a confession
Before I go take my bath and leave for tonight's nabe (stew) party, let me first admit that I was wrong. This is not a bad place. Not Tokyo, not my neighborhood, not my house. Furthermore, it is not a bad people. All I have to do to see that is to walk for less than fifteen minutes through the streets behind where I live, away from the main drag and simply look at it all. There are the children playing, there is the laughter in the upstairs rooms, there are the men and women working and loving and caring about something. That is what I want to find.

I'm stressed and I'm lonely. I'm an alien and I'm illiterate. Furthermore, I'm isolated by my stature and my appearance or made into a disgusting... object. It's not that I'm being brought down by nothing... anyone can see that being a foreigner in a subconsciously isolationist nation is a lot of weight to bear. But I need to remember, in times like these, that I shouldn't take it personally. Even if I'm not happy, perhaps the rest of the world is. If they can go on living and loving and laughing, that's what matters.

To see that, all I have to do is walk outside my door, ignore the skyscrapers, and look to the low, squatting houses and the people within.