Tomorrow is December 16, 2006. There is a ticket that asserts I will be traveling to a place unknown to the Christopher who has lived in Tokyo for the last half year. As thin as paper is, some of it carries a great deal of weight. Some of the most important and powerful things of this world of this civilization are just paper. My ticket will not change much, nor will it be remembered by anyone in just a few short months. Importance is relative.

Forgive me. I am listening to a crackly version of a Nat King Cole Christmas song. Romantic nostalgia is a noted side effect of Mr. Cole’s wide-voiced holiday music.

I’d like to see the face of an old friend, the body of another. I’d like to hear my dog bark and feel him lick my face. I’d like to complain bitterly of the cold in my America. I’d like to go where all things known and welcomed hide and wait to be reexamined, touched again by the fingers of someone who wants to remember. Like a dusty antique which has no value until it is too old to be recaptured.

Like the rice bowl for which I negotiated with a brown toothed woman near the hills of Higashi-yama in central Kansai. It, too, might collect dust, but when I find it I will rediscover how she laughed and counted in German as she packaged my bowl, ostensibly to show me that she was well versed in my native tongue.

I have seen a 60-foot Buddha and 600 miles on an $85 bicycle. I ate too much soy sauce and could never have had too much sushi. I saw a sunrise from the head of a dormant volcano. I watched an auction of bids for 500-pound tuna. I ate octopus and herring eggs and river shrimp and pickled beets and nearly 60 pounds of rice.

Perhaps I have been here too long. When I come to an intersection, I look right first. The word ‘breakfast’ conjures up images in my mind of boiled eggs and rice, not scrambled eggs and pancakes. I have been here too long because even I have started to instinctively greet people in Japanese and even I know how to fix a rice cooker.

I can get you to Akihabara to buy DVDs and I can point you in the direction of the Yasukuni Shrine if you want to join the ultra-nationalist movement. I have taken a full course load of Asian politics and can no longer remember a time when I didn’t know Junichiro Koizumi, Shinzo Abe, even Hu Jintao. Asia is senseless to me, I speak about its regions, Southeast or Northeast. I speak about the policy of these countries, but use their capitals in references, like Bangkok, Krung Thep, or Seoul or Manilla or, increasingly, Pyonyang. I have been here too long, indeed.

Yes, how quickly time passes. There have been too many writers with greater pens and better words who have written of the pain and brilliance and departure of life. These lives of ours, I might add, are particularly period specific. For each of us, for every culture, life: we spend the beginning wasting it, the middle paying for it and the end forgetting it.

An airplane will take me in its belly and shuttle me along lines of latitude and longitude tomorrow. She will take one of the world’s longest flights, ride above the world’s largest ocean, over the world’s most ubiquitous country and bring me to my world, to my home. I’ll take that ride and probably feel as if I am the only one riding those clouds at that very moment.

I didn’t see the togyu bullfighting in Uwajima. I didn’t stay in a ryokan, I didn’t visit an Ainu village. I didn’t fight the Yakuza, unchain the Burakamin or even watch the spread of American soldiers in Okinawa on a Saturday night. I won’t be coming home with a Japanese bride or Japanese fluency, nor will I have watched anime, read manga, or played video games. I saw a geisha, but I didn’t take a photo with one. I climbed Mount Fuji, but I never did get a clear view of its grandeur from below. I read about the Shinkansen, but I never managed to pay to set a foot of mine on one.

I didn’t get to Himeji Castle, and I didn’t go to Hiroshima or Nagasaki to express my sorrow for the 200,000 Japanese people that lost their lives in the atomic bombing of those cities by the country that issues my passport. I didn’t go tuna fishing, barhopping or clothes shopping. I bought no technology, and I will leave without knowing what American fast food tastes like in Japan. I will leave with knowing that I might not ever have the opportunity to come back to find out. I will leave without the opportunity to find out, or learn, or experience, or see, or do these and so many other things from which my budget, or calendar or planning or unwillingness kept me.

