All Work and No Play Make?

All I want's a comfortable middle-class life
with nice teeth for my kids,
and nice shoes for my wife.



More than a few of you have written me asking about Japanese girls. And the answers are: "I don't know", "no", "I don't know" and "I haven't tried that one". I'm way too crazy to date anyone right now, and for some reason I'm totally OK with that. I guess I've learned how to be single by this point, and I don't sweat it. Yet.

I don't really have anyone in my life, to tell the truth. I talk to my roommates occasionally about how the other roommates don't clean after themselves. I text message one of my friends from Osaka about once a week and see them once a month, or less. But I rarely hang out with anyone. I work, I study, and what little time remains I spend on my own.

It's not ideal, of course. But it was how my Tokyo experience began, so until my social life picks up I might not even realize there is any other way to live in this city. I've finally achieved the monastic austerity I wanted, and there's a lot to be said for it. Sometimes it dawns on me that this was exactly what I wanted: get up early, stay busy all day, study for several hours, and sleep.

But this city seems somehow closed to me. Entertainment is a 24-hour business in this city and yet I can't even consider enjoying these diversions. I pass thousands of cafes, stores, restaurants, bars and clubs, and it's like they were built for someone else. It doesn't even occur to me to enter them. My life lies elsewhere; in the windowless dungeon of Berlitz, in a cheap cafe studying Japanese, or in my kitchen with a cup of coffee and my laptop.

With friends and a bit of spending money I would be having a much different experience and, I daresay, more fun. But I didn't come here for fun, not initially. My hope is that if I work my ass off now, without any distraction, fun will come later. Hopefully then I'm uncrazy enough to start thinking about girls.

I've been one crazy bastard these past two months. I've been so impulsive. It's like I'm frantically looking for a direction, any direction, in which to sprint. On my sixth day in Tokyo I was freaking out about not playing the drums anymore, and desperately tried to figure out how to get to a drumset. The very next day I decided I needed a sampler and some beat boxes. The next day I decided my money should be used for Japanese school instead. Then I started researching grad schools for an MBA. Then for advertising. Then Pacific Studies.

When I got hired by the Roppongi Hills Club about a month ago now, I had just read an article about the best Tokyo mixology bars. The obsession returned; I decided I would open a bar in Tokyo someday. No, actually, I would move to London and learn their techniques.  No, New York. No, I would go back to Minneapolis and start my own place. No, I would go to New York after all. But there are all these brilliant bartenders running around the world opening bars, so maybe I should just give it all up and go to grad school after all. Definitely, I decided. I'm going to grad school in Tokyo for Telecommunications Studies. No, design. No, Pacific Studies...

Worrying about crap like this was stressing me out, so I'm trying to focus on today rather than my mercurial multi-year machinations. I'm trying to take things in single-day servings. Today, I tell myself, the only things I have to do are: make lunch, take a nap, and teach three hours of English. If that's as bad as things get, my problems are pretty good. This helps restrain the crazy a little bit.

Happily, the good days have been increasing. Sunday, for instance, I took the loop line around the Tokyo metropolis, twice, and saw a whole bunch of city that I hadn't seen before. Then I took a monorail out across Tokyo Bay and back, and I saw cranes that looked like brachiosaurs and I saw the city from the middle of the bay, a crazy perspective on the scope of my new home.

I'm still crazy, though. Today I was walking with a spring in my step. (Probably the coffee.) I was loving Tokyo and felt great and happy. But two hours later I was squirming with restlessness, convinced I needed to move to Shanghai: Tokyo wasn't Blade Runner enough. My mind started racing, considering the options for studying Chinese and Japanese in Shanghai and how quickly I could leave. I figured, I could be teaching in Shanghai in about five months if I transferred with Berlitz. I was ready for action.

How silly the idea seems now. I make plans that sometimes stretch years into the future, and then I worry about those plans. Which is stupid. I can hardly plan tomorrow with any certainty. Why stress something a year away? "Tomorrow," someone said once, "has a way of happening by itself." I try to yank myself back down to Earth every time I realize what I'm doing. There is no good solution to this except time and patience but I've been trying to rush things. Eventually it will all fall into place.


I hope. Because if this is it, I'll be pissed. Teaching, as I've observed before, is a noble thing, but I despise every minute of it. I really, really hate teaching English. I want to scream and punch and kick like a six-year-old. I hate whoring myself out speaking slow, tedious English for six to eight hours a day despite being able to speak Japanese. It's humiliating and boring and frustrating. And useless: I really don't believe that the eikaiwa actually improve English ability by more than about 5 or 10%.

I knew what I was getting into when I started. In fact, it took several months to talk myself into teaching because I was dead-set against the idea for years. But it got me to Tokyo, and now it's like I buried myself with a shovel and have to start digging.

But which way is up? I have to figure that out first, and that's been a challenge. The first and most obvious way to improve my life is to crawl out from under Berlitz. Despite every attempt to be chill about things, manage my attitude and whatnot, I hate Berlitz so fucking much I see black. It makes me want to get violent. Every lesson makes me want to throw my book on the floor and escape this terrible steel trap, chew my leg off animal-like and take my chances.

I want to strangle the supervisor who gave me my schedule.

"You will burn out with this schedule," dude told me solemnly when he presented it to me. My face fell as I saw the four split shifts every week. "You will be miserable and exhausted in a month. You won't be able to sleep at night because you will be too wound up after your evening lessons, and then you will have to get up early the next day. I could not work a schedule like this, I hate it. Well, maybe we can do something about it in a few months." That is what he said to me, and just to prove to him that I could take whatever he could dish out--and what he couldn't himself take, apparently--I've refused to budge a single lesson time from the original schedule.

I've observed this before, but it is almost a deliberate hazing, this schedule, a test for the sucker newbies. I work at 8:30 a.m., go home at 12:15, then return at 5:30 and work until 9:15. The first shift ain't so bad, but the second shift puts me in a foul mood. I've just returned from the late shift and this mood is fresh in me. Watching the setting sun from the window of the the train back to that detested basement is heartbreaking.

Yet every time I consider complaining, all I need to do is think about my students to shut right up. I usually teach male office drones of all species who work for the enormous financial hives in the area. These poor guys work ten to twelve hour days, five or six days a week, for slightly more than my minimum Berlitz salary. They make like half what I make per hour. And they're in for life; turnover in Japan is nigh-nonexistent (though this is changing).

This can't be rushed, I think. I'm doing everything I can do at the moment, maybe too much. I'm working fifty hours, six days a week. I'm getting my translating chops and some journalism experience. I'll probably be applying to grad schools in several months. In a year my Japanese should be marketable, so I can take the JLPT aptitude test. Companies are much more likely to hire you--and pay you--if you have some papers. With some patience, I may be able to get a job in journalism, or advertising, or publishing. Or something completely different, perhaps.

Except today I want to make cocktails again!



pH

Life as a dry martini, stirred.

On Saturday I relearned how to make a dry martini.

I had thought a dry martini the simplest drink imaginable: big splash gin, small splash vermouth. Swirl it around with ice (or shake it, if you swing that way) and dump it into a martini glass.

But such simplicity is unforgiving, at least according to the Japanese. With only two ingredients even small mistakes are obvious, so the balance must be perfect. On Saturday a Japanese bartender showed me how the simplest drink in the book might just be the hardest.

Dry Martini, Japanese-style:
0.) Skewer an olive, cut a shallow slice of lemon peel and put them both aside.
1.) Take a chilled martini pitcher (about 24 oz.) out of the fridge.
2.) Take the chilled gin, vermouth and cocktail glass from the fridge and place them on the bar.
3.) Put a large piece of ice in the bottom of the cocktail glass.
4.) Fill the martini pitcher with cube ice.
5.) Pour well-chilled water into the pitcher until it's about half full.
6.) Stir quickly with a long-handled bar spoon twenty or thirty times. This will dissolve the corners of the ice cubes which, having the most surface area, melt very easily. Doing this will ensure that the corners don't melt into the gin later.
7.) Strain the water out of the pitcher. Like flicking a switch, bathing the ice in water has set the ice-meltage in motion so speed and efficiency is crucial in the next few steps. This is why everything else is already prepared.
8.) Measure 80 ml. of gin into the pitcher.
9.) Measure 10 ml. of vermouth into the pitcher.
10.) Stir quickly with a bar spoon perhaps thirty times.
11.) Throw out the ice cube in the cocktail glass and strain the martini into it.
12.) Drop the olive in and squeeze a piece of lemon peel over the top of it for the tiniest hint of zest. (Don't drop it into the drink, though.)
13.) Consume quickly, "while it's still laughing at you," as someone once said.

Earlier I wrote that I admired the Japanese cocktail process but not the product. I now see that was misguided. Learning how to make a dry martini showed me that the process is the product. They are indistinguishable. The product is not possible without the process. It is the final, inevitable step.

I may take issue with some recipes (I still don't think that a gin and tonic should be five parts tonic, sorry) but the execution is quietly dazzling. To watch the care with which a Japanese bartender simply stirs a cocktail is inspiring. Each step is performed with a reverence that approaches worship of classic cocktail culture. The Japanese never really got past the sensibilities of the Fifties and every detail pays homage to the old ways, down to their retro glass martini pitchers. They order Gin Rickeys, White Ladies, and Brandy Alexanders. Garnishes are minimal. Martinis are always gin, always contain vermouth, and are always stirred. Always.

According to the old manuals a delicious cocktail is, above all, cold and pure. These two traits are somewhat mutually exclusive. It's easy to chill liquor by adding ice and shaking it, but the ice melts and dilutes the martini. One could just keep the liquor on ice but a small amount of water is actually desirous to develop the flavors and cut the bite of the liquor. (Plus it's cheating.) The proper ratio of gin:vermouth:water is sacred to some. A badly-made martini can ruin an evening; a well-made one can save lives. So the Japanese make martinis as cold and pure as they damn well can.

Enter the Japanese martini process. What I took for an excessive emphasis on methodology is actually the dedicated pursuit of a technique that produces what they believe to be the best martini possible. Each step is important and must be done perfectly; carelessness is not worth doing. The goal is perfection, and perfection doesn't happen by accident. To think you can accidentally make a perfectly pure, cold martini is as ridiculous as thinking that Tokyo Tower was built by holding a bunch of girders in a circle and letting them fall against each other.

