Mirror Country

So I'm finally settling in and getting around to posting the long promised blog about life and travel in Japan. I had decided on the name when I first arrived and what I continued to see further reinforced the decision.

My plane flew its course over the Arctic circle and I came in over the north of Japan, Hokkaido and northern Honshu. I have a passionate interest in maps and geography, so I was really quite fortunate to come over during a clear day. I'm pretty familiar with Japanese geography so as I stared out my window I could see all the major defining features of Japan before me. It struck me how thin the islands really are, especially up north. The view was wonderful and I started to get a sense that I was really somewhere else.

Because, you know, before I had left Cleveland Hopkins, I wasn't entirely sure that Japan really existed. I was agnostic on it. I'd seen pictures, read stories and spoken to Japanese people. I've met people who've been there... but I'd never seen it with my own eyes. Japan felt like a fictional place from a story book... a fantasy land where high-tech gadgets grew on vines and people dressed acted like anime characters in their daily life. A place where there was prevalent, proud tradition and genuine foreign culture. In hindsight, Japan sounded so fantastic to possibly be real. Yet I found myself following the coastline to Tokyo as I sat in an airplane above.

As the plane began to descend I started to get a good view of the agriculture and life of Japanese people in terms of physical things. They drove cars on roads that went everywhere and houses varied in size. There was countryside and there were cities. However, something continually reflected the sun to my eyes, patches of water stretching over vast fields.

"They must be flooded from the spring rains." I thought. Such things were typical for a field in spring.

But it grew repetitive. Every field was flooded and it reflected the landscape up to me in my plane. The land was a series of mirrors tilted towards the sky. The still water reflected the world as it shown and everything was in endless repetition.

I disembarked the plane and over the next few days and even the weeks, I found that Japan was much like mirror-like, flooded fields (the rice paddies as I later saw up close). Japanese culture has an inclination for uniformity and repeated patterns. For example, most men wear a suit to work and everyone wears black suits. I see some variation on the black suit/black tie, but it seems anything else is completely unheard of. There are times when I am swarmed by black suits, each person a reflection of the other. Vending machines occupy four sides of a block and I wonder if Asahi Beverages might be concerned that the disharmony of a vending machine on only one side of the block might be bad for business. In Japan, it seems, everything and everyone mirror each other in an effort to great harmony and goodness.

This is Mirror Country and the guy in the orange shirt and blue jeans is me.