Penny Hero (dot) Net

I don’t ever want to forget last night. Seeing Tomoaki again might have been the most memorable event in my entire stay here.

Ueno and the zoo, off to Ebisu to see Tokyo Bosse Nova, and through Ginza on the way home. Remember the Okonomiyaki, the view from the 38th floor with the orange moon, the long moving walkway back to the station and the conversation there, the train ride home, him meeting my host family at 10:30 at night, and the last goodbye outside the Keisei line entrance.

So sad. But so inevitable. Just like the last time. It can’t be helped, so no regrets. I go back to my other life tomorrow. It’s reassuring to know that an old life still has meaning to the people who lived it, but I can’t help but cry.

Arakawa mayor arrested for accepting bribes

Technically, I work for this guy… just a few levels of politeness below him actually. I met him too. I served him peaches and pears during some kind of inter-ken diplomatic meeting or whatever. I’ve been in his office-suite like, twice.

Anyway yeah. Apparently, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In August or July, the Vice-Mayor (for lack of a better word) got arrested for the same thing. I don’t know if it was from the same company, but the event still had the office all shaken up when I started working there and had been there long enough to sense the tension.

It’s going to be an interesting day tomorrow during my last day at work.

I guess there are a few things that you have to do before you can be a real “dumb gaijin” in Japan. You have to offend a few people by using the wrong form of the word “to give”. You have to endure endless and annoying “You are such a cute foreigner! your eyes are so big!” as if you are a new pet someone brought home. And then, there’s one more vital thing that one must do.

Last night, I completed the last of these things and became a real-life-honest-to-god-dumb-gaijin-in-Japan: I got lost in the train system. I’m just shocked that it took me this long. ha ha.

I went out to Shinjuku to meet Pingu and Natsumi, and immediately got lost in the station. Didn’t panic though, because I had my trusty cheap-ass cell phone with me and sent her a bunch of emails about where I was, and could she come find me. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find my exit, and I couldn’t find hers, so we were pretty much screwed until Natsumi randomly ran into me as she was leaving her train. She got on the phone and the three of us finally met up, and we ran off to have a lovely night of eating cake, talking about boys (*gag* but oh well… they are girls), and looking for a place to take pictures of ourselves.

Coming home was when the train system swallowed me whole and I was lost for about an hour. On the way to Shinjuku, I took a single JR Yamanote train from Nishi-Nippori Station, so I expected that the ride back would be the same. But nope. I should have gotten off at Ikebukuro and changed trains. Unfortunately, I was on some old local train with no english anywhere on it, and the announcer actually was the conductor (instead of pre-recorded Japanese messages) and was hella hard for me to understand. (the rumor that the train system is completely bilingual is a complete lie!)

Anyway, so I apparently was supposed to change trains at Ikebukuro, but I didn’t… I expected to be at nishi-nippori at 8:15… 8:15 came and went and the stations were getting smaller and smaller… the buildings got hella short too. Finally I decided to mutter “Toto, it looks like we’re not in Tokyo anymore” and get off the train. Checked my map, and realized I was about 45 minutes outside of Tokyo in Saitama. (Insert inside joke here: Takuya, there really isn’t anything in Saitama!)

After a few frantic emails and one phone call from my host mom, I got on the train going the opposite direction and road the sucker back to Tokyo and got on the right JR line… My host dad was waiting for me at Nishi-nippori, practically pale with worry! it was crazy. I love my host family. I just feel really really stupid. ha ha.

The worst of it was that the two cute Korean guys I met a few weeks ago were at my house waiting for me to come home so we could hang out one last time. I had kept them waiting for an hour and a half! ack! Oh well, they gave me presents and big smiles and we all laughed about it and they said the same thing had happened to them.

Even though I was pretty calm through the whole ordeal, the stress of the evening apparently was just enough to cause me to lose the battle I’ve been having with this cold I’ve felt trying to come on for a few days. Woke up this morning hella sick. But it’s all cool because I got to skip work, drink soup, SLEEP, and eat as much umeboshi as I wanted! Japanese treat colds as if they are life threatening. It’s quite amusing.

So yeah. I’m home safe, waiting to hear from Ethan to see if he still wants to meet today or not (I’m feeling much better). Tomorrow I actually will get to see the guy I came to Japan with 2 years ago. I’m very excited about that, and a little nervous too. The next day is my last day at work, and a farewell party… and then the following day I get on a plane to come home!

Lots and lots of moving.

The move to my third host family was pretty odd… They came to pick me up on bicycles as if I wouldn’t have any luggage. That was a pretty amazing sign of a great sense of accomodation. I kind of had a hunch that things were going to get worse from there… and I was right. After going back for the car, they brought be to their place, and I was told to put my luggage in the sisters’ bedroom (two sisters). I knew from the beginning that I’d be sharing a room with them, and that was going to be cool. They’re both really awesome girls, and their friends are people I’ve met several times before. I was really looking forward to staying there because then I could have people to go out with.

