Tag Archives: Osaka

Simple Pleasures

Catching Up:

I’m not famous. If you care enough about my doings to visit this blog, you may have been aware of my recent birthday.  And if you’re my Mom, you’re probably aware it was March 22nd… which isn’t so recent.  Yeah, this blog post took awhile.  The gifts for entering my marathon year came in many forms, but they can be boiled down to one word: change. And it all came from the people around me.

Nipponbashi, Osaka.

Nipponbashi, Osaka.

Normal life is resuming for me in Osaka, Japan.  My 26th birthday came during the peak of the abnormalcy (LibreOffice says that’s a typo, but if normalcy is a word, so damn well is abnormalcy), and it surpassed expectations by about ten thousand percent.  So here goes the most narcissistic story I’ve ever written, a post about my own birthday, as a grown man.

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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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