The me inside the me inside the mirror

This morning I stumbled onto the above picture on the Internet (I am on the train to work right now) and it got me thinking about life. I was thinking about how I am the same "me" I have always been, and yet externally I am quickly changing. Some gray hair, more wrinkles and a disappearing chin these days. This long strange trip of life is quite odd. I wonder too much about meaning, I wonder if I will ever stop wondering about meaning. Life has it's patterns, expected performance. I have things I have wanted to do and yet have never done. I have things I have done, and I have a collection of memories contrasted with my thoughts that make me who I am. Dust to dust, memento mori.  

transformation

I often wonder how much a city changes me. How long do you have to live in a place before the place begins to live in you? I remember eons ago the moment when suddenly, like magic, I understood voices around me. It was like adjusting the focus on a camera lens, suddenly noise twisted into words. Recently I feel like I am hypersensitive to smells. Many foreign people complain that Japanese people are picky about the slightest of odors. And I am wondering if that is happening to me. Although as if I was blind my whole life, and now I can see a bit of light, this sensitivity is a bit bewildering. Intoxicating, confusing. Aren't my senses suppose to decrease with age? Or maybe this has nothing to do with localizing, maybe it is the last push effort of my sense before fading away into older age. Or maybe a momentary peak of my awareness. Who knows. Fascinating, none the less.

politics of language

A few days ago, I was walking to my train station. It was bitter cold and dark, but suddenly a woman asked me (in Japanese) "Excuse me, do you know where Komagome Hospital is?" I was kind of surprised. Often in Tokyo I get ignored because of the colour of my skin. I tend to complain about this with my friends while tossing back beers or whatever. But this felt like a beautiful colour-blind moment! Perfect except I wasnt sure where the hospital was. "uhm... i've never been there, but..." I began to offer. She looked right and left, and pointed right, "Well, do you think it's that way?" I was a bit late to meet my friend, but I decided to do my best to help this lady out. I thought I was being a little rude having a conversation with her while I was bundled up behind my hood, so I pulled my hood down and started to say that I thought she was right, but in literal slow motion I saw her see my face (why she hadn't noticed my accent I'm not sure) and her eyes literally go round with shock. She held up her hands, and said "Oh, it's OK-- I'm fine." and turned around and headed in the direction she had assumed. Oh. So much for a perfect moment.

A few days after that, I was standing at an intersection near my house. I was going to the laundry mat, and so I had my laundry bag slung over one shoulder. I was appreciating the glimmer of the cold sun (it's still winter after all!) when suddenly behind me I heard someone say in Indian accented English, "Excuse me, sir." I turn around and a kind of pudgy man sitting on a mountain bike is looking at me. I offer "Uhhh... yeah?" and he says, "Can you tell me where [midnight] is?" The word midnight was the only thing I could make sense of the word. It wasn't English, it was Japanese, but that was the only thing that registered. "Uhh, sorry, what are you trying to find?" I asked. He repeated the same thing, and I shook my head and said "Up there is police box, they might be able to help you." He looked up the short hill and said "It's too far away, and it's a hill so I don't want to go up there. I'll ask someone else." At that moment the pedestrian light turned green for me, so I wished him goodluck and crossed the street.

(Also, 88 new photos in my photo album if you wanna take a peek! Yes. I went mad. Tons of random photos [maybe too many red leaves!] from all over the place. And I haven't even finished uploading all the pictures I took so far! Anyway, enjoy.)

