June 6th, 2006
American moms are still fighting the good fight, but here in Japan I think they gave up long ago. Rarely does anyone untie their shoes before taking them off, nor do they untie them before cramming their feet back into them. It makes perfect sense though. The sheer number of times the Japanese change shoes in a day is astonishing. Outdoor shoes are not worn in homes, many restaurants, some businesses, and even a few stores. Slippers are generally worn indoors, but must be taken off in tatami rooms. Also, they must be changed for a pair of often gaudy looking slippers when entering a bathroom.
The root of this tradition comes from the rather practical matter of cleanliness, but I think it has taken on a subtler meaning as well. Not only is physical dirt left in the entryway, but so too is the unclean world left behind before entering the sanctity of one’s home. While it has taken some time to break in my shoes, and taken some practice to maintain my balance while stepping up from my shoes to the raised floor of the interior without touching the dirty floor, I have come to enjoy this aspect of Japanese life. Particularly because I no longer have to worry about smelly feet or being the odd one at work when I take my shoes off to let my feet breathe.
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June 2nd, 2006
Recently I was organizing my photo album and came across pictures from cherry blossom season. It’s hard to believe that just over a month ago the now unassumingly green-leafed sakura were ablaze with subtle shades of pink. The trees are everywhere, growing naturally in the mountains, planted in people’s yards, and being cultivated along city streets and in public gardens. I spent a day in Kyoto admiring their beauty and of the places I visited, Heian Shrine was the most stunning. Its grove of fully blooming and radiant cherry trees formed a canopy on which I could nearly picture angels dancing. The famous Philosopher’s Path was a peaceful walk along a small canal lined with the flowering trees, whose petals gently fluttered down to softly land on the water’s surface, whereupon they would slowly float away. I also glimpsed a less alluring, but perhaps no less enjoyable side of sakura season. I walked through a park which is a popular spot for hanami and the remnants of the week’s festivities could be seen in the empty tarps lining the ground, the many empty food and souvenier stalls, and the worn out look of the cherry trees, already beginning to lose their petals.
Hanami is the Japanese celebration of the blossoming trees, and it literally means “flower viewing.” Each year, people gather under the trees for picnics and barbeques while drinking sake and enjoying the company of friends and family. While partying I don’t think they spend much time actually ‘viewing’ the flowers, but they make time for that too, as hundreds of people flocked to the same places I did to enjoy the beauty. The cherry blossom tradition is an ancient one, beginning with the samurai. They felt a similitude to the trees, aspiring for a moment of resplendence before their brief lives ended. Today sakura still symbolize the ephemeral beauty of life and are a wonderful way to be reminded of the simple elegance of nature.
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May 30th, 2006
There are three things that almost no Japanese meal is complete without: green tea, soup, and of course rice. Even breakfast is complemented by this trio. What? Rice with my pancakes? No, breakfast here doesn’t have a unique set of foods like in America. No pancakes. No waffles. No toast. No cereal. No omlettes. No PopTarts or NutriGrain bars. Ah, but eggs, they do have eggs. Usually hard-boiled but occasionally “cooked eyeball” style…the snotty mess that we Americans have idealized as sunny-side-up. Along with that is often some variety tsukemono, or pickled vegetables, and fish. For lunch and dinner, common foods include anything that is eaten for breakfast, as well as chicken, pork, occasionally beef, noodles, shredded cabbage, and many other strange, but often delicious vegetable type things.
I really enjoy Japanese cuisine, and was glad to learn that they eat more than just sushi. Despite that, there are a few foods that I miss from home. In general, I miss the vast variety of ethnic foods. Here, likely because they are still shedding their strict isolationist view on the world, you’ll be hard pressed to find anything more than native dishes and American fast food. They’ve adopted Italian to an extent, but no Indian, Thai, or Mexican to speak of. The lack of these three is easy to understand: with the exception of Korean kimchi or an occasional bowl of ’spicy’ ramen (takes nearly half a mini-bottle of spice to give it any real kick), they don’t eat spicy foods here. I miss sweating it out over a big plate of enchiladas or pad thai. There’s only one thing I miss more, and that’s cheese. To be honest, the cheese selection in a Japanese grocery pales to what our college fridge consistently has to offer. So if you happen to have some dry ice around, pack it in with a brick of mozarella and send it my way, would you?
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May 22nd, 2006
Novels have a way of transporting you to another world, a wonderful, exciting place. Reality melts away and is replaced by images conjured from the words on the pages. Your body reacts to the vivid scenes, your heart pounding faster as the tension builds. The novel’s world is the only one that seems to exist…until the phone rings, snapping you back to where you sit. You grudgingly answer. It’s Alex, the main character of the book you’re reading; he needs your help! He tells you where to meet him. Over the next several hours, the book turns its own pages as chapters are rewritten, all based on your actions. The book’s world and your world have suddenly become intertwined.
