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2001-06-10 - 3:26 p.m. This has been a really, really hard week. Things here osscilate between mind-numbingly fast, and soul-churningly slow. It's quite possibly the strangest place in the world. This whole trip has actually been deeply strange, and promises only to become more so. It's sort of like having resigned two and a half months of my life to living in a dream. The flight over was fantastic. Thai Airways, if anyone ever gets the chance, is a great way to fly. Oren, my travelling companion, roommate, and eternal nemesis decided that it was his duty to test the limits of the wet-bar on board, and flagged down the stewardess with the drinks trolly every time she came by. Of course, this wasn't hard to do because she came by every five minutes, in an attempt, apparantly, to narcotize the passengers into submission. We landed at Narita Airport at about 6 PM local time, and made our way quietly through customs, after only a few harrowing minutes of sleep-deprivation-induced panic when I nearly boarded the continuing flight bound for Bangkok instead of getting off where I was supposed to. Narita, for a huge international airport, was almost totally empty all through the customs/entrance proceedure, for no very good reason that I could figure out. We wandered down huge empty passageways that were designed to hold hundreds of people, silent in a group of ten, the emptiness oppressive. After Customs we entered Narita proper, which is constantly filled with people. The transition was a bit of a shock. Fortunately for us, a nice man helped us buy a phone card which we used to call the people who were supposed to be meeting us. We took a "limousine Taxi" (read "Big Comfy Bus") into Tokyo, and then were treated to dinner by Mr. Yoshikawa and Mr. Yamaguchi, who took us to our lodgings. We're living in Liberty House, a tiny little Youth Hostel/Expat Living Center/Flophouse, not too far away from the northern edge of Tokyo. The house itself is small, rundown but very clean, and is tended to by a nice, nervous man named Masa. Masa is often seen around the house performing odd chores. These chores are mostly recognizable (cleaning the kitchen, mopping the floor) but occasionally one finds him engaged in rather more mysterious pursuits ("I'm sure he's either degrouting the shower or communing with His Dark Master. I can't decide.") The house is filled with a pretty motley assortment of people from just about everywhere. The only thing they have in common is their place of residence, and a vagueness about their purpose for being in Tokyo. Just about everyone I've met so far seems to have "ended up" in Tokyo, more than anything else. You ask people "What're you doing here?" and the answer, more often than not is "Oh, y'know. This and that. Trying to get a job." It seems that the main pursuit of most of the people in the house is simply staying in Tokyo with the minimum amount of effort possible. We started Aikido before we started work. Aikido happens every day, Monday through Friday, from 4:30 to 7, and on Saturday from 3:00 to 6:30. Yeah. That's a lot of Aikido for those of you keeping score. Waseda has one of the top five Aikido clubs in the country, hence the world, and the kids train really, really hard. The atmosphere is one of communal effort, with a healthy dose of machismo thrown in. We were bewildered for the first couple of practices until people started explaining things to us. It took that long because everyone pretty much treats us with kid gloves thanks to the impenetrable language barrier. No one really knows how to deal with us. Not at Aikido, and not at work. We slip through the cracks. We're not quite "visitors," but we're not quite "Lifers." We're going to be here too long, or too short, for people to put us into a useful category. And the funny thing about it is this: You prepare to go off to some foreign country. You learn a bit of the language, aquaint yourself with some of the food, read a guidebook or two, and pray that you're not going to fuck up horribly. But the trick about Japan is that everything that anyone has ever written about it (or at least that I have ever read about it) is wrong, or at least only partially true. This place is so internally contradictory that it tends to defy description. Just about any statement that I can make about Japan, I can either negate or contradict and the statement is still true. The problem about being here is that the ways in which Japan is different from America are so vast and subtle that you find yourself constantly being caught off guard. I'm sorry this is so disjointed, but hopefully I'll start to make sense soon. I just really needed to get stuff down on here.
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