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The
oldest student in the room, a woman in her early 70s
said that Japanese ghosts were part of the earth and
existed in all the natural elements around us. She asked
me where American ghosts lived. With the movie Poltergeist
in mind, I said, with what I thought was obvious deadpan
humor, that because America was obsessed with technology
and because Americans kept moving and were always tearing
down buildings and putting up new ones, American ghosts
were no longer rooted to a specific house or piece of
land, and had instead begun to haunt the one "place"
that all Americans visited every day, the electronic
airwaves; I said that American
ghosts lived in the blank channels between television
stations.
My students nodded as they seriously
considered what I had told them, then the youngest student
in the room, a secretary in her early 20s said, “They
live in the TV here too, and in my purse.” She
pulled a tomogachi toy from her purse and proceeded
to show us how she had been keeping alive a small electronic
ghost of a child she called Anne-chan who lived in the
pager-sized device
in her hand.
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