Perfect products are possible only through perfect processes and a hell of a lot of effort. In the Japanese dry martini process every step exists for a reason and each one is important. It reminds me of yoga, properly locking each joint into the pose, step by step, to create a mind-boggling union of geometry and kinesthetics. One cannot look at a picture and recreate a pose; yoga poses are only possible through a rigorous and difficult process. If done wrong the pose will be shaky and awkward, and if the yogi is me he will fall over.

Or maybe it reminds me of tying knots, firmly securing each loop before moving on to the next. If tied correctly, the knot will be solid and tight. If tied carelessly or ineptly the knot will be loose and maybe fall apart. In any process, each step must be executed well or the process is pointless and so, by extension, is the product. And why do something you don't care about?

Each detail is important. It may seem unimportant to cut a lime perfectly, but it's not. How else to ensure a consistent amount of lime juice goes in each drink? The Japanese take the time needed to do a thing well, favoring precision over speed. I understand why: I spent five years at a drum kit with Floyd Thompson grumbling, "Do it slow until it's perfect--then go faster." Speed comes by practicing until smooth. Smoothly executing a complicated process is as fast as blundering through a simple one.

Sloppiness is not worth practicing at any speed. It is tempting to move quickly at the expense of precision, but handle things roughly and they will break. Move too fast and cause spills. Build drinks hastily and they must be remade. Sloppiness sacrifices quality for the illusion of speed because it creates more messes to clean and more errors to fix. It is better to do one thing perfectly than two things sloppily. I wish I could compare, in my life, the amount of time I have spent actually doing things against the time I have spent cleaning up sloppiness or redoing mistakes. Actually, I take that back: it would be too depressing.

To achieve perfection it is important to get things right the first time. This is illustrated by the dry martini method. If, for instance, I have don't have the gin, vermouth and cocktail glass ready beforehand then I will waste precious time scrambling to get these items from the fridge as the ice rapidly melts. The difference might be so subtle the drinker does not realize it, but I know that the martini is not as cold and pure as it could have been. My mental sloppiness has tarnished the drink.

A product is only as good as the maker's mental and physical abilities, so the proper state of mind is essential. The mind must not wander from the task at hand. The body must move as smoothly as possible, for every unnecessary movement, every dropped olive, every slammed bottle distracts the mind and slows the process. If I follow the process then I can serve the drink with confidence that it is the best I can possibly make. This is as good a definition of "perfection" as I can think of.


* All this is not to say that Japanese bars don't have their flaws. They do, and there are many cocktails I would prefer to drink in Minneapolis over Tokyo. But for their faults, I am beginning to understand why they are so particular about the minutiae. I hope the above explained why.

Murse Alert!

I'd like to take a moment talk about (what else?) purses.

Because the Japanese love them some purses. Japanese women love purses, of course, the way a fat kid loves cake. Outrageous purses and subdued purses, high-tech purses and fuzzy hippie purses like the sewn-up skin of a Lorax.

Know who else loves purses? Japanese men. They love purses, fanny packs, briefcases, messenger bags and backpacks. They love cell phone purses to carry on their belts and they love canvas shopping bags to carry over their shoulder like your mother did in the Seventies. Japanese guys are, by many American standards, gay as hell. Except they're not. They just really like purses.

An entire floor in the department store Tokyu Hands is devoted to various personal cargo transportation solutions. Tiny pouches on turquoise-studded straps retail for two hundred dollars. (The Japanese can't seem to get over their turquoise.) A company called Agility makes $250 suede chalk bags for rock climbers, though of course they're used for cell phones and business cards. The Porter section alone was as large as the men's shoe department of Minneapolis Macy's. There was an entire wall of hard-shell backpacks: smooth, ridged plastic cases resembling Yakima car boxes. Their straps were detachable, and could be fastened in various ways so that backpack was upright, horizontal, or worn like a shoulder bag.

I was really intrigued by the offerings of a company called Tagger. Their customizable messenger bags are sold in separate pieces: strap, bag and top flap were all sold separately. The top flaps were held onto the bag by velcro on both sides: they could be opened from the right or the left, or the flap could be completely detached. There were dozens of different colors and patterns so the Japanese kids could clash in a different way every day of the week.

There was another brand that specialized in bags sold in zippered segments of various colors. Beginning with the bottom piece, which is sewn shut at the bottom, new segments are zipped on, creating a bag as tall and multi-hued as one could hope for. The only problem is that they're damn ugly. Another company sold heavy-duty messenger bags assembled with big rivets, with waterproof zippers whose tabs stuck out like silver tongues from rubber lips.

Japanese people love their fanny packs, too. They use them to carry phones, iPods, etc.* But they're not the purple nylon numbers you see at the State Fair. (Although you can buy those too.) They are small pouches intended to hang from the belt loops of a pair of designer jeans. Alternately you can wear them around your waist or over your shoulder using the tiny strap that's included. Gaysville.

These bags are so varied it's impossible to make a single generalization about them. They can be leather, pleather, plastic or canvas; studded with jewels, plain and minimal or patterned and embroidered; large and bulging with pockets, slim and low-profile or only big enough for a condom and some change. They cost anywhere from seven dollars to three hundred dollars. Everyone has a few, it seems. Tough-looking dudes covered in tattoos will strut around with a little leather fanny pack bouncing against their right buttock. There's one for every conceivable style and occasion. They are as integral to Japanese fashion as baseball caps are to American fashion.

A more temporary fad (I hope) are these crazy double-waisted jeans that I occasionally see men wearing. Imagine a guy wearing a pair of jeans. Now imagine him stepping into a second pair of jeans and pulling them up until they just barely reach his back pockets. These double jeans have that effect. The makers sew the top three inches of one pair of jeans into a second pair of jeans. Usually the lower pair has a bunch of different-colored belt loops sewn onto the waist--or what would be the waist if they weren't hanging several inches below a second waist. It make me wonder how many more pair of jeans are underneath that pair. It's a weird look, like they're always falling off, The Five Hundred Jeans of Bartholomew Cubbins. I don't get it, that's for sure. What would appear, to me, to be ridiculous is apparently pretty cool to some guys. I wonder if it's one of those things that I'll only get several years after it's not cool anymore.

In a different clothing store I saw something slightly similar: a black hooded sweatshirt with another hooded sweatshirt sewn into it. It gave the effect of wearing two hoodies. Now that in itself is nothing new, but I had a problem with the fact that there wasn't actually a second hoodie inside. There were two zippers, two cuffs, and two hoods sewn on at the edges, but, for instance, in the back there was only one layer of fabric. I considered that to be affectation, which as a rule I don't really like. Nor was this hoodie particularly well-made. It looked like it would survive about two washings. But these were apparently a pretty hot item for that store. Silly, cheap crap, I guess, is the new black.

Non-Cocktail Geeks Can Skip This

Wednesday was my first day at the Roppongi Hills Club. It was intense. It's all in Japanese, for one thing. I'm the only white person in the place, except for two executive managers that I never see. That is a challenge, but not as big as I expected. It's simply a matter of acquiring the necessary vocabulary and phrases used in restaurants.

It's priceless, in terms of Japanese practice. For instance, Berlitz has a theory of "task-based learning" that they apply to their English lesson plans. The idea is that forcing the learner to accomplish something in the target language, like getting from point A to B on a map, will teach them far more than, for instance, rote repetition of common phrases. Task-based learning? Try learning how to work in a Japanese bar. Every few sentences is a new word acquired, whether they're showing me where to put polished glasses or how to mix a cosmo.

Yeah, mix a cosmo. I had to "learn" how to mix a cosmopolitan yesterday. Because I don't know how, not Japanese-style, anyway. In fact, I have to relearn almost every drink in the book, from gin and tonic onwards. Often the ingredients are the same but the proportions are quite different. Smaller, for one thing: the cosmopolitans came about halfway up the nine-ounce martini glass, mostly because the recipe skimped on vodka.

And they jigger everything. For those who didn't know, a jigger is a double-sided bar measuring cup. In Minneapolis I mostly saw bartenders free-pour (though jiggers aren't uncommon). It's an intangible art, free-pouring, all about feel. You have to use the Force, sensing quantities by the weight of the shaker, the smell of the mix, the rising pitch of the ice rattling in the shaker. It's all very inexact and I daresay that bartenders' pours are frequently off, myself included. The consistency isn't perfect but I usually think that's OK.

In Roppongi Hills it is decidedly not OK. Not only do they measure absolutely everything to the milligram, they serve some miserly drinks. A shot of whiskey is 30 milliliters. Gin and vodka are 40 ml. 30 ml. of Jameson--barely an ounce--is ¥1680, or about $16. No one gets a heavy pour. No one gets anything for free. I think that's partly due to a non-tipping culture: no one tries to give hookups for a better tip. And I applaud that, in a way. With alcohol pours so rigidly measured and adhered to they can track costs to a daunting degree. I'm sure they can tell to within a few ounces how much alcohol was wasted on a given night.

They track glassware fanatically, too. I found a pilsner glass with a chip on the rim when it came out of the washer. I just shrugged. But when I mentioned it to Teranaka, the bartender who was training me, he immediately produced a "Breakage Report Form" and I had to fill out my name, the item, and how it was broken. I wrote, "Rim chipped during washing." He looked my form over and then suggested I write a more detailed explanation so I added, "Item in question was knocked over by the jets of the steam washer, causing the rim to chip slightly." He nodded and brought it to a manager for a signature. The manager looked at the form, read it thoroughly, thought it over for a moment, and, as I started to sweat a little bit, signed it. (Imagine my consternation later that night when I snapped off the thin rim of a water glass while polishing it.)

Attention to detail is the rule here. Fifty-One, the bar where I'm working, is the cleanest bar I've ever seen, perhaps the cleanest bar on the planet. Spotless. Everything has a place and nothing is ever out of place. There is no clutter. This is a country that knows how to use space.

