During my first sojourn abroad as a wide eyed 19-year-old studying at Kyushu University in Japan, I sent out a series of e-mails to friends and family back home detailing the various adventures from one of the best years of my life. While my youth and naivety are glaringly apparent, these were my first attempts at writing travelogues and I look back at these silly little e-mails with a good bit of nostalgia and fondness. And it’s interesting to see how much the world and I have both changed over the years.
Hello, hello, hello my dear Americans,
I know what you are all thinking as you open this e-mail: “who is this freak sending me some huge e-mail from Japan”… well, for those of you who have forgotten me, just read a bit further and I’m sure your memory will be refreshed real fast… for those who actually remember me, and especially those who have actually SENT ME E-MAIL *hint-hint*, I’m sorry it’s been so long since I last wrote, but I’m sure you can understand how busy I’ve been beating off the Japanese women, going to class once or twice a week, sleeping extremely long hours, and all sorts of equally arduous affairs. Ok…. OK…. you win… I’m a big fat liar… so in fact there have been no Japanese women, I do go to all of my classes (well, I’ve skipped a few here and there… ok, ok, so I’m supposed to be in class right now, but what’s it to you!), I don’t sleep all that much (although compared to Rice it seems like an eternity) because I have to get up every morning at 7:15 and even though I could, theoretically, go to bed at say 10 or 11, I’ve been a night person my whole life and I’m not about to change that just because of one puny little morning class… besides all of that, all I’ve been doing lately is studying a lot of Kanji (Chinese characters) and reading a lot of magazines. I know, it’s truly pathetic… all of this time I have to write e-mails, and yet this is only the third one (actually it’s officially only #2)… I’ve really been slacking.
Ok, so I assume all of you college people out there have already begun your spring semester of extremely exciting courses… yeah, well, I can assure you I am quite envious because that means you will be done with classes in late April, the same month I will BEGIN my second semester… yes, this means Jay will not be done with classes until the end of July, at which point he will travel for two weeks until he gets his last scholarship in mid-August, and then return to Rice just in time to advise for O-week (this of course assumes that Jay will be lucky enough to get an advising spot at O-week). Then, seeing as how Jay will have been living at a 15 hour time difference from Houston for a year, he will suddenly be thrown back into the never-hectic (yeah right) Rice lifestyle with some serious jet lag and most probably experience a bit of an adjustment problem to the time for the first semester (or two)…. of course, his kind professors will take this into consideration and allow him to sleep through their classes and not do any of the homework… and by the next school year, when he is finally readjusted to Houston time, he will go study abroad in Japan again. Man, life is a vicious cycle, isn’t it…
Ok, so speaking of traveling, here is where I have been since my first e-mail:
Kitakyushu
A one day trip to the northernmost town on Kyushu Island (where I currently live)… the name actually means “North Kyushu”, another example of Japanese brilliance in naming things. Anyway, I skipped class one day to accompany two of my Japanese friends to this once highly polluted city (but now world-famous for undergoing one of the most extensive clean-up programs the world has ever seen). Now the city is actually quite beautiful, being right across a rather thin strait separating the island from the mainland (I hope that most of you realize that when I say island, I don’t mean something the size of Hawaii… the whole of Japan is a whole set of ‘islands’ that form one island country… duh… and so my island is the third biggest after Honshu, which is the what I call the ‘mainland’ because it is the biggest and central island that is home to most of the major cities, and Hokkaido, which is still what the Japanese think of as their own little ‘frontier’ land and is supposedly inhabited by an ancient mix of Japanese, Russians, and a few inbreds imported from Arkansas). Also, the drive from Fukuoka to Kitakyushu was quite impressive because the two are separated by a large group of mountains, whose trees were showing their last signs of resistance to winter. When we got to Kitakyushu, the first thing we actually did was cross over to the mainland (my first time to step foot on mainland soil, not counting my layover in Narita airport) to see some famous Shinto shrine in Shimonoseki (I think that was the name of the little town there… I can assure you I have a heck of a time remembering Japanese names… well, except for Japanese girls names, of course!)… we took some pictures, performed most of the little ceremonies, took more pictures (including two little twin boys who were there for their 3rd birthday ceremonial blessing), laughed at the funny looking priests, got kicked out… you know, the usual stuff when you go somewhere sacred with Jay. Anyway, we crossed back over the bridge and visited several really cool places in Kitakyushu like an old train station (oooooh… how exciting Jay!… yes, I’m sure you would all consider this a big attraction… well, it actually was pretty popular in this town because it’s one of the few original -meaning not rebuilt- surviving remnants of the old town that still remains… you have to remember that Japan may have a history thousands of years older than ours, but they also industrialized later and at a much more rapid pace than us, as well as fought a war on their home turf and dealt with many more natural disasters, meaning that most of their ancient buildings and even a large number of more modern ones have been rebuilt at least once… and some just haven’t been fortunate enough to see the light of day ever again). Then we went to one of the city’s libraries (oooooh, another place I’m sure all you would go first in a new city, eh?), which was actually really nice because it was built in some sort of old British style (I don’t know the first thing about architecture, so I won’t even pretend to know the name of the style… in fact, it could have been German or even Italian for all I know) and was right next to the bay… then, right across the street, we visited a rather eccentric little art museum… inside the museum, there was some really cool old guy playing a classical guitar and singing American songs like ‘Sunshine on My Shoulder’ or whatever the name of that song is… however, since I’m quite sure the guy didn’t know much English and was merely reading the words, the song came out more like “Sohn-shine ohn mai shoodahs meh-kuu-su mee hah-pee…” and so on. Anyway, we went to a really tasty little bakery, where the nice 50-something woman busted out with some pretty good English and talked with me for a bit… although it’s not surprising for Japanese to know a good bit of English, since they all take at least 6 years of it before graduating from high school, most have absolutely no conversational ability at all… they can’t speak more than “Mai namoo isoo Yoko Ono” (my name is Yoko Ono), or the ever-popular and extremely odd “Wahtu aah yoh hahbeesu?” (what are your hobbies?)… so for this woman, who obviously finished high school before I was born and since she was working in a bakery obviously didn’t travel around the world too often, to speak pretty good English was a bit surprising to me as well as my Japanese friends. Anyway, I can’t think of much else that happened on this trip, except for the fact that the next day my Japanese teacher yelled at me for missing class!
