January 13

I am sorry that I haven’t been updating this in a few days. My internet schedule is generally that I ask to use the net maybe once a day, and use that time to reply to emails and publish entries I’ve written a day or a few days before. So in the evenings after Reiko and everyone go to bed, I write about my day and publish it to the blog the next time I get the internet.

Yesterday I woke up at 6 in the morning feeling extremely uncomfortable, like my head was lower than the rest of me and I couldn’t get comfortable. I ended up pretty nauseous and threw up. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep because I felt too sick. I ended up curling up next to the space heater with “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, and falling asleep in a ball on the floor. Eventually I got back into bed, and slept until I was woken up by John calling my cell phone to invite me to go to 名古屋こ水どく館 (Nagoya Aquarium). I really wanted to go, but I ended up being sick most of the day, and just hanging around the house and sleeping most of the time. But in the evening we watched an amusing movie called “Bubble e Go” (バブルへGO), which was like Back to the Future but with the 90’s in Japan (thus pre-bubble-burst), and a laundry machine instead of a car. It was…pretty amazing.

Today I went to Sakae with Natalie, Nathalie, Kate and Ksenia. Right outside the subway exit, some guys were dancing around in a park.


We didn’t have much shopping success, as most of the stores we found were too expensive, but it was fun to look around. We found a fabulous goth pink-and-black tutu-corset thing that everyone wanted me to try on, and some more interesting clothes of that type at the top of a huge department store. It’s very expensive to be goth in Japan, though. Some guys were dancing in the park when we got out of the station: I remember trying to explain “goth” to Hiroe. She was completely mystified until we correctly pronounced “goshikku”, the Japanese transliteration. It’s amazing how much English is in Japanese now, and yet how much it isn’t English.

I didn't realize you could make a sexy Mad Hatter outfit:

View of Sakae:


On my way home, I mistakenly got out at the wrong exit, but immediately noticed that there was a 百円 store nearby. Hundred-yen stores in Japan are even cheaper than dollar stores in the US…☺ Going in was interesting. There was a certain attempt to weed the typical cheap products into a slightly more cute or well-presented look closer to the Japanese aesthetic, but almost everything was made in China or Thailand. You go fourteen hours away, and still dollar stores have the same items. I wasn’t sure whether to feel at home or let down.