The question I am almost always asked is if it is “strange” to be back in the United States. Of course, mostly it isn’t. I am a man of limited means so, while I most certainly have done a lot for what I have been offered, I have spent a great deal of my life wherever my family considered home. It is not strange to return to what I have known for two decades. I may have to readjust and rediscover, but strange is unknown and different. To be sure, in a grand sense, there is nothing different about the America I have found.

The Democrats have majority in Congress, a few more small businesses have been replaced by national chains in my (once) rural county, and many people have had changes of fortune in their lives, but History will not speak of this. The Northeast still has great pizza, there are still dirt roads I can drive on, and I still lose cellular phone service going through Culver’s Gap.

I am just a little less ignorant and stupid than I was half a year ago. I was at a little bar and I spoke effusively of tatami mats and konbini when I discovered I was sitting near a Japanese-born businessman. I didn’t get far before I was reeled in by friends because, “what is Showa?” I don’t know a great deal about anything, so I am prone to rattling off nonsense to the rare listener who knows less about something than I do. I have just spent four months in Japan, and I have to accept that, for once and for now, I know more about a topic than most here. I will file all that I have learned and certainly maintain and expand it, but, knowing myself, soon enough I will be twisting and battling against another world of knowledge about which I know nothing. Education should be without a destination.

It is “strange” to think how rapidly I have gone from over-confident plane traveler, to lost American in Japan, to comfortable student in Tokyo, to trying to remember how to change gears in a pick-up truck near the Delaware River. The Christmas music and holiday cookies are overflowing and I haven’t had a conversation in Japanese in days but I am not overwhelmed or confused. I feel as if someone pumped a Tokyo semester’s worth of learning and seeing into my head without my ever leaving Philadelphia or Sussex County. The memories and pictures are here to prove otherwise, but I can’t quite convince myself I climbed Mount Fuji or studied the Korean War, or played basketball with a Japanese college team before sharing a meal and drinks.

Maybe I don’t have the time to think of it all, anyway. Forget unpacking, I am throwing clothes in a bag to take on a flight to New Orleans tomorrow, where I am doing a bit of reconstruction work with a group called “Common Ground.” I guess this is the life I chose.

I am home and a little smarter but facing no epileptic shock. It is closer to the feeling you get when you wake up half a day later after three days of incessant and sleepless action. Trying to find the beginning and end of your new memories and understanding is pointlessly arduous. They are there and you are better for it, so you crawl out of bed and have the same cup of orange juice you have had every morning since you can ever remember. You take what you can remember and otherwise wipe those lost days off the calendar, leaving you a long continuity of what you might readily consider your normal life. Tokyo never happened.

Thank you for watching, thank you for reading, thank you for making all that I have done a little less solitary and a little more soluble. I would certainly appreciate any final comments or questions if you have them.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Japanese kids love their school uniforms, and you see packs of them walking through the streets. This, I suppose, is a fine image for a people that still reject individualism in preference of obedience and communal living. There are more pet grooming shops and pachinko parlors than Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Tokyo. In the United States, I expect to get beeped at if I cross a red light into traffic on my bicycle. In Tokyo, they will simply drive at me. I felt four earthquakes, lived through one typhoon season, and had one tsunami warning on my four months on that weather-pestered island.

It is a sanitary place that is kept by a sanitary people. They sweep up their leaves. There is no ‘god bless you’ after you sneeze in Japanese and why would there be? That habit was formed by the Roman Catholic Church in an attempt to wish well someone who sneezed in the late sixth century, a time when widespread disease was threatening large swaths of continental Europe.*

I was with a few Japanese friends and I mentioned in passing that my mother drives a 2000 Toyota Camry. They were, surprisingly, ecstatic, wearing pride and smiles at the realization that an American would choose a Japanese car. It was a moment of nationalistic stubbornness; I couldn’t get myself to admit that some Americans believe American vehicles are substandard in comparison to many Japanese automobiles. … I thought I had offered compliment enough. I will remember that.

I will always see Tokyo through the glare of the enormously crowded intersection outside of Shibuya Station. Lit up by mammoth television screens pumping advertisements and music videos, I will see countless billboards selling wares and thousands of Japanese going any direction but the one that would allow me to get through the crowd on my bicycle.