the future

As many of you might have noticed, I try to avoid political, too personal, and things about work on my blog. But just like last time when work bubbled into the core of what it meant to be me, I will post some thoughts. I am really really happy for America today. While in American college I had endless debates with classmates about what was wrong with American politics. I argued quite simply that politicians are supposed to represent America, but how can it be equal representation when most all politicians are rich old white men? Being a good politician of course transcends personal race and what not, but the fact of the matter is 99% of all presidents were protestant, and until now 100% affiliated themselves as Caucasian-Americans. Diversity, in all things, is strength. I see Obama as the example of a true American, his diverse family background and his strong political savvy make him a near perfect president for a twenty first century America. And on a final more controversial note, McCain and others claimed that Obama was out to "spread the wealth around" which was twisting one sentence Obama said in order to try to spread fear. But I never understood why that was a smear? What's wrong with spreading the wealth around a little bit? If the rich had a little less and the poor had a little more, wouldn't that make a better America and a better world? In any case, I look forward to seeing how this presidential term unfolds.

stolen words

The other day, I met an Australian friend of mine for some beers with him and his girlfriend. We were talking about this, that, and everything when suddenly he got quite livid about the fact that Japanese people don't borrow the English word for platypus. I pointed out that elephant and rhinoceros are among many other Japanese animal words that have endemic names. I thought he was getting up in arms about how a lot of other words are borrowed phonetically (computer becomes "konpyuta" and smile becomes "sumairu" and so and so forth) but he clarified that he was more annoyed that the word wasn't borrowed as it exists in English because there was no way for a platypus to be local in Japan. That they were local to Australia, and that it made no sense to have a "native" Japanese word. I argued that in Japanese it must just be a translation of the Latin (which I was wrong, apparently platypus means "flat footed" in Latin, I need to brush up on my Latin. Literally it means something akin to "duck's bill" in Japanese which I guess is actually a translation of the nickname "duckbill platypus") but none the less I don't think I really got how frustrated this made him feel. Flashfoward to the next day, focus on my Chinese class. (Yes, I'm taking Mandarin at work. Employee discount, and it's fun!) The teacher shows me a picture of a lady standing in front of the statue of liberty. He asks me (in Chinese of course) "Where is she from?" and I smile, knowing I can ring this one, and answer "She is from America." The teacher (a temperamental old bald man) nods, I've quieted his tamper for the time being. I have answered this question, and he wont get mad at me yet. (He tends to get upset when I answer incorrectly, something that puzzles me as a student. I'm learning, take it easy on me!) He asks, "Where is she from in America?" and I smile, confidence leaking into my grin. "New York." I say in what I assume is a Chinese accent for the place, I get close enough to receive another nod. (Something like "niu yue".) Then he throws me a curve ball, he asks me "Where is she from in New York?" I panic. Whaaaat. I try to throw on a direction word I am learning, "North New York?" He glares, not the faintest hint of a nod. I smile. Still no nod. That doesn't work. I try a Chinese pronunciation for "Queens". It doesn't work. But he decides to cut me some slack, he says, "Queens? ahhh, huang hou qu?" (Keep in mind, qu should be read CHU here.) And I have the "wow, that's what my Ozzy friend ment!" moment. I got it. It felt so weird to have a name that wasn't phonetically borrowed when talking about a borough of New York. Shouldn't it just be a borrowed word? How can there be an endemic word for Queens? It's maybe a translation, instead of a stolen phonetic copy like I was expecting. Thoughts shot through my head. If I didn't misunderstand, that meant something beautiful. There are a million sounds to describe anything. What we tag to things are only the sounds we have been assigned to associate with those things through our connection with our own language frames. There is an infinite way to perceive things. Cool!

brave new world

OK. I am sitting here totally in awe and a little scared of google. I never thought it was a big deal before. But it feels different when it hits so close to home. For awhile they have had a "street view" option in their software that lets you get panoramic photo-realistic views of American streets. Some people were saying it was creepy, and I thought they were over reacting. And I still do. But. Yeah. But. I just found out google launched this function in Japan. And that I can sit here on my computer and get a 360 panoramic view of my neighborhood with photo realism. Heck, I even recognize some of my neighbors walking around near my house and... and I can even see the Ethiopian flag hanging in my own fricking window. (Why do I have that flag? Long story for a different day.) In any case, it's a bit weird. But from a more positive side of things, I started thinking how this has the potential to pull us all together as humans. If you can roll on down the streets in any country of the world, the "mystery" of our differences will began to evaporate and maybe we'll begin to see eachother as just people no matter where we live. It's pretty amazing actually, in a way that I think I'm not able to express in words at the moment.

