Mega Market Wandering Plus Some Cultural Perspective

Welcome back all! At this point I will continue to describe the beginnings of my travels throughout the city. This day was very exciting and action-packed, so fasten your seat belts and away we go!

January 13, 2013
This day began much the same as the previous days before it. I woke up, got dressed and chatted with my wife on Skype. After that, I went with my roommate J-kun to the front gate of Nanzan University to wait for other international students and our Japanese student guides. There is a group of Japanese students at Nanzan called NaSA, Nanzan Study Abroad, that employ the buddy system to help international students make the transition to life in Japan smoothly. Today our guide Kanako took us to the Showa-ku ward office to register our addresses and apply for the Japanese National Health Insurance. In order to get to the ward office, however, we had to take the subway. This was my first time being on a subway anywhere in the world so it was a little confusing at first. You have to look at a map of the stops and decide which stop you want to get off at and pay accordingly. Sometimes when you are en route to a destination you have to transfer from one subway line to the next. This was immensely intimidating at first but I got the hang of it in the end. At the ward office, the process for what we had to do was interesting as the application form was completely in Japanese and completely confusing. Soon enough, though, we worked our way through the application and completed the process. Afterward, we stopped and had lunch at a nice little restaurant. At this point, I would like to point out the difference between ordering food in Japan and in America. In Japan, restaurants having vending machine-like machines that have buttons with the names of the meals that you can order on them. You insert your money and then press the button of the meal you would like and then you receive a ticket. This ticket is your order and as such you give it to whoever is serving you. One other thing that I would also like to mention is that tipping is not something that is done in Japan. Japanese people believe that the pay that they receive from their employment is their greatest reward for serving guests well. Therefore, in their eyes, tipping is unnecessary. Suffice it to say that this is hard for me to not do because I work at a restaurant back home and tips are very important. I had a dish called katsudon at this restaurant. Katsudon is a fried slice of pork on top of a bed of cheesy egg and rice. It was very delicious as the egg was sweet and perfectly countered the savoriness of the pork. I will definitely be having that again.

After lunch, we went to try and get cell phones. I say try for a couple of reasons. First, the plans were so hard to decipher that even Kanako and our other guide Hiroki had a hard time trying to translate for us what it meant. The second reason was because the store we went to, called SoftBank, didn't have anymore of the prepaid phones in stock so we had to order them. This was certainly a major challenge but certainly a parallel to America because US cell phone plans can be just as frustrating to try and decipher.

After phones were ordered, the group decided to go to this mega-shopping district called Osu. We took a little longer subway ride and then arrived at the biggest shopping center that I have ever seen. At the entrance to the center, we were given a map, which after looking at it we knew that it would take several days or even a week to navigate through this labyrinth of shops. J-kun and I decided to just walk around and go in a shop if it caught our interest. J-kun really likes anime so we went into many stores that had an affiliation with Japanese animation, particularly those that feature female characters, as they are extremely popular in Japan. There were a lot of stores that I found interesting as well, such as this store that had four or five floors that were full of video games, models, books and all sorts of things. As the day wore on, however, I began to be overstimulated by all of the sights, sounds, and smells. My inner introvert started screaming at me to take myself home and lock myself in my quiet room so that I could process everything. Thankfully, I didn't let this internal struggle overwhelm my emotional self-control and I still managed to enjoy myself a lot. After a long day of walking, we returned to the dorm and spent the rest of the evening relaxing. This was quite the enjoyable day.

I want to dedicate the last section of this blog entry to some cultural observations that I have been having. I would like to first mention the influence of entertainment media in Japan such as manga, anime, and video games. In the United States, if you are an adult and you participate in any of these things you are considered immature and childish. It is the exact opposite in Japan. I noticed that almost all of the people that were looking at these things ranged from young adults to men possibly in their 30s or 40s. This society doesn't bind its people into giving up things that they enjoy because it is seen as childish. I agree with this idea, provided that it doesn't interfere with the more important things in one's life. There was another common theme that I noticed while at Osu and, quite frankly, I was quite bothered by it. There was a lot of animated nudity in the stores and whole sections of product were devoted to this very thing. I knew this coming in but was flabbergasted by the sheer amount of it all. I know that the exaggerated bodily features of these cartoon women are not real but I still felt very wrong for seeing any of it. All I could think of was how I would not want my kids in the future to see anything like this and it would be very unacceptable in the US. This just kind of called into question for me what kind of morality a people group hopes to have when they do not have God and His Word at the foundation. I am just happy that this is not the kind of media entertainment that I enjoy.

Lastly, I want to discuss something that I really admire about Japanese society, and that is their thoroughness. We have had to do tons of paperwork before and after arrival and we will have more to do before we come home. While this can be somewhat annoying, as a detail-oriented person, I am impressed by it. Everything is done so as to ensure that all bases are covered, the good and the potential bad. This attention to detail is also evidenced in their emergency preparedness. Today we went through what to do in the event of a fire, earthquake, tsunami, burglary, traffic accident, interpersonal altercation and more. Everything was precise and detailed right down to the last step. While this was tedious for us students, as most of our own home countries do not hold to this level of preparation, this showed me the great lengths that are gone to in order to preserve a well-functioning society. The Japanese are a very resilient people and that is strongly evidenced by their level of preparation for a vast array of situations. As you may be able to tell, I'm learning a lot already!

With that I will conclude this blog post, but stay tuned because tomorrow I will describe our recent nabe party as well as my first day of classes and our field trip to Nagoya Castle. Thanks for continuing to stick with me on this incredible journey!