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Reflections on Japan

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life, Travel

I’ve been back in the States for a few days now and I’ve been mean­ing to¹ write a lit­tle some­thing reflect­ing back on the trip; how­ever with jet lag and what not², I’ve been a bit too tired to write any­thing up. Since I received a friendly reminder about it from AWelkin; I fig­ure I bet­ter hurry up and write some­thing. First off, let’s get the gushy fan-boyishness out of the way. Going to Japan was an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence and some­thing that I am very glad that I had the oppor­tu­nity to do. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here are some of the impres­sions that I’m left with from my visit to Japan.

Nishi Kasai (the district/suburb of Tokyo we stayed in for the first week) was very sim­i­lar to most any large city that you’d go to, except in places where it wasn’t. Most of the streets I saw dur­ing my stay in Nishi Kasai were nar­row and oddly clean. For being part of Tokyo, one of the biggest citites in the world, I expected a much larger amount of trash to accu­mu­late in the gut­ters and down the side streets. Dur­ing my stay, I rarely noticed any trash lit­ter­ing the streets and that usu­ally was just a cou­ple of cig­a­rette butts or the very rare soda can. I see more trash lit­ter­ing streets in my home­town every­day than I think I saw dur­ing my entire week in Nishi Kasai. The other thing about Nishi Kasai that sur­prised me was how green it was there. I mean, it’s part of Tokyo and they’ve got trees and bushes all over the place. In par­tic­u­lar, right next to TCA there was some­thing that kind of resem­bled a park. It divided the street in half, was lined with trees and in one part had what I think was a rice paddy. While the rest of it was paved, had benches and a small wad­ing area for kids (or a good place for the adults to dip their feet).

Of course, it wasn’t all green­ery there; there were plenty of build­ings all over the place. Some where tow­er­ing mon­strosi­ties of con­crete; while oth­ers were tra­di­tional Japan­ese houses made of wood. There was a con­ve­nience store on par­ti­cally every cor­ner, though nor­mal gro­cery stores were a bit harder to find. This reminds me of another thing about Japan that seems odd to me now; zon­ing ordi­nances. I don’t know if they just don’t have any, if they’re lot less strict than Amer­i­can ones or what, but you could be walk­ing down a street and it would shift from stores to houses to stores to apart­ments in a blink of an eye. If you’re like me and don’t read kanji; this means you can never be entirely sure if the build­ing you are look­ing at is somebody’s house or their busi­ness or both or some­thing else entirely.

Speak­ing of con­fu­sion, it is my under­stand­ing that the aver­age Japan­ese per­son has sev­eral more years of school­ing in Eng­lish than the aver­age Amer­i­can has school­ing in any for­eign lan­guage, but I have to won­der if they really under­stand Eng­lish some­times. For instance one day while walk­ing around Nishi Kasai; I spot­ted a young Japan­ese girl wear­ing a green t-shirt that said “daddy” across the wrong of it. I’ve also seen other Japan­ese girls wear­ing t-shirts and tank­tops that pro­mote Play­Boy mag­a­zine. I really have to won­der if those ladies have any idea of what their cloth­ing was pro­mot­ing. Of course, I can’t be too judge­men­tal about their shirts. I’ve got one with some char­ac­ters that sort of look like kanji, but I have no idea what they mean either³.

Speak­ing of kanji reminds me of the only thing that really hit me as a bad bit of cul­ture shock. Towards the end of our first week there; we vis­ited a store called Man­drake. It’s this mas­sive mul­ti­story geek shop­ping area, with used manga, anime cells, toys, cos­tumes, etc… I’d been brows­ing through some of the manga; just try­ing to find some­thing with cool art­work or maybe even just a really nice art­book and after I’d been in there a while all the mul­ti­col­ored kanji on the spines of the manga started to blend together and spin around a bit. It was extremely dis­ori­ent­ing and is one of the rea­sons I didn’t much like going to Man­drake or really any book­store while I was in Japan. Nor­mally, I love going into book­stores and just brows­ing around; but since I don’t read any kanji it was painful for me to go in and see all these books I couldn’t read. For­tu­nately, you don’t have to be able to read kanji to get around Tokyo or really any of the areas we vis­ited. Signs in Eng­lish were all over the place and we were trav­el­ing as a group. So we almost always had either AWelkin or Keki-san or some other per­son who was flu­ent in Japan­ese along to help us out.