glimpse

I always think I have seen most of Japanese culture and then I always get a glimpse from another point of view. Tonight I met my cute friend (lets call her Ms.I) and she was with another friend who was the stereotype of cute (hanging cleavage, long legs, all that, lets call her Ms.H) I went to a kind of stylish bar with the two of them in Imotesando. The conversation (in Japanese of course) was rapid and right down my alley, fun, bubbly conversation. We decided to have a "bar hopping" night, but by the time we left the first stylish bar the cash in my wallet was almost burned up. So I told them to go to the next bar (they pointed it out) and I would run to the ATM and be back in no time. When I got back, Ms. H was in the restroom and my friend Ms.I was talking with two old (late 60s) businessmen. They see me and one of them says, "Whos this fine young man?" and my friend says, "Yeah, he is a fine young man, he's a friend from college." and I am puzzled so I say "Do you guys know each other?" And the vocal old man laughs with a little bit of rust in his voice and says, "well, we are becoming to know each other right now." Ms. H comes back and after a brief exchange about how hot her legs are, the two old men leave. I am thinking 'dang! what creepy old men!' when Ms. I my friend says "yeah, I met some old guys like that last year, and just because we let them talk to us girls they bought all our drinks, it was so cool." Ms.H laughs and turns to me and advises me, "Be sure to turn into an old guy like that, ok?" The conversation twirls in the warm summer evening and the memory of those two old men begins to fade. But suddenly the vocal old man is back, this time with two young college boys. The old man says, "I know this nice wine bar near here, do you guys wanna go?" and I somehow expect them to react with shock, but instead they are smiling and laughing and agreeing whole-heartily. We move over to the wine bar, where he buys us a lot of wine. The conversation hovers on me for awhile, in an odd way, trying to figure out how much I could communicate I guess. The college boy next to me asks me if we have olives in america too, and I almost thought he was joking until I saw his ernest face. The old man says to me, "You speak this language quite well, so I suppose you know the word pervert?" Ms. H laughs and says "Already with that?" But I ignore the fact that he must be talking about himself and just say frankly, "There are a lot of perverts in Japan, so I am sure I know that word!" but he doesn't seem to be offended, he just laughs. "I am a pervert." he proclaims loudly and the girls smile and laugh. The conversation twirls into the evening air, my friend and her friend talking about how they have always wanted to eat dinner up in a skyscraper but couldnt afford it and other such hints. He pulls out his name card and recommends Ms.I and MS.H email him, with which they say they will for sure. Suddenly we all become aware of final train times, and it's a flurry of feet as we run towards the station. I run towards my train platform, opposite my friend's platform, shout a goodnight as I hop into my train and I am whisked away into another evening leading to the next day.

money

I dont like to feel like a capitalist pig, so I try not to want money too much. When the company I was working for went under last winter I lost over 3 months of pay. I tried not to worry about it too much, even when I was down to about one rice triangle a day. It's not like that anymore. I'm back to eating four times a day. And yesterday I was stressing a bit about expensive bills, when suddenly I noticed that the Japanese government had given me 80% of my lost wages. Its as if I was forced to save money. I plan to get back into making movies again, as a hobby of sorts so I guess its good timing.

Winter is starting to melt away. I wonder how fast we'll jump into summer this year? At work, I got transfered to a branch in the state of Ibaraki, not even in Tokyo state. One way, its over an hour from my house plus waiting time between trains. That aint cool. Want to transfer back to Tokyo but I guess that aint gonna happen anytime soon.

things i bet you didnt know

1. If you see an ethnic Korean online chat or BBS and you see people add three Ks next to their message, they arent an evil member of a white supremest klan, they are instead phonetically representing in English the way Koreans write snickering in their language on the internet. Really.

