I forgot to mention yesterday the odd encounter on my way to sartorial improvement.\u00c2\u00a0 I bumped into Ms. Mizuo, who lives at the dorm I used to live at when interning at Nippon Steel.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know what it says about me that I forgot to mention randomly meeting someone I knew in a city of ten million.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
This morning I headed out with just yoghurt and orange juice in my belly and got on a train for Kamatori, the station closest to the Oyumino chapel.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the chapel I used to attend in 2001\/2002 before they built the new and bigger one in Honda where I’ve gone on all my business trips.\u00c2\u00a0 Being back there, even though most people I knew must have been at Honda today, was a touching moment – to sing and experience fellowship with a glimpse of bright sunshine outside the curtains in the same place I’d done before with dear friends.\u00c2\u00a0 Scotty Smith, our guest speaker that Sunday because of a missionary conference, took Zephaniah 3:14-20 to look at “love so amazing, so divine” which “demands my soul, my life, my all,” which resonated with my emotional state.\u00c2\u00a0 I won’t recap the message, just go ahead and read the passage.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
I spoke a bit with some visitors there for the conference, as well as with Roberta and Sally, two long-term missionaries, and Mrs. Soneda, who is one of the few people I remember clearly from my original stay in 2001\/2002.\u00c2\u00a0 I can’t say why or how, but she’s a thoroughly pleasant woman to talk to and somehow projects a peace beyond that seems to settle on people around her.\u00c2\u00a0 Or maybe only I am affected that way.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
I also learned that I really can’t tell age with the Japanese.\u00c2\u00a0 The lady sitting next to me had raised her hand when Mr. Dedachi asked who might stay for a seminar on “Shepherding a Child’s Heart.”\u00c2\u00a0 I asked her afterwards if she had children, to which she replied with a frightened look and a “Me?\u00c2\u00a0 I’m still in high school.”\u00c2\u00a0 I guess it’s universal, but perhaps more successful in Japan: women in high school try to look grown up and women out of college try to look like they’re still in high school.\u00c2\u00a0 The amount of mothers I see that still look girlish I find staggering.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
For lunch I bought an unfiltered Kirin beer and some kara-age and tatsuda-age.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m sure the Japanese approve of that match, but I don’t know that the beer was a great idea.\u00c2\u00a0 I only drank it in Chiba in front of the train station, and as soon as I got on the train back to Tokyo a wave of drowsiness hit me.\u00c2\u00a0 The only reason for getting off at Chiba was to go to the dingy PASEO store where I always got Super Salaryman toe socks\u00c2\u00a0and found racks of T-shirts with silly English, but when I got there, the building was gone and replaced by a construction site.\u00c2\u00a0 I suppose this sudden flash of the ephemeral and the dwowsiness combined to send me into that sweet Sunday afternoon melancholy that makes me feel drained of everything but longing.\u00c2\u00a0 It makes me simultaneously aware of a desire to fly away and of lacking any reason or motive force to do so; it makes me at once regret things not done and admit that doing them would have changed little; it makes me feel an urge to take a bold decision to change everything while knowing that the boldest decision wouldn’t keep this melancholy from reoccuring.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0All the while,\u00c2\u00a0I know sleep will change everything, but in these times it would be infinitely better to have someone to hug.\u00c2\u00a0 It is strange, though, to feel lonely in a city of ten million.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
I got off at Ikebukuro and found the DVD I didn’t find at Shinjuku, then got back on for Shinjuku.\u00c2\u00a0 Ads passed by with the bold message “you are what you buy” – ads, I think, for a credit card.\u00c2\u00a0 The message was reinforced by the image: the woman’s clothing taking on the background, in one case a fruit stand and in the other shelves with earthenware.\u00c2\u00a0 In my frame of mind it was immediately obvious that what you buy adds to your burden: it weighs you down with additional responsibility.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Back in the Ikebukuro train station I bought a half-liter bottle of jasmin tea and again took to playing with it in my hand, swinging my hand forward and backward and making the bottle rotate 180 degrees around the short axis on the forward swing and catching it without obviously letting go of it, something of a toned-down urban variant on drawing a revolver with a flourish.\u00c2\u00a0 I got too confident on my way up the stairs, failed to catch the bottle and launched it up the stairs, past one elderly man’s feet, and then down the stairs again on the other side of the man.\u00c2\u00a0 He kept walking as if nothing had happened; the elderly man behind him stopped and answered my embarrassed but amused smile with a smile of his own that seemed paternally entertained more than anything.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
On my way back to the hotel I stopped at an outdoor cafe because it was still light and the temperatures balmy.\u00c2\u00a0 I got a hot chocolate (plus five creams) and a “Salami-style Frank” which turned out to be a peppery short sausage stuck on a bone, a morbid naked corndog of sorts.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n