Skyscrapers gave way to normal office buildings, gave way to houses, which gave way to rice fields, roads with cars, and spotted countryside with occasional houses. I did not like to think that this would be the last time I would see such sights, but more along the lines of the last time on my virgin journey into wonderland. I would be back. I knew it the moment I stepped into the train. After investing so much time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears into developing good social skills and fluency in the language, I would be stupid not too. I realized long before I set off how much of a kick in the pants it is to spend so much time learning a language, only to get really good the moment before you have to leave.

But alas, arriving in the mass of human transport in the middle of the countryside, I saddled up to my seat and prepared to depart wonderland. My last moments of my exchange student adventures will always be her smiling face, watching me descend the steps towards immigration from an overlooking window, my face chocked with tears of not only leaving, but leaving her behind as well. That face representing all I have come to know and love about Japan being slowly left behind as the stairs gave way to queues with restless people holding passports.

The flight home was absolutely without incident. It was probably the shortest time I ever felt I spent on a plane, not wanting the final touchdown in America because of what it represents – the end of my journey and my arrival home.

People repeatedly ask me how does it feel to be home; for which I have no good answer. America is my bread and butter, and where I have lived most of my life. I didn’t live in another country for many years, so I do not think I have quite developed a complete second personality like some have told me. To me, returning to America was like putting on an old pair of shoes, a little bit older but mostly the same exact feel.

The biggest shock to me was that the way I interact with people is still exactly the same. I thought I would be friendlier in English because it’s a language I’m more comfortable with, but I actually think I’m more friendly in Japanese. At first it took me a long time to even get the courage to talk to people, but by the end it got to the point where if someone used a word I didn’t know, I would not hesitate to ask them what the word meant. At first I thought it was embarrassing because I didn’t know the word and would just shut up, but then I realized that I am not a fluent speaker so what’s the point of trying to hide the fact that I’m not.

I guess I have just become a hybrid of sorts. I still think in Japanese, and dream in Japanese but English at the same time. I do not feel that my personality is all that different, if anything just more confident and happy to be alive in this awesome world.

Where do I go from here? Back to an American style university that’s for sure. I loved umass before I left, and now I appreciate it even more than ever. I plan on spending the next year making my Japanese better than ever, working on Brian 3.0, fighting, kicking, grappling, learning to be an even better caveman. There is a lot I need to focus on, then it is off to law school. And all the while spending time in the great playground that is Japan.

Do not misunderstand. I still find the lifestyle of Japanese people atrocious, and I would never want to seriously participate in their lifestyle. But it is hard to argue the fact that in a short time, I rubbed shoulders with some of the biggest names in my world. Japan is like a playground to make money. I tasted the good life while I was there, one filled with money, women, fame and fortune. Who would not be drawn to that? I’ll be back. A Japanese terrorist watch list couldn’t keep me out now.

One of the reasons i do not think I could get by in this country is, at this point, simply a matter of comfort factor. Im cool on the idea that i have a lot of words to learn and a lot of study to master characters, but on the whole i just do not know the system as well as i do back in the states.

The other day i spilled some coffee on my keyboard to my macbook pro. Luckily the computer still works fine, with the exception of the keyboard. now, i know where to go to pick up a new replacement keyboard. i know what torx nuts are called, i know how to explain in explicit detail exactly what happened, whats going wrong, and why. I know how to get a good estimate on what it will cost me to fix it, if i let Apple do it.

I guess at the end of the day I’m just a big dummy with no confidence in his Japanese.

I want to write, but it is slowly beginning to take me too long to think in English sometimes the Japaneses word comes first, but it takes me a minute or two to realize what the correct English word is. I find this extremely hilarious. Conversations with between friends and I are almost impossible to understand unless you have a strong grasp of both English and Japanese. I promise I will sit down sometime soon and try to remember English again. \

I never thought I would be one of those students who, “forgets English.” I never believed it.