Okinawa
Oh yes! OOOOOHHH YEEEEES!!!! This was definitely one of the coolest places I’ve been (next to driving through Houston’s 5th ward at night by myself, of course… which was cool merely because I made it out of there alive). Anyway, I took this two week trip while all of you silly Americans were at home opening Christmas presents and shooting off fireworks… never mind, I guess that’s not too silly… the Japanese do the same thing! This trip was made possible by the kindness of one of my friends at Rice (the incredibly sexy and brilliant archi known simply among her cohorts as Kiyomi) who lives in Okinawa and her extremely generous parents, who had to put up with me for two weeks while Kiyomi was out with her boyfriend. Yup, I have to admit that this trip never would have been possible if they hadn’t put me up… Okinawa, just like the rest of Japan, is an extremely expensive place to live in, much less to travel in! So I flew into Naha airport on the southern part of Okinawa island (which is the biggest and pretty much central island of the long chain of islands now classified under the Okinawa prefecture of Japan, but previously formed their own kingdom with their own language and were known collectively as the Ryuuku islands). I was of course in pants and a long-sleeve shirt due to the fact that in Fukuoka it was in the mid-40s… I of course quickly discovered that I was soon to throw off this heavy clothing in favor of shorts and t-shirt (of course the shirt was optional) because the average temperature (yes, in the middle of winter) was right around 70 degrees… everyday!
In case you aren’t familiar with Okinawa, let me give you a little bit of info about the island… first of all, it is the southernmost part of Japan and is made up of a lot of little islands that stretch almost down to Taiwan or so…. thus, it has a rather tropical climate. The island itself has an incredible history that goes back just as far as the rest of Japan… which is interesting because it didn’t actually join Japan until the late 19th century. Anyway, I won’t bore you with all the bloody details (of which I only know a few anyway), but lets just jump right up to World War II, in which Okinawa was an important battle ground… yup, it’s kind of sad that almost all of the historic structures and just about everything else on this island were leveled during the fighting, and only recently have the most important of these been restored, partly due to the apathetic approach of the Japanese government to this matter. Anyway, after the war the US held on to Okinawa for obvious military reasons… it was a good central outlet in the Pacific close to Asia in a time when the spread of Communism in this area had American’s underwear in a knot. Anyway, ever since the Americans first took over this island, there were cries from the Okinawans for the smelly Americans to get off their island… which were finally echoed by the Japanese government and finally heard in Washington… the island was ‘returned’ to Japanese hands in 1972 on the condition that the US could keep a ‘few’ troops there to maintain safety in the Pacific. Of course, the good old Americans kept almost all of their troops there and have only gradually given back the land used for bases to the Okinawans, mainly due to increasing pressure from lobbyists in the Japanese Diet fighting for the Okinawans (who used the incident a few years ago of the Okinawan girl raped by US military to its full advantage in pressing for the exit of the US). Yet to this day, of all the US military personnel stationed in Japan (I’m not sure the exact number, but I can assure you there are a lot of over-sized Americans bred for fighting over here), around 70 percent are stationed in Okinawa. In fact, in Okinawa City, where my friend’s family lives, there is a higher concentration of bases than in any other city in Okinawa, or the rest of Japan for that matter.
I found it very sad as I rode my bike around the area to find the Okinawans so pressed for land and domestic resources, and yet everywhere you turned you found the most advantageous plots of land occupied by the US military, with no access given to the Okinawans. On top of that, there is no concern for conserving space within the bases (by far one of the essential aspects of life for Okinawans and the Japanese as a whole)… there were massive golf courses everywhere you turned, military houses with spacious American-style yards, wide streets and huge, lusciously green parks (grass does not grow well in Japan, so it is a rare site to see large areas of green grass anywhere in Japan…. except, of course, inside the good old US military bases), and an assortment of other conveniences that would seem perfectly normal to an American, unless of course he actually ventured outside the gates of the base and explored the tight, cramped conditions the Okinawans and the rest of the Japanese live under. However, as I sit here and right these criticisms of my own country’s military from my room in Fukuoka (which definitely fits into the Japanese description of small), I must admit that if I did have the opportunity to live on a military base here in Japan (which, duh, won’t happen unless I am struck by a sudden desire to enlist), I would not hesitate for a second to move. The conveniences offered by the bases are just too nice… American food is bought in the base grocery stores at the same price as in America, mail is shipped back to America at the domestic rate, and the whole base is set up to give you a feeling of living in America, yet allowing you access to all the benefits of a foreign culture (since it was my first time to be on American military base while in Okinawa, I must admit that it was quite a new experience for me… while disgusted at the fact that we Americans were using the best of the Okinawa land for things such as golf courses and big yards, I was simply amazed at all of the conveniences offered to those actually fortunate enough to live within the fences… or should I say those fortunate enough to be American?). And from the American military perspective, we are the ones who have to live away from the conveniences of our own country to protect the people of the Pacific region, so is it asking too much to make our service men feel a little bit at home, even if it does completely contradict and sometimes interfere with the local way of doing things? Well, I can’t say that I stand too firm on either side of the issue, because as an American I admit fully that I appreciate the fact that our country is one of the most secure in the world, and that it provides such security to other nations as well through our strong military… yet on the other hand, having lived in the cramped quarters of Japan for sometime now, and having stayed in Okinawa for two weeks, I can assure you that as a native I might not be so quick to see the security offered by the military forces, but rather the fact that they came and stole my land and are using it for their recreation when I need it to survive. And especially in the Okinawan case, the fact that 70% of the military in Japan is concentrated on such a tiny island in the Japanese archipelago seems to be a bit irrational… to me it seems that they are being screwed by the US government as well as their own.