All of what I regret not doing will always hurt more than all of what I regret doing. I might regret getting on the train alone my first week here without knowing where I lived (Except that I lived near a Denny’s). I might regret climbing Fuji in late August with nothing but a sweatshirt and a broken umbrella. I might regret buying that rice bowl that might collect dust on my shelf, and I might regret all the time I spent worrying myself about how I should best use the short and incredibly rare time I had in Japan. Still, that worrying motivated me to do so much.

I got to the rural Gunma prefecture, but I missed the famed rugged trails and rocky majesty of Mt. Myogi. I didn’t see any of the Three Great Views of Japan: the Matsushima Bay on the Pacific coast outside of Sendai in the north, the small island of Itsukushima in the Inland Sea, and the established sandbar of Amanohashidate near Kyoto. I didn’t see a baseball game in Tokyo Dome, and who has the time to get to Hokkaido?

I mustn’t think like this. What I haven’t done is reason to return, not reason to regret.

I will be happy to find my native America again, but how remarkable my time here in Japan has been. I will remember it all. I will remember because I have taken 1,300 photographs, more than ten hours of video and blogged until my wrist bled. I will remember because it isn’t often that I get to see the dancing of a fall festival in Kichijoji or 1,500 tame deer eat out of my hands on the streets of Nara. I will remember because I might never again see Kabuki in Kyoto or business-suited drunks in Shibuya or Japanese children in Prussian school uniforms. I will remember.

Here, still in my life’s beginning, I feel like I took hold of a few months and made certain I didn’t waste it. No, I didn’t waste it; I saw Tokyo on the back of a bicycle. I took three-hour trips to the Tsukiji fish market. Once I spent $40 on fish and steaming green tea. I spent a night in a capsule hotel, awaking in a coffin of plastic with a television and a blanketed-doorway.

I spent a few good hours in a public path, sweating and sponging and soaking with four or five Japanese men, as naked and sleepy-eyed as I was. I oohed at Tokyo Tower at night and booed Tokyo Tower in the day. I saw sumo wrestling and bowed to aged taxi drivers. I saw more Japanese gardens and eleventh century temples than one person ever needs to see. I went to Yokohama and Kamakura and stopped in Nagoya. I sang karaoke, shouted a Shinto prayer led by a Yamabushi monk while I was swallowed by a freezing November-cold, Japanese waterfall that wasn’t on any map.

There is so much to see and I am experiencing one of the rarest, most precious, most important opportunities this world has to offer young people, but I’ve taken in too much. I need a break. I need to say goodbye to Japan for a time. I’d like to unpack all things of comfort and familiarity and put them on again, if only for a while. I’d like to go home.

SEE YOU IN AMERICA SOON,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 04:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This week was the premiere of my final episode from here in Japan. It is amazing how fast the time has gone, but, then I suppose that is said a bit too often, and acted upon too rarely. Still, today a plane will take me away from here, but let's not think about that now.

Instead, I thought it might be nice to let you guys see a bit more about the final scavenger hunt I went on here in Tokyo: my final tour of the city before I leave it.

To explain if you didn’t see the episode: before I left for Tokyo way back in August, my mother and I got into a discussion about what (if anything) wouldn’t be able to be found in Tokyo, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Admittedly, I took the stance that anything I could find in the rural county in which I grew up, I would be able to find in Tokyo. In response, my mother gave me a list of ten things she thought I might have trouble finding. Clearly, this, my final episode, is devoted to her.

