Ride my bicycle
Through these buzzing Tokyo streets
Sweaty guide is me

Yes, I did just begin this entry with a haiku about my bicycle. My street cred has been eviscerated.

Do you hear that obnoxious bell ringing behind you? Well that is me, clamoring up the busy thoroughfares of Tokyo, pushing my way past silly tourists and dazed businessmen. Ladies and gentlemen, I bought a bicycle today.

For 9,999 yen ($85 USD), I am the first-day-new, cooing owner of a three gear, two-wheeled Japanese bicycle. If I was a gloating man, I would mention the friction-powered guiding light or the positively-convenient metal-wire basket in front. But, I’m not a gloating man. So I won’t.

This morning on my first ride, I learned that now there is nothing holding back my breezy, out-of-control throws down Meguro-dori. I have given up my seat on bus 98 for good.

My visions of Tokyo, I found today on my bike ride to school, had been obscured by those bus windows. Today, instead of ‘that blue building,’ I saw a home-improvement planning office. Instead of seeing a tiny, wood-paneled corner restaurant, I saw what patrons were eating inside a tiny, wood-paneled corner restaurant.

Despite my apparent excitement this is a sudden purchase for a man as frugal as I. This I understand. But, last night after I finished another bus pass I recalled, as I have said in this very blog, that life naturally finds habit, but nothing threatens it more. The bus was a challenge and a wonderful experience, but, in a month, I had become accustomed to it. I must rise higher. So, I walked into the door of a local department store and bought me a bike.

What about old bus 98, you might ask. Yes, this is true, I was forced to make a sudden break with an old friend. Casualties are a requirement of a successful travel experience. Let no one tell you differently. Seeing that I am terribly cheap and that I finished my bus pass yesterday, which was another motivation for the abrupt transportation change, I won’t be making any more city bus trips soon. I knew 98 and I would meet again.

You see, the most cost-effective bus pass is the 5,000 yen sort ($42.50 USD), and, after a little math, I realized I would need, at very least, four more passes this semester. The bicycle will save me at least 10,000 yen ($85 USD). With that money-saving advantage and the reality that the bicycle allows a new challenge and a chance at new sights, there was no stopping me from busting the door into that Seiyu and muttering enough Japanese to walk out with a bicycle and its registration.

You might ask, what will you do with the bicycle when you are leaving Japan? It is actually quite sad, I tell you. Though, I have already fallen in a deep passionate form of love for my bicycle, it is not meant to be. Despite my need for a new street bicycle for my return to Philadelphia, I will be forced to resell this bicycle. Shipping costs would be too much. I am a man of pragmatism. I will find my bicycle a proper home.

(Note: I have decided I will need to name this bicycle of mine. Please, I open the floor for suggestions.)

What about the winter, you say. Well, it is my understanding that Japan doesn’t find its real winter groove until January. I am getting off this island in mid-December. We are just going to hope that some gloves, a hat and a sweatshirt can handle the early winters of central Honshu.

The worrying is done. I am nine again. I am Tokyo’s best commuter bicyclist. This, I say after just one day of bicycling. You may call this brash. Must I remind you that all the greats found their calling early? Did anyone question Mozart? Well, they shouldn’t have, and so you shouldn’t question this.

The trip to school this morning was peaceful and looking-in-the-mirror-and-really-liking-what-you-see exciting. My return trip this evening was anything but peaceful.

A night class left me in the dark for the return trip and that was more than welcomed. It would allow me to see the lights of Tokyo at my own pace. Or so I had imagined.

See, I began my deliberate pedaling before I saw my old friend, bus 98. Up until yesterday, before my bicycle purchase, she was my conveyance to school. This was all too poetic. Ars simia naturae, my friends, ars simia naturae. Naturally, I did what any self-respecting young American male would do when seeing an old friend after cutting ties. I tried to beat the living crap out of it.

Bus 98 lurched forward after making a stop and I let loose into a fury of two-wheeled motion. 98 and I were locking horns through the light-dotted streets of Tokyo. I swear to you, this was man-powered speed the likes of which perhaps only John Henry the Steel Driving Man could ever understand.

