(SEE MY EPISODE SIX)
Sushi and sumo: that’s what Tokyo does. I’ve said this before and it is as inaccurate now as it was then, but when you travel to far off lands, it is as important to search for true meanings of your destination as it is to see how you previously perceived that destination.

I have been to sumo, I have eaten sushi, but until yesterday morning, I had never been to Tsukiji.

Let me make a more formal introduction. America, this is the Tsukiji Fish Market, Tsukiji Fish Market, this is America. Many know you, but too few know you, Tsukiji.

The Tsukiji Central Wholesale Market is a large market for fish, fruit and vegetables in central Tokyo. But, those of you who have heard of Tsukiji, and certainly those that have been there, don’t remember the stalls of produce or knife shops. That is because the Tsukiji Market is best known for being one of the largest and certainly the most famous fish market in the world. Housed mostly under three or four adjacent warehouses, some open-air and others kept chilled, Tsukiji handles over 2,500 tons of marine products per day. According to the Tokyo tourist bureau, those 5 million daily pounds of fish are seven times as much as Paris's Rungis, the world's second largest wholesale market, and 11 times the volume of Fulton Fish Market, North America’s largest which is now in the Bronx of New York City.

Tsukiji is at the top of the fish market food chain in every pertinent and measurable category. The market handles over 400 different types of seafood, “from penny-per-piece sardines to golden brown dried sea slug caviar, a bargain at $473 U.S. a pound,” according to National Geographic. Seafood from 60 countries on six different continents finds its way to Tsukiji.

Indeed, Tsukiji is so popular as a tourist attraction that the early morning tuna auctions, regarded as one of the most important travel sites in the world, were closed to tourists in May of 2005. That is, of course, unless you are with an insider. If you have learned anything about me, you would know that I know how to get me an insider. It is all about connections. Or just asking anyone and everyone for help.

His name is Ken, a sushi chef for more than a decade and a half, and he agreed to wake up and meet me outside the Tsukiji market at 4:30am. If you want to take in Tsukiji, there is no choice but to meet in the darkness and sneak into the eerily subdued market.

We cut our way past the public market, with doors opening and boxes moving. We walked towards factory-like warehouses as motorized carts and forklifts buzzed around us. We strode through individual sellers, setting up containers of live sea eel, pickled octopus, crab and every fish I ever knew and plenty I didn’t. We walked and the market began to wake up. It did so quickly, within the next half an hour, what was a quiet clamor when we arrived became giant, busy crowds.

Once we managed through the mangled labyrinth of seafood, a veritable waterless ocean community where $28 million (USD) of fish is sold daily, we were on to the closed warehouses. Walking close to Ken, I opened a door, covered with a sign that read “NO admittance,” and was shot with hundreds of frozen tuna, lying on the ground, as they were poked and prodded by flash-lighted, rubber-booted buyers and sellers. (See Photo Album)

We moved from room to room, as Ken passed the “medium grade” tuna to find the highest, largest, and most expensive. Even the smallest tuna were four feet long and weighed over 200 pounds.

The average weight, Ken mentioned to me, was over 1,000 pounds just twenty years ago, but over fishing has drastically reduced that number, plummeting the average to a few hundred pounds. Tuna fishing was once seasonal. These days, Tsukiji will have auctions for hundreds of these massive tuna six days a week throughout the year. So, today, the largest blue fin tuna rarely exceed 1,000 pounds.

Still, Tsukiji is, it has been said, the Wall Street of seafood. Since the sushi craze of the late 1990s made the Japanese delicacy a global event, 500 pound tuna from New England or Spain are frozen and sent to Tokyo to be auctioned for tens of thousands of dollars, then shipped around the world to the finest restaurants, from Philadelphia to London, according to Ted Bestor, an American professor who has written books and countless articles on Tsukiji.

As Ken and I were finishing our tour of the frozen-solid, recently imported fish and the less-frozen locally fished tuna, crowds began to form around 5:30am and the auctions commenced. It was the ordered chaos that speaks of Tokyo the city.

Tens of auctioneers will sell 200 tuna in just a half an hour, about one every ten seconds. Only licensed bidders can fight for each tuna, which are heavily investigated prior to each auction. In between the swarming hoards of screaming auctions, Ken told me about the industry’s concern over dwindling blue fin numbers, as Japan’s craving for its favorite fish steadily increases and its diet is modeled after in almost every region of the world. I posed for silly photos with fish before we walked out and headed to the one portion of the Tsukiji experience that every tourist can and must do. A seafood breakfast.

