Some 70 hours later

(Sorry for being silent and absent for the past day or two, there were just so much stuff going on that I simply didn't have the time to write. In this entry, I will write about what has been going on these first days in Japan, as well as the trip to get here. Also, the blog will be in English instead of Swedish, since I don't soley have swedish readers. Swedish people may still comment in Swedish =). A few english-speaking friends wanted to me write in english, but I don't what languages to write in in subsequent enties. The following entiries will NOT be of this lenght, it's just that I've mashed together a whole bunch of happenings into one entry, like a general "impression", if you will. This one will also feel more like an essay because of that fact, but the following entries will be more blog-like. So for those who actually want to read unnecessarily long posts, Enjoy!)

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Swedish soil

Okay, so the long way to Japan began in Landvetter, near Gothenburg in Sweden. (For those of you who don't know the place, it's Sweden's second largest airport, roughly the size of a normal-sized Tokyo subway station.) Anyway, there I was, waving good-byes to my mother, on my way to the check-in. Before going there, the customs officers destroyed my Axe-deodorant and my tooth-paste since they were apparently lethal and/or explosive devices. What ever happened to the clock-ticking bags? Before Al Qaida and similiar terrorist organizations became creative there was always *one* threat - the ticking bag!

Purchase-a-harbour

(Non-Swedish people; Ignore the pun-title...)
I boarded the plane which was going to Copenhagen, where my connecting flight was, and I met a woman named Claire who was going to Seattle to study litterature and was aspiring to become an author - cool! Not much of a flight though, we talked about random things on the way there, and 40 minutes later we landed in Denmark, and parted.

Since I'm not really fond of airports, I went straight for gate C28 where the SAS Airbus 330 was standing ready. While in the waiting area there, I realized how the demography of the plane would look like. I think there were around 240 Japanese people, and about 15 danish/swedish/other people. While aboard the plane, my seatmate was a japanese physics teacher who was fluent in english, japanese, french and german. On the opposite side of the first aisle, there were three japanese women in their 50's playing Sudoku (which is a japanese math-puzzle, for those of you who have been sleeping under a rock...).

Sudoku is fine, but said ladies played this game for - hold your horses - 10 hours! I mean, what the hell?

The 11-hour long flight

So there I was, sitting in my tin can, far above the world. Planet Earth is indeed blue, and I had nothing to do. Airtravel is fun. I enjoy the takeoffs and the landings, but the time in between can be dull. This "in between time" was well over 10 hours, and with a seating area about the size of a dog cabinette you have to unleash your creative thinking. Unfortunately, I was way too tired and uninterested during this so I simply watched the different channels on my TV (There were touch-screen TVs installed in all seats). The more interesting parts of this flight were my conversations with the japanese man who was sitting next to me. He gave a lot of pointers towards my japanese studies, and talked a lot about Japan in general. I, in turn, talked about Sweden and all its interesting qualities (all, like ... three of them).

The aircraft staff were bilingual, so they knew both danish and japanese. Every hour or so they served green and black tea for those who wanted, which was very nice. My fellow japanese passanger always drank coffee though (Kohi suki desu!). The flight was boring mainly because of its route. I thought I was able to see India, China, Thailand and other interesting counties, but instead, the aircraft flew straight from Copenhagen, over Gotland, southern Finland and over the entire Russian Siberia - 13.000.000 km2 of ice and grass. The real eye-treat became obvious when we were approaching the Japanese isles. Suddenly, generic grasslands and waters were transformed into an extremely mountainous world, packed with cities all around them (Seriously, where there were 'room' for civilization, there were civilization) and in the far horizon, Mt. Fuji was standing tall. I can't really put it into words, but seing Fuji from an airplane window, with clouds soaring around the landscape, is a golden, golden moment. I recommend everyone to experience this. Then I landed! Then I stepped foot on Japanese soil! Then there was bureaucracy...

