THE SNOWBALL OF RIGHTS

As I was driving up the snowy road through the village yesterday morning, I heard and felt a metallic "bong" as a glob of snow struck the van. I reacted instinctively, turning my head to search for the snowball-throwing culprit, when with a newer instinct I caught myself turning my head to look for the culprit and thought: culprit? In Japan? There aren't any snowball-throwing culprits in Japan because, believe it or not, nobody throws snowballs at cars in Japan. It just isn't done, it's not a source of fun. I'd known that unknowingly for nearly 30 years, and had just that moment realized it.

For the rest of my drive up the mountain I thought about how when I was a boy (there's that phrase again), moving vehicles were an alien species in the struggle of the winter city streets, legitimate targets in the theaters of snowy battle that were the neighborhoods, where cars were like mastodons or other slow-moving objects worthy of a good throw (What a shot!); it was an antagonistic but fundamentally good-natured relationship between young boys and vulnerable (and therefore, in the ancient hunting tradition) targetworthy automobiles.

The snowball was as well the ad hoc manifestation of the ongoing conflict between youngers and elders, between freedom and school; in motion the snowball flew as the round white symbol of liberty, of revolution, of primal rebellion, Manifest Destiny, the right to bear arms, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all rolled into a solid orb and thrown on behalf all our forebears into the face of all inequity... It was a pretty American thing.

Here in Japan, that's all sort of moot. Nobody can bear arms here, where school is freedom (though there are distinct signs of unrest in that quarter) and liberty and revolution are seldom spoken of -- nor was Manifest Destiny ever much of a big thing in this country. Cars here, however, are just as much an extension of the driver as they are in the US, as witness my instinctive reaction, learned from driving in NY where, in my earlier kidhood, when the packing was good just about anything that moved was a legitimate target, excepting maybe widows and orphans, if you knew such to be the case. But I was now on the other side of the planet.

So there was no one there, no kid hiding behind a tree all excited, it was just a lump of snow that had fallen from a power line or something. Which on the one hand is good, I guess, not having kids out there in winter sharpening their aims, pegging their best shots at all those moving targets piloted by drivers with eagle eyes. On the other hand, there's something about the lack of such kids that seems to portend an unexciting future...