The favorite choice? Sushi. We walked to a sushi bar and took our seats. I saw that the clock read 6:45am. I sipped the best hot green tea I’ve ever had as Ken ordered a Japanese beer and sushi by the piece. We sit in front of our sushi chef and Ken dissected every motion by our food preparer. We are in Tsukiji, where some of the best sushi chefs in the world call home.

He asked me what sushi was and I answered: fish in rice, ignoring Tamago (egg) and other exceptions. (I was with a professional, I got nervous). He nodded, then broke down sushi in its language of extraction. Four tastes, he explained, was all that sushi meant. Hot, cold, sweet and sour. The hot of the wasabi, which is put in each roll in Japan, the cold of the fish, the sweet and sour in the rice mixture. It was in this way, he explained, that many Japanese dishes were traditionally considered sushi.

He laughed at my puzzled nodding, gulped his beer and thanked the chef at the first round of sushi was plopped on our trays. He bit in first and shot me a look of approval. He added as I went to dive in, that I should notice how the rice melts away and I’m left with the fish. American sushi, he explained, which is great in its own way, has become a much more compact food. A great sushi chef catering to a knowledgeable eater will make the rice hold, but allow each granule to crumble in the mouth, Ken said.

I have had sushi in Tokyo before. It was always good, but I have had some great sushi in the United States. It was my understanding that Japanese people prepare the Japanese dish with fresh produce both in the States and in Japan, so what could be the big difference?

Well, the difference, I suppose, was that the sushi Ken and I were enjoying was using fish that was swimming just hours before. Remarkable. The rice melted away and I was left with the fish. The best fish I had ever tasted. I didn’t know what to do. Each piece was the best I had ever had. It was the best fish I ever had.

I hadn’t finished swallowing an Amaebi roll, the broiled seal eel still clinging to my gums, and I looked at Ken and told him that I didn’t know that I liked fish that much. He laughed a big laugh, pounded his piece of horse mackerel, with a touch of soy sauce, and ordered another beer.

All told, I spent 4,000 yen ($34 USD) on sushi in two hours. I know. But, it was seven in the morning, I was drinking mug after mug of warm green tea, alongside a sushi chef who told me we were eating some of the finest sushi even he had ever had and so we just kept ordering more.

We had a Tokyo specialty, octopus or tako and zuwaigani, Japanese hairy crab. I even answered Ken’s challenge; I pounded down Komochikonbu, herring roe with studded kelp, and wanted more. We had five different tuna rolls, including my favorite of the day, aburitoro, fatty tuna.

The tuna is just barely seared to bring its flavor to a head. Ken claimed the technique originated there in Tsukiji and was difficult to be found anywhere else in the world.

We walked outside after paying our bill, and Ken laughed at my eyes, which must have been glazed in amazement. I had never spent more than $6 on a meal and left without complaint. I am cheap, I eat a lot. I left satisfied, I left amazed, I left empty-pocketed. I left overwhelmingly pleased.

We walked to where we had locked up our bikes, and, after a goodbye and thanks, we rode off, my stomach full and mind empty, save for recounting each bite I had taken that morning. Quite a beginning, it wasn’t yet nine am. That was Japan.

Jaa mata,
Christopher
______________________________
Oh, and if you’re curious, here is most of the sushi we had. I missed some, but these are some of the fun ones.

Aji- Horse Mackerel
Tai- Sea Bream
Maguro- Upper dorsal fin area Tuna
Chu/toro- Half and Half Fatty and Lean Tuna
Hotate- Live Scallop
Mirugai- Horseneck Clam
Akagai- Live Red Clam
Engawa- Fluke Fin
Kanpachi- Young Skip Jack
Zuwaigani- Japanese Hairy Crab
Amaebi- Sweet Shrimp
Tako- Octopus
Anago- Broiled Sea Eel
Komochikonbu- Herring Roe Studded Kelp
Ikura- Salmon Roe
Aburitoro- Seared Fatty Tuna with Nira

Posted by Christopher at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It was a beautiful day yesterday. As winter creeps in on Tokyo I thought it was an obligation of mine to do something with it. Newton, the bicycle, and I took a tour of the governmental heart of Tokyo. I occured to me that I couldn’t live in Japan’s capital for four months and not see its political home. I rode an hour or so to the Chiyoda city of Tokyo, not far from the Imperial palace, and found myself where Japanese diplomacy is done.

