Neolithic Survivor: Role-Playing Globalization, Culture, and Technology

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Note: What follows is an experiment.  I had a very productive class session last semester using this activity to teach about cultural globalization, and decided to write it up for publication in a pedagogy journal.  I just finished a rough draft, and decided, what the hell, might as well make it available for teachers now rather than waiting for publication. And while I'm at it, I might as well solicit some last-minute editing tips, right?  In particular, I'm a bit concerned that this somewhat complicated game is not really clear.  So, if you enjoy this and find it useful, you might repay me by offering any pointers in the next couple of days before I submit.  Thanks!

“Neolithic Survivor” is a single-class activity exploring concepts of cultural formation, intercultural communication, and technological change.  The activity is appropriate for courses on intercultural communication, cultural globalization, and communication and technology, and is intended to help students think expansively about the role of technology in shaping cultural values and ethnic identity.

A Neolithic Survivor game in progress.
Note the three different colors of figures,
representing three different teams.

Theoretical Grounding:

The spread of communication technology has combined with more open post-Cold War trade regimes and social liberation movements to increase the flow of information, goods, and people across cultural and political boundaries.  This condition of the current world system is commonly referred to as “globalization” (Beck, 2000; Castells, 1996; Pieterse, 2009).  Globalization involves a distinct heightening of the frequency and intensity of the interaction of nations and groups from different cultural, economic, and historical positions.  The mixing of these different cultures includes not just the sharing of cultural texts (music, movies, television), but also the increasing uniformity of the global technological infrastructure.

There are long-running arguments about what impact communication and other advanced technologies have on the structures and practices of disparate cultures, particularly including traditional cultures or those still in the process of modernizing.  Some have argued that the spread of communication technology is sufficient to transform traditional societies into modern ones, and that this process should be celebrated and promoted (Lerner, 1958; Schramm, 1964). Others, particularly after the failure of early ‘modernization’ efforts globally, have argued that the implementation of new ICT (information and communication technologies) can conflict with basic cultural values, either rendering the technologies less impactful or altering the culture’s underlying values (Kyem, 1999, 2012).  Finally, more and more scholars have pointed out ways that both technologies and messages are re-articulated to local needs, resulting in significant differences in how similar communication tools are used across cultures (cf. Appadurai, 1996).

This debate builds on ideas about the relationship between technology and culture explored by Harold Innis and Marshall Macluhan, who argued that the formal properties of communication technology have a more profound impact on societies than the content of the messages those technologies transmitted.  For instance, Innis argued that certain forms of communication emphasized extensions of a culture’s power through space to construct empires, while others provided superior duration of cultural influence through time (Innis, 2008; McLuhan & Lapham, 1994).  To fit the curriculum of my courses, my version of “Neolithic Survivor” emphasized and specifically rewarded students for engaging with these concepts of ‘time-binding’ and ‘space-binding’ media.  Technology cards and other elements of the game can be easily modified to emphasize different key course concepts.

It can be difficult for students to get a big-picture view of how the dispersion and adaptation of technology can restructure something as subtle as culture.  As with most communication courses, the first task in teaching about globalization is often to get students to look at themselves and their own surroundings as ‘unfamiliar,’ as having origins and differences , as something other than a completely natural and taken-for-granted norm.  The goal of the “Neolithic Survivor” activity is to take students out of their familiar settings and push them to think of culture as a ‘blank slate’ that is formed in a complex interaction between cultural practices, ideas, and interactions between groups.

Preparation:

Technology Cards:  Use the attached file to print and then cut several dozen cards representing a randomized selection of ‘technologies’ that will be handed out to teams.  These are the most important element of gameplay.  We define ‘technology’ quite loosely here, with a few examples of things teams can ‘discover’ being: stonecarving, navigation by stars, pottery, money, bronze, large stone structures, numbers, writing, the wheel, agriculture, musical instruments, religion, stone inscription, fire, stone tools, smoke signals, and the bow and arrow.

Obviously these do not represent any ‘logical’ progression, and sequences of discoveries that might seem strange do arise – but as we’ll see, this is part of the game’s learning potential.

I would encourage instructors to use their own creativity to add technologies to the stack that are either relevant to specific lessons, or that they just think would be fun to work with and talk about.

