Category: Uncategorized

Ride my bicycle
Through these buzzing Tokyo streets
Sweaty guide is me

Yes, I did just begin this entry with a haiku about my bicycle. My street cred has been eviscerated.

Do you hear that obnoxious bell ringing behind you? Well that is me, clamoring up the busy thoroughfares of Tokyo, pushing my way past silly tourists and dazed businessmen. Ladies and gentlemen, I bought a bicycle today.

For 9,999 yen ($85 USD), I am the first-day-new, cooing owner of a three gear, two-wheeled Japanese bicycle. If I was a gloating man, I would mention the friction-powered guiding light or the positively-convenient metal-wire basket in front. But, I’m not a gloating man. So I won’t.

Continue reading Man vs. Machine

It is good to be reminded.

Let me explain.

We all know a great deal. Whether it is useful or meaningful or if for some reason you just know how to beat Super Mario Brothers in under twenty minutes, we all know a substantial amount about the world, most of which someone next to us doesn’t know.

A very small portion of what we know is comprised of things we understand. Interestingly, unlike things we know, the amount of things we understand has no correlation to age.

There are countless thirteen-year-old girls who understand how to comfort someone, no matter the reason that someone needs comfort. This is nothing I have come to understand.

Continue reading Understanding

As it tends to do, time has been going by faster than I can catch it. I am entrenched behind the protection of a word processor in the fourth week of my embattled stay in Tokyo.

This is more than enough time for me to let my mouth run off. This is nothing new to anyone who has ever known me.

See, my name is Christopher and I never shut up. I am the eighth largest source of air pollution in the world, just lagging behind California. There was a time when I had this notion that it might be admirable for me to say whatever I thought, whatever I felt, whenever I wanted to say it, whether it was an appropriate time or not.

Continue reading Shortcomings

Not too long ago, I walked into the Ingoshira Park, a quiet walk-in closet away from the buzzing room of Kichijoji in Tokyo, with a Japanese friend.

There, under the ceiling of fawning trees, hid more street performers than I have ever seen in any American city. On the warm Sunday I was there, I didn’t go more than fifty feet before I saw another musician or painter or magician. One tune floated in the air before being consumed by the next song, from the twang of a traditional Biwa to covers of Beatles songs.

We sat on a bench looking out onto the small pond, heavily trafficked in the sun with rowboats and giant, paddling swans, analogous to their famed cousins that live in the Boston Public Garden.

Continue reading Ingoshira Park

Professors are funny things. They are directing one of the most important tasks in our land, educating the leaders of our future. They give the type of intensified and specified bases of knowledge that have been pursued the world over by the most powerful for millennia. For $10,000 U.S. a semester you can have that type of access at a major American research institution.

Part of that education is learning from a professor or two. The way they’ll smile after saying something they find particularly eloquent. Or how they chuckle when they’ve bested a classroom with a powerful question; meanwhile their students are debating whether they should stab themselves with a pen or not.

It has become a rule of mine. I don’t trust or admire professors. David Horowitz was derided for his academic purging, but what university student can really say they haven’t seen any indoctrination by over-zealous scholars. Opinion fills the gap of fact. It is worrying that more haven’t realized it.

Continue reading Professors

Sumo and sushi, that’s what Tokyo does, right? Alright, well maybe not, but they are perhaps the two most readily invoked images of Japan and, after having already gotten some Japanese sushi, yesterday I finally got a glimpse of the former.

It required 360 yen ($3 U.S.), three trains and forty minutes of travel, but I made it to Ryogoku, just northeast of my South Tokyo apartment. Just as I walked out of the station, beside me was a beautiful stone sumo wrestling statue. I wasn’t bashful enough to stop and click a few photos, only for my pictures to be blocked by the busy crowd, including the occasional kimono-clad sumo star.

Continue reading The Grand Sumo Tournament

Ryogoku is, by many standards, like so many other countless towns in Tokyo. It has tall buildings and is crowded, with its own claims of interest (i.e. the Kokugikan arena and Fukagawa Edo Museum).

The East Tokyo town has another quality that likens it to, not only Tokyo, but towns throughout this main Japanese island of Honshu (I need a line over the ‘u’, thanks): beautiful gardens and Buddhist Temples.

These are calmer, but just as recognized with Japanese culture as anything, so they remain must-dos for any extended stay in the country. It is thus that I followed a street map and came upon the former Yasuda Garden and the nearby Jikoin Temple.

Continue reading Yasuda and Jikoin

The news is different here. It is a funny bit of social science to be reminded that there is no harder goal than objective news. It is harder still to find comprehensive international news. There are nearly 200 (technically) independent states in this world, all with their own events, crises and triumphs. Your local newspaper, increasingly stuffed with revenue-pumping advertisements, can’t quite fit that story on civil war in Cote d’Ivorie.

Studying abroad is as much about seeing the world differently, including its political, social and religious strata, as it as about trying different foods and wasting a different kind of money. Different news, with its different worldview, may be of a paramount importance.

Continue reading The News

(SEE VIDEO FROM THE KICHIJOJI OMATSURI IN EPISODE FIVE)

If you ever travel anywhere, from a neighboring county to a faraway country, will you find yourself a native? Put down your AAA Travel Guide and ask a local where to go, where to eat, what to do.

Thank you, Kyle Cleveland, Professor of Sociology at Temple University-Japan, for being just that for me. An American who woke up and found himself a longtime resident of Tokyo and avid researcher into Japanese culture, he has been instrumental in guiding my travel, experiences and decisions here in Japan.

It was he who directed me to Kichijoji Sunday morning. One of Tokyo’s most desirable suburbs, Sunday was the conclusion of the district’s annual Fall omatsuri, festival. There, one of Cleveland’s former bilingual students greeted me at the train station, poised to be my very patient tour guide for the day.

Continue reading Kichijoji Omatsuri

(SEE VIDEO FROM MY TRIP TO YOKOHAMA IN EPISODE FIVE)

Excuse me Yokohama Tourism Board. I was less than enthused with my time in Yokohama.

As bad travel tends to go, I followed some bad advice and made some poor decisions. My first stop was in Shin-Yokohama, home to two sights, the 70,000 seat Nissan Stadium and my destination, the Ramen Noodle Museum. Well, if you dream of the thought that someday you might walk through those turnstiles into 10,000 square feet of noodle soup paradise, I hate to disappoint you.

It sucked.

Continue reading Yokohama