"Alec, I've never seen so many Japanese people in my life..."
Well, I have returned from my adventures.
Japan was....
Japan was....
Japan was disorienting to say the least. Getting into the airport at Narita is like walking into an acid trip. I had been sick from that stupid cold Aaron gave me and I had been awake for eighteen hours. And the thing about flying to Tokyo is, you fly through that strip of daylight on the earth so the sun is shining the entire time, sending your whole body clock for a whirl-about. So you're exhausted, you grab your things out of the overhead compartment, and it's out the doors.
Now, at the Japanese customs, they have opaque doors so you can see light but you can't see what's on the other side. So these nice women in blue uniforms ask you if you have any lives animals in your luggage and then, assuming you didn't respond "I have forty-two live baby sea turtles in my pants", you are cleared for entrance into the country.
So you approach the opaque automatic doors, take a deep breath, and plunge head first into a new experience.
Immediately, you are hit by a wave of cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, and neon light. You see a man wearing a pink fedora removing his surfboard from the baggage claim. You see businessmen reading the newspaper at a milk bar across from you. Everything is small. Everything is expensive and written in an alphabet you can't begin to understand. Everything is fast-paced, confusing, and eaten with chopsticks.
And the entire trip is like that. There is half the population of the United States living in a place the size of California. If you can bear to break your eyes away from the giant TV screens on the sides of buildings and observe the street, there are hundreds of small box-shaped cars rushing by. And rushing in between those are motorscooters. On the sidewalks people ranging from ages eigteen to sixty are rushing by on bicycles wearing their finest suits. And once the sun sets, those fancy suits and offices get traded over for poorly calculated new age fashions and pachinco arcades and karaoke.
You travel from city to city and can't even tell that you have left where you started. They all blend into one another. Downtown fades into suburbs with eventually become the suburbs of another downtown. The few glimpses of countryside that you actually see aren't some glamorous rolling hills with cherry blossoms and bonzai trees. The countryside of Japan looks more like Gary, Indiana, some industrial wasteland with a highway running through a few poorly-constructed rice patties.
The only breaths of fresh air that you can get are in Buddhist shrines at the very tops of mountains. And even then you are more too aback by the strange sense of calm to notice the smell of trees. You are awash in a sea of tranquil, foreign spirituality, something that nothing in the West can give you. All the Western religions just seem to opress you, they just make people claustrophobic and uncomfortable, with huge spires looming over the tops of buildings, always reminding you that they are there and that God is watching you.
But these buildings tucked away from everything else are different. You walk in the door and you aren't greeted by cold hard stone and an image of a man being crucififed. Instead you see flowers and gold and the sight of a peaceful man with a smile on his face as he sits cross-legged, meditating. He has his hand held up, palm facing forward, which the tour guide tells you means "You have nothing to fear. I am here to teach you".
All the busses you take are meant for people with legs half the size of yours. And you never become as aware of that fact as when the bus rockets down hairpin turns along a mountain side.
You finally grope through the dark and navigate your way through the crowded subway system to collapse onto a couch in your hotel where you pay twelve dollars for a capuccino.
After doing this for ten days, you feel as if you have been hit by a train. You can't tell if it is merely the jet-lag that makes you stay up at night or maybe just the fact that you now have a point of reference from which to observe the world that you live in everday. I can't exactly speak for Chris on this, but I can say that I find myself questioning a lot of the things we do in the west. Some of that can be explained by the fact that all the bad things about Western culture have been adopted by the Japanese and then multiplied to be thousands of times bigger than they were before. Comercials last twenty seconds and comepletely innundate you with all the information at once. There is little space for windows on the sides of apartment buildings because it has all been sold to advertise shampoo or something called Gold Rush tea drink.
Japan was the most confusing and different place I have ever been. And the fact that it was such a complete 180 degree turn from everything we know is the reason that I am so glad that I went. That and it was just a lot of fun. It was by far in the top three of favorite places I have visited. Look for pictures on Chris' journal sometime soon.
