Why nerds shouldn't shy away from Sports Bars, nor Jocks the Internet Cafe

The jock-nerd relationship is one fraught with violence, resentment, and mockery. They are seen as the two opposite ends of the traditionally held, high school-mindset spectrum of cool, as socially distant as possible without a language barrier. However, it should come as no surprise to anyone that 80s high school dramas are not an accurate representation of reality. Cultural overlap frequently exists. On the one hand, you have an increasingly massive chunk of the videogame market, once exclusively held by nerds, dedicated to sating the Halo and Madden lusts of "jocks" or "bros." On the other, there are the Nerds who Like Sports. In the course of my transformation into one such person I began to realize just how many similarities these hobbies bear, how unsurprising it is that they should overlap, and how artificial the barriers which keep nerds and jocks apart really are. What follows may seem obvious to some, but was non-apparent to me when I was being shoved in a locker (Ed. note: I have never actually been shoved in a locker, but you get the idea). As an aside--I will be ignoring baseball, as its overabundance of statistics make it beloved by nerds in their own right and a wierd crossover example that muddies the waters of my argument.

"Sports," I might have been found proclaiming loudly but a few years ago, "are boring. Nothing ever happens. Futbawl (for those of you just tuning in, soccer = futbol, NFL = futbawl) is the worst; some guys crash into each other, then they wait around and do it again." In hindsight, I can't believe how I didn't empathize more with those watching the game that I pronounced "boring." How many times had I been engrossed in a video game, be it Starcraft or an RPG, only to have my mother walk in the room and wonder aloud how I could be so interested in and waste so much time on something so "boring." The way I see it, just about anything is boring if you don't know what's going on. The most riveting piece of public speaking is a snoozefest if you don't know the language that's being spoken, the most beautiful futbol play looks like a bunch of guys with bad hair running around with a ball to the uninitiated, and a perfectly executed 6-pool in Starcraft seems like just so many weird lookin' computer aliens and pulsating buildings to my mother, who doesn't understand why the garbage is not yet at the curb. This, of course, is not to say that things become interesting by virtue of expertise--no amount of study will make drying paint into good television. (This is the argument my friends would surely make if I tried to propose this to them: Starcraft is boring no matter what. Its status as a sport (which it is (in Korea anyway)) was a topic of frequent discussion in our apartment. For the sake of brevity, for this post I will take as a given that if not a sport, it is at least entertaining to some to watch competitive matches (for evidence, check the number of subscribers of esportscasters such as HDHusky)).

My point is simply that interesting things--things that a given person might very well enjoy--are often written off by that person out of prejudice, reinforced by the negative, boring experience of the few times they've tried watching it. Further, there's more similarity between futbawl and Starcraft, hockey and DoTA, or baseball and halo than most people realize (or most partisans of either camp will admit). The basic principles of competition run through all of them. "Two men enter, one man leaves" touches something deep within us. It's just that most modern sports-entertainment subsumes this primal desire beneath layers of rules, teams, and strategy that cloak it from view without the right decoding tools. Hell, even a race, a competition at its purest, is pretty boring unless you know the guys involved, what typical splits for that distance are, and that sort of thing. The thing is, though, that while the competitive drive is dressed up beyond casual recognition, many of the world's disparate games' clothing is fairly similar.



The similarities are obvious

Both starcraft and Futbawl involve extensive preparation. In the language of Starcraft, there are two general terms for a player's skill: Macro and Micro, similar to economics. Macro is a player's ability to control the flow of the game: establish bases and resource production, produce more troops, that kind of thing. Micro is the skill that comes into play in a battle: individually selecting units and having them attack this enemy or that, dodging moves by your opponent, and the like. Neither is necessarily more important; a player far superior at macro who can't micro for crap might simply overrun an opponent with the opposite skills, but might also see his massive army kited around and destroyed by the skillful use of a small number of units' movements and abilities. Before a match, pro starcraft players will watch replays of their opponent, hoping to find a weakness and exploit it. Which general tactics on the macro front a player will use are variable, but micro happens so quickly and within the muscle memory of the players' hands that they can get a feel for what macro approach will work best. Good choice of strategy can win, but only if it is supported with the technical micro skill to pull it off.

This is comparable to the strategy and skills found in a football game. Coaches and quarterbacks will decide what plays to run and when, the "macro" of the game; the actual skill of the players in doing a particular play or series of plays, the "micro," determine whether or not the overall strategy is successful. A starcraft player might note that his opponent is very adept at manipulating a unit with a wide-area attack, such as a templar's psionic storm, which can destroy large numbers of weaker units very quickly. Responding to this, he will plan to use a smaller number of more dispersed, more powerful units to negate this strength--this, of course, will only work if he himself is capable of the micro to handle an army of that kind. Similarly, a coach might note that the defense of his opponent has a powerful line, capable of blocking running plays with regularity, and thus instruct his quarterback to rely more heavily on throwing the ball. Again, though, this relies on the players' skills to carry out such a plan. It is this duality of plan and action, the moment when it all comes together, that I think is the most exciting moment in either kind of game (second only to the suprise moment of brilliance--the 80 yard kickoff return for a touchdown, or the clutch drop of a nuke on someone's army in starcraft).

To return to my original assertion, though, both of those moments are only exciting if you have the context to recognize the perfect confluence of plan and action shown in a 6-play touchdown drive or the sudden breakout performance of Slayers_Boxer using 3 marines to kill a lurker by dodging its spines. Watching either is a moment of engaged, stand-up-and-knock-over-your-chips excitement--if you enjoy it. If not, it's just another bunch of burly, armored guys hittin each other or.. well, in the case of the marines, just another bunch of burly, armored, pixellated guys shooting an underground killer space bug.