While I was in Okinawa, I pondered these thoughts quite a bit, but I also managed to have a lot of fun… I rented a bike from the military base (jeeez, what a hypocrite, eh?) and rode around a good portion of the area around Okinawa City (in other words, around all the military bases…), including three absolutely beautiful islands off the Kateran (spelling?) Peninsula… Kiyomi’s dad dropped me off on the last island (they are all connected by bridges) and I rode back and stopped every three minutes to take pictures. Also, one of the most fascinating things I did was go around to many of the old castle ruins with Kiyomi’s dad, who knows just about everything that can be known about the island of Okinawa (by the way, I learned most of the info written above from Kiyomi’s father… he is a retired Navy officer who fell in love with Okinawa – and an Okinawan – while stationed there and decided it was the ideal place to retire… I can’t say that I disagree with his reasoning). I got to see all sorts of places (or actually I should say the ruins of places) around the island, many over a thousand years old… we spent an entire day driving from castle to castle and checking out how the people used to live… and of course during this whole time Kiyomi’s dad shared a lot of the ancient history with me… it was absolutely fascinating, and if I would have gone to Okinawa on my own, I would have spent my life’s savings and not learned a single thing about the island… in fact, I probably would have just sat around some over-priced resort all day long and stared at the water… not that staring at the water in Okinawa is such a bad thing! And of course one of the most unique things I did was celebrate the New Year with Kiyomi’s family… we all gathered at her grandmother’s house and I had some of the best food I’ve eaten yet in Japan. It was really cool because even though none of her family knew me, I still got the traditional little envelopes from all of her relatives… and of course inside the envelopes was a nice little wad of money! I must admit this was an added bonus to the already exciting festivities. Basically, we all sat around at the table (of course it was a traditional Japanese table where you sit on the floor) and ate anything from the ever-famous sushi and sashimi (raw fish) to traditional Okinawan delicacies while doing what just about all Japanese people do on New Year’s Day… watch TV. That’s right, every year for the entire New Year’s Day, there are special programs broadcast with a bit of everything mixed in, offering a spectacular demonstration of anything from strange international sports competitions to live traditional Japanese performances. And later on, for a bit of practice on my pitiful Japanese, I talked to Kiyomi’s adorable little cousins and gave them a little geography lesson (which was actually quite easy considering most countries’ names in Japanese are almost the same as in English). They really enjoyed making fun of my bad Japanese, but besides this minor abuse it was much easier to converse with them than their parents, mainly because I just get too nervous when talking to adults… speaking a foreign language to native speakers is just a really new phenomenon to me, and even though I love it, it’s still quite difficult for the time being. I did various other things in beautiful Okinawa, but if you want to know all the bloody details, you’ll just have to ask me when I get back to the States… I’ve obviously already written way too much on this place here!
Yame City
If you remember from my last e-mail (yeah right), this is the place where I did my first homestay back in early November. Well, this city must really like foreigners, because apparently they have several programs a year in which they recruit students from the international center at my university and drive them down to this quaint little town in the south of Fukuoka Prefecture (about an hour and a half away by car). As soon as I saw that they were hosting another program, I signed up right away… the actual homestay took place this last weekend. Well, last time I did this program, I was placed in the household of an English teacher, which was probably best at the time because I had only been studying Japanese for a few weeks and had absolutely no practice in speaking Japanese. This time, however, I was placed with a completely different family, which spoke absolutely NO ENGLISH… which was good because even though I still don’t know much Japanese and I still can barely hold a conversation, I really needed the practice. However, before I even met my family, me and the four other people (yeah, it was really small this time for some reason) did a number of other quite exciting things. First, since this particular program was set up by one of the elementary schools in the town, we first paid a visit to the school… if I would have known what I had gotten myself into when I signed up, I might never have done it! The school, even though it was a Saturday, had set up a special international student exchange day and all of the kids had come to school in their full uniform attire to meet these exotic people from foreign lands. Well, it turns out that they wanted us to give a little speech in the gym in front of the 500 or so little kids and all of the teachers. And of course, guess who got to go first… our fearless hero Jay, who had the least Japanese training out of all five people and was definitely just a bit nervous. Well, even though my Japanese wasn’t flawless, I got up there and had a great time… I got the kids all pumped up from the beginning by being really silly and then just told them basic things like where I was from, what I was doing in Japan, and of course about how I hated wearing the little Japanese slippers because they were usually only half the size of my feet (at which point I of course raised up my size 13 feet and showed them the pathetic little slippers that I could barely even fit my toes into, much less the rest of my feet).
