It is typhoon season. It rains long and often here in Tokyo. Today it was particularly stormy. This morning I woke up and found that the world outside was wet. It was steady and it was hard, but I wouldn’t take the bus. I couldn’t take the bus. I am stubborn. I didn’t want to spend the 400 yen. I didn’t want to miss the exercise. I didn’t want to feel lazy. More importantly though, I said, as I often say to myself when trying to do something that seems outrageous or pointless, it was an opportunity to do something different. To ride in a typhoon. I looked out the window and saw nothing but water.

I rode the bus for a month. You can never go wrong when you do something new, if you do that something new just once. So, I took my Japanese umbrella and some spare clothes in a plastic bag stuffed in my school backpack. Things seem safer from the window.

My umbrella didn’t last to my first creaky turn. The wind flipped her inside out, making the umbrella more a bowl than a cover. I stopped, crying the rain from my squinting eyes, fixed the umbrella, stuffed it in my basket to cover my bag, and rode on.

I made it to school, riding the glances of Japanese faces unsure why I would be showering in the rain on a bicycle with a bag covered by an umbrella. I went to a bathroom. I changed my clothes and went to class. I assumed the rain would subside.

The rain did not subside. Things seem safer from the window. I changed back into my wet clothes. I went to my bicycle undeterred. The rain grew, but never raced to a sprint. The rain continued; it did not heighten. The rain was comfortable and satisfied with pattering on my shivering shoulders.

I got home a couple hours ago. Things seem safer from the window. I took a hot shower, a luxury I have been given. As I dried myself, comfortable once again, I remembered. I remembered that just an hour or so ago I was racing down the hill of Meguro-dori, the rain pinching my face, the wind pushing my bicycle. For every sentence of meaning and truly original experience that we acquire, there is no complaint or discomfort that can discredit it. I smiled down that hill, and I couldn’t stop smiling, the rain peppering my lips.

Near the end of my trip, a group of young girls in school uniforms came running around a corner, laughing and shouting. They were laughing and shouting at the rain, smiles bursting from their little faces with closed umbrellas in their hands. To many I was being just as foolish as they were.

Yet, seeing those girls only made me happier with my decision. There is something to be said for the justifiable hedonism of the innocent. Those girls were laughing and shouting at the rain and why shouldn’t they? Isn’t it odd that from time to time water falls from the sky?

Isn’t it a feeling to be cherished and sought after? The rain tickling and digging at your waxy face and shriveled fingers. It is when you are young. At some point in our lives the rain becomes a burden, a curse, an interruption to our suited day in the business world. Suddenly, things seem safer from the window. You huddle underneath functioning umbrellas and forget once you were a child laughing and shouting at the rain, a smile bursting from your little face.

I could have ridden the bus. But I wouldn’t have much to write about, would I? I rode a bicycle through a Japanese typhoon, laughing and shouting at the rain, a smile bursting from my little face.

I didn’t ride the bus. I took my squeaky bike for another trip through Tokyo streets, but this one was different. I have certainly ridden in the rain, but not this hard, not with this much wind, not with this much reason to take the bus. I passed by a few little old ladies who appeared to have umbrellas for heads, and I passed a few other bicyclists, all adorned with full-body rain gear.

Maybe I thought what I did was a little heroic, riding my bicycle through the storm. Probably you think what I did was a little stupid, riding my bicycle through the storm. Isn’t it odd how often stupidity and heroism are so closely linked?

But, of course, what I did wasn’t heroic. It wasn’t heroic because it was just rain and it was just water and as storms go there was no story. I saved 400 yen. I got my exercise. I didn’t feel lazy. More importantly though, I did something that is original and is worth a story. Stories and their pursuit being my understanding of why we live our lives make that trip quite worthwhile. Things seem safer from the window, but you never know until you try.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 01:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The stunning conclusion of my very brief rundown of Japan ends with a global perspective. I’ve kept it short, but, if you’re looking for the lurid details of an intimate encounter, feel free to skip this entry.

Japan. What do we think about it in the U.S.? Technologically advanced, or at least that is all I really knew about it previous to pre-departure research.

Based on its technological pursuits, which was founded on an intensive pursuit of a niche in the world during the 1950s, post-American occupation, Japan experienced unprecedented economic growth through the early 1990s. Then it all went to crap, if only briefly.