Obviously this isn't some kind of a shame-on-you to anyone who doesn't watch, much less enjoy, every single sport or e-sport. I would, though, like it to be a call for understanding. It may seem like the most exciting thing happening in that golf tournament your uncle is watching is the growth of the green's grass--but he's just as pumped about that putt just as you were about the Blackhawk's shorthanded goal last night (speaking of, YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS). Moreover, he's pumped for pretty much the same reasons--you've just learned different games. Besides, you never know. Ask him what's going on; it might turn out that you find as much enjoyment watching golf as I have found watching the sport of those guys that once threatened me with swirlies (Ed. note: I haven't even been threatened with a swirlie, either).

Super-Duper Bowl

I watched the Super Bowl.

I even had some kind of idea what was going on! Finally, I was able to succumb to peer pressure/the desire for an excuse to eat excessive amounts of junk food and watch the game, without needing to protest lamely that I "only watch it for the commercials." In a somewhat vain effort to relate to other human beings, I had been following the Bears this season, catching most the games. They had a pretty good run, and at least there's the consolation that they got knocked out by the team that would be the WORLD CHAMPIONS.

World champions. Seems kind of silly, considering that all the teams are from America. Then again, no-one else in the world really cares about football. Football of the American variety, anyway. For clarity, I will use "futbol" for the world-cup variety and "futbawl" for the Super Bowl kind. Anyway, no-one else in the world really cares about futbawl. It's like a small town in Canada came up with some silly sport, like "ice-ball" or "curling," then declared the winner of the town's competition the "World Champion." Change "small town in Canada" to "world's last remaining superpower" and suddenly it makes sense, right? It's certainly not as egregious as the "World Series," of course, because in that case there are other baseball-playing nations about. Hell, they even beat us regularly when ACTUAL world championships are held (I am told, however, that this is because we don't have nothin' to prove to nobody (and even if any of our star players join in, they're ordered by the people that actually pay them not to try too hard to avoid injury)).

That's one thing, but the announcers also called it "the sports world's largest stage" a few times. This year's super bowl was indeed the most watched program in American television history, drawing 111 million viewers (source). Meanwhile, the futbol world cup final last year drew more than 700 million viewers (source). That counts all those gigantic squares of fans outside stadiums watching a giant screen as one, by the way. It's almost like the Super Bowl is 1/7th the size of the "sports world's largest stage." Hell, most premier league games probably have a higher global viewership than 111 million. Turns out there are over 6 billion people that aren't American, and couldn't give half a crap about futbawl. Just some perspective that we as a country refuse to acknowledge, I guess.

The most important thing to realize, of course, is that the world cup's viewership is split up across the entire world, shown on hundreds of networks in as many languages. The Super Bowl, on the other hand, is kept right here and on one, single network that has done unspeakable things to gain the privilege. Why is this the most important thing? Why don't you ask some overpaid and underperforming ad agencies? They fit both of those monikers even better than most New York sports teams this time around. I was especially happy I didn't have to watch this particular Super Bowl "for the ads," because it would have been a total waste. I refuse to name any names, though. I'm pretty sure that most of them were intended to be as tasteless and/or mind-bendingly stupid as possible so as to make people talk about the ad and inadvertently mention the brand repeatedly in doing so. This solidifies it in our subconscious minds so that when we go to the marketplace and see it next to 4 competitors which are empirically equivalent in every way, we choose theirs. I refuse to let them win. I will, however, admit that they certainly reached new lows.

Well, there is one ad that I will allow to claim victory over me. It is VW, and they had the only good commercial. This makes them deserve additional advertising. It is not because of their cars, but because that ad was adorable.

Speaking of overpaid and underperforming, the Black Eyed Peas' performance was honestly worse than some of my middle school orchestra concerts. For more of that perspective I mentioned earlier, compare it to the opening ceremonies three years ago in Beijing. It's totally absurd. Even beyond the fact that all of them really, really need Autotune (not to mention that you couldn't have really heard their singing even if you wanted to for some reason), they couldn't even get the weird blinking assholes to walk around the stage in a real circle (I believe this fine fellow on The Internet illustrates the point rather well). Fergie's blinking futbawl armor couldn't protect her from her inability to sing "Sweet Child of Mine," making a totally gratuitous cameo by Slash even worse (and bringing fears of "wardrobe malfunctions" to an all-time high). Part of the giant word-stage that was supposed to be the finale didn't even light up.

We, as Americans, are complacent. We think that whatever fantastic sum was spent to let some terrible singers gambol about in flashing costumes was well-spent, and good enough. We think the final of our home-grown brand of violence is the biggest sporting event in the world. We're entitled, lazy, and sloppy. We can't even get someone to sing the national anthem who knows all the words, but we preface it with a reading of our Declaration of Independence (with the boring parts expurgated, of course).

The President said we were living in a Sputnik Moment. Most of those who have gone through the public school system recently were probably unsure of what he was talking about--what is a sputnik?

Yes, I appreciate the irony that a post beginning with the revelation that I actually cared about the game this time proceeded to expend not a single letter on the game the rest of the way through. Go Packers?

What

Welcome back, internet.

What's that you say? You are surprised I am beginning another blog post by apologizing for the time that has elapsed since the last? You shouldn't be, that's pretty much how things roll here at quiche of the week. Taking more than a year off at a time is fairly par for the course as well.

I suppose it would be best to bring you up to speed, my treasured (yet woefully uninformed) reader. Here I am in the good old US of A, having taken leave of my Oriental ambitions. I even managed to graduate college at some point and find (kind of) gainful employment (though, talking about my job specifically could lead to federal charges (it's true, but it also makes my job sound so much cooler than it actually is (oh yeah baby nested parenthesis are back, you know it (in a big way)))). While my mystery-employment is indeed somewhat gainful, I'm not compelled to write much—or think much, especially compared to the academic boot camp that is the University of Chicago.

