During my first sojourn abroad as a wide eyed 19-year-old studying at Kyushu University in Japan, I sent out a series of e-mails to friends and family back home detailing the various adventures from one of the best years of my life. While my youth and naivety are glaringly apparent, these were my first attempts at writing travelogues and I look back at these silly little e-mails with a good bit of nostalgia and fondness. And it’s interesting to see how much the world and I have both changed over the years.
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Hey guys,
It’s me… you know, the little samurai boy whose been busy harassing these poor Japanese people for the past 6 months… yeah, well, they haven’t kicked me out of the country yet (though not from a lack of trying, I can assure you), so I’ve continued my frolicking and have many a story to tell… unfortunately, I actually have work to do this semester (can you believe that… what a crock… I didn’t come all the way to Japan to do WORK…), so I don’t exactly have the time to write you guys another novel about my adventures the past few months…. I know this is terrible news, as you all were fond of taking 3 hours out of your busy schedules to read about some moron in Japan getting beat up by old women and picked on by little kids, but you’ll just have to suffer! Now stop your whining and get busy reading!
All right, you are probably wondering where the heck I was for the past 3 months or so (actually, you could probably care less, but it never hurts to dream a little)…. well, to be quite honest, I don’t really remember…. so I’ll just pull as much as I can remember out of my brain, and the rest I’ll pull from a much more productive part of my body (*hint- this is where some of my best papers and speeches have come from). Ok, so, where to begin…. hmmm… how about with me meeting the emperor… or maybe me and Nomo sipping some sake together… oh wait, maybe the best starting spot would be me and Yoko having a little chat about our dear friend John… the poor bloke, he really was a great guy…
Actually, the story begins on a cold and dreary day back in January… our fearless hero, the young samurai from the far shores of the western lands, made his daily dash to school on his trusty bike, cutting ever so dangerously between the cars and trains that carried the lifeless businessmen to another mundane morning of work. Little did our hero know that this was to be a special day, one that would change his life forever… well, the next seven months of his life, at least. As the young man burst through the doors of the international student center, ready for another day of torture from his Japanese teachers, he heard a voice calling in the distance… a voice that carried a message… THE message… “Hey stupid, don’t bring your umbrella inside, you’re gonna get the floor all wet… jeeeeez, were you dropped on your head as a baby or something?!” came the voice of the fat old janitor standing at the end of the hallway (oh, sorry, that wasn’t THE message… but it’s coming)… so after putting his umbrella away, our fearless (though now a bit embarrassed) hero dragged himself up the four flights of stairs to his classroom. As he approached the room, trying to block out the agonizing screams of his fellow classmates and praying in vain that his teacher wouldn’t use the SPIKED chains that day, he noticed a somewhat aged Japanese guy wearing round glasses and a cap crouched next to the wall. A fat, funny looking dog lay next to him, gazing up with lazy eyes. Coming closer to the guy, our hero (who from now own, for the sake of simplicity and to protect his identity, will be simply referred to as J) noticed it was the guy from the Nissan commercials… yeah, the SAME STINKIN’ GUY!
J, not a big fan of Nissans, tried to walk by as if he hadn’t noticed Mr. Nissan, but as soon as he passed, he heard THE voice: “Nissan”…. and then again… “Nissan”… and then again, but this time louder…. “NISSAN”….. and again it came, even louder than before…. “NIISSAAAN”…. soon he couldn’t hear his classmates screams anymore because the hall was echoing with the mad laughter of the Nissan Man…… “NIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!”… J couldn’t stand it anymore, and not especially looking forward to another day of whips and chains (with a little Japanese instruction added in for that extra special touch), he turned and fled in fear…. taking the stairs 5 at a time, he was out the front door in a flash… “Hey stupid, don’t forget your umbrella… jeeeeeez, I don’t know how you Americans got to the top… you’re all a bunch of stinkin’ morons!”…. not looking back at the disgruntled janitor, J ran as far as his legs would carry him (unfortunately, J hadn’t exercised in a long time, so his legs didn’t take him too far). Out of breath and worried that the Nissan man might be hot on his trail, J ducked into the nearest building. Now, of all the buildings he could have possibly entered, he somehow ended up in the coolest building on campus… yup, the place where all the happening stuff is going on… where all the coolest people on campus hang out… where the big brains come together to butt heads with one another… yup, of course… the engineering building (this in no way reflects the author’s biased opinions toward engineers in any way… it merely states a well known fact).