Playing Pieces:

You’ll need about a dozen markers or figures about the size of nickels to represent players’ tribes.  They should be four different colors, or otherwise marked to be distinguishable by team. If you happen to be a board game fan, you can probably find something appropriate around the house – I was able to use various figures from a Dungeons and Dragons board game.

Playing Board:

You’ll need a playing surface divided into roughly even-sized squares that fit your figures.  The attached file representing the Fertile Crescent may be used, or if appropriate for your class you may use a different regional map and turn it into a play surface.  Scale is not really important to gameplay.

Depending on your technology circumstances, you may want to print your map out on a transparency.  The ideal possibility would be if your classroom is equipped with an overhead projection camera, allowing the image of the board to be magnified for the whole class, in which case you can just print on plain paper.  Otherwise, you may need to project the board as a transparency, or in a worst-case scenario you can place the playing board in the center of the room and allow students to look at it more closely as needed.

The Activity:

Neolithic Survivor is a turn-based game that simulates cultural change and hybridization over time as a group of small tribes in a nonspecific prehistoric period move, grow, and adopt new technologies.  While it is played in part on a game board, the largest portion of its gameplay consists of collaborative storytelling, in which the players make decisions whose outcomes the instructor determines.

This kind of gameplay is based largely on the creative and collaborative model of tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons[1].  While such games often involve complex statistical systems to simulate probability and outcomes (most often in combat), their more deeply distinctive feature is the way players make choices and a gamemaster improvises the consequences of those decisions in a way that constructs a larger narrative.  Neolithic Survivor focuses almost exclusively on the storytelling element of such games, with the instructor serving as gamemaster-for-the-day.  As we’ll see, this means that the game calls on an instructor’s ability to be creative on the fly.

A game of Neolithic Survivor tells the story of three or four primitive tribes and their transformation, over the course of hundreds orthousands of years, into sophisticated communities with distinct identities and mutual relationships.  The emergent story is a parable, and is not meant to reflect any real instance of similar development.  Instead, it is intended to capture a sense of what it means for a culture to make decisions about technological usage and interactions with others, and to develop in particular ways as a result of those decisions.

At the beginning of the game, read this script:

As the game starts, you are playing as the leaders of a tribe of very early humans, living a very rudimentary nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Tigris/Euphrates river, far back in human prehistory.

Each receives one technology card per turn, for every five population.  After receiving your card, you have three to five minutes to work as a group to write one or two sentences about how you will use your new knowledge.  How will you use it increase your power?  How can you use it to influence your population?  The population of another tribe?  Can you use it to claim territory?  Be creative!  Try to come up with actions that will either improve your tribe’s monopolization of space or your monopolization of time. You may use a computer/smartphone/tablet to research ideas for how you will act each turn.

But you can only use your new technology in ONE way, so be thoughtful!  For example, if you discover fire, you can use it to construct a system of communication by smoke signals or to cook food, but not both.  Your communication enhancement might give you greater ability to move or more prowess in battle, but more healthy food would increase your population.  Also note, some technologies can interact with previous discoveries!  For instance, if you have already discovered bows and arrows, you can use fire to make flaming arrows.

After all groups submit their actions for the turn, I will determine the outcome of the turn.  I will award “population points” based on the creativity and effectiveness of your planned actions each turn (or I may take points away!). Everyone starts with five population points.  Each additional five population points earns you an extra population marker, which grants you an extra population figure, which allows you to control an extra territory and gain an extra card each turn.

Following this introduction, the game proceeds as follows:

11.     Divide students into three to five teams.  Ideally, this is an activity in a class of no more than 30 students, so that each group is small enough to operate collaboratively.  Have each team, or tribe, pick a name.  The instructor then creates a visible scoreboard on a whiteboard or the like, with a column for each team.  Each team begins with five points.  In this game, ‘points’ represent the population of a tribe, and can grow or shrink on the basis of game outcomes.

22. Using an overhead projector, display the map.  Using any method to decide order of selection, have each team pick a starting location, with each team represented by some sort of figure or marker.  Council them that map features make a difference – encourage them think through what it might mean to plant their tribe on a river or coastline, for instance.

33. Distribute, at random, one technology card to each team.  Give teams three to five minutes to collaboratively write a one- or two-sentence description of how they will use their new technology on a slip of paper, with team name.

44. Game master (instructor) collects all technology decisions.  At this point, teams may also move their figure one space, if they wish.  During later turns, when they may have more than one game piece, they can move none, some, or all of their pieces.