Chiefly, Chiyoda is home to the National Diet Building: the country’s legislative arm, Japan’s Congress.
Japan’s bicameral legislature is not only responsible for day to day policy, but also for electing the country’s prime minister, currently Shinzo Abe (Think the in-power Congressional party electing the American President).

The two segments of the Diet are the House of Representatives, currently with 480 members elected every four years, and the House of Councillors, currently with 242 members who serve six year terms. It should be noted that the Japanese Constitution doesn’t dictate exact numbers for congressional representation.

Completed in 1936, the National Diet Building is an impressive structure. Upon further inspection though, its architecture does appear muddled. Hundreds of entries were reviewed and the final plans became a mishmash of many of those entries. It morphed into a modern slice of Italian Renaissance style, East Asian design and Egyptian geometry.

Still, it is worth a photograph and a moment’s delay. The bottom portion of its main hall is fronted by four sturdy columns, of the yellowish stone color of the entire building by which they are surrounded. Above is another layer, similarly designed but narrower in girth, its columns far smaller and six in number. The building is crowned with a pyramid and then a tiny hat that resembles the entire structure in much smaller reproduction. The entire compound is surrounded by a moat of asphalt and a humorless, black wrought iron fence, interrupted by guard stations of similarly yellowish stone.

The National Diet building isn’t far from the home of Japan’s 14-member Supreme Court, which is, beyond membership, similar enough to its American counterpart in responsibility and power. For its own, the Supreme Court building appears from the outside to be an island of boring cement walls, a collection of mismatched, textured expanses of hard rock, like an unimpressively colorless paperweight.

On my way home, I stopped in Minato-ku, which houses a great many important foreign embasses. I found the American Consulate, which I had been eager to do as I felt it was compulsory of me, as a U.S. citizen living in Tokyo. I snapped a photograph of the plainly colored and narrow building, noting that the only clue it wasn’t another Japanese office was the Stars and Stripes hiding limp in the grayish sky. It suddenly felt odd to see the flag in public.

Having become tired of bicycling and been scolded by an Embassy guard for running a red light, I decided to head back home, a few more photographs in my camera.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 12:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I was on a train a few days ago and heard something I hadn’t heard in almost half a year: an old married couple fighting. They were American tourists, or so I surmised from blatantly and unabashedly listening to their conversation. She felt that he always treated her “like a child,” as he had recently done by asking a waitress in a restaurant where the bathroom was on her behalf.

It was odd. I do see non-Japanese Westerners almost every day, particularly in Tokyo, but I don’t as often overhear English and more specifically, American English. It was refreshing to hear the squabbling that is a signature of long relationships. It was nice to think that I might be lucky enough to have a berating, nagging wife willing to stand by me for the better part of a century and maybe explore another continent. Someone who will be willing to tell me everything that is wrong with me on a crowded train in Japan. That wouldn’t be so bad at all.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I started counting the roads in my Tokyo atlas. I didn’t finish.

Look, it is no secret that I get lost. I walk and bike and ride long and fast and blind. I welcome it, even if not in the moment I become lost.

There is no place I have gotten more lost, more often than here in Tokyo. Maybe I have stumbled upon the answer.

What I have been struck by these one and a half months is how rarely Japanese people seem to know a damn thing about Tokyo geography. I would stop by someone and even with map in hand, they wouldn’t seem to know. It didn’t seem to be out of indifference for my being lost, either. It seemed more as a general unawareness.

Yesterday I was biking with a Japanese friend. He was showing me how to get home, leading me to Hibya dori, a large road I would recognize. He took out a detailed map of metropolitan Tokyo, found its location and wrote down directions for himself. We took off, zipping in and out of traffic, the wind in my lengthening hair.

Suddenly, he pulled over and told me something didn’t seem right. We rode over to a police officer, and he asked him for help. The officer took out his own pocket atlas to search for Hibya Dori, a major Tokyo avenue.

It took ten minutes, three maps, two atlases, two officers and my friend before they found Hibya and how to get there.

My friend apologized as we turned around and headed back the way we came. I told him how I was blown away by how complicated and needlessly windy so many Tokyo roads seemed. He laughed and told me that there was some history to that.