While this scenario is far from being possible, experiences like it do exist. Known as alternate reality games (ARG), the past decade has seen the birth and increasing popularity of this new form of interactive story telling. An extreme, but perhaps ideal, example of an ARG can be seen in the excellent film The Game. When I first saw the movie, I realized what an amazing concept it was, and how fun it would be to actually be involved in something only half as good. The A.I. ARG was before my days of being technologically adept. I missed out on the Halo 2 ARG, but it put alternate reality games on my radar. I had no interest in the Xbox 360 ARG. But finally, one has come along that I found out about early in the game, and care enough about to participate in.
The Lost Experience, as it has been called, revolves around the deep mythos of the TV series Lost. Thus far, it has been highly entertaining, but not necesarily because of the game aspect itself. So far, web sites, telephone, TV comercials, a newspaper ad, and even an entire book have been used for delivering clues. The clues have been fairly simple thus far, all being solved in minutes or at most an hour, by members of the growing community. The community has actually been more interesting than the game itself. Wild and entertaining theories have populated the several blogs and message boards that have sprung up since the start of the game, and the community holds its collective breath as it waits for each new clue to prove which theories have merit. If used properly by the powers that be, the community has the potential to make the actual gameplay quite interesting. Riddles that require cooperation from every member of the community and dynamic adaptation of the story arc are two things that I really hope this game can offer over its expected summer-long duration. The potential is there, but will they invite us to wander the invisible corridors that somehow lie in both a fictional world and our own?
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May 19th, 2006
It’s dark and I am alone. But I don’t feel alone, there is a presence…I attempt to move towards it. I can’t…my body doesn’t seem to respond to my command. Odd. I am lying on my back, I try to roll onto my side. Still I cannot move. What is that presence? Who’s there? It’s becoming more than a curiosity, turning into urgency. This must be a dream…where am I? Too many shadows and my head, like my body, is frozen in place. It’s coming closer, ominous, a definite danger. I need to move…my fingers, my toes, my eyes, nothing moves. But I see. I’m in my room..this is real. I need to escape, something terrible is going to happen. I try to speak…nothing. I struggle harder, hoping that some part of my body will respond so I can break the spell. An unhuman noise..but it came from me. Finally something. I’m almost out, but I must hurry. There is no time left. My head turns, dizziness. I seem to escape, but slip backwards. Ah, my fingers move, then my hand, my arm, control rushes back. I’m concious and can move again, but barely. I’m on the edge. If I return to sleep now, I’ll fall back into that torturous state. I must get up, walk, have a glass of water. It’s been nearly thirty minutes since I went to sleep, but I feel as if I’ve been awake the whole time.
And in a way, I was. It’s something that has become very familiar too me over time, a condition known as sleep paralysis. Caught between the real world and the dream world, I had become concious during REM sleep, a time in which the body is supposed to be paralyzed to prevent harm. As far as I can remember, I have been affected by this my whole life, but only since a few years ago have I understood it to be more than just a simple nightmare. It was terrifying as a child, and even now it is still frightening despite being lucid during every episode. Recently it has become quite bad, happening nearly every night. All I want to do is escape peacefully into the dreamless darkness of undisturbed sleep. It is only there that my mind can truly rest its weary synapses.
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May 12th, 2006
What else was I supposed to do? I was stuck in the mountains for days with no food, and the mountain beast walked right under my ishi uchi tana I had set up on the cliff side so I pummeled it. I had no way to start a fire as everything was drenched from the incessant rains, so I ate it raw.
Ok, so maybe the mountains were really a city and the rain was barely a drizzle, the first I’d seen all week. And maybe the cliff was actually a bar stool in a nice restaurant. And no, I didn’t actually kill the horse. But I did eat it, and it was raw. And it was delicious. Known as basashi, this local dish of Kumamoto is made of thin, bite-size slices of raw horse meat and dipped in garlic and soy. The meat was wonderfully tender and had a flavor better than any steak I have ever eaten. It was a bit on the pricey side, but well worth it.
Basashi wasn’t the only new food I tried while I was in Kyushu. I sampled Kumamoto’s other specialty, karashi renkon, as well. Lotus root stuffed with mustard and bean curd, battered, then fried. Delicious. Chicken Namban is well known in Miyazaki, but I tried tuna Namban instead. Fried tuna chunks with a light sweetness and served with a tartar sauce. Delicious. In the small castle town of Obi, I ate obi-ten, which is made of minced flying fish, tofu, sugar, and miso, deep fried. Good, but not quite delicious. Finally, in Fukuoka, I had my first meal of okonomiyaki, a strange pizza/pancake with vegetables and whatever else you’d like in it. Delicious, but actually a specialty of the Kansai region, so I will have to try the real thing back in Kyoto.