Even the lemons and limes. Tera cuts them into perfect segments and then carefully arranges them in a little tin box so the wedges nestle between each other as perfectly as cogs' teeth. In Minneapolis I would first lop off the ends off a lemon (the north and south poles, the "nipples") then cut it into eighths. Tera does the opposite. He cuts it into eighths then trims the ends off of each segment individually, finally eviscerating the pith in the center. This method takes exactly eight times as long as the method I used in Minneapolis, but makes sure each segment gets trimmed perfectly. When I mentioned the difference in approach he merely said, "Yeah, your way is easier, huh?" But I thought I detected a smile.

It almost seems like the process is more important than the product. The process is about intangibles, tiny subtle details carefully observed. Teranaka squeezes limes between a tiny pair of bird-footed tongs rather than using his fingers. When he stirs a drink he always daubs the tip of the bar spoon dry on a little white cloth first, then gives the drink three quick stirs, lifting the ice with the spoon after each stir to shift the contents of the glass. Every methodical step is quick, smooth and unconscious. It's ingrained in him to work carefully and he rarely spills. He works quickly despite all the extra steps.

Ice is a perfect example. Ice is incredible in good Japanese bars. They buy it in bags of big clear glaciers so cold they stick to your fingers, and bartenders painstakingly arrange them in the glass. You know you're going to get a good drink when you see the bartender picking through big rocks of ice with a pair of tongs, searching for the perfect chunk rather than just scooping them into a glass indiscriminately.

Yet as admirable as the process is, I cannot admire the product to the same extent. Roppongi Hills's recipes are surprisingly poor, to my eye. Gin and tonics are 1/4 or 1/5 gin. Cosmopolitans are 1/3 vodka and 2/3 cranberry, lime and Cointreau. Mojitos are hardly muddled at all, and use a paucity of mind leaves. Garnishes are uninspired. These are, of course, matters of personal taste and regional variation and since I'm working in their bar I will try to learn their way.

It was a lot to swallow when they told me to shake drinks differently, though. Shaking a cocktail is something I've always done in a sort of side-arm whipping motion. I had my reasons for feeling it is a superior shake, which I will spare my gentle readers. Japanese bartenders, needless to say, shake a cocktail completely differently. I guess I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment, because when the first cosmopolitan of the night came up I felt compelled to shake it my way. I knew they would correct me immediately but I did it anyway (partly because I can't shake their way very well).

Sure enough, after I had sent out the cosmo a manager immediately came over and asked me to shake drinks like Japanese bartenders. I surprised myself by swallowing my argument and agreeing without hesitation, but inside I was frustrated. I had brought it upon myself, though. Tera seemed to think I was completely clueless about shaking drinks. By his standards, I suppose I am. He was a bit cocky about it--as cocky as they ever get, which is to say still pretty polite. "Watch my shake," he said, and demonstrated the Japanese way.

The Japanese cocktail shake is an impressive thing, I will admit. After Wednesday night I decided I was going to damn well learn it, so I asked a few bartenders to show it to me. I must say--I'm almost a convert. The method I've seen here is the "hard shake," a semi-legendary method highly regarded by Japanese bartenders and more or less unheard of anywhere else. In Japan, devotion to the hard shake seems almost religious. Shaking is the very essence of mixing a drink, the fundamental art, so correct execution separates the master bartender from the peons.

The hard shake method excels, supposedly, at mixing ingredients of different weights, like cream or egg white, with liquor. Drinks made with the hard shake are very frothy. In addition it's supposed to simply make drinks taste better by adding better bubbles to the mix. So say the Japanese, anyway, and they're the ones paying me.

The basic idea is this. The bartender holds a cobbler shaker with only five fingertips to minimize skin contact with the shaker. This transfers as little heat as possible through the metal and thus melts the ice only minimally. This is very important. Cradling the shaker gingerly but firmly the bartender starts to rock it back and forth by snapping the wrists up and down. In capable hands it is like watching a percussionist play. The bartender starts slowly but soon the shaker is a little furious blur in their hands. Japanese bartenders flap their arms a little bit, too, which looks silly.

The shaker hardly moves--it shouldn't travel farther than about six inches in any direction--and this allows bartenders to get it up to impressive speeds. The shaker isn't moving much but the ice inside is slamming against the sides like crazy. The hard shake method creates a distinctive metallic "crack" sound which has a very musical quality. I think this happens when the method is so cleanly executed that the contents hit the ends of the shaker as a single piece, rather than as a collection of loose fragments. Finally there is the post-coital deceleration and then the pour. After pouring his drink, Teranaka snapped the shaker to the side with a flourish equivalent to a gymnast's bow.

Yet even the admirable Teranaka had his flaws. When he pulled the shaker to the side he splashed me with liquor. I was surprised by the sloppiness because everything else was perfect. Perhaps it was a case of overconfidence. But he also did some things that were simply wrong. Moscow Mules are supposed to be made with ginger ale, for instance, not soda water. It's been that way since the drink was invented for Smirnoff in the Forties. Yet Tera made Moscow Mules with soda, for some reason. And a proper cosmopolitan is made with lemon vodka (or very occasionally normal vodka), yet Tera had me make cosmos with blackcurrant vodka because we had a lot of it in the liquor room. I later looked these up in the Japan Bartender's Association book (a volume found in every bar in Japan) to make sure--he was just plain wrong. Even Roppongi Hills Club's own official recipes didn't agree with him on these.

This just proves to me that Japanese bars aren't intimidatingly perfect, just different. I'm not sure how much I buy into the fetishization of the hard shake, for instance, but it's worth learning since I'm here. And although the technique is mostly flawless, I'm not convinced that the originality or overall quality of cocktails here rival what they're doing in, for instance, New York or London. Japanese bartenders are technicians, surgeons and chemists first, artists second. I've been searching for some kind of cultural metaphor in all this but I'm not coming up with anything. Until I do, let's leave it at: wax on, wax off.

In the Heart of the Great Nanpou Tree

I am inspired by the Japanese version of Excellence. I see people completely devoted to their craft, singlemindedly striving to do it the best they can no matter how humble the pursuit. Like anywhere, of course, there are plenty of examples of mediocrity in Japan. But sometimes I will see someone--bartender, soba maker, sushi chef--who is very, very good at what they do. Devotion and humility are writ large in their posture and demeanor. Those two attributes are about as good a definition of excellence as I can think of.

Shimokitazawa is a cool neighborhood to live in because I see lots of people doing things they seem to enjoy and getting by modestly but, conceivably, happily. There's a fashion-design boutique down the street called Meme. It's a spare studio with a big mirror, a rack of clothes hanging from the ceiling by wires, a mannequin with various half-finished bits of clothing pinned to it, and a drafting table.

There are usually Japanese hipsters standing inside discussing mannequins while one of them slouches in front of a MacBook, working. When they're not inside they're drinking wine on their front step. I get the impression it's a husband and wife who design the clothes and every evening one or another of their friends drops by to hang out. Whether or not their label ever makes it to a storefront on a major street in Harajuku remains to be seen. It's possible, but they seem more concerned with enjoying life and trying to do something well--make clothes, in this case.

A little further down there's a little workshop where two young guys are constantly working with tiny tools and bits of wire and magnifying lenses. I still have no idea what they do but it looks like they're repairing eighteenth-century watches or something. And every so often I'll walk past and they'll be sitting outside with a pizza, chuckling about something. Japan is so dense that only those who have really made it can afford an arty, minimalist Ginza boutique with polished wood floors and a zen garden in the courtyard. The eighteenth-century watch guys work in a steampunk laboratory the size of an American walk-in closet. But they probably are experts at whatever they do and I think that is its own kind of success.

The other day I had coffee with a friend in a very cool coffeeshop. It was a cozy, eccentric place with lots of dark wood; I felt like we were nestled into the roots of a huge tree. The owner, an old man with smeared bifocals, had a cool coffee setup: a rack of bunsen burners with glass percolating tubes, a coffee lab. He made each cup individually and in his movements I got the sense that this man had spent years learning how to perfect his coffee. It was good coffee, of course, but what impressed me the most was his air of dedication.

On the walls were were African masks, random scraps of paper, Miles Davis posters, pictures of cats. Books and magazines were stacked everywhere. It was very peaceful. My friend observed that time flows differently in places like this and I realized that he was right. Tokyo is Tokyo: bustling, artificial, noisy, hectic. But then you open the door and walk in and almost instantly relax. You're no longer in Tokyo. You're in the Heart of the Great Nanpou Tree.

There is something noble about the pursuit of excellence, something rewarding in a way that being a mediocre rich guy can never really compensate for. Of course, the real challenge is to figure out how to get rich while pursuing excellence. But I suppose that misses the point a bit, doesn't it?

Urban White Noise

I've been here a month and a day and I can hardly begin to grasp Tokyo.

To get to Kamasuzaka onsen took about two and a half hours out of downtown by rapid-express train, and it was only after the first hour that I saw anything remotely like countryside. It was nice to get out of Tokyo last weekend, although I was probably technically still in Tokyo. Tokyo is so large it is both city and prefecture. Nevertheless, two and a half hours out of the metropolis I was finally surrounded by greenery.

It was almost suspiciously picturesque. I saw rice fields and bamboo forests and tiny, furry mountains. Japan is about 70% mountainous, but I was in a surprisingly flat region. Across miles of level fields I could see the occasional bamboo-feathered hill jutting out of the mist. In the midst of this countryside I passed little Japanese townships with populations larger than St. Paul.

Most of these remote towns were ancient. In the city it is easy to overlook Japan's history because they've covered the old wood and stone in shiny chrome--what little remained after the war. But in the rural neighborhoods, where tiny wooden houses like bonsai fortresses outnumber the convenience stores and pachinko parlors, it's a different country.

These neighborhoods are Old Japan, built to the specs of centuries past. Houses stand so close to the high stone walls that their tiled eaves overhang. Their gardens are smooth white gravel, craggy boulders and trees pruned like puffs of smoke. Maybe, hidden away, a shrine with an alcove for incense. They are small and well tended, intended for private enjoyment rather than public display. Of course, the well-preserved, quaint neighborhoods were probably built by wealthy families. The less desirable neighborhoods are ramshackle labyrinths built from a patchwork of rusted corrugated metal and scrap wood covered in peeling paint. Some of the poorer houses would fall over if I leaned on them hard.