I will see Japan in the eyes of the old men with their suits and matching hats, bowing and smiling and laughing. I will remember the ancient maintenance man who let me sleep in his cabin in Nikko National Park, and I will remember those guys with whom I played basketball in the shiny elementary school gymnasium

I will remember eating rice, splurging on sushi and devouring tonkatsu and soba. I will remember the beautiful women pushing baby carriages and the hair sprayed twenty-somethings. I won’t forget the students at the English camp at which I taught or the woman who bought me a beer after I met her at a festival in Kichijoji. In my mind, I will always be able to touch the giant Buddha and the tame deer I saw in Narra, and the twenty temples and three geisha I saw in Kyoto.

Thank you for that, it feels good to remember, even if I could never forget. Now, I can work on rediscovering this very strange, very open place, the United States. I will let you know how that goes.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

*According to Cecil Adams, author of the Straight Dope column

Alright, well, we all have this vague understanding that given names come after family names in Japan, making our contemporary American conception of “first” name fairly meaningless and confusing. Moreover, the family name taking its place in the front of a person’s name is a firmly Asian tradition, from China to Indonesia to most Middle Eastern countries of which I can speak.

I’ve read some interpretations that have suggested that the family-name first order has had a historical place in developing Europe, but I haven’t the energy to confirm that, and this isn’t meant to be one of those heavy-handed history lessons on which I try to harangue you all so often.

So, we’ll focus on contemporary usage. As you know, the Roman alphabet on which the Romance languages of our Western world base themselves is a (relatively) recent import to Asia. Here in Japan, a country that had six years of overt, and closer to ten years of what was effectively, American occupation post-World War II, and has a long history of business and political ties with the Western world since, Romanization of the Japanese language is widely recognized, on subway signs, some street signs, and almost everyone can write his name with our 26-letter alphabet.

Another consequence is that almost all Japanese will transpose the order of their names when dealing with Westerners, or even whenever they use the Roman alphabet. So, while some might interpret that as a sign that the tradition is dying, do understand that when written in characters, Japanese names are never switched, always remaining family name first, given name second. In purely Japanese fashion, the government is into the regulation of names. Less than 3,000 kanji are allowed to be used in personal names, even less for the newly born, with exceptions for Japanese named before the regulations took effect, according to a poorly translated, exceedingly confusing Japanese government document I tried to read.

A host of issues crop up, as, of course, characters can be pronounced in different ways, so, Japanese passports require an official Romanized-spelling of a person’s name. This, even though, to become a Japanese citizen, one needs a Japanese name written in characters, though hiragana and, increasingly, katakana is used. Generally, in Japanese, the family name comes first and, when Romanized, the family name comes last. (Fortunately the Japanese do not typically give middle names).

For anyone familiar with Japanese names, this doesn’t get as confusing as one might think, as there are few names that can serve as both a family and a given name. Meaning, that while in the United States I have had friends with “Davis” as both a first name and last name and two legends of American pop music call themselves “Billy Joel” and “Elton John,” this doesn’t quite happen in Japan, indeed in most Asia that I know. The only name I have seen both as a family name and a given name “Masuko”, but a friend told me that “Kaneko” is another example. Still, they are few and far in between.

Anyway, in actual use, family names are often used to refer to people, most often with tag-phrases that show respect (somewhat similar to Mr. and Mrs.). Use of given names is largely restricted to familiar situations, particularly socially or when someone older refers to someone younger. Even today, many Japanese people will avoid using any name for those that are senior, instead using a title. One you likely know is “sensei” for teacher.

Most often, Western media readily transpose the order of Asian-style names, particularly for the politicians and diplomats with whom they so regularly deal. So, to anyone who has his nose in the lists of world leaders, he likely knows Japan’s Prime Minister as Shinzo Abe. I certainly do, but, in a discussion with some new friends I met while playing basketball, they laughingly corrected me. “His name is Abe Shinzo,” a young man said, trying to hold back a smile, surely a sign that he read me to be a confused foreigner.

But, there certainly are examples of names retaining their Eastern-style order. I’m sure you’re familiar with the pudgy, North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il. He took over power when his father, Kim Il-sung, died. This mostly has to do with a greater openness to the Western world by the Japanese than the North Koreans. Of course, it does seem fairly odd that anyone would so easily switch his or her name order. I suppose I really wouldn’t mind, but I am not eagerly hoping someone will call me by my family name first.

The reality is that the motivation is often through embarrassment. The Asian, and particularly contemporary Japanese, devotion to respectful obedience comes in very stark contrast to a much more open, bullying Western world. Now, of course, we really don’t mean anything by it, but those hard, clangy sounds of Japanese names have been the brunt of many American jokes, and names from throughout the continent bring snickers to Westerners when they visit the East.

