For those of you who saw my first episode, you’ll know that a great deal of my young life is spent thinking about this life-to-do list I made when I was 14-years old. Well, I actually got to cross off some things here in Japan, and I thought you might be interested to see what I had planned to do long before I decided to study here in Tokyo and what I actually got done.

In October of 2005, I made an addition to the list that, in many ways, brought me here: to visit Tokyo, Japan. Two years earlier, after I first discovered sushi, I decided I wanted to eat the Japanese delicacy in the country’s largest city. I was fortunate enough to do that just like I was able to see a Geisha, which I did in Kyoto and sing karaoke in Japan, two other goals I made in October 2005. I guess I was thinking a lot about Japan a year ago, for some reason.

In June 2006, realizing that I had done a great deal of outdoor orienteering without scaling anything much larger than a few thousand feet, I decided I wanted to simply “climb a mountain.” In late August, I completed that, along with another goal I set in October of 2005, I reached the summit of Mount Fuji to see the Japanese sunrise, as you’ll know if you saw my third episode.

When I was in the Nikko National Park a few weeks ago I finally got to fulfill one of my list’s original goals; I saw a monkey in the wild. A few weeks later I stayed in a Buddhist monastery, an addition I made to my list after I stayed in a Trappist monastery in South Carolina. It may have been a small one, but technically, I survived an earthquake large enough to feel, a goal I made in May of 2004. Having read about it in an article describing a competition for a new list of the Seven Modern Wonders of the World, I added visiting the Kiyomizu Temple to my list, something I got to do when I visited Kyoto. (You can still see pictures in my Kyoto Photo Album).

Some of the list’s components that I managed to complete here in Tokyo didn’t have much to do with Japan at all. I finally memorized the geographical locations of all 50 of the U.S. states well enough for me to be confident I won’t forget and can produce under pressure. In October of 2003, I decided that I wanted to teach in a foreign country, something I got to do when I taught at an English camp in the rural Gunma Prefecture a few weeks ago (Read the blog). Finally, I also got to attend my first international film festival, when a Sociology professor I have befriended offered me a ticket to Tokyo’s globally known cinematic convention (Read the blog).

All told, I made 13 additions to the completed side of my life-to-do list. I suppose that is something to be proud of, seeing that this was through just a few months. With those new completed goals, I have finished more than 60 on my list. I would be a lot more enthusiastic about that if my I hadn’t added almost 70 new goals to my list while I have been here! I guess in some ways that means I didn’t even break even while in Japan.

Still, I am happy with my additions, though now, I am even further from completion. Wish me luck.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Have I mentioned enough how rare my opportunity is here? I have probably shown time and time again that, unlike most people, I don’t believe even what I think. I believe through research and comforting, warming numbers, a hollow pursuit that inevitably leaves me questioning how reliable any statistic I find may be anyway. Everyone knows what old Mr. Twain said; to paraphrase: there are three types of lies, a regular lie, a boldfaced lie, and statistics.

Still, I have nothing else, so, it is just that which I bring you. The clearest way for me to convey how outrageous that it is that I am studying in Japan is to first remind you how fortunate I am to even be pursuing education after my high school graduation. I shared my childhood with a handful of friends who didn’t go, went but dropped out of, or haven’t yet gone to a college, four-year or otherwise. I also have friends who had the money, the family stability, the desire, and the maturity to start and continue an education. I guess most of my closest friends are in the latter group, making my experience an incredibly inaccurate portrayal of American life. I fear that too many people who did get the chance to or be around those that did acquire a Bachelor’s degree don’t realize how relatively uncommon graduating a four-year university is.

Only about a quarter of Americans 25 years or older have done it, according to the American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. More precisely, in 2005 the number was 27.2 percent, a substantial bump from 25.9 percent a year before, but, still, that hardly makes my chance to study anything I want at the respected Temple University in urban Philadelphia. Sadly, I think too few people realize how truly special a college education is. I mean, really, ask yourself, if someone asked you yesterday, would you have thought that just one in four people over the age of 25 graduated from some accredited college?

Not surprisingly the city of my affection has a rate below the national average, about 20 percent, and far below the country’s so-labeled best-educated city, Seattle, where about half of its population 25-years or older has achieved a Bachelor’s degree or more.

Some might ask what all that privilege really means. Well, to a realist, it means a better chance at financial security, a worry of many people. College graduates earn an average of nearly $2.1 million in their lifetimes, almost twice as much as those with only a high school diploma, according to the same Census Bureau data.

Now, while money usually improves the more standardized education you receive, and accepting that college educations are becoming more common, though still surprisingly infrequent, there is a fear that the quality of that education isn’t what it has been, or, some say, should be. According to a Washington Post article printed in December of 2005, an adult literacy assessment that was published earlier that year showed that the reading proficiency of college graduates has steadily declined in the past decade, without much explanation.

While the details present specifically troubling results, the overall message is bleaker still. Of college graduates tested, only 31 percent were classified as “proficient” in reading and writing, nine points lower than 1992, according to Michael Gorman, the president of the American Library Association who spoke to the Washington Post.

