KOBE FALL

Last Sunday, I was in Kobe (the main city to our west)for the day. There's a foreigner-friendly Japanese congregation that meets at a former Norwegian Sailor's Mission at 10:30 (Kobe is a big port city), then a mainly English international church service at 4:30 in a Reformed Church (actual church bulding) in a neighborhood of small bars, a clinic and a Yakuza mafia branch headquarters (so the pastor informs me). Well rounded!

It was a beautiful fall day - low 70s, sunny, dry. In between services I was catching up on lots of grading (four classes worth), and what better place to do that than sitting on a park bench near city hall on a perfect Sunday afternoon.

Down the row of seats from me was some kind of amateur guitar afficionado group (the Japanese congregate in interest groups). The playing was often quite good. The singing quality, however ... Well, let's just say that Bob Dylan was sounding an awful lot like Pavarotti in comparison! One young man played the mandolin and did a surprisingly good job of "Oh Susanna!" Another couple had come with their perky dog in a bandana (the dog was wearing the bandana), and another couple brought badminton rackets and was batting a shuttlecock back and forth. A beaming toddler in red-red tennis shoes was enjoying himself immensely walking up and down stairs, doing leg stretches till his little butt touched the ground. The simple joys of movement. Amateur baseball players were at it on the lot next door. A couple was sitting across the field, his head in her lap. That kind of day.

For lunch I had the turipuru beri wafuru (triple berry waffle) at a European style cafe. They see it as desert, with whipped cream and jam. Yum!

THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE?

I have a hard time relating to the old WWII GI maxim about "all Japanese look alike." I haven't found that at all. What's amazing is the sheer variety of features, complexions (olive Mediterranean skin to pale white, to dark tan), hairstyles (you oughta see some of them!), dress. I liken it all to marsupials in Australia. Where you have just one species, it proliferates in the most varied forms: wombat, kangaroo, Tasmanian Devil. Almost every "type" you see in the West can be seen in Japan - and then a few extra: the bookish nerd with the bad hardcut, the fashion plate (male or female), the middle-class housewife with sensible shoes, the wild teenager with dyed hair, the society woman with impeccable understated taste in grays and charcoals, the toughened laborer, the passsing-through-puberty teenaged boy with the squeeky voice. Then there are the more exclusively Japanese types: the older woman in a kimono (probably for some ceremonial occasion), the "salary man" in a dark suit (and his younger counterpart in the same suit with elongated, over-the-top pointy black fashionista shoes).

I expected to find a nation of conformity and emotionless automatons and find instead ... San Francisco! Wild variety - Berkeley on steroids. Perhaps everyone is conforming, yes, to their in-group, but this is a nation of 1000 niche markets. A nation of a tall downtown buildings filled to the brim with 100 small businesses, bars, restaurants inside - each with its own clientele. (An Irish pub here in Osaka is on the inside of the 6th floor of an office building and has no outside windows.) And the denizens of the 1000 niche markets all happen to sit next to each other on the trains (everyone except maybe the CEO of Honda is condemned to take the train) so it's a great people-watching opportunity. Not that there's much action to watch. Everyone immediately becomes engrossed in (a) sleep, (b) checking their cell phone, (c) reading a novel, (d) listening to their i-Pod. Half of them are doing (a). "Sleep Deprivation Nation" is my next (and first) novel. Catching 40 winks or running up stairs to make some deadline - those are the two poles of life for Japanese (at least in public).