On the other hand, I think hav­ing all that help wasn’t entirely good for the class because it seemed sev­eral peo­ple would do every­thing they could to avoid hav­ing to speak Japan­ese them­selves. We had 3 half-days of Japan­ese lessons from Sato-sensai and some peo­ple appeared to speak Japan­ese fairly well in class but then would sud­denly lose all their Japan­ese skills once they left Sato-sensai’s class. I know my Japan­ese was very weak; but by the end of the trip, I could:

• intro­duce myself
• tell some­body what one of my hob­bies was
• order my own food (if I could point at it, already knew what it was called or some­body could tell me what it was called)
• com­plain that the weather was hot⁴

I don’t know if that meant was I more independent/confident/foolish than my fel­low stu­dents but it seemed to me that we were not in the U.S. so we should make every effort to speak the native lan­guage of the coun­try we were in. This is just some­thing that seemed to me as a basic form of cour­tesy that we could do for our “host country”.

Cour­tesy was another thing that I noticed and liked about Japan. Peo­ple were nice to each other all over the place whether they knew one another or not. Peo­ple would say sum­i­masen (excuse me/sorry/please) and ari­ga­too goza­imasu (thank you) at the drop of a hat; while back here in the States, it some­times seems like you have to prat­i­cally save somebody’s life before they’ll say thank you.

Ok, enough already about what I did like; what didn’t I like? Well… their milk tasted a bit off from what I’m used to and rice cakes at break­fast time got old fast⁵. Also the heat was nearly unbear­able and bonk­ing my head in door­ways was annoy­ing. But none of those were major issues really, prob­a­bly the biggest thing that would have annoyed me would be their atti­tude towards sched­ules. We were pretty heav­ily insu­lated from this thanks to AWelkin’s efforts but given some of the things we talked about over din­ner that first night back; I get the impres­sion that the Japan­ese do not view sched­ules as some­thing you really set in stone (like we silly Amer­i­cans do). It seems to me that they felt it was per­fectly ok to rearrange the sched­ules at a moments notice and con­tinue to arrange them until they were happy about it; with­out ever real­iz­ing that the silly for­eign­ers were likely to get stressed about it (which we did, fre­quently). Still I was pretty well insu­lated from that so it wasn’t too bad. Prob­a­bly the num­ber one thing about Japan that dis­turbed me were their ceme­ter­ies; specif­i­cally those areas set aside for chil­dren who’d died. Usu­ally, I’d see these with lit­tle stat­ues (of a stand­ing Bud­dha?, not sure need to ask AWelkin about that) with knit­ted bon­nets and/or a bib. Accord­ing to one dis­cus­sion, I’d had with AWelkin about these stat­ues⁶; the Japan­ese feel a need to honor all of their dead, includ­ing those chil­dren that died young, at birth, were aborted and what not. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, as to me that seems to dis­play a deep and abid­ing respect for life but see­ing the children’s sec­tion of the ceme­ter­ies dis­turbed me on some fun­da­men­tal level. It’s rather hard to describe; there was a sense of “this is really creepy” but over­laid with a sense of deep sad­ness. *shud­der* Think­ing about those parts of Japan still creeps me out a bit.

As this was my first trip out­side of the U.S. (and the first plane ride that I can remem­ber going on); I did end up learn­ing a few things about myself:

• I can han­dle rid­ing in a plane just fine, even in coach, but I’d rather be up front so I know when the plane is going to dip or turn and per­haps won’t be quite so put out by turbulence.
• With proper moti­va­tion, I can learn other lan­guages fairly quickly. Note that I didn’t say well or in depth; just quickly.
• I’m still oblvi­ous to flirt­ing⁷.
• As worldly as I might want to appear to oth­ers; I get too big a kick out of being a tourist to not stop and stare at (or take pic­tures of) things that inter­est me.
• I enjoy trav­el­ing immensely.

¹ Trans­la­tion: The final project of the course was to write one last jour­nal entry talk­ing about the trip and what the trip made me learn about myself.
² Switch­ing from U.S. time to Japan time was easy, switch­ing back has been bru­tal and prob­a­bly wasn’t helped by giv­ing blood yes­ter­day.
³ I wore it dur­ing the home­s­tay and Makoto-san didn’t know what they meant either. At least, he said he didn’t know but that could have been just him being nice and not telling me that it said some­thing stu­pid or vul­gar. *sigh* I have really need to learn how to read kanji!
⁴ It took me a few days to pick that one up and I really only got it after a bit of help from KO, but I ended up using it a lot!
⁵ Though I loved hav­ing the miso soup every day, yum!
⁶ The one where I found out they were for chil­dren.
⁷ AWelkin said that some of the art instruc­tors were flirt­ing with me dur­ing class. Ariesna has men­tioned before that she’s noticed other girls flirt­ing with me. *shrug* I still don’t really know what either one is talk­ing about.

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