I'm set set

Every meal in Japan is healthy, except breakfast. At least so far. I haven't really figured out what Japanese people eat for breakfast yet, so I've basically been eating what I feel like. (I haven't moved in with my host family yet.) At about 9:30 I went to the supermarket and picked up bread with strawberry jam stuffed inside, bread with a solid layer of honey in the middle, and really iced bread that looked like a half-hearted cinnamon roll without the cinnamon. I only ate the first and the third and it just gave me a sugar high. You'll have to excuse me for that.

One thing I've wanted to get down since last morning is this thought. I may be able to immerse myself in the culture and the environment by living with a Japanese family, but I can never really know what it's like to be 日本人(nihonjin = Japanese). If I could somehow switch bodies (or souls, or however you see this) with a Japanese person for a day... wait, this seems familiar. Ah, yes. Let me recall a game called Shenmue for the Sega Dreamcast.

Back when I played it, I thought this was the best game ever. In fact, going back and playing it now, it's quite boring. The game was a commercial failure because it focused more on recreating a real-life environment than on having fun gameplay. It was rather epic: I have a copy of a Guinness Book of World Records book from some years ago that said that Shenmue was the most expensive game of all time. It's probable that the game no longer holds the record, but there's a reason the series was never finished. A sequel, Shenmue II, was released for Japanese and European Dreamcast and American XBox consoles, and wasn't much successful either, although they put more action into that game.

What was the plot? It's the year 1986. You're an 18-year-old Japanese dude well-trained in the martial arts by your father, who is killed in an epic showdown with another martial-arts expert from China whose name you know to be "Lan Di." You see him die in the dojo that's part of your house, and you try but can do nothing to save him. Why did he die? What were Lan Di and his accompanying mob looking for? That's what you set out to find. This is a fighting game where you spend most of your time walking or running around, asking people for info as to what the hell's going on. (There was a preview disc of this game released in Japan that showed off the fact that you can maintain a leisurely pace walking around, just taking in the beautiful environments of the game and not really hurrying. This didn't work because nobody wants to walk around slowly during a game, and especially not in Japan when time is of the essence. Or perhaps the creator of the game thought this would be appealing specifically because everything's so rushed in Japan. Well, it didn't really work.)

But one thing this game offers you that no other game does is the ability to walk around in a nihonjin's shoes. The environments, while graphically out of date, are extremely realistic when compared to actual day-to-day surroundings in Japan. At home, you have a curfew and you force yourself to follow it; the game makes you go to bed by 11 PM. (People don't break rules here. They just don't.) As soon as you buy a drink at the vending machine, you drink it there and you throw it away. (It's looked down upon in society to drink in public anywhere apart from the place you bought the drink.) Slot machines and pachinko are popular as all hell, and it's not evident why. You take off your shoes immediately after entering the house, and then you step up and into the house. Even the stepping up part is a short cutscene.

You see, all these things are there, and although I will be experiencing all of these while I'm at the homestay, there is certainly one thing that will not be the same, and that's the fact that I'm not Japanese. For sure, the communication will not be smooth at first. It's not just that, however. In Japan, when you're a foreigner, you're always a foreigner, at least as far as strangers and society in general is concerned. The question is, how much does this change on a person-to-person basis? One thing I'm very excited about is forming friendships with Japanese people here. It sounds shallow on the surface, but there's more to it than you'd think. One thing I've never done is become friends with someone across a whole other language. And I'm probably (hopefully!) going to be speaking more in Japanese than in my native language! That's crazy! That's really cool! And I've been running around doing a lot of things to prepare for my time here at school, so I haven't really had time to settle down and become friends with people yet. I'm really excited about what can happen over the next few months, not about classes, but about the interactions I have with people when I'm here. Eventually I'll learn what role I can play as a foreigner in this society, yes, but I'm more excited about the roles I can play as a friend here. And being a friend itself is not a role to play. It's being a friend. That's what's so exciting about this brief stay in Japan.

A few days ago, a professor here was filling us in about alien status in Japan, and he showed us his alien card, which he had had for 34 years. Thirty-four years!! I know that I learned in 6th grade English class that (as far as integers go) you're only supposed to use numerals for the numbers that are of three digits of larger when you're writing, but come on, 34 years. That's a long time to be in a country and to only be considered an alien. He's a "permanent resident." How tough is that? If he doesn't have his card on him, he could possibly be deported. Ouch. I have to keep my passport on me at all times. I do wonder whether Japanese residents have to have a national ID card. That sort of thing ("REAL ID") is happening in the United States, with the federal government forcing states to accept this ID thing or face funding cuts or something. Hopefully the Japanese don't have to put up with this nonsense we're having over in my country. I'm okay with having to walk around with an ID if it's not my own country. But in my own country, which, by the way, calls itself the "land of the free," it's ridiculous that I have to walk around with a card to constantly prove where I belong. And I have to pay for that card?