Tokyo Kills Me

Rumi and I have bad colds, so we've postponed our apartment hunt for at least a week.

Tokyo Kills Me

Although within city limits Kodaira is, Rumi tells me, considered more a part of the inaka, the countryside, that surrounds Tokyo. She should know, being a country girl herself, though when I look out the window I see more bedroom community than rural holdout. I guess what she means, in part at least, are the little plots of agricultural land jammed between new five-storey mansion-style apartment buildings. No rice paddies here, but we do have apple and persimmon and kiwi fruit orchards and vineyards and, spotted just the other day, even a field of strawberries, in addition to the usual gardens of cabbage and daikon radish which fill every unoccupied scrap of land (a tax dodge, I've been told). 

The air out here is fresher. We drink water straight from the tap.

But we won't be here much longer. Rumi's new job is in Ginza, in the heart of Tokyo, and suddenly her commute time is one and a half hours, double what it was when we first moved out here four years ago. So we have started the hunt for a new place to live. Details to follow...

Tokyo (Almost) the Top City in the World

Actually, it's London. Or so says a recent article in the Traveller supplement (print only) of (London-based) The Independent newspaper. There's a synopsis of the article, plus a bevy of reader reactions, at www.japantoday.com. It's hard to take such rankings seriously, but they always provoke a lot of interesting reactions...

... Don't Forget Japan

In last summer's feature article Make Way for Japan, Rowan Callick reminds readers of The American that while the economies of China and India are grabbing all the media attention, Japan has quietly recovered from the bursting of the financial Bubble and is still the second-most important economy in the world.

Old School

There's an article in the NY Times about the rising popularity in Japan of teaching practices and curriculum being imported from India. Seems that the current generation in Japan have lost the sense of discipline and work ethic that, until recently, made it a leader in math and science scores.

Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu!

Akemashite Omidetou Gozaimasu!
Originally uploaded by Aaron Paulson, aka "tokyoaaron"

Happy New Year from the shrine atop Mitakesan!

Hello World

Welcome to the latest incarnation of a blogging project that began nearly ten years ago , at the dawn of Internet 1.0, with the monthly Postcards from Hokkaido and which continued some years later with Tokyo Kills Me. At the time, I wanted these blogs to be a way to stay in touch with friends and family while I spent my oat years perambulating around the globe, choosing from a beggar's banquet a place to settle down and call "home."

A lot has changed, of course, in those ten years. Most important for my overseas adventure, my status in Japan has changed from that of long-term traveler - I arrived with a three-year departure date firmly in mind - to... what? resident alien? I like the sound of that... immigrant? ... no, nothing that permanent... expat? that's getting close, though the term makes me think of gin-soaked nabobs ... native?... of course not, but part way in that direction. So, how about "half-gone native?" in any case, that will be, I suspect, the subject for a later post...

For now, I'll describe my current situation in anthropological terms, as a participant observer. On a day to day basis, I share in the miseries and the rewards of big city life with the other workers living in Tokyo. At the same time, I barely speak the language and I work in a Canadian school. What's more, and this is key, I still have not reconciled myself to the idea of settling permamently in Japan. In other words, the adventure continues. It's just that it's entered a more introspective phase lately, and so this blog may turn out to be more introspective as well, now that the shock of the new has worn off. This blog will be a journal of that adventure as it enters this late, self-conscious stage of development.