I know I have not written in a while. For that I apologize. Rather than sitting in my room and writing essays on my self-reflections I have been out, enjoying the newly warmed temperature, and taking hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Today I went to the famous Fish Market in Tsukiji and shot, in a matter of two hours, over 200 photos – almost 1.5gigs! The little bar on the right with the pictures is all my favorite photos uploaded on Flickr so that I at least have the option to protect and reserve all rights to my images, as well as providing me a huge gallery to view in and of itself. Flickr is the largest and in my opinion, the best, online photo community on the net. Please take a look if you feel so inclined.

I think I have come to the conclusion that photography is the second most important thing in my life right now. The first is, of course, health, fitness, diet, exercise, and fighting. I have gotten into quite a nice routine of going to school or the gym in Sendagaya, then just spending the rest of the day wondering around Tokyo seeing what sights I can find and take pictures of. My photo folder on my harddrive is almost up to 16gigs and contains thousands of images I have taken.

Soon, with the dawn of a new spring in Japan, I will be out even more and hope to attend at least a few Spring Cherry Blossom festivals that are had in and around Japan.

I want to work on a artistic/photo journalist portfolio. For now, I am not trying to make this anything more than just a career, but I will never put it either above my abilities or below my interest level. I have vivid dreams of taking pictures, and it has come to be that the click of the shutter is my new Zen.

[Warning: snowboard intense slang ahead!]

Snowboarding in Japan is definitely an amusing experience; to me at least, with 17 years of experience.

The first thing I noticed when going to Ikebukuro to hop on the bus was that there’s like a million kids all going at the same time. In the US, when you go to the mountain, there are a lot of people from all ages, but the place where we went to only had young kids from teenage to maybe late 20s at the oldest. The bus makes two stops on the way, American rest stop style, and each time it was just packed with kids coming from the mountains. Its like everyone takes a vacation at the same time, and does the exact same thing each time.

The second thing I noticed was the lack of fences — anywhere. There were so many runs that could easily kill someone if you fell off the side. It was quite exciting actually. I got to take advantage of that fact and had some nice cliff bombs.

The place we stayed at, for the price, was actually quite nice. Hard to complain when you get breakfast and dinner, of course Japanese style, and a nice bathhouse room pumping fresh mountain spring water from the aquifers that seem to exist all over Japan. We slept four to a room, Japanese style with tatami mats all over and crashing out on futons with bean pillows. It was quite nice to get out of Tokyo and get back to nature.

The rental snowboards were actually of pretty piss poor quality when compared to the US, which I found both startling and completely expected. I mean — the kids here suck [which comes later], so why would they know the first thing about what a nice board should and will feel like? The boards were mostly covered in scratches head to toe, piece of crap bindings, boots that were from the Regan administration era, and edges that couldn’t cut your skin if you hammered your fist into it.

The most surprising, as hinted at earlier, was the complete and absolute level of suck that exists. For the price, about 50 dollars for two all-day passes, the facilities and snow quality was extremely surprising. If you went off course at any point you were greeted with at least five feet of fresh puffy powder snow. With more skilled friends and my board in tow, I would have been doing glade runs all day.

But these kids suck. Seriously. They spent at least 50% of the time sitting on their ass in the snow. I know in Japan if it is not your “thing” then you are not dedicated. It is a shame really, because snowboarding really isn’t my “thing” either but yet I could board circles around 99.9% of these kids. I saw one REAL rider the entire time, and only for a fleeting second, and all he did was switch 180 on like a three foot table to a clean front side 360 on the six foot table in the only nice rhythm section in the park. I did not see anyone attempting the 10-foot table once, which was a shame because the landing was nice fresh untouched powder. Again, had I brought my own equipment I would have never stopped shredding that hit.

