It is Thanksgiving in the United States, isn’t it? I suppose that means no one is likely to read this, but I’ll write it anyway. Here in Japan, Thanksgiving is even less recognized than Halloween, which is only seen with some scattered store displays and small celebrations by Westerners here in Tokyo.

Sometime between late September and early November in 1621 the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast which is now known as the first Thanksgiving, though it didn’t become an annual event and wasn’t even called a thanksgiving, which would have been considered a religious, not a celebratory event. It is just that needless information that I have crammed in my mind that should have told me that this time of the year was a foolish one to be away from the country I love.

At that so-called first Thanksgiving, the only two items that historians are certain were served are venison and wild fowl. There would have been few vegetables, because of the coming winter and meager techniques for storage, and, without sugar and ovens, none of the basked desserts like pies that we so regularly associate with Thanksgiving. Indeed, it is more likely that lobster, eel or even seal was served, and less chance that anyone was saving room for pumpkin pie, according to Kathleen Curtin, a Food Historian at Massachusetts’s famed Plymouth Plantation.

Still, I think the holiday is more about squeezing around a dinner table with your family, whether you like them or not, and so, I think I’ll end up at the home of a few American friends later tonight, though I don’t expect to have any turkey, a North American fowl.

After a century or more of Thanksgiving-esque holidays during the fall, including a 1623 celebration of a devastating New England drought, the custom of celebrating the year’s harvest gradually took hold in the pre-American state, according to historian James W. Baker. By 1817, New York State had adopted Thanksgiving Day as an annual holiday, followed by many other states by the middle of the century, according to the History Channel’s website. Old Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt set in 1939 the fourth Thursday of November as the day soon-to-be synonymous with football and the beginning of the Christmas season.

I find it all fascinating, particularly when I can excitedly spout this out at a non-American who tries to say, as a country of immigrants, we haven’t a consolidated culture and are without, as an English woman once tried to convince me, “a united history.” I am not religious and don’t, for a minute, believe one has to be Christian to be an American, but from October 31 to January 1, I think the United States is at its best. I am an ornery, pessimistic, antisocial crab, but Christmas caroling and family holidays get me mushy inside. I’ve managed to miss a big portion of that season this year. The "Merry Christmas" signs hanging from lamposts in Jiyugaoka and the glimmery holiday displays in storefronts don't quite do it for me.

See, I’m different. For much of the year, I am as independent and solitarily social as I am capable of being. Anyone who has followed my time through JYA knows this. You’re much more likely to have read a story that involves me taking a train, riding my bicycle, visiting a new place on my own. While most of the other cast members have photo albums full of smiling faces, full of new friends, and visiting family, mine are of landscapes, interrupted by awkward photos I ask strangers to take of me.

The holiday season is, when I am in the United States, a time for me to let down my guard. I transform into a new person, though I have no rational explanation why. All I know is that, as I’ve mentioned in other blogs, I started to hum “White Christmas” and imitate Bing Crosby ever since I flipped my calendar to November.

I will go and have some fun with my friends, let myself take a break from my final papers and my departure preparation, but I know I’ll be thinking of my family and even the friends I have back in the United States.

I suppose in 1621, many of the participants in that first autumn celebration were a lot farther, a lot more removed from what was familiar than I am now. We’ve gotten weak in those four hundred years. I wish everyone a happy and warm Thanksgiving, whether any of you get to read this or not.

Happy Holidays,
Christopher

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In my typical fashion, I have kept copious notes on a great deal of information that will likely interest no one. Still, I will share it with you now, just a week from my leaving this country. On that bicycle of mine, I managed to clock about 593 miles since I bought it Thursday, September 21. That is nearly the distance between Philadelphia and Indianapolis, Indiana and works out to be about nine miles a day or roughly 60 miles a week. Seeing that I will be selling Newton, my bicycle, to a mutual friend for 5,000 yen, half of her original cost, I certainly think I got my money’s worth. (Don’t worry; Newton’s new rider is a kind, gentle man, who will treat her well).

Here at home, I finished five 5-kg bags of rice, meaning I ate 55 pounds of Japanese-grown grain in less than four months. That is like me eating a healthy ten-year-old boy’s weight in rice, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

I am amazed by my tightfisted skimping. Excluding my apartment rent, I dropped just $1,490 on all the trips, all my food, all my hostels, all the buses and trains. Including all of my domestic travel, that means I spent an average of $12 a day in Japan. Fairly impressive seeing that I spent most of my time in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

I left Tokyo eight times, and spent time in five of Japan’s 47 prefectures, while remaining only Honshu, the Japanese mainland, without seeing any of the country’s three other main islands. I did see a great deal of Tokyo, and I probably should have, as I was here more than 110 days or about four months.

