Two posts at once!

8:42 am EDT- Atlanta, GA

Connecting flights make me sad. Two and a half hours, I just find a comfortable position to sleep in, and suddenly the plane lands; hopefully, 12 hours might just do it.
I’m watching CNN, and up comes the story of the hostages saved from the FARC in Colombia. When I was in JFK a couple hours back, they showed a short biop of the three American contractors saved in the operation; ingenious really, and I commend all those that were involved, but I question the effectiveness of a system that requires five years to act. Certainly, Colombia may have needed those five years to reform and consolidate its institutions, and may well have only had the necessary will once the FARC’s historic leader had died (I don’t remember his name at the moment; someone please look it up and put it in a comment), but I wonder why America had not acted on its own; perhaps neither three Americans nor Ingrid Betancourt, the Franco-Colombian politician, were worth the time if Colombia couldn’t pick up the slack in the weeks and months after.
Either way, farm disputes lead to gunfights that lead people to spend years in chains at the whim of men with guns who have never farmed in their lives. And here we are at the top of the world. If I’m not careful, I might turn socially conscious!

5:20 am Japan time- Tokyo

I have just woken up in my comfortable new Japanese style Tatami matted room. It is about 8 footlengths wide and 14 footlengths long. It is separated from the rest of the Manshon (as apartments of this type are called) by three sturdy sliding panels that form a sound insulating wall. It would by western standards seem small, but the lack of raised furniture gives a sense of space that would otherwise be swallowed up by banisters and shelves; so for me, the room seems very large, and I can happily live here for seven weeks!
When I first flew into Narita, Tokyo’s airport, I noticed two things: First was that arrivals gate (I was terminal 1, north side, so this may not apply to the other parts) was exceedingly quiet, though it was busy; more like a small train station than a huge airport. The second was that I had arrived nearly an hour earlier than scheduled. I proceeded to get yen, email y’all of my survival, and eventually met up with the staff from the school. They were all in their early twenties, the five of them who were running around catching scared foreigners, and to my surprise, they seemed to meld from Japanese to Mandarin to English like it was nothing. Frankly, I could not have told you, had I not known better, where these people came from; the benefits of being a polyglot, I suppose.
One of the organizers called two of us to come with him. The other boy was named Bradley. A rising high school senior from Baltimore, Bradley knew no Japanese and was here for a month. We rode in a school cab from Narita to “Tokyo.” I say this in quotes because I have very little idea what constitutes Tokyo. From what I saw in the cab, it is an urban sprawl taken to its logical conclusion, so I don’t have any confidence in my descriptions, whether they are of suburbs or of the city itself. Anywho, Bradley was living not with a host family, but in a dormitory-like setting. The neighborhood he was living in was filled with bike-shops, cleaners, used car dealerships, and fast food places. To be fair, my host family’s home looks out on a KFC, but his had a Denny’s, Pizza Hut, 7-11, and other such establishments. I also saw a Pachinko parlor, which if I am not mistaken is a kind of gambling/gaming place. Anyway, I suppose this might be a “working class” neighborhood in Tokyo? Really, no idea. In reality it was very nice; very clean, very pleasant, and fulfilling any student’s needs. Additionally, as Bradley told me, his neighborhood was only a couple of minutes away from Tokyo Disneyland. We all know where Bradley is going! Oh, that Bradley. Nice kid, hope to see him in school.
Anyway, after dropping Bradley off, The driver and I drove off to my host family’s neighborhood. Getting off the highway, I noticed a shift in the tenor of the place. The houses and buildings were taller, there were sit-down restaurants and new car dealerships; boutique shops and furniture stores sprang up where they were absent before. My host father, Daisuke, picked me up from the cab; he is a clean looking young Japanese man. 23 years old, an inch or two shorter than me, with dark skin and glasses of the thick plastic variety, he was dressed in nice jeans and patterned t-shirt. When he pointed out our building, I said “Apaato?” which is the Japanese word for apartment. He looked at me with a slightly pained expression and said that we lived in a “Manshon.” An Apaato is much smaller and cheaper. Learn new things! Anyway, we go up the elevator to the eighth floor, where my host mom, Mika, aged 25, wearing a pooh-bear t-shirt, meets us, holding little 2 year old Miu, their daughter, in her arms.
It would be a good time to point out that Mika and Daisuke both speak English very well. They both attended U of Wisconsin Sheboygan (they both cringed as they told me the campus name), and now are trying to raise Miu bilingual. This leads to very funny scenes where Mika tells Miu to close the door in English, and me telling her the same thing in Japanese! They are willing to speak to me in Japanese, and have taught me a few things already, but given my limited ability, we agreed to a mixed speaking arrangement. Perhaps as the weeks progress I will be able to wean myself off English more and more.
One of the first things Mika asked me was about my eating habits. She had read I “hated” pork, since I was a Jew. I laughed and said (in Japanese!) that as a Jew, I couldn’t eat certain foods. The lights flickered on in her eyes as she began to comprehend why someone would forego pork and crab. She asked me lots of questions about being Jewish, what it means, so on and so forth, and explained herself by saying (if anyone has read Learning to Bow, this should seem very familiar) something along the lines of “We are just one country, we don’t have so many different kinds of people that often.” Given the fact that her time in America was spent in Wisconsin for four years, I remain unsurprised.
Ok, There’s lots more to say, including a description of the rest of the Manshon, which is very interesting, but I am mildly tired of typing, so for now, signing off!