Before you travel, study abroad or not, you have to have goals. No one is questioning that. But, it doesn't hurt to readjust, reaffirm, and re-list those goals once you've settled in. You'll learn more and doubt less. So, here are a few new pledges for my time here in Tokyo.

1.I will grow my hair. This may be less a pledge and more a premonition. While I do like the idea of walking into a Tokyo barber shop and getting a trim, in my favorite game of trying something new, I am going to abandon my military-shave for the long hair that is fashionable in Japan. (I may only have half a year, but we’ll see what I can do when I will grow my hair.)

2. I will sing karaoke with Japanese girls. Karaoke and sushi are pretty much the meat of American perspectives of Japanese culture. So who could disagree that I should get pretty Japanese girls to sing the American country music that I love. I am thinking there could be some fantastic footage if I will sing karaoke with Japanese girls.

3. I will bathe in an onsen. Soaking in the nude in natural hot springs is traditional Japanese through and through. I am not one to be afraid of a little skin, so this is a must. I figured I’d let you know textually because NBC has reservations about viewer retention if any audience was forced to see me naked. So, I guess you won’t get to see for sure if I will bathe in an onsen.

4. I will not eat any fast food. I do not eat at fast food restaurants in the United States, but, I will admit, initially Japanese fast food seemed less sinister and less of a dietary disaster to me. I went to Sukiya and had a beef bowl my first week in Tokyo: cheap, fast, big and low quality (sound familiar?). It would have been a mistake to not see the Japanese version of fast food, so I don’t regret eating there once. It made my wallet feel better, but I got a bit of a stomach-ache. Now I can say that heretofore, I will not eat any fast food.

5. I will not get a cellular phone. Is there anyway for me to say the following without offending someone? I find short-term study abroad students (less than a year) who feel the need to get a cell phone obnoxious. … That is inappropriate to say. What I can say is that in the United States the idea that someone can contact me at any moment is troubling, so whenever I travel anywhere I use travel as a fitting excuse to be unavailable. I am in Tokyo. I am largely traveling on my own, and so any challenges that are emboldened by my cell phone-less pockets are welcomed by me. Phones are status symbols in the U.S. but, don’t be fooled, that trend, like many others, took form here in the land of the rising sun. It is readily assumed by Japanese people that I have a cell phone. I, more proudly than I should, gloat that I have no cell phone now, nor will I ever while I am in Japan. Maybe other students think it is easier to keep in contact with friends or family at home, maybe they think it is an efficient means of protection, maybe they want to be connected to whatever social network they have found abroad. I must respect that, but I will not get a cellular phone.

6. I will get A’s in all of my academic classes. In my past semester or two, I have become increasingly concerned with academics. Perhaps my increasing responsibility over my school costs, the passing of time and opportunity, or a genuine rise in interest has made me cognizant of grades. Whatever the reason, my studying in Tokyo will have no bearing on my intention to nail perfect scores in all five of my classes, from the Modern Japanese Empire to Comparative Asian Politics to Japanese Politics to the Politics of Human Trafficking to Asian Religions. Studying abroad offers fantastic opportunities, including the classes, so there is no reason not to enjoy the content and excel. There, now I’ve gone and said to an NBC audience that I will get A’s in all of my academic classes.

7. I will travel domestically as far from Tokyo as I can. I can’t quite justify this as a study abroad in Japan if I can’t get outside of Tokyo. Philadelphia doesn’t quite speak for the rural belt of central Pennsylvania, and the world’s largest city doesn’t quite cover Japan. So, I will travel domestically as far from Tokyo as I can.

8. I will travel somewhere every weekend. I counted every weekend I have left before I leave this archipelago. Not one will go to waste, and this is a pledge. That means wonderful additions for this blog, the photo album and probably also for my list of lost experiences. It is important that I will travel somewhere every weekend.

9. I will travel somewhere else in Asia. There are two plans in the works. For the interest of surprise, I will keep those plans as secretive as my big mouth can accomplish. All you need to know is that Christopher is taking a plane somewhere other than Philadelphia International Airport in the coming months. That is a promise; I will travel somewhere else in Asia.

