Worse Than Coleslaw

My last day of teaching was one week ago. There’s lots to talk about still, but my Internet connection is a little spotty now that I’ve moved out of my apartment. I will provide new entries and status updates with as much regularity as I can manage.

One thing I was told upon arriving in Japan was that Japanese toothpaste was no good and that I should have some good old fashioned American toothpaste shipped to my apartment as soon as possible if I hadn’t thought to bring any with me. Incidentally, I was told the same thing about deodorant, and condoms. Japanese dentistry as a whole did not garner rave reviews among the veteran teachers who were in charge of my training; I was told that dental procedures such as drilling for cavities are typically done over multiple visits, so you’d go in one day to get your tooth drilled and the hole covered with a temporary seal, and then make another appointment to have the cavity filled later. Not fun, and little in my experience has given me any reason to alter the dismal view of Japanese dentistry that I inherited from those that came before me. In my poor farming community I rarely encounter anyone over 30 who doesn’t have at least one gold tooth. I’ve met exactly one student with braces at either of the schools at which I teach.

That said, I do have dental insurance here, after a fashion. More than I’ll have when I return to the land of the free and the home of the brave. A few weeks after arriving in Japan I noticed what looked like a hole on the front of one of my lower premolars, which was not so surprising considering I hadn’t been to a dentist in years. It didn’t hurt unless I just brushed the crap out of it, but several months later I decided I’d get it checked out while still residing in a country known for its low-cost dentists, if not for said dentists’ quality.

“Getting it checked out” in this case involved me phoning the company I work for and scheduling an appointment with my IC, or “Independent Contractor.” ICs are usually housewives who my company calls upon periodically to assist helpless baby birds like me with procedures that are still well outside my capabilities to navigate. My IC showed up at my apartment on a Saturday morning and had me drive the three blocks to the nearest dentist’s office.

Upon entering I was told to take off my shoes and put on a pair of indoor sandals in order to maintain the cleanliness of the floor, which is pretty normal here but which also is an example of irony since the dentist himself wore white slacks with grease stains all along the front of them, such that he looked more like a mechanic than a licensed medical professional getting ready to stick his hands in my mouth. I noticed that his own teeth were pretty whacked out, which did not fill me with confidence either. I was ushered into an examination room and sat down in one of the chairs there. One of the assistants held out a special stand for me to put my glasses in, which is so totally Japan. The dentist selected some prodding instruments from a tray to the right and began the examination, which lasted all of a minute. He started in with some kind of explanation, his gaze darting back between me and the IC like he wasn’t sure who he should be addressing in this situation.

“None of your teeth are bad,” my IC said. “Do you have a pain?”

“No pain,” I said. “But I thought I saw a hole in my tooth.”

“But no pain?” She seemed confused as to why we were there if I didn’t have a tooth that felt like it was already rotting out of my mouth.

“I have no pain now, but I may later, right?” It took me about three minutes to explain my thought process behind getting a hole in my tooth looked at before it started hurting, and I pointed to the tooth in question again to make sure she knew what I was talking about.

A few more words between her and the dentist. “It is not a cavity,” she said. At this point she pulled her electronic dictionary out of her purse and started tapping at its keys while muttering “nandake, nandake” under her breath. Eventually, she looked up. “Not cavity. It is a baby tooth.” More conferring with the dentist, and then she said “These three teeth”—I held my lips down and looked in the mirror, and the dentist pointed at one premolar on each side of my lower row, and one premolar on the upper row— “these three teeth are baby teeth.” Looking at them now, they do look much smaller compared to the rest of the teeth in my mouth, but since reality for me is a construct of my own consciousness, I just assumed that that’s how premolars were supposed to look.

“Are you sure it’s okay, though?” I asked. “I mean, that really does look like a hole in my tooth there.”

