Japan: the country of sumo wrestling, school girl skirts, anime, Samurai, high speed trains, and big business. It may be another big city but there’s none of the cold, every-man-for-himself vibe that New York gives off. The streets are impeccably clean and everyone is willing to help a lost tourist weather they speak the same language or not. The people are focused on community and every person appears to be a perfect citizen. I saw a three year old girl with pig tails get on the train by herself on her way home from school. She was confidently clutching her little pink backpack…that’s how safe it is! Though it may have been the country to compete with in the eighties, it’s been in a recession for the last twenty years or so. The youth start applying for jobs two years before they graduate college and the employment rate is only at sixty percent. A new trend called the “parasitic singles” has emerged. Personally, I think the term is a little harsh, but it refers to all the thirty year olds without jobs who live off their parents, dress immaculately, and go out partying with their friends every night. More and more women are entering the work force and deciding to either have no children or to wait until they are settled in their careers. This means the population is rapidly aging and Japan will soon need to find better ways to provide for their elderly with such a small work force. The US, and most of the western world, is experiencing this same trend. Luckily for us, our immigration rates are high enough that the population of the United States is remaining consistent despite lower birth rates. Anyone against Mexican immigration right now may be thanking them in a couple decades when their work is paying off our social security. Japan has always been a country with strong isolationist tendencies so they don’t have the same ability to rely on immigration the way we do. I also saw several girls with fluffy brown dogs in sweaters, they’re not really important to anything other than the fact that I thought they were really cute.
The country is goofy, energetic, and friendly…and my first day in Kobe was an absolute disaster. I will describe it briefly in order to avoid rant status. The day consisted of getting in trouble in an internet café (it was part internet café, part sketchy comic book store) with the Japanese police because one of the girls who tagged along with us left without paying. Her excuse was that she explained to the guy behind the counter that she hadn’t used any internet, but seeing as how that man did not speak any English, her point was moot. She didn’t have any cash on her so we had to pay for her, and because of the ordeal with the police it cost about five times more than it originally would have to just pay for the internet. We then tried to get back to the ship to meet up with our group going to Hiroshima. The same girl insisted that she knew the rout we were supposed to take (despite my suggestion that we get a map or ask) and we ended up getting on a train that went 45 minutes in the wrong direction. We then spent the next two hours backtracking and trying to find the train station to hopefully catch it before it left even though the SAS people had our tickets. We made it to the train station five minutes after it was gone. I had been paying for the train tickets for both of us (again, she had no money) and we both needed lunch so I played the role of sugar daddy and bought that too. We were eventually within a fifteen minute walking distance from the ship but she had decided to wear high heeled boots and her feet hurt too badly to walk so we had to get on YET ANOTHER TRAIN, and I paid another six bucks for a five minute ride. She hasn’t paid any of us back yet. Luckily, my bad experiences in Japan ended there, and by the end of the day I pretty much knew the transportation system like the back of my hand.
That night, ready to forget our frustrating day, we went out to sushi. The restaurant was in a sketchy dark ally but the inside was well lit and had beautiful wooden floors. We had to take our shoes off and put them in lockers at the front of the restaurant. The lockers had some tricky wooden lock and I was the first one to figure out how they worked, chalk one up to the English major! We then got our own room where we sat cross legged at a long table with beads that covered the doorway where the waiters came in. I think I ate enough sushi for about three people. Tori and I also have a tradition that we take a walrus picture with our chopsticks every time we eat sushi. There are definitely some winners in my picture collection. It might also interest you all that, because everyone is expected to wander around barefoot, they have little rubber slippers in the bathroom to put your feet into. Crocks should really look into expanding their advertising to the Japanese bathroom shoe market. After dinner, we went out to the main downtown area of Kobe where apparently the characters come out of their daylight hiding. We saw a seven foot tall transvestite (her shoes added a bit to her height) who couldn’t keep her skirt from falling down and then couldn’t keep herself from falling down either. She toppled over right in front of us on the sidewalk and about seven small Japanese men came pouring out of the building next to us to help her up. We also made friends with two men in suits who brought us all to their favorite bar and bought everyone drinks. They didn’t speak very much English, but luckily two of the guys in our group knew some Japanese so we managed to converse in a chaotic sort of way. All I really understood them saying was “Oh my god” which they kept repeating while holding their hands to their faces in shock. I also believe that one of them proposed marriage to Hillary but it was a little unclear. Dancing, luckily, is universal. When we left our friends and started heading home, a crazy Japanese girl charged us and stuck her tongue down Hillary’s throat. Hillary pushed her away and she came charging for me but I was prepared enough to duck. She then flashed all of us before her two male friends came running up and grabbed her and pulled her away. Like I said, we met some characters.
The next day I DIDN’T miss my trip and made it on the train to Kyoto where I spent the day wandering through Zen gardens with my art class. Rock gardens get a lot of prestige but when you look at them, well, you realize that they’re just made up of a bunch of rocks. Of course rock gardening was invented by Zen monks because the drudging process of raking pebbles was supposed to help them fall into meditation. When I got over the fact that I was staring at rocks for twenty minutes, I had to admit that there is a simple kind of beauty to them. Zen gardens take organic beauty that is usually only found in nature and manipulates it and maintains it through intensive man-induced labor. While wandering through one garden I felt like I was in the middle of an overgrown forest in California before I saw a woman crouching on hands and knees with a tiny nail clipper cutting out, individually, every microscopic piece of dead moss. I also encountered several massive spider webs with angry looking green spiders lounging in them. Spider webs have a kind of beauty too but I prefer to admire them from a distance.
