Tadaima

I got home at exactly midnight last night from a nearly two-week trip to Japan. This was my first trip back since I lived there over two years ago, and although it was a really harried trip in which I didn't feel like I got to spend enough time with people individually and felt like research-related activities took up more of my time than I had intended, I am really glad I went.

I had a rather ridiculous itinerary, due to the fact that I lived in the Kansai (Kyōto-Ōsaka) area and all my friends did at the time, but they have now all scattered across the country in the past two years. So I flew into Kansai Airport in Ōsaka Prefecture, and over a week traveled north by train to Sapporo on the island of Hokkaidō for Nakamura-san's wedding and then back down to Ōtsu, where I used to live. This is a north-south distance equivalent to going from Santa Barbara to Crater Lake, Oregon, notwithstanding the fact that the Ōsaka-Tōkyō distance is mostly east-west, so it's like starting in San Diego or Tijuana. Japan being a highly advanced country, I was able to do this train journey is less than a day and a half. :)

The first few days of the trip were a bit disorienting. I deal with jet lag well, but I found it harder to readjust to speaking Japanese (especially politely) and remembering social customs. I felt like I was constantly putting slippers on and off at the wrong times, failing to properly express my appreciation for things, and getting in everyone's way. In short, I felt big and clumsy. These feelings receded in a few days. After coming back to the United States and meeting so many people who had lived in Europe or developing countries, I began to feel like studying abroad in Japan kind of doesn't really count as international experience--although you do have to deal with a terribly difficult language and customs, it's a very affluent country, so you are never faced with having to deal with a lower standard of living than you expected, and anti-Americanism is so rare that you are never really faced with having to reevaluate your own country's role in the world. After going back there on this visit, I think that it was plenty different from the life I have readjusted to back in the United States (particularly Berkeley).

Back when I lived in Japan, I came home once to the US, and it was a fascinating experience of reverse culture shock. At the time, I saw and evaluated my home country through the lens of my experiences in Japan; things I had never noticed before bothered me, and things I had always taken for granted were refreshingly wonderful. In short, my impression of the United States at the time was of an affluent but still developing country (think Costa Rica, or Malaysia). In Japan, I got very used to imagining that economic inequality didn't exist, since it is so much less starker than in the United States. On any day in Japan, you encounter a half-dozen people working in the service industry, who speak to you in an exceedingly polite but distant manner. Because economic inequality in the United States (especially in Berkeley and Oakland) is so glaring, at the beginning of this trip, I kept wondering who these people were, whether they were making enough money, and whether they felt stuck in dead-end jobs. I was also amazed that they were never immigrants. Is there any point in maintaining the stiff formality of the service industry in a democratic, affluent economy? Do we really need this level of service? These questions bugged me for the first few days, and then I completely stopped thinking about them.

It's also interesting seeing how rapidly Japan changes. One interesting change on this trip was the prevalence of paper towel dispensers in public restrooms (normally, you are expected to carry your own handkerchief). The media and advertising seem much more focused on reducing carbon dioxide emissions (or at least playing lip service to the idea) than before. Conversely and regrettably, Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist seems to be getting a lot of serious attention, including among academics. Cell phones, as expected, have bigger screens; some now double as tiny computers, with screens, miniature keyboards, and tiny styli that slide out of the back of the phone. New cars have TV screens that alternate between a road map while driving and regular TV broadcasts while stopped. I saw a video screen broadcasting a man waving a flag in order to alert drivers not to drive into a construction zone in the middle of a busy street in Kyōto. The shinkansen (bullet train) will soon be extended to Hokkaidō. The place where I used to live in Ōtsu is pretty much the same, although they apparently now have a Thai restaurant (several years too late, in my opinion), and the area around the Center for Ecological Research has been changed dramatically, with a water tower, preschool, retirement home, and some kind of storage facility popping up. And many of my friends are now married.

Over the next few days I will try to update this blog with more detail on my trip, and where possible, photos.