There are three people born in Japan whom I met here with whom I sincerely intend to keep in contact. I took more than 1,300 photographs and close to ten hours of video. If that doesn’t seem like much, you obviously have never been forced to watch someone’s home movies. Math was never a great strength of mine, but I think this shows I had one interesting experience, full of memories I won’t be able to forget, and the numbers don’t lie.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

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Sometimes I wonder if I would read this blog if I wasn’t writing it. Would anyone read this if he didn’t know me, or is this just someone’s assigned reading, in one way or another? I write an awful lot more than my NBC contract requires, so I suppose this is more about me than them. This is the little-publicized pilot-season of a startup, online-only reality show featuring ten anonymous college students, so, assuming the readership is accordingly meager, I suppose this is more about me than you, too.

As I was weaving in and out of Jiyugaoka traffic last night, the rain pattering the hood of my smelly, sweat-stained Temple University sweatshirt, I decided that I am intimidated by the night. Morning light speaks to me in soothing tones of a day to be used, while its moonlit sister accuses me of misusing or, even worse, wasting a day that is now gone. It is a time for excitement and mystery for many, but, for me, night is biting and reminds me more of goodbyes and loneliness.

The Japanese sky managed to be a dark bluish tone, hushed by a moon, and decorated with a coral reef of offsetting grayish clouds, interconnected but so desperate to be closer still. The headlights of slippery black taxicabs revealed the rain that tried to sneak to the ground without being spotted, hidden in the cooling night air that fell from that cloud-adorned firmament.

The headlamp of my bicycle hummed along the edge of my slick front wheel as I hammered on my pedals, riding somewhere, my apartment the default choice of a mind wearied by too much. I decided that I am bored by these challenges. My habit of movement and welcoming new obstacles is habit just the same. Life falls into habit, but nothing threatens it more.

My thoughts floated to less troubling issues, like buying omiyage, travel gifts for friends, and how long I would let myself have under the warm water of a shower. I got to thinking about the winding roads of Tokyo and thought it odd that, when using the small frame of mind of my little body, the road I take home always appears to be going straight but, any map tells me, it certainly isn’t.

Would it be childishly overdramatic or, even worse, banal of me to suggest that that is troublingly similar to our own lives? In an existence of 70 years, a few hours, even a few weeks, is really too small to judge the direction of a life. I really cannot know now what my time here in Tokyo, Japan will do to my exaggeratedly meaningless existence. I don’t know if these words I am writing will be forgotten tomorrow, if ever read by anyone, or if they might help me, if they might help anyone. Hopelessness is just the time that separates your diversions.

I have learned enough about Tokyo geography that the only lost I get is in my own mind. In time, my apartment saved me from draining any more of my energy through directionless and unhelpful thought. I parked my bicycle, my sweatshirt a little darker, heavier and wetter, and forgot, if only for a while.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 03:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I saw a red overhang with white bock letters reading, “Little Mermaid.” I found that perplexingly interesting enough to draw me nearer. By the time I realized that inside the glass windows were four or five white cloaked Japanese wearing tall French chef hats shelving the golden brown goods and sugary treats that define the Western bread culture, I was inside salivating. Immediately I began to imagine how expensive these simple Japanese versions of carbohydrate staples would be. Then, through the blurred vision of a dreamlike trance, I managed to see the prices were reasonable enough, in my Tokyo-adjusted sense of costs to be sure, but reasonable still.

After grabbing a small tray and a pair of metal tongs, I circled the 180-square foot, wood-floored showroom, teasing my tastes with long, gulping stares of piled baked goods and doughy breads. For less than 700 yen ($6 USD), I walked outside into a brightly-lit, windy afternoon with an oversized pig-in-a-blanket, a fried chicken drumstick, a narrow six-inch roll filled with potatoes and bacon, a doughy quiche with pizza-like toppings, and a long braided sugary donut. Well, I can’t begin to decide if this lunch was as good as I thought it was or simply as close to American food as I have come in four months. It doesn’t much matter, I voraciously devoured it all.

Now, I think this may have broken my pledge of avoiding anything similar to the diet I frequent at home, but it didn’t seem terribly wrong. It was a small, on-site bakery, which I could see from peering through a partly closed door, watching a handful of other such-dressed cooks rushing around a tiny room of commercial ovens, stacking trays of the warm and gooey. A great deal of Western-style foods have integrated into Japanese culture, particularly among the wealthier, more worldly citizens of Tokyo, so, really, my diet these few months have been more along the lines of a nearly poverty-stricken, rice-consuming fool.

I have managed to justify my drinking fruit juice, as I say it is for health. But, really, it shouldn’t need justification as the diets of Japan, an island nation that has been import-hungry since the late nineteenth, have long included foods that aren’t readily considered traditional Japanese fare. So, too, with the cozy, bakery with the French chef hat wearing cooks and their delicious treats.