2. It's cold right now. I sleep with a big red plastic hot bottle (or rather bottle I put hot water in to) that Japanese people call "yutanpo" it helps me sleep, but if I roll over and it touches my belly, it makes me too hot and makes me have weird bloody dreams. Odd, I know. So I have to wrap it in a blanket layer so I don't overheat.

3. I would love to live in this Stanford torus style space colony station.
Yeah I know its super geeky or whatever. But living on the inside of a donut shaped world that is slowly spinning in space, with a glittery space backdrop, soft light filtered through solar mirrors and lush artificial landscaping, with the horizon stretching up and away from you on both sides. Nice, beyond words!

4. I haven't written a poem in awhile, I really need to get more creative.

5. I want to know what happened to 15 year old Gertrude Seifert and her 17 year old loverman. Who're they you may ask? Here they are:



Still confused? Well, recently I have been a bit addicted to "deep diving" on the internet again. Even thinking about starting up a blog about it. Recently on some of my expeditions I've been digging up massively ancient newspapers, this one is "The San Francisco Call" from April 1, 1910 (page 3, to be precise) ...Still confused a bit about who they are? Let's read the original text:


LOVER IGNORANT
OF HER DEPARTURE
Maid Who Eloped With Boy
Will Be Taken Abroad for
Indefinite Stay
SAN DIEGO. March 31
Gertrude Seifert, whose sensational elopement with Thomas Foreman, aged 17 years, Tuesday startled San Diego, was removed from the custody of the jail matron at 2 o'clock this morning by her father and mother, placed on the Owl train without being given a chance to communicate with boy lover and today is speeding eastward to New York-city and Germany for an indefinite stay. Thomas Foreman, kept in ignorance by the jail matron, at noon today had not learned of the move. During their elopement young Foreman held a pursuing posse at bay with his rifle. They were captured only after an exciting chase through the brush. The lad did not surrender until he was covered by the guns of the deputy sheriffs, and then only to protect the girl. - - - The elder Seifert promised to let them marry after his daughter had spent 18 months abroad, but this may have been only a subterfuge.


armageddon and my mama

As I'm sure any reader has noticed, I don't usually talk about work on my blogs. Work is work, it isn't my blog and I think it's best to keep it that way. However, recently work has been boiling to the point where it might spill over into my personal life. My company is self-destructing. There is massive meltdown going on. The students are running away because of scandals, the government has shut down signing up new long term contracts, and many teachers are running away because it's all so demoralizing. The company is on the brink of a massive belly-flop if something good doesn't happen. It's got so bad I even have Japanese friends from out of town calling and telling me to find a new job. It's an awkward odd moment in my work life, not sure what's going to go down.
But in happy news my friend Christina D. came to visit last week, and from today my mama comes to visit me! I can't wait to show my mama around town. It will be fun to go to famous places, and look at beautiful things for awhile. And then maybe after that I can deal with the job melt down with a peaceful mind.

night of living silence

It's 1:40 at night. I'm waiting for my clothes to dry at the coin laundry. I sit on the hard sidewalk, back pushed against a vacant building, reading a really good book about Australian place names. My shoes are off, my barefeet pushed against the asphalt. A thin misty rain starts, cutting through the still humid night. I ignore it and keep reading, part of me aware of the feeling against my skin and the occasional taxi drifting past in the darkness beyond my peripheral vision. It's moments like these that my mind kind of twirls, reflecting on a kind of 3D depth to my life's current state connected to what it is and what it will be. These deep thoughts distract me briefly from the book, and I see the mist has left a thin glistening sheen on the pages. I check my chipped orange cellphone, another 10 minutes. I keep reading.