I've been reading on the train (you will hear about the train, my fair reader, oh how you will hear about the train), but I can still feel my brain-muscles atrophying each and every day. My poor brain is like a pallid nerd sequestered in his familial basement, his fragile frame losing substance by the day as he contemplates the merits of Kirk, Picard, et al (That's really the best analogy I can come up with. (Why yes, by having failed to prove my point, I have proven my point. That just happened)).

Aaaaaaanyway, the immediately obvious solution to this is to think about things. If only it were so simple! I am easily distracted, and the world of today is overrun with distractions. Unless compelled to organize and record them in a lasting form, my thoughts are as ephemeral and inconsequential as a third-party in the American electoral system.

“Well,” says the hypothetical person giving me obvious solutions, “Why don't you write some of these so-called 'thoughts' (sheesh, there is no need to be so sarcastic and hurtful, hypothetical person) in a journal?” This is still wholly insufficient, however, as I am nothing if not a member of 'Generation Me.' The thought of a journal which only I would read—barring biographers digging about my things after I become incredibly wealthy and famous (at which point I would destroy it and fabricate a new one wholesale anyway (in order to manufacture an elaborate and awesome past (think Teddy Roosevelt meets Han Solo)))—makes me somewhat queasy. So I will shout it into the void of the internet, and one hopes that this will give me the will to continue this endeavor.

What, however, shall I write about? I am no longer even doing uninteresting things somewhere interesting. I'm still cooking, but everyone knows the first incarnation of this blog was pretty bad and showcased nothing but my general failure to produce remotely appetizing food.

Anyway, I guess I'll write about stuff, things, and junk. I'll even do my best to get a laugh or two out of whatever unfortunate souls happen to stumble across this small gas-station-and-wendy's exit on the vast and erotica-laden information superhighway. I will also do my best to revive totally obsolescent terms, such as “information superhighway.” Wish me luck, please! I'll see you next week (or in two, at which point I will open by apologizing)!

Final Japan-Thoughts part 1

There's something strange about the blog today. Blogger is entirely in English. I sat down on a toilet, but the seat wasn't heated and there was no bidet. The business I conducted there involved a certain slab of deliciously grilled cowflesh. That's right folks, I'm back in the U S of A, burning oil and not seeing ads for "Christmas cake (Maybe I mentioned it? Man I could write a whole post on Japanese Christmas)" and being rude to everyone as they are rude right back. Refreshing.

There were things I never got through, though, as I was so backlogged by Tokyo that I leaped directly into finals and had no time to write anything but a lengthy complaint about how people look funny at me on the trains. SO. This will actually be totally disorganized and things I want to write down with no regard for order or whether or not I already talked about it!

KINKAKUJI:

There are two photos you are required by law to take if you visit Kyoto. At the city border they literally stop you and check if you have both of these images either on postcard or digital media, and if you have neither they don't let you leave (THIS IS NOT TRUE. But it might as well be, it's like visiting New York City without going to Times Square or visiting New Jersey without going to a landfill (oh wait that last one is literally impossible to do)).

One I have already posted, of Kiyomizudera. The second is Kinkakuji, where there is a pavilion which is gold, the Kinkaku They cleverly put a pond in front of it meaning that every bit of gold is doubled, like a corporate matching promise in a public television funding drive. The pavilion itself was made by one of the Ashikaga Shoguns so that he could have tea parties with his buddy, the abbot of the attached temple. As time passed, both the temple and the Ashikaga became less and less important- but a gold building is timeless. The Temple has a real name, but everyone calls it Kinkakuji, literally meaning 'the temple where the golden pavilion is.'

DIGRESSION: In Japanese, because there are no spaces until the end of a sentence, many times when there is a word that describes a proper noun it is directly attached when transliterated to english. This confuses us a lot. The most common example I've seen is rivers; I have seen many people talking about 'the Kamogawa river...' but 'kawa' means river, and in a compound it softens to 'gawa,' so you're saying the Kamo river river. In this particular case, 'kinkaku' is made up of kin = gold, and kaku = pavilion. Ji means temple, which is why every temple somehow has a ji at the end of it (the kanji can also be read dera, and alone it's tera- which is the word for temple in general- but I couldn't get a straight answer out of anyone as to why it's read ji at the end of some temples' names and dera at the end of others'. ). SO Kinkakuji (which I translate in my head to 'that temple where the sweet golden pavilion is') is what everyone calls the place because the Zen temple there is for chumps, and Kinkaku is the pavilion itself. Just thought I'd straighten everyone out just in case.

Anyway I paid my 500 yens, got my ticket, immediately handed my ticket over, and was ushered in to The Picture Taking Spot. I will not show you the picture I took because you can see it 8000 times by typing Kinkakuji into google and waiting. I will show you the picture I took of everyone taking pictures, because I thought it was so great that the building and the garden and even the mountains were, for all intents and purposes, a postcard frozen in time (rebuilt in the 1950s because a crazy monk burned it down but eh) for everyone to copy down into their own cameras and take home.

Once you proceeded past the Picture Taking Spot, there were a bunch of nice garden off beyond the temple that you could wander through, that the 'I have taste' part of my brain was all 'man this is nicer than the gold' but the sensible part of my brain that knows awesome when it sees it told the former part to shut up and go back to take more pictures of the sweetness. So that was Kinkakuji. As an interesting aside, Kyoto has a very limited subway system and I refused to take their buses after a traumatic experience early on in the quarter (don wanna talk about it) so I ended up walking about an hour and a half each way to get to the temple. It was a nice day, I stopped in at a few more interesting and nice but not famous shrines and temples on the way, and I got to see a lot more neighborhoods. Overall it was a good time, and I got my requisite postcard picture.