You guys can keep me honest, and let me know if you have any suggestions or advice.

Jaa ne:
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 04:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The news is different here. It is a funny bit of social science to be reminded that there is no harder goal than objective news. It is harder still to find comprehensive international news. There are nearly 200 (technically) independent states in this world, all with their own events, crises and triumphs. Your local newspaper, increasingly stuffed with revenue-pumping advertisements, can’t quite fit that story on civil war in Cote d’Ivorie.

Studying abroad is as much about seeing the world differently, including its political, social and religious strata, as it as about trying different foods and wasting a different kind of money. Different news, with its different worldview, may be of a paramount importance.

Here in Tokyo, the capital and largest city of a questioned leader in the Asia-Pacific, the news floats into the classroom. In this city, where its citizens are blessed with comparable living standards to those in much of the U.S., people tend to be as indifferent to news as Americans. Many Japanese students are as bored by their country’s domestic and foreign affairs as my peers are at home.

Because, of course, the controversy that encircles the Yasukuni Shrine is as commonplace as American debate about abortion.

Yasukuni is a shrine in Tokyo dedicated to Japanese war victims. Built in the 19th century, the shrine is meant to commemorate the lives of some 2.5 million, according to the Tokyo Shimbun. But, the shrine is in the news throughout the region for less than 20 of those lost Japanese.

In 1978, more than 1,000 convicted Japanese war criminals were secretly enshrined, including 14 Class-A criminals, tried and convicted for their roles in the Japanese Pacific War effort.

Conservative ultra-nationalists in the Japanese government continue to reject their country’s atrocities of the past, like the murder of 300,000 Chinese during the Rape of Nanking in the late 1930s. While there is a swath of Japanese legislators that are outraged at the historical revisionism of some of their political opponents, current Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has repeatedly visited Yasukuni, much to the dismay of the governments of Asian countries that were victimized by Japanese aggression in the early 20th century.

In mid-August, Koizumi made his sixth and perhaps most controversial visit, as it was his first trip to Yasukuni on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in the Pacific War. Through China, the Korean peninsula and beyond, governments and Asian media lambasted the obtuse arrogance of the right-wing, ultra-nationalist movements in Japan.

Yet, among American media, all I could find was a piece in the small political magazine the New Republic, a wire story from Reuters that ran in the Boston Globe, and an article on the website of National Public Radio.

This isn’t tiresome global affairs that can’t sell newspapers. This is complex and controversial international relations between the world’s fastest growing economy and the most industrialized non-Western country on this planet.

I might not have gotten the story if I wasn’t studying in Tokyo; if I was instead in my apartment in North Philadelphia.

I am absorbing political discourse and trying to follow international dialogues, the likes of which I have never grappled with before. It is a reminder that any travel is an opportunity to learn in more ways than for which anyone can prepare you. For the 150 yen I spent on the Tokyo edition of the International Herald Tribune, I was given an education that avoided overlap with my American learning.

Here in the continent we call Asia, Yasukuni seems to be in the minds of everyone. It finds its way into math lessons as well as into history classes. Probably not so in the United States.

I couldn't find any American medium covering the birth of the Japanese emperor's grandson last Wednesday, a cesarean birth that will, if the imperial family has its way, one day continue the world's oldest hereditary institution.

Last week the only story in an American news source on the coming selection of a new Japanese prime minister was an AP story that I found in the Houston Chronicle. It is expected that Shinzo Abe, currently a top government official, will find his way to the prime minister's seat when Koizumi steps down later this month. Abe is a man whom some speculate will push to change the country's constitution so Japan will be able to use military force in its international policy.

But only the half a million Houston Chronicle readers could have known that. The news from any one place in this world is invariably spotty. (This is why your high school history teacher better have taught you to get your news from a variety of locales.)

I write this on September 11, 2006. In the United States, it is the fifth anniversary of what is often cited as the worst foreign attack on American soil since the country’s independence. Yet, the cover of today’s Japan Times focused more on sumo wrestling than terrorism.