I was prepared for that but what depressed me the most was, as I have complained about previously, was the “sameness” to everything that we did. From the bus, to the hotel we stayed at, to the bathhouses, the mountains, rental equipment, everything had this strange sameness to it that resonated a deep chord in my soul that I really do not like.

The town the resort exists in is quite interesting too. See, Japan has a huge problem with the aging population and declining birth rate, much like other countries, and this town was a perfect example of that. All of the young kids have since gone off to college in Tokyo, and left the old people to die [seriously]. There are hoards of abandoned rotting houses. Well, the might not even be abandoned but due to the lack of footprints in the snow, that was the only conclusion I could come up with. This is like one of those towns that are always on the news in Japan, because whenever it snows really hard in places like that, huge numbers of old people die because they either freeze to death or starve.

Once again I am reminded why I am glad I am not Japanese.

The Warrior Diet
Basically this diet can be summarized into a single sentence.

Eat like a Paleolithic man.

So far I am on day 2. I started a blog on Google’s Blogger but I think I should update here when I am bored as well. I will back post day 1 and 2 for your reading pleasure.

Day 1—
Yet another one of many blogs I have spread out across the internet, this one in particular deals with the new diet I have recently found called the “Warrior Diet.” The concept is quite simple; bring humans back to the Paleolithic period, and eat like they did. For the Google Book click here.

So far, I am still eating my normal breakfast, reduced fat milk and bran cereal, followed up by some coffee. For lunch, I have a banana in my pocket. Right now, I am really hungry. Let us see how this goes!

Stats:
167cm
66kg
Military Press: 40kg
Push Press: 50kg

Day 2—
Last night I kind of splurged a little and ate Japanese okonomiyake for dinner. Basically a mix of water, flour, egg, cabbage, tuna, and little pieces of bacon all tossed together into a frying pan, lightly cooked with a dab of oil so it does not stick, and topped with some special okonomiyake sauce and mayonnaise. It was quite delicious.

Now it is about 12 o’clock and I am really hungry. So far all I have ingested was coffee. I have a banana in my bag that is looking more and more delicious as the day goes on. I do notice a much higher level of alertness than I usually exhibit at this time of day, but I must admit it might possibly be due to the coffee and nothing else.

I feel like I should be getting some better fruits that do not have a very high glycemic level. Most likely I will end up switching to grapefruit and oranges for the high fiber levels.

The story continues! 伝説をつづく

So I had this really long essay on snowboarding in Japan, but I forgot it at home. So stay tuned. Check out my flickr on the right side for the pictures.

So I had my first reverse culture shock experience today. I was watching videos online of the latest debate between Obama and Clinton and their excessive use of each others first name came as a blow. I mean, regardless of who is talking about what, I doubt that they are the best of friends. I guess it is weird because after being here for so long, you can learn a lot about people relations by the way they refer to them in Japanese — that whole “san” thing that like to make fun of. [Me included].

I guess I really am turning Japanese, no matter how much I fight it! NOO!

*This has nothing to do with my life in Tokyo, and everything to do with my life, my brain, the way I think and feel. A personal rant that makes me cry the deepest tears because of how frustrating it is living a lie — a façade — and is probably the reason why I drink so heavily, smoking on the trains at 5 in the morning getting faces from Japanese people while I just shrug and say, “I just don’t give a fuck.”
–
I get it all the time. People make fun of me ritually because whenever I hear some asinine claim about something, I’m the first one within seconds checking what the good kids on the Internet think about it. I was not always like this, although I have been on the Internet for a lot longer than most people. I remember the birth and rise of both Google and Wikipedia.

I am sure I can remember when I first got into science. I remember getting a book from my parents in the 80s that was like a “Cool things that science does for us,” kind of book. It was well written, and well illustrated, and while the English was way over my head in a lot of sections, what I did understand baffled me and the pictures dazzled my rods and cones. There was and still is no doubt in my mind – I am hooked, science is the shit.