Food:
1. Mexican Taco Shells – I found these easily in a supermarket I sometimes use, however they aren’t in smaller markets. I guess I underestimated the influence of our Southern neighbors.
2. Popcorn – This was harder to find than I expected, but I was able to buy a small bag of pre-popped popcorn on a supermarket’s snack isle. I suppose this treat introduced to Europeans by American Indians hasn’t completely consumed Japan as it has North America.
3. Philadelphia Cheese Steak – I tried a few bars, including a so-labeled “Irish Pub,” but, as suggested by some friends here, I couldn’t find anything like my greasy friend from Pennsylvania.
4. Burger King – There are no longer Burger Kings in Japan, excluding one on the American Yokota Air Force Base here in Tokyo. I couldn’t even find out myself if that Burger King still existed because the premises aren’t very welcoming to strangers, American or otherwise.
Other:
5. Kenny Chesney CD – I found a surprisingly large section of a five-story record store in Shibuya devoted to American country music, with a healthy collection of Kenny Chesney. I interestedly peered at a couple of middle-aged Japanese men who were scanning the isle, one of whom was buying a Bob Seager album.
6. Pressure Treated Lumber – I pass a few small lumber warehouses just on my way to school. I have been assured by a few men living in Tokyo that pressure treated lumber is actively used in the large Japanese construction industry.
7. Krazy Glue – This specific product name isn’t used in Japan, but rubber cement is.
8. The Book of Mormon – I went to five of the largest bookstores in Tokyo and a handful of libraries, but, surprisingly, I couldn’t come up with one copy of the holy book of the American religion with some 2.5 million followers.
9. Hummer Vehicle – Here in flashy Tokyo I have seen perhaps ten different, shiny H2 vehicles.
10. Dental Floss – I thought this was a very odd choice by my mother, but, to her credit, a professor of mine told me that just ten years ago, one simply couldn’t find dental floss in supermarkets. Today, the product is much more common, though, still, only relegated to department stores and not nearly as widely used as in the United States.

I thought this was one of the more interesting things I got myself to do. I guess I have yet another reason to thank my mother, a woman who has already given me enough, both big and small. Tokyo scavenger hunts do count.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 04:35 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I will be home soon. A relative statement, to be sure, but, when compared with the lives that have come before me and those that will come after, I am already home. I am first going to spend some time with my parents in their needlessly large home in one of those developments that disrupt the rural New Jersey region in which I grew up. I will speak some Japanese and they will hug me with their eyes, after their arms get tired, and everything will be different for about three days.

Then, the first twenty years of my life will shine through the gleamy top layer that came about over this past half year. Change comes gradually. Small moves. After long trips like this, I can say after only limited experience, you return eager and ready for change, but you do return to the person you once were, save for whatever new knowledge or self-awareness can manage to fight the tide of decades of habit.

But, oh, how good it will be to be home. In my mind I am awaiting the green Sussex County I left in August, but, of course, I am going to find it in a deadened winter. Sadly, that isn’t all that will have changed when I return.

I will eat American food and maybe find an old American friend or two, regale them with some stories of the Orient. I am looking forward to smoking a cigar or two in my pickup truck with a close friend whom I haven’t seen in a time too long for someone of my age to not see a close friend.

It will be a review of my life thus far. I will go back to the home of my childhood and escape the exhaustion I have accumulated here in Tokyo by bicycling through the city and beyond. Then, in between my returning to Northwest Jersey for holiday celebrations with a family to whom I have managed to feel closer since traveling 15,000 miles away, I will make it back to Philadelphia, city of my nascent adulthood.

In trying to rectify my two devout allegiances to where I grew up and where I live (and grow up even more), I think I have settled on an explanation. Sussex County, a place of rural memory and suburban expansion, like so much of the United States, is my sister, something I love without question and without end. Whether I had little or no choice in growing up with her doesn’t much matter, I know so much that I love and, particularly now that I am away, I can’t quite think of anything I couldn’t love about her.

Philadelphia. Philadelphia is, contrary to unconditional and unquestioned familial love, a love I have acquired through time, by choice, though without ready explanation. I am confronted regularly with her faults, with her disastrous and seemingly needless shortcomings. I am told too often that she isn’t as exciting as New York City or as smart as Seattle or as unique as Chicago or as funny as Boston, but she is mine, and, really, who else has the Liberty Bell?

My Philadelphia is, has been, in a state of defeatism, a collective distaste of even the citizens of the city for the city. The newspaper that has so long defined it, the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is the third oldest surviving daily in the country, is crumbling, if only in the eyes of the people who most need to remember what it means to the city. The mass transit system, SEPTA, gets picked on, sometimes without reason, too often with it. The Phillies, the 76ers, the Eagles, the Flyers: all franchises of power in the past have since fallen from grace. These are the things that are supposed to make an American city a world-class city.

The “bad” neighborhoods seem to outnumber the “good” ones, every mayoral election since the 1980s seems to have been run on ethical reform, and the murder count is added up by people too terrified to do anything but laugh at its absurdity. This is the single most important historical city in the most powerful country in the world. What terrible faults, but I love her anyway.