Between these villages and the city there's a vast expanse of urban white noise. I passed through drab factory towns, miles of stained concrete with utilitarian signs ("Iwata Compressor") and a mind-boggling canopy of power lines overhead. Tiny cars filled huge parking lots on a Saturday evening. Tokyo is so large that when a certain area is devoted to a specific industry there's a lot of that industry. The areas of concentration in Tokyo are intriguing because they bespeak the size of the city that could demand so much of anything.

I changed trains at a station called Utsunomiya, a city of metal and dust that seemed to exist only because several major rail lines converged there. I've never seen anything so simultaneously barren and bustling as those five platforms teeming with people waiting for trains to somewhere else. Utter desolation was close at hand. I was sure I would find tumbleweeds and stray dogs outside the station. Surrounding Utsunomiya were acres of train hangars, dead-end tracks and switchbacks for maneuvering locomotives. Webs of powerlines met webs of rails at the horizon. When I finally pulled out of Utsunomiya I saw, beyond Japan Rail's bunkers, sunset on a hazy gray city whose lights still hadn't come on.

I passed through proletariat bedroom communities of tenements housing at least a thousand people each. In this quintessentially Asian suburbia, clusters of off-white hives almost thirty stories tall loom large as skyscrapers. Each hive is a double-sided coin locker of narrow apartments. The apartments have a single door and window which open onto communal balconies that serve as an entire floor's hallway. From afar, the door and windows across the faces of these vertical villages blend into dense, uniform patterns.

Tokyo is a city struggling with its own mass. It's an obese man whose bulk is crushing his own arteries. Japanese people rarely so much as hug, yet their subways are civilized moshpits where frantic citizens stuff themselves into already-stifling trains as the doors shut on them. There's a very specific technique to it. They approach the door, which is already bristling with arms and umbrellas, and turn around. Then they back into the train, compacting the mass of people behind them. They will brace against the doorframe and force themselves in when it's really crowded.

Against all expectation I find myself wishing I was living in the coutryside I saw last weekend, amidst rice and trees and mountains. This city has me craving organica: blues, folk, jazz, soul. The acclimation process continues...

pH

XXX NAKED JAPANESE MEN XXX REAL LIVE WET HOT XXX

I am hesitant to make generalizations about Japan because many people reading this have far more experience in Japan than I do. I have this sense that they're out there making snarky lists of my errors in a little black book with a padlock on it. Like when I said that the Japanese don't understand minimalism a few weeks ago? Oops. Of course the Japanese understand minimalism. Just look at their food. They all but invented it, whatever Steve Jobs may claim. But the day I wrote that, I had just been exposed to colors that aren't even in the optical spectrum and had come back from Harajuku reeling. I had to watch a silent movie to get my wits together. Though the Japanese understand minimalism they are also masters of multisensory assault, it seems. Duplicitous bastards.

The point is that there are going to be the inevitable exceptions to my observations and I am often wrong. So get over it, black-book-writers. Whew. I feel much better.

Uh, so yeah, naked Japanese men? Well, yes. I went to an onsen this weekend. I think most of you may have heard about onsen, but maybe that's just me assuming again, like I assumed everyone knew what Roppongi was. So for the rest of you: an onsen is a Japanese public bath fed by a hot spring. Japanese custom is to thoroughly wash in the adjacent showers before entering the bath. God help the poor gaijin who sullies the bath water.

The bath, which accommodates at least a dozen, is typically a big stone pool in a big stone chamber filled with steam. The chamber is filled with steam because the water is unimaginably hot, often as high as 45º C (113º F). To the uninitiated such temperatures are tolerable for about five minutes. I am definitely one of the uninitiated and before long I have to climb out of the hellish pit, dizzy and rubbery. My vision inevitably goes black for a moment and I am forced hang onto a nearby wall or naked Japanese man to avoid falling over.

The onsen I went to this weekend wasn't that hot. In fact, it was almost tepid. I was disappointed because there's something soothing about the near-death experience of a really hot onsen. When you get out the volume has been turned down on everything else and your body is pleasantly painful and pink. And even though 113º F probably isn't hot enough to kill anything in the water except me, really hot bath water at least feels sanitary. The onsen I went to should have had complimentary petri dishes next to the guest towels, because I worry that there was a thriving mini-Tokyo of bacteria in the lukewarm water. The water was a bit slimy, too, due to the spring water's naturally high alkaline levels. At least I hope that's why, but maybe it was just from all the cholera floating around in there.

The spectacular outdoor bath more than made up for whatever communicable diseases I picked up this weekend. There are far worse things in life than sitting up to one's neck in a hot spring in the rain, surrounded by pine trees. It felt like a picture in a Japanese travel brochure, except the photographer would have probably made the bathers take the towels off their heads because they look ridiculous.

The towel is for modesty's sake: it's to hold in front of their bits when walking around the bath. When they get into the water they often fold the towel and put it on their head in a little pile. Historically baths were unisex but in recent times most onsen have moved towards same-sex baths. When I think of unisex baths I think of the Japanese Women's Olympic Volleyball Team, but after seeing some of the little old ladies who were staying in our inn I was grateful for this segregation.

Onsens often have a Japanese-style inn on the premises and are a good vacation destination. Some onsen are lavish affairs, like Japanese spas. The Japanese make a weekend of it, drinking and feasting and bathing to excess with extended family and friends. It's a good group activity: who doesn't enjoy watching their naked, sweating great-uncle pass out when he tries to get out of the bath? Onsen are also a good home base for Japanese sightseers. They go and see the local attractions (other onsen) during the day. They sample the local delicacies, which are usually various kinds of bean paste with a twist: it's wrapped in a maple leaf, or something. Then they return to their bath house, wash off the dust from a hard day touring bath houses, and prop up the occasional staggering white guy mid-faint. Afterwards, pink and happy in their rooms, they proceed to drink everything they can find, send for more, drink that, and start telling erotic jokes* about how fried chicken looks like testicles.

Beats driving three days to see the world's biggest ear of corn any day.



*Japanese humor is not incompatible with Western humor. But Japanese jokes are completely incompatible as far as I've seen. They're usually puns or one-liners that twist the Japanese language and presuppose an extensive knowledge of Japanese cultural history. For instance, "I will soon (go to New York/take a bath.)" Or there's the classic:
Q: Do you know how to build a fence?
A: (shrug)
Hilarious.

Next time I'm coming on a corporate expense account.

It appears I need to buy an ironing board. We have an iron but no board, and I can't decipher our tiny washing machine's buttons well enough to turn off the "super-wrinkle" cycle. I could alternately get my clothes laundered at a cost of about six dollars per shirt. The local cleaners insist that any cheaper laundering will ruin the shirts completely and unfortunately I believe them.

I also probably need to buy a clothesline as there's no dryer. More hangers, as well, and a wheeled rack to hang things from. The "closet" that my room boasts is large enough for about six shirts if they've been ironed completely flat. Even then it's so shallow that it will crush the sleeves when I close the door. Though my apartment is furnished I still have had to replace many things that I couldn't bring with me. I hope the Necessity Replacement Phase is almost over but something tells me it's just begun.

The problem is larger than simply buying stuff. Of course, when my income's been halved and cost of living has been (at least) doubled, money is a big part of it. But it's a challenge just to solve problems whose solutions were self-evident in the Cities. This began my first night here, when I was finally done unpacking at one in the morning. I was about to go to bed when I realized: sheets and blankets? There have been many, many forehead-smiting moments like that. Usually they revolve around minutiae. Laundry is a big challenge, as is keeping my room anything like organized: I'll need to buy some shelving and cabinets before long--and then where the hell will I put them?

I have been forced to develop new routines for mundane tasks. It's all petty stuff, but the constant barrage of inconvenience wears me down at times. I look forward to when I have figured out all the trifling problems and my life settles down a little more. I would love a day during which I don't wonder "So now what the hell do I do?"

Another big one is food. Eating cheaply has proved all but impossible. I was eating every meal out during my first week, but started making stuff at home to save money. Lo and behold, that's expensive too. Good luck making a meal for less than $5. Though it goes against common sense, eating out seems cheaper than cooking, and either way I'm going broke fast. The only way to avoid this is to eat absurdly boring food. White rice and... well, maybe some kimchee or something if I'm lucky. And forget about eating healthy. Vegetables and fruit are absurdly expensive for the most part. The most I can hope for is to eat reasonably un-unhealthy.

I'm sure I'm missing many possibilities for cheap, healthy, tasty meals, but how would I know? I can hardly read labels. Shopping for anything takes two to four times longer than it would in Minneapolis. For me it's usually a process of wandering around aimlessly hoping the sought-after item falls off the shelf and onto the floor in front of me. After a few minutes of this, when the staff starts trailing me like a shoplifter, I finally go and ask for help.

When I finally do get home with the miso paste, or whatever, I then have to prepare it. This involves more label-reading. Usually I sit there with my electronic dictionary and a bewildered, hateful expression, moving my lips soundlessly as I try to decipher directions. Reading them usually takes longer than actually cooking the item in question, and as often as not I prepare it wrong anyway.

Of course, it's not all that bad. One of the best ways to eat is to get a big bowl of rice and several small side dishes: kimchee, spinach, mushrooms, carrots, sausages, miso soup, seafood, whatever, prepared simply and easily while the rice cooks. As one might expect, Japanese and other Asian foods can be gotten at a somewhat reasonable price. Unfortunately I have no idea how to make many of them. Noodles are plentiful and cheap. Seafood is plentiful but less cheap. Chicken is cheap but don't even think about red meat unless it's a special occasion. Things like spinach, alfalfa sprouts, avocados, apples and bananas, are reasonably priced, as is bread.

Grapes are about four to six dollars for perhaps 20 grapes. Of course, they're also enormous and plump and delicious. In addition, the Japanese--who abhor skins on most fruit and peel everything--have managed to breed grapes that just pop out of their skin when you bite into them. Strawberries are ridiculous; I once saw a box of twenty strawberries for thirty dollars, but of course they were the most flawless examples of strawberryhood I'd ever seen. I haven't seen a melon for less than fifteen dollars and I believe that's cheap. Et cetera.

