Japan Day 1…

My first 11 hours in Japan have gone very smoothly. I’m currently awake at 3 in the morning suffering from jet lag (I woke up to some night workers since my window is open… and it definitely feels like morning right now (its 11am back at home). That aside, things haven’t gone too badly at all.

The trip started off at LAX. I was a bit apprehensive about United as I’ve had trouble with them in that past, but the flight from LAX to SFO went without a hitch. We departed on time. We arrived on time. There were a heck of a lot of kids. It felt like a freaking day care with a group of obnoxious snot nosed what looked like 7th and 8th graders (maybe freshmen in high school… freaking kids get younger and younger every day) that I hoped I wouldn’t see later on as per their chaperone’s conversation with the flight attendant; they were flying to SFO to connect to an international flight to.

I made a lot of friends on the plane. My neighbor, a rather burly… asian? I don’t know… guy named Felix was off to Edinburg to hang with his girlfriend whom he graduated from USC with, him in some sort of broadcast communications, her in something that led her to law school. I remember it was a somewhat non-typical path to law school. He wore a thick ass suede leather jacket. Looked nice as hell… and about as hot to boot in the very temperate Californian weather.
Behind me was a guy getting to know a Swedish girl… it seemed kind of shady… but had something to do with Santa Barbara… sigh… I really shouldn’t listen in on people’s conversations… but I can’t help it when the guy’s blasting away.

People seemed pretty friendly, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the baseball cap. Waiting for the shuttle transfer to the international terminal at SFO wasn’t too bad… no impatient people pushing and shoving to get to their next flight, the guy behind me was like “did we make it?” as the bigass group of kids and chaperone took the last seats available on that shuttle… and he follows with “no… we didn’t make it…” the attendant tells us to wait a bit… and we hang.

I see the guy later as I miraculously am able to grab a bite to eat and we nod in mutual acknowledgement of having passed this rather innocuous trial, this right to continue our journeys. Adventures are always fun.

By the way… the gate for the Japan flight… abound with tons of hot girls… and it only gets better the closer I get to the country.

One thing that I know I’m pretty good at is that I can remember people… where I’ve seen them and how long has elapsed since I’ve last seen them. Obviously the system isn’t perfect, there are a fair number of people that have slipped through the net when I’m online… but I’m pretty good at remembering faces… I don’t think I’ll be forgetting these people any time soon… granted I don’t really remember that one Ukrainian girl I drove to a rather shady setup in Escondido to help my German sub-letter help his newfound friend… its prolly my first glimpse at the type of human trafficking that still occurs in the US… granted I don’t think it was anything illegal… but it was definitely shady business. However I digress.

After lunch I boarded the plane… which had already been half way boarded so the gate was empty. There was no one just milling around waiting to get on an overcrowded flight. The pressure to just move bodies someplace was absent and people seemed to actually be treated like people should be when embarking on such a trip.
My carryon was huge. I got to my seat and this lady was totally setting up her personal space in my seat and she even went so far as to ask me to help her put her luggage up in the bin. It wasn’t until after a minute of her continuing on with her space that I had to intervene and claim my seat. She turned out to be a researcher working on statistical analysis of the TOEFL at Tokai University and had just returned from her sabbatical at Cambridge, and more importantly, my first newfound friend in Japan. We talked about a ton of topics and I won’t enumerate them all cuz… well frankly I don’t remember all the details of such small talk… especially when it amounted to about 14 hours of small talk, as she gave me a crash course on the train system used in Japan, and more or less held my hand through the ticket purchasing procedures, and helped pass the time to boot as she was going in the same direction. I’m still getting used to it, but I seem to be getting the hang of it. She also helped me with the pay phone system in Tokyo… which sucks btw, everyone is on cellphones here so pay phones are very much a thing of the past, but I have no choice as I won’t get my cellphone for a few more days. We said our farewells at Tokyo Station where I got off to connect to my next train, the Chuo-line, what has so far been my lifeline to Tokyo as my hotel is right next to the station in Musashisakai.
I was able to get in contact with Yuta. At this point the jetlag was hitting me pretty hard. The pay phone definitely didn’t help because we decided to hang out in Shinjuku and we decided to meet at the EAST Entrance to Shinjuku Station. I couldn’t find the EAST entrance so I hung out at the SOUTHEAST exit and the SOUTH exit until I finally discovered (quite some time later) that the entrance did in fact exist, and I was about a block away from it… because Shinjuku Station is underneath a freaking MALL… and the old man at the Southeast exit train booth was like “Denwa nai desu” ‘X’-ing his hands so I couldn’t tell Yuta where I was exactly. I ran to the right exit when I discovered this and it turned out the East exit is freaking enormous…. which is funny because I got in to the exit through an alleyway which was this puny thing that smelled of urine and even housed two homeless guys. Talking to the guys at this exit was much better as they were a little better with the whole shitty Japanese/English combo and even let me into the station to make the call.

Caught up with Yuta, ate some Ramen… rather I ate, he drank as he had some business prior with some other friends, and caught up. For those of you that are curious as to how he’s doing, he’s not doing bad here in Japan. In terms of taiko, I think he’s doing amazing things, but at the same time I don’t feel as if what he’s doing is that far beyond my reach. By no means am I anywhere near as talented as he is… its just that I can sort of relate to his experience and that it is not so far above and beyond what I have seen in taiko that I feel like I’m talking to a celebrity.
My next stop is a ginko to ensure that I have enough cash for later, and then Asakusa. As much as I should take pictures… I don’t feel like being all touristy right now, so I’ll refrain. Something that I noted in a previous entry to my paper journal (where I’m keeping track of stuff) is that I don’t seem to feel that sort of excitement that one feels about embarking on an adventure. One way of looking at it is that to me life is an adventure at this point. I certainly don’t want it to end although it seems like an end to sort of free lifestyle might be in sight. I did crazy shit as early as last summer where I traveled some 3000 miles in a month, 3 plane rides to the great North West, and 1 solo drive to freaking Corvallis. Another way of looking at it stems from a conversation I had with this one lady awhile back where she was like… maybe you’re a Japanese person reincarnated. She’s funny though and one should take that with a grain of salt especially when she follows up with, I think I used to be Native American… amazing. I have no idea what I was in my previous life (probably a caterpillar that got stepped on by a moose), but it sort of feels like I’m coming home even though I’ve never been here before. By no means is Tokyo the same as San Diego or Los Angeles, and I certainly feel like a foreigner here, but at the same time I don’t. Japanese is something I’ve pretty much heard on a daily basis for the last 7 years as my primary source of entertainment: anime (otherwise known as TV) and music, and my experience in Paris with the metro has given me a primer or foundation to work the train system here in Tokyo… so while I certainly feel lost slowly getting used to the names and Kanji here, I feel much more at home and much more grounded than I probably should.

I guess that kind of leads in to the next topic… which is much more theoretical by nature and much more related to ethnic studies, but I think I’ll just grab a bit of granola and try to catch a few more z’s. Hopefully I will be up to discussing it later as it is pretty important… dealing with my own terms with this vague notion of a national identity… which more and more… I feel like I don’t have.