See, this brings me to my pure point. Education is rare, and the educated getting the most out of their education is rarer still. This is what I am trying to do here. Will I be among the third of college graduates that are “proficient,” when I graduate? I hope so, and, while living in Tokyo doesn’t directly make me a better reader, or a stronger writer, or capable of scoring a better grade on an SAT exam, I like to think it does make me a lot more aware and even a little smarter, in the word’s vaguest definition of simply alert. We all can appreciate that reading John Milton or quoting Alexander Pope aren’t indicative of having a monopoly on intelligence. There are a lot more valuable and helpful things to be good at, and understanding how to live happily is not the least of them.

It is in that way that living in Tokyo will make me a better person, just as being given the good fortune to study at the collegiate level has. It is that much sadder that only a few percentage points of American college graduates, who are just a quarter of the U.S. population, will get to study abroad. Not all rare opportunities are beneficial. There is no inherent correlation between the two, but studying abroad, as I have said and written and about which I have foamed at the mouth, is an example of when the unusual and the useful collide.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 10:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

With my time in Japan coming to a close, but having no last plans that could be completed at night, a few days ago I finally accepted a running invitation to go to a party at this hotel that houses most of the American students that study at my university. I have managed to avoid much contact with my fellow Americans, the only reason being that I felt I should strike out on my own here.

What struck me was how… still foreign Tokyo seemed to many of the other Americans with whom I spoke. I suddenly felt really satisfied with what I have learned and experienced here, though I suppose I shouldn’t need to compare myself with others. Before I even got to the party, I was surprised to find that the few that had invited me didn’t even know where they lived. Yes, I have had my experience with that, as you saw in my first episode here in Japan, but that was filmed on the third day I was here. Seemingly, the other American college students with whom I spoke had only experienced the subway to school and back to their room.

Now, I have written before, and still maintain, that traveling abroad is so unique that even if you were to entirely shelter yourself you would still learn more than you’ll likely realize. I haven’t wavered on that front, but I can’t imagine coming so far at such great cost and not seeing and doing all I could. I haven’t gone to the greatest of lengths, but I tend to think I have done well for my time and means.

These twenty-somethings had come, or so it appeared having only met most of them that night, to have a typical American college experience, but in Tokyo. I am sure that studying in Asia has shown and taught them a great deal, but it didn’t appear that many had challenged themselves much. I made the mistake of getting into a conversation about Japanese culture with a couple of these Americans, and I was terrified to find that neither seemed to know anything beyond the simplest of clichés. Now, understand. I don’t, for even a fleeting moment, insist that I know much about anything, particularly not Japan, as I have only been here four months and seen through just my own eyes and what I’ve read and heard from Japanese friends and longtime residents here. That being said, I felt like I had lived in this country for decades in comparison to the two, who weren’t sure if Christianity was as popular here in Japan as it was in the United States.

I was truly awestruck by their ability to be in Tokyo for so long without finding, seemingly, anything about the Japanese culture. What troubled me more was that they seemed to speak as if their time here demanded that they had, indeed, become well versed in the culture. For one painful moment, I pictured the two of them speaking with friends when they returned to the United States, passing off what I found to be grossly inaccurate portrayals of the Japan I have come to know, not that my version is an accurate one either.

I suppose it is important to understand, however long you travel, you can’t much speak about the intricacies of a culture. I learned a bit about how some might over-perceive their knowledge of a place, having kept themselves from actually experiencing the place. I found it chilling that I might have allowed some fool have an effect on my perception of another country. I suppose it was okay to have an experience like home, and it was nice to see how other Americans were finding Tokyo, but I am glad I have been living in my own apartment and I was happier still that I had chosen to stick to my own experiences. I’ve done alright, indeed.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I took another bicycle ride on Newton a few days ago. My destination was another sight I decided I needed to say I saw before I could leave Japan satisfied: the Tokyo Dome. The 500,000 square foot domed stadium, which can seat 55,000 people at capacity, is home to the famed Yomiuri Giants (the former team of New York Yankee Hideki Matsui), and hosts more than 60 baseball games annually. Opened in March of 1988, the Tokyo Dome is Japan’s first domed stadium.

However, in pure Tokyo style, it isn’t just a dome, it is a compound. As you approach the Tokyo Dome, no matter your direction, it is obscured by the Tokyo Dome City amusement park and dwarfed by the 500-plus foot Tokyo Dome Hotel, with more than 1,000 guest rooms and more than thirty restaurants, lounges, chapels and banquet halls. Just for show, there is an outdoor pool and elsewhere around the Tokyo Dome rests a bowling alley, a day-spa, Japan’s 50-year-old Baseball Hall of Fame museum, and more than ten restaurants and stores. The “Baseball Café” has to be my favorite, as it boasts on its website that it is “modeled upon the theme of the good old days of American MLB,” where “diners can enjoy true-blue American fare, like steaks and bacon and cheeseburgers.” Oh, Americans and their meat.