We were topping the hill near Meguro Station as the light turned yellow. Of course I punched it. I couldn’t help but smile as old 98 followed me through the red-turning street light with a gruff of her gas-powered soul. You don’t give up so easily, do you 98?

The playing was over. I had left 98 and needed to let her understand that I had made the right decision. The Hindus call it moksha, sometimes the Chinese call it ch’i, the competitive and meditative have pursued it for millennia and ancient peoples have known it even longer. Whatever you call that place when you reach perfect balance with the world around you, that is where I was, dear readers. I was changing gears and avoiding pedestrians, on the road, back to the sidewalk, then back to the road again. I am not sure where I went or what happened but I reached a level of speed and control with that bicycle that may have never been reached before and likely never will be in the future.

I dispatched bike messengers with reckless haste, knocked bags out of the hands of elderly women and devoured Japanese sidewalk, with 98 chugging along desperate to not lose face. I swear to you, if even for just a moment, my bicycle tires left the ground and I went high enough to glare at my mass-transit counterpart right in the headlights.

We reached the crest of the hill and before us lay precious momentum and the effective and understood finish line below. There would be no winners or losers in this race, my friends, only the fastest and the forsaken.

I came down that sidewalk and may lightning strike my Alien Registration card if I didn’t near life-threatening speeds. To my right it appeared as if all the cars in Tokyo had pulled over to allow 98 pass. There were lines of Japanese hands passing off cups of water to me as they cheered for all humankind. This wasn’t America against Japan, my friends, this was, truly, man versus machine.

Suddenly I pulled ahead with the deft movement of a ninja, appropriately enough as I was racing in their country of extraction. My only obstacle was a smiley-faced twelve-year-girl who had just pulled in front of me. Sent by bus 98? Perhaps, but I just smiled. My young adversary may have had a ten speed, but more gears couldn’t replace what she didn’t have in experience and will never have in heart.

I went to third gear, easily passing her, and gently shoved her into a passing shrub. There would be no stopping me from crushing bus 98. This may sound cruel, you simply don’t understand, after all I do not take kindly to those that force me to slow my pace. Just as I turned to watch my twelve-year-old would-be assailant shake her tiny fist at me, I ran a just-turned red light, leaving bus 98 the unwelcome position of failure.

And this was just my first day riding.
Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

It is good to be reminded.

Let me explain.

We all know a great deal. Whether it is useful or meaningful or if for some reason you just know how to beat Super Mario Brothers in under twenty minutes, we all know a substantial amount about the world, most of which someone next to us doesn’t know.

A very small portion of what we know is comprised of things we understand. Interestingly, unlike things we know, the amount of things we understand has no correlation to age.

There are countless thirteen-year-old girls who understand how to comfort someone, no matter the reason that someone needs comfort. This is nothing I have come to understand.

Things we understand cannot be evaluated on multiple-choice tests or essay exams. They are processes and ideals and ancient, evolving social structures that biology, and anthropology and all the sciences in cooperation haven't been able to entirely figure out. Religions might have an outside chance of getting it if they could just get over themselves. Spirituality is too general a term. .. I do not understand it.

What we understand and the other things we know are supplemented by what we grasp.

Picture yourself on the monkey bars back when our society didn't think monkey bars were too dangerous. You know you are on those bars and that you will cross to other side. But, your hands are slimy because the hands of children who climb the monkey bars are always slimy. You know you are on those bars, but it is harder for you to defend your position on those bars. If you are challenged in any way, friction will cease and you will fall to the woodchips below. You do not firmly know you have those bars, you grasp those bars.

We only grasp a great deal of what we think we know. Sometimes what we grasp can be correct and right and true, but until it is challenged and we learn to know it, it doesn’t matter. We still only grasp it.

Such is travel, particularly travel to a place with a culture foreign to you. You can challenge what you grasp and come to know. You can take things that you know and come to understand something greater.

I have been abroad before and I am always blown away by how similar people are no matter where I go. Culture and language and if your family name comes first or second, it all doesn't matter.

It is good to be reminded of that.

I find that most people will say that they know this: that we are all similar, that we are all people, no matter where in this world you go. But, I think most of us just grasp this. I love every moment that I am able to reaffirm that I am fortunate enough to understand this.