yamaguchi memories

I had a few days off work so I thought I would take the bullet train down to the last prefecture on the main island of honshu. Yamaguchi. I woke up early, and made my reservations on a vending machine in Shinjuku station. I picked up a station lunchbox (ekiben) and hopped on the nozomi bullet train (shinkansen). It takes about 5 hours on the bullet train to get to Yamaguchi, and only about 2 hours on the airplane. But somehow I like the feeling of being a rocket cutting through the countryside of Japan, nothing beats it. The plush green fields, small hamlets clustered around the train tracks, and the tree clumped mountains. Increasing in frequencey near the bottom of honshu, it was most surprizing to count the endless amount of tunnels the train would speed through. It felt like a land-based submarine, sometimes coming up for less than a minute to offer a breathtaking view of a deep country valley or something before submerging in a long tunnel again.
Hanging otu with Evan in Yamaguchi was a lot of fun. He is a very open-minded friendly guy, so he had a lot of local friends to introdue me to. Including a couple running a sushi shop, a rich widow, and an elementry school teacher from America. My second day there we rode around on a bike tour of his countryside town, warm air floating past us with a taste of rain-coming in the fragrance. And when the rain came, I poured. The welcoming dance of a typhoon on it's way towards the coast. I had to run up to Tokyo, with the typhoon chasing me. Eventually it got lost in Nagoya, and I was back in Tokyo with fairly little rain left to be thrown at me by the smashed typhoon. (Photos uploaded soon maybe?)
And speaking of natural earth things, a quick word on the earthquake that rocked this area. I was teaching when suddenly the table began to shake. I looked around at the students, everyone paused. I remembered how the current left-to-right shakes are a good sign and the not-present up-and-down shakes are a bad thing. I said something about that, and then got back to teaching. Although the tremors shook down some houses in the prefecture next to Tokyo, over here in Tokyo area we all bairly noticed enough to change what we we were doing.

collection of moments

I was walking to the 100yen shop at 2 in the morning (why is another story) and I walked past a group of construction workers huddled around a chalk sign posing after the completion of the installation of a drainage network. Is that something I missed when I was in the states? Is that something that isn't common here, I just happened to see it? Why are construction workers taking school-style group photos? The moment lingered in my mind.

Today I had to wake up really early to go to immigration in Shinagawa, but the weather was great. So on the way home I decided to make a video about the Yamanote loop line. Just the idea was fun for me to think up, I was going to translate all the station names into literal English. I got a tuna sandwich and chunky mango juice, and emptied out my 1 GIG digital camera memory card. I ended up giving up on the translate all the station names thing (all that text was too cluttered looking and a lot of work) but I still made the video. Making it was fun, and brought back memories of my total geeky moment of riding the Yamanote loop about 7 times last year. Its a big loop. Anyway, I cant vote for its coolness (7 minutes of a train, that might not be your thing?) but this (Live Video stream, it wont show Japanese right now, but the English text works) is the video I made, if you want to check it out.

revolutionary critical mass

As I sit eating my microwavable cheese and ham and egg naan I can't help but think about the impending revolution that is reaching critical mass in Japan. Some Japan-watchers might think I'm talking about the coming militarization of Japan that the prime minister and his companions are pushing for at the moment. That is frankly a little scary, and it will ultimately lead to a change in the way Japan sees the world. But, no, I mean a far deeper change I can see all around me. Tokyo, and thus by some extension the rest of Japan, is on the cusp of becoming a truly international city. I can hear that in the myriad languages I can come across down town, I see it in the faces of the millions of foreign people streaming past me in the train stations with a look of wonderment on their faces, I can sense it in my kids classes that seem to be quite full of multiethnic children these days. In most countries in the world, seeing a huge mix of the world mingling on the streets, and children of different ethnic heritage in a classroom shouldn't be and isn't surprising. Japan has been stereotyped as a homogeneous society, but the foreign population is reaching critical mass. When you can see a white guy working at McDonalds in front of your house, you know its about to happen. A Japan that truly begins to become a new country with a new culture that will lead to a new way of seeing the world. Change is coming.