I also happen to be a member of a very religious, Irish catholic family. My mom [I know you’re reading this and I love you with all my heart] drove us to church and Sunday school, on Mondays, up until my little sister got her conformation; a very long time. However, even before I got my confirmation my doubts began.

I remember the day. It was a snowy winter day; us kids were outside playing on a weekend or day off. A little while earlier before he started treatment, my brother, at 15 years old, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I don’t remember what I asked him, only his reply. “I don’t believe in God. What did I ever do to disserve this?” It hit home too hard. It was like when a rock flung by a car in front of you hits your windshield. Once that pit was there, the cracks only spread, albeit slowly.

That was when my interest in Buddhism started, as my interest in Asia began to foster into an obsession. I liked the things that Zen Buddhism said. All that talk from D.T. Suzuki about no-ego, the upper consciousness, deep alpha level meditation: this was like religious science! I thought.

When I went to college for the first time my thoughts on the individual mind began to forest into something that would later become a pillar of my being. Research on exercise and mental health were starting to reach full steam ahead, people were doing brain scans on monks to try and understand what was going on. It was like my skeptical utopia of a thousand year old text being up held by modern science. There was something real going on here that I needed to become a part of.

The cracks were spreading but the windshield is still intact.

For the next few years I wrestled with my split personality. For a while I considered myself a Zen Christian, one who believes that Jesus is our lord and savior and that meditation was a more pure form of praying. This held up for a while, and I even started going to church in the army.

I did start getting disenfranchised with the bible long before that. I thought that literal interpretation was the same as smashing your face with a rock. I thought that the good of the whole far outweighed the good of the few, and that women should always be pro-choice, banning stem-cell research and the war on terror had entirely different motives, and all at the end of the day was nothing more than excuses for people to keep fighting.

Even for a long time in college I would quote biblical lines to my friends to help them out. They were going through some tough times and are good Christians, I thought. Why not pull out my knowledge, my training. I know the lines; I know the interpretations and the meanings. Hell, I even read the Da Vinci Code and found it nothing more than entertaining.

Windshield still there!

Then one day my good friend and co-worker Young-Min and I were in the library joking about some of the stupid articles on Wikipedia and he got me onto this one about Nazi Mysticism. It took me all of a few minutes to pull that one apart, but I stumbled onto something much better – the Nag Hammadi texts. I became enthralled, read as much as I could from the best authors on the subject, and spend countless thousands of hours pouring over translated works. I read the bible, many times, in a row, cover-to-cover, back to back. I memorized most of the Gospel of Thomas because I found it so fascinating. I even did research and read the original book on the theory that Jesus actually spent the missing 20 years of his life in India at a Hindu monastery. As a firm believer in Occam’s Razor, I began to see the truth for what it really is. Christianity is a sham, invented by those who were in power to remain in power, and has nothing to do with anything any more than me worshiping an imaginary idea of a perfect ham sandwich.

But I still felt that pull whenever I looked at images of Jesus on the cross, which to me was God’s way of saying, “You are smart, Brian. Don’t concentrate on the gates to heaven as much as the paradise that exists beyond. You know that you should be a good person, and that to me is the most important thing of all.” I think I stole that subconsciously from Buddhism. The quote goes something like, “If you only see the finger pointing to the moon, then you miss it in all its true beauty.”

It’s cracked, broken, looking like something in a junkyard, but by golly it’s still attached to the car somehow.

Then my friend lent me this book that everyone has been talking about online. Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion.” I had read about the book before in a Time magazine debate between an atheist evolutionary biologist, Dawkins, and some crackpot Christian Scientist who claimed to be the same. The debate I read wasn’t even a close match. Dawkins destroyed him, the very essence of his personality came out by the language he used to decimate his opponent, all the while retaining a smug humility about him that seemed to suggest he was on to something much bigger than anything any religious person could hope to fathom. It was like my Zen experience all over again, only this time much more liberating.

