Wee Kev's Blog

Two days ago, I rented a few movies to copy so I’d have some practice material when I left Japan.  One of them was Fast Food Nation (not Japanese), which was a book I read that turned me into a vegetarian a few years ago.  I vege’d for about a year and when I moved to Japan I thought it’d be too hard to continue in a country where I couldn’t even ask for the check, never the less go over the intracies of the menu.  Japanese people don’t really have much of a concept for vegetarians, they understand the term, but the don’t really grasp the concept.  They’ll tell you something is vegetarian, when it clearly has meat in it.  I’m still unsure about what they consider vegetarian, but it’s undoubtedly a concept very foreign to them.  Fast Food Nation is based in my home state of Colorado, and chock full of A list actors, Bruce Willis, Greg Kinnear, that awesome dude from Blade that plays his father figure etc…  Anyway, the movie brought back all the reasons I gave up meat in the first place, and then the end of the film shows a fairly graphic display of the slaughter room in the meat packing plant and it solidified my membership in the ‘pain in the arse to invite over for dinner’ Vegetarian community.  If anything, its worth a watch just to get you off fast food, it’s so gross, and so true, it’s frightening.  There’s so much poop in mass produced meat! Yuck!

    So I headed over to the local library today, as I can’t stomach studying at McDonalds anymore.  I checked the website and it said they opened at 9, so I rolled over around 9:15… yep, the sign in front of the building said 9:30.  It’s super hot outside, but no biggie, I’ll roll over to Super Tamade (the greatest/cheapest/24hour grocery store in Japan) and buy some bananas to snack on (I’ve been eating bananas like crazy since I started watching MR.Brain.  Seen it?  It’s awesome).  So I roll back buy at 9:35 and the doors are open.  Success, so I rock up to the 3rd floor and I am greeted with another sign 10時〜　grrrr… WTF!  So I leave again and this time, I just head home and start some chores.  Chores in Japan are a bit different… I have to clean my tatami, and hang my bedding out side and beat it with a broom, separate my trash into the various (they vary by city) categories (organics, burnables, non-burnables)(I heard some cities have up to 20 different categories of trash.), clean out my drain catch and finally vacuum.  Anyway, so I head back over at 10, and to my astonishment they’re open.  I rock in and the first thing I realize is that this place doesn’t have internet.  WTF!  No internet! Isn’t this supposed to be a house of information, how can you not have internet?  That’s like NASA still using an ABACUS to do their trajectories.  Well, pretty dissappointed, I sit down at my table, and I’m surrounded by 50 year old men, all reading the newspaper.  Basically all Japanese libraries are the same, and all their constituents are old men, killing their free time by enjoying free air conditioning, sitting in front of a newspaper.  Well the guy in front of me, must have picked up a particularly interesting edition, as not 5 minutes went by and he was fully asleep.  Not just asleep, but so asleep that he’s already deep enough that his own snoring doesn’t wake him, nor does the sensation of drool dripping off his lower lip.  I’ve got headphones so it’s no problem for me, but some of the others look a bit annoyed, but of course, this being Japan, they say nothing.  So 5 minutes later, the staff comes by, presumably to gently wake this dude up, but .... she passes him by and comes to me instead.  She points to my power cord for my laptop plugged into the wall and gives me the X arm/hand sign.  I guess since I’ve got a monolingual Japanese dictionary, and a workbook of hand written Kanji in front of me, she assumes I can’t comprehend the language enough to understand “no”, so that’s all the communication that I receive.  Yes, ‘I’ am the one breaking the rules today, ‘I’ am not allowed to use their electricity, it is forbidden, as it is everywhere in Japan.  The old man asleep at the table disturbing the entire library is fine and staying with social guidelines.  I love this country, it’s one of the safest, cleanest, greatest places on earth, but the rules often make me cringe.  Staff commonly somehow during on the job training loses their ability to think independently and becomes a robot unable to make independent decisions outside the scope of their training handbook.  It sounds like an exaggeration, but if you’ve lived here you certainly know what I mean.  So… as I was a bit upset at the ridiculousness of the whole thing, I bounced and met up with Tomoko who spent the day at my apartment finishing up the cleaning (Japanese girlfriends are really really useful, get one and you’ll never have to do anything for yourself again).  I told her my story and she looked as though that’s normal and just how it is.  She also explained to me, that libraries are only really for use for people who are currently using the materials inside and that if your not using a library material, the staff will generally ask you to leave.  Students are forbidden to go there just to study. (unless of course the studying involves some sort of library material) This is also why they don’t have internet as it encourages people to loiter.  So this also solves the mystery why the library has no students and is always full of old men reading the newspaper.  So I asked where students are supposed to study if they have a home that is unfit for learning, and I was told a Cafe or McDonalds.
Somehow that seems really screwed up, especially in a country that the world looks upon as a leader in primary education.  So sadly, until I find a better solution, I’m back at McDonalds, drinking bottomless cups of coffee and enjoying the smell of fecalburgers and fries….

-kev