Five Things That I've Learned So Far

At long last, I have finally made it to the virtual oasis that is the local internet cafe in the area around Tokyo Dome near one of the close railway stations, Suidobashi. As I sit in a tiny cubicle no bigger than enough room for the chair and console, I can find some peace and quiet to write a nice long blog entry. At the guest house that I am staying at, the computer is situated in the living area and kitchen area; while free, it's often very busy with people cooking, talking, hanging out or other people who need to use the computer as well. In Tokyo, internet cafes are seemingly everywhere, but being the foreigner that I am, the language barrier prevents me from finding them all. Fortunately, I've met some great friends who pointed me in the direction of the internet cafe. The nice part about this program has been the ability to meet people from all over the world. Right now, I've been hanging out with a great group of about six people mostly from America but one is from Thailand - Ben. Another member of the group that I have been hanging out with, Dave, has a friend who lives in Japan named Yuuske. It will be an added bonus that, tomorrow, Yuuske has invited us to hang out with his Japanese friends in Kabuki-cho at an Izakaya. A Japanese Izakaya is most closely related to a pub in western culture, although it's different in many ways. At the Izakaya, you're expected to order a lot of food for people to share and sample and people often will be at the Izakaya for two to three hours standardly. It will be a very fun experience to be invited to this kind of evening and, no doubt, there will be lots of pictures.

I was fortunate enough to go to the famous Ghibli Museum that I mentioned in my last entry. The train ride, which was covered by the academy, took us an hour outside of the city to a town called Mitaka. After a twenty minute walk, we arrived at the curious museum, which felt like we stepped into one of Miyazaki's works. While we were not permitted to take photos of the inside, the outside exhibits and buildings were amazing. The large statues, items and surroundings were truly extraordinary. Inside, I was able to browse through some of Miyazaki's actual original sketches and drawings. Part of the museum was also going to the small theatre inside to view an original production that Miyazaki did just for the Ghibli Museum! As a special token, each person received a limited original film cell from a Miyazaki film. I got a rare film cell of "no-face" a principle character in the film Spirited Away. If you have never seen the movie Spirited Away or any of Miyazaki's works, I highly recommend doing so; all of the major films are readily available and in English in the United States.

Class lately has been very fun! Right now, we've been focusing on various verb forms, adjectives and helpful phrases as well as learning the various characters. I'm able to fluidly read Hiragana, but still have work to do on my Katakana and certainly my Kanji! In Japanese, there are three types of alphabets: Hiragana for words that are natively Japanese (such as mizu みず, which means water); Katakana for words that are not native to Japanese (such as kohi, which means coffee) and Kanji, which is imported from the Chinese and are characters that represent both words and concepts. I do enjoy going to class every day and each class reveals something helpful and new as I roam the city, as if each day I get something new to try out as I go through my daily routine.

This week, I hope to chronicle in detail my routine in picutures from the streets that I pass and the Tokyo Metro ride to the classroom environment and the local lunch eateries that I am now beginning to frequent in the Kudanshita area.

However, I'll leave you with a fun entry: five things that I have learned about Tokyo thus far:

5) Timing is everything. The trains come every two minutes and depart so as to not be late. If you're one minute late for class, you're just late, period. Lunch is exactly from 11:30 until 2:00 and it's a little weird to do anything differently. When you finish your meal in a local ramen shop, you better be moving quickly - it's impolite to just hang around and chat after you're done with your meal. Because keeping an efficent schedule is so vital to the Japanese, everything does lapse into certain predictable patterns, but it also means that you better be part of that system!

4) English is happy friend lots let's speak! I'm surprised at how much English you can find on things like signs, the metro, menus and more, which makes navigating Tokyo much better than I had envisioned. Sadly, unless it's from a big established company with native speakers to check grammar and sentence structure, much of the English has a tendency to get a little...sloppy. Many things have unusual, gratuitous descriptions that don't really make all that sense, such as "gold is premium coffee with a radiant like beauty perfected with premium beans. For a radiant life, let's drinking!" Then again, I can not be too critical: the other day when asking Ide-Sensei if I could use the bathroom, I said "watashi-wa toire-te tabetai desu ka" instead of "watashi-wa toire-ni ikitai desu." The latter meaning "may I to go to the toilet?" and the former meaning "may I eat the toilet?" Oops.

3) Everyone smokes. Restuarants, bars, coffee houses, reading rooms, internet cafes - you name it and there's a good chance you'll find someone smoking. Fortunately, the city does a good job of making options for people, but unlike in America smoking is much more prevalent here. Even the word for tobacco is written in Hiragana and not in Katakana and literally pronounced also as toubako (とうばこ）.

2) When in doubt, go the local route. Although Tokyo is in no short supply of options for food, I've found that some of the most flavorful and, incidentially, cheapest food is by far the local fare. Yesterday, I had the choice between getting a subway sandwich or fresh market sashimi (さしみ) for about the same price. The difference is almost indescribable. Eating local is not only delicious (oishii おいしい) but also quite cheap (yasui　やすい).

1) Go green or go home. Don't even think about just throwing your trash away, because you just won't find a normal trashcan here. Everything, everything, here breaks down into three general categories: combustibles (for paper, most wrappers, etc), non-combustibles (plastics, food products, etc) and recycleable bottles (glass, cans, plastic bottles). Throwing your waste away just isn't an option. Also, the most popular methods of travel, incidentially, are bikes, the Tokyo Metro and walking. I don't think that I've ever walked as much daily ever before, but it's a great way to get to where I need to go both physically and environmentally. It's a huge social faux pas to throw away your garbage or to be needlessly wasteful, which is remarkably (and yet not all that surprisingly) why Tokyo is so very clean even with such a dense population.

I'll keep everyone posted as I am able! Mata Ashita!