Five years.
It had been five years since I had last entered Japan, five years since I had last walked the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama.
As I type this, I am still jet-lagged from a short but absolutely fantastic trip to the land of the rising sun. I can’t wait to get back.
My wife and I did have a flight booked for Japan a few years back. The departure date?
April 10th, 2020.
So, we had to cancel.
But on the bright side, we got some pretty face masks and cabin fever. Yay!
Japan had announced that it was “open” to foreign travelers in late 2021, but first they limited it to a set quota of people allowed in – and then only to people coming in via set tour packages.
My wife and I had since used our flight credits to book a trip to Puerto Rico, but when Japan finally opened to everyone this past fall, we immediately changed plans, and booked a flight to and from Haneda Airport.
Okay, so what makes Japan so special? Why this need to go back and back?
Well, as for me, it was the first place I had ever been outside of the United States.
I spent the academic year of 2004 and 2005 studying abroad in Tokyo, and exploring these new surroundings whenever I got the chance.
In truth, my decision to study there was mostly practical.
Temple University offered two main programs abroad: Tokyo and Rome. I would have loved to go to Rome as well (and a hundred other places), but Rome was mostly tailored to art or history students, whereas Japan offered courses in many different majors, including my own: Psychology.
But Japan certainly was an attractive option on its own.
I had soaked up its wonders as a child, sometimes without even realizing it, as with the opening animated sequences of cartoons like Transformers and Thundercats.
And sometimes fully realizing it, as with Tranzor Z, Speed Racer, Ronin Warriors, and Sailor Moon.
By my college years, I was deep into the Criterion Collection catalogue:
… and was fairly well versed in the films of Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Shohei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima, and Shinya Tsukamoto, not to mention the animated masterpieces of Studio Ghibli.
I was into Japanese bands like Shonen Knife, The Boredoms, and Cornelius.
“Why study there?”
As queen Yoko once asked: “Why Not?”
So, at Temple University Japan, I took classes in English that counted toward my Psychology major, in addition to courses on Japanese language and culture.
One highlight was a class on Japanese film taught by the eminent critic of Japanese cinema, Donald Richie (filmheads might recognize his voice on some Criterion commentaries).
Temple Japan also allowed me to meet and befriend native Japanese students who were taking classes there.
The friends I made there showed me sides of Japanese culture that foreigners tend not to know about. A few of those Japanese friends even studied abroad later on in Philadelphia, at Temple’s main campus, so we could continue our cultural exchange even once I came home.
One such friend eventually became my girlfriend, and then later on: my wife.
Hence the continued interest in visiting Japan whenever we can.
Given our excitement upon returning, I figured it would be fun to do a series on my experiences abroad: the sights, the struggles, the surreal, the lessons learned, the crazy stories. Whatever’s interesting enough for an installment.
For now, I need to go out and walk in the sunshine to fight this damn jetlag.
But I’ll be back with more “souvenirs” next time.
Sore jaa, mata ato de ne!
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Sounds great! Looking forward to the ride! Japan was always on my short list of places I wanted to see. Still is, though the past few years have dampened that wanderlust. Maybe reading your series will reignite it.
Yes, hopefully you do get over there at some point!
One thing to consider is that the yen has been doing pretty poorly recently. Our exchange rate when we visited was 72-75 yen per dollar, which really worked out for us. The flight was not cheap, but everything else felt like it was on discount!
This series will be a grab bag of anything interesting, but maybe I could write up some tips and recommendations for one’s first time there.
Ha, whoops: it was more like 150-175 yen per dollar. I believe when I first went there to study abroad, it was something like 80 yen per dollar, so on the losing end. Not great for a poor student, but instant ramen is cheap wherever you go!
Pandemics permitting, how often do you usually go to Japan?
Well, we had it set at 3 years. But then the pandemic happened, and my wife had to wait 5 years just to get back to her home country. So, we will probably head back there in the spring of next year, to catch up.
My wife is from Poland and I’ve been there once in the almost 40 years we’ve been married. That’s because her immediate family is here, so the only people to see was cousins she didn’t know well. Plus, the Polish tradition is to treat guests like foreign dignitaries. We would have spent all week sitting at the dining table, being served amazing homemade Polish food.
