Yay America (...?!)

I know I said my last post would be my final one, but I thought I'd write a quick note from the getting-used-to-America side of things again. I've been here for 6 days, and am busy noticing all the little things.
The big things are easily noticeable - being able to communicate with the guy at the verizon store to set up the details of my new cell phone plan (I was BEYOND ecstatic as it was all done in English). Also my first trip to the American supermarket. Regular sized green peppers. Provolone cheese. Entenmenns! My lord, I almost orgasmed in aisle 6.

But the subtler things are making quite an impact on me.
I still take my shoes off when I come into someone's house.
I am unfamiliar with getting such large napkins and placing them on my lap during a meal at a restaurant.
I want to ask for chopsticks at said restaurants.
I love having public garbage cans.
Two words: western toilets.
Everything is the right size again. No need to duck when walking through a doorway. Couches allow me to have right angles at my knees.
It's very odd looking UP at some people taller than me.
I have seen some BIG asses.
Short skirts, low-cut shirts. YAY cleavage!
American-sized portions. At a restaurant, I ordered an appetizer and that was bigger than any meal I had in Japan.
I'm wondering where my 8 thank yous have gone after eating at a restaurant or buying a bagel.
My first day driving, I accidentally made a left hand turn and ended up on the wrong side of the road. It was on a road in my home town - one I have driven thousands of times. I thought, wow, did they add a new right-hand turn lane over there? Why is everyone on the right? Whooops....
My body was not happy with American foods for a few days either. I've been eating healthy foods, but my stomach has still been asking, "What the hell is this shit you're giving me?"

Probably the biggest adjustment is to the strength of Americans. Not so much the physical strength, although we are far bigger and stronger. It's more of the personal strength people display. The volume of voice. Word choice. How they walk. During that same trip to the supermarket, as I was reveling in the fact that I could glance at all the bottles on the shelves and instantly know they were all shampoo, I heard someone yell, "*tsk*, UM, WHERE THE SOAP AT?... ANYONE KNOW WHERE THE SOAP AT??" I said to myself, "Man, I love America!" (a couple minutes later I heard, "OH, *tsk*, NEVER MIND. I FOUND IT.") People not being afraid to speak their mind to the world. Damn the torpedoes!

I'm just about over the jetlag. In successive days after coming back, I woke up at 3 AM, 5, 7, and then 4. Yesterday and today I feel pretty back to normal. So that's nice. But my mind is still wandering somewhere over the Pacific.

But I thought you'd like to know what you have in store for you if and when you make the leap back home...

Auld Lang Syne

Those of us from America recognize Auld Lang Syne as the New Year's song. It is sung once a year, every year, right after the stroke of midnight on January 1st. No other time is it appropriate, and no other time is it heard.
Yet for some unbeknownst reason, Auld Lang Syne is the Japanese national song to indicate a store is closing. Supermarkets, restaurants, 100-yen shops, electronic stores, clothing stores... you name it, they play it. It's the song to indicate "You had best hurry up and finish your shopping so that we can close at the zero-second mark of the designated closing minute."

So I've chosen that as the heading of my final post to my Life in Japan blog.

I am very excited to return to the States. I can't wait to be around English again - in stores, overhead announcements, menus, newspapers... I can't wait to ask a salesperson, "What's the difference between these two products?" and be able to comprehend the answer.
I'm looking forward to sitting on couches, chairs and toilets and walking through doors for which I am the appropriate size.

Of course I will miss the food, the people, the cleanliness, the politeness (however surface it may be), and being a mini-celebrity (Even after being in Japan for 11 months, still when I go to the local grocery store, I get the "OOOOHH!! Dei-bi-do!" excited calls from the cashiers).

But onto bigger and better. I will be a high school math teacher this fall in the Boston area. The exact details of my employment are not yet known - I have a couple face-to-face final interviews scheduled for next week and then I'll make my decision (I already have one job offer).
It's been great bringing you a glimpse - and that's all it really can be - of life in Japan. It's been at times bizarre, hilarious, confusing, frustrating, and loving, but it's been a load of fun and consistently entertaining. I hope you have enjoyed my stories and pictures, and want to remind you that should old acquaintances be forgot and never brought to mind, and should old acquaintances be forgot then auld lang syne.