The country was faced with a major slowdown as it finally reached some levels of equality with established Western powers and, therefore, struggled with the sudden nearly unbridled competition from those older states.

Still, Nihon remains a major economic power, both in Asia and globally. Last year, Japan started a two-year term as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. This was big news, and has been followed by dogged pursuit by the Japanese government to find a permanent spot. No one knows why. Well, at least it doesn’t matter why, because ancient rival China, currently a permanent seat-holder wouldn’t let it happen.

Indeed, Japan has issues with most of its Asian neighbors. Japan still hasn’t formally ended World War II with Russia, then the Soviet Union, as no treaty between the two states was ever signed. Moreover, China, Taiwan and Korea, all dispute other islands that Japan claims to be their own.

These issues are exacerbated by a growing ultra-nationalist movement in Japan that often choosing revisionist history as a means for dealing with the country’s brutal imperialistic past, which reached its height in the early 20th century.

Some say Japan is rearming and will rediscover its imperialistic path if no one watches the country close enough. This is a particularly topical and interesting point. See, in the Japanese constitution, which was written, originally in English, by the staff of Douglas MacArthur who led the American occupation of Japan after World War II, there is an article that clearly states Japan cannot have a standing army. Some interpretation has allowed the country old defense forces, which is why, if you notice, every branch of the Japanese military has ‘defense’ in its name.

What is interesting is that, while some can say Japan’s military is indeed very small, some, like the People’s Republic of China, can say that the Japanese army is anything but small, clearly, some argue, an unconstitutional practice. See, Japan boasts $44 billion annually in military expenditures, which is fourth most in the world behind the $518 billion of the U.S., China’s $81.5 billion, and France’s $45 billion. But, because of its economic status, that military total is just 1 percent of Japanese GDP. So, it depends on how you want to look at it.

Perhaps the only reason Japan hasn’t been pushed off the map by much of Asia, excluding the country’s close ties with the United States, may be its wealth. By any scale, Japan is a wealthy nation, precipitated by its aforementioned technological economy. Measured by purchasing power parity, Japan’s is the third largest economy in the world, behind only the U.S. and its neighboring China.

Still, excluding only central Africa’s Malawi and the Middle East’s Lebanon, Japan’s public debt, 158 percent of its gross domestic product, is the largest national debt in the world. Even our American government has accrued a debt only 64 percent of our GDP, just thirty-fifth highest in the world.

Its debt is understandably attributed to the island nation’s general lack of raw materials, despite its rapid consumption of them. Lagging behind only the United States, the European Union and China, Japan is consuming the most oil in the world, some 5.5 million barrels a day. Granted, Americans are pumping nearly four times that at 20 million barrels a day, one fourth of global consumption, but the U.S. also produces nearly 40 percent of the oil it consumes. Japan produces less than 2 percent of its national demand.

The only raw materials the tiny island nation can produce are vegetables, some grain and fish. Yet, as one of the largest consumers of fish in the world – think sushi – Japan still imports vast amounts of tuna and other beloved gilled creatures. Despite the imports, Japan goes beyond its enormous coast line (12,000 miles more than the U.S.) and is still known for overfishing, depleting resources throughout the Asia Pacific. Oh, and those Greens out there? Some Japanese still love their whale. I can buy it at almost any delicatessen that sells meats and fish.

Shorthand: Most of Asia dislikes Japan politically and tolerates them economically, while the U.S. will continue to give Nipon a big thumbs-up until the country ceases to be an incalculably important strategic ally. Japan has both a huge and a very small military, while being outrageously in-debt and economically impressive all at the same time.

Jaa,
-Christopher

I relied heavily on the CIA World Factbook, one of the spy agency’s most admirable annual endeavors, and supported it with my own anecdotal and conversational discoveries, one of the more nonacademic and equally untrustworthy methods for cultural understanding, but my primary tool, nonetheless.

Posted by Christopher at 01:23 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In our continuing series on figuring out Japan, today, why don’t you learn a bit about Japan domestically? Seriously, why don’t you?

Japan is roughly the size of California – just a bit smaller – with a population of 127.5 million, while the Golden State has just over 36 million residents.