I can list these, all of the complaints most would have, but it is harder for me to tell you what I love about her, beyond the shallow and pedestrian: the greasy kiss of a cheese steak, the simplicity of the Penn Tower skyline, the elegant majesty of City Hall, the intricacies of hundreds of neighborhoods, those ubiquitous SEPTA buses. I am too young to know much, but, if I were asked, I would say that that is what love is. To find it easier to point out the flaws of someone than her perfections, but to still want nothing more than to be there, with her. Philadelphia, you have a suitor.

Still, it occurred to me that I have found myself in a womb of security here in Tokyo. I will soon go back to everyday-life Philadelphia, not into West Fairmount Park or City Hall, but into a crummy apartment in a troubled neighborhood. A friend emailed me to tell me that he had been mugged the other day. Not an “Oh no, I’ve been mugged!” way, but more sullen, more distressed.

When I first came to Philadelphia, I was an admitted country kid going to an unquestioned urban center, a school in North Philadelphia, often said to be plagued with too much poverty and drugs and violence. I can remember showing off to my friends, as if living on the border between gentrified and ghetto-fied made me a man. I like to think that I have grown a lot. In three years, Philadelphia has gone from a ghetto-theme park to a home for me. I am distraught when a friend tells me about having a gun in his back or when my apartment-mate tells me that there was a robbery outside of our window. That isn’t a distress out of self-serving fear; it is a distress that stems from my being unconvinced that Philadelphia is changing for the good, unconvinced that it is becoming the world’s next great city, as National Geographic labeled it last October. Unconvinced that she is deserving of my unyielding admiration, respect, and awe, of my passionate love.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I was laughing about my habit of carrying two wallets when I was out back home in Philadelphia, one to offer if I was ever robbed. I am suddenly worried that Tokyo has made me a little softer in my four or five months here. Danger alerts us, but security deafens us. There is no questioning that I am a different person in Tokyo than I was, and soon will be, in Philadelphia.

With all that said, how happy I am to be returning to Sussex County, a fledgling bastion of mid-Atlantic American agriculture, and Philadelphia, the most historically important and fifth most populous city in the United States. How happy I am to be returning home.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, if you remember, I had made some pledges about my time here in Japan. With my departure just days away, I suppose it is time to evaluate myself.

I will grow my hair.
I haven’t so much as cut a strand. The result is, well, when I wear a baseball cap I have ugly curls that fight my ears for supremacy, but, alas, my hair certainly doesn’t grow fast enough for me to have even entertained the thought of any of the hairstyles popular here among young men. That is probably for the best.

I will sing karaoke with Japanese girls.
I sang karaoke alright. I sang karaoke like no other American has ever sang karaoke. It was, as I suggested in the blog devoted to the subject, one of the best hours I have had my entire time here in Japan.

I will bathe in an onsen.
Done. You can read that blog, too. I spent an entire afternoon soaking in the hot springs that are an active part of traditional Japanese life.

I will not eat any fast food.
Completed. I haven’t so much as set foot in any of the American fast food chains that pepper Tokyo, and, even when traveling outside of Japan’s capital, I didn’t eat at any of Japan’s fast food restaurants after I made this pledge.

I will not get a cellular phone.
This was easy. This has always fit my independent stature. While I missed out on some American events and Japanese friends, I was happier to avoid another link to needless technology.

I will get A’s in all of my academic classes.
Well, I don’t get my grades until late December, but I’m feeling confident.

I will travel domestically as far from Tokyo as I can.
Well, I got out of Tokyo eight times in my four months. I suppose that isn’t anything to gloat about, but, with only weekends to travel and even those reduced by school work and costs, I am not terribly ashamed. I got as far south as Kyoto and as far north as Nikko National Park, neither of which are extremes even on this mainland Japanese island of Honshu. I didn’t make it to any of the three other main islands of this country, but, I suppose I haven’t failed too miserably.

I will travel somewhere else in Asia.
Sadly, you’ll miss it, but, yes I will be stopping off to the People’s Republic on my way home.