I believe that that has really struck many Asians, particularly the Japanese, and many are self-conscious about it, whether they know it and admit it or not. With Asian-Americans that can be seen when names like Quyen become Justin or Phung becomes Michelle. But, it is a reality here in Japan, too.

When I ask someone for their name, (Onamae nan desu ka?), I am often met by a moment’s thought, before I get a too-easy-to-pronounce-to-be-real name. Just yesterday, I tried to speak with a young college student. After it was apparent that neither of us was well versed in the other’s language, I asked him his name. After a hesitation, he said, in a heavy accent, “Dave.” Oh peculiar.

Sadly, I understand it. Westerners have a history of not being terribly welcoming to what is funny in our culture. I met a beautiful, young girl a few weeks ago and after she proudly told me her name was “Ayako,” I couldn’t help but think of a cartoon character from a television show called “The Animaniacs” that I watched when I was little. This is nothing particular to Japan. The name “Phuc” is fairly common in Vietnam, but, laughs aside, it means “luck” in the local language.

In the United States, as the Asian culture nears a century of growth in America, there appears to be a rebound in using less “American Christian” names and rediscovering old roots, albeit often those that coordinate best with Western culture. The Korean name “Soo Jin,” which sounds like “Sue Jean,” is currently very popular, according to Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

I hope that confidence will help Westerners (including myself) become better accustomed to Asian names and less likely to openly laugh at some names they might encounter when traveling abroad. Plenty are tame enough, like the Japanese equivalent of John Smith, “Yamada Tarō,” but from time to time you do find a name like Korean meaning “virtue,” “Fuk.” Meaning it isn’t outrageous to find a “Fuk Yu,” however, according to Kim, these instances are lessening, even in many areas of these Asian countries.

Greater access to the Western world has altered a lot of Asian traditions, perhaps few greater than Asian names. Many better traveled Chinese will adopt a Western name to come in front of their birth names, giving rise to the possibility of you meeting a “Ted” from Shanghai. The famed Seattle Mariner Ichiro Suzuki switched his name, but, then, if you hadn’t noticed, NBA player, Yao Ming, a legend in China, hasn’t made the switch, and the back of his number-11 Houston Rockets jersey reads simply, “YAO.”

I suppose it is all a personal choice, but an interesting one indeed. I suppose awareness is the first step towards understanding, no matter how silly you think some of those names sound.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Still, there appears to be nothing stopping their popularity, particularly among older Japanese. The Pachinko industry employs nearly a third of a million people, is responsible for about 40 percent of Japan’s leisure industry, including bars and restaurants, and has an estimated 30 million regular players spending more than 30 trillion yen ($254.2 billion USD) a year, according to Japan Zone, an online travel guide. Those pachinko profits top the entire service industry in Japan, according to National Geographic. Like most effective forms of gambling, it is fairly startling how quickly one can lose his money, as 500 or 1,000 yen will likely yield nothing more than a few minutes of disappointment.

Bright enough to be street corner lighthouses, the Pachinko Parlors invariably emit a seedy, but somehow alluring glow from thousands of tiny light bulbs, which encircle the windows and doors. There is always at least one near every train station, and along the countryside, they are known for garishly destroying whatever beauty small Japanese towns might still exude. You step through sliding electric glass doors and, if the overpowering cigarette smoke doesn’t knock you over, you will find the blinding white light you found outside is suddenly accompanied by at least seven or eight of the most annoying noises known to man.

Upon entry, first, one uses cash or a prepaid card to buy a tray of these small steel ball bearings. It works out to be about 4 yen per ball, though 100 yen is usually the minimum purchase. Still, a serious pachinko player wouldn’t likely spend less than a few thousand yen, according to Japan Zone, an online travel guide.

Once entered by the player, the balls fall through a maze of nail-like pins. Essentially, the goal is to get your balls returned to you, but with a lot of new friends. Each ball has a cash value of about 2.5 yen each, according to Japan Zone. The newer machines feature a digital screen with popular cartoon characters and all the bright flashing lights and incessant noise that you’d expect from a building of bright flashing lights and incessant noise. The government sets win-ratios, but there are always allegations of parlors increasing winner totals on busy days to promote higher patronage.

