Your Friedman in Japan

I am back in Japan! Where things remain intriguing, new, and sometimes downright mysterious.

Which quite frankly, to lean on that totally lit phrase-maker Winston Churchill, makes each new day an adventure, wrapped in enigmas, inside my own bafflement. Which I like a lot — it is never dull around here.

In their undeniable wisdom, main campus of Temple University in Philadelphia decided to reassign me for another year as visiting faculty in Japan, continuing to bring my pedagogic knowledge to the new Kyoto campus. Either that or main campus of Temple University is determined to forge ahead with me stashed a safe 6800 miles away to give them an even-more-extended break from any remote chance of my barging into some senior administrator’s office with my latest list of “brilliant and innovative suggestions we should implement immediately!” (C’mon, free weekly movies projected onto the side of the new library with free popcorn remains a genius idea — we just need to install a small sea of outdoor weatherproof sofas! And college-wide faculty-and-student outdoor silent-disco competitions was a complete no-brainer!)

And so main campus Temple University in Philadelphia will have to soldier on without me and my endless supply of bright ideas. I am quite happily back in Kyoto, this time in a new apartment, and it is already the end of the second week of Spring term.

I have been unpacking and decorating my new place, of course, and exploring the new neighborhood, since I am now located about eight blocks and across a large boulevard west of my last address.

This is an office of mystery in my new neighborhood.

And this is an entire building of mystery in my new neighborhood: The MOONBAT Building.

No clue what they do here, but apparently MOONBATTING requires an entire edifice to accomplish.

I continue to study Japanese, and am having a lot of fun with that. Not progress, but definitely fun. Here is today’s new sentence:

その帽子はダサイです。Sono boushi wa dasai desu! That hat is hideous!

We are all wearing our winter hats here, as the temperature hovers around freezing. Northern Japan is already piled with snow, but Kyoto is in the more temperate south. I hope for snow!

In other news, I have been eating Chrysanthemum Leaves.

I put on a warm winter hat the other night to walk to the Gion neighborhood with my friend Yoshie to visit a temple festival where one prays for good fortune and obtains decorated bamboo fronds to display in one’s business premises to assure more good fortune. I’d been initially puzzled seeing people walking around Kyoto with decorated bamboo branches all day.

Lots of people put on warm hats to get some lucky bamboo!

I was very busy decorating at my new place, but not yet with any bamboo. But apparently I have been inspired in my brief time here by the fabulous intensity of the Japanese play of color and texture! Behold!

Before and After:

That, and I hauled some favorite soft furnishings over with me from Philadelphia. That patterned rug actually compacts to the size of a large book. While in Philly I also slit open some cushions I had and removed all the stuffing while watching an old episode of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Finding Your Roots (I really love that show), and then unfolded and restuffed the cushions here in Kyoto with all-new Japanese stuffing and sewed them up, while I watched the latest sumo wrestling in Japanese on tv. I now have a sunny, colorful, well-cushioned living room in Kyoto.

If you hadn’t heard, there is a new young sumo wrestler from Ukraine who is now named Aonishiki Arata (he was originally Danylo Yavhusyshyn), and at age 21 he is making a huge splash as he vaults, or hurls, or sumos, or whatevers his way up the ranks with remarkable speed. What impressed me after seeing him fling opponents weighing 75 lbs more than him from the sumo ring was his perfect-sounding Japanese when he was interviewed after. That alone gives me hope that someday I too will either be able to speak Japanese or at least fling 300-lb people out of my way.

But you know, one of the notably nice things about Japan, on a list that just continues to get longer, is the reliability of 300-lb people never being in one’s way. This is the land of the 4-foot tall grannies, and whether on their bikes in the winter weather, zooming around on their motorscooters, or just blithely pushing their wheeled shopping bags right across your path on the sidewalk, they are indomitable and inspiring. Don’t even think of getting in their way.

Instead one can embrace the Japanese tradition of peace and calm, and go visit the cats. The cats might ignore you, but ever so calmly.

So one is happily busy here eating leaves and arranging pillows, and I wish you each a fine and warm new year. And all those essay assignments for later in the term will get done shortly, I promise, as soon as this latest sumo program is over.

あけましておめでとう! Akemashite omedetō! Happy New Year!