In Tokyo’s formable years, during the Tokugawa, a reigning family that held Tokyo for more than two centuries, leaders constructed Tokyo in such a way that conquering forces would be delayed in capturing the city. There was no direct route to the capital. I suppose it was their intention that any rival Japanese groups or invading foreign powers would be stuck looking at a map trying to find Hibya dori. I don’t know if that is true. My friend is no historian, but it sounds logical and I want an answer, so I will accept it until someone proves it wrong.I suddenly felt vindicated. My being lost was simply the result of three hundred years of strategy by powerful military rulers.

If you need to get somewhere in Philadelphia and you ask a police officer, he will tell you. Manhattan is a grid. Even in more complicated American cities, there is, no matter what you think, a sense and order to it. I can gather direction.

In Tokyo, I have found myself staring at the sun trying to orient myself. Roads twist and disappear and merge, and it is not terribly uncommon to find road signs that suggest a particular direction of a particular road is traveling in two opposing ways.

That massive mass transit system of Tokyo, too, has added to the problem. Tokyo residents might memorize some of the subway stops, but all this does is make it even less important to follow the geography of the city.

I am exhausted and lost, but pleased to understand why. I have a map and an atlas and the sun. My friend keeps a compass on his bicycle, which I thought was pretty funny. I will learn this city, just give me some time.

Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 03:07 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I had a Sunday morning and, well ahead of my school work, I needed to do something with it. I flipped through a Tokyo guidebook, but was unenthused. I took to reading the news and heard mention of Japan’s Emperor. I realized that I hadn’t visited the Emperor yet, and I had been in his country for more than three months, how rude of me!

So, as I often do, I saddled up old Newton, my bicycle, and took to the road, destined more than an hour northeast of my apartment towards Ginza, a large Tokyo business district. My destination: Kokyo, the Imperial Palace.

It was cloudy but warmish and I flew through the crisp wind towards. The Imperial Palace is on the site of the old Edo-jo Castle, which was built in the 14th century, remastered in the 1590s, and by the 17th century, it was the largest castle in the world.

When the Meji Emperor made Tokyo his capital, he ordered the palace be reconstructed. It was destroyed during the Allied bombings of 1945, and the present structures were completed in 1968.

During the height of the Japanese economic boon in the 1980s, real estate assessors estimated that the 250 acres of the Imperial East Garden, in which the actual palace is located, was worth more than all of California (156,000 square miles).

The East Garden is well fortified, including deep-flowing moats and stone walls rising more than 20 feet. The East Garden’s walls are surrounded by the outer-palace garden which has several open pathways to access from the surrounded chaos of Tokyo. Even the outer-palace garden is surrounded by moats and large stone walls, which are relics from the original Edo-jo complex and structures from the 19th century.

The large paths and open space of the outer palace garden are favorites among joggers and walkers. Otherwise, it offers little more than gravel expanses and tracts of carefully tended lawns and perfectly manicured pines. That is except for the view from the Kokyo Gaien, a large, rocky plaza in front of the palace.

There lies another of Japan’s necessary photo-opportunities: the view of the palace itself resting on a green cliff behind the Nijubashi Bridge, which spans the imperial moat. In front of the Nijubashi is the old stone Meganebashi, or Eyeglass Bridge, adding to the photo’s beautiful levels.

The Meganebashi leads to the Otemon Gate, also originally from the Edo-jo complex, which guards the main entrance to the East Garden, home of the Imperial Palace itself. However, other than on January 2 and the Emperor’s birthday (December 23), the general public can’t get closer than a photo from outside of the East Garden’s walls.

Still, the Imperial family’s seclusion doesn’t keep the Japanese and tourists from coming. Understand, the emperor may not have any constitutional power, but to this very day, it is not appropriate to speak badly of the Imperial family. It simply isn’t done. When Emperor Akhito had a grandson a couple months ago, it was front page news and in everyone’s conversation.

According to the Japanese Constitution, the Emperor is just a figurehead, the symbol of national unity. Emperor Akhito, who has presided over the Imperial family since his father died in 1989, is the only reigning emperor in the world and presides ceremoniously over Japan’s constitutional monarchy. The Japanese people certainly see it that way.

There is a great deal of pride in the family. The Imperial house recognizes 125 legitimate monarchs in direct accession, making Japan’s the world’s oldest hereditary monarchy still in existence, traced back to the mid-600s BCE.

