So Many Blog Topics, So Little Time

We’re leaving for home in three days. . . and I’m looking at a long list of blog topics I wanted to write about. It’s just not going to happen. And I’m not going to continue this blog once we leave Japan.

So instead, here’s part of my list, just to give you a taste of what I’d hoped to have time for.

*Our recent three-day cultural trip to Nikko on a Fulbright-sponsored tour. We stayed with an older Japanese couple in Utsanomiya, learned about the tea ceremony from a tea master, learned about indigo dyeing from a “Living National Treasure” (a Japanese designation for someone who is accomlished at traditional arts), made pottery in a famous pottery town (Mashiko), and visited Nikko, with its gorgeous shrines and temples, waterfalls, lake, etc,

Below: The tea master

Skeins of yarn at the indigo dyer’s studio (below):

Stone lanterns at Nikko (below):

*The weather: Hot and humid as hell. But signs in store windows say “weak air-conditioning,” which I didn’t understand until I walked in and the air-conditioning was indeed rather weak (just enough so you’re not miserable, but not really enough to get you cool). I think people are being encouraged to keep air-conditioning low to save energy, and to reduce the greenhouse effect that occurs in Tokyo when the city retains hot air from the sun and the millions of air-conditioners. Apparently the government conducted an experiment in one neighborhood where they asked residents to water the sidewalks each day, and the air temperature was actually lowered by several degrees. But it wasn’t considered feasible or affordable to use so much water all over the city, or to install any kind of cooling systems in the sidewalks, so nothing came of the experiment. And by the way, the Japanese eat eel in hot weather, which is supposed to give you sustenance and help you handle the heat.

Below: Hot weather matsuri (festival) attire for man and boy

*Another post on some of the strange food we’ve encountered, which now includes “ice bagels” (with ice cream in the center), coffee jelly (at Starbucks of all places), yuba (tofu skin) ice cream, soy-flavored Kit Kat bars, pork rectum and uterus (no, we didn’t try them), and an awful story about a dish made with tofu and tiny live eels that you’ll have to ask me about because it’s a bit too long to tell here. (By the way, Japanese eggs taste so much better than American eggs. I still haven’t found out why, but it must either have to do with the breed of chicken or the feed they’re given.)

*”Engrish”: The very funny ways English gets mangled in signs, T-shirts, brochures, etc. I’ve written about it before (actually, hundreds of people have written about it before) but it’s still funny. A few of my examples (photos) follow. For some more, visit Daniel’s favorite website, www.engrish.com.

*Japanese aesthetics: How tastes seem to veer towards extremes, either beautifully spare and minimal, or kitchy and cute. Think tatami (straw) mats and paper screens. . . versus Hello Kitty and giant video screens. This is an example of an ancient culture where everything is new. Example: People are expected to tear down their houses and rebuild every 30 years or so. Between earthquakes and fires, wars, and the craze for everything new, there’s very little old architecture here.

(Below: Three photos of old Japan. From top: A rice vending machine. Edo-era architecture in Kawagoe, a town near Tokyo. A tatami maker’s shop/studio.)

(And below, new Tokyo: Shibuya crossing, which is supposedly the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world.)

*Shopping: This has to be the most materialistic country I’ve ever visited, with a consumerism that puts the U.S.’s to shame. To meet the demand, there are more stores and more stuff for sale than I’ve ever seen. And the stores are amazing. They’re big, beautiful, appealing. Department stores are full of clothes, of course, but the big department stores also contain restaurants, food halls, travel agencies, bookstores. You’re greeted when entering stores and restaurants, and thanked profusely when leaving. And shopping here is vertical. In the States, a stores that was located on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or higher floors of a building would suffer greatly. But here people are so used to high rises full of stores and restaurants, that the crowd on the 8th floor is usually just as big as the crowd on the ground floor.

And I was also going to write a whole separate post on supermarkets. . .