I was jammed on a crowded bus on my way to school this morning. A mother dragged her young son on and stood beside me. The boy was babbling. He was pointing out the window and naming the stores he saw. He was young and symmetrical, and therefore, invariably cute. His incessant chatter aided him in this pursuit of being so.

It was all very adorable and average until I caught the glimpse of an elderly woman seated not far from the boy and his mother and me. Her hair had long ago ceased to be graying, instead finding stability in a permanent, deadened gray. Her aged face hid behind big white sunglasses, but her focus was too strong to hide, dark lenses or otherwise.

She was intent on swallowing every morsel of every word and gesture and movement that the little boy made. She appeared to have lost control of her smile, as it swerved and sped and brightened with every silly, little-boy-thing, the little boy did.

Maybe she was on that bus to go see her own grandson and the little boy was a welcome reminder of what was to come. Or maybe the woman had no son, and so, as things work, had no grandson, and she was trying to absorb enough of the boy to feel the glow that grandparents must feel.

It is fair to assume that I will never know if either, if any of that is true.

When the bus got a little heavier after a few stops and the mother had to hold her little son, this elderly woman rose
from her seat and, after a series of "di jobu, di jobu," it's okay, it's okay, she swapped positions with the mother.

The elderly woman turned and took one last full-swathing glance of the boy and his mother cradled together in the bus seat that the elderly woman just offered the pair. She did so with a sort of envy that held no sense of vengeance. It was natural and supportive and wholly human. Not strictly Japanese and not entirely American.

At the next stop, the old woman got off and walked away. The little boy kept talking as his mother tried to close her eyes for a moment's rest. It is likely that the mother will never remember and even likelier that the little boy will never know, but that elderly woman was happy watching the mother and her son. Truly and authentically pleased and warmed for four minutes by two strangers. I don't need to know her name or even how to ask her her name to know that.

I have seen this scene before. In many places and in many ways and at many times.

I understand that people are people everywhere, even in the most delicate of manners.

Still. It is good to be reminded.

Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As it tends to do, time has been going by faster than I can catch it. I am entrenched behind the protection of a word processor in the fourth week of my embattled stay in Tokyo.

This is more than enough time for me to let my mouth run off. This is nothing new to anyone who has ever known me.

See, my name is Christopher and I never shut up. I am the eighth largest source of air pollution in the world, just lagging behind California. There was a time when I had this notion that it might be admirable for me to say whatever I thought, whatever I felt, whenever I wanted to say it, whether it was an appropriate time or not.

I ignore people who want to know me. I hurt people who are kind to me. It is a weakness. The universe is littered with my shortcomings.

I have, in the past year, tried to cut down on this. Thinking before I speak: it's like a higher energy fuel with lower emissions. You don't believe me. People say a lot of things.

I truly appreciate someone who doesn’t need to hear himself speak. I am not yet comfortable with what is and must fill it with what I shape it to be. It is a weakness. The universe is littered with my shortcomings.

Anyway, even if I am trying to cut down on the hurtful comments and insensitive remarks, when I am in my realm of comfort in Philadelphia or my childhood Sussex County, if I do slip up and say something rude, it just rolls out of my mind. Truly and sadly, I genuinely don't care, and feel I was in the right for saying what I felt. It is a weakness. The universe is littered with my shortcomings.

I am not in Philadelphia or my childhood Sussex County.

This leads me to find another praiseworthy note of studying abroad. Put it up on the big board. Any travel on your own can make you react differently towards yourself, towards your own actions. You see that tool bag you are at home in an entirely different way.

So, in the four weeks I have been in Tokyo, I have postulated pompously to professors and negatively to new friends. What has particularly prompted me to write this are the countless thoughtless jabs and needless comments I have made to my producer during our consistent business chatter through email.

These comments are meant to break the monotony of day-to-day business with a friend or an employer. I always thought it was a neat way to push someone out of their comfort and mine from my own, to unite in a nontraditional way. I have trouble justifying using portions of the little time I have on pleasantries and small talk. I would rather something unusual, more exotic, a fight even. Sometimes that even works for a while. But, invariably I cross that line.