Scary, isn’t it?

Jaa:
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 06:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

(SEE VIDEO FROM THE KICHIJOJI OMATSURI IN EPISODE FIVE)

If you ever travel anywhere, from a neighboring county to a faraway country, will you find yourself a native? Put down your AAA Travel Guide and ask a local where to go, where to eat, what to do.

Thank you, Kyle Cleveland, Professor of Sociology at Temple University-Japan, for being just that for me. An American who woke up and found himself a longtime resident of Tokyo and avid researcher into Japanese culture, he has been instrumental in guiding my travel, experiences and decisions here in Japan.

It was he who directed me to Kichijoji Sunday morning. One of Tokyo’s most desirable suburbs, Sunday was the conclusion of the district’s annual Fall omatsuri, festival. There, one of Cleveland’s former bilingual students greeted me at the train station, poised to be my very patient tour guide for the day.

A day after a busy trip to Yokohama, I was unsure how I would receive a day of central Honshu’s heat. We found a centrally located set of drums, beaten by traditionally-garbed Kichijojians and surrounded by onlookers. This was its beginning.

From there, my smallish, Americanized Japanese guide Megumi, with bobbed black hair and a warming laugh that she used to hide her curious eyes, took me to one of Kichijoji’s several shrines. Walking passed stands selling takoyaki, fried octopus, and boasting small carnival games, she explained her understanding of the omatsuri.

There were eight or more Kichijoji neighborhood groups, each of which would carry their omikoshi, portable shrine, from its home (sometimes in a temple or garden) to the town center, where all the groups would chant and show off their omikoshi as the omatsuri’s conclusion.

Traditionally it was believed, Megumi said, occasionally gauging my understanding of her English (which was far better than for which she gave herself credit), that a Shinto god lived within the omikoshi.

With Megumi translating, I found from her mother and others who were carrying an omikoshi, that much of the religious meaning had been lost for the participants. Seeming surprised by my interest in the traditional meanings of the festival, Megumi’s mother echoed all of the other participants I questioned in assuring me that it was a social event for fun, nothing more. It took my passing a few drunk drummers to get the message.

At first I was a little disappointed. But then I remembered something written by Donald Richie, acclaimed American author who has called Japan his home for half a century. (MEET DONALD RICHIE IN MY THIRD EPISODE)

“Visitors to Japan are… hoping for something more Japan,” Richie wrote in The Image Factory, but, “new Japan is now continually in your face and [changing].”

Sometimes Westerners want to see the Orient as a place untamed and unlike the homes of our memory. A place where polytheism reigns, you eat with sticks and the alphabet just seems pretentious. It is jarring to see a block party with drinking and young people disillusioned with the religions of their grandparents. A mirror is a troubling thing.

This changed nothing. Tradition is a passing of message and importance. I regret that at this time on this day in this place I do not know what my family name means. I do know that it meant something to someone at sometime in someplace, and that is from where my pride in it originates.

Megumi’s mother laughed when, through translation, I asked her if she was proud to be carrying the omikoshi. It didn’t appear in the translation but it did appear on her face and in her eyes and I saw it as it billowed out of her Japanese ears. She was proud of carrying the shrine, not because she thought a Shinto god was trusting her middle-aged shoulders, but because she knew there was a time when there was meaning in it all and something done indirectly is done just the same.

Megumi and I followed one of the omikoshi parades. She and I slicing through the sweaty crowd, a singular body that managed to expand and contract in every direction, simultaneously fighting us and pushing us towards the omikoshi, a two foot by four foot box adorned with ornate gold, intricate carving and simple paper cutouts, an appropriate dichotomy for the beer-guzzling, Shinto-supporting events around it.

Late in the afternoon we met all of the omikoshi and their human conveyances in one overcrowded explosion of celebration and confused awe.

The groups answered their leaders’ chants, all in competition, while rhythmically hoisting the omikoshi skyward and dancing to music which seemed to have no origin. There was clapping and whistling and singing and more, all of which came from everywhere and nowhere all at once, as I fought sweat from overtaking my voraciously consuming eyes.