I might have been OK with that but the point of traveling is to see the country, not just the dining room. I told my wife we could go without telling anyone but she said we’d run into someone who knew her. She’s from a small village, but I didn’t think she was right.
She was right. We went to Poland in 2015 and spent most of our time in Krakow and Wroclaw, but we did go to the village one day and visited her grandparents’ graves. It’s a small cemetery but we had to ask a worker where their graves were.
Sure enough, when we got home, she called her father in New York to let him know we got home safe. He said he heard from his friend in the village asking if she had been to the cemetery recently.
Word gets around.
That’s funny, we don’t have the same foreign dignitary issue, but my wife is from a more remote area in Yokohama, where most people there are related to her dad.
Not only is it freaky seeing every sign and bus stop corresponding to her family name, it would be impossible to go through that area without someone knowing about it–particularly given that gaikokujin are never in that area–and word getting around.
I can imagine. As a skinny white dude, in Poland I kinda fit right in.
Wait…are you from Philly? Did I know you were from Philly?
I have so many questions!!!
Also, I’ve never been to Japan – it was too far from places I wanted to visit. A college buddy of mine was in love with Japanese culture for the longest time, and went on to work at an import-export business there for a couple of years before returning home and getting his MBA from UCLA.
And yes, he married a Japanese woman.
Yup, I’m originally from Northeast Philly, went to Central High, and then Temple. My accent isn’t as strong as most of my family’s, but it’s defully there to some extent.
I believe you moved to Philly around 2005, right? We may have gone to some of the same shows around then, at least until I left for grad school in 2007.
I feel weird about being in the White American Dude/J-Wife Club, but what can you do. In Montreal, someone we met once invited us to trivia night at a bar, and it turned out that it was all white dudes and asian girls in the group he got together! That was downright creepy.
Man, I am LOVING all the travelogs on here lately! Seriously, totally loving it. It’s making me want to do my own account of my first trip to England…
The Geography dept at UF had a sister program in Utrect, Netherlands. For some reason studying a semester in Utrect held no appeal to me at that time. Me. The wanderer who always wants to go somewhere new and experience new things, said nah. Only thing I can think of to this day was I was horribly burned out on school by that point, and if I was to travel overseas it would not be to do more studying. Dumb me. 🙄
We visited friends in The Hague, and used the city as a hub for our various travels around the Netherlands and nearby countries. We didn’t go to Utrecht, but there’s a lot of great stuff to see throughout the Netherlands.
One thing that was remarkable was how unremarkable Dutch food was! You gotta love the freshly made stroopwafel, but most restaurant fare was rather boring. It all confirmed my earlier suspicions when I had asked a Dutch colleague about the food there, and she replied, “Well…we have great Italian restaurants!”
Dutch food = meh.
Deutsch (German) food = good for soaking up the beer.
Pennsylvania Dutch food = enough calories in one meal to provide you enough energy to do a barn raising in a day BY YOURSELF.
Oh yes. We went to Cologne for two days, and had some fantastic food and beer. Felt completely dehydrated though, since the beer’s a lot cheaper than the water!
I would love to hear your account of your experiences in my homeland. Always fun to hear what people make of it.
On the subject of Dutch food. Totally agree with Phylum about stroopwaffels, I could give myself over to gluttony for them. Also had some very good Dutch frites (fries) from street vendors with curry sauce on them but overall, no one goes to Amsterdam for the local cuisine. Then again, the space cakes are very popular.
I never had felt a big connection with Japan, but all 4 of my kids love Japanese culture. This was led by my oldest daughter who fell in love with Japanese Manga and Anime. My 2nd daughter is taking Japanese as an elective in school. They would all 4 leap at the chance to visit there. I mean, I’d be happy to visit, too, but it’s not at the top of my list.
I sure love Gyoza, though.
I imagine most foreign interest in Japan relates to the arts, and most often niche pop culture like anime and manga. I wasn’t too different, though my interest was mostly through art films and independent music.
I guess Japan can’t compete if the priority for travel is ancient history, remote locations, or leisure resorts. Still, there’s plenty of beauty to be found, some history as old as 6th century AD, and tons of arts and culture.
If you’re a food lover, I highly recommend going to Japan. Tokyo is one of the food capitals of the world, but standards in taste and presentation are quite high everywhere you go. And yet it’s quite affordable given those high standards.