But… really, there was no physical space for any of my things… I couldn’t unpack, and only after I struggled to explain that I don’t need a separate room, just a little bit of space to unpack, did they empty out a few drawers… I was pretty disoriented. After I while though, I kind of resigned to it. I contemplated calling Watanabe-san and asking if I could move back in with my first host family, but eventually decided to just wait, and see if it got better.

It did get better in a way. The sisters invited two of their friends over and we had a little bit of a nifty slumber party. Me and this one girl Junko ended up talking about stuff that I haven’t been able to really talk about since I left the US because it’s so hard to translate into Japanese. But she is in the same (romantic) situation I am in, so she understood even though my Japanese is shit, and her English isn’t much better. That felt good to just exchange complicated stories and agree to each other that all that should matter is what is between the people involved, not what other people think.

So, for a while I thought, hey. I could live with this. The next morning, breakfast was together and we made plans to go out for dinner (me and the two sisters, who apparently run the house). They have a guitar so I even got to play for a while before taking off for work. At lunch, I was SHOCKED to see Watanabe-san come in and ask to talk to me.

Someone told her about the situation, and she decided it was better to try to get me to move back in with my host family (!!!). That’s one Japanese stereotype I’m very happy to have seen played out… that whole “think of others first and go WAY out of your way to fix their problems” thing.

So with her help, we hauled ALL my luggage back across town again… hoofing it where we had to, and taking a train and a taxi where we could… I owe her my soul. really I do.

Anyway, I feel like I am home now. I feel so relaxed. I’m glad it worked out this way for so many reasons. so relieved.

Ok… time for food and then bed.

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In Other News: I got to take a class on the Japanese Tea Ceremony today. The degree to which each simple motion is choreographed is… insane. They number all the steps you take, how many lines in the tatami mat need to be between each item on the floor, and how many between the mat and your knees. I wouldn’t be surprised if breaths were counted at some point too. The hardest thing is getting the (forgot the name) cloth to gracefully fold itself in your hand at the beginning. Mostly everything else makes sense, the way a martial arts kata makes sense. Anyway, it felt very nice… because all of these motions and the entire ceremony was created back in like… I forget. but a long time ago.(god my culture teacher would kill me if she found out I forgot what period it started in…)

Anyway, it’s like a direct link to that period in Japanese history. Knowing that maybe millions of women over hundreds of years performed those exact motions for various Samurai, Shogun, maybe even the Emperor? Yeah… even if my legs and feet will never work properly again EVAR from sitting like that for so long, i feel pretty nice now.

going to sleep now. I get to teach english tomorrow! fun.

Brain is still a little bit numb from everything. I woke up and got ready for work… had the normal “I don’t want to go to work” blues, got there and had a pretty normal day. I got to go to a culture museum and see all the local stuff they found here dating back as far as the Jomon period (!!!). Then I worked on (and almost finished) the video script translation I’m writing. I got a little frustrated because I tried and failed to make a specific and very necessary question clear to Watanabe-san… but hopefully what I’ve done will be of some use to whoever uses it later. (I needed to know if my script was going to be used as a voice-over, or for english subtitles) My japanese still sucks.

They threw me a small party at the office during lunch. Just our little ‘bunka-seisho-nen’ crew (I know I romanized that wrong. I’ll fix that later). it was pretty spiffy and cool. Takaki-san ate all the leftover cake and we made jokes about him being a cake-lover (that’s bad somehow?). That was probably the only part of the conversation i understood well… when we resorted to american-style joking and insults. haha.

After I got home, my first and third host families came over for the party… it was so nice to see them. I’ve only met the daughters of my third family so far, but they seem really cool. I feel like I kind of got transplanted into this… well, bloody big family composed of three different households… I don’t know how to um… comprehend it… My first family feels more like ‘parents/sister’ and I love them to death… second one are like grandparents… third is like a set of cousins (because I still haven’t met their mom or dad yet.) I’m extremely grateful for all of it… at some point I’m going to write a zillion poems for them all… especially for the Enomoto house (first family).

In Other News: At work today, I had this very very strong feeling that there was a presence following me around. Its something I haven’t felt since like, high school, and before that. Before today, in retrospect, I’ve found myself wondering if those feelings I’d had back then were imagined, or just a side effect of my insecure adolescence… but I felt it today, so distinctly, and for so long (about an hour and a half), with work and conversation going on at the same time (before, it would usually only come when I was alone) that it was impossible to ignore… and impossible to shake, until finally it went away by itself around the time I got off work.

Strangely nostalgic and kind of … cool, for lack of a better word. Back then I used to dig so hard into the people around me, trying to find out who it could have been… or I’d immediately drop into some meditation to see if i could talk to it. But today, it was just a warm thing. I liked it there, around me, and I didn’t care to know what it was. It was just there. Its like a compromise between the obsessive investigative believer I once was, and the insane psudeo-postmodernist skeptic I became in college… maybe I’ve found a new ballance. not sure.

Anyway, so that was my birthday. thanks to everyone who sent me emails on my phone, and gmail and everything. *hugs*