So this morning I drag myself out of bed hacking up sputum, as seems to be the norm lately, a wonder down to the Shibuya ward office to update my gaijin card. I walk in, in a fever induced haze and wobble my way to the special counter for people that don’t have native blood. Two youngish girls in the bad give a, “good morning welcome” and an old man moves over to help me. As he gets within about a step of me an even older woman appears from behind a computer in the back and intercepts him.

I tell her, “I’ve recently renewed my passport and …”

She breaks in with, “Oh okay, please sit down”

I hand her my Your Location Must be Known at All Times Because You are a Danger to Society Gaijin Card and the two passports. She flips through the one that doesn’t have holes punched into the face and CANCELED etched into every page.

When she gets to the page with my transfered visas she stops and says, “You correctly transfered your visas, didn’t you“. Then she hands me a form - it’s Japan, so there’s always a form - to fill out and shuffles away back behind her computer.

After she’s give me time sufficient for a four year old to write down their personal details she returns to pick it up. She gives it a cursory glance, looks up and without an gram of embarrassment says, “You look completely different from the picture on your gaijin card, don’t you? You look much better now”.

Well then. Just when I thought that Tokyo was full of cold, self-absorbed and isolated hosers I get confronted with someone with a sociable spine.

On my way out she sends me off with a, “thank you customer“. Customer? How nice.

A question I’ve been asking myself for the past 12 hours:

If you knew you weren’t going to be tied to a particular office or classroom for at least 1 year, where would you live? Would you live in the place that you are now? Would you go back to a place that you had been before? Would you bother setting up a semi-permanent place at all?

I love Tokyo. I love living in Japan. I have a lot of friends and resources around here. Every day can be an adventure. Ever day I can learn something new. Every day I can see something that I haven’t seen before.

I do, however, definitely feel trapped at times.

I like New York City. It’s a fun place with lots of stuff to do, but I feel absolutely stuck when I’m there. If I’ve got a place to stay that feels like home then I feel great about being there. If I know I need to drive out of the city at some point soon then I feel clausterphobic. It’s something about the bridges and the hassle of having a car with me when I’m there.

Tokyo is similar. The adventure that can be had every day becomes a hassle when my Japanese processor isn’t working so well. Maybe a drivers license and access to a car that can get me to the stix would ease my occasional clausterphobia.

One of the things that drives me nuts about living in Japan is the artifical delay attached to movies. Superman Returns doesn’t open until August 19th. I guess I should count myself lucky considering that the new X-MEN movie doesn’t open until September.

I’ve had Fever Pitch - and I wouldn’t if I wasn’t from Boston - on DVD for about six months. I just saw an advertisement for it in a theater in Shibuya.

I guess you have to live in a nation famous for distributing illegal copies of movies in order to see them at the same time that they’re released in the US.

A guide for izakayas where you can drink from the morning. A guide for izakayas where you can drink from lunch time. hmmm… Me thinks there might be a bit of a drinking culture in Japan.

If you’ve been following this blog - the writing not just the pictures - for the past week then you know that I had a great time at the NYC Kendo Club 30th Anniversary Tournament. You also know that a major contributing factor to that good time was speaking in Japanese with a lot of people that I’d never met before.

Over the past couple of months I’ve slowly, but steadily been getting better at inducing people to have Japanese conversations with me. It really hit a head during the weekend of the tournament; probably because there were so many new faces and I spent almost no time in the English speaking bubble.

One of the primary complaints that I used to hear from other gaijin and utter myself, is that it is so difficult to get Japanese people to speak to you in any language other than English. Well, the truth is that it actually isn’t all that difficult to do, but it does take an effort to induce them to stop seeing you as an English slut.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll post some of the strategies and tactics I’ve been using and observations that I’ve made about breaking down barriers and going from a free English lesson provider to a free Japanese lesson consumer. So check back next Tuesday for the first installment and leave comments with your own observations.

Let’s have a conversation (in the language of our own choosing)! ;P

But at least it get’s me out of bed early enough (03:30) for sunrise. It’s too bad that the sky was coverd in clouds though.

It’s been a while since I’ve woken up for sunrise in Boston, but if my recolection is acurate, the sun comes up much much later there.

Anybody got a suggestion for dealing with insomnia? Jeff had it all through college. He didn’t deal with it so well: just drank a lot of Mountain Dew and looked for pictures of parasites on the Internet.

So I found Mustone’s exhibit out next to the Ginza tracks in Shibuya. It’s a long wall with several subjects including cats and rabbits in addition to the monsters. Take a look at the rest: http://www.simulacre.org/wordpress/photos/tags/mustone/.