The time is nearer and nearer still when I will go home and have American pizza and french fries from my favorite pizza place. My mother will make me Italian food and bake holiday cookies. I will grill a hot dog and finally have cheese again! I will rediscover creamy yogurt with granola I can recognize and will be able to afford apples again. Yes, American food awaits me.

My stop in the Little Mermaid bakery was a great break from the heaps of rice and sprinkled soy sauce that I have lived on for months, but, with so little time left, I do think I will stick to my somewhat arbitrary decision to eat only “Japanese” food, as a lifetime of U.S. delicious-ness is awaiting me.

Jaa mata,
Christopher

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Here is another quick Japanese culture lesson for you. If you know someone who grew up in the country, ask his him who his sempai and kouhai are. Almost without question, he will have an answer.

Japan is, people like to say, a country of obedience and community, without the independence of the West. One of the clearest examples of this, and one of best ways this structure is passed on is through this mentor-like system. While it might refer to seniority in a business or some organization, most usually every person grew up under the tutelage of someone just older, his sempai. It is the responsibility of the sempai to guide and advise his younger half, his kouhai, the best he can. In return, it is generally understood that the kouhai must respect and follow his sempai. Just a few days ago I went out to a bar with a group of Japanese college students I had befriended. While, I believe, it more common to find a group of American friends all similarly aged, the sempai/kouhai dynamic changes things.

I was there, drinking Suntory and eating tonkatsu and fried potatoes with the group’s grand sempai, a 33-year-old, whose kouhai was 26-years-old, who was sempai to a 25-year-old, who was sempai to a 23-year-old, who was sempai to a 22-year-old, who was sempai to a 21-year-old, who was sempai to a 15-year-old. If they got into arguments, the sempai would always make the peace, and there was a genuine respect for one’s sempai. Granted, normal social skills skew the presence. The 22-year-old was clearly the most popular, most athletic and most out-going of the group, but he knew his place and didn’t question it. It is this, the sempai and kouhai system that might be one of the clearest ways to describe how much of Japanese society is structured and remains. It is surprisingly refreshing to find such a tradition still so active.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

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Ever heard of the Yakuza? Come on, of course you have. Organized crime has been around for centuries and there are few topics that have so regularly inspired movies and blurred the line between truth and fiction in so many different parts of the world than institutionalized illegality. The Japanese are no exception and their yakuza are not only the subject of many a contemporary tale of Robin Hood, but also a real institution, shrouded by mystery and as often well-structured as it is seemingly diffuse.

Many regard the yakuza as descendants of the armed groups that supported seventeenth century Japanese daimyos or powerful samurai. The more brutish of the yakuza arm are often considered to have developed post-World War II when the demand for black market goods created a booming underground industry. More powerful yakuza members are from prouder lineage, many of whom were brought up in families that modeled themselves after American gangsters of the 1920s. With the American occupation of the 1950s came an outlaw on firearms, but the questionable level of Japanese power with Douglas MacArthur effectively running the country, the yakuza developed a monopoly force and laid its foundation in Japanese politics and business.

The yakuza are reputed to hold influence over many members of the National Diet and police forces, which helps in its profiting on prostitution, gambling and other entertainment industries on the fringe of Japanese society. Known for their tattoos and being proud outcasts, as the very name “yakuza” reflects a losing hand in a Japanese card game, their influence is generally recognized more as a stabilizing and recognized function of Japanese society than a cultural scourge. Indeed, Japan is by no means a country plagued by violence, despite the estimated 110,000 members in 2,500 established yakuza families, according to Court TV’s Crime Library website. In contrast, according to the same source, the United States has more than double the Japanese population, but is known to have just 20,000 members of organized crime syndicates. Indeed, while the United States is known more for its losing battle with individual criminals, street gangs, as well as larger, more established criminal organizations, the yakuza are recognized to have a firm and long-standing alliance with Japan’s strong right-wing nationalists. Many have said that the yakuza’s influence flourishes in the corporate world as well, pursuing its will inside Japanese businesses and even internationally.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

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Through my university here in Tokyo, I managed to score a teaching position at an English camp for Japanese high schoolers over a long weekend a few weeks ago. Naturally, I was thrilled to get a chance to be paid to spend a few days with Japanese teenagers.

Even more thrilling was that, in late October, I loaded six buses with a group of nearly 400 students, assistants and teachers, and took a five hour bus ride north, after nearly two hours of trains, to the rural Gunma prefecture (See English Camp Photo Album).

The final forty minutes of the trip, the buses muscling up the cutback roads that carved their way through the elevations caused by the lingering force of Gunma’s three famed peaks, Mount Haruna, Mt. Akagi, and Mt. Myogi, was my another splendid chance to be close to Japan’s rural arm. The colors of autumn were at their finest.