A LAST ODE TO ARASHIYAMA



Oh man Arashiyama, I went there almost every weekend that I didn't go anyplace else. I could walk there from homestay house in about 20 minutes. It was good- on days I was doing work and didn't have a 4 hour (hour on transit each way plus 2 hours of wandering I usually take) chunk of time to actually go someplace, I didn't have to feel like a waste that never left my room by taking a nice 40 minute walk, say hello to real live neighborhood Japanese people (very interesting watching the landscape go from "real" to "tourist" mode, especially right at the imaginary border where I got the "wow you done got pretty lost huh" look from people now and again). Arashiyama is the general area where I climbed a small mountain my very first weekend in Kyoto, there's a river, there's festival food, it's bustling but there are always quiet spots (except at the height of leaf-changing season, when you could not draw breath within a mile of the place because every person in Kyoto needed to see the leaves there- the other mountains and rivers around Kyoto are culturally inferior you see). That was a bit too sarcastic- there is really a fantastic arrangement of mountains with a higher than average ratio of deciduous trees to evergreens, and it was really beautiful when they were all orange and red. It was pretty beautiful most of the time, there's a famous bridge, I had a spot on the riverside that was pretty much the only place in Kyoto that I thought that was a nice place to sit that didn't turn out to be a "couples spot." I liked it a lot!

My last weekend I went there one final time and climbed the small mountain (I feel really bad saying mountain because it took literally 45 minutes from riverside at the bottom to the peak, but that's still more than a hill so I dunno) over there again, took more pictures from the top. Didn't have my buddies with me this time because they were 'studying for finals' or some nonsense, but I met a really friendly elderly Japanese man at the top who was chowing down on some ramen cooked with a little propone stove and admiring the view. It was a nice thing to be able to mostly just hold a polite conversation without feeling particularly like a moron, turns out he was retired and hiking all over around Kansai, and when I said I was from NY he said it was a life goal of his to get here and climb some of our mountains too. Cool guy!



I liked Arashiyama a lot, even though my professor wrote if off as one of the fakest places to be found, kind of like I just did to Kinkakuji up there. Kind of like people are liable to do to Kyoto in general.

Well, really, it's unfair to say my professor wrote it off- the course he taught was basically how Kyoto is a really interesting place to look at the whole whirlwind of ideas and problems you run into when something is 'old..' Is it 'real?' Is it 'touristy?' Is it 'authentic?' What do these things mean? Everything is pretty complex, because you have to consider that a lot of history is weighted and distorted as politics rumbles on, you have the fact that there are Japanese tourists and foreign tourists whose wants, needs, and tour guides are similar but not identical by any means. You have small shrines that have been neighborhood affairs, running for 800 years that no-one goes to but the neighborhood folks, and you have massive establishments flocked to by tourists as "old Japan" that were built for that very purpose in the 1890s. Among those tourists, though, you have genuine believers; as my professor said, if you look hard enough, most cherished old traditions are less than 200 years old, regardless of how far they claim to go back. Does this mean they're fake, or less important?

What's the point of being the asshole at Christmas mouthing off about how it's a pagan festival that the early Church pasted Jesus' birth over to make conversion easier? It's about family now and you're just ruining dinner. In the same way, it's kind of sad that there are old, important temples that slip off of the tourists' shortlists in favor of 'more touristy' ones, but is it really worth pointing out to anyone?

"Kyotoland" is this idea that there is a second city on top of Kyoto, comprised entirely of a tour-on-rails of old things, traditional Japanese cooking, and Geisha- irregardless of the fact that there are over a million people living and working very much in the 21st century Japan in every way. For class we read a really bitter essay by a Western (swiss born UK raised American based) photographer about how he expected a beautiful and traditional city, but found it had been destroyed by modernity, geisha crushed by the thousands by horrible gritty concrete pachinko parlors raining from the skies like apocalyptic meteors. Maybe not that bad, but he was sure put out by the fact that there were trains and department stores and that the temples suggested by his guidebook were full of other westerners with the same guidebook (http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/isett/index.html). Mr. Isett has clearly never been in a Machiya or understood real estate, because frankly if I had any option besides a downtown full of only 2-story wooden buildings that manage to, all winter long, maintain interior temperatures colder than the outside in addition to flagrantly violating any kind of modern fire code and designed entirely by and for an entirely pre-modern society... I would take it. Even if it's gross soul-crushing concrete. He goes on about how temples are cheapened by the throngs of tourists- but temples have been tourist spots and business centers in Japan since there have been temples, where do you get off your high horse thinking that it's some kind of desecration to have tour buses lined up outside it. If they'd had buses in the 1200s you could bet your bottom they'd be pulling up in that very spot (for the temples that have been around that long anyway).

And Geisha... oh Geisha. They're such a complex thing. The word comes from the Tokugawa, the idea that they are shorthand for "traditional Japan" came from the Meiji when an entire culture was being created via picking, choosing, and good old random historical accident, and the question of whether or not they "are or have been" prostitutes must be met with the opaque and facebook-esque "It's complicated." Nevertheless, Westerners and Japanese alike will go absolutely beserk, diving for their cameras whenever one is spotted on the streets of Kyoto (though Westerners occasionally embarrassingly mistake any Japanese woman wearing a kimono for a geisha, which is basically akin to declaring any woman wearing heels at all in New York a.. well.. I can't finish that simile because there is nothing right to put there because Western culture just doesn't have anything like geisha. The point is that Japanese ladies, especially middle class ones, wear kimono all the time if they are dressing up to go out and it sure as hell don't make them geisha.)

You've got all the prostitutes during the Occupation putting themselves in kimono and telling the GIs they're geisha, entrenching that "geisha girl" image into the American zeitgeist, while you're got a whole bunch of Japanese people who see the modern Geisha as an institution that's the apex of preserving and perfecting the traditional Japanese arts of dance, music, poetry, flower arranging, and the whole deal. In their actual work in the modern day they are very expensive and very cultured performers and entertainers for male clients (though apparently the entire situation has been going down the tubes since the bubble economy burst in the 90s, as companies could no longer afford to bring in geisha to close deals every time).

