So this is going to be my blog on the whoooole 6 month trip I'm taking here. I'm just gonna put my preface here, it's not G-rated. I won't be talking about my time at strip clubs, using drugs, etc etc etc because I'm a poor, law-abiding student and I'm honestly not into anything excessive groady. But at times, I will indeed talk about booze and porn because those are just staples of Japanese custom and it's my goal to be frank and try to give as accurate and in-depth of a picture of this country and my experience as possible, some personal things notwithstanding. If you don't think the kids should see this, don't show them. I'm not gonna talk about Japanese women at the next Thanksgiving or anything like that, so if you have any questions at any time, put them here and if I'm going to answer them, I'll answer them here. So let's get going.
I could try to catalogue the 24 some-odd hours I spent in transit but since I actually don't hate you all, I'll try to keep this detail concise. I'll start in New Orleans: beautiful winter weather of 70 degrees at T-minus 3 hours til my first embarkment. I had to say a surprising amount of goodbyes. I say surprising, because applying to this program I didn't feel like I was leaving much behind. Like, yeah, I had a few friends in New Orleans, but most of them were coming and going anyway and it's not like I saw them more than once every few weeks. But by the time I was ready to leave, it seemed like I had quite a few people backing up my journey, and I was amazed at how much love I got. The tangibility of my journey didn't really start to effect until my parents and all of my friends, one by one, came by to visit and hug and tell me how much they were gonna miss me and how jealous they were and what a great time I would have. The number one questions I was asked, by both domestic and Japanese friends alike, was "are you excited?" The answer was quite astounding. Saying goodbye to all my party buddies, thinking buddies, the Frenchie I live with, et al was the easy part. Letting it sink in and then facing myself later was the hard part. 6 months is actually a long time, just so you know. And before I return, my roommate will have already moved out and back to France, which really marked some heavy finality in my life. But all this reminded me of my goals and supported what I was doing. My journey is about getting out of my comfort zone, trying something new, discovering what it means to be human, and maybe accidentally stumbling upon happiness along the way. That's stuff I just couldn't guarantee happening if I remained stagnant in New Orleans, and I know my friends are all behind me finding new answers to my life questions, no matter how unorthodox the methods (read: going to a country where bars don't card). So I set out with a heavy heart, a mission, and half of a plan. Good news though, I put in a nice application for a research project about the culture of jazz and hip-hop in Japan. Good chance it will go through, and they said if it didn't win with the committee I applied with, they'll move it over to another grant automatically.
So the way out of New Orleans was moderately uneventful. The fellow on my left was a jovial father-figure. I shot the shit with him a little and told him about my journey eastward. He was impressed at how I had arranged my major and worked in my study abroad experience and had everything set to really make good out of international study. He said I struck him as such a smart kid, and asked me if I played an instrument growing up (the answer is no). He said that he had heard how that's one thing that causes kids to grow up with a higher IQ. I suggested to him that if he wants a well-rounded child, he should aim to have him practice hard at three things: a foreign language, an instrument, and a sport; and most importantly, he should be allowed to choose the most interesting topic of each of those three lest he should grow up hating what he was put through. I probably should have added in "logic puzzles." Oops.
The flight to Tokyo was painfully uneventful. Seat was crammed, legs hurt, sleeping was hard but highly demanded. I pretty much arrived a zombie, and I simply did not get a chance to catch up on sleep in transit to Sapporo. The one thing I must note about that international flight was that there was like a huge block of Americans around me. I can't help but feel like they purposefully clumped all the gaikokujin together just to quarantine us from the actual Japanese for the convenience of everyone but us. I with my functional Japanese was not amused. I hope the attendants enjoyed having me respond to their English in Japanese. I absolutely loved check in at Haneda, they just shot me right through customs with no whining in about 10 minutes, and then shipped me on a terminal bus where I met two American airline employees who told me about how their job allowed them to pick places like Japan to visit and how their degrees didn't have shit to do with their work. C'est la vie. Coincidentally, one of the dudes had a sister at Loyola. Small world indeed.