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May 11th, 2006
…but now it reminds me of everything. Well, not everything, but certainly much more than it used to. I’ve been here in Japan for nearly two months, and some of my best memories have come from getting lost. Racing blindly through the streets of Tokyo to make it back to our youth hostel before the front door was locked. Meandering around Kamakura until being invited to picnic with some Japanese men. Drifting through the back streets of Kyoto and seeing a geisha in a rickshaw. Stumbling into a subway station to discover an underground mall. And many times just happening across a serene shrine or temple. Some of the best moments come when you get off the well-worn tourist path.
Last week in Kyushu I discovered that riding the trains until I get lost can be just as easy, and can get me even more lost than I ever could on foot. I ended up in the most out of the way place with no way to get anywhere in time to do anything. Trying to avert a disastrous week, I rearranged my plans with the help of a travel agent in the station, and with help from a man in line for the travel agent. He spoke some English, so he did some translating between the travel agent and me. He then treated me to lunch, stopped by his house to show me his garden, treated me again to cake and coffee at his friends’ shop, and finally took me to my hotel.
I was amazed by his generosity and friendliness, and it was a fun chance to speak Japanese. As it turns out, he was the first of many kind people that I would meet during my travels. And as always, getting lost turned out to be a memorable experience.
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May 10th, 2006
I recently returned from a whirlwind tour of Kyushu, the third largest island of Japan situated to the south of the archipelago. The island doesn’t seem that big on a map, but I found plenty to do and could have easily spent two weeks there instead of one. My original plan was to do a lot of hiking in the northern half of Kyushu, but a combination of a travel mishap and the realization that I wasn’t well enough prepared for these hikes led me to change my plans. I still fit in a few nice treks in the mountains, as well as some urban hiking, and even a day on a bike. The weather was beautiful all week. I ended up spending a lot more time on the trains than I was expecting, but this wasn’t all bad since there was always gorgeous scenery to watch go by. I made excellent use of my Japanese while I was out on my own and I feel like the week really helped me improve. I have a few good stories from my trip, but I’ll save those for later posts.
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May 5th, 2006
Denshijisho – an electronic dictionary. It eliminates the need to own a library of dictionaries and probably costs less too. After some debating, I bought one for $130 in Akihabara and have never looked back. I can read menus with it. I can go to the store and actually know what I’m buying. I can communicate with anyone. It may be slow, but it lets me learn in situations where I would otherwise learn nothing, and probably get nowhere. My denshijisho can go anywhere and do anything.
Actually, that’s not true. It shouldn’t go in my back pocket because it does not make a good seat cushion.
I was out with my colleagues one night and as often happens, a topic arose that was difficult to discuss. I opened up my dictionary and saw a big black spot obscuring much of the screen. Luckily I didn’t really need the denshijisho anymore. I had no English words to describe my shock.
Repairs were going to be $100 and take almost a month. I decided to look for a new one and pay the extra $30 to have this invaluable tool back instantly. I found a store with my denshijisho model, but it was $40 more expensive than I was expecting. Now I wasn’t sure if getting a new one was worth it. I tried explaining my situation, how sad and terrible it was that I sat on my old denshijisho, in hopes of getting a lower price. The clerk spoke no English though, and I’m pretty sure he couldn’t understand my Japanese at all. Luckily, and I do mean luckily, there was a British fellow standing in the next aisle over. He happened to overhear my conversation, and just happened to speak Japanese. He explained my situation to the clerk and was able to get him to sell it for the $130 price point I was looking for. Someone must have been looking out for me, because it is rare to see a foreigner, let alone one who speaks Japanese fluently.
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May 4th, 2006
To the casual observer, the tea ceremony may appear to be the most boring and senselessly rigid ceremony in existence. Why must I endure the torture of seiza, the Japanese style of sitting? What makes tea special enough to be ceremonious about? It’s not so much about the tea, as it is about escaping from the chaos of reality.
The ceremony starts as soon as you walk through the door, removing your shoes and washing your hands and mouth at the font to leave behind the filth of outside. The host conducts you into the silent and pristine tea room. Sweets are served in a precise manner, and must be eaten as precisely. The thick green tea is prepared with exact movements. There is no chaos. The sweets, the utensils, the cup, and the simple decorations must all be admired. There is beauty, which can often be hard to find in reality. Everything has a clear purpose, which is not always the case in life. Like the samurai of years past, one can always find comfort and sanity in the peace of the tea ceremony.
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