After the speeches were finished (one of the guys was from India and spoke fairly good Japanese, so he sat up there for like 10 minutes and blabbed away, whereas the other four of us, all students in the JTW program, just spoke for a few minutes and ran out of things to say), we split up and went to individual classrooms where we did various things. In my classroom, I was hoping they would ask me questions and I would get some good Japanese practice in, but instead the teacher just wanted to take pictures of the blue-eyed, blond-haired freak with his students, so the little cuties came up to me in pairs and did the whole “my name is Yoko Ono” routine, then turned around so the teacher could snap a picture of the three of us. After about the third set, I decided that I needed to spice things up a bit, so I started putting kids on my shoulders for the pictures, holding them upside down by their feet, banging their heads together, blowing kisses to the little girls (which got me a few phone numbers afterward… unfortunately, they were sixth graders… a bit too old for me!), and just doing silly stuff to make the pictures a little more interesting. As soon as the pictures were over, I tried talking to the kids, and the first thing I asked was who liked soccer… of course almost every boy in the room raised his hand, and even a few little girls timidly chimed in (I’ve found that soccer isn’t near as popular with girls in Japan as it is in the States… in fact, I’ve found sports in general don’t seem to have as much appeal with Japanese girls… this isn’t to say that there aren’t some seriously athletic Japanese girls, because believe me I’ve seen a few that could mop up the floor with me… of course, I guess just about any American girl could probably do the same with me…). Anyway, the next thing I know the teacher marches us all outside and splits us up into girls against boys (yeah, that made perfect sense), but then realized the slight ambiguity amongst the teams and figured by putting the big, tall American on the girls team, everything would be evened up. Needless to say, the girls team didn’t do too well, especially considering there was one boy who was absolutely one of the best soccer players I have ever seen for his age (and of course he liked to let his fellow students know it with a lot of hotshot moves… this kid, who was only in sixth grade, even did a complete bicycle kick that was about as close to Pele as you can get)… I was rather impressed.
After getting my butt kicked at soccer and receiving presents from the students, most of which were adorable little origami creations, me and the other gaijin (sorry, I’m tired of typing the word ‘foreigner’, so I’m just going to use the Japanese term from here, which most Americans know anyway) were taken to the local sake factory, which just happened to be where my last homestay father worked and since his wife speaks really good English, she was there to translate for the guy giving the tour. It was nice to see her again and her adorable little girl, but I felt really bad because I still hadn’t sent them an e-mail since I stayed with them and they knew I had easy access to it. After the sake factory tour (which wasn’t all that exciting because I had just visited a different sake factory three days before for one of our field trips and already got to see how the whole process works… besides, they always make you sample the stuff and I can assure you that I like sake about as much as drinking water in Lubbock, Texas… in case you’ve never tried either, rest assured you aren’t missing out on some of the finer things in life). Next we trekked to a cool little place where you make ‘washi’, a special kind of handmade paper to which you can add cute little decorations. At this place, you got to choose from a bunch of pretty little flowers and stems to put in your paper and make a design… I chose to make little bookmarks, although I must admit I have always been a bit lacking in the artistic field… everyone else finished twice as fast as me, yet for all my work, my washi looked by far the worst in the group… I tried to make one flower look a bit psychedelic by mixing a bunch of different colored petals to it, but it came out looking more like something a first grader might have done on a bad day… a REALLY bad day. But at any rate, the homestay program paid for us to make the stuff (as well as for everything else), and even though my bookmarks look like something only a really proud mother of a kindergartener would stick on her fridge, they are pretty neat… I definitely enjoyed the experience, which due to the fact that you have to pay for it I probably never would have done on my own.
After making our beautiful washi, we trekked over to a huge doll warehouse, where they make and sell huge doll sets as well as really cool looking ornamental samurai helmets and huge fish windsocks. Yes, this is another one of those Japanese things… the dolls are for Japanese girls who have a special time every year where they get to display their dolls in the main room or entrance room of the house… a full set can run anywhere from a few thousand dollars to more than a house in Japan (which I can assure you are a lot more expensive than in the States). Usually the dolls are collected individually as the girl grows up, who then takes some of them with her when she is married and starts a collection for her own daughter. The samurai hats they had for sale were kind of like the guys equivalent of the dolls… it is tradition for every boy to have one (but don’t quote me on this… they didn’t really explain any of this, they just let us walk around the factory and explore… the only reason I knew about the dolls is because I read something in a book about it). As far as the windsocks go, they are hung up on boys day (I think its in May), and let me just say these things can come in really big sizes… the oldest boy in the family has the largest fish and it is flown highest on the pole, and then the younger boys are given smaller flown lower on the poll.