Getting out and into Sapporo was a breeze. My guide for this city is my friend Ryoko, a local I met through an online language exchange community (fantastic investment of 6 bucks a month). She's giving up her few days off from her 7-5 hell to show me around the place. The thing I discovered about Sapporo is that it's a city of festivals. If you can catch the snow festival or the sports festival (snowboarding and skiing in the middle of the city), it's fantastic. Otherwise, it has little to display beyond everything in your average Japanese city. It's like a cross between the urban content of Kyoto and the urban design of Manhattan. No, seriously, it's my understanding that an American planner was hired to simulate the design of New York while developing the place in the Meiji Era. It shows. It's also cold. Very cold. A giant thermometer outside of Sapporo Station shows how far below 0 the temperature has dropped (celsius). You could play a drinking game with how many times we said "samui." Finding gloves was one of the high points of my day. Though, I have to say the snow was beautiful.
At several times I was met with what makes me occasionally shake my head and say "oh Japan." This included my experience with department store assorted goods such as a book called "Jindiana Jones," an Obama mask, various 420 paraphenalia (in a country where no one smokes due to how illegal it is, like meth/heroin levels), sex goods right next to video games, tasteless shirts with broken English, and schoolgirl costumes designed for men up to 180 cm tall (the men were even displayed modeling the costumes on the packaging). I also identified to Ryoko that within Japan there must be parts of Jigoku (hell) and Tengoku (heaven). Jigoku for me was the hobby shop that was more pornographic, copyright-violating material (they apparently do not have SOPA here, who knew) than actual original-print manga or videos. It was a row of some 8 consecutive vending machines on the side of one building. Tengoku is the Golf Bar, a minigolf and batting cage that includes...well, a bar. So you can get trashed before you swing a few shots. It was also a few eternal cuisine favorites of mine, including huge bowls of miso ramen and chu-hai, a cheap canned cocktail made of shouchu (Japanese vodka, like soju) mixed with fruit juice or soda.
I suppose I should also talk some length about Ryoko and her gateway for me into the world of the Japanese, since this blog is about ways I'm discovering myself in the world. Ryoko's English is fantastic. My Japanese is not. Naturally, being Japanese as she is, she fretted about not being able to understand me properly, a concern that I, being American as I am, didn't care enough to worry about. Of course she's trying a lot harder to speak and understand English than I've been with Japanese, but as they say here, shikata ga nai. Not like I haven't tried. Our friendship is fantastic because we both feel like we suck at each other's language, but we still manage to hold deep conversations about life and can laugh with each other and really try to get to understand where the other comes from. I've gotten a lot more out of her than I have out of a lot of people I used to be friends with in America, and I'm going to explain why.
Ryoko is a funny case because she's been quite exposed to American ideology, as in she's been to America, speaks with Americans often, etc, yet she's still trapped in the Japanese ideology. I tried to explain the Rocky Horror cult to her. She was surprised that people would do smutty things on-stage. I told her our student board puts on one public theater presentation of a porn per year (true story). She said such a thing could never fly in Japan. I asked her if this was the same Japan where porn is easier to find than deoderant even in a grocery store. She reluctantly conceded. Another cultural challenge was compromising our differing cultural ideals of responsibility. As I explained to her, in Japan, when someone tells you not to do something, you assume it can't and shouldn't be done, so it doesn't happen. It's why, as a Chinese immigrant notes in the movie Shinjuku Incident, "Just because the Japanese don't steal, they think we won't" in reference to how easy it is to just grab food from an open market in Shinjuku. In America, I said, when someone tells you not to do something, you weigh the consequences of doing it, and if they don't exceed the benefits, you do it anyway. This, I said, was actually a virtue on the part of the Japanese. It meant they found themselves responsible for doing what they were socially expected to do and implicitly said they would, and didn't utilize technicalities to worm their way out. Those technicalities don't exist. There is no "What one does not know can't hurt him" principle in Japan. Call it honor, sheep mentality, whatever, it's the reason why Japanese can get shit done and don't have to shout about being the best country in the world while failing to get shit done. It works, and Japanese work, and I, the heartless, inconsiderate jerk, can talk with them, because in place of passive-aggression and hiding the truth and protecting oneself with technicalities, Japanese would rather just engage people and answer the questions they are asked and not ask questions that they don't want answers to. I love the Japanese. Sorry America. That's not to say I automatically despise all Americans. I'll always judge people on an individual basis, but as a whole I'd rather meet Japanese people than Americans for the long run. There's something about their genuine honesty even to the gates of hell that I don't think I could find anywhere else in the world.
I have some pictures to put up, but unfortunately I'm screwed for time and I just had this post sitting around from last night from before I got an internet connection, so I'll drop another update tonight or tomorrow morning JST.
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