Yoyogi Park, Part I

Being homesick and lonely and totally lost in Japan, I naturally rooted out some fellow gaijins (foreigners) and arranged for a meeting to celebrate the most American of American holidays, the 4th of July. I did this by joining up on a little site called meetup.com, where I then joined the American group and planned to attend their holiday picnic in Yoyogi Park. For anyone new to Japan that may or may not be reading this, find people and groups of common interests on meetup.com or some similar site and go. You may not know anybody and might be nervous about meeting strangers through a strange website, but when you're done you'll have made some friends. Use these websites to make your life easier and more enjoyable... plus, you'll probably get to go to some cool places you might not have otherwise gone to.

So this is Yoyogi Park, apaprently the biggest and best park in Tokyo. I wouldn't really know if this was true or not, as I haven't been to any other parks, but its definitely a beautiful place. It's amazing how far a little grass and trees can go in improving your happiness. After disembarking from the train and seeing the trees, as one can see from the top photo, I felt twenty times better about being here. People need life because people are life and a city isn't living. But a park is. Life is everywhere and it tells you its there. It's a reassuring feeling. The life of the trees, birds, bugs, grass and shrubs tell you that you're not alone.

So of course, many people also feel this, consciously or unconsciously, which is why they gather there. Yoyogi Park, as I found, was a vast hub of people and activity. Foreigners and Japanese. Life attracts life it seems and the park was full of it. Not least of all, us Americans enjoying our patriotic holiday in a foreign land. It's strange how we do this, but all cultures do this. We go to different places and cultures and we bring our old culture with us, we can't help it. It's inevitable. America was founded on this, immigrants bringing their culture with them and sharing it. In an ironic twist, there I was, bring my culture to Japan. America was once the importer (and still is for the most part) and there I was being the exporter.

But anyway, I enjoyed conversation with fellow Americans and other nationalities. As it turns out, half the people attending were Japanese looking to hang out with Americans. Not that there's a problem with that, but the 4th was a lot of sharing with curious others. I also ate some of these little awesome things below. They're pastries filled with a sweetened bean paste. Custard would have been more awesome, but this bean paste is actually quite tasty. Nothing like beans at all.


And here's a photo of the people I met at the park that day. They were a very nice group and it was definitely a pleasure.


So this concludes Part I, in Part II I'll show you some of the more awesome things I found in Yoyogi Park.