Life Post: My Last Post From Japan (For Now At Least)

 I'm writing this in a hotel room in Tokushima. It's my last night here, and I left my apartment for good earlier today. I also ended my phone contract today, which means I'm in the wonderful position of only being able to use my phone with wifi.

This felt like a moment I should capture somehow, yet I'm scared to dwell on anything too long because I've done a remarkable job of not crying so far today. Something which can't be said about yesterday, my last day at work. It was a difficult day. At one point, I was even crying in the middle of a junior high schooler's lesson while she steadfastly pretended that I wasn't (big thanks to her for that).

When I'm back in the US, it might be easier to document all of what I'm feeling, but right now, it still doesn't entirely feel real. I think my brain still expects to go back to work and that this is, if anything, a brief vacation. I had a thought about being an English teacher earlier only to immediately remind myself that, currently, I'm not. (Currently, I'm unemployed, but that's a whole other thing.)

The entrance requirements to get into the US changed pretty last minute for me on January 12. Starting the day I get back (impeccable timing) people can only enter the US with a negative Covid test. I'm in rural Japan where getting a Covid test in the three day window and in English (to show US officials) is a challenge, so there was a mad scramble, and I'm incredibly thankful to my coworkers for helping make it happen. Luckily, I could get tested, and (even more thankfully) the result is negative. After that and my original flight being canceled, I am rather paranoid about everything, but that's to be expected considering it's a pandemic.

Once I get home, I need to quarantine for a week. I'm not opposed to some rest time, but I think what worries me is that I'll start dwelling on how sad I am to have left Japan if I have too much downtime, so I'm making plans. I'm going to try to get a head start on certain things I have planned during that time, which hopefully I'll share more about in the future.

Until then, I'm going to try my best to cherish the short time I have left in Japan despite it not being ideal thanks to Covid restrictions.

Book Review: Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald

Published: February 12th, 2013
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Received: purchased
Read from November 29th to December 29th, 2020
Synopsis from Goodreads:

I know my own mind.
I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way.

These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality.

“Blindspot” is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. Writing with simplicity and verve, Banaji and Greenwald question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups—without our awareness or conscious control—shape our likes and dislikes and our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential.

In Blindspot, the authors reveal hidden biases based on their experience with the Implicit Association Test, a method that has revolutionized the way scientists learn about the human mind and that gives us a glimpse into what lies within the metaphoric blindspot.

The title’s “good people” are those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions. The aim of Blindspot is to explain the science in plain enough language to help well-intentioned people achieve that alignment. By gaining awareness, we can adapt beliefs and behavior and “outsmart the machine” in our heads so we can be fairer to those around us. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds.

Brilliant, authoritative, and utterly accessible, Blindspot is a book that will challenge and change readers for years to come.

Review:

Blindspot was written by two of the psychologists behind Harvard's Implicit Association Test. I first took several IATs when I was in college. Not as part of a college course but on my own after they were mentioned in the psychology course I was taking. The book itself issues a lot of warnings about taking an IAT because the tests can often alarm people who take them because it reveals inner biases. In fact, the level of caution that the book used when speaking about taking the test was surprising to me after my own experiences.

As I mentioned, I took several IATs, yet I wasn't surprised by my results. I would probably chalk that up to being well aware of the idea of inner biases and how they work before I took the first test. I knew I had them, so having them revealed wasn't a massive shock. In fact, the idea that inner biases exist and influence people's decision making feels like common sense to me, so in a way, the most shocking thing about Blindspot for me was the idea that it wouldn't be. I don't think I realized how new the idea of them are to psychology until I read Blindspot.

Learning the history behind the IAT and how psychologists learned how to actually measure hidden biases was the highlight of the book for me. I learned a lot about the history of the IAT that I found absolutely fascinating. I also used reading the book as a reason to go back and take the same IATs that I had taken in college.

Taking IATs is a very valuable form of self-reflection I believe, so I do think this book is a very valuable introduction to that for anyone who isn't aware of the tests already. This entire book did a good job of incorporating the history of the tests' development with explanations of the psychology behind them, and on top of that, it does a good job of making you reflect on reasons why inequality still exist despite the book very much being about the tests themselves and not larger structural inequalities.

Blindspot is a valuable reading experience for anyone, and I would highly recommend it.

Life Post: I'm Leaving Japan and Going Back to the US

 I'm kind of dreading writing this post (despite the title already giving you the gist of it) because there's just so much I could say, and at this point, I'm kind of exhausted by repeating it.

But after three and a half years of living in Japan, I'm moving back to the US at the end of January.

This feels like such a long time coming because I actually made the decision to move back last January. The plan then was that I would go back in July. Then the pandemic hit, and I wound up extending my contract twice. I could have extended it again, and in many ways it might have been the smart thing to do, but continually pushing it back was making leaving so much harder. I feel like I need to leave now. Not because I'm unhappy or anything but because it feels like it's the right time. Or, rather, it felt like it was the right time months ago.

I know I'm not unique in the pandemic pushing back plans. It's happened for just about everyone, so I won't go into that too much. But when it comes to why I'm deciding to leave, I really don't have an answer other than it feels like the right time.

When I started working at my school, I had eight coworkers. As of right now, three of those coworkers are still at the school. Our school has two foreign teachers (of which I'm one), and I've worked with three different ones since being here. I've apparently worked here longer than any foreign teacher has at least in a long, long time, and it's been incredibly difficult to tell everyone that I'm leaving.

I haven't mentioned anything online until now because the students didn't know yet. We started telling them the week before last. There are still a few who don't know because they were unable to come to class, but the odds of them finding this before I can tell them are at least very low.

Leaving Tokushima is going to be one of the most difficult things I've ever done, and the fact that it's happening during a pandemic definitely makes it harder. I have a lot of anxiety about something going wrong (especially with my flight), and every day I think about the fact that I have good health care here but don't know if I'll even have health insurance when I get back to the US during a pandemic that's far worse there than there.

But those aren't worries that I want to dwell on in this post. I'm sure I'll right more in the future about how moving back goes, and once I have dealt with the grief of leaving a bit more, I'll hopefully write more about my experiences and emotions about leaving as well.

Now that I can talk about leaving online, you can probably expect to see some mentions of it here from time to time as I've been talking around it quite a bit in the few life posts I've done on here for the past year. But that's if I have time to even write anything. Believe me when I say that I have a to do list a mile long and more stress than I know what to do with over everything I need to do in the next few weeks. I'll just keep my fingers crossed that nothing goes disastrously wrong and that I don't get so stressed out to the point of not being able to enjoy the time I have left.

Book Review: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Published: January 5, 2010
Publisher: The New Press Inc.
Received: purchased
Read from October 31 to November 22, 2020

Summary from Goodreads:

"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole."

As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them.

In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.

Review:

This book is a decade old, but it is still relevant to the current situation in the United States. Really, it's quite striking how much that is true. The book was published not long after Barack Obama became president, and references to that are made in the book. Now, after another Obama term and a Trump one, this book is as true as ever.

Much of what is covered in this book are things that I've already known from other reading, but that didn't make it any less compelling. Alexander has done a great job of providing data about the current state of incarceration in the United States. I know this saying has become quite cliche, but this book should be required reading. These are things that every American should be aware of, yet too few are.

I highly encourage everyone to pick up this book.

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