Cute as he may be, the little chicken mascot on my Nissin ramen package seems to be making dastardly work of his unborn little brother. He does look pretty happy about the whole business. Perhaps he’s relieved that he won’t have to vie for mommy’s attention.

Unrelatedly, it snowed today! I haven’t been sprinkled with those falling flakes in a mighty long time. Alas it’s unlikely that I’ll be dreaming of a white Tokyo. It didn’t really stick.

I went to my first yoga class today. How fascinating it was to reverse engineer the instructor’s running commentary from only a knowledge of the grammatical structure and the things we were supposed to be doing with our bodies. I learned so many new nouns and verbs! I did get a little lost when he started talking about India and energy flow but at least I now know how tell people to bring their gaze to their nose in Japanese.

I’m not sure how things are elsewhere in Asia, but in Japan, people ride their bikes on the sidewalks at very high speeds. Not a day passes when I don’t have a near-fatal collision with a speeding bicyclist on my way to class. The sidewalks are crowded with people, mind you. I have a hard enough time not bumping into other pedestrians without the zooming chariots of death screaming by periodically. It doesn’t help that my natural inclination is to veer the wrong way in a pinch. That’s brought me centimeters from disaster on more than one occasion.

There also seems to be no problem with doing it in the darkness of night. Fortunately, most people have the sense to turn on a headlight of some sort as they come barreling down upon you in excess of 15 miles an hour.

In Rome, I recall a certain sense of “unease” when riding in cars with Romans as they would casually slip through centimeter clearance having spaces without slowing from highway speeds, but as a pedestrian I never felt the sort of terror that I feel on a regular basis strolling down the sidewalks of Japan.

I read the translation by James Fallen which endeavors to preserve the rhythm and structure of this extraordinary work and succeeds brilliantly in my humble opinion.

This turned out to be good solid tactic strategic fun. Though I’m not sure why they were nominated for a writing award. The writing was pretty much your standard “lost in translation, but probably was never there in the first place,” wacky Japanese.

Nearly every store clerk from whom I’ve had the pleasure of receiving change in bills has done this really cool flippy thing where they swing the bills around with their pinky and snap them one by one in a very blatant counting process. It’s like Vegas!

I’ll have to find out if that’s part of the job training or if it’s just something one learns in the wily course of adolescence. Maybe I can even get someone to teach me if I show them how to spin a pen as part of a manual dexterity exchange program.

You might think that campy, low-tech special effect having Godzilla movies were relegated to the land of cult following. But you’d be wrong. Second only to Finding Nemo in screen count is this cinematic masterpiece: Godzilla vs. Mothra vs. Mecha-Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.

I bet my meager Japanese skills won’t even stand in the way of my enjoyment of this film. La langue du cinéma est universelle.

In perusing the text of my new lease, I couldn’t help but dwell on this particular subsection:

3. When using Object, Borrower must not do what are written below.

1. To produce or possess firearms, swords, explosive or ignitable substances.
2. To bring in or fix up heavy and large equipment such as a large-scaled safe.
3. To use TV, stereo set and other appliances at full blast and to play the instrument such as piano.
4. To breed animals such as savage beasts and poisonous snakes, which apparently cause troubles in the neighborhood.

I guess I’ll just have to leave my good friend Chippy, the safe-cracking, Metallica loving, explosive piano juggling cheetah, back home in America.

There’s simply a lot more automation going on in this country. Automatic doors abound. My toilet activates some sort of fan when I close the lid, but only if I’ve actually used it. It can tell. Even the little clock built into the bed in my hotel room detects when there’s been no motion in the room and dims its LCD display so as to provide a more soothing sleeping environment.

There’s a piece of hardware sitting under my telephone the purpose of which I have yet to discern. Given the sophistication of the other hardware in the room, I can only assume that it is constantly monitoring my emotional well-being and would immediately notify rectifying personnel if I were to find anything to be even slightly to my dissatisfaction.

Having arrived in Tokyo but 36 hours before year’s end, I felt something of a sense of urgency with regard to my New Year’s Eve plans. Forunately, the Tokyo club scene is even better documented (via the Internet) than San Francisco.

A few minute’s perusal turned up the Jungle Calendar and a promising party in my vicinity at a club called Aoyama Hachi. Another couple of hours of research left me with a vastly better grasp on the nightlife resources at my disposal, but with nary a better alternative than my first lucky find.

Having already experienced first hand the challenge of locating anything in Tokyo — even with the aid of the map snippets that every sane business uses in lieu of an address — I went out for a stroll in the early evening with the ulterior motive of locating the club. A couple of hours of walking left me with a vastly better grasp on my general vicinity but with nary a clue as to the wherabouts of the club. It didn’t help that I had forgotten to bring either the address or the little map I copied by hand from the club’s web site.

I was confident that I had a vague idea of where the club should be, despite the strong counterevidence that my hypothesized location was one of precious few dark spots in the colossal light bulb that is Tokyo. Fortune shined upon me, however, as I did eventually locate the club after combining my newfound mental map with the much more useful and precise paper map I had forgotten to bring the first time around. That the place was down a dark alley in a rickety building on what had first appeared to be an abandoned lot was, in retrospect, all the more charming.

The evening proceeded as well as could be hoped from there. The club, naught more than four small rooms vertically stacked, was hopping. The drum and the bass were top-notch and I even liked the MC — I think Japanese has better flow for rapping than English, all those vowels come in handy. There were gaijin aplenty, some similarly recent arrivals and some with a year’s tenure or more. I even made the acquaintance of a few locals, most of whom spoke English but the universal language of glow sticks provided a gateway to some who didn’t.

At midnight, there was your standard countdown, in Japanese of course. I was amused at the fluid alternation between Japanese and English on the part of the MC. He even announced “one minute left” in English, though the 30 second mark was announced natively whether because “thirty” or “seconds” were dangerous linguistic territory I can only speculate. I managed to hold out until 4:30am thanks to lively discussion with my new friends, but given that my body began protesting at 10pm (already 5am according to my stuck in PST rhythms), it took my entire force of will to remain conscious for the walk home. Plus no one had made any mention of staying up to see the sunrise, not that it would have been visible from inside the smokey windowless club.

The year firmly off to a good start, thus I began my Tokyo adventures.

I can’t say that I have a strong feeling about blogs one way or the other. I had a short lived fling with LiveJournal, but we parted ways amicably many months back as I was feeling guilty for being so neglectful.

Given the arrival of the New Year and my own arrival in Tokyo just two days past, I figured it was time to rekindle the flame with self-indulgence, lacking style and banal commentary. Thus, I’ve joined the club of geeks abroad taking advantage of the miracle of the Internet to bore unsuspecting readers with their experiences and reflections.

Really I’m doing this so that I won’t feel so guilty about shirking the responsibility of keeping in touch with my friends back home. Plus, I’m sure all this English writing will do wonders for my Japanese.