What might account for Japan being smaller than California but having 3.5 times as many citizens? Well, the Japanese live longer, that’s for sure. Life expectancy in Japan is over 81-years-old putting it in the top ten among the world’s oldest living people, a list topped by the people of the small, western European country of Andorra, whose population can expect to live to 84-years of age. For some perspective, the title of lowest age expectancy goes to the landlocked south African country of Swaziland. There, citizens can be called lucky for crossing the threshold of 33-years-old.

Is it the rice? I don’t know, but there are a few reasons why the longevity of the Japanese might be puzzling to some. For one, Japan floats in one of the most earthquake-prone regions in the world. While, the ‘big-one’ may have been 1923’s 7.9-on-the-richter-scale destruction, taking some 130,000 lives, some scientists clamor that these massive geological movements happen at intervals of about 70 years. Do that math. It is 2006. Oh, we’re overdue.

Big one or not, Japan has about 1,500 seismic occurrences per annum. This on an island with active volcanoes, typhoon seasons and always in the grasp of a tsunami or two. An island paradise, indeed.

Depending on where you hang your hat, Japan can get even more brutal. While Tokyo winters are mild, the cold months of December to February can make for rough living conditions in the north. There is a region of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido called “snow country.” This area around the Japanese alps has been called the snowiest in the world. The year 1945 brought an estimated 23 feet to the region. Yes, 23 feet of snow. Seriously.

All that being said, Japan is an industrialized, democratized state, so its people all have the chance to ignore politics like the Western world. In Japan, suffrage begins at the age of 20, at which time citizens can vote for local officials and their representing members of the 700-plus member Diet, Japan’s bicameral legislative branch. It is the Diet which chooses Japan’s leading political figure – its prime minister, a position recently awarded to Shinzo Abe.

Despite the position’s political power being taken away by a constitution written by American-occupation forces post-World War II, technically Japan’s head of the state is its emperor.

A Japanese hereditary hierarchy for a Japanese land. Ethnically, Japan is certainly Japanese: 99 percent, to be specific. In terms of religion, 84 percent are a combination of Shinto and Buddhist.

All that said, the Japanese people are known for suppressing individual achievement and goals, instead finding strength in group effort. Sounds great, but, like anything, there are some issues. … A whole lot of timid, overly-reserved people, but that is just biased, anecdotal conjecture.

Still, what that group environment has done is create a united nation out of a people that was anything but just 150 years ago, when the country first began to modernize. What has become an important image for many is the Japanese flag, and it is a memorable one, if only for its simplicity. It is pristine white with a red circle, representing a sun without rays, contrasting at its center.

Shorthand: Japan, the island system, is dangerous, Japan, the people, are not, but they are old, united and respectful.

Click here to read "Japan Part 3 of 3: International".

Jaa,
Christopher

I relied heavily on the CIA World Factbook, one of the spy agency’s most admirable annual endeavors, and supported it with my own anecdotal and conversational discoveries, one of the more nonacademic and equally untrustworthy methods for cultural understanding, but my primary tool, nonetheless.

Posted by Christopher at 12:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is a month in the making and perhaps even tardier than that. As your disorientated guide, uninformed teacher and uninspiring leader, I apologize. Let’s figure out Japan.

NBC has done a lot of things right in this, the premiere season of what I hope to be a show of divergent course in the nascence of online-only media. What they didn’t do was give you viewers nearly enough information about our countries of travel. But, then, I suppose that is just what I am supposed to do, and so I am here to do it now.

So here it is: my first in a three part series that might just be my bid for an Encyclopedia Asiananica. I hope all of this will give you a better understanding of one of the world’s more interesting and powerful nation-states. Today, we’re going to very briefly and generally discuss Tokyo in every way I could think you might want to break it down. I will follow with two posts on Japan, a domestic breakdown and then try to place the country in a global concept. If you’re actually still reading, you’re probably alone, so keep going, if only out of pride.

Tokyo, as it is known, consists of the Tokyo metropolitan area, the end of which I can’t find, and the actual city of Tokyo. Tokyo sits in the Kanto region of the central Japanese island of Honshu. Yes, Japan is a nation made of several islands, making it an archipelago, and I am willing to admit that previous to my living here I wasn’t terribly aware of that.

Now, follow me here. Under Japanese law, Tokyo is a “metropolis,” not a city. Rather, Tokyo is made up of dozens of cities, towns, neighborhoods, 23 wards and some coastal islands. All of these have their own local governments, with the wards led by mayors.