Dodging all the (very cool) engineering students scurrying off to their labs for some exciting advanced research, J cut a straight path for the nearest bathroom, figuring it would be a good place to hide for a while, just in case one of his Japanese teachers was to come after him with the chain saw (J was obviously quite familiar with his teachers favorite tools by this point… he had evoked their deployment more times than he liked to remember). Dashing into the first bathroom available, J kneeled down to see if there were any open stalls… to his surprise, in the stall closest to him, he saw a pair of high heels connected to a pair of legs in panty-hose… “man, there are too many drag queens in this country” J thought to himself… not wanting to meet the guy connected to those legs, J quietly got up and started to head for the door… as he was leaving, however, he noticed how odd it was not to find any troughs for peeing in the bathroom… “man, how can Japanese guys live without those things… I guess they just don’t realize what they’re missin” J thought to himself as he noticed there was nothing but stalls in the bathroom… on his way out the door, a rather beautiful young woman rushed in to the bathroom, giving J a very strange look… J wondered for a second what she was doing going into a mens’ bathroom, but just dismissed her as another drag queen… a few feet further down the hall, he passed another bathroom… rather perplexed at the close proximity of these two bathrooms, but still fearing the wrath of the chain saw, J ducked in for shelter… checking first for any drag queens that might be lurking in the bathroom, J only found a young Japanese man in suit and tie shaking the dew off his lily at the far trough… “wait a second”, J thought, “THIS bathroom has troughs, but the other one didn’t… what a strange country”… not taking any more notice of such a trivial issue, J walked over to the sink to wash the sweat off his face… peering in the mirror, he noticed that he wasn’t looking so hot… in fact, he looked rather sick…
“You all right man?”, the young man at the end trough said as he zipped up his pants and walked toward the sink, “you don’t look so good”.
“Yeah, we Americans aren’t very attractive, are we” J replied, rather taken back by the stranger’s offensive statement.
“No, I mean you’re sweating really bad and you look kind of sick… are you feeling ok” the stranger asked again.
“Oh, yeah, except for the fact that my Japanese language teacher is chasing me down with a chain saw and I ran into the Nissan man this morning, I’m feeling just dandy…”
“What?! You saw THE Nissan Man! WOW, that’s incredible… did you get his autograph?”
“Well, no… I don’t even know what his name is…”
“Oh… yeah… I guess that makes sense… anyway, my name is Hiroshi and I work here in the engineering division office… why don’t you come back to the office with me and I’ll get you something to drink… you look like you could use it…”
“Wow, that would be swell…”
Hiroshi led the way, and as they walked out they passed the first bathroom J had entered… another young woman… well, supposedly a woman… walked out of the door… J, even further perplexed than before, just gave up and figured some sort of cross-dressers club met in the engineering building or something… the only thing he couldn’t figure out was why they all looked so much like real women…
When they entered the office, everyone turned and stared at the funny-looking gaijin who had just entered the office… J surveyed the room, and in the back corner, he saw the girl/guy (?) he had passed on the way into the bathroom earlier… when she saw J, she let out a very feminine giggle, and J overheard her say to the girl next to her “hey, that’s the stupid foreigner I saw in the girls’ bathroom while ago!”…
After downing some Japanese tea the secretary had brought, J talked with Hiroshi for a while about where he lived, what his family was like, and all those sorts of interesting conversational devices J picked up from his very educational high school speech class. Hiroshi similarly asked J about his stay in Japan, and was rather surprised by the fact that an American came all the way to Japan to meet Japanese girls…
“Man, what were you thinking… this is Japan… we may be able to produce some darn good cars, but we sure as heck don’t make anything close to the likes of Pamela Anderson or Cindy Crawford… you should have stayed in America pal”…
After several hours of yacking, Hiroshi found that despite the stupidity of this silly foreigner, he was rather fond of talking with him… so he invited J over to have dinner with his family. J, being poor and unable to cook for himself, gladly accepted the offer.
