"someone's gotta show a little butt crack" -mai

I've been reading travelogues, travel magazines, travel guides, searching for the answer to why we leave home. In its most simple form, the editor of The Best American Travel Writing writes that we travel "to see new places, meet new people, have exciting experiences. Also, I travel just because I like to move." He then goes on to explain what best can be described as a some kind of circumabulatory disorder, with symptoms ranging from enjoyment of microfiche to the misuse of rolling dishwashers. I don't particularly trust him, his disorder, or his simplicity.

It is clear that trekking through Africa or perhaps South America both make winning fodder for travel writing, only second best to traveling to war-ravaged countries, as contemplating the political state of a living in poverty while being surrounded by machine guns never fails to pique interest.

(don't tell, but I also remembered the secret to avoiding cliches. i'd share it with you, but not here, not now)

In any case, I feel that I can breathe easier these days, which is a relief. I am beginning to realize what I am and what I am not, what I can do here and what I cannot.

This afternoon I spent an hour conversing with an ICU professor about the state of gender studies in Asia -- in Japanese, no less. Of course, she cheated a little and used English vocabulary when the Japanese was too difficult, but given the subject matter, I think that we accomplished a great deal. You win some, you lose some. Some days I am incompetent, some days I speak Japanese.

I have decided that some people come here to find what makes "us" different from "them," whereas I came here to find what is universal. Perhaps neither of these things exist, perhaps both quests are inherently flawed. Perhaps we'll never know. As they say in the islands, "A bird in the hand is better than shooting five with your foot in your mouth." Right? Right??

instead of studying honorific and humble forms, which i have both studied before and have decided are unnecessary for stupid gaijins like myself to ever construct, i am going to spend the next hour translating an interview with james franco that i found in the japanese Elle. now that's putting my japanese to good use!

today i bought two cute very japanese-looking shirts, and i was so proud of myself for figuring out how to ask for a dressing room (took my shoes off before entering the room, but secretly didn't cover my face with the cloth before slipping the shirt over my head...hey, i didn't even have any makeup on!) and how to pay for the pretty things (want a picture? i'll send you one from my cell phone!), and then the cashier girl had to go and confuse me with some indecipherable question. just when you think you've conquered something as easy as buying a shirt, someone has to go and throw some phrase you've never heard of into the mix. and no, i don't want to hear that perhaps studying up on those honorifics and humbles might have made the situation any better... ok fine, maybe you're right.

oh well, i am now the proud owner of two extremely cute and extremely japanese shirts. no matter what the linguistic difficulties, no matter how stupid the gaijin, eventually you will make your purchase, you will find a way to get home, and you will get by just fine. whoever said that it was hard to get by in japan without understanding the language just wasn't willing to make a big enough fool of him or herself.

partying in japan=hardcore!

drinks
Originally uploaded by sillyhapa.

Going in clubbing in Japan entails one thing for which American partygoers are wholly unprepared ... Once the last train stops running (and in our case, the last bus, which ends at the unfairly early hour of 10PM) you are stuck at your current location until 4 or 5AM, when the trains start running again. Yes, this means that after you start partying around midnight, you must continue dancing, sweating, drinking, laughing, ALL NIGHT LONG.

And then, at that point, it is 5 in the morning (nearly 6 after eating breakfast at McDonalds) and all you can think of is your nice soft bed (or perhaps your rock-hard grain-filled pillow, which is sounding deliciously enticing right now), but there looms a 40 minute train ride from Yokohama to Shibuya, a 40 minute transfer from Shibuya to Shinjuku to Mitaka (Musashi-Sakai only if you're lucky enough to navigate the rapid versus local trains at this hour, which you're not), a 20 minute bus ride home, and the walk from the bus stop to your doorway, which suddenly seems like the longest trek in the world.

It was amazing. We came, we partied, we conquered.

We also made the acquaintance of a Japanese ballerina, a Japanese Brit, and the only Japanese girl I've ever seen to sport a side ponytail, nose ring, jeans shorts, and cornrows...all at once. Believe me, it was spicy. So much more fun than our standard foreigner-at-ICU fare.

In other news, I have been informed that this 100+ degree weather (I assume, no one is really certain how to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit over here) is the hottest Japan has seen in the last 50 years. Moreover, the day that Emily decided to go out for the lacrosse team, it was the hottest day all summer. Makes me feel like less of a baby for whining about feeling sticky all the time. Cho atsui!

i am such a nerd

It is a difficult thing to obsess over language, to revel in the complexities of word choice and pacing, rhythm and syntax, to find joy in the underlying meaning behind a delicately crafted juxtoposition of verbiage (to recognize when you are grammatically incorrect, and do nothing to reverse it, because sometimes it just SOUNDS good), and then...

to enter a land where the most complex statement you can make runs parallel to "Even though it is hot outside, he still plays tennis!". And it's not only that your level of fluency would amuse only a grade schooler, but you spend countless hours each day engrossed in the construction and repetition of such sentences. Where is my poetry? Where is my lyricism? No wonder I find myself disappointed and frustrated on a daily basis.

