mokudekiru

I am in JAPAN. Right now. Surprised? So am I, sorta. Mostly because of the timeline of planning this trip:

Plane ticket for Saturday – purchased on Wednesday
Train ticket for Saturday at 6:10 am – purchased on Saturday at 5:30 am

Yeah, ギリギリ (leaving things until the last minute) is how I roll, apparently.

One troublesome thing about traveling to Japan:
Getting here (here being my friend Yuka’s house) took 27 hours, but really, it took the entire weekend, because with the time difference, I left my home at 5:45 am on Saturday morning, and arrived here around midnight on Sunday night. Whew. But with a few hours to the airport, 2 hours of delay while sitting in the plane (waiting for connecting passengers, de-icing the plane, and otherwise chillin’), 12 hours of flying (6+ of which were spent asleep! I won’t be a 時差惚け！) in business class, which is freaking amazing, an hour or so of customs and finding my bag, picking up my rental phone, changing some $$ into 円, and buying an adapter so I can actually charge my laptop here… I decided it was time to find out where I was going.

For my first week in Japan, I’ll be staying with my friend Yuka. I contacted her about a week ago on the off-chance her family would be nice enough to let me stay here, but realized that her email address had changed and the only way I could contact her was via mixi-message (Mixi is sort of the Japanese equivalent of Facebook.) So I’d told her when I was coming, my flights, etc., but we hadn’t quite gotten around to exchanging email addresses and phone numbers. So right before I left America I sent a mixi message asking Yuka for her contact info. I was pretty certain she’d have time to respond before I got there.

So I picked up my rental phone, stood in the station, figuring out how to use the damn thing, found the web browser, logged into mixi, was delighted to see there was in fact a message from Yuka, opened it, realized there’s no way to copy/paste from a website (or at least I couldn’t figure out how to do it), got out a piece of paper, and wrote down phone numbers and email addresses.

I found some appropriate train and shinkansen (bullet train) tickets and headed towards Tokyo, and wrote Yuka an email on the way. Contact stablished!

At Tokyo station I looked around for some food to eat. None of the typical bento looked particularly more appealing than any of the other typical bento, so I was unimpressed. Instead, I found a girl giving out free samples of Earl Grey flavored bagels, which was one of the most amazing tasting things I’ve ever had, and decided I needed more of whatever they were selling. I gazed longingly at various green-tea flavored pastries and settled on this green-tea-white-chocolate muffin. It was one of the most delicious things I have eaten in a long time. Look at that green, moist fluffiness…

After paying, I made a run for it and actually made the bullet train in time, with at least 1 minute to spare (doing great!) I changed trains at Shin-Osaka and started heading toward Yuka’s house.

Or so I thought.

I made a critical mistake, which was that after stop #2 or so, I completely stopped paying attention. This means that when we got to Amagasaki, I should have changed trains. But I just sat there, because, again, I wasn’t really paying attention. I played with my cell phone, I people-watched a group of guys across from me on the train (who were talking about me briefly, and I got to hear the inaugural “gaijin” said about me). Anyway, after a couple more stops I was thinking “this is a strange train station name that I’ve never heard…” and after one more, I was in Itami. ITAMI!??! I know where Itami is, and that’s NOT where I’m going. Okay, time to turn around. I got back to Amagasaki and made sure to take the correct train. Suddenly the station names were extremely familiar and comforting. I emailed Yuka to explain why I was late (whoops). It should not have taken over an hour of riding local trains, but it did.

Finally I made it to Yuka’s. Her dad predicted exactly where I had gone wrong on the train AND at what station I had realized my mistake. Yuka gave me some soup and kurumi-pan and chocolate, and we hung out for a while. Walking into her house was a bit weird, since I came here once, at the very end of my stay in Japan. So it’s been 2.5 years, but actually being in her house, it feels like no time has passed at all…

So I’ve only come to Japan from outside the country twice before this. Once in 2005 (my first visit) and once in 2006 (the beginning of my study-abroad year). Each time I arrived, everything would always seem extremely weird, bizarre, foreign, cute, polite, stylish, small, etc. I was always hit in the face with the pure Japanese-ness of it all in a very jarring, Lost-in-Translation kind of way.

The weird thing with this trip is that everything seems totally normal. Yup, there’s suddenly a lot of Japanese people, stores selling Japanese things that I love, ads featuring celebrities that I fangirl, those train station sounds, riding on one side of the elevator, every professional person in a cute and very ironed-looking uniform, kanji freaking everywhere… I’m still thinking oh-my-god-I’m-in-Japan but I’m not reacting to things in that fresh-gaijin EVERYTHING IS CRAZY HERE kind of way.

Is culture shock like riding a bike?

Or maybe it’s just that this time, instead of everything being weird and overwhelming, it just feels like home.

But in the first almost-24 hours of being here… there have been a number of things that I hadn’t actually forgotten about existing, but I sort of forgot to expect, and were pleasant surprises:

– Heated toilet seats. I am back in “it’s winter so your toilet should be cold” mode from America. What a freaking pleasant surprise the first time I went to the bathroom here.

– Exactly how pleasant Japanese baths are. Yeah I miss ofuro on a daily basis, but after primarily taking showers for most of college, the whole ofuro routine is SO NICE. Especially after traveling for 27 hours, soaking in 42°C water late at night in the winter… so completely wonderful.

– amado (storm shutters) – they’re on the outside of the windows in the room I’m staying in. They just make the room pitch-dark even when it’s midday. I used to actually not like amado when I lived here (one of my host families always closed them) because it threw off my sleep cycle to have it be dark like 4-am in my room at 10 am, but again, after the whole 27-hour journey thing, the ability to sleep soundly until 10 in complete darkness is very appreciated.

For now, I’ll indulge in a little bit of tv before Yuka brings back μ (her singing group) to practice here and I reunite with 5 other people I haven’t seen in 2.5 years. I’m going to their concert tonight, and it should be FAB.

Jya ne.