There are more than twenty members of the current imperial family, but the familial connections become too complicated for me to much care. While the Emperor and his family are often treated as the head of state, beyond ceremony and popular pressure, they hold no real legislative power. Beyond my photograph and my bicycle ride, I was all but indifferent towards the Imperial Palace.

But, then, I am not Japanese.

Jaa mata,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A month ago, my readers might remember, I mentioned an earthquake I survived. Alright, apparently, a 4.8 earthquake is inconsequential to the experienced. I am not experienced.

So, needless to say I was more surprised than most of the Japanese students around me when I heard ceiling tiles and lights rattle for a few seconds. There was a moment of laughter and then someone switched back on the fast-paced Tokyo walk that surrounded me.

Not knowing what else to do, I followed. This I have mentioned. It wasn’t until later, when another student from Philadelphia who is also here in Tokyo mentioned the brief stir that I got to announce that that was my first earthquake survival story.

Alright, so it wasn’t anything to focus my autobiography on, but it was an accomplishment for me nonetheless.

And, while the overall experience of any travel, international or otherwise, is your grandest of stories, there are the countless smaller moments that you can’t let yourself forget. I stayed in a Trappist monastery for a brief while a year or so ago, and I can still remember the smaller moments just as well as the entire trip’s unique storyline.

I didn’t have much money so I worked for my room and board. I can see myself, shovel in hand, as I watched an 85-year-old bicycle towards me. He was late and it occurred to me only then that there I was, bagging compost on an organic farm run by monks. I smiled uncontrollably. I still do.

Travel can do that, and studying abroad can be a remarkably economical way for students to travel. If you do it right.

For me for now, studying at a satellite campus of my home university allows for the same tuition costs and the very same financial aid package. What studying abroad allows for is the opportunity for new scholarship opportunities, too. There are limitless lists of donors and organizations and programs searching for young, excited world travelers whom they can fund.

An essay and an interview got me $500. Some extra community service work got me over $1,000. I mailed an audition tape and after a few interviews, NBC has helped me record my time in Tokyo and share it with you. Special things can happen when you travel to study. People want to help you do it.

With the right motivation and interest, studying abroad can become very little more expensive, if more expensive at all, than your home school. Moreover, any travel, if done right, can be reasonable (reasonable being a relative term).

With international exchange rates, travel – including study abroad – can come close to money-saving. Tokyo hardly presents friendly costs (note its long run as one of the world’s most expensive cities), though I try to make it work with smart grocery shopping, but because of inflation in Ghana, when I studied abroad in West Africa I could easily eat very well on $2 or $3 U.S. a day.

Frugality aside, a semester or even just a week abroad is powerful and, for most of us, a one-time only thing. Spending should reflect that.

For me, I am trying to travel and explore as much as I can now because I have no idea what the future holds. In my everyday life I skimp and penny-pinch on everything, but I wait for those moments when I’ll splurge (if even just a little bit).

I went backcountry camping with two friends through the Smokies this past summer. A tent and some peanut butter held us for most of the week, but I didn’t hesitate to drop an extra $50 on an advanced caving tour through the Mammoth Cave National Park (the world’s largest recorded cave system in the world).

Here in Tokyo, my money-saving rises and falls on two categories: transportation and food. I am, I can admit, obsessed over my answer to the former; I can look out my apartment window here and see that two-wheeled solution.

Opposingly, food has presented some questions and constantly forces me to toe the line between simple and that of meager. I think in the past week or more, I have etched out a diet that satisfies my tastes, health and budget, and even allows me to ride a wave or two of some segments of Japanese society.

The rice cooker is my personal Buddhist shrine. I bought a 5kg (more than 11 lbs.) sack of rice for 19,000 yen ($16 U.S.). I splurge and buy a liter of soy sauce every few weeks, eggs and vegetables weekly, and I even treat myself to some meat every few weeks.

Rice is the staple: three meals a day. Rice and egg for breakfast, rice and vegetables for lunch, rice and a little meat with vegetables for dinner. I chug water mostly and add a cup of fruit juice (100 percent fruit juice for health’s sake) for breakfast and dinner. I assure you that I quite enjoy it. You disagree. The obscene of the ascetic, I’m sure.

So I steam and cook, and simmer and mince, spice and spread and manage to spend less than $25 on food weekly. Hold on, I can see the comments posted already. I do, naturally, treat myself on occasion. Eating out here, some ice cream there; don’t you worry. If you read regularly you will know that I spent nearly $40 U.S. on sushi a day or so ago. What more do you want?

