Still Here. Leaving Soon.

Flashlight, toiletries, business cards, books, 18 ties, three jackets of various categories, shirts, shoes, shorts, ginch, socks, medications--condoms...travel guide, phrasebook, pocket-tranzilator, headphones, camera, camcorder, laptop, my suit, two pair slacks, a couple movies, a whole bunch of sh*tty souveniers, a sh*tload of cash and my E ticket. Not in that order, but that's my life--that list is. I'm all packed and have nought but the waiting to do. So as per your request I've begun chronologging what will doubtless be another series of my crazy anecdotes.

This jouney is all about finding answers, so I'll start by answering the most common ones that I recieve: Why Japan? What are you doing there? How did you get hooked up with that and why havn't you left yet?

Well to explain I'd really have to take you back to the nineties: 1996. Foursquare and that game where you throw tennis balls at the wall. My first pair of shelltoes. Yellow walkman and three tapes: Queen, Outkast and Weezer. That's my life in 4th grade. Track 7 on Pinkerton starts with River's sensual crooning a little like this: "God Damn you half Japanese girls..." And I think it was that line that started a mild Asian cultural fascination that lead to an Anime and Manga compulsion and then just kind of spiralled out of control. Fast forward to 2005. Irreparably culturally confused, I took Japanese at college and according to McGill University I'm better at speaking Japanese than English. I'm packed and ready to go to Japan for two months.

I'll be a translator's assistant, or an editor of English Documents at a company that my sense of decency begs not to involve in this chronolog. I'll work there in Tokyo for two months or so and then I'll travel at my leisure for a few weeks around the area.

One Wednesday I was having tea when I got a phone call and was asked by my father, who had been at that time engaging in business negotiations with, if I'd like to go to Japan for a month and work as a volunteer. By serendipitous happenstance--the same force that arranged the strange match of my parents, gave me a big name and small body, and forever finds me situations beyond my control but not my expression--when the execs at **** ******** learned that I had been studying Japanese at McGill they asked my father to ask me the above. Apparently they want my English skills to assist with their foreign-correspondence. I agreed noisily. A short while later, they told me I could go for two months! Later they told me they'd pay me! Then they forgot to request a certificate of eligibility from the immigration bureau! That's the only form that's mandatory for getting a work visa in Japan! So after the ridiculous waiting period that spanned my brief introduction to Japanese bureaucracy and no results...I'm a volunteer! But not by choice...remember that. I'm a conservative and it's a known fact that no conservative gives away any of his money or time for free unless a big government bureaucracy forces him to. The timing of my summer is a little messed now, but I still get to stay the full 8 weeks and I finally leave Tomorrow! Now finally, just a few questions that I thought of this moment (if you think of any good ones email me please)

Can this country of massive commercialism, this jungle-layered urbanscape, this brightly lit consumer paradise, this land of the proverbial others restore a lone boy's faith in humanity? Give him a sense of identity at last? Find me a girlfriend? --To be decided on later, along with the title of this adventure. If anyone has any suggestions or comments let me know.

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Part of trip: Japan Summer 2006

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