Japanfatuation

Whoever doesn’t believe in love at first sight needs to go to Tokyo…they will be exposed as the fraudulent non-believers that they are! Japan!! Japan!!!! My toes wiggle and my eyelashes bat coquettishly at the mere mention of the place. Not only did the album ‘The Lemon of Pink’ by the Books (a savagely good cd) synchronize perfectly with my entry into the country, but I finally was able to understand the language (to a degree), and the earth’s rotation graciously volunteered to incarnadine the fingertips of all the trees and send brisk whispers through the streets, with the smell of rice cooking and tea brewing at the fringe of every chilly gust. I can’t get this place out of my head. First of all, they have realized the blatant superiority of green tea as a flavor. Kit kats, ice cream, liquor, you name it and they have it green tea flavored. Also, TOFU! I ate tofu ice cream, a tofu latte, tofu in soup that, all hyperbole aside, kept a dopey grin on my face for 3 hours after its consumption. Even thinking about biting into that heavenly rectangle of wonder gets me salivating. The first day I set foot, in Kobe, the weather was sublime, and a group of about 15 kids and I hopped on the train to Kyoto for a field trip-esque excursion with my global studies teacher. We wandered around some Buddhist and Zen temples, visited a garden and a shrine, and padded through a mossy green forest and marveled silently at the majesty of the changing leaves. Mitzi’s mom, who is living in Tokyo at the moment, came and met us and we went out to dinner---I ate the aforementioned tofu that day, enough said. That night me and my ‘posse’ went out to caper through the streets of Kobe. I drew a very well-rendered inebriated octopus on the wall of this bar called ‘Sonic’, and requested songs from the DJ that were just too obscure, and was mildly disappointed. The subway closes at midnight and I was out past then, so my friend Brian and I had to get a taxi. For some reason, I always forget the word for boat (fune) and mix it up with the word for winter (fuyu), so here I am at 2 in the morning asking a very perplexed and very amused taxi driver to take me to the “big winter”…but I made it back safe and sound, to wake up the next morning and go OSAKA! So much color, so much style, so much noise and youth! Mitzi took us to a Mexican restaurant (one of the many foods I am craving with mounting agony) and we all were in throes of gustatory passion for the 2 hours we sat there and basically licked our plates clean. My group of friends has gotten to the point where we basically just eat each other’s food and just ask out of habit, so arms were crisscrossed and forks colliding like crazy in our dimly lit corner of the El Pancho restaurant. Jim and Rob’s is getting some serious income as soon as I get back into Ojai, that is for sure. I miss Mexican food like CRAZY!! So after El Pancho, we walked around the city for a bit, visiting a very pricey vintage/”thrift” store and taking pictures in this photo booth that was bejeweled and pink and sparkly and just ohhh so me! People watching in Japan is amazing. Everyone here has the coolest outfits, I don’t think I saw one person who didn’t look like they had planned their ensemble the night before. 5 different patterns and a kaleidoscopic color scheme seems to be the general rule for fashion, but they manage to make it work. Meaningless English phrases also seem to be a favorite. I bought a T-shirt that says “Kick Out! STUPID GLORY DAYS!” on it. I plan on wearing it weekly, if not more! Then from Osaka, we went to Kyoto, where we met Mitzi’s mom.