Japan is full of stories of little old ladies who squeeze out a living by plunking thousands of yen into these machines and waiting for the mathematically inevitable victory, so-called professional pachinko players. Prizes actually include cookies and cigarettes from the parlor’s gift shop, but they are often – quietly – exchanged for money through a small window just outside the parlor in back alleys, according to the Japan Living and Travel Guide. Now, I haven’t seen any signs of the yakuza, Japanese organized crime syndicates, which are reputed to be active in the pachinko industry, but I have seen the traces of these windows and secretive exchanges of cash.

The flagrantly illegal companies that offer money in exchange for the legal winnings of players then sell the goods and tickets back to the parlor, after taking their own profit. So, it is a generally understood, technically illegal component of Japan. I suppose pachinko, a game that began to take hold of Japan in the 1950s, according to National Geographic, is too popular for much of a crackdown to come.

Concerned about attracting another generation of pachinko addicts, Sankyo, a leading machine maker has recently employed Nicholas Cage to appear in television commercials as an active pachinko-player, according to Japan Zone, an online travel guide. So it is nice to see that Cage is doing his part to create another age of gamblers and addicts among the Japanese people.

In 2001, a UK company bought shares of Tokyo Plaza, which runs about 20 parlors in Japan, according to Japan Zone, and made plans to bring pachinko to England, which I think is for the best. Finally, the best of Japan will find its way to the Western world.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Established more than twenty years ago and annually offering the coveted the Grand Prix, given to the best film, the Tokyo Film Festival is clearly the continent’s premiere festival and one of the most respected in the world. Japan’s celebrated, though recently beleaguered, film industry has produced some of the world’s most respected cinematic productions, and they all take hold during a Tokyo October at the city’s film festival. Along with Asian masterpieces, films, documentaries and popular movies from throughout the world find their way to Tokyo in late October.

The professor kindly bought me a coffee at a Tully’s Coffee before we met two of his friends, an independent documentary filmmaker and the Director of the Fulbright program in Japan. I know, fancy.

We had a filling meal of appetizers and Japanese tea before we hastened back into the rain and rushed to the Roppongi Hills movie theater. Despite the weather, the enormous theater was almost filled to capacity, and I was eager to watch the film, as it had caused a bit of a stir before I had left the United States for Japan last summer.

Al Gore gave a video apology for not being able to attend the premiere, the same monotonously, depressive speaker I remembered him to be, only now with some extra weight and a more stylish wardrobe. The hour and a half I spent watching the film was worth my time, a fine collection of evidence of the human impact on climate change, if without adding anything dramatic to the debate. I was fairly disappointed in Gore’s inclusion of some needless potshots at President Bush, despite his stern-eyed declaration that, “This is not a political issue.”

It had a fine gleam, as films in this new age of entertaining documentaries often do. With the loss of pure grit and artistry through practicality of documentaries of the past (before the dazzling technological advances of the past decade or two) replaced with a focus on fast-moving and gimmicky foundations in the pursuit of big box office numbers, An Inconvenient Truth fell into, I thought, the same problems of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” another money-making, shot-calling documentary-esque movie, problems like stating facts as if the film itself was a firsthand source.

I don’t mean to suggest Al Gore was cooking the books, I just mean that I like to hear from where all the information comes. I had a few other smallish gripes, but, to be honest, thought it was a nice way to motivate the unmotivated, if only for a short while. Still, as is my nature, I immediately threw my criticism of the film at the Sociology professor and his friends, perhaps even more forceful in some attempt to justify my place in the dialogue with three older, better versed academics. I was met with stoned disapproval from the filmmaker for my comments, and he was seemingly taken aback by much of my criticism. I felt sheepish, but refused to redact, choosing rather to reform. In retrospect, I was probably petty in my criticism though, as I said, it was probably more in a sad attempt to win over my older companions. Still, I got the feeling that I didn’t make friends, not because of what I said, but that I said it. I didn’t come out of the movie and play liberal patty-cake. I tend to think films and lectures and rallies of this nature are considered third rails for some, untouchable from criticism, as, no matter their means, their message is inarguably purposeful. I failed the test and pissed on the atmosphere of change-can-happen, the-world-is-ours empowerment.

For this I apologize. Hey, I turn off the lights and recycle. Seriously! A lot more than most. Oh, the pangs of the critical and the disenchanted. Why is it that everyone, no matter one’s place on the political spectrum, seems so dismissive of varied thought? Perhaps I am, too. Oh, I suppose that at the very least it was a free movie!

Jaa ne,
Christopher