The Japanese Way

Its a beautiful day today, bout 26 degrees, sunny. I went for a bike ride around the neighbourhood with shorts, sandals and a tshirt, trying to find a nice park or somewhere to get some sun. After some searching I found a beautiful park with a small lake in the middle quite close to the train station. Such a contrast to cycle through grey concrete apartment blocks and ugly powerlines everywhere to see such an amazing and natural looking park. Such contrasts are everywhere in this country. I cycled around the small lake on a carefully manucured path, and everywere I looked I saw different facets of Japanese life. A young couple holding hands, a bored looking fat man selling Yakitori at a stall, countless families, children running everywhere. At one point my train of thought is broken by a young boy on a small bike who nearly crashes straight into me. "sumimasen!" He apologizes as he rides by.

Everyday I spend here I see amazing and fascinating things which I find totally different from anything I knew back home, but today, on this bike ride, I seemed to see it all through different eyes. We are the Japanese. The Japanese are us. We are all the same. We are all humans. For the first time since Ive been here I felt like I had a home and that I belonged with the things I saw around me. Today I wasnt just another gaijin english teacher looking at everything in Japan throgh a mental microscope, looking for strange things to point out. Today I was Japanese.