The English language is my lover, my confidante. We understand each other, we exist through each other. Japanese will forever remain my partially retarded stepchild, even on my best days.

If I were stranded on a desert island, I would bring with me the latest issue of Creative Nonfiction, my favorite Annie Dillard essays, and a collection of the year's most excellent magazine writing. I do believe Japan is the closest thing to my desert island I will ever come to.

So, when I'm finished writing Japanese essays entitled "My Favorite Store in Kichijoji" and studying for oral examinations on "How To Help A Friend Prepare for A Trip to Kyoto," I relax by reading Living Like Weasels, or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Over and over. *sigh*

As I depart to go hammer into my skull the best example for the Japanese proverb equal to "When in Rome...", I leave with you a little gem from Sallie Tisdale's essay, "On Being Text":

"Most of a writer's decisions are unconscious. A stroke of paint here, a switch to a minor key there, the use of flaccid instead of soft. At this level, expression simply appears; it is expression expressing itself, images, ideas, states of mind and feeling being acted out, evoked, displayed. An idea appears, connects to another, a layer appears and then another--suddenly there is a leap--Ah-ha! This connects to this, this idea hides under this idea, and if I move this detail to the end, then suddenly the whole tone becomes suspenseful. I don't know how one knows the right word or the right tense, how exactly I know when a sentence needs two fewer or one more syllable. I can go on about rhythm and prosody, about mood and tone, but sometimes one just has to take the gifts the world gives us.

Maybe literature lives only in the reader--born in the writer's changing life, taking its breath in the reader's changing life, a different story for each person who reads it. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears, does it make a sound? Who cares? Until I open the book, there are no words inside."

my professional career awaits my return...

Latest email from my mom:

A guy from the NY Times just called and he asked for you and I told him you were in Japan and he said, "that won't help. We wanted her to shoot a job for us." OH MY GOD, YOU'RE A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER!!! I assumed he needed more paperwork filled out for that skateboarding thing, but he wanted you to do more!!!

Consider this your [ironic] mass email

icu
Originally uploaded by sillyhapa.

Week three in Tokyo has come and gone, marking the official halfway point of the summer. Exciting, ne! I live in a dorm at the International Christian University, where there are about 125 foreign students in my intensive Japanese course. We study Japanese from 8 -12 every morning (which is far too much, if you ask me, but I'm sure it's good for me), and then have the rest of the afternoon and evening to ourselves.

The campus is very green and pretty for being in Tokyo, which I guess is one of the perks of being on the outskirts of the city. The downside is that we have to take a bus to get to the train station, and then most of the cool areas of the city are about a 30-45 minute train ride from there. Public transportation in Tokyo is amazing, and we certainly take advantage of it.

On the schooldays we generally take the bus to Musashi-Sakai for dinner, but then come home to study (or watch movies, or read, or go to bed early) since it's time-consuming and tiring to go out much more than that. But on the weekends we've been doing our good share of sightseeing, shopping, clubbing, karaoke-ing, and walking around.

Living on campus in the dorms means we don't get much interaction with the locals, but in the fall I'll be with a homestay, so that should change. I've also been trying to get involved with groups on campus that are run by the Japanese students (hiphop club, taiko drumming, working at the Japanese equivalent of the Women's Union).

Mostly I would describe my time here as quiet, thoughtful. It's not the party-central study abroad experience of the Prague-ers, the academic powerhouse of the Oxford-ites, or the roughing-it immersion of the Cameroon-folk...it's something else. I can't wait to hear about everyone else's abroad experiences once they begin.

this experience has been told already. I demand better.

Perhaps what I struggle with here is the inevitability of the cliche. I despise cliches, I run from them at all costs. I deride what I believe to be an overused and obvious observation, even when I know that it makes me a fucking hypocrite. I believe it is the goal of any writer, any artist, to attempt to be original, to portray what one believes to be universal in a way that is startling in its presentation, to innovate, to provoke, to make your audience see something in a way they'd never even imagined was possible.

And yet here, all I see, all I hear, all I experience is a walloping huge cliche.  Perhaps it's why I feel so loath to participate in "cultural activities," like going to the tea ceremony, learning Japanese calligraphy, watching kabuki theatre, even eating sushi. Maybe you think I'm lazy, maybe you think I'm not taking advantage of these awe-inspiring opportunities, but to me, these things are not enough.  They mock what it is I want to learn, what it is I want to find. 

I just read a week's worth of articles on slate.com written by a journalist who spent two months in Tokyo on a media fellowship from the Japan Society. Okay no I DIDN'T read them, because they were titled as such: Japanese Cliche No 1: Wacky Food. No 2: Manga. Then came Inane Protocol, Capsule Hotels, Earthquakes...the list goes on and on. I couldn't bear to continue. And do any of those things even sound interesting? Maybe they do to you (you stupid gaijin!), but to me, they're clearly things we all have read about, all have heard stories about, and all could have written before stepping off the plane into the iconic land of the fucking rising sun. In fact, I could add dozens of facile, inane cliches to the list, and let me tell you, reading about them would be boring, unenlightening, and a waste of time.