Okay, well, I guess I didn’t pass my pledges with absolute perfection, but, as a man who prides himself on pursuing and meeting the goals he sets, I feel satisfied that I, if only marginally, did just that. Feel free to make comment and berate me on my sloppy justifications of failure.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 03:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Maybe you caught wind of the tsunami that came through Japan recently. (Yes, I do think that was an embarrassing, vague, weather-related pun). There was an 8.1-magnitude earthquake north of the Japanese island of Hokkaido last week, according to Japan’s Meteorological Agency. This created a momentary reduction in water level, which led to a massive water surge that we like to call a tsunami, all aided by typhoon-like weather conditions. All of this according to a Geology class I was occasionally awake for three semesters ago and what I could gather from a hastily written CNN article that I read a few days ago.

Initially it was a small 16-inch wave, but in time water levels had risen by a few feet around Hokkaido. Alongside the northern coast of that island, Japanese officials were expecting waves nearly 7 feet tall, sizeable during a usually calm season, according to NHK, Japan’s primary public broadcasting agency. Now, for friends and family 15,000 miles away, the fact that this earthquake happened 1,000 miles northeast of Tokyo wasn’t much comfort. I got a handful of emails checking on me, but, understand, the distance between Tokyo and the epicenter was about the distance between Philadelphia and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Would you really worry much about your own safety if some natural disaster hit the Twin Cities?

Now, I’m sure it didn’t help that American news sources ran articles with quotations like, “An earthquake of this size has the potential to generate a destructive tsunami that can strike coastlines in the region near the epicenter within minutes to hours," as said by a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to National Public Radio. Also, to be sure, since the 9.1-magnitude earthquake that hit the coast of Indonesia and led to a tsunami killing more than 200,000 people across 11 countries back in December of 2004, even the word ‘tsunami’ summons images of death to a lot of people, particularly Westerners who are a little less experienced with these Pacific-famed storms.

Now, climate-change fiends are beyond worry over the increase of storm strength due to a warming ecosystem, and, it certainly appears, they aren’t that crazy, but, fortunately, natural disasters are as regularly deadly as we sometimes think. Moreover, as a common understanding among the meteorological community tells, most of the deaths resulting from naturally occurring, climatic events are caused by man-made infrastructure crumbling or foolish living patterns.

If you’ve learned anything about me by reading this, you’ll have learned that something like this sent me into a flurry of research to broaden my understanding. The largest earthquake since 1900 (with the entry of the first modern earthquake magnitude scale) hit 9.5 on the Richter scale in late May of 1960 in Chile. 9.5!? I can’t even imagine that. Still, while sad, relatively few, 2,000, people lost their lives. The most amazing result was how widespread the damage was, though, from $75 million worth of damage in Hawaii to 138 deaths and $50 million in Japan, according to the United States Geological Survey.

In addition to the 1960 Chilean earthquake and the one that resulted in the deadliest tsunami in history in December of 2004, there have been only two other earthquakes in more than a century of recorded history with magnitudes 9.0 or greater. There was a 9.2 in southeastern Alaska, which caused 100 deaths in 1964, and another registering 9.0 in 1952 on the Pacific island of Kamchatka, with no recorded casualties, according to the USGS.

Now, I am a nerd, to be sure, as I find all of this fascinating, but I think I have a reason to write all of this. I suppose my point is that the scary reality is that natural disasters, being natural, have no human concept of order or sense to them. They tell me that I am in greater danger here in Japan of the earth opening up and swallowing me than I would be on eastern U.S. soil, but, then, I have a much better chance of being murdered over $15 on a dark Philadelphia street than any of this. We act with calculated risks, but I don’t think too much time should be spent calculating those risks.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there was an earthquake in Franklin, New Jersey, just minutes from my childhood home, back in February (0.9, but an earthquake nonetheless). On big maps, the world seems a lot smaller than it really is. To my friends, an earthquake in northern Japan means sure danger for me in the Kanto region, though Japan is as large as California, and I don’t think anyone in Northern California is fretting over seismic activity in San Diego. This tiny world of ours is bigger than we sometimes think.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Posted by Christopher at 01:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)