I wholly sympathize with my producer, a man who gave me this opportunity to explore a new world and share it with others. He says nothing but complimentary things to me. I am too immature to accept compliments. They make me uncomfortable. I am like a third-grader pushing a classmate in the mud because he can’t tell him he wants to be his friend.

Yesterday on the bus I made a snide remark to a fellow American. While eating lunch a few days ago, I used a bit too much sarcasm for a curious Japanese student who was simply trying to use his English. I'm sure he perceived me to be rather rude. As someone who claims to want to represent the United States proudly, I don’t always do a very good job. It is a weakness. The universe is littered with my shortcomings.

In the United States, I would forget about all of this. I would consider them mistakes, always apologize, but move on. I would understand them to be in the past and realize time moves too quickly to worry about what has passed.

I haven't been able to do that here. I see myself in the home of someone else, and I can’t stand these things that slip out of my mouth or through an email. I agonize over them.

I don’t want to say something hurtful to someone who is trying to help me. I don’t want to push someone in the mud because I don’t know how to make friends.

I have been trying for a year to slowly kick this habit. Maybe a few months studying abroad is just what I need.

Jaa ne:
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 04:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It was1:38pm on the Sunday of a holiday weekend and I was writing a paper for a class on modern Japanese politics. The beat of a drum and the sound of voices broke what little concentration I had managed.

It was a cool afternoon, another cloudy day in the late Japanese summer, and beyond a bordering building, the source of the commotion was revealed: a local festival. Like the Kichijoji omatsuri I had seen a week ago or so, there was a crowd, albeit much smaller, encircling a traditional drum and an omikoshi, portable shrine.

It should be noted that near my parents’ home in New Jersey it is odd to see roving festivals. Even my apartment in North Philadelphia has yet to yield a spotting of Americans dressed in Revolutionary War clothing swaggering passed.

I had woken that morning wondering if it would be a mistake to do nothing but schoolwork as I sat on a different continent with a time-sensitive visa. There an experience had walked up to my door and stopped for a water break.

I suppose it invigorated after the group had left. I had heard that the 2006 Nippon Craftbeer Festival was ongoing in Azumi-bashi. It would cost 2,800 yen ($24 U.S.) for an entry that included ten samples of local Japanese microbrewers, which interested me (Buy local, damn it!).

As I started my walk towards the train station it was well passed two pm. An hour worth of travel would put me, assuming I didn’t get lost, through the gates at 3:30pm; the festival concluded at five pm. I thought it would be a waste and decided not to go.

Generally, when I am given any opportunity to do something unique and I back out, I am overcome with a sense of self-revulsion. Overcome. As I took a seat again in my apartment, it began to rain outside and, if only briefly, my decision felt validated.

I tend to think this is the most difficult aspect of travel. Perhaps, it is the most difficult aspect of life. You will do things, we all do. But, it is tougher to choose what not to do. People have said it before; I would rather regret something I did than something I didn’t do.

When you are traveling, timelines are squeezed, itineraries are jam-packed, energy is high. When the travel is extended over months, I am prone to believing you need to find time to look around you. You cannot do it all. Well, let me speak for me, perhaps I am not capable of doing it all. Despite my wishes of the contrary, I cannot maintain maximum experience-pursuing output every waking moment. So, I try to find something worthwhile for my moments of inaction, like this, writing my thoughts and cleaning my mind.

Am I wrong? I am horrified that it is very likely that I am.

I didn’t go to a Japanese beer festival today, which was liable to be a pretty fun event. Instead, I sat here and wrote about it, finished a school paper and planned another trip. Is this picking my battles or taking the easy path? And why am I so terrified that I am being lazy, and weak, and wasteful with this remarkable opportunity, pissing away a few more hours of a particularly thrilling portion of my valuable life?

I did not go out to fight today. I prepared for another day, a day without rain, a day with some planning. I worked towards my goal of getting good grades and having a great trip, and I tried to let someone learn or connect with my thoughts on the matter. Still, I can’t quite read the scorecard to decide who won, who lost and who’s to blame.

Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 08:59 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Not too long ago, I walked into the Ingoshira Park, a quiet walk-in closet away from the buzzing room of Kichijoji in Tokyo, with a Japanese friend.