Japan was....
Japan was....
Japan was disorienting to say the least. Getting into the airport at Narita is like walking into an acid trip. I had been sick from that stupid cold Aaron gave me and I had been awake for eighteen hours. And the thing about flying to Tokyo is, you fly through that strip of daylight on the earth so the sun is shining the entire time, sending your whole body clock for a whirl-about. So you're exhausted, you grab your things out of the overhead compartment, and it's out the doors.
Now, at the Japanese customs, they have opaque doors so you can see light but you can't see what's on the other side. So these nice women in blue uniforms ask you if you have any lives animals in your luggage and then, assuming you didn't respond "I have forty-two live baby sea turtles in my pants", you are cleared for entrance into the country.
So you approach the opaque automatic doors, take a deep breath, and plunge head first into a new experience.
Immediately, you are hit by a wave of cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes, and neon light. You see a man wearing a pink fedora removing his surfboard from the baggage claim. You see businessmen reading the newspaper at a milk bar across from you. Everything is small. Everything is expensive and written in an alphabet you can't begin to understand. Everything is fast-paced, confusing, and eaten with chopsticks.
And the entire trip is like that. There is half the population of the United States living in a place the size of California. If you can bear to break your eyes away from the giant TV screens on the sides of buildings and observe the street, there are hundreds of small box-shaped cars rushing by. And rushing in between those are motorscooters. On the sidewalks people ranging from ages eigteen to sixty are rushing by on bicycles wearing their finest suits. And once the sun sets, those fancy suits and offices get traded over for poorly calculated new age fashions and pachinco arcades and karaoke.
You travel from city to city and can't even tell that you have left where you started. They all blend into one another. Downtown fades into suburbs with eventually become the suburbs of another downtown. The few glimpses of countryside that you actually see aren't some glamorous rolling hills with cherry blossoms and bonzai trees. The countryside of Japan looks more like Gary, Indiana, some industrial wasteland with a highway running through a few poorly-constructed rice patties.
The only breaths of fresh air that you can get are in Buddhist shrines at the very tops of mountains. And even then you are more too aback by the strange sense of calm to notice the smell of trees. You are awash in a sea of tranquil, foreign spirituality, something that nothing in the West can give you. All the Western religions just seem to opress you, they just make people claustrophobic and uncomfortable, with huge spires looming over the tops of buildings, always reminding you that they are there and that God is watching you.
But these buildings tucked away from everything else are different. You walk in the door and you aren't greeted by cold hard stone and an image of a man being crucififed. Instead you see flowers and gold and the sight of a peaceful man with a smile on his face as he sits cross-legged, meditating. He has his hand held up, palm facing forward, which the tour guide tells you means "You have nothing to fear. I am here to teach you".
All the busses you take are meant for people with legs half the size of yours. And you never become as aware of that fact as when the bus rockets down hairpin turns along a mountain side.
You finally grope through the dark and navigate your way through the crowded subway system to collapse onto a couch in your hotel where you pay twelve dollars for a capuccino.
After doing this for ten days, you feel as if you have been hit by a train. You can't tell if it is merely the jet-lag that makes you stay up at night or maybe just the fact that you now have a point of reference from which to observe the world that you live in everday. I can't exactly speak for Chris on this, but I can say that I find myself questioning a lot of the things we do in the west. Some of that can be explained by the fact that all the bad things about Western culture have been adopted by the Japanese and then multiplied to be thousands of times bigger than they were before. Comercials last twenty seconds and comepletely innundate you with all the information at once. There is little space for windows on the sides of apartment buildings because it has all been sold to advertise shampoo or something called Gold Rush tea drink.
Japan was the most confusing and different place I have ever been. And the fact that it was such a complete 180 degree turn from everything we know is the reason that I am so glad that I went. That and it was just a lot of fun. It was by far in the top three of favorite places I have visited. Look for pictures on Chris' journal sometime soon.