Author Archives: gregnasif

A Night with Yuu in Osaka

Streets in Osaka.

Streets in Osaka.

Japanese friends are hard to make.  Since coming to this transilient country I have befriended quite a few Americans and some British and Irish people. That’s mostly it.   In such a dense and developed nation, far fewer speak English than possibly anywhere I’ve ever been.

The culture is also hard to penetrate: most Japanese are shy, indirect, and not very socially brave. Americans are therefore seen as intimidatingly cool. Moreover, Japan suppresses individualism and glorifies conformity.  They even have a saying to this effect: The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Then there are those great exceptions on which ride the waves of history.

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How to Observe D-Day in Japan

This will be a short note.  I apologize to my millions of loyal fans, for whom I’m currently working on a new full-size entry about a recent evening in Osaka.  But I thought, living in a country virtually demolished by the victorious forces in World War II, I could leave a note on the 70th anniversary of that war’s most pivotal moment.

The year after D-Day was a historical period of extreme cultural exchange, perhaps not seen since First Encounter 450 years earlier.  Within weeks, the French farmers and villagers of Northern France, celebrating their liberation, were tasting Coca Cola, trying bubble gum, playing baseball and listening to American music for the first time.

Fast forward to today.  I work in Kyoto, Japan, the ancient capital of Japan and perhaps its most culturally valued, historically preserved city.

IMG_3420Walking through Kyoto, one sees a Burger King dominating the city center, a Starbucks filled with youth, two or three McDonalds’ every square mile, Disney movies filling the theaters, “New York” Pizza stands, Facebook users, Instagrammers, even Japanese apps are named in English, the word “vintage” everywhere, English signs everywhere (and I really, really mean everywhere), etc. etc.  Irrelevant but ironic is the widespread Japanese glorification of white people with blonde hair.

We’ve brought America to every nation on Earth, and it began on the beaches of Normandy 70 years ago.  I’m not sure how to feel about how far it’s come, but cheers to those who got the ball rolling, at high cost, and for the best reasons.  USA number one.

-Greg

You Won’t Find That Here

Today is May 7th, two months to the day since my arrival in Japan. I knew I’d leave behind major comforts in America, yet I wasn’t ready for the blow I received the very first night.

It was March 7th.  After an exhausting journey, our trainer Kyle took my co-trainee and me to a grocery store in Osaka, Japan. Looking around at all the food, thinking of the reasonably comfortable hotel room waiting for me, I felt safe at last.  Proceeding to the open refrigerator, I grabbed the first plastic container of a beige substance I saw. “Great,” I said. “Hummus. Looks like I have breakfast for tomorrow.”

“Hummus?” repeated Kyle. “Yeah, you won’t find hummus here.”

Horrified, I dropped the sweetened soy-paste.

Won’t find hummus?

I thought this was a metropolitan country. There’s an Italian restaurant on every street here, and there’s not a corner in Italy – or any Mediterranean country for that matter – without a kebab stand selling hummus for an extra euro.

“Japan is different,” explained Kyle.  Mercilessly I might add.

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The Greg Nasif Blog Awakens

This is my first post in what I hope will be an ongoing standard – The Greg Nasif Blog.
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To be sure, the mighty gregnasif.com has existed for over a year and is proudly the something-billionth most trafficked website in the world. But I never knew what to do with the site; rather I was parking my car in this spot for the offchance that I would get really famous (or infamous) overnight for an insensitive tweet and someone would snatch the URL before I had a chance to gather myself. After all, look what happened to sarahpalin.com. And that will be the last time I ever compare myself to Sarah Palin.
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But after moving to Japan and seeing my friend and co-trainee Rob Milchling’s exciting blog, it occurred to me, after keeping a private journal for nearly four years, that it might time to begin publicizing some of my more interesting ventures. Indeed, I am writing this current entry on my three-year-old iPhone at a British bar in Kyoto, Japan.  Most interestingly, Brits around me are grunting and wailing about a soccer game on TV, in bizarre accents I thought only existed for comedic purposes.  It was a spontaneous decision to come here, and it’s these spur of the moment/everyday international experiences that I feel somehow as if I’m betraying a solemn duty by not publicly recording. No more. Today I give in.
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I have had many writing projects rise and fall. This one, however, I am sure will succeed. It is really nothing more than a depot for my writings opinionated, news-oriented, or otherwise. Wherever I go, Whatever I do, I always find I have something to write. And after some ten years of including both alcohol and social media in my life, I finally trust myself to handle the traditionally dangerous combination. Thus this blog is invincible and not even a worldwide nuclear holocaust will destroy it.
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More entries will follow, and since this technically isn’t even the first post, I guess it was completely useless.
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Presenting the Greg Nasif blog.

 

Dissenting 101

Dissenting 101 was this writer’s sophomore thesis at the University of Maryland.  In addition to a senior thesis, sophomore history majors at the UMD are also expected to produce an extensive paper of individual research.

In this paper, the nationwide student rebellion of the late 1960s and early 1970s is investigated at the University of Maryland, with an eye toward understanding the motives and beliefs of the many student protestors.  This paper was submitted to UMD’s Janus Journal, which publishes ten undergraduate essays each year.  The essay was accepted and published in Janus Journal for the 2010-2011 school year.

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This is a reprint of a previous production by Gregory A Nasif. The pictures are iPhotos taken from cutouts of their newspapers, and are the copyrighted materials of those respective papers (cited above). They were presented at the 2011 Janus Journal Reception with the paper, but were not included in the original. If you would like to contact the writer, please email [email protected]

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