And tourists, whether from other parts of Japan or other countries (hell even Kyoto locals) go nuts over 'em, whatever version of the Geisha idea they subscribe to. Is it worth being snide over? Probably not. Is it worth writing a page about it on a blog? Apparently so!

I'll probably post more things as I think of them and as I take a break from baking christmas cookies, eating christmas cookies, and going to the store to buy more sugar and butter for christmas cookies.

Sundry and miscellany

Welp, a lot of stuff has happened since Tokyo, most of it boring, so I will abandon the narrative approach and talk/think out loud for a bit about stuff I've been meaning to talk about. I'm feeling pretty good, I was talking with my host mother the other day about Thanksgiving and how I was really sad I couldn't be with my family or have apple pie, and I guess I looked pretty sad doing it because today my host mom made some apple pie to go after dinner! It was not.. exactly.. apple pie, but delicious nonetheless (she used a storebought square, flat pastry shell and filled it with sliced apples.. really more of a turnover but there was no way to communicate this and I felt it would be a tremendously dick move and really ungrateful to 'correct' her about it anyway). She seemed to think it was a failure but I did my best to assure her it was still delicious (it was) and that honestly pies are hard to make in a microwave (Japanese houses do not have ovens, there's a 2-inch high broiler for fish under the stovetop and that's it). Anyway, happiness! Cannot replace the folks at home, but it was incredibly nice of her and made me feel much better.

This segues awkwardly into something I realized poring over what pictures to upload this time around: racism and Japan. I've sort of skirted around it a few times, and I'm sure other people have said things about it much cleverer than I can say, but this is a blog not an academic article and I am entitled to shout my opinions into the void, so here we go. Poring over pictures triggered this because in one there's a white guy on a bike in Kyoto and I immediately went 'oh hey a tourist.' It did not cross my mind for the barest second that he lived here.

I would say that this is because I have internalized the values of what is perhaps one of the most racist societies in the developed world. They don't have genocides or anything (any more, see: colonization of Hokkaido), but legally, in the media, and in general, the Japanese are very seriously and very strongly of the opinion that only the Japanese belong in Japan, and that you will never be Japanese unless you are really (ethnically) Japanese. They are much to polite to say this straight out unless they're one of the right-wing crazies, but if you press the vast majority of Japanese people you will discover this conviction somewhere.

You will never see this on a vacation; when you are clearly a tourist with no aspirations beyond that you are a customer and will be shown as much courtesy as possible. There are places you Shouldn't Be, but still generally the Japanese have to problem with you. They aren't racist in the sense that "all non-Japanese are smelly and I hate being around them (many are racist in this sense against the Chinese)," but if you make any sign of trying to naturalize all that goodwill will dry up faster than spit in the Sahara. They make every attempt to keep you in the tourist sphere; even in conversations that I start in Japanese and that I would be perfectly capable of managing in Japanese, servicepeople will vastly prefer speaking horribly mangled english to having to respond to a gaijin in their own language. This is an experience that happens across everyone in our program, which is especially frustrating for the kids in the top levels of language class who are basically fluent.

One of the worst things is that I've been realizing that when my friends complain about this, I not only defend the Japanese people's attitude but accuse my friends of being unfair. "You're holding them to American standards" I say. I automatically assume that because it's part of their society to be one tribe-one country-one family-one in-group, that this is acceptable and how things should operate. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. It's even self-destructive; Japan is aging rapidly (to put it mildly), and there are literally millions of Chinese and Southeast Asians that would love nothing more than to move to Japan and work, but the Japanese will have a single 50 year old in the workforce paying for the healthcare of a billion over-80s before they allow that to happen.

In a way, though, I feel they've 'earned it.' They are perhaps the only real nation-state in the world that didn't have to invent itself out of a coalition of ethnic groups pretending they had been one people forever. Sure they fudge a bit to get it into the BCs, but it is pretty much accepted that the majority of the main three islands of Japan has been one gene pool and one system of society under varying levels of central control since the 800s AD. There is no other developed nation that can claim anything reasonably close; Britain was invaded over and over, mainland Europe, Asia, and the Middle East are a stewing pot of migration, invasion, and the Modern National Boundaries are fairly arbitrary (made in the 1800s for Europe, with ethnic identities largely constructed after the fact to explain why you should listen to the shmucks in the Capital, and a little after for the rest of the world with ethnic divisions wholly ignored by colonizing powers drawing boundaries), and America is entirely a nation of immigrants. Maaybe Norway? I don't know very much about Scandinavia, I'll admit. But yeah, Japan honestly hasn't had anyone who wasn't Japanese on the mainland for quite some time, right up until the postwar period when the constitution we wrote for them forced them to play nice.

So we have a what, a who, a why, and a how. But what to do about it? Should anything be done about it? I had some vague idea of this whole issue before coming to Japan, and one would think that living here has allowed me to solidify an opinion; it absolutely hasn't. Having the experience of being stared at, "you speakku engrishu?" when I can clearly sort the business at hand in Japanese, and the general cold knowledge that I would never want to (be allowed to) live here has certainly soured me on it. But on the other hand, as broken as it is in many, many other ways, Japanese society only really works the way it does because it's Japanese. Being as inside it as they'll let me, watching the news, and seeing what they consider problems compared to us in the States, they have a pretty sweet thing going that only works because they're all so damn Japanese about everything. Having never lived in another country, I'll admit I sometimes have the problem of assigning things that are just different from the US and that are done the world over as things unique to Japan, but careful assessment shows that even after knocking those out there are a tremendous number of things that really only go on in this crazy place. Introducing alternate viewpoints or an actual mixing of culture would break it all. Now, Japan has always, always imported culture (civ class was basically 'ok, there's this thing the Japanese do, this is when they got the idea from China') but they always, always make it Japanese in the process. Mickey Mouse becomes anime, architecture is adapted, televisions are made amazing. When I say mixing culture I mean a large number of people who legitimately have a different culture coming to and living in Japan (not in army bases) and the two actually having to work out their differences in society- it would be totally disastrous.