I do it for the memories, ladies and gentlemen. If I will remember that restaurant dinner five years from now, I’m in. But, I know I will remember the fun of shopping and cooking on my own, and I will better remember the added travel I can encounter because of the money I saved. The triage of the ascetic, I’m sure.

Small moves.

Maybe I’m crazy. The small stuff counts. But there are plenty of small things to be found in the very pursuit of saving some bank which can then help you to do the big stuff. I’ll let you know in November when I am working on four months of thrice-daily rice-based meals. Until then, I’m not crazy at all.

Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 01:29 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Friday was another national holiday here in Japan: Bunka No Hi or Culture Day. Of course, culture day, along with a day off from classes, got me to think about Japanese culture, as I had explored it in my fifth episode, which premiered last week.

What is contemporary Japanese culture? What is any country’s culture? I’ve been here for nearly two months and seen a lot of Tokyo and surrounding cities. I’ve been to Kyoto in the south, Gunma and Nikko in the north. I’ve spoken to a sociologist who has lived in Tokyo for nearly two decades. I interviewed Donald Richie, who has lived in Japan for 60 years and has written 40 books on Japan. No one can really define the culture. It is too large and too diverse, not to mention the Japanese people do tend to take on styles from around the world. Especially here in Tokyo, there are so many contrasts.

But, I thought I had to try to mince through the culture. If I had been here in Japan for three years I doubt I could talk about the culture, let alone three months and then try to define it in three or four minutes.

What I can try to do and attempted in that episode was to try to show you what you might expect out of Tokyo. And that is crowds, busy trains, technology, from beautiful cars to wicked cell phones. It is a taste of the traditional with not much of the tradition left, from sumo as sport, festivals as parties and more Japanese people taking photos of shrines than praying at them. It is every big American city with just a bit of a twist, from innovation to different fast food, to driving on the wrong damn side of the road.

It is a society that appears to hate to discipline, yet is disciplined. I suppose that is directly related to this country’s devotion to blending in. The kids seem to love their uniforms. I see faceless groups of students all dressed in their school uniforms well after the final school bell has rung. Individualism is growing, but still hardly a Japanese priority. In that way, rather than school teachers coming down hard a student, rebellion is put down by the “enormous social weight,” to steal a phrase from Donald Richie, that being Japanese puts on its citizens.

An often quoted national proverb fits well: "The nail that sticks up must be hammered down." Still, it is a fight to understand what is theirs, what is Japanese, because so much has come from elsewhere. The clearest example is with the language. The Japanese love their language and are eager to consider it the hardest in the world. Nothing makes many Japanese people happier than to hear from a foreigner that the Japanese language is difficult to learn. However, of course, the kanji characters that make reading the language particularly difficult – hiragana and katakana are generally considered easy enough to learn – come from China. Those 3,300 characters that the Daikanawa Jiten estimate a person needs to know to be a literate adult and the 6,000 in the Japanese language, as estimated by Monash University, the largest university in Australia, can’t be, whether they’re simplified or not, Japanese, can they? (Roughly 50,000 kanji characters have been created in Chinese civilization, though most of those refer to specific places or insect and plant names).

It is in this way that there is a constant debate as to what is Japan, what is Japanese. I’ll let you know when I figure it out. ..I’ll let you know when anyone figures it out.

Jaa mata,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 12:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here is something else to be learned about Japan. Addresses are done a bit differently than they are in the United States. See, except for major roads, the streets of Japan are not named.

Instead, the 47 prefectures of Japan (think, states) are divided into cities and towns (Tokyo has 23), which are then subdivided into neighborhoods and blocks. I will use the address of my school as an example.

2-8-12 Minami Azabu, Minato-ku
Tokyo 106-0047, Japan

Okay, I’ll go from largest to smallest division for simplicity. Japan: well that’s easy enough, the country. 106-0047: the postal code, the Japanese version of American zip codes. Tokyo: the prefecture, the largest subdivision of Japanese territory, of which there are 47. Minato-ku: the city within Tokyo. (Specifically, Tokyo, the prefecture, has 23 such cities, along with smaller towns and islands). Minami Azabu: the neighborhood within the city of Minato. 2-8-12: the block, and individual building number.