55. Game master (instructor) evaluates all technology decisions, and assigns population points, generally in a range between one and three, depending on the creativity and effectiveness of the teams’ declared use of the technology.  Outcomes of decisions may depend on each tribe’s geographic location, or on the interaction of more than one decision.  For instance, land near rivers will provide better results for tribes that choose to invest in agriculture.  Also, in the event of a conflict between tribes (almost guaranteed sooner or later), the game master has to resolve the conflict, deciding how many population points each side lost or gained, and what territory each tribe controls at the end of the turn.  This determination is based on any number of factors including teams’ declared strategy and relative level of technological development.

66. Each turn is identical in structure, though they will get more complex.  Each turn will take at least ten minutes to resolve, so games will generally involve between four and seven turns in one class session. 

77. As the game continues, teams accumulate more population points, and one figure is added to the playing surface to represent every five points of population.  This allows teams to control multiple types of terrain.

88. Teams ALSO receive an additional Technology Card for every five population points they have on the board.   Teams need to describe how they will use each piece of technology.

9 9. As the game continues, teams accumulate more technologies, at random, and become more differentiated from one another, with different advantages and disadvantages.  If teams get a new technology card identical to one they have already received, they can use the same technology in a new way (remember, each new technology can only be used one way).

1 10.  Remind students that because this is a narrative game, decision making and planning are very open-ended.  Students can get very creative, and you may have to improvise, as I’ll show in the sample game described below.

111.  The game ends when time is up.  If you want to debrief in the same class session, allow at least ten minutes, but you may also want to devote a second class session or substantial chunk to discussion of the game.

112.. Count up population points to determine the winning team.  Students will be drawn into a game they think they can ‘win,’ but as with all educational games, who wins isn’t of as much interest as the process.

Gameplay Examples

The rules for Neolithic Survivor are relatively simple, but the real engagement and learning opportunities for the game come from students’ creativity and the game-master’s responses.  Each student decision about how a team will ‘use’ a technology or otherwise act or move produces unpredictable results as they interact with the decisions of other teams.  A few examples taken from games played in the authors’ classrooms will help show how this can work at the level of individual technology uses, on a turn-by-turn basis, and over the course of a game.  To help show the bigger picture of the game’s flow, these examples are drawn from a single real game.  These examples show that while the game emphasizes communication technology and practices, more material aspects of life and technology are also represented.

Example Technology Use 1: A team receives a card giving them the ability to draw durable images on stone.  Drawing on Harold Innis’ discussion of time-binding media, they specifically choose to inscribe religious imagery.  The game-master responds by declaring that they have successfully founded a new religion, increasing social order, and awards them two population points.

Example Technology Use 2: A team, who earlier in the game had learned agriculture and chosen to settle near a river basin on the map, are later given the card granting the ability to create pottery.  They choose to use this technology to store food.  The game-master declares that this drastically increases their durable food supply and grants them four Population Points.

Example Technology Use 3: A team who had earlier discovered the bow and arrow and established a military subsequently invent musical instruments.  They choose to use music as a form of military control.  The game-master awards them 2 population points to represent their increased ability to defend small threats, and informs them that their military is now particularly potent.

Example Turn: A team that has developed both military power and a powerful religion moves to attack a team that has built a larger population by focusing on agriculture and social structure.  There are no rules in Neolithic Survivor for combat – the game-master simply has to make a decision based on what makes sense given the circumstances.  In this case, the game-master chooses to reduce the population of each team, which is much more damaging for the smaller, aggressive tribe.  As a result of this mistake, the smaller, religious, militiarized tribe decides in the next turn to pursue peace with the tribe they had attacked.  The game-master chooses to allow it, and the two teams negotiate a peace and then merge, along with their technology, to form a culture with strong agriculture as well as intense religious practices and military strength. 

Debriefing:

This game simplifies culture to a Neolithic context, with a small population, limited geography, and only a few ‘moving parts’, and shows how it grows larger and more complex with innovation.  This model provides easily digestible insights into many fundamental ideas of communication, technology, and culture.  Though the game-master should always dictate outcomes that are sensible and proportionate (i.e. punishing teams that make unstrategic decisions and rewarding those that act carefully), there will ultimately be no neat, linear progression to the game, and the game can be actively engineered both before and during play to emphasize different concepts depending on the course context.