Many of my friends think this would be a good disaster, but I'm really not sure. If nothing else, living here has given me a lot more to think about.

For further reading, a noisy gaijin trying to change Japanese opinions about how gaijin are noisy (I'm not a fan, but he's the biggest guy in this 'scene' such as it is. His big international moment was when he compared the word gaijin to the n-word. Again, nooot a fan.): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debito_Arudou

Tokyo FINAL

Back again! Almost a month to the day after I got to Tokyo, I will complete telling the internet about it. Good times.

So, we checked out of our hotel and headed with all of our earthly possessions to Tokyo Station, where we put them in a locker.. somewhere.. and left out one of the exits.. somewhere.. In order to get to the Imperial Palace! Now, my classes every day in Kyoto are a 10-minute walk from the old-school Imperial Palace is, but it really gives no context for the one in Tokyo. For one thing, the one in Kyoto was made in the old Imperial Shinden style, based off of Chinese capitals, while the one in Tokyo was build on the grounds of Edo Castle, built by Tokugawa Ieyasu, lest anyone doubt just how much of a baller he was. If anything, Nijo Castle in Kyoto is a more fitting comparison than the Imperial palace. On the other hand, there is hardly anything left of the castle, either; you can go stand on top of the foundation of the gigantic keep, but it burned down in the Edo period and was never rebuilt. Where the Emperor actually lives is a 50s concrete building (the one they build in the Meiji was totally obliterated by us firebombing Tokyo to the ground in World War 2). We got the tour, and it was very nice. They even gave us little mp3 players with an english audio tour on them. The Japanese know what they're doing with gardens, I can tell you. There are basically two levels of security; only tours go into the inner part where the Emperor lives, but there is a large ring of gardens and things around it that apparently you can go in and out of freely. A lot of people were eating lunch there.. pretty sweet break room, if you ask me. We also stumbled on a Police Brass Band playing a lunchtime picnic concert, so that was nice.



All gardened out, we headed just a bit north and checked out Yasakuni Shrine, because one of my companions has a boundless appetite for controversy. Meanwhile, I brought along only my hideously over-acute sense of "I am not supposed to be here." Yasakuni Shrine is a Shinto Shrine where the kami enshrined is the sum total of everyone who has died serving in Japan's military since the Meiji Restoration. It's a bizarre thing for a Shrine to be doing, and is a strange outgrowth of the Meiji-era re-invention of Shinto into something more resembling a "modern, Western" religion that could be used for Nationalism. At the same time, invented or not, I don't want to belittle a place meant to honor the dead. "Well," one would think, "What's so wrong with this? We have Arlington, and no-one minds.." The difference is that many of the Grade-A War Criminals that committed horrible atrocities in China and other places in East Asia are enshrined there along with everyone else that died in the war. Every time a Japanese Prime Minister visited the shrine to pay their respects (and the LDP ones frequently did, at least in part because one of their biggest power bases was veterans), China flipped out and there was an international incident. Prime Minister Hatoyama apparently has pledged not to do so, but the Shrine remains in any case.


Regardless of issues of war criminals, I just felt times a million like I shouldn't be there. Many of the Japanese there were elderly and perhaps paying respects to a brother, father, or friend; many of them might have been in the war themselves, and here is this jackass American kid flouncing around taking pictures of them because "it is so interesting." No thank you, I tried my best to rush the group through as fast as possible and I have very few pictures from inside the precincts of the shrine itself. We also didn't actually ascend into the main building, just looked from afar. They have giant imposing metal Torii; it gives a very brutal feel (though I got a picture of two doves cuddling on top of it which is like 18 billion symbolism points). I also managed to get a lot of thinking and looking in between trying to escape, it was interesting but I still felt bad because even apart from what the Japanese think, there I was at a shrine honoring guys that, no less than crimes in China and Korea, were trying their damndest to kill my grandfather and I'm not sure how OK I am with that. Anyway.



We spent the rest of the day in transit- wasted some more time lost in Tokyo Station looking for our stuff, and then we hopped a train for Nikko after being joined by a new member, bringing our team up to 4. Nikko is about 4 hours via local train to the northwest of Tokyo, and is a magical wonderland! We stayed at a place with little Japanese-style cottages (http://www.nikko-inn.jp/, I highly highly recommend it if you ever find yourself in Japan, it is run by a great couple that were extremely friendly and chatted with us for a while over tea, the cottage was fantastic, and it was fairly cheap!), two stops before Nikko itself. Getting off at the station was a bit scary.. the station was a platform only big enough to fit two cars, and the ticket booth was a porta-potty sized shack, and there was NOTHING IN SIGHT (later in the morning we learned there were a bunch of buildings around, the Japanese are just concerned about the environment or something and don't leave all their lights on everywhere with the blinds open). Fortunately the main building of the Inn was about 4 feet from the station so it was all ok.

After and extremely restful night (We got sushi delivered right to the room/cottage! And slept on futons on tatami! So traditional!), we headed out bright and early to experience the wonders of Nikko. Lemme tell you it was pretty wonderful. There were pagodas and temples and a reaaally nice garden that was right at the right time in terms of the autumn leaves. But all this paled next to one thing I experienced in Nikko.

The best thing in Japan. Hands down. This is the greatest thing the Japanese have ever made. It is one of the greatest things anyone in the world can ever make. I couldn't handle it I stood staring for literally minutes. This thing is off the hook. We paid 14 dollars for a combo ticket that got us into all of the temples and shrines in the area, and I would have paid 20 just to see this one thing. I would have paid 100.



Look closely at that picture. See that gate? That gate??



THAT GATE!