After exploring the doll warehouse, we headed back to meet our new families-for-a-night, who were awaiting our arrival with eager faces. We did little introductions and then the next thing we knew we were off on our separate ways with our families… I was sent with some guy and his daughter, who just told me to follow them out to their car and then drove me straight to their house…. I think they were really nervous at first because they didn’t say anything the first few minutes of the car ride, probably wondering how much Japanese I could speak and whether or not I even wanted to talk to them. When we arrived at the house, at first there were only two kids in the main room (where I spent the entire evening until I went to bed), but after a few minutes about 10 little kids came out of the backroom and pounced on me. They were absolutely adorable, but I was a bit confused as to where they came from. After talking with them a bit, I found out they were from the same elementary school (they all kept talking about my big feet problem) and that they were just there to visit me. Anyway, I played around with them for an hour or so, and then when some of them left (or maybe just went into another room), I played Uno (yup, the cards were in English, which was rather funny at times because only one girl actually knew what cards like ‘Draw Four’ meant and the other ones would just try and keep playing instead of drawing their cards… I also had a lot of fun trying to clear up rules that they didn’t understand… I can assure you I got a lot of Japanese practice in) and watched a little Japanese TV. Then two more adults came out from one of the other rooms (adding to my confusion as to who all actually lived in this place and who was just visiting… at first I thought maybe these were one of the kids parents who also wanted to play with the gaijin!) and we all had dinner together. I was asked a lot of questions about America and how I liked Japan, at which point I of course explained what a crummy place America is and that’s why I came to Japan as soon as I could. Since I was still curious about the housing situation, I inquired about who actually lived in the house and if they were all related (unfortunately I don’t know how to say inbred yet in Japanese or I could have turned it into a really interesting conversation) and what they did for a living. It turned out that the two women in the room were sisters (even though they looked nothing alike… my homestay mother looked older and she was actually a bit overweight, whereas her sister was quite attractive and had a slender typical Japanese figure) and between the two of them they housed five children (this is a rather unusual setup for Japanese from what I’ve gathered so far, although I guess it is probably more common in small towns like this one than in the cities).
After dinner, the kids pretty much went off into the other rooms and I didn’t really see them much more that night. The parents and I stayed in the main room and just talked and talked and talked… it was by far the best practice I’ve had for my Japanese so far and after about three hours of talking I was very comfortable and speaking fairly smoothly (although I still had to deal with a limited vocabulary and often they had to repeat their questions before I understood what they were asking). We talked about everything from the danger of American cities (apparently this is one of the more impressionable things of American society on the Japanese, who live in one of the safest countries in the world… it’s not all that uncommon to see women walking around the streets by themselves at night… although they’re probably working, if you know what I mean) to Saddam Hussein, which was a lot of fun to discuss because I found that Americans are not the only ones who think this guy is missing a few gum balls in his candy machine! The next morning I was awaken by the children, one of which gladly jumped on the sleeping gaijin to see what kind of response she would elicit… I took a shower in the wonderfully different Japanese bathroom (you typically sit on a little bucket and take your shower instead of standing up… at least that’s the experience I’ve had at both of my homestays). I had a rather American breakfast… scrambled eggs and toast (my host mother put some ketchup on the side and I tried it with my eggs for the first time… it was actually quite tasty). Then I sat around with the rest of the family and watched some TV (whooo… that’s going to take quite a while for me to understand… at least when you are speaking face to face with Japanese, they will slow down and use easier words because you are a gaijin, the same way I slow down when I speak English to a Japanese person, no matter how good there English is… TV, on the other hand, is geared for a Japanese audience and thus makes no concessions to the poor gaijin… everything is fast and very difficult to understand). However, while we were flipping through the stations, we found some documentary-type program on martial arts in Okinawa, and since my homestay family knew I had just gotten back from there, we watched it for a while and I was actually able to understand a little of the slower-paced speaker. After TV, it was time for me to take off, so we loaded my bag and all of my little gifts (including a loaf of homemade bread from my homestay mother) into the car and drove back to the school. The people in charge of the program gave little speeches and then asked us to tell everyone what we thought of the program… I of course told them they were all a bunch of backwards farmers who really needed to industrialize before the rest of Japan left them in the dust… of course followed by my utmost thanks for their kindness. And then that was it… just as fast as we had driven into the town and entered the lives of our new families, we were driving into the sunset on our way back to commotion of the city…. and so the vicious cycle goes on.
Fukuoka
Ok, so this is the city I live in, but since it is the seventh largest city in Japan, there is a lot to do here and I have been to various places. First of all, I have to brag about my city a little bit… in a recent Asiaweek magazine, which annually ranks the top forty major cities in Japan, there was a new guy at the top this year… that’s right, someone beat out the gargantuan Tokyo, someone overcame the beautiful and extremely clean Singapore, someone topped the bustling metropolis of Hong Kong, someone crushed a now ailing Seoul… and it just so happens that the city that topped this list was…. oh, you already guessed it… wow, you guys are soooo smart…. that’s right, Fukuoka was rated the best city in which to reside out of all Asian cities (which I can assure you covers a lot of cities). I was really impressed when I read this, and I certainly believe this city deserves to be up there, but I must admit I was a bit surprised. How could such extremely popular and internationally important places as Hong Kong, Singapore, Osaka, and even Tokyo be out-ranked by a tiny underdog in southern Japan. Well, the ranking took a variety of things into account, such as the environment around the city (one of the biggest factors this year in light of the big conference on global warming held in Kyoto in December), the cost of living within the city, how well the city’s government is operated, and a wealth of other things that might not always be beneficial to the ranking of a huge metropolis such as Tokyo or Hong Kong. Anyway, I am quite satisfied with the city myself, even though I come from the best city in America (and the rest of the Western Hemisphere for that matter… ok, so maybe Houston is lacking in a few.. ok, a lot of areas, but it’s still not a bad city… ok, it’s a bad city, but one can survive there… ok, so one can only survive in certain parts of the city, but I still love it just the same).