In the very first chapter of the book he confirmed my deepest darkest secrets and as I read he pulled apart the bandages that covered my religious scars only to show me there was nothing there to begin with and flooded my world with a new radiant light of science. That windshield not only was completely destroyed, its barely even sand now. The message he was saying was the truth. All the nonsense, all the ghost stories, goblins, vampires, and magical genies are nothing more than fairy tales. If god heals the sick, then he hates amputees. Abraham’s God, Zeus, Thor, Ra, and Allah all share one common thread – human beings invented them all so that the darkness at night was a little less scary.

My world became so clear, so profound, so liberating it was like I was born again, into a new realm of awesome power. It’s science bitches! The force that has transformed our way of life holds all the answers. Faith is an intellectual cop-out. At the end I was mad it took me so long to realize it. I can stop worrying about basically everything, and take comfort in the fact that at the end, there isn’t any light at the tunnel, or even a tunnel. The more I read, the more I discover for myself, and the more clearly my picture of reality comes into focus. Evolution destroys the need for a God on every level including the cosmic level. That it is ok to say, “Well we as a species don’t really know what happened at , but that doesn’t mean we need to put there to justify its existence. That we really just don’t know, but when we do we will be able to talk about it.”

Religious people like to claim that the liberals are oppressing them. Yes, this is true. The truth of the matter is, we really don’t like you. It sickens us to see what people do in the name of “God” when all it takes is the slightest bit of insight to realize that all religion is crock of shit.

Here comes the hard part.

It sure is fuckin’ lonely at the end of the day. On one hand, it makes my love for my family stronger than it ever has been. Without them, I am nothing. It makes me want to surround myself with my good friends too and make sure they know how much they mean to me. At the end of the day, love is all we have.

I do not live in a world of unicorns and dead people in the clouds waiting for me when I die. I live in the world where if I kill a bajillion people and then commit suicide, the only thing I’ll feel is nothing. That the only difference between losing consciousness and death is that you only know you blacked out when you wake up. Death is the same thing; only you do not wake up. Zip, nada, done, out, blackness. We have all experienced death; only we know it because we wake up. Makes sense to me, and falls perfectly inline with Occam’s Razor.

Life has become special and bleak, like the warmest bed in the universe surrounded by the blackest night imaginable. Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and many others have said it beautifully. Do not be sad that this is all you get, be happy that you got it at all. Be happy that it took the universe about 10 billion years to make us the way we are. We should feel lucky to be alive, to know we are alive, and be thankful we had a chance to participate in the greatest thing ever – existence.

But what am I to do with that? Of course I love being alive, I love every miserable second of it, but what does that mean to me as a person? I have gone through about a million different possible job opportunities that I would be ignorantly happy in, but at the end of the day my brain pulls me into one direction and one direction only. “Brian, this is your ego. Congratulations! You have completely mind-fucked yourself, but the problem is that you can never go back to the old self you were. You cannot rewind me, back to when you were ignorant. So what do you do for yourself and your future? There is only one answer, and I know we are crazy enough to do it. We have to do something BIG. We have to put our name in the history books, if there are books in the end.”

Recently I was thinking of just cashing it all in and becoming a bad guy. And when I say bad guy, I mean a really bad guy. Of course, I would never let anyone know what I was really doing, but at the end of the day I just eat dirt and all the while my family present and future would live nice and comfortably. Because if there’s no heaven or hell, then isn’t that the point really?

The more I entertained that idea the more it has pushed itself out of my head. I am not a bad guy. I have the capacity to do bad things, but at the end of the day even the best laid house of cards will still fall prey to any number of things, including the simple wave of a hand.

Then I watched a music video by a hip hop guy in Japan called K-Dub Shine, who I have listened to for many years. The video was made for a movie called “All the Invisible Children,” which tells the story about how children are exploited in Africa for the benefit of greedy tribesmen and what not. I think the project has spread to the entire world now, and shows child-related travesties all across the globe. I still haven’t actually seen the movie myself, but just the lyrics and the images in the music video were enough to haunt me for months.