After a relaxing day a pretty things, I met up with Michael and we hopped on a high speed train to Tokyo. Collin and Jared had been too lazy to plan their own train ride so they tagged along with us, but they didn’t get me lost or make me buy them anything so their company was appreciated. What would have been a twelve hour bus ride to Tokyo became a short two and a half hour ride with reclining seats, which means that high speed trains are like, really fast! I would also like to make a note that Michael had never seen the Matrix and for some reason this morally offended me so I spent an extensive part of the train ride describing the plot and action sequences. I don’t think I was able to do justice to Keanu Reeves, that man has skill that could never be duplicated *cough cough*. When we got to Tokyo, we were supposed to meet up with Allison and CJ but none of our phones would work and I might have run up a bit of a roaming charge (sorry Dad!) We decided to let it go and checked into a hostel with Jared and Collin. The boys and girls had to be in separate rooms so I was stuck all on my own in a room with ten bunks. It wouldn’t have been as creepy if I hadn’t seen the horror movie Hostel like three times. Then again, Japan is the least creepy country on the planet. I saw several young women walking alone down dark and isolated allies with strollers after midnight. We also were supposed to wear our shoes on the stairs but not in the rooms so I kept on having to shoe and de-shoe as I made my way between the ground level, my room, and the boy’s room. I’m telling you, I would never own any shoes with laces if I lived there. We then went out to a club called Muse where the people were much more normal than those we met in Kobe; it was more general dancing and frivolity instead. It’s true what they say about Semester at Sea kids, they’re everywhere! My friend Chase had a cousin living in Tokyo and she brought him to the same club so we had a mini ship reunion. When they say that everything in Japan is expensive, well it’s true, everything in Japan is expensive. Our cab ride to the club was about five miles and cost us fifty dollars…but at least we were splitting it four ways.
By morning, Michael was able to call CJ using Skype so we made a place and time to meet (just like they used to do back in the olden days) and checked out of the hostel. After a couple more train rides we were right in downtown Tokyo and reunited with our smiling friends. They had had a frustrating day the day before (a lot like my first day) so we took it easy, wandered around an outdoor market, and checked into a hotel where we all watched sumo wrestling while I filled out my application for working at Yellow Stone this summer. Our hotel room had robes and there may or may not also have been a time where we all dressed up in robes and tied the waist bands around our heads and jumped around on the beds like ninjas.
For dinner we found a restaurant called The Lock Up. It’s themed like an underground prison. We had to walk through a pitch black hallway filled with loud clanging noises just to get to the front door. When we entered, girls in police uniforms handcuffed us and took us our table which was in a closed cell. The drinks all came with cool themes. Michael got his drink in test tubes with different flavored liquors that he had to mix himself. CJ’s drink had pop rock in it and crackled all dinner long and Allison’s drink was smoking the entire time. Midway through dinner, there was a fake “jail break” when the lights went out and men in costumes ran around to all the tables and rattled and broke in to the cage doors. For some reason, fear and food make an awesome combination. Why do they not make more themed restaurants? When we had been sufficiently scared to death, we left with the mission to find a club. We ended up meeting a club owner named Austin Powers who convinced us to go to Club Casablanca…which was entirely empty except for two other Semester at Sea kids. We booked it out of there and decided we couldn’t be left to our own devices. By lucky coincidence, we ran into our waitress from The Lock Up on the sidewalk. Her and three of her friends were on their way to go sing karaoke. They were what American pop culture would call “emo” with tons of piercings and funny haircuts and they asked us if we wanted to join them! The eight of us got our own room and spent the night dancing on our seats and singing Lady Gaga and theme songs from anime cartoons like Dragon Ball Z. I wouldn’t have been able to plan a better last night in Tokyo if I’d tried.
We had a bit of a mishap on the train from Tokyo to Yokohama the next day. We’d bought tickets to the normal train but ended up getting on some more expensive luxury car. The lady who came to check our tickets was extremely friendly (unlike most people on trains when you don’t have the right tickets) and drew us a map of how to transfer to the correct train from the next stop. The public transportation system in Japan was incredible, but I was ready to not get on any more trains for a while after we left. Yokohama was a smaller city than Tokyo or Kobe and felt like a lot like a beach front town in the United States only it was cleaner way cleaner.
On the last day I went to a traditional Japanese Tea Ceremony followed by Zen meditation led by a monk. The tea ceremony consisted of bowing twenty gazillion times, making sure your bowl was turned in the correct direction, and sipping all of the strong, bitter matcha down in the right intervals. The monks perform the tea ceremony before they meditate in order to rejuvenate and caffeinate. It got the job done but I personally prefer a nice big mug in my living room. My preference had a lot to do with the fact that I can’t kneel the way the Japanese do for such an extended period of time. The meditation could only be described as hilarious. I’ve meditated before, but never quite like this. The monk walked around the room with a giant still that he smacked people on the back with if they looked like they were falling asleep or loosing concentration. Apparently the slap is supposed to signify the transfer of the Buddha’s knowledge to the student, but all I saw it transferring was some welts. I also found it a little counterproductive because it’s difficult to relax and concentrate when the person next to you is getting mildly beaten. On the plus side, they gave us free origami figures of women in kimonos as parting gifts; I think the trade was well worth it. And then: THE PACIFIC.