So off they went that night to have dinner at Hiroshi’s house. As it turned out, Hiroshi, though 25, was like most young Japanese men of his age and still lived with his parents… a rather brilliant idea, actually, considering the cost of living in Japan… so J met the folks and also Hiroshi’s sister, who at the age of 21 was already a hard-working banker (ok, well maybe banker isn’t the best word… she does work at a bank, but being young and female, and being that it is a Japanese bank, she is probably more likely to be serving tea to the men and doing menial jobs than crunching numbers and setting up corporate bank accounts). Hiroshi’s father, quite the joker even in his mid-50s, was a worker at the local branch of JT, the biggest tobacco firm in Japan. And needless to say, the mother was the typical hard-working (that’s NOT a sarcastic statement) Japanese housewife, who from early in the morning until late at night took care of the needs of the household. J was immediately quite fond of the family, and they all had a wonderful time that evening.
So now you are probably wondering what the heck this long story has to do with anything… “so what”, you think, “some moron whose name you want tell us meets the Nissan man, runs off into a bathroom and meets some Japanese guy and then gets invited over for dinner”… yes, well, there is a connection here, I can assure you… though you may find it hard to believe, the above idiot, though seemingly a your run-of-the-mill moron, just happens to be yours truly… yup, I know that was pretty tricky of me to just name him J and speak from the third person perspective… I knew you’d never catch on… but anyway, the reason I told you the whole story is because the above-mentioned family, the wonderfully nice people they are, allowed me to do a home stay with them… yup, even though I didn’t exactly meet Hiroshi in the bathroom of the engineering building, he does work here at the university I’m studying at and I was able to set up a home stay through him. At any rate, I have been living with them since the end of January and they have been absolutely wonderful… I have been very fortunate to have such an opportunity, as I get to see daily how a Japanese family really lives… sometimes they find it a bit odd that I should be so interested in their daily activities (like when I sit and watch them eat or take a bath), but they are always very accommodating to my needs and have been quite wonderful to me. I really am having a great time with them, and when I come back to Japan in the future, they will definitely be the first people on my list to visit.
Ok, besides my home stay, you assume I have been doing other things here in Japan since the last time I wrote… well, most of that time was actually spent in jail or on probation, so no, I really haven’t been doing anything… okay, so the cops let me out a few times to go on vacation. Unfortunately, this e-mail is already to long (the police here in the prison said I only have 10 minutes left on the computer before our daily beating begins, so I have to type fast), so I will only tell you where I went, without a long description of what I did:
Osaka
Yup, I went to the second Tokyo of Japan, where things are just as packed and just as noisy as the capital. Unfortunately, despite it’s very urban resemblance to Tokyo (when I say urban, I mean you could walk around the city for days without seeing one piece of grass… we’re talking a lot of concrete), it just wasn’t as cool. Anyway, I went here for a week in late February and did a homestay. The couple I stayed with was really cool, but they were working almost the whole week so I was pretty much on my own every day. So I just basically I just took the train to a different part of the city every day and walked around for awhile. Unfortunately, since the people I stayed with lived kind of far from the heart of Osaka and I had to come home every night for dinner (since I didn’t really see my host family during the day), I didn’t have much of a chance to check out the night life of this city. At the end of the week, however, I went with my host family to their mountain house (yup, they were a bit on the rich side I think) in the neighboring prefecture. We passed Kobe on the way (you know, the city that did a little bumping and grinding a few years ago), and I thought it was probably one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen so far in Japan (if you don’t mind having your city completely leveled every once in a while by an earthquake, it’s probably not a bad choice of places to live in Japan). Anyway, there wasn’t anything too exciting about Osaka.