Indeed, with a governor the political leader of Tokyo – currently Shintaro Ishihara – we Americans might see this city more like one of our states than anything else. Rightly so, the metropolitan size of the city is about 1,400 square miles. That is just smaller than Delaware’s 1,900 and nearly 400 square miles larger than Rhode Island. The 309 square miles of New York City’s five boroughs comprise little more than one fifth of Tokyo’s, while Philadelphia County is just 135 square miles. There are 12.5 million people calling Tokyo home, 8.1 in New York City and just 1.5 Philadelphians.

Despite Tokyo failing to fit in an American concept of city, it is the capital city of Japan nonetheless, as it houses the Japanese government and emperor, along with the embassies of the countries with whom Japan holds formal diplomatic ties.

With a city of that size there should be no surprise that Tokyo’s economy is the among the world’s largest. Indeed, there are limitless ways to order this world’s great cities, from population to size to wealth to mass transit to number of suits per capita. They all give you different lists, but take one bicycle ride through a particularly busy ward or one rotating ogle at the city’s continuous concrete kingdom and you will see, Tokyo is the largest, tallest, widest, densest, busiest, bicycle-crowd-iest city in the world.

The city, which has latitudinal likeness to North Carolina and Virginia, wears a comfortably temperate spring season from March to May. The season is known for peach, plum and cherry blossoms that flower and color the streets. From June to August, Tokyo regularly boasts temperatures exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit with humidity, too, just for laughs. In August and September temperatures occasionally flirt with the mid-80s, offset by the height of typhoon season that affects the Kanto region.

While the Pacific typhoon season is effectively endless, May to November brings forth more to northeast Asia, and September is home to the brunt of Tokyo-destined storms and winds. This accounts for the daily rainstorms, stolen umbrellas, and, as an interesting note so soon after the release of my third JYA episode, why climbing 13,000 foot Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest point, proves particularly perilous – often yielding no view from its summit.

Tokyo can bring in 4.5 feet of rainfall in a year, while North Carolina nets about 4.1 feet and old Philadelphia claims just 3.5 annually. December to February is Japan’s winter season. But, compared with northern Honshu, the main Japanese island, and Hokkaido, another island in the archipelago, Tokyo has relatively mild winter temperatures.

Shorthand form: Tokyo: it’s wet, hot, big and busy.

Click here to read "Japan Part 2 of 3: Domestic".

Jaa,
Christopher

I relied heavily on the CIA World Factbook, one of the spy agency’s most admirable annual endeavors, and supported it with my own anecdotal and conversational discoveries, one of the more nonacademic and equally untrustworthy methods for cultural understanding, but my primary tool, nonetheless.

Posted by Christopher at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By most standards, I am not particularly cultured. So, it might surprise you to hear that recently I was in a small, basement club in Tokyo watching Japanese avant-garde films from the 1960s. Yeah, it surprised me too.

I was there to see the event’s host, an 82-year-old author who has lived in Tokyo for some 60 years. Anyone who takes cinema seriously or who knows anything about Japanese culture has heard of Donald Richie. He is considered a central figure on Japanese film, and the man has pounded out more than 40 books on Japanese culture, in addition to his own films and weekly columns. There is scare a scholar known more widely than he.

Any readers I have might note that I have mentioned him before. He is an elderly legend and an accomplished Japanese academic. He is also American. Or, he was born in the United States, and, as he told me, still maintains that he is, “an American living in Tokyo.” Even after calling Japan home for 60 nearly-consecutive years.

It was odd to see him. A man of great success by many measures, he was dressed fashionably as one might assume of a man possessing his artistic celebrity, but his style was contrasted by an aged figure and frail demeanor. When fielding questions about the films, his on-point responses, overstuffed with names that incite cinematic marvel, were slowed by an occasional cough or a moment’s hesitation.

It was clear the difficulty in some of Richie’s delivery was a new arrival. This is a man who has made a career on his voice and style and presence. In the shadows and spotlights of the trendy club, I saw him not as an authority, but as a smartly dressed version of my grandfather, more interested in a good night’s sleep than watching experimental film and answering questions from an audience of pretentious cosmopolitans.

He sat in a folding chair with a small crowd of fifty who watched him rewatch these 40-year-old ultramodern short films made by names like Shuji Terayama. To my lower-middle class American sensibilities, the films were strange and the child nudity stranger. It was only this college education I am fortunate enough to be pursuing that helped me pick out any meaning at all.

