The Last Few Days

Day 15

The place where I had breakfast sold "liquid coffee" . The implications are frightening.

Today I return to Tokyo, for a couple of days in a hotel in Ginza, which is the most expensive district in the world. Ginza is a region in the midst of Tokyo where every major business needs to have an office if it wants any prestige at all. It's also where the biggest and most expensive department stores are.

I spent the train ride trying to write Kanji characters.

The Japanese language is written using three alphabets. The first, Kanji, are characters that were taken from Chinese. Kanji characters are these amazingly intricate little guys which symbolize all sorts of things, and there are thousands of them. Most people don't know more than a few thousand characters, and newspapers are only permitted to choose from a set of 2300 Kanji in order to keep them accessible. Even so, it is estimated that one fifth of Japanese people cannot read the newspapers. (It should be noted that the NY Times reported in 1992 that one fifth of Americans could not read a newspaper.)

To fill in the gaps of Kanji, there are two other alphabets. Hiragana is the first one. Hiragana is used to change the form of Kanji characters, much the way we use various endings to change the form of stem words. The other is Katakana, which like our alphabet is a phonetic alphabet.

Katakana is important because, as the primary phonetic alphabet, it's used to spell out things for which there is no Japanese word. All words borrowed from foreigners, therefore, are spelled with Katakana. In theory, you could write down everything in Japanese using only Katakana, but there would be too much ambiguity because the same sound might mean two things. Written with Kanji and Hiragana, there's no ambiguity. So how do they figure it out when it's spoken? Context.

At the time of the Meiji Restoration (1867?), the political change which began Japan's modernization, the parliament debated making English the official language of Japan on the grounds that Japanese was just too hard. When that failed, they tried to throw away Kanji and just use Hiragana and Katakana, but the ambiguity problem killed that proposal.

The Japanese tend to be very understanding towards gaijin who try to learn Japanese. But if a foreigner actually becomes fluent, they tend to become extremely uncomfortable. Japanese people tend to assume that their language is too hard for non-Japanese people to learn, and I'm told that people who speak Japanese too well are often poorly treated.

I spent my first few hours in Ginza shopping. I was tempted to buy a product called "Let's Beer Great" even though I couldn't figure out exactly what it did. I ended up in Mitsukoshi, a gigantic department store with a supermarket in the basement. The supermarket gives away lots of free samples, and I got to snack on lots of interesting things.

I noticed that some of the traffic lights are red, but then below them are green arrows pointing left, right and straight. I don't understand the distinction between that and green.

Something good for foreigners in Japan to know: when a restaurant advertises "snack" , that's code for strippers.

For dinner I met up with my brother again and we went to a Thai restaurant. For dessert, we had a fruit called "durian" which is supposed to be the worst smelling food in the world. In Thailand there are hotels that have a "no durian" policy. It tasted really good though.

Day 16

I stayed in my brother's Gaijin House, so I got to meet a few of his housemates. Mostly Europeans and Australians. One of them told me that in Japan they sell "sock glue" , which you put on your upper leg to hold your socks up. My brother's toilet contains the warning "Japanese drain pipe is so tiny, please don't flush too much toilet papers" .

Spent the day running around Shibuya and Harajuku, nothing especially exciting. Rainy. For dinner we went to Nobu, the famous restaurant owned by Robert Deniro. The food was pretty good, but the famed sushi was nothing special. I'll have to try it in NY, where it's made by Morimoto of Iron Chef fame.

Day 17

Breakfast at a French place. This is just about my ideal breakfast experience: French food served by Japanese people. Spent my last morning running around Harajuku again, it's easily my favorite neighborhood in Japan. Packed a bit. For lunch we had shabu-shabu with Yanezawa beef. Shabu-shabu is where you get a pot of boiling water and these paper-thin slices of beef, and you cook them yourself by dipping them in for a few seconds. Yanezawa is a high quality grade of beef, just below Kobe (we were in a hurry and couldn't find it). It was delicious, you can really taste the difference.

Then to the airport. Flight back was about 11 hours, shorter because of hte jetstream or something.

Well, that's about it. I thought I learned a lot about Japan, and looking back over this journal I see I sure had a lot to say, but in fact I feel like there's so much I don't understand.

Really what I learned is that you can't understand a culture in 17 days. I don't think you could understand it in a lifetime (I sure don't understand my own). But that shouldn't stop us from trying, because understanding is the basis of community and international understanding is the foundation blah blah never eat any sushi with mayonnaise on it.

Before I stop writing, I'm going to describe one last Japanese TV show because it needs to be shared. Like all Japanese TV, I have no idea what it's name is.

The show features a bunch of kids wearing helmets, and they have to deal with a number of physical challenges. First they had to run across a river by stepping on stepping stones, but most of the stones were fake and wouldn't hold weight. Most of the kids fell in. Then they had to draw a random card to decide which of several people they would sumo wrestle: a real wrestler, a giant white guy, a little guy, or a man in a costume so big that he kept falling over.

Then they were put into a giant room with these balloons, and apparently there was some sort of goal or something, I couldn't understand it. Next they were dressed in horse costumes and made to wear roller skates, and they had a horse race (with little jumps).

Next was a pole vault over water and a race across the tops of mattresses that were stood up like dominos. Then a sort of tennis game, but the ball was a guy in a ball costume supported on wires. Next, they were all put in sacks which covered their arms, and made to bite these little hanging plastic bags. Finally, they go through a giant obstacle course where people throw giant balls at them to try to knock them down.

I defy anyone to understand this country.

Special bonus postscript! An anonymous reader wrote in to say that this TV show is known as "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge", and can be seen dubbed into English on SpikeTV.