There, under the ceiling of fawning trees, hid more street performers than I have ever seen in any American city. On the warm Sunday I was there, I didn’t go more than fifty feet before I saw another musician or painter or magician. One tune floated in the air before being consumed by the next song, from the twang of a traditional Biwa to covers of Beatles songs.

We sat on a bench looking out onto the small pond, heavily trafficked in the sun with rowboats and giant, paddling swans, analogous to their famed cousins that live in the Boston Public Garden.

We spoke of our cultural differences: she Japanese, me American. She admired the interaction of Americans, lamenting how many Japanese people, so worried about being respectful, are more likely to ignore you than say something that could be taken as rude. It was for that reason, she told me, that she liked Ingoshira Park so much. With the performers and those selling their goods on the ground, a dialogue was forced between strangers.

I told her how I enjoyed the respect the elderly were granted in Japan. How, I said to her, it appears to me that a huge segment of the American population is told they are worthless and helpless and should be asleep somewhere when not babysitting the grandkids or playing cards. In Tokyo, I mentioned, I was struck by the gray-haired men in suits, and wrinkled faces that work perhaps expendable, but purpose-serving jobs instead of hastening, indeed, sometimes welcoming death, as I find many of their American counterparts doing.

She spoke of the simple freedoms of America and I smiled. I recalled the openness and kindness for fellow Japanese in Japan and she smiled. We sat there for an hour, perhaps, bouncing from Japan to the United States and back, jet-setting from one continent to another by the means of cultural conversation, a swan boat occasionally getting stuck in overhanging branches.

The sun was warm, but inside Ingoshira Park it was cool and friendly and the most private a public park had ever felt. She had had American-style sushi and liked it, which gave me a chance to admit missing all of the American foods I was constantly craving, cheap pizza, un-slimey yogurt and anything my mother ever made.

I told her about my trouble with and inclination towards admiration for Tokyo’s mass transit, which gave her a chance to tell me about the pains of commuting in crowded trains to work. She mentioned that during morning rush, the trains are so full that the system had taken to reserving some train cars for women only, to avoid too much unavoidable contact.

I was involved in no great Japanese event, encountering no Japanese experience. I was sitting in a park with a beautiful girl and talking about what was the most important thing in the world at the very moment. That is nothing I couldn’t or haven’t done in the United States. It is so very important to understand that, though it might be forgettable at home, there in Japan with a Japanese girl, I was experiencing something of note, merit and worth memory. There are no small moments when studying abroad.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Professors are funny things. They are directing one of the most important tasks in our land, educating the leaders of our future. They give the type of intensified and specified bases of knowledge that have been pursued the world over by the most powerful for millennia. For $10,000 U.S. a semester you can have that type of access at a major American research institution.

Part of that education is learning from a professor or two. The way they’ll smile after saying something they find particularly eloquent. Or how they chuckle when they’ve bested a classroom with a powerful question; meanwhile their students are debating whether they should stab themselves with a pen or not.

It has become a rule of mine. I don’t trust or admire professors. David Horowitz was derided for his academic purging, but what university student can really say they haven’t seen any indoctrination by over-zealous scholars. Opinion fills the gap of fact. It is worrying that more haven’t realized it.

Studying abroad offers the opportunity to meet professors with different accents and addresses, but academia is the one true global village this world has. Here in my tiny university in Minato-ku, there are professors from around the world, but the competition of scholarly work is not foreign here.

It is nothing new to say that there are professors and there are teachers. There are academics working for book deals and notoriety from magazines and journals whose circulation is made of PhDs. Then there are teachers; professors that will learn your name, tell you why you’re research paper is crap, but then email you months after you’re done with her class when she hears you’re on an NBC reality show.

You will find some genuine enough professors. I have a handful here in Tokyo, but I feel I find they are the exception.

It is difficult, I don’t ignore it. Professors are expected to create knowledge and disseminate it. I wouldn’t criticize nearly as much if I didn’t know that there are teachers at the university level. There are those that publish and poll, but come to the classroom and do more than listen to themselves talk.