        Kyoto, lamentably, was only viewed at night and on a soggy, gray morning. We walked through the metro station (I won’t even go into the transportation system here…it should make the U.S. pale with embarrassment) and got dinner at a little restaurant where we all sat on the floor and they came out with giant egg omelets and slapped them on the sizzling black surface that took up the center of our table and kept the food piping hot the whole meal! We slept in a ryokan, a tatami-matted, narrow-staircased, paper-walled traditional Japanese inn. They kept green tea constantly at our reach, and boy did I drink a lot of it. I fell asleep really early, to a badly-dubbed Mission Impossible in Japanese. Woken up by the clicks of women’s high heels outside our inn (the tiniest sounds came through those walls), we all got up and fetched breakfast and then boarded the sleek, playpus-headed Shinkansen, or bullet train, to Tokyo!! Soaring through the country side, I mentally ran up every hill and leapt at every low-lying cloud, knowing that I would soon be on the water for almost 20 days, with only a hurried Thanksgiving in tourist-clogged Honolulu to break up the monotony. Arriving in Tokyo, the sun was listless and only let a few rays weakly seep through the grey clouds. This may have been why my visit to the Harajuku district (of which Gwen Stefani so colorfully sings) was mostly fruitless—only a smattering of furry costumes and gothic regalia, but still enough to make it worthwhile. After a tofu burger and some miso soup, we went to Shibuya station, where flashing comic billboards and neon signs lit up the sky like the aurora borealis above the endless herds of humans crossing the streets. The weird thing about Tokyo is that even when it seems like there are two thousand people in one tiny little square, it is still silent. Put the same amount of New Yorkers or Indians or French in the same situation and it would be bedlam! Everywhere I went the Japanese were so polite and self-contained, which was an interesting contrast to their off-the-wall style and adoration of gaudy, self-aggrandizing Western media. That night we went to this club called Gaspanic, where drinks were painfully overpriced, but I got to boogie the night away with a Japanese man in what looked like a plumber’s one-piece suit, and his companion, an arm-swinging black man in striped overalls. We got back (Chris, Scott, Emily and  I) to the subways on the very last run, at midnight, and returned to our hostel. The lightning fast internet was heaven for Chris and I—we stayed up until 3 in the morning talking to friends and uploading pictures and freaking out about how rad Tokyo was.
        The next day was THE BEST DAY OF MY ENTIRE LIFE. I woke up to the sun (oh glorious golden orb of joy!!) at 7 in the morning, and felt it in my every limb that things were going to be perfect. I got a cup of coffee downstairs with the hostel owners, showered (towels cost money so I used my purple bandana instead), and everyone eventually got up and we rented BICYCLES!! Mine was orange and had a basket AND a bell…I was so in love. We had to wait around for Mitzi, Drew and Kristin to get to our side of Tokyo from Mitzi’s mom’s, so we rode around the bicycle rental place ringing our bells and “Top of the morning to you”-ing, probably giving the owner a headache and causing considerable confusion amongst the Japanese businesspeople. Once everyone was together, we flew through the streets of Tokyo, a perfect temperate day with frayed clouds lacing the horizon and the wind making rusty whirlwinds of fall leaves on the sidewalks. A forty-five minute stop at a supermarket with about thirty aisles of everything I love and more gleeful bicycle cruising led us to a gazebo type structure at the edge of a park, where we all parked our bikes, sat down, and unpacked our exploding grocery bags of sushi and chips and mochi and banana chips and enormous (the size of grapefruits) Fuji apples and other delectable snacks and just sat and feasted. First of all, riding bicycles is probably one of my favorite things in the world to do. The fact that I did it in Tokyo, during fall, on a beautiful day, and then got to eat the best sushi and eat real Fuji apples that haven’t been frozen and ruined in a cruise-ship freezer for months…I was in heaven. Every time I hear bicycle bells from now on, my eyes will glaze over and I will probably be in a nostalgic reverie for a few hours. And the day wasn’t even half over! After consuming my weight in sweetened rice and tofu, we pedaled around more, stopping at a really eclectic flea market and a little souvenir boulevard, then went back to the hostel. After a cat nap and some general laying about, we hopped on our bicycles again, and rode, bells-a-jingling, across town to a karaoke bar. We got our own private room and ‘Happy!’ Beers and sang at the top of our lungs for hours. I was really surprised, they had Radiohead and Peter, Bjorn and John, and Bjork and quite a bit of non-mainstream music. We all thought the walls were soundproof, so we just sang as loud and as ear-piercingly as we could, but (this I discovered several days later), you could hear everything in the hallway! So what I thought was a private, one-on-one screaming of ‘Ocean Avenue’ with Chris was heard by all of Tokyo!
So my conclusion is this: I love Japan. I LOVE JAPAN. Marry me, oh land of tofu and chopsticks and hello kitty!!! Why did I ever leave you?!