This question led to the quickest mouth x-ray I’ve ever had. The dentist spoke as he pointed to the developed x-ray film, which led to more discussion between him, my IC, and the female dental assistant. Finally, my IC said, “Your baby teeth are not supposed to stay in your mouth this long. So they are damaged because they are not so strong. But I’m sorry, there is nothing he can do about this problem.”

My question is, how was this not caught before? Like, I admittedly have not been to the dentist in five years, since before I started college, but even at 19 it would have been unusual for me to have three baby teeth sitting in my mouth, right? Why am I hearing this for the first time via some dude who I need a translator to communicate with?

Despite being a waste of time, this trip to the dentist—including an x-ray—only cost me 2500 yen, or about $25. And that’s without any insurance, since my dental coverage doesn’t kick in until the yen equivalent of $75. So it may have been an abortive attempt to receive treatment, but at least it was a cheap abortive attempt.

Another interesting thing I noticed was the imagery used in the posters hung up on the walls of the waiting room, which definitely demonstrated a difference of perception between the East and the West. Consider the following example of a poster I saw near the entrance to the office (I made up the title, but everything else was just illustrated with pictures):

The Wonders of Nitrous Oxide -or- My Trip to the Dentist
Panel 1: A woman drawn in an angular style sits in a dentist’s chair with a nitrous oxide mask over her nose. The dentist prepares the tools of his grim trade nearby.
Panel 2: The same woman is shown walking on a rainbow as clouds in the shapes of adorable woodland creatures float in the sky around her.
Panel 3: The woman dances on giant piano keys.
Panel 4: The woman slowly awakes from the dental procedure, her eyes half-open. Having holstered his various sharp objects, the dentist stands over her looking reassuring.
Fin.

Not sure that would fly back home.

About a month ago I started taking karate lessons held twice a week in a gym near City Hall, about a five minute walk from my apartment. The Japanese style of martial arts that my instructor teaches is at odds with the American Kenpo style that I studied for something like eight years when I was a teenager—the footwork is all convoluted and the only stance we use is too deep and impractical, to begin with—but it’s enjoyable enough and gets me out of my own head for a while, which is important when, on any given eight-and-a-half hour workday, I have approximately eight-and-a-half hours of downtime. Part of the curriculum of this class consists of lots of zen type posturing; my instructor even tried to explain to me the oft-repeated parable of the willow bending in the wind versus the oak tree fighting against the wind and being blown down as a way to tell me to relax my fucking shoulders already holy shit man, which was quite interesting considering he speaks no English and I speak not nearly enough Japanese for something on that level. Most of the other students are elementary or junior high school age, which adds an element of hilarity to the whole endeavor since, for these small town kids, seeing a foreigner is a pretty strange occurrence. They enjoy getting me to play tag with them, and also frequently walk up to me during breaks, hold out there hands, and say “Jan ken pon!” which is the Japanese name for rock, paper, scissors. On one such occasion this one girl, I think she said she was eight years old, eager to showcase her international knowledge, even corrected the other kids:

“Ya ya ya,” she said. “Eigo de ‘scissors paper stone.’” I was impressed.

Also in attendance are a little five-year-old girl and her mother, who started the class a couple of weeks after I did. Since she’s so young, it’s pretty likely that I am the first non-Japanese person this kid has ever seen, so she gets pretty shy around me. She spent two or three classes studiously avoiding my gaze, but one day as we were all gathered around the massive space heater during a break, after a good deal of hesitation and several false starts, she whispered something into her mother’s ear and pointed at me. The mother walked over to me, smiled, and said, “Ninjin wa Eigo de nandesuka?” which means “What is the word ‘ninjin’ in English?” The little girl held back, using her mom as cover.

After six months in Japan I’ve grown used to people asking me basic, GED-level questions in Japanese and having to shrug my shoulders with a meek smile on my face, which doesn’t work as well as it should because the shrug is not a recognized gesture here. Lately I’ve started nod enthusiastically in such situations hoping that the person I’m speaking to will assume I understand even when I don’t; this is a technique I learned from my students, who frequently use it to great effect, cementing in my mind the idea that teaching involves a two-way flow of information between teacher and pupil. So I in this case I actually had to blink a couple of times before I was able to respond, because, strangely enough, I knew the answer to the question I was being asked.