It was only afterwards, when Richie was engaged in a discussion with a Brit, a German and a handful of Japanese film enthusiasts about how the films couldn’t be watched in much of the United States, that I really thought about this man. He was born in a little American town and tried to find the world. He put on a nice suit and stylish glasses and became a legend. How odd and seemingly inorganic to me.

I walked out into the rain of a Tokyo September and found my way to a train station, the sky hidden by more tall buildings than I ever met in Philadelphia, trying to decide if there was any sense to be made about the man, the movies or the night.
Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 11:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I am taking a short rest from Tokyo-telling. I was eating my daily breakfast of rice, egg and a soy sauce splash, and got to thinking that your college guidance counselor and showy and nosy neighbor are right, a point that even I continue to harp upon, the strange importance of travel. Between you and me, I don’t even think you have to do much once you do travel to get anything out of it. You certainly won’t learn as much as you can, but if you were to sit on a couch in a different country or a different time zone for just a week or so, I bet you’d see something differently. Don’t think this type of experiential learning requires great lengths.

Still, the grandness of so-labeled “study abroad” is exceptionally altering. I can tell you. I can tell you because I sit writing this at a university in Tokyo, Japan. I can tell you because I took classes at the University of Ghana in West Africa. I can tell you because I even did more than just sit on a couch at these places.

Chances are, if it wasn’t you, then you knew someone or you knew someone who knew someone who took some classes when they weren’t eating croissants in Paris or learning about ecology in a Costa Rican rain forest. They always came back with the same clichés, how it changed their lives. Funny thing about clichés is that sometimes they’re pretty dead on accurate.

For me it wasn’t as clear. I didn’t foam at the mouth or start carrying books of obscure authors. It was a spewing out of my mouth and a crawling on my back of information and ideas and ideals and questions and my own post-teenage sense of answers. I walked off a plane returning from a different continent and I went to work finding a new way to find a new continent.

I can tell you because I sit writing this at a university in Tokyo, Japan.

I am twenty-years-old, I am a proud Temple University Owl and an even prouder American. But, I wasn’t as proud and I couldn’t defend or understand any of those geographical bounds or textbook readings until I had seen them from the outside. Or as close to the outside as an insider can get.

And other Americans, especially American universities, are starting to understand that.

Close to 50 million Americans travel abroad annually and that number seems to be on the rise a bit. Moreover, since 1991, the population of American students studying abroad for credit has well more than doubled, from some 70,000 to numbers nearing 180,000 through 2004, according to statistics released by the Institute of International Education.

In late July, an act was introduced in the U.S. Senate aimed at increasing numbers of American study abroad students to 1 million in a decade. As it makes its slow way through Congress, I keep thinking that we might actually be at a point when study abroad will become a norm for college students, not an exception. When studying abroad increases, so too, it is fair to believe, will totals for all Americans traveling to other countries.

Though the numbers are rising, I still far more regularly see European foreigners than American foreigners here in Nihon. I can’t help but believe we’re missing something.

Well over 300 heads of state and world leaders graduated from American universities, according to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Alwi Shihab, the former Indonesian Minster of Foreign Affairs and persistent defender of Islam as a moderate religion, graduated from my own Temple University. The United States certainly has some of the finest schools in the world, but it would be absurd to not recognize American students could similarly benefit from studies at foreign universities.

You go somewhere, you not only learn about that somewhere but you better understand nearby somewheres and even better appreciate all the somwheres. Knowing about somewheres is terribly important in foreign relations.

Yet, still, some in the U.S. think of studying abroad as a semester off, a joke, four or five months to get drunk off a different type of domestic beer. I wonder if that has anything to do with the opinions some think the world holds about us Americans.

I was in Accra, the capital of Ghana, and I learned some Twi. I’m in Tokyo and have taught myself how to distinguish the Hiragana in elevators. I have a 6 foot by 4 foot American flag hanging in my apartment, but I carry my stars and stripes with as much respect for wherever I travel as I can.

The world needs to see more bright, engaging Americans who want to learn about different cultures and challenge themselves. The world needs more Americans who know the feeling of being thousands of miles away from home. The world needs more Americans who can speak more languages and more Americans who are proud of being American because they know the alternatives. The world needs more Americans studying and traveling abroad.
Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I made a purchase ten days ago. Ten days is long enough for me to decide that the 9,999 yen ($85 USD) I spent on that hill-clobbering, three-geared, two-wheeled Japanese bicycle was well spent.