Kyoto and Nara
Even though these cities don’t have much in common (except for the fact that they are the two most big “cultural centers” of Japan), this trip was taken as a group with the program I am in, so we saw both cities together. Kyoto was absolutely beautiful, and all the old temples and shrines were quite fascinating. It even had a pretty decent night life scene to offer, as several of us discovered when we ventured off the first night after our sponsors had gone to sleep. However, despite all of Kyoto’s magnificence, Nara was rather lame. It just seemed like we were in the middle of the countryside (actually we were in the middle of the countryside), and there just wasn’t anything but the really old temples and shrines to see (which is great and all, but not exactly enough to satisfy a bunch of rowdy 20-something-year-old students). We did go to a park with a lot of tame deer that we got to pet and feed, and we did get to see a once-a-year festival that involved lighting a bunch of long poles on fire and running up and down the balcony of a really old temple with them (I swear, these Japanese are such pyros!). Besides that though, there were no great highlights I have to share (actually I’m just tired of typing, so I don’t feel like telling you all the details).
Tokyo
Yup, this was actually a stop-off on my way up to Hokkaido, the northernmost island in the Japanese archipelago. Anyway, Tokyo was obviously one of the places I wanted to see most while here in Japan, so I took the opportunity to stay at a friend’s company’s dorm for a really good price (because let me assure you, Tokyo is NOT cheap, especially when it comes to finding a place to stay). Anyway, this whole trip involved using a really cheap train ticket that lets you ride on local trains (which stop at hick towns so small they aren’t even listed on the most detailed of maps) all day for something like $15 or so. So I figured even though it would take me three or four days each way, it would be cheap and I would get to see all of Japan… well, that was fine and dandy, but my butt sure did hurt by the time I finally made it up to Hokkaido. Anyway, about Tokyo: it was big, there were lots of people, and there was enough neon to light the whole state of Texas. It really was a fascinating place, because there is just so much to see in Tokyo. It’s like a whole world squeezed inside one big city (a world primarily filled with Japanese, of course, but nevertheless a city filled with just about anything and everything). The basic impression I got from Tokyo is that it is probably one of the coolest cities in the world you can visit, but definitely not a place I would actually want to live. But at any rate, I really enjoyed it and have had fun watching dramas lately on TV and recognizing places in Tokyo that I went.
Sapporo
Yup, this was my final destination on my trek up to Hokkaido. Sapporo is the only real “city” in Hokkaido, and at around 2 million people, it is the 5th largest city in Japan. I really liked Sapporo… right after visiting Tokyo, it’s hard to go to another city in Japan and be really impressed, but Sapporo somehow pulled it off… it wasn’t necessarily that it was so captivating like Tokyo, but just that it was very beautiful with all the surrounding mountains and well-developed city planning. It is definitely someplace I would want to live in Japan in the future. There are also plenty of places nearby to ski, so it obviously suits me well. Anyway, I did a home stay here too for a week, and generally passed the time by doing about the same thing I did in Osaka, except this time I usually went around with my host family. I even got to go to the ski slopes for one day while I was there, but it definitely didn’t compare to the slopes of the Rockies (not that I didn’t have a good time… I didn’t think I’d ever get to go skiing in Japan, so I was quite thrilled when my host mother told me she had free lift tickets). And of course, I couldn’t possibly have gone to Sapporo without paying a visit to the famous Sapporo Beer Factory. Anyway, Sapporo is certainly one of the best cities I’ve so far visited in this strange land, although if you only had the opportunity to visit one city in Japan, I would say Tokyo’s the best bet.
Ok, well, I really don’t have any more time (they’re dragging me back to my tiny little jail cell), and you are probably falling asleep now from reading about my non-adventures in Japan. Anyway, I just wanted to get this e-mail out now because I know most of you in college are almost out and many of you won’t be checking your e-mail over the summer. So good luck with your finals and be happy your almost finished… your poor friend in Japan has 3 more months of classes to go!
Later,
Jay “yes, my Japanese teachers really use chain saws” Hubert