Go for the gyouza. Stay for the nikuman, champon, oden, okonomiyaki, shabu shabu, kaiseki, unajyuu, yakiniku, kare udon, and the best sushi in the world!
I do love sushi…and probably a lot of other foods there that I’ve never heard of.
I’ve not made it to Japan. Its not that I haven’t wanted to go, just that other places got ahead of it. It’s always seemed a fascinating place because it feels so alien to my own culture.
I presume that with the time spent there and having a wife from Japan that you can speak the language. How about reading Japanese? Are you proficient and how easy have you found it to learn?
You know, I think I speak Japanese more than I realize sometimes. When we were planning this trip, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with her friends and family, since we hadn’t been back in 5 years, and I don’t actively study the language any more. In fact, when we left, I had just finished my first French class! Surely my brain would be too scrambled to function.
But in fact, I did pretty well this time around. Hardly any English was spoken in the 10 days we were there, and I even got in some good dad joke puns (they call them old man gags). I was thoroughly exhausted by the end of it, but also was eager to speak and learn more. Now that I’m back, though, I’m back into French! C’est la vie.
Reading and writing are by far the hardest aspects of the Japanese language. There are literally tens of thousands of characters to memorize. And unlike Chinese, which assigns one sound to each symbol, Japanese has 1-7 possible sounds per symbol, so different combinations of characters will signify different pronunciations. It’s insane.
At my best, I knew perhaps 1,000 kanji. Now I have no idea. There’s some default level that I’ll probably never forget (300 or so?), and others that I’m rusty on but can usually guess well enough. I’ve still never fully understood a newspaper article, let alone read an adult book, if that answers your question.
I figured the reading / writing was going to be a lot more difficult than speaking the language but wasn’t sure if that was just my western assumption based purely on the characters looking nothing like ours.
That certainly doesn’t help! But yeah, the Japanese took an already complicated system, and made it even more complicated! At least it’s not nearly as tone-sensitive as Mandarin and Cantonese are, so speaking is a good deal easier.
Translated from the English books always pose a conundrum for me. How much credit should the translator get? The last international book I read was Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police.
By now, I should have read half of Haruki Murakami’s oeuvre. But I haven’t. I loved Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. When I was done, I asked the same question as is my habit after finishing a foreign language book. Would I like the original version, less, the same, or more, than the English one.
Well, I can’t say for sure since my reading still ain’t great. But even watching something as completely silly as Kantaro the Sweet-Toothed Salary Man on Netflix, people who don’t know Japanese are missing out on some excellent bad puns.
I imagine that there’s ton of wordplay and layered meaning that the best Japanese authors employ that will get lost in translation.
I loved Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion so much in its translated form that I was determined to read it in Japanese.
Perhaps Mizoguchi from that story would argue that the actual experience of reading the book robs the writing of its true unvarnished ideal potential…but really I just couldn’t get past the first few pages due to all the kanji.
That is absolutely not creepy at all. You’re not Rivers Cuomo.
What is creepy, in retrospect, however, because I didn’t know what h***** was in the nineties, is somebody who admits to having crushes on female anime characters. There was an American singer-songwriter who went on record about this fetish. It’s not the Weezer frontman.
“You are eighteen year old girl who live in small city of Japan.”
50/50 chance that girl is not eighteen.
Where’s the verse in “Across the Sea” in which the mother of this girl alerts the authorities about her daughter’s new pen pal.
Esmeralda from Hunchback. I will die on this hill. 😍
Okay. Merida in Brave. Underrated voice work: Kelly MacDonald.
Robotech(Macross) was cheapo anime that found a cult following. I am told that it was three different cartoons that had nothing in common with each other, masquerading as a triptych. The first one, by far, was best; it had a love triangle, which was heady stuff for us kids who grew up on The Smurfs. Rick Hunter was the dashing hero. He had a choice: Lynn Minmei or Lisa Hayes. Classmates and I had very earnest conversations about which woman Rick should choose. It was about style versus substance. Rick chose wisely.
You just totally put a verse from Tom Breihan’s “favorite” song into my head:
Gotta get in tune with Sailor Moon
‘Cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes
That make me think the wrong thing