Akihabara!!!

8:50, Tokyo, 7/15/08

After class a friend and I hopped on the subway train two stops to Akihabara, the so called “electric town.” The district grew out of an urban scrap heap following the end of the war, where young students strapped for cash would sell replacement radio equipment. As the years progressed and Japan flourished, the radios turned to washing machines and refrigerators, and those turned into today’s computers, game consoles, and large game arcades. We stepped into a number of game arcades, where we were duly impressed by the quality of the interfaces and the visual splendor on sale, but were turned off by the lack of variety and unfathomably high prices. This didn’t stop dozens of Japanese youth from spending their money, though, or watching as others exhibited their skillful mastery of Tekken 6; don’t get me wrong, for a game with only four, unmarked buttons, and a small joystick, Tekken was certainly worth my ten minutes and one hundred yen. That said, one hundred yen was certainly all I was going to spend on the game, lest I begin to believe that my own martial arts skills included back-flip submissions and energy pulse cross-blocks. Given that assailants do not make exceptions for the deluded, I decided to save my money and not spend eight hundred yen on the Gundam Pod: imagine the womb, except you get to choose guns and shoot robots. If this doesn’t appeal to you, you clearly were never a boy.
Emmett, the friend I went to Akihabara with, goes to college in DC, grew up there, and wants to join the FBI, and laments the lack of the “best and brightest” in government. He has my vote. We were discussing this in what I could only conclude to be a Chinese style restaurant where the only memorable thing I ate was a mango pudding dessert which, as I have just learned from my host mother, is a very famous Japanese dish. Go figure.
I think that I have biked more in the last week than in years back in America. I bike to and from the train station everyday, to the grocery store with Mika, to the mall with Mika, to the post office with Mika, to neighboring “towns” with Mika– We live in Achida Ward (ku, 区), one of the twenty three that compose Tokyo, and each ward has many smaller towns inside. — In conclusion, Mika is trying to acclimate me to Japanese living, and my legs are longing different climes. What keeps me going through all the biking here is just how scary it is all the time; biking in Japan is like driving in China: Winner take all. I have learned to stop on a dime for cross traffic, but I have yet to learn to negotiate head on traffic; one dozen bikes head for another dozen bikes across train-tracks; I was initially disconcerted by this scenario, but then realized I had no choice, as I was already surrounded by a swirling mass of gears and wheels that moved under some unknown force; I call it “The Courteous Way of Two Dozen Bicycles,” and as number 25, I was clearly disturbing the peace. I made it out ok, but I have a feeling that my bike and I have a long way to go before we’re singing in the rain and not screeching with wet brakes.
Oh, and back to Emmett and my adventure in Akihabara. We were in a subway station, reading an advertisement. It depicted six young men running naked, behind which there were hundreds of schoolgirls in uniforms, on bicycles and on foot, cheering them on. Covering the mens’ nether regions was a long black line, upon which was written the sentence “学校じゃ教えられない!” (Gakkou jya oshierarenai!), which translates as “They don’t teach this in school!” Of course, neither Emmett nor I recognized the third character at first, so we consulted my Kanji Learner’s Dictionary. We were arguing about the number of strokes the character had, used for reference in the dictionary. “It’s 7 by 3!” “Nah man, it’s 6 by 4!” “That’s not possible! There is no way that is four strokes!” All the while, a Japanese man in a light blue shirt and khakis was standing near us, clearly amused at the site of two white boys puzzling over a simple underwear advert like it was the key to curing cancer. We eventually located the character, found it was “Teach” and solved the puzzle. I am proud to say I read my first piece of Japanese media, and I feel a mildly less hopelessly illiterate!