hair - dark. The chance that I will learn to occupy as little space and I will not go to bars, as the average Japanese woman, is also small. And in general, I do not know what it means to be “my own” and whether I was “my own” in Minsk. It was here that I felt how I could be satisfied with life, what it was like to understand where you were going. Here I meet incredible people from all over the world, and everyone has their own history - whether it’s my friend who quit her job in the international economy in the States and went to Japan to become a bike mechanic, or my roommate, who managed to learn physics in Los Angeles, work as an assistant chef at the French embassy in Berlin and find yourself here to learn bioinformatics.
There is a feeling that despite the fact that Japan is still one-shot society, and after the name and age, a foreigner is asked "when are you leaving?", She gives a chance to some. Only in Japan, "God, what is your little face" is considered the best compliment, and a date can end up sleeping on tatami in an Internet cafe. Here I can take the subway to the ocean - just like Patti Smith in “Just Kids”. In Tokyo - come to the bar and ask to put one of the 25,000 jazz, blues and soul records. And it was here that I met my man - a former motocross, similar to the characters of Kar Wai, impulsive, awkwardly gentle and able to explain complex things with understandable words. I traveled with him to Kyoto, rode a motorcycle on the slopes of his native Mie prefecture, saw sake with his parents and saw the Ise temple - the largest and most important in Japan. But the most important thing is that we do not share the cultural background: I laugh and study more than with all those who spoke my own language and grew up in a similar environment.
Of course, in Japan there are a lot of class-less ones: bureaucracy, 100 grams of cheese for five dollars and unpleasant Japanese Gopniks at the Hachiko statue at the world's busiest intersection. But it is here that I finally feel not my own, but myself. There are many difficulties ahead, but this country with a huge moon, sakura and tradition is a special New Year's Eve, which serves as your bridge to it, allows you to go further along this tunnel, which I was able to see a year ago.
Photo: Yulia Shur, Shutterstock, Tomo Tang / Flickr, Takayuki Miki (1, 2)