“Carrot,” I said. The little girl poked her head out from behind her mother, and I sounded the word out more slowly so she could see my lips forming each syllable and hear how it was pronounced. “Carrot.” This is one of the very, very few instances in quite a while where I have been able to display something resembling competence in my day to day life. After six months spent as a cheeping baby bird—stranger in a strange land working at a strange job that I don’t have any idea how to do well—it was nice to finally be able to feel like I was capable of, like, occasionally affecting my surroundings in a positive way. It was a revelation.

I consider this an epic win.

Addendum: I uploaded the Winter Sports Festival pictures as a video slideshow. Also, the pics from Tokyo are up a mere two months after the fact, and can be viewed here on Picasa because Flickr is asinine, and stuff.

1. I once wanted to Change the World. A part of me still does. At the moment, though, I’ll settle for having health insurance.
2. I wear my glasses all the time despite the fact that I can still see pretty decently without them. I tell myself that this is because, if I didn’t put them on in the morning and keep them on all day, I’d never remember to put them on even when I did need them.
3. A major reason why I am thinking about leaving Japan is that I hate being in a place where no one laughs at my jokes.
4. All of the best decisions of my life have been made for the stupidest reasons imaginable.
5. I’ve spent a good portion of my life idolizing the image of the slacker savant, that figure in movies and books and such who excels in life while minimizing his or her actual work output. I (literally) slept through high school and got a 4.2 GPA, all-nightered it through college and graduated magna cum laude and with honors, and devoted myself to as many pursuits that I was already good at as possible so as to reduce the amount of practice I would have to put in to those pursuits. Now that I am ostensibly an adult, however, this approach is much less successful at allowing me to actually do anything with my life.
6. I prefer to have a relatively small number of close friends than an extensive network of casual acquaintances because I hate the idea that the words I speak mean less to the person I am speaking them to than they do to me.
7. I keep waiting for one of the books I am always reading or the CDs I am always listening to or the movies I am always watching to somehow encapsulate my existence and explain to me why I am the way I am and what shape my life should take from here on out. At some point I got sick of waiting for this to happen and tried creating my own catalysts for personal growth in the form of short stories, funny articles for the school newspaper, and blog entries on Facebook, which brought me closer but still haven’t quite done the trick.
8. I really suck a planning and organizing. This might be one reason why I dislike my current job so much.
9. The idea of wearing a tie or even a collared shirt is irrationally offensive to me. As far as I can tell a tie serves no practical purpose whatsoever, and I hate being beholden to arbitrary standards that have no basis whatsoever in reality.
10. I really, really want to get a “Calvin and Hobbes” tattoo.
11. It takes me forever to answer e-mails and such because I always try to really think about what I’m going to write back, and if I’m not feeling particularly eloquent at that specific time I’ll put the message aside and wait until I am. Sometimes this can go on for days (and weeks), even with something simple like writing on someone’s Facebook wall. For similar reasons, it took me a long time to write this list.
12. I tend to get really nervous when shopping for clothes, so I do as much shopping as I can online. When I do go to an actual store to buy clothes, I don’t always spend as much time as I should trying things on and finding something that really fits me. As a result, many of the clothes I own are (noticeably) either to big or too small, but I wear them anyway.
13. You know that one game people play when they’re drunk sometimes where you hold out ten fingers and take turns saying something you’ve never done, and then if any of the other people in the group have done that thing, they put one finger down until there is only one person left who still has one or more of his or her fingers up? And since this game is mostly played by drunk people, the “I have never” statements usually end up being about sex? Yeah, I always win that game.
14. I hate waking up early. I recently realized that I have never woken up before 10 AM voluntarily. Even in instances where I’d volunteered to do something that took place before 10 AM, when it came down to actually waking up for that thing, I’d have hit the snooze button and gone right on sleeping if I could have. If I ever get married, my wedding will have to be in the evening or else I’d stay up until all hours the night before and then hit the snooze button four times in the morning and almost be late.
15. Despite my intense dislike of waking up, I have a pathological tendency to go to bed at late hours for no other reason than I hate the thought of spending less time awake and doing my own thing than I spent at work on a given day.
16. There is no number sixteen.
17. Something about an ordinary, quiet life is extremely appealing to me and is also terrifying. I realize that my personal happiness has historically been linked more to the proximity of good friends and the amount of time I am able to devote to goofing off rather than traditional indicators of success such as creative output or professional development, but this is hard for me to justify philosophically. It’s still hard to say whether hard work and great deeds will win out in the end over my desire to spend entire days watching music videos on YouTube.
18. I love food, but I have an extremely unrefined palette. To me, there is very little difference between a Subway sandwich and one from an actual deli, Chipotle is the ultimate Tex-Mex establishment, and KFC’s factory chicken tastes better than almost all of the “authentic, home cooked” fried chicken I’ve eaten at restaurants in my various travels across the Southern United States. The one exception to this rule is with soda; I stick with Coke or Pepsi and don’t touch that offbrand stuff.
19. Even though I consider myself an environmentalist, I have never, ever had fun on a hiking trip.
20. My favorite album of all time is Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” Many is the time I have made myself hoarse by belting out “Oh Comely” while driving too fast down I-10 on my way to one destination or another.
21. I think it would be cool to be a stand-up comedian, but, like many other jobs that seem cool, I have no idea how one actually gets into that line of work.
22. I don’t make eye contact with people unless I think about it really hard. I try to play this off as an amusing personality quirk rather than the sign of a deranged mind. It is an especially unfortunate tendency at job interviews, but is inconvenient in a wide variety of social situations.
23. My favorite novel is Picture This by Joseph Heller. Despite repeated gushing recommendations and despite the fact that I have loaned it to at least two different people, I have yet to convince a single one of my friends to actually read it.
24. My personal theme song is “Aside” by The Weakerthans, unless I’m trying to psych myself up to do something important, in which case it’s “Boy Decide” by Murder By Death.
25. I have trouble being concise.