Mount Fuji

Since I arrived in Japan, one of my goals has been to climb Mount Fuji. I did a lot of research on it, and picked the weekend of June 23-4 as when I would ascend the beast. The official climbing season starts on July 1, and given the Japanese way of doing things, I wanted to avoid the massive crowds which would gather at Fuji once the season officially opened.
Early in the week prior to my climb, I received an email from a friend of mine who was also - coincidentally - climbing Fuji the same weekend. He said that he'd heard that Fuji was under snow and the authorities were not letting anyone climb the mountain past the half-way point. Worried, but not convinced, I had my Japanese friends call the local authorities to get the real deal. They get back to me that the local authorities know nothing of this, and so I continue to plan the details of my trip. During such detail planning, the day before I was to go, I called (rather, I had a Japanese friend call) a hut on the mountain to get some more details about staying there for a few hours to get some food during our ascent. That's when the original news was verified - climbing Fuji was impossible due to a meter of snow on the mountain. No one is allowed to climb until July 10th. Real bummer, as I fly back on the 3rd.

Well, instead I plan to go to an area near Fuji so I can enjoy its visual splendor and sit in some onsen during my final weekend in Japan. Make reservations, and go.
I go with two people - one who is a sunny person and one who is most certainly not. To the uninitiated, that would come across as describing their demeanor. But that's not how the Japanese view it. A sunny person is someone who "creates" sunny weather when they go on vacation. Similarly, a rainy person brings down any good time. When I was first asked - back in October - if I was a sunny person, I said, "Sure I'm a happy guy, generally in a good mood." That comment was met with very confused looks. I have since learned that yes, I am a sunny person in the eyes of the Japanese.
So anyway, I went to Fuji with one sunny and one rainy person. Having finished work the night before, and having received a job offer in the States two nights before, I was very relaxed, and my sunny nature shined through. Even though this is officially the rainy season in Japan, we had some gorgeous sunny weather for the 4-hour drive northward to Fuji.
Yet this is when the rainy person took charge. The closer we got to Fuji, the cloudier it became. It was so bad that when we actually arrived at some of the classic spots for viewing the iconic mountain, all we saw were clouds. Not even a shadow of a mountain. Just fog and clouds.
And so it stayed for the entire weekend. Save a few hours when it actually did rain, it was foggy and cloudy the entire time, rendering the mountain completely unviewable. My friend Yumiko emailed me that "Fuji-san is a very handsome man, so he doesn't like to show his face...." She also pointed out it's incentive for me to return. She's right.

So while I had hoped to shower you all with gorgeous images of this outstanding geological splendor, all I have is a disappointing, and ultimately unsatisfying, story. So here it is, the magnificence of Mount Fuji.

The Best Things In Life Are Free (or, cost 100 yen)

The 100-yen shop in Japan is one of the most glorious stores I have visited in any country. It puts the American Dollar store to shame. (100 yen is *roughly* 1 US dollar).
Like its American counterpart, you can find many types of goods there. But unlike the shops in America, the quality of the 100 yen goods is pretty remarkable. Most of my kitchen supplies come from there.
More than one American who has lived in Japan for a while and who has returned home during my stay here has commented to me that one of the top things they will miss is this wonderful store.
A sampling of things I have picked up from the 100-yen store:
oven mitts, sunglasses, a bathroom mirror, kitchen knives, chopsticks, notebooks, glasses, container jars, rice bowls, custard bowls, sushi plates, screwdrivers, ceramic tea cups, flower pots, an incense stick base, picture frames, an umbrella (which sucked, the only really poor quality item on this list), slippers, and a frying pan.

I had hoped to post some pictures of these goods to accompany this post, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. Just take my word for it - the 100-yen shop rocks.

Why? Because It's Japan

One of the core reasons I love traveling - and have loved living abroad for the past two years - is to better understand foreign cultures. To get the answer to the question of "How do they do it over there?" but more importantly to answer the "Why do they do it that way?" question.
So I found myself quite frustrated for the first couple months of my Japanese experience. I continued to hound my Japanese coworkers, friends, and other strangers (bartenders, waiters, random people I met outside Kyoto station) with Why? questions. But instead of getting any sort of substantive answer, the most frequent response was, "I don't know. We just do it that way."
My frustrations boiled over and I lashed out at a couple coworkers, "Aren't you Japanese? How can you not know why do you things this way? Haven't you ever asked?" And with these questions I began to realize something I have already posted on, the Japanese mentality of conformity and not asking questions of authority. Don't stand out. Don't think outside the box. Or, rather, you can think outside the box, just as long as you don't tell anyone your crazy, straying-from-the-pack ideas. This means, don't ask why. Just do it.