Fukuoka has just about everything a big city could offer, yet still maintains the feeling of a smaller, more personal town. I read this in a million different brochures before I came here, but now I’m beginning to see that this is really true. Besides all the city has to offer, the location is great too… we are on the southernmost island of Japan, so the weather is decent here in the winters (its a bit colder than Houston), but one bad thing is that it rains entirely too much in the winter (although my friend said this is rather unusual weather this year and that usually it doesn’t rain that much until the rainy season in June and July, when it literally rains every day). Besides the weather, the city is right on the Sea of Japan and is backed by a beautiful mountain range that can be seen from all parts of the city because Fukuoka has no major smoke-bellowing industries and thus maintains rather breathable air (although just about every major city in the world today is getting to be pretty bad on a person’s health… I can just picture a future world filled with a bunch of Mexico Citys… wouldn’t that be a great place to bring up the kids). Well, I bought a decent mountain bike (a TREK 950, for any of you bike aficionados) from some other American guy who is teaching English over here…. evidently he got hit three times by a car on this bike and really screwed up his back so that he can’t ride it much anymore… but although his back took a beating, the bike appeared to be in perfect shape… so I bought it and I’ve found that it was a wise decision because I go everywhere by bike, whether it be 3 miles to school everyday, 8 miles to downtown, or 15 miles to the library. I’ve been to quite a few places in Fukuoka so far on my bike, yet there are quite a few places left to be explored. One of the most beautiful places in Fukuoka, and I assume one of the more newly developed judging from the architecture (again, let me just warn you about my skills in architecture… the place could be 100 years old for all I know), is near the Fukuoka Dome, the only dome in Japan with a retractable roof. Right near this absolutely beautiful stadium is the Fukuoka Tower, which I have yet to ascend but plan to do before I leave. These two structures alone are enough to elicit endless admiration, but there is more… a few blocks away sit the city museum and library next to each other… let’s just say that when I rode up on my bike I was absolutely in awe at the beauty of these two buildings… I definitely wanted to give the city developers back in Houston a call and tell them to get their butts to Fukuoka to learn how it’s done. I didn’t actually go inside the museum (let’s just say that anything that might cost money is an immediate turnoff to me, especially if it’s not something that I’m just dying to do), but I can assure you that if the outer appearance gave any indication of the inner contents, it would have well been worth any entrance fee they could have charged.
I did however go in the library, which was the reason I rode my bike almost 15 miles to this area, and for good reason. I had read a little brochure on the library, and I got the impression that it was just like a typical American library… let’s see, you’ve got the restaurant and coffee shop on the first floor along with a special student studying room equipped with all sorts of fancy high-tech equipment, several large auditoriums for special lectures, a main movie theater for educational films, a large selection of VHS tapes for viewing on the 30 or so plush little private viewing theaters with built-in TV and VCR, and… oh yeah… books. On to the second floor, you’ve got plenty of computers, plenty of study areas, plenty of books, just about every newspaper in the world (with probably almost every back issue on computer or microfilm), and who knows what else… the place was huge and the design of everything was very modern… after one hour of walking around and just checking the place out, I knew if they ever built a library half this cool in Houston, I would certainly be there every day. By far the most colorful place in Fukuoka, as in most cities, is the downtown area known as Tenjin (which name uses the Chinese characters for heaven or sky and for gods… even though most names in Japanese don’t have a coherent meaning between the individual characters, I like to think that this name means ‘place of the gods’, or even a little bit more of a stretch – ‘playground of the gods’). I head to this place at least once a weekend, sometimes two or three times, to do anything from dancing at one of Tenjin’s many clubs to shopping to eating to studying to looking for part-time jobs at a really cool non-profit international exchange area. Tenjin has everything… all of the major shopping stores are represented in the general vicinity, plenty of small, family-run shops are mixed in, the best restaurants in town offering anything from Mexican food to the best Thai food outside of Thailand are close at hand… just about any kind of place you could expect to find in a big city can be found in Tenjin or its surrounding areas. Canal City, which was opened a year or two ago as one of the most innovative entertainment complexes in Japan, offers a huge AMC movie theater (yup, they’re taking over Japan too… the difference is that a normal ticket here cost 2000 yen… or about $16… which is pretty much what all movies run around here), a wide variety of restaurants and shops, a beautiful Hyatt Regency hotel, and various other things housed in one of the most innovative and beautiful complexes I’ve ever laid eyes on! Right behind Canal City is the city’s red light district, which I must admit seems very well patronized. If you are a guy and stroll down one of Nakasu’s (the name of this area) many streets alone, you will be easy prey for the many ‘vendors’ who try and lure you into their shows or shops or whatever filthy thing they are selling. Yakuza (the Japanese mafia or just gangsters in general) can be seen quite often around here walking around in their dark, stiff suits with their sullen faces telling you to walk on the other side of the street. Some of the stores in this area selling just about the kinkiest of things openly display some pretty nasty gadgets in their windows, perhaps a bit more blatantly than their American counterparts (and certainly much more blatantly than I cared to see!). Anyway, when I walked through this are (with a female Japanese friend of mine to keep the vendors from imploring me to view their fine shows), I just had to laugh at how a people that somehow seem so innocent in many ways to me not only copy the loveable things about the West, but also the downright dirty things as well (although I wouldn’t say that all of this has been borrowed… sex is of course a universal concept… though of course a bit obscured in places like Alabama… and I think the Japanese and moreover the Chinese can be credited with the introduction of many sexually-oriented ideas and gadgets into the West… I’m certainly not an expert on the topic, but I might just decide to write me thesis on it someday!). Looking around in this area at the many scantily clothed women and the oasis of drooling guys, I just kind of laughed because I was merely viewing the reflection of America through slanted eyes… I guess wherever you venture in this world, people will always be people, and some will always have more twisted machinations than others.
