Silence is Golden???

This last week has been interesting in light of my last blog post. The theme for this month is "family" in our English classes, and in talking with my students about how love and communication occur in Japanese families, they quoted to me the old adage, "Silence is golden". So it's not just in the church here, but an attitude and approach to life.

Saturday night I attended a modern dance performance in which a friend is apprenticing. True to form, it was very modern- but another word I used to describe it to my friend was "dark". The third and final dance was my friends favorite, so I was looking forward to seeing it. But after watching it I began to wonder why. It was a story of a man, a silent figure, who went around choking, suffocating, and imprisoning the people around him. The people he controlled eventually stopped struggling and gave in and began to act in similar ways to the other dancers on stage. There was a woman in a pink shirt who throughout the dance, maintained a posture of fear, trembling, shaking violently in place, in some sort of trance. She'd come out of it from time to time, and tried to show another frightened dancer a view of something outside of that scary world, but in the end, in one such moment, the play ended when the girl in pink stabbed the frightened girl while she was looking to the outside. The girl in pink then stopped shaking and adapted a new composure all together. She calmly walked off stage, turning a stage light off as she did. Whatever evil or fear or force she'd been struggling with throughout the dance had clearly won her over. All the while, throughout the performance, a hooded man in black sat with his back to us. He never stirred or moved, but clearly had an important role in what was happening.

So I asked my friend why it was her favorite- it seemed so dark to me. But for this 23 year old Japanese Christian girl, it was something she could relate to. She said that she often feels the emotions the dancers portrayed- gripped with fear, wanting to scream, but nothing comes out. It was a bit of culture shock for me to realize that the Japanese people in the audience with me liked it not for its darkness, but because it expressed what they are feeling inside. Silence. It can be deafening, and as the dance portrayed, is torturous, agonizing, and hopeless, and certainly not golden.

Many things I have observed or wondered about in this culture- things that the church struggles against and things that people live enslaved to- things I haven't been able to put words to- were illustrated and reinforced through the medium of dance; those struggles and more.