That exists, but I haven’t found much of it after taking college-courses for three years on three different continents. Perhaps it has to do with the impersonality of America’s 28th largest university. Maybe it is just because there aren’t enough passionate educators. Maybe there aren’t enough passionate anythings.
Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 07:56 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

(See My Photo Album and Forthcoming Episodes for visuals>

Sumo and sushi, that’s what Tokyo does, right? Alright, well maybe not, but they are perhaps the two most readily invoked images of Japan and, after having already gotten some Japanese sushi, yesterday I finally got a glimpse of the former.

It required 360 yen ($3 U.S.), three trains and forty minutes of travel, but I made it to Ryogoku, just northeast of my South Tokyo apartment. Just as I walked out of the station, beside me was a beautiful stone sumo wrestling statue. I wasn’t bashful enough to stop and click a few photos, only for my pictures to be blocked by the busy crowd, including the occasional kimono-clad sumo star.

I found it odd to watch these sumo wrestlers fall out of subway cars, hidden as a 300 pound man can be in the crowds of Tokyo. I found myself leaning against a wall and trying to decode all the personal mysteries of every wrestler who passed my way. They all appeared to have the grace of athleticism, the type of odd collection of size and skill that fills the professional ranks of American sport. They carried athletic bags, wore sandals and more than a few peered through carefully placed eye glasses.

I followed a pair, one of whom was barking into a cell phone, ruffling his kimono, towards the 8,000 plus seat Ryogoku Kokugikan. The Tokyo crowd of which I had become accustomed was slower moving as it offered collective exclamations at these culturally-immersed mountains. I walked into the green-roofed arena and climbed to my seat, one of the very last rows having paid only 3,600 yen (about $30 U.S.).

The arena was quite full for being the middle of the 15 day tournament. The Nihon Sumo Kyokai (Japan Sumo Association) holds six of these Grand Sumo Tournaments annually. I was arriving quite late in the eyes of some, with the clock reading 2:30pm when I finally sat down, while the bouts begin before 9am daily.

But, to others, I was early. You see, there are 800 rikishis (wrestlers registered with the Kyokai), many of whom participate in each tournament. According to their ranking, based on tournament records and evaluated by a Kyokai committee, rikishis are stuffed in one of a handful of categories. I walked into the tournament in the midst of Juryo bouts (think Triple-A minor league American baseball). At 3pm the Makuuchi (think the major leagues) bouts begin, and the audience swell reflected that.

As with much of what I find here in Tokyo, my initial ignorance assured that all of my previously conceived perceptions remained steadfast. I peered down to the sumo ring below and saw two mostly-naked, overweight men pushing and slapping at each other until one fell. I rediscovered images of friends in big, padded, plastic suits bouncing into each other at carnivals.

Sometimes stereotypes are true, just outrageously shallow interpretations. Such is sumo. When the grand entrance of the Makuuchi came, an audience that ranged from passively attentive to indifferent suddenly became entirely focused. The seats filled, eyes turned and cheers increased.

For me, the Juryo bouts provided a wonderful opportunity to acclimate myself to the traditional and even vague notions of sumo law. Following my most common interest, I pestered anyone who spoke English with questions and found a handful of sheets that were meant for people like me. Anyone with much interest can find a great deal of information on the website of the Nihon Sumo Kyokai, English is available: www.sumo.or.jp/eng.

With the boring education out of the way, I found myself wholly caught up in the excitement of the matches. It is remarkable to watch the agility of the wrestlers, to watch them charge each other and see one evade the other, as camera flashes encircle the dohyo, ring.

Without weight restrictions, it isn’t uncommon to find a wrestler facing an opponent outweighing him by a hundred pounds or more. During one such bout, I watched a larger rikishi charge and push back his much smaller opponent. Yet in a second, power turned hands, as the smaller rikishi dropped his right side and tossed his aggressor to the ground with his left with the roar of the crowd approving his maneuver.

If the audience maintains strict allegiance to particular wrestlers, I couldn’t follow it, as it appeared whoever managed a clever move was shelled with cheers. During another bout, a tangled mess of the two wrestlers hung over the edge of the ring, jockeying for position before they both fell, one just outlasting the other. The crowd was, as they say, electric.