trip to immigration

My friend in Korea is getting married but as a quasi-member of this society I currently reside in, I had to go to the immigration office today to get permission to travel. Although I find it kind of weird that I can't travel internationally unless I get permission, thats the way things roll, so thats what I went to go do. I woke up a little late, because I had a special day off and wouldnt be going to work today. The sky was getting darker, even though it was day, so I decided I should rush to the station before it began to rain. And thats when the sky decided to down pour. Litteral buckets of rain smashing down. Heres a direct link to a 7MB (I didnt have space on my card, so its lo-res) quicktime video of the rain turning some stairs into an urban waterfall. My socks, and pants were totally soaked. Well, I got on the train and head to the immigration office in Shinagawa... and since this wasnt my first time, I got the required "revenue stamp" at a convenience store before going up to the immigration office. For some reason, they wont take cash and require these special stamps but dont post any information about it. So a lot of people just wait forever and get upfront and are told they cant be helped with out the stamps, or that was my experience anyway my first time there. Today I heard some lady complaining on her phone in English about how she wasnt sure what to do but she was just waiting anyway. When she got off the phone, I asked her if she had revenue stamps, and explained what they were... and immediately like flys attracted to sugar water, I was swamped with several other inexperienced foreigners who wanted more details. I also noticed that English speaking foreigners are noisy. While I ended up waiting for about 2 and a half hours, I noticed that a baby crying in one corner and the white guy talking to his wife on the other side of the room had about the same level of vocal output. Who would have thunk it. So after the loooong wait, I go up to the counter and say almost nothing, hand over my passport and get the permit in literal seconds. You'd think it would be more efficient if it was built into my visa, instead of requiring me to wait for it. But oh well, thats bureaucracy. As I walked out of the office, the sun was beaming bright on the freshly bathed earth as if signally a movie-style change in moods.

two sides to one coin

I was walking to the local 99YEN discount shop, and I walked past a bar I had seen when Tom came to visit me from Hong Kong. Its a chicken-on-a-stick (yakitori) bar, and sometime around 11 at night me and Tom had walked past it. We were hungry, and the Japanese sign out front read "open for business" so I slid open the door and started to step in (with Tom behind me, not yet through the door) and the owner looked over at me and said (in Japanese of course) "We're not open for biz-nuss, son" (I'm trying to capture in English the feeling of informal friendliness that could also be seen as rude depending on which way you want to read it.) Although that sounded oddly like something from a cowboy movie when the greenhorn walks through the doors, even more so because of the open sign, I decided I must have just caught the bar right as it was closing up. Which brings me to my 1:30 in the early morning walk past it a few minutes ago. It was still open, with customers inside. Heres where we get to the two sides on one coin idea. This situation could be understood as zenophobia or racism or a mix of the two. But it could also be understood in a million other ways too. Maybe the owner's friends came in from out of town. Maybe the customers were yakuza gangsters and the owner was afraid to push them out and close up. Maybe he has special super-late hours on Sunday nights. The list could go on forever. The same two sided coin situation can play in the opposite way. When I got to the 99 YEN shop, I was in a hurry so I just grab my super late dinner stuff and just as I'm thinking about walking to the counter, the register-guy runs over and brings me a basket for my stuff, I tell him I dont need one because I'm buying my stuff at that moment. He responds by bowing and using respect words in a hurried nervous manner that makes me feel important, like he needs to sell me my stuff as fast as he can so I can go home to my warm house. Of course, up pops the two-sided coin. Maybe he was thinking I was a drunk foreigner and when I communicated with him he realized I wasnt one of those two things. (I'm sure you can figure out which!) Or maybe he was feeling guilty for not liking me which translated into rushed service so he could get me out of his hair. Or maybe his rush was fear I would hurt him or speak to him in some freaky language, or both. Theres always more than one way to see the same thing, I suppose.