Whenever American sporting and cultural events find their way to Japan, they almost always end up taking place in the Tokyo Dome. In 2000, when the New York Mets played the Chicago Cubs in the first Major League Baseball opening game played outside of U.S. territory, it was there, when Tony Tubbs took on Mike Tyson in a Don King-promoted World Heavyweight Championship extravaganza in 1988, it was there. Madonna had concert there in September, but Michael Jackson and the Backstreet Boys had been to Japan’s biggest concert venue before, too.

I took some boring photographs, as the cloudy sky was unwelcoming as it was gray. Still, I stared for a while at its domed roof. The technology is apparently the same as it is at American domes, but I still find it fascinating. According to the Tokyo Dome website, “air is constantly blown into the dome by a pressure fan, keeping the air pressure inside the dome some 0.3% higher than that outside, thus holding up its covering membrane.” It is a pressure change only equivalent to that between the first and the ninth floor of a building, but it still manages to support its egg-hat. Pretty interesting.

I got there on an early weekday evening, finding the only crowds around a roofed structure, with a small food court. As I peeled through just a few hundred people, I saw on the television screens that angularly decorated the open-air, cement-grounded and litter-strewn ledge, tucked away from the street and within sight of the Tokyo Dome, that we were there to do one thing every industrialized nation can appreciate: gamble on horse-racing.

I bought fried fish on a stick for 200 yen and, after dousing it with some mustard and ketchup (my first use of the American-loved condiment here) I returned to the crowds, people-watching as I so often do. Around me the faces and bodies and emotions seemed repetitive, as if a writer with a weak handle on character-development was writing the story. They were all cigarette-smoking men with tired eyes and soon to be disappointed minds.

I stayed for one full race, watching men watching eight tiny horses bobbing up and down on a television screen. There were screams and, in the end, more heads down and flicked cigarettes than smiles and laughs. One wrinkly little man threw his racecard on the ground in angry defiance. I picked it up and found it circled with hopeful bets. I decided to take it home with me, as a tribute to the man, so someday I might think of him and wonder if he is happy somewhere with his family instead of throwing racecards and smoking cigarettes to keep from screaming at some anonymous horse on a cold, cloudy day, his only warmth hundreds of other forgotten souls waiting for that one big win.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, so, as much as I am here to disturb the stereotypes we might have of Tokyo and Japanese culture, I have one preconceived notion I had about Japan that appears to be entirely accurate. Japanese people love karaoke!

A compound word meaning literally “empty orchestra,” karaoke in the United States is, I would say, generally considered banal without being old and unpopular though widely known. In Japan, and, I am told, throughout Asia, karaoke is beyond pervasive. Any of Tokyo’s countless entertainment districts will have at least one karaoke bar, club, or box-building. After readily acknowledging that I had to partake at least once before I left Japan, I finally got a chance to karaoke, when I piled into a glass-doored room on the fourth floor of a karaoke box-building in Jiyugaoka last week.

With a key to room 404 in my hand, I realized that I had never sung karaoke before. I don’t think I am misrepresenting American culture when I say that, karaoke isn’t an average night out. Certainly, I have seen karaoke nights at bars in Philadelphia and occasional promotions for karaoke at parties or clubs in New Jersey, but I remember always feeling that participants were most often either self-promoting singers, not good enough to sing professionally, but good enough to make everyone else feel like a jerk for singing, or over-intoxicated partiers, a drunk convinced by his friends to get on stage and make a fool out of himself.

Along with eight or nine friends, I paid 1,400 yen ($12 USD) for unlimited drinks and an hour of singing into microphones, while reading lyrics on a 42 inch television screen. I stood for the entire hour and screamed Queen’s “Fat-Bottomed Girls,” repeated Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” murmured “Come On Eileen” by Dexy's Midnight Runners, and cried out some Gwen Stefani song. For the holiday season, I dueted over Mariah Carey’s version of “All I want for Christmas is you.” For my finale, out of pure love of Philadelphia, a friend and I covered Boyz II Men’s 1994 number-one hit, “I’ll Make Love to You.” It really was quite beautiful. (There are even rumors that you might be able to see a snippet of that performance in my final episode, which premieres December 15).

Of course, I only had the microphone for Queen and my epic finale, but I sang otherwise. How odd. In the United States I held nothing short of contempt for the idea of karaoke, but it was, perhaps, the most fun I had in a single hour during my time in Japan.

A Smalltime Japanese singer Inoue Daisuke invented the karaoke machine in the early 1970s. As people tend to say about silly inventions that storm through a culture, who could have known? By the 1980s almost all of Asia had embraced karaoke and near the end of the twentieth century it had made its way to the United States and soon some of Western Europe. I do think I will try karaoke when I get back to America, but, sadly, something tells me it just won’t be the same.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Post Script: Oh, oh, oh, I almost forgot. Let us review something. It is not pronounced, "KAH-ree-o-kee," but rather, it is, "KAH-ree-O-kay." I try to give you as authentic an experience as I can!

Posted by Christopher at 03:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)