These are just the things I recognize. At least half of my neighborhood grocery store resembles an alien biology lab. There are bizarre vegetables I don't recognize and fish bits I didn't know existed. There are bags of different colored mush and boxes of pastes and packets containing flakes of dried matter. Many of these things would be delicious if I could figure out how they're meant to be prepared.

If anyone know any simple, quick recipes I could use, I'm taking suggestions. Preferably something compatible with rice.

The sun is shining.

Yes it is. Today is a good day. I just finished work for the day and enjoyed a walk through the city with a liter of cold green tea. There are so many different kinds of tea here, about six different choices in each vending machine, and it's hard for me to tell them apart. The tastes are different of course, but I'm not sure why or how. There's oolong, green, Chinese green, jasmine, barley tea, tea made with rice, autumn tea, and many more. As a rule they're all very light and refreshing.

Tea in hand, I walked from Roppongi to Aoyama 1-Chome. It was hot. Summer is still clinging on, and I was sweating a bit by the time I got to the subway. Tokyo is very hilly, so my walk involved lots of ascending and descending, mostly past restaurants and clothing stores. It goes without saying that they were expensive. There were tapas restaurants, Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, and dozens and dozens of Japanese restaurants. Usually the Japanese restaurants have deceptively humble decor and seem to specialize in something--say, sukiyaki.

I miss the days of Rotary when people would take me to restaurants like this all the time.I wasn't really aware enough to appreciate it at the time. I didn't really understand what they were treating me to in the hopes that some iota of Japanese culture would penetrate the space between my headphones. Oh, I have some regrets about that. There I was, surrrounded by Japanese people speaking Japanese to me and giving, giving, giving, and all I wanted to do was hang out with my English-speaking friends (and Naoko, of course) and drink. I hope to make up for that now. I believe in redemption. So far my studying is going well, and I have plans. I always have a plan.

Today I worked at the LC in Roppongi for six lessons. It was an early Saturday morning, eight-thirty to be exact, but I was out by 3:15 so I can't complain. I have Sundays off and Monday is a holiday, Respect for the Elderly Day--and I get paid! Paid holidays a first for me and my evening is a cheery one. On the way home I bought two big Kirin beers for later.

I think the Berlitz teachers I trained with are getting together tonight for drinks. I can see it all starting again: fourteen foreigners are thrown together in a strange city and immediately become friends because it's convenient and they speak the same language. The same as Rotary was. I want none of it. Those guys were OK, but damn. If I wanted to hang out with English speakers I would have stayed in Minneapolis.

In fact, I'm kind of shocked by some my coworkers. I met someone who has been here seven years and can hardly speak the language--in fact, several people. I met someone who despises Japanese food, all of it, even after four years here, and will eat little aside from Wendy's. Some constantly complain about their job and all the terrible things about it. Some have unmasked contempt for the Japanese students who pay their bills. Many people complain about Japan and the various ways Japanese food, culture, language and custom are different from their own. Everyone bitches constantly, in fact, though many work less than eight hours a day. After talking to Japanese people who work twelve hours a day, I want to throttle the ungrateful bastard who complains because her student actually showed up for a lesson. If anything it's inspiring me to shut up and keep positive. I just hope the ceaseless moaning doesn't rub off on me.

So tonight I'm going to go out on my own and maybe try to make some Japanese friends. I'm going to stick around Shimokitazawa instead of going downtown. Downtown would be fun and all, but the trains stop at midnight and while that's a bit early, I don't really feel like staying out all night, either. I'll get to know Shimokitazawa a little bit, which is a great area anyway. There's a place called Bird Cafe where I've gone a few times and chatted with the bartender and his friends who hang out there. I'll probably start there and then find out where to go for a good show. I could do some live music and a few beers. No work tomorrow or Monday--sounds like a good weekend.

It's the Pip Hanson Show, The Book, The Musical: Now a Major Motion Picture!

I am sitting in an internet cafe drinking Chinese tea. Through the store windows I can see Japanese rain and Japanese traffic. The cafe (which has a full bar) has a covered patio with plastic transparent plastic curtains in the back so people are still able to sit outside. At one patio table sits a girl with a green mesh trucker cap with a silver sequined front. My waitress is tiny and cute and has very short hair. I am in love with her, of course, but like most Tokyo girls she is so jaded and bored of gaijin that I might as well be covered in guano. Or maybe that is just her inscrutable Asian countenance.

The keyboard is covered in Japanese as well as English and the layout is different; the space bar is about two keys long and the key next to it switches the keyboard over to Japanese. While typing I will hit the key where I think the space bar should be and suddenly二里利故意手巣にかに幹に身町背地味いとい midsentence.* Also I cannot seem to find the apostrophe no matter how I search, so I need to be creative with my wording. No contractions today, sorry.

I am waiting for my second block of lessons to begin in about an hour, at 6:15 p.m. Yes, my second block of lessons. I have what some might consider the schedule from hell: Begin work at 8:25 a.m. Work for three hours. Then a six and a half hour break, only to return at 6:15 and teach for another three hours. This is my schedule four days a week; On Saturday I have a shorter break and teach for seven or eight hours. I have Sunday and Wednesday off. Everyone says split shifts suck but though it's not ideal, I don't think it will be so bad. In six hours I can go home, eat some lunch, study some Japanese, and take a nap. Maybe even prepare for my evening's lessons, though no one else does in my Language Center.

Teaching English is not hard. The training made it seem really hard, applying confusing methodology and linguistic theory to a job that is not much more than speaking slowly to people who barely understand you. But it is not hard. The toughest part, I am told, is staying awake; I imagine that will come in a month or so when I am used to everything. But today was my first day in the field and it went fine (the first half). There will be a wrinkle or two, but not for long.

Nevertheless I am not excited about this job. It is easy to see the where this road leads because I am surrounded with extreme examples of what ten years would be like at Berlitz. On the one hand, I have the bitter lifers who have been doing the same thing forever; on the other, the peppy cheerleaders who slowly climbed the company ladder because they think this is all so neat. Neither one is appealing because I cannot really be enthusiastic about this work.

Really, I don't think the job is so terrible. My schedule sucks because I am a rookie, but if I pay dues (though to use that phrase in this context makes my skin crawl) I will achieve seniority. My schedule will improve along with my salary (the latter minimally, I am sure). And the work is almost admirable. I had a distaste for teaching English that was hard to get over, but after watching the Japanese students I respect them for wanting to learn English. That makes the job a more bearable.

Eikaiwa (English conversation classes) is a big industry in Japan. Every single train station seems to have at least one outpost from one of the big eikaiwa companies, and downtown there are literally thousands of them. Can you imagine a thriving industry in America that teaches Spanish? Because I cannot. Of course many Americans learn another language, but there is no way an enormous percentage of the population would regularly attend Spanish conversation classes by choice. Yet every day Japanese students pack the classrooms of the eikaiwa, patiently and shyly studying their little textbooks. They come for various reasons, and not all by choice. Some are only here because their company will pay for it and give them a promotion if they can then pass a certain English test.

But many are here out of a genuine interest in the language. Maybe they come because they lived in, say, New Zealand twenty years ago for college; though they may never return, studying English keeps that memory alive. Maybe they want to forget the humdrum of life as a middle-class Japanese person for forty minutes a week before they return to their jobs, families and responsibilities. I admire their quiet fascination with life outside of Japan. My feeling is that English offers them a brief escape from Japanese life, which I can imagine would be stifling. Seeing this makes me a little sad, too.

During training I watched several lessons on a closed-circuit video camera. (Yes, there are cameras in the classrooms.) One student was a pleasant, soft-spoken man with thinning hair and a round face. He was wearing the standard-issue salaryman uniform: black suit with a white shirt, top button undone. The subject for the day was "budgets" so the instructor began by asking him about his own job. Is his department over or under budget every month? Is it ahead of or behind schedule? Etc. With modest pride the man, who worked at Mitsubishi, said that his department was always under budget and ahead of schedule. A successful ladder-climber at the top of his game. But when the instructor asked if he liked his job he sagged a bit and shook his head. "No... I don't... like job."

(I've found an apostrophe key! Hoozah.)

It makes the job more bearable to know that students like him must be getting something out of the lesson, enough to devote a lot of time and money to them. The lessons are expensive; Berlitz charges ¥340,000 for forty lessons. That's not quite $3400, and many students go through forty lessons in a month.

Despite the high cost of these lessons, the plush days of the Seventies and Eighties are over. From what I've read, teaching English in Japan used to be like picking bags of money off of low-hanging branches, with high demand and low supply. But the economy is not what it used to be and there is a larger supply of English teachers now. The average salary of an English teacher in Japan has remained the same for eighteen years, despite inflation.




And that's fine, I guess. I can't complain about anything in my life and I'm going to try not to start now. Without going into too much detail (I'm about to go to bed) I will say that things are a bit rough right now. The past nine days have been a rude awakening of several kinds, and there are some lean times in my future. I'll leave it at that. And if that's all that's wrong with life than I should be grateful. Mind you, going home is not even a consideration. Instead I'm determined to improve my situation, however I have to do that. I'll leave it at that and try to elaborate later. Love to all of you.

pH




*For those of you who can't read Japanese, that was gibberish. It was simply the result of typing, in English, "I will be writing in Japanese" after hitting the magic button.

Gwen Stefani was right, as usual

So far I have found that my recreational activities are broken down into roughly two categories: spending money and walking around. When I'm not walking, I'm spending money. Even if I just want to stop walking and sit down I have to spend money, because there is nowhere to sit in Tokyo that isn't the property of a cafe or restaurant. Oh, sure, there's the occasional plaza with public benches. but these are few and far between. When I do find one there are Japanese people sitting on it because they have exactly the same idea as me.

The public benches are always crowded because Tokyo is always crowded. Everything is crowded at every hour of every day. This might be an exaggeration, but only slightly. Rush hour in the subways begins at six a.m . and never really stops. It swells and subsides and swells again until sometime after midnight, when the final trains are packed hip to hip (or worse) with red-faced salaryman leering without focusing at girls who ignore them intently. It's hard to imagine the extent of human traffic in Tokyo; no matter where I go I'm fighting crowds. And of course there is no fighting the crowd. It's useless to try because there's no end to it. I'm surrounded and outnumbered. My only option is to be zen about things and just shuffle slowly in long lines down the sidewalks of Shibuya or Harajuku, keeping an eye out for a place to sit which will inevitably be occupied by Japanese people.