The camp itself was three days of my leading, along with some twenty other young assistants instructed by the school’s English teachers, the students of Yamato Nishi High School through games and speech contests. At the heart of the learning was supposed to be the students having the opportunity to interact and speak with native speakers: that’s me.

Yamato Nishi has the splendid privilege of receiving funds from the national government’s Education Ministry in an attempt to try new ways of teaching English. The result was that very English camp, hosted at the enormous Kogen Seminar Center of Tokai University, tucked deeply isolated in the middle of a deep rock face of Agatsuma-gun, Gunma.

With another assistant, I shared a room that was at least twenty tatami mats, large indeed. It allowed for the two of us to lie comfortably on our futons, wearing our yukatas, separated by a large coffee table, around which we sat cross-legged and sipped green tea. After the students were required to return to their rooms for nightly curfew, many of the assistants walked dark trails that led to a small stream or sat outside in the cold and laughed and told stories. In between that fun, I played geography games with a handful of new friends, four or five of us trying to name all of the U.S. state capitals or recall as many of the 54 independent African countries. Yes, I am that lame.

The English of many of the students wasn’t terribly coherent, and, I regularly admit, my Japanese is on level far below an average kindergartner, so sometimes conversation became stagnant. Still, I genuinely felt I developed a friendship with many of the students, most of whom I ate my meals with, stuffing my face with some of the best Japanese food I had had in the country.

They taught me Japanese table manners, and we tried to compare cultures. I made my students laugh, but also kept at least one group of students after one of my sessions after they didn’t meet my expectations for their collective presentation. It was all of the fun of teaching, without any of the headaches of paperwork and hassles. I was taken with how much freedom I was given, as I was left alone with ten or twelve high school students and asked to, in effect, teach them a language of 200,000 words.

I fell into only one tirade about the necessity for dreaming and pursuing those dreams, most of which was probably lost on my Japanese-speaking 15-year-old audience. I took more pictures than I could even begin to count engaged one student in a dessert-eating contest. The girls were beautiful and image-conscious, and the boys were self-searching and more hesitant to laugh at my jokes. They were, in effect, like any group of 15-year-old American children I have ever met.

How is it that I find myself into these remarkably rare and indefatigably memorable experiences? This was clearly another. I had been rereading Joseph Heller’s famed “Catch-22,” but I slept on the bus ride home as one of my young students, who had chosen to sit next to me, asked if he could try to read it. Likely, I won’t ever hear from any of these young Japanese students ever again, but that doesn’t mean their effect was lost.

Jaa mata,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 02:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Another stop that is worth time in Tokyo is Ueno. In November, Ueno is known to offer a number of museums, including the Tokyo National Museum, one of the country’s largest, and a few scattered shrines. Yet, as I’ve stated before, museums are something I have mostly avoided in Japan, wanting rather to see the country, than artifacts of the country.

What brought me to Ueno was Ueno-koen Park. See, in Japan, hanami, or flower viewing, is a fairly popular day-trip during the spring. With a tradition of hundreds of years in Japan, couples and families and friends will take a plastic mat and a sushi picnic with sake, and sit underneath the trees of any of 60 prominent viewing locations in Japan, watching the flowering beauty flutter in the warm wind of spring. From early April in southern Honshu to mid-May in Hokkaido, any of those locations are overrun with Japanese awaiting a relaxing day of hanami. With some 1,000 cherry trees, Tokyo’s Ueno Park is known to be one of the finest locations for hanami in all of the country.

I have seen many beautiful photographs of the park in the spring, but, unfortunately, I will be long gone from Japan by then. Still, I needed to be able to say that I had been in Ueno Park, hanami or not. The Park also has the odd distinction of being the location of the only resistance to the modernizing revolution, the Meji Restoration, almost 250 years ago. Some 2,000 Tokugawa loyalists were soundly defeated in 1867 by the country’s first modern army.

I arrived at Ueno Park, made Tokyo’s first public park in 1873, just after sunset. The famed trees were naked and silent, their sakura, cherry blossoms, the unofficial national flower, were nonexistent. There was some fine fall foliage left near Shinobazu Lake, but with night setting in, the most color I found was nearer to Ueno Station, known for housing a once prominent black market and a modicum of Asian bazaar-style shopping.

Since the devastation of World War II, the area around the Ueno station has also been known for a large number of homeless communities, something not as often seen in Japan as it is in most American cities. Ueno also has Japan’s first zoological garden, revered for its pandas, though space is limited compared to American animal preserves.

I skipped it all. I just had to cross it off my list: see Ueno Park, cherry blossoms or not.

Jaa mata,
Christopher

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