At any rate, once you hook you a woman in Nakasu (or anywhere else in the surrounding area for that matter), you only have to walk a few hundred meters to one of the many “love hotels”, one of the more humorous things I have found quite prevalent in Japan. Basically, these places are ‘pay by the hour’ places where you discreetly check in (you pay to someone behind a curtain so that no one sees you or who your with, which might be a potential hindrance to many individuals behaving badly (which I would say is probably 90% of the clientele at these places). After you pay for a certain increment of time (and rarely are there any all-night customers, if such a thing even exists), you head up to your room, which is decorated in one of about a million different zany ways… anything from a big boxing rink (gloves included) to a tropical forest (trees included) to a King’s royal quarters (concubines not included). From that point it is obviously up to you what goes on, just as long as you check out when the time is up. I of course am relating all of this from what I’ve read, but I would like to go with a bunch of friends sometime (no, not for that, you perverts) and split the cost of maybe half an hour just to go check out what the inside of one of these love hotels actually looks like. Also, the sheer number of hotels I’ve seen in Japan just makes me wonder what the Japanese are up to… if you could just the number of extramarital relationships in Japan by the number of love hotels, then I would have to say the Japanese are a pretty extracurricular people when it comes to their sex lives! There are a lot of other places in Fukuoka worth visiting, but I’ve only listed the more interesting ones for the sake of conciseness (looks like I still wasn’t too concise, but what’s it to you anyway… I’m the one who has to make it… err, think it up… and type it… all you have to do is shuffle your eyes around a little bit, mumble what an idiot this guy is, and go on with your daily affairs). There is one more thing worth noting, since we don’t have it in Houston (or most other American cities for that matter)… a subway system. Yeah, I must admit that this was my first experience using a subway and I definitely like it… but I can see how it wouldn’t be very efficient in a place as spread out as Houston. They also have a really cool underground walkway below Tenjin which is bustling with shops and people all day… this we actually do have in Houston, just not to the same extent as the one here in Fukuoka.
Ok, so these are the places I’ve been in the last few months… I realize the list is rather short (I said the LIST, not the descriptions), but the only real break we’ve had thus far was used for my wonderful trip to Okinawa. In March, I will have several weeks off and I plan to go quite a few places, but I haven’t mad up my mind yet. Also, once classes end in late July (aaaahhhh!), I will have about two weeks to do some more traveling. So I’ve thought up some potential destinations… if any of you have ever been to any of these places and have suggestions, please wr…. never mind, I forgot I was talking to a bunch of Americans…
Major cities in Japan
This would involve taking either the shinkansen (better known to Americans as the bullet train… or to those of you out there a little challenged, it is the really, really, really fast train), which is quite expensive, or the old JR trains, which are quite slow and involve tons of transfers that sometimes must be performed in less than 3 minutes. Either way, I would trek along the major cities that basically constitute the basis of the Shinkansen line – Hiroshima (they say the radiation is low enough now that if you visit it won’t really have any effect on you… only your children), Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Nagoya, Yokohama, and the ubiquitous Tokyo!
Seoul
I’ve wanted to go to Korea for some time now, but seeing as how their economy is in a big slump right now and their currency has halved in value over the past few months, I figure I can get some really good stuff for really cheap… in fact, seeing as how my laptop is a Samsung, I probably should have just waited for this economic crisis to happen and then gone to Seoul and bought the thing at half price… of course, the fact that the operating system would be in Korean could be a slight problem. Also, I’ve become pretty good friends with the Koreans here in my program (except the one Korean girl who tried to stab me the other day… I get the feeling she doesn’t like me), and one of them said I could stay at his house if I wanted to… which would probably be good since I don’t speak a word of Korean (actually, I know how to say ‘cheers’ and ‘eat’, but I don’t think these two words will get me more than a lot of really strange looks) and the only expensive thing in Seoul is housing. Plus, a round-trip ticket to Seoul is a whopping $150 or so, making this trip sound pretty reasonable financially!
Hong Kong
Let’s just say that I had better pocket every penny (ok, yen) I get from this point on if I want to stay in Hong Kong for more than a night or two… this place is darned expensive (so is Tokyo, but getting to Tokyo is a heck of a lot cheaper), but it’s also one of the places I want to see more than anywhere else in the world (of course, there’s always downtown Detroit on the top of my list). I suppose I probably won’t make it there this year due to cost concerns, but I’m going to make a point of visiting as soon as I possibly have a chance… maybe I can even study abroad there!
