Japan is only partly what I remember it, and that's most likely because when I was here last it was with a group, which moved in a bovine clump so that nobody really had to know exactly where one was going to get to their destination. The train system is entirely bilingual, and luckily for me the second language is English, so even the poor non-Japanese speaker would be able to manage alright. I say poor because, although it's not likely such a person would choose to come here, any non-Japanese speaker would be in serious trouble. Although many of the signs are bilingual, most of the people are not. So if you need help beyond what is written...good luck.
This morning I met my friend Jerich from high school at Musashi-sakai station, the closest train stop to ICU, my school. We ate, and then took the bus to the campus and walked around its eerily silent pathways - almost nothing arises such a mystical, almost metaphysical silence than the emptiness of a location that is designed to be full of people. Such was the mood this afternoon. As Jerich and I stood silently in the school chapel as an unseen organist played baroque, non-believer-scaring pieces on the enormous organ, the sense of religious accomplishment accompanied by angst of being a place long imagined but never viewed overtook me. The process that had brought me here was nearly 10 months in the making.
The cicadas were buzzing madly, and I felt called upon. To what I do not know, but the location was finally revealed. The combination of deep green foliage and concrete on campus evoked a convergence of the man-made and the natural, and as I boarded the bus I felt that I was leaving a place I had already spent many hours before I had actually arrived.
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