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Published: September 25th 2007
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I face planted falling off of my bicycle today. I was riding to Musashi-sakai station from my skewl and I was preparing to go from street to sidewalk...you know how it is if you've ever riden a bike..well i wasn't straight on enough to make the curb so my wheel skidded with the curb of the sidewalk and i just toppled over full force to the left. I would have been embarrassed but since no one came to help me I suppose they didn't see...either that or they figured the foreigner needed to learn a lesson. Japanese people teach their kids really early on that falling isn't something to cry about and they should just get up and keep going...kind of like a metaphor for life? I see these kids falling all the time and the parent just looks at it until it gets up and then keeps walking without asking if the kid's ok or anything and the kid doesn't cry, it just gets up and goes on. When Matt, Amy, and i were at the mall in Yokohama we were going up the escalator and there was this mom with her kid in a stoller right in front of
us. The little boy must have been about 3 years old and was balling its eyes out for some reason. Matt and I even exchanged 'why doesn't she shut her kid up' looks, and then, suddenly as we neared the top, the front wheels of the stroller caught on the end of the escalator and the stroller flipped forward and I saw the kids little shoes from under the stoller hanging on the last step of the escalator, matt and I almost fell on top of the stoller as we were coming up, we had to jump over him, and then immediately we were trying to get the stoller up to see if the kid was alright. it was really scary, amy was trying to flip the stroller around but soon realized the kid was strapped in as we saw his feet and hands flailing in the air. Meanwhile...the mother of the child isn't trying to save her baby, she's kneeled down and apologizing to Amy profusely for what I can only speculate was her son+the stoller getting in her way up the escalator. When the kid was finally situated upright and his mom stopped apologizing, she knelt by the
little boy, who was miraculously not hurt, and asked him if he was alright. He just had this really shocked look on his face, like what the hell happened.....but he had stopped crying.
Because this weekend was a holiday weekend - due to something about the equinox - my friends and i decided to live it up. Saturday we left for Yokohama. It was just Matt, Amy, and I but we ended up seeing some of our friends down there and on the way back...it's so easy to spot gaijin (foreigners). Actually the word for foreigner in Japanese is the combination of the words 'gai' (outside) and 'jin' (person), so basically put its' 'outsider.' For a gaijin to integrate into Japanese society is impossible. Japanese people in general tend to think in terms of the Japanese people and everyone else. Therefore, being a foreigner in Japan, it really interesting coming to understand the expectations and shoulds and shoud nots of a gaijin. For example, when my host mother and I went to the temple in Asakusa and tossed a coin into the shrine box, she bowed her head but told me I can't because i'm 'not japanese'. My professor,
John Nathan, has lived in Japan for thirty years and even as a fairly famous person among the Japanese he expained to us in class that as a gaijin, it is virtually impossible to be fully accepted into society in the same way as a person of japanese decent. He went on to explain that many japanese beleive japanese is too hard for a foreigner to master and that a foreigner doesn't think like a japanese person and therefore cannot understand its culture and ways. I've read many books that have said the same thing about Japanese society, that its impenetrable by a foreigner, and in my experience i've noticed this myself, however, among young people - my age especially - i've noticed that they don't fit this stereotype. I've noticed that older people really don't know what to think of young people in japan today and i find it really fascinating that its only within the last ten years that this kind of 'new bread' of personality among young people has emerged and the older people are just confused. Anyway, i'm probably confusing and boring you and not making any sense so i'll stop. i'm really interested in why
the young people of today are so strikingly 'unjapanese' in one way...but then from an outsider's perspective the youth culture is so unique it can only be credited as 'japanese'.
So tonight I sat with my host mom in the kitchen and showed her my pictures from the weekend. It was reallying interesting because as I showed her my pictures she would have some of her own picture of the same place 26 years ago. While I was in Kamakura we visited a Shinto Shrine and saw a traditional japanese wedding taking place. My host mother took out her pictures of her wedding and I was really supprised to find that at her wedding ceremony she wore traditional japanese clothing, but then when she went to her reception she changed into a western style white wedding dress. The most interesting picture to me was one in which she is in her traditional japanese dress cutting her western style wedding cake.
The Emperor of Japan is supposed to be a direct descendent of the supreme Shinto god, Amaterasu, therefore the Emperor is always married in the traditional fashion at a Shinto Shrine.
Also while I was in Kamakura
I talked with Khan for a long time about what we wanted to do with our futures. He is working really hard so that he can create/head a k - college international school in Japan. He keeps a book with him that he writes his ideas for the school in and how he plans to go about acheiving it. He said he wants to be able to invite international teachers to his school and provide his students with interships and courses that will help them acheive their goals. I told him how one day i want to start a coffee shop with my sister, I told him he could send his students who are studying english to my shop to work and he said he'd come help me build the coffee shop from scratch. He informed me that when one espires to be something or do something they shouldn't let anything stop them and keep working toward it. Who knew he is such a sage little man.
Well here are some pictures for you from this weekend. I hope you enjoy! there are alot. i've gotten comlaints that i'm not in enough so here are some of me :P
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can you give me a cool japanese name to put here?
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reading megan's blog is better than sleep. and that's saying a lot. im sorry you got hurt meg!
so is that your clear umbrella, ella, ella, eh? that's pretty sweet. im sorry to hear that you fell off your bicycle megan, i would have stopped and helped you up dude, cuz that hurts! that's cool tho that you got to go on a vacation kinda, luckily i havent seen the movie hostel, or else i prolly would have turned back time and had you not stay in one. but i mean, jackie had some good experience there, so maybe it's def worth it? i like that ferris wheel, it kinda looks like you need to be high to ride on it tho - high as in altitude, of course (in case your mom reads this) ha, but in all seriousness, that kinda is insanely tall. alright, i hope you're doing good megan good.