Author: Christopher Wink

Before I could even begin to compress and react to returning to the United States of America, please indulge me. May I mention what already appear to be my lasting memories of Japan and its baby, Tokyo?

Japanese kids love their school uniforms, and you see packs of them walking through the streets. This, I suppose, is a fine image for a people that still reject individualism in preference of obedience and communal living. There are more pet grooming shops and pachinko parlors than Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in Tokyo. In the United States, I expect to get beeped at if I cross a red light into traffic on my bicycle. In Tokyo, they will simply drive at me. I felt four earthquakes, lived through one typhoon season, and had one tsunami warning on my four months on that weather-pestered island.

Continue reading Lasting Memories

Tomorrow is December 16, 2006. There is a ticket that asserts I will be traveling to a place unknown to the Christopher who has lived in Tokyo for the last half year. As thin as paper is, some of it carries a great deal of weight. Some of the most important and powerful things of this world of this civilization are just paper. My ticket will not change much, nor will it be remembered by anyone in just a few short months. Importance is relative.

Forgive me. I am listening to a crackly version of a Nat King Cole Christmas song. Romantic nostalgia is a noted side effect of Mr. Cole’s wide-voiced holiday music.

Continue reading Parting Thoughts

I will be home soon. A relative statement, to be sure, but, when compared with the lives that have come before me and those that will come after, I am already home. I am first going to spend some time with my parents in their needlessly large home in one of those developments that disrupt the rural New Jersey region in which I grew up. I will speak some Japanese and they will hug me with their eyes, after their arms get tired, and everything will be different for about three days.

Then, the first twenty years of my life will shine through the gleamy top layer that came about over this past half year. Change comes gradually. Small moves. After long trips like this, I can say after only limited experience, you return eager and ready for change, but you do return to the person you once were, save for whatever new knowledge or self-awareness can manage to fight the tide of decades of habit.

Continue reading My Homecoming

Well, if you remember, I had made some pledges about my time here in Japan. With my departure just days away, I suppose it is time to evaluate myself.

I will grow my hair.
I haven’t so much as cut a strand. The result is, well, when I wear a baseball cap I have ugly curls that fight my ears for supremacy, but, alas, my hair certainly doesn’t grow fast enough for me to have even entertained the thought of any of the hairstyles popular here among young men. That is probably for the best.

I will sing karaoke with Japanese girls.
I sang karaoke alright. I sang karaoke like no other American has ever sang karaoke. It was, as I suggested in the blog devoted to the subject, one of the best hours I have had my entire time here in Japan.

The rest below.

Continue reading My Pledges: Evaluated

Maybe you caught wind of the tsunami that came through Japan recently. (Yes, I do think that was an embarrassing, vague, weather-related pun). There was an 8.1-magnitude earthquake north of the Japanese island of Hokkaido last week, according to Japan’s Meteorological Agency. This created a momentary reduction in water level, which led to a massive water surge that we like to call a tsunami, all aided by typhoon-like weather conditions. All of this according to a Geology class I was occasionally awake for three semesters ago and what I could gather from a hastily written CNN article that I read a few days ago.

Initially it was a small 16-inch wave, but in time water levels had risen by a few feet around Hokkaido. Alongside the northern coast of that island, Japanese officials were expecting waves nearly 7 feet tall, sizeable during a usually calm season, according to NHK, Japan’s primary public broadcasting agency. Now, for friends and family 15,000 miles away, the fact that this earthquake happened 1,000 miles northeast of Tokyo wasn’t much comfort. I got a handful of emails checking on me, but, understand, the distance between Tokyo and the epicenter was about the distance between Philadelphia and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Would you really worry much about your own safety if some natural disaster hit the Twin Cities?

Continue reading Tsunami

For those of you who saw my first episode, you’ll know that a great deal of my young life is spent thinking about this life-to-do list I made when I was 14-years old. Well, I actually got to cross off some things here in Japan, and I thought you might be interested to see what I had planned to do long before I decided to study here in Tokyo and what I actually got done. [See a blog that chronicles My Life To-Do List here.]

In October of 2005, I made an addition to the list that, in many ways, brought me here: to visit Tokyo, Japan. Two years earlier, after I first discovered sushi, I decided I wanted to eat the Japanese delicacy in the country’s largest city. I was fortunate enough to do that just like I was able to see a Geisha, which I did in Kyoto and sing karaoke in Japan, two other goals I made in October 2005. I guess I was thinking a lot about Japan a year ago, for some reason.

Continue reading My Life To-do List

With my time in Japan coming to a close, but having no last plans that could be completed at night, a few days ago I finally accepted a running invitation to go to a party at this hotel that houses most of the American students that study at my university. I have managed to avoid much contact with my fellow Americans, the only reason being that I felt I should strike out on my own here.

What struck me was how… still foreign Tokyo seemed to many of the other Americans with whom I spoke. I suddenly felt really satisfied with what I have learned and experienced here, though I suppose I shouldn’t need to compare myself with others. Before I even got to the party, I was surprised to find that the few that had invited me didn’t even know where they lived. Yes, I have had my experience with that, as you saw in my first episode here in Japan, but that was filmed on the third day I was here. Seemingly, the other American college students with whom I spoke had only experienced the subway to school and back to their room.

Continue reading An American Party

I took another bicycle ride on Newton a few days ago. My destination was another sight I decided I needed to say I saw before I could leave Japan satisfied: the Tokyo Dome. The 500,000 square foot domed stadium, which can seat 55,000 people at capacity, is home to the famed Yomiuri Giants (the former team of New York Yankee Hideki Matsui), and hosts more than 60 baseball games annually. Opened in March of 1988, the Tokyo Dome is Japan’s first domed stadium.

However, in pure Tokyo style, it isn’t just a dome, it is a compound. As you approach the Tokyo Dome, no matter your direction, it is obscured by the Tokyo Dome City amusement park and dwarfed by the 500-plus foot Tokyo Dome Hotel, with more than 1,000 guest rooms and more than thirty restaurants, lounges, chapels and banquet halls. Just for show, there is an outdoor pool and elsewhere around the Tokyo Dome rests a bowling alley, a day-spa, Japan’s 50-year-old Baseball Hall of Fame museum, and more than ten restaurants and stores. The “Baseball Café” has to be my favorite, as it boasts on its website that it is “modeled upon the theme of the good old days of American MLB,” where “diners can enjoy true-blue American fare, like steaks and bacon and cheeseburgers.” Oh, Americans and their meat.

Continue reading The Tokyo Dome