What MORE is there to this country? Has Japanese culture become so commodified, so prized for its wackiness, so overdepicted that we have nothing left to discover? Wow Lori, but why don't you go to Japan and REALLY see what it's like. Maybe what we dream about over in America is WRONG, and you can find the REAL JAPAN!

Give me a break. You think that Seth Stevenson, with his precious funds from the Japan Society, didn't try to depict Japan as it really is? You think Dave Barry didn't really come here? You think that watching Lost in Translation didn't give you an accurate picture of Tokyo? He did. They did. They all did exactly what I'm doing right now.

Yeah, it's different over here than it is back home. That's why Americans like to come here, right? To marvel at the fact that you have to take your shoes off and bow, that you can eat Japanese food and listen to J-Pop, that people are so polite that they'll come chasing after you when you leave an extra 20 yen tip (and hey, that was going to be my trump card, the one story I actually found amusing. but no, it's simply fodder to add to the pile of cliches). But we already know the differences. We come here to get lost in them. Why else would Sofia Coppola have chosen such a place, where the neon lights filled with chinese characters and ubiquitous karaoke machines and drunken salarymen and oh-so-hilarious television programming make an American feel exactly not at home?

Don't get me wrong, I neither know nor understand this place and how it operates. There is something subtle and complex about the interactions between Japanese people, there is something indescribably beautiful about an outlook on life that I will never be able to voice, there is something melancholy about social trends and emotional consequences that I can't put my finger on just yet, and surely never will. What I mean is that what I have the ability to see, and what is handed to me on a daily basis is what I have described thus far, and that it frustrates me to no end. Finding my way out of this mess is what leaves me at a loss.  It is not the country or the culture that are at fault here; I am debilitated by my own inability to observe.  I disappoint myself.  Something is missing that I can neither name nor find the means to remedy.

So. I'm off to the city to drown myself in sake. Then maybe I'll watch some anime and finish my homework outlining a path to the nearest temple. Gotta love it here. It's just so Japanese.

when will i post a happy post?

the gender dynamics of this place are making me uncomfortable. any american boy, with no discernible capital, becomes the most popular kid in town; japanese girls fall over themselves trying to befriend them, speaking in fractured english, embarrassingly eager. if you are a girl in japan, it is your job to be cute and servile. you will grow up to be an office lady or a teacher and most certainly a wife, and you will never be able to progress beyond these roles.  archaic, i know, and they have progressed beyond this as a society, but in practice, it still feels like this.  in everyday interactions, it still feels like this.

frustrating, to say the least.

today i saw a sofrozen

registering as an alien in another country is a bitch. so is trying to get health insurance. so is making phone calls. i miss my cell phone with all my heart.

the blonde kids here say they feel like freaks; the japanese treat them with hostility and mistrust. the japanese-american kids feel the expectation of their faces; they should know how to speak but they don't, and if they do, it's not enough.

what do i feel? i feel my invisibility. no one sees me here, no one notices me. if i had to guess what people thought about me, i'd say they thought nothing at all. it doesn't mean i fit in, it doesn't mean i'm not an outsider. i don't even know what it means.

i think i want it to mean that i'm not here at all. has it really only been 5 days? it feels like forever.

damp, pessimistic, and mosquito-bitten

took the language placement test today, surely failed it. five or six or maybe even seven years of cramming kanji really paid off, no?

venturing out to conbinis and suupas sapped my energy, but bargains scored at 100 yen shops never cease to amaze. of course, i'm also in the land of $2 cokes the size of salt shakers.

it's strange to have started my study abroad while everyone else is smack dab in the middle of their summers. i didn't bring my computer so that i might have a chance at freeing myself from the interweb jungle, but i find myself huddled away at this study lounge, praying for email or at least an LJ update at 5 in the morning. contact, please.

p.s. my journal's title is in reference to a song by Brand New. I don't even like Jude Law

to tokyo we go, oh no!

finally arrived in tokyo, finally made it to the university, finally done lugging around unbearably cumbersome luggage. sitting around perspiring in this thankless stickiness, waiting for something to happen. waiting to realize that i don' t speak japanese, that i really am a fraud, that i am constantly wanting to do what i never really can.

tired of repeating myself. on the plus side, if i don't become japanese at least maybe i can become a hip hop dancer. how will i spend the next 6 months of my life? there has to be an answer.

thank goodness for claire. and i miss jason.

making movies 

tough girl 

yeah, I'm famous

skateboard chick 

Photos of me and my skateboard to be featured in an article in the New York Times Education Life section about different trends on campuses around the nation. Check it out on August 1, because I won't be able to.

Home for the minute

leaving for japan in 3 days, hurriedly unpacking and packing. home is fleeting, travels are many. career plans blossoming with every new film project.

we'll see how it goes.