READ BETWEEN THE LINES


barren
Tokyo is an expanse of asphalt and concrete- a nexus of buildings and roads in an intertwining maze as far as the eye can see. Now that the leaves have all fallen from the trees, there is no ounce of green in this mass of brown. Even from the highest viewpoints, where one can find parks and playgrounds in the summer, the city now stretches out a homogeneous mass of industry, all traces of nature gone from it until the first Plum blossoms show.

dog show
The woman herself was dressed strangely but how I can't really say. Something about her seemed eccentric but that was only secondary to the strange sight of her companion. Unleashed and walking not five feet behind her followed a mid-sized black lab dressed in a full jump suit and matching scarf. At first, I thought, How stupid and embarrasing for the dog-- and to be unleashed in this city? How dangerous! But then I realized in fact that perhaps she thought of the canine as an equal-- maybe dressing and freeing her dog is her way of expressing it.

smells
Waseda smells like shit. No, really. There's something about the subway system in that area that just DOES NOT FUNCTION. And I don't enjoy those unpleasant whiffs on the last leg of my walk to school every day. In the summer it's worse.

Tokyo is a city of bad smells. Of course, the air quality is bad from automobiles and industry... but it's worse because every jackass on the street seems to think they have the right to puff away on their god-awful cigarettes when they're within a millimetre's proximity of others. (And people wonder why I like cloves.)

Train and subway stations are smell like a mix of grease, oil, exhaust, smoke and women. The hookers and OLs wear their perfume like a stinky advertisement of their lives. When they walk by, their thoughts and opinions trail in the air. Smell-o-vision.

I hate the smell of my family's detergent. It somehow smells musty and dirty. I know it's not a scent that results from my own body, as my clothes smell strongest of it after they're washed. I don't smell like me anymore even without the detergent because of the strong change in my diet... but the detergent makes me feel unauthentic somehow, as if my scent masked in this unappealing cologne has changed who I am.

porn
He sat one seat ahead of me reading what looked like a tabloid. He kept the paper folded lengthwise (as Japanese is read) so that he could view it without being in others' way. I saw first that it had some sort of feature on Pro-Wrestling but then he turned the page and there she was. A woman and her lovely, bare breasts. Of course, I'm sure they weren't natural... because who, in this day and age, bares natural breasts for a camera? He wasn't embarrassed to see her and she looked equally as happy to see him, but he turned the page as if he wasn't interested anyway. Still, only a few moments later, he turned back, unable to forget her quarter-page image. And there, hidden in the folds of the paper, was a more graphic photograph still... a foreign woman and several men. He looked again, briefly but unhurriedly and turned the page to peruse ads which I can only assume were for other women interested in recieving money for what men like to pay. There again, breasts. There again, an invitation. And this in a bus so crowded that the isle was crammed with standing people.

I never hear anyone curse in Japanese unless there's a BIG ouch. They don't casually intersperse conversation with "crap!" "shit!" "damnit!" or "fuck!" In fact, I can't even think of the colloquial equivalent of most of these words. But they still look at porn (animated or otherwise) in public. That, my friends, is one big cultural difference.