Tokugawa Ieyasu is enshrined here, and his successors decided he wasn't just going to be enshrined as a god, he was going to be enshrined as a god in STYLE. And what a style it was. Japanese Art Historians generally hate on it, calling it "Japanese Baroque (AS IF THAT WERE A BAD THING)" and saying it is "ostentatious." Japanese art historians mainly busy themselves with the subtle beauty behind a cup which is slightly lumpy one way and another cup lumpy another way, so I will forgive them for not recognizing the sweetest thing to ever happen in the world when they are looking right at it and complaining. It's like the Micheal Bay of architecture. Instead of "hey, there is a scene without an explosion, I'ma put in a helicopter and blow it up," it's "oh crap there is something not covered with gold, let's carve a SWEET DRAGON on it and THEN cover it with gold."


Who is that jerk all getting up in my picture of the gate? I don't know but his ugly mug is detracting from HOW AWESOME THE GATE IS.

I don't care what anyone says, I love that thing. The rest of the shrine was similarly gilded and awesome, and there are the hear no evil-see no evil-speak to evil monkeys carved (in painted wood, BO-RING) on one of the lesser buildings, I guess, but it's like being offered a 5-star restaurant meal while CONSUMING AND BATHING IN THE AMBROSIA OF THE GODS, except instead of that it's a gate. The best gate of any gate ever. I will forever be jaded at architecture, because I'm pretty sure nothing is going to measure up.


Above was one of the other temples in Nikko and hey look it's pretty I guess? What-EVER. Man, that gate.

Anyway, we ate food or whatever which I didn't taste because all I wanted to taste was the gate, we rode back on another long train (away from the gate...) and I stayed in CAPSULE HOTEL which was an experience and a half, and I dreamed all night in my tube of love of my life, that GATE. MM that gate.

I don't even remember what we did the last day. I know we didn't get onto the night bus until 11 PM, but being so recently parted from the only thing I ever truly wanted to see in my life was traumatizing. I think we went to Ginza and ate at that Chocolate Cafe (I got chocolate sandwiches! They also had strawberries and it was pretty good but not as good as THAT GATE). We may have wandered around Akihabara a bunch more and I got to be reminded of home by rummaging in bin after bin of random fairly worthless computer and electronic components (Fun idea for rich people: Fly to Tokyo, go to Akihabara, everyone gets 500 dollars to buy enough junk to piece together a functioning computer. At the end of the day you put them together and the best one wins!). Anyway, after another rousing jaunt on the misleadingly named dream bus, I was back in Kyoto!

Phew. Back to writing about my boring life, instead of my boring life surrounded by exciting things!

Tokyo threeee

Gather round, oh ye that desire to catch the pearls of wisdom that dribble from my keyboard like so many pebbles! Pearls incoming. These particular ones relate to the following day of Tokyo madness, though first I would like to digress on some now-stuff. It being a mere 40 or so days until christmas (and under the duress of enduring 3 hours a week of rehearsing christmas music in handbells), I have decided it is high time to begin my yearly ritual of listening to Handel's Messiah nonstop until maybe Februaryish. I feel like I've grown as a person; in High School, I could barely get excited about any of it except the part I was all 'oh hey I know that (the hallelujah chorus).' I thought I had grown when I discovered there were in fact OTHER choruses is this massive oratorio I had seen as a vast expanse of boring leading up to one song followed by boring. Yet finally, starting toward mid January last year (partially due to the fact that I was not alone in my ritual in my dorm, there were several kids in the University chorus singing it (they do a really great job every year, by the way, if anyone is in Chicago when it happens) and one other kid like me with no vocal talent whatsoever that just can't stay away from this stuff). Anyway, I now love every second of this two and a half hours.. even the recitatives! Even the Soprano recitatives!! My favorite part of them remains the "boop... boop!' from dominant to tonic that the organ does at the very end every time, but the rest is OK TOO I GUESS. Also, 'O thou that tellest good tidings to zion' is baaaaaaller. My favorite, though, remains and always will be "for unto us a child is born.." ah man classic stuff. For contrast, for Christmas the Japanese have so far put up vaguely christmas tree-esque things everywhere. From what I gather from friends and host families, the idea is that on christmas, you buy a "christmas cake" and hang out with your significant other in a bizarre confectionerally confused Valentine's day. I can't make this stuff up! Things are obviously different for Japanese Christians (of which there are several), but talking about that would ruin the 'hey man the Japanese are weird' vibe I've got going.

ANYWAY back to Tokyo! So for that fateful day we decided to see some more electronics, so we headed down to a big old area of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay, joined to the city by Rainbow Bridge and that I think is called Odaiba? Though that might just be the bit of land at the beginning of the bridge that's a park now, that was originally made as a precaution against the danger of Commodore Perry coming back and bombarding the hell out of Edo. IN any case, this place was weird as I can describe. It wasn't even like being in another city; it was like being in another world. We went on the special train line that starts in Ginza, heads over the bridge, and circles this miracle land that Should Not Be. We got off pretty early on the train to hit up the Panasonic Center, but ever from the train this place was ridic.. I don't know how to describe it. There were no actual businesses or living spaces or shops- it was all convention halls, gigantic high-rise hotels, museums, and corporate showrooms. Giant, flat space with gigantic buildings just erupting out of the empty landscape almost at random. On top of this, there was literally NO-ONE THERE. Especially after being used to fighting through a packed crowd to get down the rest of the tiny tine streets of Tokyo, it was really disturbing coming to this place of massive, spacious promenades with no-one on them. Pretty sad, really.