The Great Bangkok to Singapore Journey
Ok, this trip was actually not my idea, rather the plot of several South Africans I met here at the university who made this wonderful trek over the winter break. They said it was absolutely wonderful and quite cheap, especially since the Thai and Malaysian economies are also in shambles right now (this whole Asian economic crisis, as horrible as it may be for the local economies, could work in my favor if I decide to travel in any of the ailing countries… the yen has twice the buying power it did just a few months ago in Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia). Anyway, the trip would work something like this… I fly into Bangkok, stay a few days and check out the city, avoiding tall buildings where evidently a lot of businessmen who have lost everything are jumping to their deaths. Sad. Then I would trek down the Thai coast with its sandy white beaches and clear blue water by bus, foot, and good-old hitchhiking, staying every night in beach-front resorts for a fraction of the cost of the slummiest hotels in Tokyo or Hong Kong. Eventually, I would cross over into Malaysia, where I would continue to trek along the coast and enjoy the beautiful beaches… I would definitely like to stop over in Kuala Lampur, where Japan recently beat Iraq to qualify for the World Cup (of course this obviously isn’t my motivation for wanting to see the city)… finally, at the end of my journey, I will (carefully) enter the city-state of Singapore, being careful not to chew any gum (none whatsoever), not to spit in the street, not to forget to flush the toilet, and definitely not to spray-paint anything! Yup, this may be one of the most civically restrictive countries in the world, but it is thus one of the cleanest and most beautiful. Or so I’ve heard. It has also become a very international city (which seems to have quite an appeal to me since I came to Japan) and I wouldn’t mind working there some day in the future… if I could manage to live without chewing gum!
Well, this is my exciting travel agenda… I obviously won’t be able to make all of these trips, but I plan to make at least two of them, and if I could make three without going deeply into debt, I will definitely return to the States a happy man… of course, I’d have to say that even if I didn’t make a single one of these trips, I am still having the most wonderful experience of my life over here in Japan and I definitely plan to come back soon, whether it be to work, study, play, get married, have kids, teach English, teach Russian, become a farmer… whatever… it really doesn’t matter, as long as I get a chance to live in Japan again and enjoy the hospitality, the culture, and the amazing resilience of the Japanese. But I guess I shouldn’t really be looking that far ahead just yet… I still have almost 7 months left here in Japan now and I plan to take full advantage of them.
Minna ganbatte!
Sayonara,
Jay
P.S.- “What… he’s not finished yet!”… yeah, well, just one more little (yet rather important) thing to share with you. This Sunday (i.e.- tomorrow here in Japan), I am moving out of the international student dorm for good… no, I’m not moving in with a Japanese girl… I’m moving into a permanent homestay! That’s right… I will be living with a typical, run of the mill Japanese family… however, the problem is that I’ve only met them once (and actually I didn’t even meet the father, who was at work on a Saturday afternoon, not atypical for Japanese), so I’m only assuming they are your typical Japanese family… for all I know, they could be the most tyrannical people in the world who seek to lure in some dumb, unsuspecting gaijin to do their dishes, their laundry, their cleaning (of course if they want me to cook, they’re just SOL). However, they seem extremely nice and I think everything should work out wonderfully. The program was set up by the staff of my program (they set one up for all of the students in my program… however, my family was kind enough to offer me a permanent homestay, so I took full advantage of it) by finding people who work at my university that are willing to set up a homestay with an international student… for my homestay family, they found some 25 year old guy who really loves soccer and works in the office of the engineering department. However, the fact that he was so young and the fact that I didn’t notice a wedding ring on his finger made me wonder if I was going to do a homestay with a single guy or what?! After talking to him a bit, I discovered that he actually still lived with his parents (another phenomenon not too uncommon among the Japanese) and that he has a 21-year old sister. So then I figured that maybe this could be a very cool homestay (no, not because he had a sister about my age, which certainly doesn’t hurt, but because I would get to experience life with a real Japanese family). However, I feel really bad for my homestay family having to put up with me for the next 7 months… besides the fact that they were unlucky enough to get someone as crazy as me, they don’t speak a bit of English (even my homestay sister, who has studied English for 11 years… yes, I’m dead serious!) and I have yet to master the Japanese language, so there will definitely be a language barrier present in our conversations during the first few months…. but this is exactly why I want to live with a Japanese family, even though I am forfeiting the absolute freedom I am experiencing for the first time in my life from living completely on my own (except for the fact that the Japanese taxpayers are keeping my billfold from getting empty). The fact that I will HAVE TO speak in Japanese every single day will help my Japanese improve immensely, as well as give me direct insight into how a Japanese family actually lives, rather than merely gleaning this information from a book. However, as anyone who has ever had to communicate in a foreign language knows, it takes a lot of energy to hold a conversation unless the foreign speaker is rather fluent or pretty close too… thus, it will be very difficult the first few months as my Japanese improves for me to come home from a long day at school and have to expend a great amount of energy just eating dinner and doing other everyday affairs. As Americans, we greatly take for granted the ability of communication because we only need to speak English to get by… in general, we have no appreciation for how important, yet so very difficult, it is to carry out verbal communication. I can assure you that now I am finally learning a foreign language*, I have learned to appreciate the value of communication and that it should not be taken for granted in any shape or form. (*Spanish just doesn’t count for me as knowing a foreign language because the American system of teaching foreign languages is even worse than the Japanese system of teaching English… and even though Spanish is 10 times easier than Japanese for the native English speaker to learn and even though I studied it for two years and Japanese for only 3 months now, I can already speak way more Japanese than I was ever able to speak in Spanish, which was definitely reaffirmed yesterday when I tried speaking with some guy from Honduras who spoke no English… at first I thought it was fun to try and say something in Spanish, but every other word I had to resort to Japanese to ask how to say the word in Spanish… we switched over to Japanese after I made a pretty miserable mess of the Spanish language).
