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by giant televisions in the streets and the
chance to eat raw cod sperm as smiling
Japanese folks lead me into safe explora-
tion.
of Japanese. Even without the language, I
managed to meet provocative people, have
wild experiences, eat unusual food, stay in
some relatively inexpensive lodging, and
develop an abiding curiousity in the country
that brought me back to live there.
country that has been well editorialized,
there is some very real danger that I am
generalizing or specifying erroneously.
None of this is true for sure! Some is
regional, some is misinterpreted. Take these observations as fodder
for your own poking around, and question everything. Most folks you
meet, foreign and Japanese, will be happy to share data with you
and talk with you about Japan.
read and write. You'll be confronted with most of the services and
settings you might expect in modern western society, except the
interface will be largely unintelligible. This is changing somewhat as
instructions are increasingly provided in English, in roman letters.
But occasionally the English you'll find is more curious than helpful.
They have interpreted English language and western culture in their
own way and you're likely to learn as much about your home and
yourself as you will learn about whatever "Japan" is.
Japan to have an inkling that
the Japanese are not as the
rest of us are. In fact, they're
decidedly weird. If you take
the conventional gamut of
human possibility as
running, say, from
Canadians to Brazilians,
after 10 minutes in the land
of the rising sun, you realise
the Japs are off the map, out
of the game, on another
planet. It's not that they're
aliens, but they are the
people that aliens might be
if they'd learnt Human by
correspondence course and
wanted to slip in unnoticed.
- A.A. Gill, "Mad in Japan"
is "sun" and the second "source." Together
"ni-hon," they mean Japan, sun-source. The
second character also means origin, root, or
book; look for it on bookstores.