I attended my Hell School’s Winter Sports Festival on Saturday of last week. This consisted of various snow-related games and activities. The first event was a relay race where three people worked together to drag a tire with a small child riding on it around a cone and back to the starting line before passing the tire on to the next team. The soccer field was completely frozen over with ice that was in turn covered by a thin layer of hardened snow that . In other words, designed in the laboratory of the Creator to be unto me and my history as a resident of the Sunshine State as kryptonite is to Super Man.

I was in the first group for the first race, and only made it about four steps before my feet caught in the snow and I fell to the ground. The rope attached to the tire remained clenched firmly in my hand, and I was dragged a pretty decent stretch behind the team before the two other teachers noticed that I was no longer level with them. The teacher relay team ended up not winning that race, although this was not entirely my fault. It’s cool though: I totally brought it home during the tug of war segment later that day.

I walked away from the race with my hands all scraped up and bleeding from being dragged on the ice. As I was taking stock of my injuries, I walked by a couple first-year girls huddling together to stay warm. “Good morning!” they both said. I waved at them. One of them pointed at my face and had a brief conversation with her friend. A group of Japanese teenagers who have been taking English for a while form a sort of gestalt organism; on their own they’d have a hard time communicating with me, but in a big enough group, they can usually come up with about the same level of conversational ability. This is a process that I am pretty used to by now: a group of students will approach me, and one of the brave ones will attempt to ask me a question. For example, “Where you from?” was popular when I first started teaching. The phrasing may be perfect, or it may be a little off. Either way, the asker of the question will then cock his or her head and say “Eh? Eh?” and will turn to converse with the other people in the group, running through several variations of the question in order to try and form a consensus. It actually is pretty interesting to see them perform these translations out loud because it helps me understand the differences in grammar between the two languages. “You where live? Are? Where are you… where are you live? From? Where are you from?” This can take 45 seconds or more, and I sometimes feel like I ran down the escalator at the subway station just in time to watch the train leave and right then understand that I’ll have to wait the full ten minutes for the next one.