In a course focused on technology and communication, the game could illustrate the idea that communication is constitutive – that forms of communication do not simply ‘reflect’ the cultures that use them, but in fact shape those cultures in non-deterministic ways.  Observations of how fire can be used in different ways can build into discussions of how modern technologized communication has different impacts on the various societies that adopt it.

In a course about identity or globalization, the game could show how cultures and ethnicities are not pre-given, but emerge through a process of change over time.  For instance, in the gameplay example above, the struggling team that chose to ‘merge’ with a more successful team illustrates a fairly historically common process of melding or hybridity (cf. Kraidy, 2005). The game’s mix of randomness (in the discovery of new knowledge) and strategy (in teams use of technology) is particularly suited for illustrating the concept of contingency – the idea that any given cultural formation is the result, not of the logical unfolding of some inherent national or ethnic ‘essence,’ but of a series of historical events that are the product of the strange alchemy of purpose and luck.  The game may, then, serve as a powerful support for a course that advances a position of cultural anti-essentialism (see West, 1990).

The game’s main shortcoming is that it relies heavily on the improvisational skill of the instructor/gamemaster, and on a sense of cameraderie and exploration in the classroom.  The game’s structure is intentionally open-ended, and there are relatively few hard rules in place to deal with the vast number of possible actions undertaken by a team.  An instructor/gamemaster must be prepared to quite literally make things up as they go along.  Particularly in the awarding of points and declaration of a winner, this might lead to student unrest if the course as a whole is not already on a steady footing of collaborative exploration.

Works Cited:

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1st ed.). Univ Of Minnesota Press.

Beck, U. (2000). What Is Globalization. Polity.

Castells, M. (1996). Rise of The Network Society (Information Age Series) (1st ed.). Wiley.

Innis, H. A. (2008). The Bias of Communication (2nd Edition.). University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.

Kraidy, M. M. (2005). Hybridity: The Cultural Logic Of Globalization (1st ed.). Temple University Press.

Kyem, P. A. K. (1999). Examining the Discourse About the Transfer of GIS Technology to Traditionally Non-Western Societies. Social Science Computer Review, 17(1), 69–73. doi:10.1177/089443939901700107

Kyem, P. A. K. (2012). Is ICT the panacea to sub-Saharan Africa’s development problems? Rethinking Africa’s contentious engagement with the global information society. Progress in Development Studies, 12(2-3), 231–244. doi:10.1177/146499341101200309

Lerner, D. (1958). The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Macmillan Pub Co.

McLuhan, M., & Lapham, L. H. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Reprint.). The MIT Press.

Pieterse, J. N. (2009). Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Second Edition.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Schramm, W. L. (1964). Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing Countries. Stanford University Press.

West, C. (1990). The New Cultural Politics of Difference. In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (pp. 38, 19). MIT Press. Retrieved from https://my.ucdavis.edu:443/main_frame.cfm

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[1] So as not to waken students’ skepticism, it might be best to omit the roots of the game they’re about to play . . .

"Accidental Racist": At least it's not "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk."

So . . . it seems the moment has come.  The explosive response to Brad Paisley and LL Cool J's "Accidental Racist" shows that country and hip hop still have a lot of . . . things to discuss with one another, let's say.  In the song, Paisley defends his wearing of the Confederate Flag "because he's a Skynrd fan," while LL offers to "forget about the iron chains" of slavery if white country boys will just stop thinking of him as a criminal because of how he dresses.  So yeah, there are a lot of problems, but at least the song is sincere, and a real dialogue.


By contrast, a few years back I was fascinated by this OTHER encounter between hip hop and country:

I was so fascinated by "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," in fact, that it ended up being the subject of my first major scholarly publication.  In it, I talk about how country music actually IS black music, and how subtly fucked up it is when country musicians consider themselves to be making a generous gesture when they reach out to black people or black culture in any way.  And of course I try to make clear that, despite some public interpretation to the contrary, "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" isn't actually any kind of attempt to reconcile country and hip hop - it's a country parody OF hip hop.

So, compared to that?  "Accidental Racist" is a step up.  I can see why people are getting upset, but I guess I'm inclined to give Paisley the benefit of the doubt.  I have no frame of reference for what he's saying - where I live and work, wearing a Confederate flag for any reason would probably get you worked over pretty quick, so it's hard to imagine doing it just because you're a Skynrd fan, but at least it feels like he's TRYING to be honest and engaged. 