(SEE PHOTO ALBUM)

I closed my Tokyo bus school-commuting tenure after a month of slobbering on those wide, tinted bus windows as I stared at the skyline above. After finishing my bus pass, I find myself wheeling through those very skylines.

Now it’s me that is swooping past hand-holding couples and ringing my bell at slow-moving elderly men, always with, “sumi ma sen,” excuse me, floating over my shoulder. The ride to school is a hilly trip, which always hastens a sweat on my forehead, even with the increasingly cooler winds of a late Tokyo September riding along my side.

My first day’s trip to school was thrilling. This, any faithful readers – if I have them – would know. A week’s time hasn’t decreased that interest, though it has made me a little wiser, a little more experienced, and, probably, put me in a little bit better physical shape.

What is particularly beneficial of this bicycle is how readily new city sights and alternate locales open to my flattened-wallet hands. When I am on the street and in the crowds on my way to buy groceries or consume textbooks, suddenly details emerge that I didn’t find even on my slow-moving tour guide of a bus. I pass a small blue building on the corner that sells “American Junk.” I have found an old man with a cracked smile and sprouts of hair on his bald, wrinkled, birthmarked head, as if a graying spring had suddenly sprung. He stands on a particular street corner and, as the eyes of old men tend to do, his eyes twinkle at me as I pass him each morning.

I have expanded use of this bicycle well beyond its commercial use of commuter-ship. If my destination is in Tokyo, I tell confident Christopher, then that location can be met by my foot-motored cycle.

The experience shouldn’t be different than any bicycling I have done in Philadelphia. But it is. Perhaps I am simply closer to overwhelming terror when I bicycle around City Hall in Center City. Tokyo, they tell me, is safer, calmer, and horn-less. This isn’t, I’m afraid, entirely true, but I do feel far more confident in the improbability of being run down by a Tokyo motorist than his Philadelphian counterpart barreling down Broad Street.

I am told there is court precedent that leaves Japanese drivers almost invariably on the wrong end of accidents with bicyclists. I am not knowledgeable on the Japanese court system, neither is my source. I expound his philosophy anyway because it is a tidy fit in my description of my safety in passing Asian taxicabs, running red lights and crossing crosswalks.

Different from Philadelphia is how so few bicycles glide along asphalt, preferring, here in Tokyo, to ride the sidewalks. On the street, I am in a minority, but, to be sure, I am not alone in fighting weighty, engineered vehicles for space on Japanese thoroughfares.

A minority is still a large number, I assure you. You see, as I’ve said, bicycles are everywhere in Tokyo. In garages and on top of buildings, stacked in the back of supermarkets and strung together in parks. I am now another, riding in the morning and trading, “ohayo gozaimasu,” to those I pass in exchange for a smile and a laugh.

I am a stranger here, perhaps never more apparently than when my tall, American frame is pedaling a basketed conveyance, yet I haven’t found anywhere in this country I feel more comfortable and at home than on that seat, wheeling through a busy Tokyo crowd.
Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 11:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So I have this peculiar habit of ending my entries with, "jaa mata." From a recent blog comment, it has occurred to me that I never mentioned what that meant. How absurdly anti-educational that is. It comes in closing, so, yes, some of you are savvy enough to understand it is, indeed, a Japanse farewell. "Jaa mata" can be translated to mean "See you again," while its shortened, and more commonly used, form is "Jaa ne," which I sneak in from time to time, means, basically, "See you." Dreadfully complicated isn't it?

Anyway, for those of you hoping to expand your everyday Japanese, here's Christopher's pronounciation guide, (JYA maTAH) yes, JYA being the first sound, not the name of this dreadful show you're experiencing.

(JYA nay)

That being said, what you should know is what the Japanese call Japan: Nihon. If you are to continue to travel with me in Tokyo, you need to know this, that is just respectful. Nihon, get it, (NEE hone)

And a particularly literate comment brought forth, "Fuku wa uchi," which, someone far more capable of Japanese translating than I tells me means literally, "Fortune comes in." (Ignore what Googling the phrase tells you, my source is more reliable)

Commonly the phrase runs as, "Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi" The Devil is out! Fortune comes in."