I can cram myself between them and probably ruin their day in the process, or I can continue on to the local cafe, order an iced coffee and sit for exactly as long as the iced coffee lasts. I say that because depending on where I am there are usually people standing around holding trays and waiting for me to finish my drink and get the hell out of the coveted chair. Some cafes seem to have perpetual lines out the door. It sometimes just seems easier to keep walking.

I went to Harajuku today determined to walk off the pain in my knee caused by walking too much. Off I set, bum knee or no. Harajuku is everything it's cracked up to be and more; whereas Ginza provides posh shopping for adults, Harajuku is for the kids. I can't even guess how many clothing stores I saw today, catering to every imaginable culture, subculture, and untersubculture. The major streets are the domain of the big name labels, but the winding back alleys are packed with hundreds of tiny little stores catering to one fashion fetish or another. Make no mistake, these are not clothing stores, they're costume shops. Life in Japan seems like perpetual theater, at least for the fashion-conscious.

I saw fifteen-year old girls with black lacey French maid outfits. Glam-rock wannabes who clearly spent hours doing hair and makeup together just so they could swagger down the street together--and I'm talking about boys. Girls in matching blue and pink striped overalls with matching pink lame and rhinestone purses. Tattooed neo-tribal bike punks with dreadhawks, straight out of Mad Max. Lip piercings seem to be big right now. I saw many kids with twelve spikes, hooks and rings jutting from their mouths, heavy enough to make their lower lip droop. And hip-hop, hip-hop, hip-hop.

In Osaka I remember being repelled by the colors found in Japanese fashion. Now I find I love them. They are indeed repellent, but mesmerizingly so. Wild, clashy hip-hop sneakers with bizarre patterns are huge here, and I can't say I mind that. Clashing colors are like dissonance in jazz: beautiful when executed well. Some Tokyo fashions are all about sensory overload, using color in a completely different way than American fashion. "Often the more the merrier" is the rule.

Tellingly, I tried to explain "minimalism" to a girl who worked in a clothing store today. It wasn't easy. The idea that "less is more" is a difficult one to convey here. (Or maybe my Japanese just sucks.) Here, less often seems to be less, at least as far as fashion goes, and stubborn Midwesterners who try to deny it are either cheap or lazy.

O, Whitey. So square. You can always spot the gaijin: ill-fitting clothing, sloppy haircut, stained sneakers, poor choice of facial hair. And of course that goes for myself as well. Even the gaijin here who try to adopt Japanese style usually look to me like fish out of water. It's weird to be ethnocentric against my own ethnicity but the Japanese simply look cooler than white people. If they want to wear FUBU and bling, they can pull it off. If they want to wear a pinstriped suit and cuff links, likewise. If they want to wear enormous grandma sunglasses, white boots, a leather hip pouch and a cowboy shirt that says "Ass Man"... it works, though a white dude wouldn't make it two hundred feet in a get-up like that. Gaijin stand out not because we're blond but because the even best-dressed of us still look like hicks.

Of course Japan has its share of schlubs. I expected to find Japan populated by fashion plates, which of course it isn't. But the ceiling is higher here, as is the median. In the midst of very normal people walk the most bizarre sartorial Darwinisms I've ever seen. Some go to insane lengths for fashion, and usually even the geeks look cool in a geeky way. Japanese fashion is fertile and experimental and wild. I lack the eye to see who is cool and who is not; I don't get the underlying formula yet.

In fact, I'm not sure that rules of "cool" and "uncool" even really apply here. The girl in short-short-shorts, cowboy hat, platform shoes, white mascara, hair extensions and a full-body bronze tan probably thinks that the girl in the white maid's outfit with angel wings, elbow gloves, top hat and fake blood dripping from under a fake eyepatch looks pretty weird--and vice versa. Without dwelling too much on the usual cultural stereotypes I would say that Japanese fashion culture seems to be a series of in- and out-groups rather than a hierarchy whose pinnacle is Prada.

Though I don't usually get a sense that these people are all inventing their own original styles. Undoubtedly there are some creative people doing creative things with fashion, but when you look through a doorway and see two dozen different mannequins in Elvira-bondage outfits, or when you find thirteen different guys' stores selling the same line of turquoise-studded snakeskin belts, or when you happen to glance at a newsstand and see magazines that offer beauty tips for girls who dress up like anime characters... You start to get the sense that these are all predetermined styles that they're buying into. The styles are manufactured and sold, like almost everything else here, and any decision is a pledge of allegiance to a particular subculture.

I don't mean this in a sinister way, because it's not. People have to buy clothes.They have to choose from a set. Fine. Tokyo offers much more choice than Minneapolis, but like Minneapolis every choice is culturally significant. So what does the guy in zombie drag signify?

A real estate tour of Tokyo

I've been in Tokyo a week now.

It doesn't really feel like a week, but I couldn't tell you what it feels like either. Time feels mushy. Mostly it seems that I've never been anywhere else. Minneapolis is distant. I think my mind is busy adjusting and doesn't really have time to reminisce at the moment, so maybe I'll get a wave of nostalgia sometime in October. For now simply coping is a full-time occupation. I've been training every day and squeezing Japanese study into the gaps. After training I usually have some kind of Berlitz-related homework and then I eat dinner and usually conk out at about ten.

Yesterday was a day off, though it didn't really feel like it. I met with two different realtors. A few days ago I gave my month's notice to my current landlord, so the pressure is on to find a new place. It's a bit worrying, really, but a month should be enough. In a city as large as Tokyo there's always apartments turning over, but in the meantime it's stressful. I would call my landlord and try to take back my month's notice except that everyone, Japanese and gaijin alike, seems to think that I am getting ripped off. It's the neighborhood; Shimokitazawa is very hip, apparently, and so even the lousiest den can command unreasonably high prices. I was talking to a bartender who lives in the area and shares a one-bedroom apartment with two other guys.

I had asked the first realtor about apartments in the neighborhood so he met me at Shimokitazawa station and we walked to a nearby unit. It was shabby as hell and there was a hefty deposit and "key money" as well. Key money is like a deposit except you don't get it back at the end of your lease. It is a uniquely Japanese institution that infuriates foreign residents. For obvious reasons: you're paying someone for the privilege of then paying them rent.

So in the case of the Shimo apartment I viewed, rent and "management fee" was ¥82,000 (not quite $800) per month, but the deposit and key money were both equal to two months' rent. Plus a month's rent for the agency fee. Plus the first month's rent, plus fire insurance, and I've probably forgotten one or two other additional fees. If you're doing the math with me, we're at almost $4800 just to move in, $2400 of which I will never see again. Plus of course a cleaning fee when I move out, plus a cancellation fee if I don't stay for two years. Etc. And it's unfurnished--I still need a bed, refrigerator, and everything else I didn't bring with me from Minneapolis.

I didn't take it.

The second agent was more helpful. He showed me there were some deals out there. He was able to find several departments without a deposit and without key money, which the previous agent was unable to do. The second guy was named Nomura and he spoke decent English, though we switched to Japanese after he found out I could speak it. And speak it I did, with an ease that is improving every day. It's coming back!

When you're a foreigner looking for an apartment with no key money and no deposit in a cool part of Tokyo... well, you get what you pay for. More importantly, you don't get what you don't pay for and at first Nomura didn't really have any good news, trotting out floorplan after floorplan of hellholes without refrigerators for ¥87,000 or whatever. In my head I was already composing the cringing email to my current landlord begging for my room back, if he hadn't already given it away.

Then suddenly Nomura found something: a virtually brand-new studio in Ikebukuro with no deposit and no key money. The rent was ¥85,000--what I'm paying now. There was an additional maintenance fee (of course) of ¥15,000 per month. That brought it up to almost a thousand dollars per month (at current exchange rates I suppose it's more like $900). That seems like a lot, but it isn't much more than I'm paying for this crappy room in this crappy guest house and I'd have my own place in a pretty bustling area of Tokyo. The building was built in 2006 so it's not only squeaky-clean but it's also up-to-code as far as earthquake safety, which has been much on my mind of late. Not only that but for another ¥10,000 a month it would be fully furnished with a bed, covers and futon, HDTV, refrigerator, microwave and clothes washer.

A thousand dollars a month. I was almost certain I couldn't do it, no matter how nice the place was or how good a deal, and I tried to dissuade him from showing me the apartment. I suggested that I would think about it and tell him tomorrow if I was interested, at which point we could go and view it. I didn't want to waste his time. But he seemed quite intent and after a few attempts at refusing I relented and off we went to Ikebukuro. I figured I had dropped enough hints; he couldn't be mad at me when I didn't take the apartment. I had never been to Ikebukuro and I had nothing better to do that afternoon. He also wanted to show me another place for almost the same price and it would be useful to have some kind of baseline for later apartment searches.

As he promised, the apartment was beautiful. Shiny floors, fresh paint, big bathtub and shower with a separate toilet. There was a balcony, a washing machine, a pretty HDTV. A big closet, a desk to study at, 24-hour management help and a good security system. A gated lot for parking bikes. A bed with a futon. All I would need to buy was sheets. As far as deals go, this was a great one; the price was right and it saved me a lot of trouble and expense (in the short term). There was no key money, only first month's rent, an agency fee of one month's rent (this is inescapable no matter what you rent or where; it's the system) and a guarantor's fee of half a month's rent.

And yet. Ikebukuro seemed like a decent neighborhood but I wasn't that enthusiastic about it. It was fine, I guess, but I wanted more than "fine" for a grand a month. Nor was it especially convenient for work; it wasn't very close and I would have had to transfer every morning at Shinjuku station, the busiest train station in the world. 4 million people a day use it; it's one of the stations where begloved platform attendants still have to physically cram people into trains every morning. The Ikebukuro-Shinjuku line is probably the most heavily-used line in Tokyo. That wasn't quite what I was looking for.

