Memories of Japan (small things).
1. Oden, which is in a black metal pot with boiling vegetables. The sound of the bubbling and the steam coming from the top on a cold night.
2. The smell of incense at a temple at night with the sound of the temple bell tolling.
3. A ripe persimmon tree in a late spring snow.
4. Drunk on the train at night, and the most beautiful woman in the world is sitting on the other aisle about 12 feet away.
5. The Japanese people you’re with get your Japanese joke.
6. Drunk Japanese man insults you in Japanese thinking you won’t understand, and you reply in Japanese and he gets it. And leaves.
7. In a very small village, in the local Shinto shrine, you take a largish amount of useless 1 and 5 yen coins you’ve been accumulating and loudly drop them into the offering box in front of the idol. The old priest opens his door expecting some high school punk sees you, the gaijin, there making an offering. The look on his face.
8. The Japanese “authentic” German Biergarten actually is authentic, with massive steins of delicious German beer.
9. The kissaten (old style coffee shop) with its delicious heavy cream and perfect coffee has an authentic Indian ambience because the Indophile who owns it gutted a coffee shop in Mumbai and transported it and installed in into the place where you are sitting, down to the local advertisements posted on the walls.
10. In another coffee shop shop, called “Five Yen Change”, while you are sitting there having a cup, a couple of middle aged women, regulars, come in with fresh Madeleines, and offers some to you despite the fact that you are not actually a regular yourself.
11. The new detective novel that you bought and sneaked to your secret coffee shop in the basement with the gay hunchbacked waiter is even better that you expected. And so is the coffee.
12. The shaving sink at the cheap ancient inn you visit in Kyoto is in the open and you shave effectively in the outside with the wind blowing on your face.
13. You ask the owner of the Indian restaurant who the photo of the old man hanging over the door is and he says “he is me deity”.
14. In another Indian restaurant, in Kyoto, you order Thali in several small bowls and a grossly obese Turkish man sits down near him, orders four of what you ordered (to eat alone) and then plows through the food, tossing the chicken bones onto the floor.
15. In very cold weather, small wheeled stands appear outside selling hot chestnuts heated by stove in the stands that whistle with the steam.
16. The bar where you are having a wonderful session with close friends will stay open until you are finally done, no matter what. Even after dawn.
17. That the coffee sold at the Hankyu Station in Osaka actually is the worst coffee in Japan. Which is kind of cool.
18. On the way to work you see an elderly Japanese man, who looked like a professor, jogging, while only wearing running shoes and a Speedo made of the British flag.
19. Breaking up a fight where some Japanese punks were bullying a Korean high school girl by shocking them by telling them in decent Japanese that you’ll will utterly fuck them up if they don’t leave her alone.
20. Asking your host lady in the inn if she can have your old size 12 (American) shoes so she can put them in her vestibule in order to scare potential burglars.