To complicate matters for no readily understood reason, the buildings aren’t numbered in a geographical sequence, but rather in temporal order of construction. So, finding a new address involves some searching. This might be why everyone I have ever asked for directions in Japan has always had an atlas or map.

Riding a major boulevard in Japan will display street signs, but rather than displaying street names, they show neighborhood names and block numbers. Forgive me if this is a result of my ethnocentricity, but I’d take an American address for simplicity any day, though I do like the technical neighborhood divisions.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 12:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There is disparity in this world. The English language and my position on this planet afford me the opportunity to refer to the largest-scale, globally encompassing, heart-wrenching, should-be-apoplectic, kick-you-in-the-balls obstruction in a tight, succinct six words. Polonius said that, “brevity is the soul of wit,” but in a civilization of complexity, the terse can be irresponsible at best, incendiary at its most violent worst.

I went to a bar with some American friends one night a few days ago. Down a few flights of stairs, below the well-trafficked streets of Shibuya, an entertainment district in Central Tokyo, I stuffed myself in a booth with four guys and slowly sipped a beer as I told dirty jokes and ate complimentary popcorn. In time they coaxed a few Japanese girls to our table, and soon our party had ballooned to nearly twenty.

I laughed loudly and exchanged meaningless jibber jabber in between my attempts to understand a few more points of Japanese culture, asking a girl that sat across from me about marriage and racism and social structures. As often happens with large groups, it took some time for us to collectively stumble back into the October Saturday night, only after I paid 800 yen for my 300 yen beer to cover what wasn’t left by the rest.

It was just before the night’s final train, after 12am. As they stuttered and rambled through a group discussion of where to go next, I held a post on the corner of the street, looking at what was around me. This, some might say, was the splendor of an advanced economy.

Ahead of me sat a group of young men and women, wearing bright colors and designer labels, their heads ornately decorated with wildly styled hair. Band members appeared to be cleaning up after a show in a small club as they poured out of a narrow doorway with anonymous-looking black instrument cases, casually avoiding two wildly swerving, wholly intoxicated men in business suits, alternately tossing their heads back, cackling and smiling so widely I could only assume they were competing for size.

They click-clacked passed a girl on one knee, her presumably alcohol-induced nausea hidden by her long, stringy dark hair that would have been held back by her friend had she, too, not been too drunk to stop laughing, too drunk to remember. Behind them was a long bearded, heavily-clothed man whose jacket was so dirty it had forgotten its color, his eyes dispassionate and his body weary from too many yesterdays.

Japan is a developed nation of wealth and Tokyo is its crowning glory. Is this to what the so-labeled developing countries of the world should look forward? Economies and democracies stable enough to allow for citizens to forget about them altogether? Political upheaval is a sign of instability or democratic nascence, which often operate conterminously. Social innovation, the creation of societal diversions, is a sign of the combination of stability and relative freedom, which rarely operate conterminously.

There are large international organizations with necktied diplomats and fancy formulas to tell us after what countries other states should model themselves, gross domestic product per capita and human development index ratings. Maybe I am not smart enough to understand all of that.

It appears to me that all they’re really saying is that the drunker your population is on Saturday night without currency devaluation come Monday, the better off your country is. There isn’t a government on this planet who wouldn’t take the opportunity to have control over a state secure enough that its population can choose to forget. Autocracy is a vice for the terrified.

But this can’t be the end. The height of the nation-state can’t be an indifferent electorate, can it? Denizens able to spend money on dog grooming or spend time by club-hopping or hair styling. Did we establish market economies or iron-fisted dictatorships or liberal democracies so we could forget? Indifference becomes ironically uniting, the level of political activism subscribed to by those living too poorly to have hope and those living too comfortably to care.

The American dream becomes one of granting all people the opportunity to have a democracy stable enough to ignore. Japan has realized that dream. It is there in Shibuya. The disparity of the world can be ignored thanks to success. That gray-bearded man whose coat no longer knows its color and those drunken business men together unite in apathy. There are more important and far more entertaining things to be done.

Traveling forces me to think about these topics. Topics too complicated for my young mind to take on, their solutions laughably unapproachable. It hurts my head. Sometimes I find myself lagging in dismal self-reproach, trying to teach myself how to ride my bicycle without hands, trying to teach myself to forget, to pursue indifference and have fun. To forget that there is disparity in this world. If we were all given the opportunity to forget about disparity, I suppose there wouldn’t be any disparity to forget about anyway.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

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