Catch-up Part 2!

7:18 pm, 7/22/08, Tokyo

One might ask why I do not throw a couple days away and start on today’s events instead. I suppose my answer would have to be that, given how hard these kinds of summers are to come by, no day’s memories are dispensable.
On Friday after school, I went with a group of friends to Ikebukuro, a fashionable shopping and entertainment district. There we engaged in one of Japans most venerated and culturally distinguished pastimes: Karaoke. While I expected a pub-like setting, what I got for my 500 yen was an hour in a darkish private room filled with couches, small tables, and a large TV and an even larger Karaoke machine. The selection was vast, and we had a lot of fun imitating singers from Maroon 5 to Britney Spears; we even tried to do some Japanese songs, but none of us could read the lyrics fast enough, so it came down to “somethin’ somethin’ somethin’, la la la la A-Ri-Ga-To somethin’ somethin’ somethin’…” and so on. Clearly my Japanese doesn’t yet extend to the land of J-Pop.
On Saturday, we headed off as a school to Kamakura, a seaside town full of temples and shrines. It come to its present form through the efforts of a Daimyo, a samurai feudal lord, who in an attempt to make up for past misdeeds and bring his karma to spiritually acceptable levels, invited members from all the major sects of Buddhism and Shintoism to build on his fief. The town was impressive, and the sight of the sea for the first time in weeks, stretching out in all directions, leaving any civilization behind in blue abandon, was comforting to me. As an island boy, I haven’t ever been very far from the water, and though I do not go as often as I could, the sudden realization of how distant a clear beach would be from where I lived in Tokyo, an hour at least, meant that just seeing the water was something I couldn’t take for granted; for all I knew, I wouldn’t see it again for a while. Anywho, y’all will see from the pictures (if I ever get to posting them), that the shrines would make an impression on anyone, but the most impressive sight of the day would have to have been the Daibutsu, the giant statue of the Buddha. It rose at least thirty feet into the air, and visitors were even allowed inside for a look. For twenty yen, it was easily the cheapest thrill of the trip yet. It was dark, cramped, and mysterious, just what you would expect from the inside of an enlightened man, if the human body were tour-group sized.
Sunday I slept, and wrote. It was a good day.
Monday was a national holiday and turned out to be quite action packed. First on the agenda was the Anpanman museum. Anpanman (literally: Sweat Bread Man), is a hit children’s TV show in Japan starring a superhero with a head made out of bread filled with sweet bean paste. Miu is in love with the show, and considering what we wanted to do for the holiday, we decided that a happy Miu would make the day all the pleasanter. Kiddy museums are funny in that though the exhibits are all designed for four-foot tall children, the overwhelming majority of the visitors are adults, but knowing Miu, four people were barely enough to handle her, and we were all exhausted when we left an hour and a half later. Miu, of course, was all smiles. We then drove to Costco. Costco, in Japan? That was the question on my mind as well. However, even after I was able to accept the concept of high end wholesale in an admittedly rich country like Japan, I still was unable to accept that somehow, Japanese were purchasing “Kirkland Signature” products. It seemed so very much like home. Aw well, I suppose I’ll just have to get over it. While there, I saw a rack of English language magazines, and I pounced; I just finished the novel I brought over with me, and I was beginning to feel reading withdrawal.
We then proceeded to a rocky beach, where, for the rest of the day, we marveled at the industrial landscape of Tokyo’s outskirts and took heroic pictures on the boulders. In a lot of ways, it felt just like the rocky beaches on the north shore back home, but I doubt Billy Joel ever wrote a song about this place.
Today. Ah today. Finally I come to a time whose images still come to mind like water in a river, flowing without end; I need not dig a well and pull at the basket lest the bonds break and all sinks into the dark ground of forgotten days. Today class was more challenging than usual, and study will likely only head further uphill; an encouraging development. After class Emmett and I headed for a bookstore we had been told would have a large foreign language section and a Kanji practice text Emmett had gotten in the states and one I vowed to buy in country; I found the book, along with other entertaining volumes, in the store, which turned out to be one of the largest in the city, but the trip there turned out to be half the fun. The bookstore was near Shinjuku station, by the New South Exit; sadly, we arrived in the North-East. Shinjuku is labyrinthine in its complexity and marvelous in its modern, clean, almost futuristic aesthetic. Restaurants and product stalls seem perfectly blended with the myriad flights of stairs leading everywhere and nowhere at once, none of which deterring travelers determined to reach the eponymous turnstiles. At times, I wondered if I was on a space, not a train, station. New as it may be, Shinjuku is classic in the confusion its size causes to the neophyte, and it took us at least half an hour to find the desired exit. When the chance arises, the plan is to revisit the store before leaving Japan; hopefully Shinjuku will open the gates more promptly next time.