I have begun training my replacement at my company. He is not new to living abroad - he's been out of the USA since 2001, living in Bangladesh, England, Thailand and Indonesia. But to Japan, he's a newbie. And he insists on asking the "Why" question to everything. I answer as best I can. But he has quickly become familiar to my "You're preaching to the choir" and "Damned if I know. Why are you asking?" shrugs.

Now, certainly there are parts of American culture for which I can't answer the "Why?" question. I don't know why it's bad luck to open an umbrella indoors. Or why we carve pumpkins on Halloween. Or why we sing Auld Lang Syne only once a year, the stroke after midnight on New Year's. But I know why we eat turkey on Thanksgiving, why we light fireworks on July 4th, and why we say "God bless you" or "Gesundheit" after someone sneezes.

Most Japanese people I have asked don't know why we take off shoes when entering someone's house, why you say "Yorushiku onegaishimasu" (literally, "Please be nice to me") when meeting someone or asking someone to help you, or why the Japanese flag is the way it is.

So today, my girl and I went to a small cafe we stumbled upon several weeks ago. The owners of this cafe are some of the happiest people I have ever met. They are both retired and opened this small cafe on the shores of Japan's biggest lake, Lake Biwa, to pass the time and spread positive energy. When we last visited this cafe, we spent a couple hours talking with them about everything under the sun. The old man (his wife calls him "Grandpa") pulled out a small whistle-like instrument and proceeded to play "Amazing Grace" and "Greensleeves" for us - both of which he learned simply by listening and mimicking a CD. Such a great couple, still so very much in love, we decided to visit them again.
Again, we had a wonderful time, and again, "Grandpa" broke out his flute and played a new song for us. When came time for us to leave, they both came out of the cafe (in POURING rain) to watch and wave as we drove by (even though we had shared about a dozen "thank you"s and "take care"s in the cafe before we left). When I asked my girl why they came out, she answered, "Because it's Japan."

And so that's become the de facto answer to my unanswered "why" questions. So why do we eat soup with chopsticks? Because it's Japan. And why are there so many popular cartoon characters who are pieces of food (Anpan-man, who's head is bread, Onigiri-man, who's head is a rice ball, and their merry friends)? Because it's Japan. And why is there nothing said after someone sneezes? Because it's Japan.

And that's the only way it can be.

"Are you Japanese?"

Is a question I have received frequently from my students. I've both told them the truth and lied, but no matter what, they're confused. If I'm Japanese, why do I speak English and have curly hair? If I'm not Japanese, how is it that I'm living in Japan and can speak some Japanese?

So, am I Japanese?

Yes:
I eat just about everything with chopsticks.
I apologize unnecessarily.
I eat fish, rice and miso soup for breakfast.
I recognize the supreme authority given to Rock, Paper, Scissors for resolving interpersonal conflicts.
I can be sitting with 4 friends at dinner, and be (just as everyone around me) pounding away on my cell phone sending emails.
I take my shoes off when I come home, and require that of all my guests. My take-off-shoes reflex is so strong, that when entering hotel rooms, I feel odd leaving my shoes on.
I look forward to nights out ending with a trip to the local karaoke place.
I eat Japanese-size portions.
During conversations, I make "I'm listening" grunts and short "OK" comments, even to Americans, which throws off some Americans who are used to silence on the other end when they are speaking. Similarly, if I'm speaking to someone and I don't receive that same feedback, I wonder if the person I'm speaking to is still there.
I stare at any and all foreigners.

No:
I'm tall.
I have curly hair.
I cross the street on red.
I can't stand natto. (a popular bean curd dish - it's the Japanese Vegemite)
I think for myself, openly question authority.
I can't read kanji.
I don't consider 9:31 to be late, when the schedule says 9:30.
I can't sit in the seiza position.
I hate sitting on the ground.
Lastly, I was born in America.