(Above: Daikon, which are giant Japanese radishes.)

(Below: Japanese carrots, which are also giant!)

(Below: An assortment of pickles at our local supermarket.)

*Made in China: As you can imagine, the market here is flooded with cheap stuff from China, the same as it is in the States. But people here have an enormous suspicion of Chinese goods, and will happily pay a lot more money for domestic products. Example: In the supermarket, one head of garlic grown in Japan costs more than a huge bagful from China, but many consumers buy the Japanese garlic in spite of the price. An American man married to a Japanese woman told me his mother-in-law was so biased against Chinese goods that when she recently bought a pair of Italian shoes she grilled the sales clerk to be sure that no part of the shoes, not even the sole, had been made in China!

*Maid in Japan: “Maid cafes” are a strange and somewhat creepy phenomenon in the Akihabara (electronics) section of Tokyo. They’re like small restaurants or tea rooms staffed by young women who dress up as maids and treat customers (mostly male “otaku,” or nerds) as masters. The otaku, who are crazy about manga (comics), anime (cartoons) and electronics are generally not very suave with women, so these bars are especially appealing to them. They can have cute girls fawning all over them, offering them foot rubs, and even spoon-feeding (chopstick-feeding?) them if they desire. Apparently these cafes are not fronts for prostitution, but that doesn’t really make them more palatable. I think what’s most off-putting isn’t that these maid cafes exist. . . but that there are so many of them, and that they are inundated with women begging to work there.

*Japanese TV and women’s magazines: Both pretty bad.

*Japanese museums: Also (surprisingly) bad. The National Museum here is particularly shabby, and the art museums aren’t very impressive. I’d heard before I came to Japan that “Tokyo is for entertainment, and Kyoto is for culture.” It’s somewhat true, but Kyoto’s culture is shrines, not museums. We really haven’t found any world-class museums anywhere (except in Seoul, Korea, and Taipei, Taiwan, which had museums to put Tokyo’s to shame).

*More on earthquakes: We’ve had three of them within six days recently.

*A roundup of some strange (to Americans) customs and rules. Special slippers to wear in the bathroom. Ear-cleaning (considered extremely important, although I’m not sure why). Smoking allowed in restaurants and coffee shops, but not outside on streets or sidewalks (see photo below).

*Transportation: The Tokyo subways, the shinkansen (bullet trains), and bicycles everywhere (see below, a cycle commuter parking lot).

*The expatriate community: Who they are, what they’re like, what parts of the city they live in (Roppongi, Azubu-juban, Hiro-o), etc. And the incredible hoops that foreigners are forced to jump through by a large and rigid bureaucracy to get the proper documents to live here, open a bank account, get an apartment, travel freely overseas and return, etc.

*Health care: When we arrived in Japan we were told that if we became ill, even in an emergency, we should make our way to the hospital by taxi or subway, and not call an ambulance unless absolutely necessary. Apparently hospitals can turn away ambulances, but have to accept patients who walk in the door. Not only that, there’s no law requiring cars to make way for ambulances on the street.

*Generational differences: Japan has a higher percentage of elderly people in the population than anywhere else in the world. And there are huge differences between the generations. Younger people are much taller and more westernized, but they also seem shallower and more materialistic, less independent and individualistic. Older people seem more relaxed, more naturally expressive and emotional, and just more interesting in general. It may be unfair, or it may be a function of who we’ve met, but in many cases we’ve enjoyed talking with older Japanese people more than younger. One silly difference between the generations: Older people think it’s polite, and a sign of appreciation, to slurp their noodles noisily in restaurants, but younger people seem to think it kind of rude and sloppy!

*Plants and animals: The enormous Tokyo crows (or are they ravens?), the tiny bats, the koi (carp) ponds, and the snow monkeys and brown bears that like to bathe in the onsen (hot springs).

Oh I could go on and on. . . except I can’t. So many blog topics, so little time. . .