I'm sure there are some questions about my recent bodily renovation. Here are some thoughts in no particular order.
I'm ending my scholarship in two short months and consequently entering the job market. While I think that the academic market in the States is fairly forgiving of eccentric styles, the Japanese one seems less so and also there is a large chance that I (owing to having no publications, either real or pending) will end up doing some corporate English teaching or other things that require a more traditional visage while I work on my dissertation. Also, job applications here almost always require the applicant to attach a photo, and so now I can go out and take a bunch of pics to be affixed to my apps/CVs. In the end, it may not matter as I am going to try to get freelance translation work as my second (after adjunct teaching) choice, but I figured better safe than sorry.
My feeling about my dreads has been that they are a kind of historical record of my life since I started growing them. They were conceived out of sadness and a feeling of impotence over my mother's diagnosis of cancer, and as such always represented something a bit dark to me. Also, my own assessment of my time here is that it has been mixed; it has been both an amazing experience of growth to increase my language and cultural knowledge as well as a time of somewhat unfulfilled promise as I have become increasingly aware of how much more I have to learn to truly be the expert in premodern history/philosophy that I would like. So, for all my progress, there has also been an undercurrent of inadequacy that at times has led to depression and a desire to run from this place and return to the familiar, to the easy. So five years on after my Mom's passing and nearly 5 years into my time here, I felt like I needed to put an end to this chapter.
Here in Japan there is a societal recognition of changing one's image to put physical representation on emotional and/or spiritual changes. In the premodern period people at times took the tonsure -- shaved their heads and became buddhist prelates -- to mark radical changes in their lives. Sometimes those people would 'return to the world' sometime thereafter and resume offices and/or stations, but the record seems clear that they were thought of in a different light. Even modern examples abound, and I have known many people that have undergone イメージ チェーンジ or 'image change' to mark a new period in their lives. As I transition from being a student to being a teacher -- in social status, if not in actual profession -- I wanted those with whom I am familiar to have a visceral experience of the change. Moreover, as I continue to embrace local cultural norms, I felt like I needed it for myself. I am hoping to change my lifestyle rather drastically in the coming years and I wanted to have a clear jumping off point, a point where I killed my old self and became reborn.
All that being thought and said, I have come to realize that the face that I see in the mirror is not me (anymore). Somehow I thought that this external change would somehow also return me to a me from the past, and that I would revisit a time before the pain and the culture shock and the struggle to build a life for myself weighed down by the knowledge that there was no longer a generational buffer between me and my own death. That I could literally cut these out of my existence. Perhaps the thing that is clearest to me now is that that time is only a memory, and that knowledge has stripped away my innocence. It will likely be 2012 before I look again the way I did two days ago (plus some wrinkles and more grey hairs), but it is my aim that my future dreads represent only happiness, bounty, success, and peace.
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