A match rarely lasts more than ten or fifteen seconds, but involves perhaps three to five minutes of preparation, spreading salt as a symbol of cleaning the ring, entering and showing respect to each other, and more. Sumo, which started as a ritual asking for bountiful harvests, has managed to maintain a great deal of its tradition. The bowing and stretching can be agonizing to some but serves as buffer, allows for exciting contrasts, and keeps sumo one of the few holds onto traditional Japan.

Despite its 1,500 years of hold on the curiosities of insiders and outsiders alike, a young Japanese man told me that interest has waned among many Japanese children in past decades. International sports like soccer and baseball have stolen more than a few fans and prospective wrestlers, to be sure.

For now, it is alive and well, if in an elderly age, and there may be no more exciting sight to see.

Jaa mata,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

(See My Photo Album and Forthcoming Episodes for visuals)

Ryogoku is, by many standards, like so many other countless towns in Tokyo. It has tall buildings and is crowded, with its own claims of interest (i.e. the Kokugikan arena and Fukagawa Edo Museum).

The East Tokyo town has another quality that likens it to, not only Tokyo, but towns throughout this main Japanese island of Honshu (I need a line over the ‘u’, thanks): beautiful gardens and Buddhist Temples.

These are calmer, but just as recognized with Japanese culture as anything, so they remain must-dos for any extended stay in the country. It is thus that I followed a street map and came upon the former Yasuda Garden and the nearby Jikoin Temple.

Japanese gardens are, it might be fair to say, widely recognized as a part of the culture and often imitated in the West. I came to Yasuda at the intersection of two busy Japanese roads, with a truck gurgling up a highway overpass not far overhead. An odd, yet typical, home for a Tokyo garden; zoning that is found in any of the city’s districts.

Indeed, there is nothing of particular note about the small, tidy Yasuda garden. Instead it is worthwhile more as a splendid example of typical Japanese. I walked inside, or, rather, that is how it feels when the simple green canopy swallows you in down its neat sidewalk. The individual arms of branches and shrubs and trees are lost in an indistinguishable collection of walled comfort.

These gardens are built for calming reflection, and if it wasn’t for my own silly mood at the time, I would have seen how well venue and use cooperate in Yasuda. I strolled the strolling garden, passing the large stone sculptures that can act religiously, aesthetically and otherwise. They are simple mounds of hard generic geometry that serve as fitting contrasts to their soft surroundings.

I walked over a bridge, painted in a bright New York Mets orange. I fingered the lacquered cement and abandoned my effort to try to understand its place in Yasuda, while the answer written neatly in Kanji on a nearby sign was lost on me.

I reentered the zoom of Tokyo and found the nearly adjacent Jikoin Temple. Like Yasuda, Jikoin was a valuable sight for its role as the ordinary, or as ordinary as Buddhist temples can be for a Westerner.

Virtually every Japanese town has one of these temples, places of worship for Japanese Buddhism, while larger cultural centers, like the imperial capital of Kyoto, can have thousands. Today, most are used to display sacred Buddhist objects, while others still function as monasteries.

Despite being common, these temples are unquestioningly noteworthy. As per the asceticism of Buddhists, the structure, one that most Americans have some visual representation of in their minds, is long-sloping and plain. But, as an architecture student will tell you, a collection of the simple can create a unit of the divine.

Like many temples, Jikoin features a tiered mount, called a pagoda, which is generally used to store remains of the Buddha, like a tooth in the form of a representation. There are few Tokyo citizens that would marvel at it, with its replication found millions of times over in Japan. It is simply different from the American structures of which I know.

A flourished green roof from age, sturdy rock walls of age and well-manicured grounds fighting age: there isn’t much to label as the defining characteristic of its magnetism for cameras, other than it being unusual to my eyes. I circled the building and found a jungle-gym with children playing in the shadow of the Jikoin. What is normal to you, is foreign to me, foreign to you is normal to me.

Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 04:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Learning a second language is clearly one of the hardest, most admirable, and most rewarding learning experiences I have found. This, I say, knowing no more than a few scattered phrases in a few scattered languages. I say this as I say not learning a musical instrument has been one of my great regrets: without knowing, without really trying.

I can gurgle some Japanese, stumble over even less Twi, trickle clichés in Spanish, and barb with buzz phrases in German, leaving French the only language that I can even fake conversational ability. The phrase, “I dabble,” comes to mind. I haven’t done well, but I have done.