If I had been certain that my salary with Berlitz would cover it I might have pulled the trigger despite these considerations, but while I'm reasonably certain that I will be working a lot I don't know for sure yet. The last thing I wanted was to be locked into a two-year contract and hemorrhage money on some fancy apartment. As good a deal as this place was, I knew I didn't need an expensive nice apartment, I needed a cheap crappy one. It was an agonizing decision but I refused the apartment.

As if to underscore what I would be passing up, the next apartment we saw was lousy. The building was not very nice, located in a shabby neighborhood quite far from the station. It was easy to refuse. Curiously it was only about ¥7,000 cheaper than the other place. Again, no key money or deposit.


So I didn't get an apartment yesterday. I did get a five-hour tour of Tokyo and some Japanese practice as well as a few ideas of what to expect from my apartment search: lots of crap punctuated by the occasional good deal. I did not, however, call up my landlord and ask for my room back. I have a friend who is also looking for an apartment and we have decided to join forces and split a two-bedroom place. Based on prices we've seen, we will be able to get something much nicer together than we could afford on our own. We're going back to the same company tomorrow to look into 2DKs (2BR+dining+kitchen) and see if we can't find something for about ¥75,000 each. As long as we don't want Shimokitazawa I think we'll find something.

Rowaaru.

It's Friday night. The past week has consisted of daily 8 1/2 hour training sessions with my English conversation company, Berlitz. The sessions take place in a business district called Aoyama ("Blue Mountain", if you're curious). Things can get grueling by hour seven, but they are liberal with breaks and I can't really complain. It's not bad once you get used to it.

The first few days I was waking up at four or five in the morning due to jet lag. Though that's almost subsided by now I've continued to rise early; six a.m. seems to work well. I arrive at the Aoyama subway station a little after seven and check into one of the many coffee shops in the underground corridors around the subway station.

Though the Japanese do have malls, there aren't many. The Japanese don't really need malls because they spend a huge amount of time in various mass transit stations and these stations have become prime commercial real estate. Each subway station is a mall unto itself. This is especially true in the big central stations. Who needs a mall when you walk past thirteen shoe stores on your way to work?

The Aoyama subway station is no exception. Though it's not as commercially-oriented as some of the big Loop stations, I still find convenience stores and newsstands before I've even left the station proper. Once out of the station I'm on the first floor basement level (there's also a second floor basement level below) and surrounded by stores and restaurants. At seven a.m. most of these are shuttered but there are a few cafes and coffee shops catering to the early commuters and I set up camp in one of these to enjoy a "morning set" and some Japanese study before training begins. Sometimes I choose Cafe Croissant for their crab-and-avocado croissant sandwiches, but the music there is too distracting. Think peppy, square jazz covers of Marvin Gaye. Yeah.

So usually I choose Cafe Loire (don't even ask how the Japanese pronounce this). It's clearly an old place and I dig the vibe. It has that diner-gone-to-seed feel that most Denny's used to have before they reupholstered everything in fuchsia and cyan plastic. The wood tables are scratched and scarred. The walls and ceilings are smoked mirrors, which give the place a sepia tinge. Whether this is due to an actual glass treatment or to the fact that they allow smoking in Cafe Loire--and everywhere else--is uncertain. Regardless, the mirrored ceilings allow the servers to look up at the ceiling to see how your meal is coming along, rather than hovering and staring at your table. The leather booths are shabby and worn, and badly need to be reupholstered in bold, "funky" plastic as envisioned by an American restaurant consulting firm, but thankfully that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

Like many Japanese restaurants, Cafe Loire serves water in three-ounce glasses and servers seem surprised when you're able to finish it. Their early menu is limited to four or five different "sets", which in this case means a small meal and a coffee. The choice of meals is limited to the following: buttered toast with jam; "hamtoast": a piece of bologna and mayonnaise in between two pieces of toast; a "mini-sando": a tiny egg and bologna sandwich cut into three pieces with a side of corn; and one or two hot dogs with ketchup and mustard, cut into two halves. Those feeling adventurous can order a boiled egg for fifty yen. The Japanese are mad about sets, but usually they're a little more varied than this.

Loire's food is far worse than their coffee, which is a forgivable offense at seven in the morning. It seems like a lot of places don't offer refills as freely as American restaurants. Some places, if you order a coffee you get just that: one coffee. But Loire offers free refills so I sit and slug down coffee as I study tiny, cramped characters in a workbook. I've overdone it a few times and rattled around the building like a windup toy.

By noon the place is bustling. All the restaurants are open and doing a brisk business with the people who work in the twin 25-floor Shin-Aoyama towers directly above. There are French cafes and bistros. Chinese restaurants. Stores with stacked lunch boxes containing rice, pickles, and pork cutlet/fried chicken/tofu and sesame with seaweed/what the hell is this? There are salons and a shoe store apparently specializing in gold lame. There's a store selling dozens of different clothes hangers that look as though they should be in a museum. Next to that is a Riedel wine glass store and across from that a Spiegelau wine glass store. The basement levels and the first two levels of the towers are full of these places.

To my surprise traditional Japanese restaurants are the most common of all. The Japanese are so preoccupied with other cultures it sometimes seems as though they are uninterested in their own (*wild generalization alert*). But in the Shin Aoyama building there are dozens of places selling tempura, soba, donburi, tonkatsu etc, as well as more modern creations like the "omurice"--an omelet of sorts with ketchup and rice in the center. Today I sat in one of these semi-traditional Japanese restaurants. I say semi-traditional because even though they look the part, the fare is very standardized Japanese Food and not really distinguishable from competitors. While I ate a katsu-don and soba set (they love their sets, man) in a room filled with tatami and sliding doors, the Beatles played on the speakers overhead.

The other day I discovered a restaurant with a big window through which you can see a man making soba (buckwheat noodles) by hand. He takes a big sheet of floured dough and folds it three or four times, making a big heap. Then he lays a big board across the top and uses that to guide a flat-bladed chopper about a foot and a half long through the dough, cutting long, even strips of noodles. It's very cool to watch him work.

Enough emailing. I've been sitting in a stuffy, flourescent-lit office for five days now and finally I can go out. I have earned this weekend, that is for sure. I am off to meet a Japanese friend, Yuji, for drinks in Ginza. I look forward to the prospect of both drinks (I haven't had so much as a beer for eight days) and Japanese conversation. Yuji's a great guy so it should be a fun night.

Pencils

I had a pretty good day today, which was badly needed. Culture shock has definitely been taking its toll in weird ways. I didn't really know what to expect but it's been impossible to ignore it in the past 72 hours. (Only 72 hours?!?!) It comes out in different forms. One of the biggest of these is a sense that there's nowhere to go and nothing to do. Considering I'm surrounded almost constantly by opportunities for diversion, this is an odd sensation. Not having many friends–and not yet having a phone to call them with–intensifies it. Restaurants, karaoke, theaters, bars, shopping: they're all around me but it's no fun to go alone, especially when I have to wrestle with Japanese to do it.

The language barrier is also a big thing, and it is a barrier indeed. My Japanese is shockingly bad. I have neglected it terribly in the past two years since graduation, and it shows. Ordering food at restaurants was terrifying at first because I had no idea what the hell they wanted from me sometimes (even if it was things like "for here or to go" or "what will your side dish be?") so I got very awkward. My confidence is slowly coming back, which helps a lot, but I have a long way to go.

I feel like I've wasted so much time. Part of me knows this isn't true. I've learned a lot of different things in the past few years that I wouldn't trade in: drumming and mixing drinks were both skills that I expect to draw on in unexpected ways later. But at the moment they're simply not applicable and so I'm left with... virtually nothing. My peers in the Berlitz training classes are all pretty talented, intelligent people. A few of them speak five languages while I'm struggling with my second. One taught rock climbing. One majored in Chinese politics in college. One lived in Singapore, Thailand, France, Hong Kong and Australia.

I've gone from feeling pretty on top of my game in Minneapolis to being a complete newbie in Tokyo. I can't even feel like I've done something all that special because there are a lot of foreigners in Tokyo--a lot. You see one every thirty seconds or so, it seems. More, in some neighborhoods. Foreigners in Tokyo seem to be pretty harsh judges of each other, which doesn't help. In general it seems like gaijin resent other gaijin for ruining their Japan experience. For ruining their sense of being special? Or maybe that's me projecting. Regardless, as far as gaijin go I rank low and I don't enjoy that feeling. My Japanese is so embarassing right now that I get nervous speaking it around other gaijin. Ech.


But today was pretty good. No real reason why. I think I'm just getting a little more comfortable. I've gotten over the feeling of being stared at, which makes me awkward and thus a bit bumbling. My Japanese isn't getting better yet, but I'm getting more confident in it: I'm remembering that I do, indeed, know the language. And actually know it pretty well, if I can but remember it. I had several successful conversations today, pulling forgotten words from the dusty recesses of my memory. One hard month. There was a little strut in my step today. Of course, it's hard not to feel cool walking around Shibya in a pinstriped suit listening to the Pharcyde, but it's more than that.

All this is also an incentive to study hard. I borrowed a pencil from a cafe today for kanji practice because my ballpoint pen was not really conducive to kanji practice–the strokes were all the same width and the feel just wasn't right. Plus I couldn't erase my many mistakes. The waiter lent me an old-school wooden pencil (sharpening it for me first, of course) and after using it for a while I grew to love it. Normally I hate pencils like this, but there was something about the ritual of sharpening the pencil every page or so that was very soothing, like keeping a knife sharp or a drum head tuned. With good tools, there is something satisfying about the work. I immediately went to a stationary store and bought a little pouch of three wooden pencils with clear plastic caps to protect the tips, a sharpener, and an eraser to inspire my kanji practice. A small but satisfying purchase that makes the studying an almost reverential act.

Home

I'm here. I'm home. Tokyo is awesome. I don't really know where to start. The plane ride was uneventful and everything went pretty smoothly and on time. Several friends met me at Narita and we took the "Skyliner" into the city. Narita is quite far out of the city–in fact, it's not even part of Tokyo–so even on a super express train the trip took over an hour. At first the land was lots and lots of fields which were mostly invisible at night, what with rice not having streetlights and all. It took about fifteen minutes to enter anything remotely urban.