Three Essential Works on Sound and Territory

After a conversation I've now forgotten, with a person I can no longer remember, I still managed to write down three amazing tips on books I need to follow up on for my work-in-progress on car audio and territorialization.

Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare

Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb

The Manchurian Incident and the Alien Act

Eighty-one years ago today, a Japanese Lieutenant set a dynamite charge on the tracks of a Japanese-controlled railway in Manchuria, in Northern China.  The act, blamed on the Chinese, was a successful attempt to initiate sino-Japanese war by the Japanese Kwantung Army.  The army had to an extent gone rogue, engaging in militant acts intended to provoke a Chinese response, and was about to be disciplined by the leadership from Tokyo when it chose to take matters into its own hands by manufacturing Chinese resistance.  This is known as the Manchurian Incident or the Mukden Incident.  What followed was more than a decade of Japanese occupation of and violence against China, including the most brutal single incident in all of World War II, the Rape of Nanking.

Note that I say Nanking was singular in its brutality, not in the number of people it killed.  The statistical honors might go to the Holocaust of eastern European Jewry, or to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the United States, or maybe even to the firebombing of Dresden by the English.  What's remarkable about Nanking, and what it shares with the Mukden incident that paved the way for it, is the completely uncontrolled and undisciplined nature of Japanese military action.

Perhaps this is the real threat Mukden and Nanking hold for Japanese popular imagination, the reason there has yet to be a collective national reconciliation with the legacy of the war, nearly a full century and several generations later - a phenomenon whose very narrow manifestations in popular music I've documented.   Perhaps it's not the evil of these acts that's so threatening, but the fact that they are out of character.  Certainly, the Germans killed all those Jews, but they did it with a characteristic German efficiency that can be recouped - they may have done something wrong, but they were still German.

Japan's war crimes, though, defied every treasured stereotype of Japanese unity, the concepts so often propagated, not just in the West but within Japan itself, of a 'hive-like' 'oriental' mentality, of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and humility.  In Mukden, low-ranking officers took it up on themselves to undermine the plans of their leaders, including implicitly the Emperor.  In Nanking, enlisted men ran wild, raping, pillaging, and murdering in endlessly creative ways.  These were not strong Japanese collective actions gone awry - they were actions deriving from some other root, something alien and awry, something that, whether deeply human or deeply perverse, were surely not 'Japanese.'  They cannot be recouped, explained, or folded into a narrative of evolution.  For those who believe in the uniqueness of the Japanese spirit, they can only be denied, repressed, dismissed.

Big Announcement Time! About My New Book, Blown Horizonz

Hello friends!  I'm really excited to make an exciting announcement. About WRITINGS.

If you read this here blog, you see random, scattered, off-the-cuff musings on a semi-random assortment of popular culture nuggets, political haps, hot links, etc.  But you may also occasionally see links to my writing elsewhere, and maybe you've wondered at those times, HEY, WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT?

What's it all about is that I pretty frequently for the last ten years or so have been writing about music for outlets like Tinymixtapes, the Japan Times, The Wag, Popmatters, Audiogalaxy, etc.  I've now finally taken the time to compile some of these pieces into my FIRST BOOK!

It is titled Blown Horizonz: Incidental Comments on Psychedelic Noise, Abstract Rap, and Other Music That Will End Your Mind, and it will be released on September 1st, 2012.

Actually I should have probably written "FIRST BOOK"! above, in scare quotes, because it may or may not be a real "book."  It's an ebook, which I'm self-releasing, with the generous cooperation of my various editors and publishers. Is that a real book?  Your call, bro.

The collection will contain essays about everything from free jazz to weird folk to U.K. garage to Kool Keith.  It includes interviews, mostly with white rappers like Cage, Themselves, and MC Paul Barman.  Some of these pieces are difficult or impossible to find, including essays on Japanese hip hop and the Night People scene that I published in the print-only magazine Signal to Noise, and pieces from a decade ago that only saw the light of day in small newsletters.  There will also be at least one piece written fresh for this collection.

One of the Signal to Noise essays was shortlisted for the 2010 edition of Da Capo Press's Best Music Writing, so that might be worth checking out.  My writing has also been praised by such luminaries as Michael Gira of Swans and Dylan Ettinger.  But just in case that's not compelling enough, you can watch this space over the next month for samples, plugs, and the like.