I've been trying to figure out why Japan has such a homogeneous population with about 98.5% ethnic japanese people. I got my answer in Narita Airport. The hight of bureaucracy! By some screwed up reason, the customs people are dying to know my personal information. Forget standard sheets of information applications, they litterarly wanted more information about me than I, myself, knew about myself. I was handed a few sheets of paper to fill out on the plane from Denmark to Japan, and I wondered, "Why don't they just hand it over when we arrive?" Well, you remember that the flight was 11 hours right? It took a great portion of that time to fill out those sheets, which I'm guessing was intentional. For example, they wanted me to list every item in my personal belongings and how much they were each worth.
Have in mind that I have packed a year's worth of stuff.

Jet lag, new beginnings and a fake taxi driver

Japan. The only country in the world which has been the victim of a nuclear strike - twice. Allied forces ripped it apart some 60 years ago, burning Tokyo to the ground, while dropping bombs which killed hundreds of thousands of people in mere fractions of a second in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A country that had undergone a complete change from an isolationist state to an international hub. USA contributed to Japan's revival by giving them leftover steel. That very steel is today Toyota, Subaru, Honda, Yamaha, Nissan, Suzuki, and Mitsubishi, to mention a few. A country with a population of... well, too many, and with a size inferior to the state of California, Japan is one of the most compact nations in the world.

And among it all, I stood! While arriving in Narita, I met with a swedish guy who I shared a taxi with to our residence. I found it strange that the taxi driver didn't understand when I introduced myself. He was like an amish farmer looking at a nuclear facility when I said my name is Kristian. The thing is though, our travelling agent had made reservations with another taxi driver (who we believed was the actual driver who was driving us!) A nice, fresh, start, eh? It didn't help that I had had no sleep on the plane, so I was pretty inattentive. Language barriers became ubiquous from the minute we landed, it seems. The drive from Narita to Tokyo was about an hour. So obviously, the fake cabbie wanted some buck for his work. When we arrived at the guesthouse, we realized that we had taken a random taxi by mistake, and that the real driver was still in the airport looking for us. The fake driver, tired of trying to interpret our english, took off. Would that ever happened in the western world? A swedish taxi driver would've given us a lawsuit for sure. Not that you can be found guilty in a swedish court of law, but still...

Sitting in the back of the wrong cab...

Our residence is in Matsudo, Chiba. Matsudo is a city in the Chiba prefecture, which in turn is a suburb to Tokyo - So in Swedish terms, Matsudo would be a farmer's den. This 'farmer's den' has a population exceeding that of Gothenburg, a centre that reminds you of movies such as Bladerunner and Star Wars with its futuristic elements, it has 24-hour stores available wherever you go, and huge 50+ store buildings here and there. We have a 30-minutes train ride to school, which is in Shinjuku.

My room is on the fourth (top) floor of this guesthouse, and is about the size of a swedish bathroom. I feel kind of bummed about the fact that my suitcase is taking up a previous square metre of the room, but meh - I got all I need. Besides, the first floor of the residence has a nice, quiet inner-yard, a shower hall, gym, sauna, dining rooms, kitchens and television/chill areas. I haven't really explored much of it, I'll write back if I see something interesting, like this sign on the door to the yard:


Exploring Tokyo

So what is the most obvious thing a foreigner should do, after a jetlagged sleeping gap of over 10 hours? Get out in the craziest city in the world of course! There were some students arriving the same day. Some french, swedish and korean people I think. So far I've gotten to know five other students, who I hang out with so far; Alexandra, Alexander (whose photos are in this blog, since I lack a camera), Jack, Marcus and some other dude. Anyway, me and another swedish dude went to the Matsudo station to check out the train path to shool so that we wouldn't have to look for it when classes started. The 30-minutes train ride was anything but boring really - I used to commute between my home town/craphole and another town back in Sweden when I worked, and needless to say, there weren't really anything to see outside. This route was the complete opposite, there were seemingly endless horizons of buildings on both sides - no building like the other (I'll get back on that later on). We found the school, which is located on the opposite street of a 24-hour open McDona..., er, I mean, Makudonarudo and a few hundred other restaurants and shops and... well, I don't really know what 99% of the buildings are since their names are all in kanji.

Afterwards we went a little further into Shinjuku, which is one of the central districts of Tokyo. I seriously don't know how to put this in words... Shinjuku is simply amazing.