Once we were on the outskirts of the sprawl, though, I started to get excited. I started to see things that jogged my memory of what Japan is really like. It was more than just seeing the stores and signs that I had once known well, it's the whole jumbled vibe of Tokyo. I had forgotten the chaos and the closeness. Things really are just a different flavor here. It's like a meteor buried itself in the ground and unfurled into a city: stairs winding up the sides of buildings, roads unfolding and branching, capillaries pushing through the earth to become subways.

Tokyo doesn't go up as high as I expected. The tallest building in Toyko is the Midtown Tower in Akasaka and it's only 54 floors. The IDS is 57. This seems impossible to me but everything I've found on Google seems to support it. My best explanation for the comparatively short buildings is the necessity of designing them to withstand earthquakes.

But Tokyo makes up for its stature with density. Tokyo is absurdly dense. Each street is pretty much a canal through concrete buildings eight to ten stories tall or more. On each floor of each building on every street there is a bar, restaurant, salon, massage parlor, clothing store, English classroom, sex shop, karaoke parlor, electronics store, or cafe. Most of the signs are tiny, a little vertical rectangle advertising "Monsoon Cafe" or something, surrounded by dozens of similar signs. And this is the prime real estate: no matter how obscure the sign, at least it's on an actual street. If you turn off into an alley you'll find the same thing: more buildings. More tiny winding stairs. More bars/restaurants/etc on each floor. And then you turn down into an even smaller alley and suddenly you're wandering through tiny cramped corridors where you have to duck to avoid the ceiling and there are all these little sliding doorways with red curtains across them and the smell of noodles billowing out on a head of steam.

And that's just one block. I have been here just 24 hours at this point, so I still don't have this place figured out. In fact, I'll be lucky if I ever "figure out" Tokyo. But in a few months I should be able to comprehend it a little better. At the moment I just stare and giggle with glee.

My house is kind of a shithole. It's not the worst place in the world but I have some qualms. Security is lax; our front door is flimsy and seems to be mainly decorative. The same can be said for my own door and also the door to my veranda. Yes, I'm on the ground floor so I have a tiny little veranda surrounded by a flimsy wood fence higher than my head. There are seven people in the house and one shower for everyone. The toilet is in a separate room but there's only one of those as well, so we'll see how smoothly these things go in the morning. Among my friends in Tokyo the consensus is that I'm paying too much for what I'm getting, so the apartment search will begin promptly.

The neighborhood I'm living in, Shimokitazawa, is actually pretty cool. My immediate surroundings are a pretty sleepy residential neighborhood with a school across the road. In this kind of dense urban area, a residential neighborhood is an interesting thing. Everyone uses as much space as they can squeeze from their lot. Everything abuts everything else and usually there's not much more than a few inches between house and house. There are plants and fences everywhere for some semblance of privacy, and clutter is the rule. Since there was very little planning involved there is no kind of organized grid system. Things are crammed into any space that will fit them.

A few blocks from my house is where Shimo gets interesting. There are dozens of tiny streets that are mostly used by pedestrians, bikes and scooters. Lining these streets are more shops, restaurants and bars. The difference here is that everything is really small and quaint. The streets would barely accommodate a Hummer and the building styles are more old-fashioned than the downtown area. The entirety of many of these little restaurants would fit within the bar of, say, Temple in Minneapolis. Somehow they manage to cram like twenty seats and a kitchen into that space. It's a cozy neighborhood and I would be happy to live near it if I can find a new apartment somewhere in the area. It's also really convenient, just a few quick subway hops to my job.

Speaking of subways, Tokyo has a very cool new system for paying for subway use. When I was in Osaka it was all magnetic tickets: little orange rectangles with origin/destination information encoded on the black coated back. You fed the ticket through a slot and it would crunch through a bunch of conveyor belts and then pop out of a slot at the end of the gate. That system still exists in Tokyo as well, but they've also installed what seems to be RFID readers in every gate in the metro area: little glowing panels that read your "Suica" pass, or better yet–your cell phone. Suica passes are commuter cards that you them with yen. When you lay your wallet containint your Suica against the panel the gates open up and a little screen at the end of the gate tells you your balance as you walk out. Alternately you can use your cell phone as a Suica card, preloading it with cash and laying that against the panel. It's much quicker than mechanical ticket delivery systems and perfect for a rube like me. This way I don't have to sit at the ticket machine squinting at subway maps in Japanese and trying to find the price of a ticket to my destination. Instead I just enter with my Suica, somehow find my way to my destination, and exit with my Suica and the price is automatically calculated. A nice step to skip.

Of course, as soon as I get a cell phone–which will be as soon as humanly possible–I will be using that instead. Cell phones are not quite as insane as I had expected here, but there's no way they could have met my expectations unless they were actually implanted in skulls. There's nothing like the iPhone (yet)–but I'm not convinced the iPhone is the technical benchmark of cell phones. It may be the benchmark of cell phone user interfaces, but phones here could show it a few tricks, I think. In addition to using them as a subway pass by preloading cash, you can use them as credit cards at any store with a reader on it. So most convenient stores have a little glowing panel at the register that you lay your phone against to pay for your cans of coffee-flavored oxygen (yep). In addition to anything you can find in the US (internet, GPS, mp3 playback), here are some other common features of cellphones in Japan:
> Large, beautiful screens that swivel horizontally to become widescreens
> TV tuners
> Fingerprint-recognition locks so no one can use your phone
> Micro SD cards for storage
> Fairly advanced 3D graphics and games like Katamari
> Touch-pads for your thumb to move a mouse on the screen
> 5 megapixel cameras
> Video chat by a second camera facing the user
> Purty designs
In addition, lots of phones now have motion-sensing capabilities like the Wii remote. I'm not sure how this is useful except to play games, which of course they have in droves. I have seen a Katamari Damacy game on a phone that is controlled by tilting your remote. You can also use the motion-sensing capabilities–this is really really cool–to take panoramic pictures. Just turn on the panorama feature on your phone's camera, hold it up and turn in a circle. The camera will sense the turn and calculate the appropriate panoramic image based on that.

Gibson, eat your heart out.


Japanese, jet lag, and culture shock are all challenges that I am definitely dealing with at the moment. For instance, at the moment it's four a.m. and I'm continuing this email because I can't sleep any more. I conked out at nine last night, almost midsentence. My room is still a bit of a shambles because despite my best intentions to finally organize everything I didn't make it past 9 p.m. last night. Getting up early will no doubt become hard soon, but if that's as bad as jet lag gets I'm fine with it.

Japanese and culture shock are knottier issues, but I have faith that they will be overcome. I dealt with them when I was eighteen, so I can deal with them now, too. But my Japanese is rough, that's for sure. The knowledge is there somewhere, but it's hard to access. Even if I had less actual Japanese education when I was in Osaka, I had way more confidence. After a year there I would blithely sail into any situation and tackle it. Right now, though, I feel awkward and bumbling at times, which can be hard. Ordering food can be a challenge because even if I can order my shrimp burger and consomme-flavored fries all right, the server invariably has some question that I don't for the life of me understand. It sucks at times.

Of course, yesterday was pretty much my first day here. I'm writing all this with about twelve waking hours of experience under my belt, so I have a long way to go and I know that. Definitely an incentive to study hard. I can't pass judgment on the situation quite so soon. One hard month–that's what I've resigned myself to.

Planes

I suppose this as good as any a way to begin.

I'm on a plane again. To Japan. Again. People are beginning to board; I was one of the first, after much confusion, and so I can see them as they enter and find their seats. Mostly Asian, though not necessarily Japanese. The man next to me is headed to China, to a city that sounds to my ears like “Talien.” From Tokyo he flies to Beijing, then to Dalien. Sixteen hours total, so I guess I won't be complaining about my own flight.

No one looks their best in an airport. Some combination of light and grim exhaustion, I think. Not many youths on this plane, mostly oddly-dressed middle-aged ladies and businessman who constantly apologize to each other. There's a cute girl two rows ahead of me whom I noticed earlier in the airport. She's wearing a baggy hoodie; the combination of hip-hop fashion and Japanese girls has always appealed to me. Another young Japanese guy I noticed in the airport was wearing a bulky Adidas hoodie, white with small green Adidas logos tiling it. He walked down the aisle later with his hood up and is head down, looking oddly stiff. I noticed there was a tear rolling down his nose after a moment.

Our plane has two aisles, which I enjoy. I rarely ride in planes with two aisles, and they remind me of visits to England when I was a kid. The trip to England was bad enough; the return trip was interminable, and the last two hours were excruciating.
They're ready to depart now, so my laptop has to go. More later.


I'm off. It's 3:31 p.m. Johnny is setting up the bar right now. Traffic is getting bad, if it's not already. I stared hard at Minneapolis's skyline from the plane window thinking thoughts like this, trying to frame some kind of goodbye. There are never really any definitive goodbyes and hellos in my life. The lines are blurred. It's one, then it's the other, and somehow the transition was never really noticeable. I couldn't really comprehend that I was leaving Minneapolis, couldn't conceive of any other posible place I could be, and when I'm in Tokyo Minneapolis will be a myth, too. Something you scare misbehaving foreigners with: “If you're bad you'll have to go back to Minneapolis...”

We flew over Edina on the way northwest to the Pacific. I suddenly realized I recognized my neighborhood. Seeing cars on the highway near my house reminded me of the hellish traffic I've slogged through in the past week while luggung possessions to Edina. Subways were never as appealing as when I was stuck in gridlock two blocks away from my house on Como Avenue. I feel sorry for everyone who will have to deal with the aftermath of the 35W collapse until the end of 2008. Lakes were choked with algae so they were a cloudy metallic green. Boats carved Lake Minnetonka into spirals. That was goodbye enough, I guess.

I have escaped. I refused to believe, even this morning, that I was going to Tokyo. I've had this sense that the city would refuse to let go of its own. Even on the plane, I thought, Minneapolis would reach up its hand and snatch me out of the cabin seconds after lift off. I would land in the dust, bruised and winded for my hubris. But no, I'm out. In the clear lakes below me I can see white clouds reflected, and blue skies beyond; the choppy lakes sparkle like TV static. I'm on a plane to Tokyo, which is going to sparkle even brighter and crazier. The hand of the Orient lifts me now, snatching me from Minneapolis and whisking me to strange new lands.