“Red,” she said, and pointed at her face, and then at my face again.

“Ah, yes,” I said, after a moment of blank stares and awkward hand gestures. “My face is red. It is very cold today.” I mimed shivering and rubbing my arms. This was my best guess as to the meaning of their inquiry. It didn’t seem to satisfy them, but they appeared unwilling to take this line of questioning any further.

There was a short period of silence wherein we all stood there without any of us making a move to walk away. That was my cue to start asking them questions in English; both of these girls were in a class I taught and were noteworthy for being well-behaved and good-natured in a school full of angsty hardasses, so I was interested to know what clubs they were in, what their favorite subjects were, that kind of thing. This went on for perhaps ten minutes, at which point one of the school’s English teachers walked by. One of the girls motioned him over and asked him a question in Japanese.

“Blood,” he said, and then repeated it to make sure they had the pronunciation right. “Blood.” She pointed at my face again.

The teacher turned to me, nodded in recognition, and said, “You have blood on your face.” I reached up, and, sho’ nuff, my hand came back with red smears on it from what would turn out to be a few small scrapes on my cheek and upper lip. To their credit, the girls both took it in stride and were able to manage answers to every question I asked despite the sight of a crazed-looking gaijin with blood on his face staring them down. Good for them.

Pictures of the snow relay can be found on this Picasa Web Album. I have started using Picasa after discovering that Flickr limits you to only three photo sets. Hell with that.

I was flipping through my journal earlier today while I was at work and came across an entry I’d made over Winter Break while I was staying with a couple of friends in Marumori and unwinding after our successful five-day excursion to Tokyo. Said entry detailed a small but extremely poignant (to me, at any rate) “Japan” type moment. I have reprinted it here with relevant hyperlinks for your reading (and viewing [and listening]) enjoyment:

January 05, 2009
12:40 AM

After spending the entire day loafing around Jamie’s apartment, him and James playing “Valkyria Chronicles” while I read the Murakami book I’d picked up in Sendai, the three of us stopped at a Daily Yamazaki, which is a well-known chain of Japanese convenience stores (or “konbini” as they are often referred to here), to get some latenight snacks. As we entered the store I heard the opening strains of a familiar tune from back when we were all in high school. “Dude,” I said, “It’s Jimmy Eat World,the one song with the video where everyone’s in their underwear.” We proceeded to make our way around the store picking up its various delectable wares, all the while singing along and doing a kind of shuffling walk that was almost-but-not-quite a dance. The only other person in the store was the middle-aged Japanese man working the cash register, who had obviously been trained to display no emotion. I found this to be an extremely cool little moment, and as we were driving back to Jamie’s apartment I realized that this experience really reminded me of that famous scene in Reality Bites where Winona Ryder and Janeane Garofolo dance around a convenience store to “My Sharona.” Except in Japan. Adding “except in Japan” to the end of any anecdote that evokes a particular memory from the past just increases the awesome exponentially.

In homogeneous Japan, the specific details of your heritage or ethnicity or whatever are less significant than the fact that you are not Japanese. Thus, all people not from Japan, whether they be American, Philipino, Chinese, Korean, whatever, are all usually referred to using the word “gaijin” (or “gaikokujin” if the speaker is trying to be more polite), which simply means “foreigner.”