As quickly as the celebration rose to its greatest height, when leaders climbed on top of the platform in front of each omikoshi and gave even more pointed direction for my glare and camera lens, it came to a halt. A wild scramble for every watering hole and beer-infused cooler in Kichijoji.

For her own part, Megumi’s mother took me to one of her favorite bars; a bar which, through her daughter’s translation, I learned would be closing in December. She bought me a Sapporo beer and some yakitori, chicken kebabs, and was surprised when I told her I was a proud American who didn’t eat McDonalds and didn’t drink Coca Cola.

The bar was more a windowsill opened to the sidewalk where nostalgic festival-goers were drinking and eating while lamenting the bar’s impending demise. Smoke billowed from its small opening as chicken and corn cooked over grills, and I had a conversation couched in charades with an omatsuri veteran.

After Megumi’s mother learned my diet was based on brown rice, she insisted I take a bag of chicken breasts and an admiring smile, as I wandered once more to a subway station. I stumbled over a traditional Japanese phrase of thanks, as I tend to do, and got on a train that would return me to the normalcy of a megalopolis thousands of miles from my home. A smile stubbornly fixed above my satisfied chin.

Jaa ne:
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

(SEE VIDEO FROM MY TRIP TO YOKOHAMA IN EPISODE FIVE)

Excuse me Yokohama Tourism Board. I was less than enthused with my time in Yokohama.

As bad travel tends to go, I followed some bad advice and made some poor decisions. My first stop was in Shin-Yokohama, home to two sights, the 70,000 seat Nissan Stadium and my destination, the Ramen Noodle Museum. Well, if you dream of the thought that someday you might walk through those turnstiles into 10,000 square feet of noodle soup paradise, I hate to disappoint you.

It sucked.

It has been said that I exaggerate. People have assailed me with labels of pessimist, cynic, and whiny, complaint-filled brat. But, let the Shinto gods strike me down if I didn’t pay 250 yen for a ticket into a gift shop and a food court.

250 yen is barely more than $2 U.S., you say. Ramen is one of the world’s widest eaten foods, from traditional Japanese fare to money-strapped American university students, you remark. The history of ramen is fascinating, enthralling even, you shout.

Yeah, I hear you. That is why I turned on my camera and put on my traveling shoes.

However, all I saw in the Ramen Museum was a shop with every ramen product known to the Japanese consumer class, two running video compilations of ramen commercials, fifteen historical markers written in Kenji (which I can’t entirely read), and a food court, all of which someone felt was worthy of a small cover charge. Note: I can go to the 125-year-old Philadelphia Museum of Art, with its 225,000 works of art, for free.

I bought a fish croquette and walked out into the overcast, rain-threatened Shin-Yokohama humidity. My complaining subsided as I strode through another Japanese skyline, with the Landmark Tower and its architecturally creative neighbors fighting the monotonous sky.

Having already wasted some 400 yen ($3.50 U.S.) to get to Shin-Yokohama, I trudged on and took another train to a ferry to get to the doorstep of Yokohama’s heart. I did find some admittedly interesting, if perplexing, street art and my first Japanese water fountain (they exist only in parks, apparently).

From there I made my way to Yokohama’s Chinatown, Japan’s largest. Feel free to point out to your friend who is trying to learn what irony is that Japan, despite its historically volatile (and violent) history with the People’s Republic of China, has one of the world’s largest Chinatowns.

I do concede that walking through the streets of Chinatown was another experience about which I will gloat. Another bustling Japanese urban district for sure, but its lights, signs and denizens were of an origin and feel unlike others.

I took a picture standing in front of the Goodwill gate, a familiar sight to anyone that has been to any large Chinatown, from Philadelphia to South Korea. I even ate some ramen.

It is always that way with travel and the new experiences you find. Grudges die quietly, with a smile and a new line of thought encroaching on your hostility and sweeping it (and 21,000 yen) out of persistent memory.

Jaa:
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 03:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)