So after confirming there had been no apocalypse and it was just Tokyo being ridiculous as usual, we hit up the Panasonic center to see if they had anything interesting to sell us. They had some cool exhibits about learning about science, a lot about how they were developing new energy efficient things (why we are not all using induction stoves baffles me), yadda yadda. Then a representative lady accosts us! "oh no we thought this was public" we think, "are we being kicked out?" but thankfully thanks to our slick Japanese skills we learned that in fact we were being asked if we wanted a demonstration of the latest incredibly expensive gadget Panasonic is actually pouring all of its research dollars in while they prattle about 'energy efficiency' and other unimportant things. Yes we did want a demonstration, and boy did we get one. This thing is called the "Life Wall." Remember Fahrenheit 451? The TV that's actually the entire wall of your living room? Yeah it's that. Except it's also a computer, and can recognize you when you walk up to it. The representative walked close to the wall, and it popped up a gui right in front of her.. if she chose something like a video or music, it opened at just the right size/volume for where she was, and if she moved it followed her and adjusted size/volume accordingly.. pretty cool. She could also control what the whole wall was doing with vague gestures (that were apparently as frustrating as one would imagine, but hell the thing's a prototype and you are changing channels on your wall-TV by waving your arms around). It's also called the LIFE WALL. Pretty cool!

We left the center depressed that we never in our lives will have enough money for one. To cheer ourselves up, we walked across most of the island-thing to basically the biggest ferris wheel in the history of the world ever. The walk was, again, distressing.. giiiiant boulevards, no people. To get to the ferris wheel we went through 2 stories of empty parking and 1 story of toootally empty arcade in this building, the footprint of which was easily a football field or two. Luckily there were employees to run the thing, so we went up on a terrifying 15 minute journey into the sky and back (my companions insisted on the clear cabin.. wonderful).




Unfortunately, it was a pretty humid day so the view was somewhat limited. Still worth it, though.. got to stare at the Pacific ocean and all the warehouses/cargo ships in between us and it for a while, and the skyline as seen from the Bay. Disembarking, we resumed wandering, and stumbled on a Toyota exhibition hall where they had a car magically driving itself, as well as a chair for disabled people that had (I kid you not) giant robot legs. Other highlights include about 200 square feet of random quaint 17th century Italian village. After the initial confusion, we got down to some sign reading and discovered this whole thing, shops, fountain, and quaint chapel, was available for rental on a weekendly basis for weddings. Absurd! Wedding village! Extravagance!! Speaking of extravagance, also along the way was a shopping mall known as THE VENUS FRONT, which was made basically to be an ideal italian city at night. If only they didn't have 'poker face' pouring in over loudspeakers, the effect was really good.. the ceiling was all night sky, the storefronts all lovingly crafted from the very living plastic in the traditional style. We had no interest in shopping though, so we headed to the Miraikan (literally means 'Future hall') to check out what people would show us about cutting edge technology when they weren't trying to sell it to you. It was pretty cool.. couldn't hold a candle to the MSI in Chicago or the Boston Science Museum, but they try. There's a walk-through model of one of the ISS modules, a big series of tubes to simulate the internet (you create 'packets' with arrangements of black and white balls and send them in, watch them go around, then someone gets your message at the other end. Pretty cool, but hah hah series of tubes). They had one of those '3d virtual reality rooms' that are always disappointing that was disappointing, some really really cool light stuff (strips of LEDS that just look like they're a flickering line when you look right at them, but draw a picture when you look from one side to the other quickly, which I thought was way cool and spent like 5 minutes taking photos of by spastically jerking around my camera on semi-longish exposures whilst children pushed their ways past me and my companions sighed and checked their watches loudly), and a giant globe covered in active LED displays to show the world from space in reeeaaal tiiiime. They also had ROBOTS! They even have ASIMO, only the greatest robot of all. We got there after his last show of the day (they have a little like glass presentation case that they take him out of 4 times a day to perform), though, so we only got to take pictures of him standing there and being boring. That's about it I guess!

Departing, we resolved to walk back across the bridge to soak in some views, and I took some pretty ok views with my trusty camera. We decided also that, as it was getting sunsetty, it would be nice to stand on the bridge and watch the sun set and the lights come on in Tokyo. It was, in fact, really nice. I have pictures to prove it!



We then hopped the train to the trendiest place to be in Tokyo at night, Roppongi! We managed to dodge the Nigerians telling us 'yeah yeah come into this club your friend is right inside I saw them yeah saw your friend (in english),' and check out some cool stuff. We had dinner at a not-bad-at-all Pan-Asian place (not-bad is the best thing I will ever say about Pan-Asian, as I am morally and philosophically opposed to such trendy things), and checked out the absurd amounts of swank and class that adorn the Roppongi Hills complex. They have some reeeeally sweet architecture around, and a big ol sculpture of a spider. Tokyo in general has crazy architecture.. like no-one is keeping track, they can just put whatever building they want wherever they want and it will fit in because it's not like any of the other buildings make any sense. It's fantastic! Speaking of tall buildings, we caught a bunch of the city by walking for a while to get to Tokyo Tower, then caught even more of the city from the observation deck. Getting there was pretty trippy.. we walked through some real neighborhoods, which was a nice break from touristland, but it meant we ended up approaching the Tower from the wrong side.. and for some reason there was a gigantic white oblong.. land-blimp.. thing with "100% New Zealand 2011" written on it, what sounded like a club going on inside, and men in business suits all rolling in. We still have no idea what it was all about, and I feel like knowing would only detract from the TOKYO EXPERIENCE, which just isn't the same without that special 'what.. the hell' feeling. Also before ascending the tower (I'm not going to talk about the view because I mean it's a view from a tower what do you want flickr it maybe (OH hey there was one weird thing, there's like a little Imperial Shinto shrine at the top what is UP with that (or, why is that shrine UP with what), ah Tokyo you never disappoint)) Anyway, after descending from the tower, we found the nearest subway station and returned to the hotel, for our last night in that particular base of exploration.

OH HEY so I also totally forgot in the day before this (right before shinjuku gardens), in the post before this, we went to sensoji/asakusa that I could have said a lot about but like the moment is totally past and can serve only to confuse you. Nothing particularly special I gueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesss..

NEXT POST: Imperial Palace, Seriousness (we went to Yasakuni Shrine, I want to talk about it but it's not something that I'm willing to be a snarky ass about), and if there is time maybe I will delve into our time in the magical land of Nikko!