I live in Iwate prefecture, which can be thought of as kind of the Wisconsin of Japan—cold, rural, backwater-y, and not particularly exciting, the punchline to a million jokes that few people care enough to tell, but charming too, like most places can be especially when you can’t understand all the potentially hateful and base things the average John Q. Takahashi on the street is saying. Being such a backwater, Iwate prefecture—and specifically the town that I live in—does not have many English speakers, to the point where, since I am going for at least some vestige of anonymity with this thing, I am reluctant to even say exactly where it is that I live on my blog because doing so would instantly identify me as one of maybe three native English speakers in the whole place.

So I don’t have a lot of contact with other foreigners, and when I do see another person who looks like they might speak fluent English, I get kind of excited. I want to run up to them, give them a hug, and say, “Will you be my friend?” Living life without reliable avenues for communication is a lot more exhausting than people realize. And really, I don’t feel like this impulse is all that unusual. I mean, due to the homogeneous nature of Japan and the difficulties foreigners often face in adjusting to life in this country, it would make sense to assume a certain amount of camaraderie between non-Japanese living here, a badge we all wear with pride like veterans of some long-forgotten war. A secret handshake. A clubhouse in the woods. Midnight rituals. Fucking bylaws. I’d even be cool with just a wave or a thumbs-up as we walk by each other on the street, some simple gesture of acknowledgment between two human beings sharing a common bond as they pass each other all awash in a sea of Other-ness, as if to say, “Holy shit, dude, we’re in Japan!” It’s not much, but it’s a connection, something to keep the isolation at bay.

Operating under the assumption that other people in a situation similar to mine will share these sentiments, I try to smile and nod whenever I see a foreigner while I am out and about, especially in smaller towns where such a sight is a rare occurrence indeed. Back at the beginning of my stay this was to acknowledge a common bond, establish a dialog, maybe the occasional bit of small talk between comrades and arms in such. Initiating contact with strangers has never been my way, but the idea was that if I looked friendly and stuff that people would think it was okay to say “hello” to me. But I quickly discovered that most foreigners, when presented with this situation, will avert their eyes and pretend not to notice my doing this, as if I were their crazy ex-girlfriend or that irritating guy from work with with fifteen cats and a kee-razy story about each and every one of them. Since coming to this realization, I still make eye contact and nod “hello” to every foreigner I meet simply to make the statement that there has not been some sort of mutual decision on both of our parts to ignore the other’s existence. I passed one hipster-looking white dude in Sendai on a staircase, me coming up and him going down, and since casting his gaze down towards the ground as is normal would in this case have caused him to meet my eyes, he opted instead to turn his head so that he was looking at the blank wall next to him rather than, you know, the stairs.

I like to think that I would not have chuckled had he tripped because of this, nor would I have been doubled over with laughter had he broken his neck due to said tripping. But I can’t be sure. I’m working under the assumption that, since these encounters are so fleeting, these people do not yet have substantial reason to avoidme specifically, and so that their refusal to acknowledge my existence is illustrative of some larger reluctance to interact with other foreigners outside of controlled circumstances.

It still is not clear to me why exactly strangers in a strange land, when faced with the rare-ish opportunity to converse in their mother tongue, would choose to pretend like that opportunity does not exist. It probably has something to do with maintaining one’s sense of adventure or something. You make it to Japan, you go through the rigors of homesickness and culture shock and come out the other side reborn a semi-functional (if illiterate) member of Japanese society. You feel like a stupendous badass, a world-traveler, a self-reliant and dynamic personality. Even little things like being able to order at a restaurant or ask for things at the post office seem like feats of epic win. It feels good, like you’re capable of anything, and I guess some people either feel like it’s presumptuous to try to horn in on a random stranger’s nomad Bohemian fantasy or are living out said fantasy and are thus reluctant to have contact with foreigners for fear of upsetting the illusion.