(OH nee wah so TOE. FOO koo wah oochi)

And, while we're on this subject, I should clarify the two Japanese words I knew before I started learning in the months preceding my Tokyo arrival. "Sayanora" and "kon'nichi wa." They meant goodbye and hello to me before I learned better.

"Sayanora" is really only used when referring to a goodbye with a sense of finality, as if the departing will not return for a long time. And "kon'nichi wa" is "good afternoon," though it is used widely, from 10am to well past sunset for some.

See, who among us can say we didn't learn something new today? Who, I demand!

Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 04:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It is 3:53pm on Sunday and it is raining.

This whole typhoon season is no joke. I don't know if I ever been anywhere that endured so much rain so regularly. It has allowed me to get a great deal of schoolwork done, but it has also kept me munching. I have had two cups of rice, an egg, and a peanut butter and blueberry jelly sandwich. Oh, and plenty of apple juice. Yes, I am terribly wild.

The rain has also made me think which makes me write. I am sorry for those here enduring my verbose incoherence.

I was lying in bed early this morning, before I got up to start a paper for school at nine am, and remembered riding the bus to school in early September. I still have seen so little of Tokyo, but then, there was nothing familiar. Now, as the rain pounds harder, I can look out my window or around my room and see what is familiar and, in that sense, what is mine.

I thought about that first time I mounted a seat on the bus’s front wheel and saw Tokyo open her arms to me. I still have yet to find a business district in this city that doesn’t share the singular quality of height, something that my eyes took in then and still absorb today. Look for the skyline of Tokyo. There is no lens with enough exposure to capture the more than 50 buildings over 500 feet tall that are scattered throughout the nearly 400 square miles of Tokyo.

I found nothing intimidating about its magnitude, though. The great cities of this world have never given me a sense of insignificance. Rather, I remember that even then, as my bus snaked its way back into traffic after picking up a man wearing a suit and an unsatisfied look, I couldn’t suppress a smile, the result of knowing I was a functioning part of this Japanese beast. A beast that has acted as home and heart to a Japan that still has a world of mystery for a young man.

The bus cradled my fellow passengers and me through another cloudy day, a theme of that late Japanese summer, a theme that continues right now as the rain sneaks in an open window. I couldn’t quite read my stop in Kanji, but I would recognize the supermarket on the corner. I would mumble some thanks to the driver in Japanese and jump off the bus to watch 98 leave my side for the night, sure to meet me again in the morning.

The universe is littered with things I do not know and will likely never find. The Yagumo-sanchome bus stop on Meguro-dori in Meguro-ku is no longer one. It is that what is so important about going somewhere, anywhere new. You need to see what other options there are in the world, but you don’t need to allow any of it to be familiar. None of it needs to be home.

This is why my fingernails are too long. I have a travel manicuring kit without fingernail trimmers, long since confiscated by airport security for the threat the two-inch instrument posed. I could buy a new trimmer. Surely, Tokyo sells the device. For now, I’ll bite them and bend them. Those that know me will laugh and call it a credit to my frugality. To me, it is a way of fighting permanence. As if when I fiddle with my fingernails, I remind myself this is not home, this is not my life.

But, my fingernails can come with me to see the Goodwill Gate at one of the world’s largest Chinatowns and they scratch at the handles of my bicycle as I weave in and out of Tokyo traffic, the lights of Shibuya glowing on my sweaty face.

Perhaps it is that which most excites me about any form of travel. In this, what I would consider the neo-formable period of my 20 year tenure of relative consciousness, being able to define what it is I appreciate about and what I want in my comfort of home is the most pressing of my life’s objectives. Seeing all that I can allows me to do that. I know I will love my home and appreciate that place the more when I return after seeing a Giant Buddha and riding the bus and hopping the trains.

I am so excited by all that is around me, but, then, something isn’t right if some part of you doesn’t want to go home when your stay is over. I will see something exceptional every weekend, but be living somewhere exceptional everyday. Living the trip, then finding your life. That is how to do travel, or at least, that is how my young mind understands travel.

I am everywhere and active and moving to see, but with all I have done in the past few years, especially this particularly extended stay in Japan, perhaps it is time I take some time to really remember where I am from. Most look for a reason to get away from their home; I’m hoping to find a reason to stop leaving it.

Jaa mata,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 07:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)