The world around the United States has so many amazing opportunities for people to learn language. Americans clamor about it: how the U.S. is monolingual, leading a multilingual world. The stars and stripes are leading a parade with snickers in languages we can’t understand following us the entire way.

I’ve roofed with Latinos working in the States illegally, I’ve eaten with migrants hoping to work in the States illegally, I’ve played basketball with West African teenagers acting like they were in the States illegally and I’ve flirted with Japanese convenience store checkout girls who thought about moving to the States legally. They all had some English they were proud to throw at me.

Though my pride might fight me to admit it, hearing my native language, even coming from foreign mouths, moved me, warmed me, comforted me in surroundings that most would think would keep from any of those emotions. Yet, sometimes that line between educational enlightenment and submissive rhetoric troubles me.

Let me steal and then retread a path laid by Robert Phillipson; have I been walking through “linguistic imperialism?” Phillipson wrote a sinisterly critical book titled with the same phrase, a book of which I read only half, labeling English a tool used by neo-colonialists. Oops, I said the ‘c’ word.

Now I tend to think Phillipson went too far, a common American liberal attack on everything that is in current function. But, I’ve been to Ghana, where the official language is English. Come to think of it, I don’t know of any West African country that has an official language that isn’t French or English. Am I wrong? Doesn’t that seem even just a little unsettling?

Understand, I don’t believe there is an imperialist mastermind that sits at home, twirling his moustache, thinking of ways to conquer the world. The reality is that now in most African countries this linguistic imperialism is institutionally so at best. Think South Africa, where fellow JYA cast member Lauren is stationed. There are four or five languages fairly widely spoken in the former apartheid-state, without a huge deal of overlap. The colonizing language suddenly becomes the only way to unite what would otherwise be a senselessly bordered state.

But, in the West African state of Burkina Faso, where some 90 percent of the population speaks various forms of a similar language, French remains the official tongue.

In West African Sierra Leone, English is the official language but is used by a minority (its literate population). Note: Krio, an English-based Creole-speak brought by freed Jamaican slaves is understood by overwhelming portions of the population.

Now, say that I am out of my field of knowledge. Tell me that I am on a silly NBC reality show and that I am supposed to speaking about sushi in Japan, not the warfare of language abroad.

But, that fight doesn’t need to be excluded from my time in Tokyo. I actually tend think pushing English as the international language (listen to me European Union) is for the best. It might be fair to call me Eurocentric as British imperialists made my argument possible, but rather than fight it, I say benefit from it.

Still, I think any educational system that isn’t actively pursuing multiple languages is obsolete. A university that seems to suppress other languages worries me. And that is where this long-winded rant was born.

Temple University-Japan is an odd school in a lot of ways. It wisely markets itself as the oldest and largest foreign university in the country. There are 2,600 students from 40 different countries, according to the university’s website. As an officially recognized foreign university, TUJ has the opportunity to give American undergraduate and graduate degrees a continent away. To do this, TUJ, understandably, mandates that English is the school’s official language.

Yet, I was in the school library recently and uncomfortably watched a girl, who simply couldn’t speak English well enough to convey her question, start crying, as a librarian, who could speak the girl’s native Japanese, had to adamantly refuse to use nihongo.

I spoke to someone in the TUJ’s administration who told me, without wanting any name mentioned, that the school’s brain trust regularly reminds, if not threatens, professors and employees that English is the only language to be spoken. There are signs in the hallways repeating that there is, “No Japanese,” allowed.

I have been here four weeks. I know nothing of the school’s development, its legal requirements, or philosophy. I have done no wholesale investigative research on the issue. But, still isn’t that troubling?

Luckily, because of subject matter, professors skirt the issue and rightfully give the majority Japanese students an advantage with regular use of Japanese phrases. I just don’t think it would be right for me to be studying in Japan, surrounded by Japanese students, and have no problem understanding class discussions.

I will hoist the flag in support of teaching every person English, but any attempt at stopping other language-use is a scary reminder of a crueler past and foolish policy that will, in the end, bog education, not buoy it.
Jaa,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 04:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)