Best of all, the book will be FREE for at least two weeks after its initial release!  How will I make money, you ask?  And my answer is, of course, volume, my friend.  Volume.

I hope at least one or two of you are as excited about this as I am.  (Thanks Mom!)




If you would be interested in receiving a digital copy of the book for review, please let me know in the comments section below.  Thanks!

Regarding Workers

I took the above photo a couple of days after the 3.11 earthquake, mainly to illustrate the amazing speed with which Tokyo returned to everyday normality. The guy in the middle is just one subtype of an eternal Tokyo presence - the sidewalk promoter. He's giving out flyers (and probably tissue packages) to promote a contact lens shop, but you'll also see people doing much the same work in service of Italian restaurants, Karaoke boxes, manga kissaten, Korean barbecues, and hostess clubs (including the vile subspecies who harass passing young women to try and lure them into the sex industry).

I've lately been thinking about how little I understand the human element of a job like this. It's just one of a variety of undeniably crappy jobs you see people doing every day in a city like Tokyo, from fast-food server to Donki clerk to construction-site traffic-director.  The last time I worked a job of this sort was about a year ago, when I did short stints as a parking-lot attendant and line-cook as part of my confused attempts to deal with unexpected funding shortfalls in my last year of grad school.  Both were part-time jobs, and the line cook job was actually a hell of a lot of fun, but  I ended up quitting both jobs with no notice in moments of frustration and/or overwork.

I had that option, because I knew I was on my way to other things, but I was nonetheless able to hold onto some (facile, superficial) sense of solidarity with "workers," thanks to my cushioned, provisional version of poverty, and the genuinely merciless grind of grad school, in some ways undeniably more demanding and even exploitative than this sort of service job.

Now, though, I'm realizing how much that illusion of lived solidarity was insulating me from a real consideration of the challenges posed by living in a mercilessly stratified society.  Job-wise, I'm now living a ridiculous fantasy, which if not quite financially secure does happen to include total freedom.  I'm suddenly not sure how to feel about the legions of workers through whom I float, to whose daily struggle I find it more and more difficult to truly relate.

The Kafkaesque Absurdity of Japanese Paperwork

I had a rather eventful weekend, the less positive side of which was having my nice bicycle stolen (apparently by someone with a hacksaw and quite a bit of determination) from Koenji late Saturday night/Sunday morning.  The upside of the crummy experience was that I got to feel quite good about myself after going in to talk to the police and rather uneventfully reporting the theft on Monday morning.  Everyone I talked to was quite sympathetic and very helpful.

That was, for all its shadows, the good story.  The bad one began when last week I decided to finally get settled back into a yoga routine, which I'd been letting slide.  I found out when I first got here that though a recent yoga boom made studios pretty common, many of them - particularly those associated with the Yoga Lava chain - are women only.  But, since yoga has proven so vital to me keeping on an even keel over the last two years, I decided it would be worth it to trek down to Shibuya a few times a week to the closest male-friendly spot (I was also planning to bike there frequently . . . oh, cruel irony!)

"Talking to you is like talking to a Japanese person."

I ran into a friend of mine last night.  He's a Japanese guy, about my age, with a very cool job - he's a street calligrapher.  I haven't yet seen him in action, but as he described it to me, he talks to people for three or four minutes, then, using elaborate Japanese script and high-quality ink and paper, produces works that attempt to capture the essence of the person.  So, he's something like a mix of palm reader and poetic caricature artist

I'll be posting more about him and his interesting job soon. Last night, he was set up to do a few hours of work on Nakano Broadway, the shoutengai [shopping arcade] that I walk through on my way home from the station. I was headed home from school and feeling a little sick, so we didn't talk for long, but apropos of almost nothing, he told me that "talking to you is like talking to a Japanese person." He wasn't referring to my language skills - our conversations are usually a mix of English and Japanese.  He said it was more about my character or nature.

Such a strange thing to say to a person.  He's traveled abroad extensively, and I met him because he used to work at a guest house with a large foreign clientele, so he has pretty good grounds for comparison. I didn't press him on the issue, but just from what I feel about myself, I would hope he was referring to my somewhat reserved nature, my reflectiveness.  Of course, these are more ideals of Japanese identity than realities - practically speaking, he could equally well have meant that I was a falling-down drunk who hated his life, or that I was shallow Jersey Shore-esque Egg Man. Both of these are pretty uniquely Japanese, or at least could be seen as such.