Regardless of the reason, my existence was not acknowledged by a non-Japanese stranger in public until I visited Tokyo, a trip which took place after I had been in this country for almost four months. On Christmas Eve my friends and I took the train over to Akihabara, Tokyo’s legendary electronics district. There I was able to finally fulfill my long-time fantasy of playing a round of Dance Dance Revolution in an Akihabara arcade, and in that arcade we ran into a white dude with glasses and an “Arizona State University” sweatshirt who was waiting in line for some esoteric cube-based rhythm game. He turned to look at us.

“Do you guys speak English?” he asked.

“Yes we do,” I said.

“You can always tell here,” he said, motioning to the Japanese people all around us. “It’s convenient.”

“You have no idea how nice it is to hear you say that,” I said.

So I spent five days in Tokyo at the beginning of my Winter Vacation and have made a short detour to Miyagi prefecture with some friends before I head back to the frozen northlands from whence I came. Miyagi prefecture, with its milder climate and larger and more interesting capital city, is still a major improvement over the town in Iwate where I currently lay my head, but it seems like a major drag after the kidney punch to the senses that was Tokyo, the world’s largest metropolitan area. While this does mean that I have some time to breathe and do some writing, it wasn’t easy for me to get on that northbound bullet train, to leave behind what seemed like a great gig—all the glitz and glamour and energy from such an enormous population combined with a crime rate that would be phenomenally low for an American city a tiny tiny fraction of Tokyo’s size—for the promise of rice fields and sub-zero temperatures and poor cell phone reception. I’m not knocking rice fields, exactly, but they’re not really my thing.

As I rode the Shinkansen up to Miyagi, when I wasn’t sleeping or listening to the old man in the seat across from mine suck off a toothpick for what seemed like (and actually was) two hours, I spent some time reading a book about the ending of the world and allowed my mind to wander, entertaining visions of moving to Tokyo and doing the big-city thing after a lifetime spent in places where a bunch of my friends and I could get together and while away half the night standing in a circle asking each other a million permutations of the question, “So, what is there to do?” without ever coming up with an acceptable answer. Sure, the rent’s high and I’d continue to have trouble communicating with people due to my lack of Japanese ability for the foreseeable future and would still probably feel isolated and alone more often than not even amidst all those huddled millions…but my thinking is that if I can put myself in a place that has the best of everything to offer, I can at least be hopeful of eventually finding whatever it is that I am looking for—be it serenity, security, a decent cup of coffee, inspiration, motivation, and/or creepy anime memorabilia for me to browse through in back-alley storefronts and then not buy in quantities sufficient to last an Age. The seasons of my soul (or whatever) have often been characterized by unnamed longing, so a big city seems like it might be the right place to hang out in. It’s simple mathematics: even though I still don’t know what it is that I want out of life, it is statistically more likely that if I ever do figure that shit out, I will be in a better position to obtain whatever Thing it is in Tokyo than I would be in most other places. Unless that Thing I wanted out of life turned out to be snow, in which case my current place of residence would provide a pretty solid foundation on which to build my future.

In Iwate prefecture—a place that sucks even compared to the other sucky (and not-so-sucky-but-still-kind-of-meh) places I have spent significant amounts of time in, and sucks even more than a similarly proportioned American town would simply because of the language barrier—I often feel like I am drowning, so far removed from anything that moves me or even feels real that, for all my complaining, I don’t even know how to go about improving my life other than to wait for my current contract to expire in March and toss the dice again to see if the next place I end up will be an improvement. It’s hard for me to tell whether my current existential discomfort is due to my own bad attitude and inability to experience joy even while inhabiting a place that actually is beautiful and serene and magnificent, or whether I have 100% accurately described said place as being total ass and am thus justified in being a little disgruntled every now and then while I plan my escape. Am I making a Hell out of Heaven, or am I merely seeing Hell for what it is?

If I moved to Tokyo, though, maybe I’d finally be able to tell once and for all whether it’s me that’s crazy, or whether it’s everyone else.

I have a lot to say about Tokyo, although it might take me a while to get it all down. Stay tuned.