With buildings like this sprawling up from the ground, it's easy to get awestruck

Anyway, we walked for about eight hours (!) and explored some other districts, and well... It really can't be expressed in words how much I've fallen in love with this metropolitan colossus of endless TV screens (ranging from entire BUILDINGS to small plasma screens INSIDE vending machines(!), thanking you for purchasing drinks with a high pitch anime-girl voice), its peculiar contrasts and extraordinarily beautiful women! In addition of housing the largest and tallest skyscrapers of Tokyo, the train station in Shinjuku is larger than Arlanda, the major airport of Sweden. Well over three and a half million people use it daily - about 40% of Sweden's population. Needless to point out, I felt like Mufasa did when he was trampled down by a horde of wildebeest in The Lion King when I stepped my foot in that station. The japanese aren't the largest people on earth, but when stacked in huge numbers they can be lethal to say the least.

I also found a great manga bookstore when trolling around with Marcus and Jack. It's not far from the school, and the collection was indeniably grand, even though the store itself wasn't even a medium-sized one. Inevitably I ended up in the hentai section. (Note: There are LOTS of j-girls reading guy-on-guy manga, lots lots lots!)

Next up on the sleepless tour of two baka gaijins were Yayogi Park, which was one of the single strangest moments in my life. Why? Well, you'll have to experience it by yourself really... It's like this: One second you are in the midst of a wall of skyscrapers surrounded by an ocean of people, and then, you walk into a park (which at a first glance, seems just like a big garden in the middle of the city). It's no garden...

The subtle entrance to paradise

It's a freaking forest in the middle of the largest metropolitan area in the world. It's not really like a forest that I'm used to. It's like walking into an old Kurosawa film with all the old wooden gates, houses and bridges. The trees are so dense that they connect with the trees on the other side, so that you have some sort of natural roof over the pathway, making it very dark and quiet. It seems entirely isolated from the craziness around it, and while you're there, all the city noise is vanished - completely gone.

On the other side waits Shibuya district. Shibuya is the ecstacy drug of Tokyo. It's a very hip, young and modern district with loads of clubs and trendy shops everywhere. And of course, the famous crosswalk!

A small townful of people crosses this scrambled walk when the light goes green. I stole this picture from google.

The decorations seen everywhere are constant, not only seasonal. I mean, we were walking there on a wednesday evening, and the craziness blew us away. I can't imagine how it's like on a major holiday. Everything that could be exaggerated, is. It's like Alexander said - The japanese people do this for one reason - because they can. The plasma screens inside vending machines, the excessively-cleaned streets, the crazy architectual ideas... it's all because they can, and can also afford it! Taking a walk in Tokyo gives proof of Japan's economic power.

After over 29 sleepless hours I went to bed, and it was good. Good good.

I'll probably head over to Akihabara with Alexander tomorrow (Friday) and buy a digital video camera, so I can show you the city in motion and create some sort of 'video blog' in addition to this one. A friend of mine, Jack, actually shares an apartment with "TkyoSam", who is kind of a famous youtube personality for his japanese video blogs.

Okay, so that is a short summary of my first glance of Tokyo. As I've said numerous times before, it's hard to appreciate the magnificent prominence of Tokyo by reading about it like this, but I promise that subsequent blogs will be more 'blog-like' when I'm out adventuring and not like a summary like this one. I apologize if this post reminded more of a textbook info-sheet about the country rather than a blog ;P

Anyway, Alex wrote on MSN that it's time to eat some delicious ramen! (Yeah, he's two floors down and we are too lazy to go up and down in order to talk) So I guess it's time to eat. School starts at 14:45 tomorrow, and I have to prepare a japanese introduction... wonder how that'll go.

(Check out Alex's blog at www.alexanderquist.com) Why didn't I purchase a domain... >__>;

Oh, and did I mention that it is hot as hell over here? Breaking sweats in a T-shirt in the middle of the night is not fun. At all. I don't think we have extreme temperatures here per se, but the humidity and subtropical climate makes it hotter than a 30 degree day in Sweden, when it's like 20 degrees here.

Over and out ---;
Sayounara :D