second day in japan
second day in japan
we’re staying on a naval base, Atsugi. I was expecting to have someone who knew the local cutlrue, knew the language, but I hadn’t anticipated the insularity that the Navy imposes on its members. The reality is that while Dalton took a few years of Japanese, he’s still an American kid from Utah, and that the Navy does its best to make this place a litlle piece of “home”, that is, Ameica, away from home.
I woke up this morning really really sore from all our walking yesterday. FIrst, it’s a shock to me how much one day of walking around in the rain can take it out of me. Dalton, only 20 (but on a Navy base in Japan old enought to buy booze) keeps describing himself as “old”. Perhaps the military does that to you, makes you old prematurely, I don’t know, I wasn’t ever in the military. But whenever I bitch about being “old” to my friends, many of whom are reading this, they protest that I’m not old, but I have one thing that keeps reminding me.. you might not think I’m old, but you don’t have my knees.
I took a bath this morning in a really big deep bathtub. Doing so in Japan I am reminded of a story I read somewhere about an early western explorer visiting the folks in Japan. As the story goes, there was a big tub filled with hot water, and the explorer person, seeing it, immediately jumped into it, to the dismay of the locals, who had planned that this would be a community resource, with people ladling water out as needed, and here was this one person who took it all to himself. I’ve heard stories like this all my life, and felt somewhat abashed as an American, a westerner, at our attitude towards the rest of the world, but I am particularly aware of it here/now. I realized, also, yesterday as i walked around amongst the Real Japanese People that I had never really understood the movie “Lost In Translation”. I can understand how a westerner could feel completely alienated here, especially if he knows none of the local language. We were in a 7/11 (which is really called “7 & I Holding Company”, but has exactly the same color scheme on their sighs. - the wonders of branding) and they had a numebr of kinds liquor available for purchase, including the brand of scotch that Bill Murray’s character is in town to promote (can’t remember the name, I’ll have to look it up later, maybe bring some back for my scotch snob friends to sample) One intersting thing about this bathtub that I have to mention: not only is it deep
As I mentioned, I’m staying on a US military base in the “navy lodge”, which is eseentially a hotel. But this hotel is different from any other hotel in that it’s under the management of the Department of Defense. This means that the stations have lots and lots of PSA commercials sponsored by the DoD, telling their audience things like how important it is to save money early, how you should be careful about changing your legal residence (check with legal counsel), the dangers of power of attorney, what the seal of the DoD means (with detailed analysis of the elements like the arrows below, the bars, etc), how sexual harassment messes with “the mission”, how you should wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle. It’s weird seeing the world through this particular reality tunnel.
I mentioned yesterday about the shirt I bought, I had a chance to read the tag today.. It says:
“Euphuistic: The Euphustic concept is to involve you in the designprocess. so we can create styles that make you feel good and look great. At Euphuistic, that,s what we mean by fashion”
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about common words and what they really mean, and one that I’ve been thinking about is the difference between fashion and style? To give the teacher’s book explanation from the back of the book, IMHO the differennce beween fashion and style is that style is personal and indivitualistic while fashion is dictated from outside.
By the way, the bag that my goodies came from has a website.. The place was called Harada’s and their website is http://store.yahoo.co.jp/harada I haven’t seen it (there isn’t any net access here, so I have been writing these in wordpad, and copying/pasting them to my live journal while in Dalton’s room, which reminds me a lot of a college dorm) so i have no idea what is on their website.
I wanna say somethign about cigarettes: I haven’t had a cig since i was at the airport in Seattle because i didnt want to paricipate in the high prices i anticipated. Lemme say a little about cigarette prices in the vending machines. A full pack of cigs is 1000 yen, which translates to about $11. They sell short-packs which have 6-8 cigarettes for 300 yen. I suspect I’m gonna try one if for no other reason tha t’m detoxed enough that it would be
Well this is about as much time as i have. I’m hav$ing a lot of deja vu’s lately, Anyone want to remind me of what that means?