It was decided right then. That these kids the world over are this planet’s future and it is going to take a movement to begin to protect them. These precious creatures are being exploited because of their youth and have no idea what they are doing: like little robots. Being in Japan has made me hate the idea that human beings have the capacity to be nothing but robots. Sometimes people tell me that I really do not fit in Japan, that I am too individual and too selfish. My only response is to that is, “I am not a robot. I try as hard as I can to think for myself and do what I want, not what others tell me to do.”

Then I watched this movie called “Zeitgeist.” You can see it on the movie main page for free via Google video. I watched this in the mid evening today, and for 8 hours I’ve been looking for anything to try and change my mind. It did not take long to debunk any of the other 911 conspiracy videos, but this one it seems like the best they can come up with is something like, “It is full of anecdotal evidence.” It is not even about 911, but about the web of lies we have been force-fed since the early 1900s. I wont say anything more other than just watch it.

It has brought me new light, new purpose. It talks about stuff that I have researched for years, and does it flawlessly. I am glad to be a good fighter, proud to be a good soldier, because I refuse to let these people bully me around. I want to be part of this movement, this new free thought that is emerging. Where we as a human species are finally banning together and realizing the travesties all around us and finally have the courage to stand up and do something. We will not let leaders tell us that god spoke to them and told them to invade Iraq. That god does not like stem-cell research because it might actually make drugs that can cure people rather than fund the treatment until death. That god hates homosexuals even though it clearly exists in the entire animal kingdom, which is also entirely atheist I might add. I want to be part of this movement that says we are not going to take this shit and we sure as hell ain’t gonna take it sitting down.

I am willing to fight. I do not fear death anymore. I want to help put a stop to this madness and bring about change, at least fuel the idea that we can actually live on this planet together and at least fight over the real issues instead of blaming other people and other gods. It has become more transparent than my windshield, and we see right through the lies and deceit. We can all do it but we all have to put aside our petty jealousy and consumerist views of the American dream, of a good life, and the dumb idea that we are actually different. We are human, and therefore we are the same. But first we need to kill the notion of God and get that scab of human existence off of our palms so that we can really get to work in the field of earth.

Because at the end of the day, love is all we have. It is our greatest and most beautiful contribution we can give back to the world. If everyone worked just a little bit to put just a little bit of love that we feel for our families into our neighbors, into a stranger, into someone we have not even seen, then our world will be flooded with peace and happiness. We don’t need some 2000-year-old Arab messiah who floats on clouds to do it for us. We can do it ourselves, but we need to break out of this mental prison that those in power have put in place for us, and we need to do it NOW. We, the free thinkers, need you. We need you to think for yourself, to do your own homework, to reach your own conclusions, and at the end of the day talk to other people about what you have learned. The key word here is learning, because we are all equipped with the capacity, but completely lack the perspicacity.

www.zeitgeistmovie.com

I haven’t written in a while lately and for that I apologize. Life here has settled into the almost-mundane category as I like to call it. I’m completely adjusted to my existence here. I’m completely comfortable speaking Japanese to anyone, mostly. I’m just good in my own way.

What’s interesting to me lately is this feeling of straight “comprehension,” that’s been happening. When you study another language at first you constantly have to map words to translations to understand, but eventually your brain finds those neural interactions on its own and the conscious mind doesn’t need to do it anymore.

Lately that’s what’s been happening with me. I find myself watching TV more and more, not because I find it interesting, but because I love being able to tune out reality and just zone out in front of a TV that’s playing something in a language that’s not my own.

I used to hate watching Japanese TV because at the end of the day, I had no idea what was going on. Now I watch just about everything and anything. There are still times when I don’t catch entire sentences or more, but i’m used to it.

I noticed this shift in my brain taking place when I started to actually feel moved by something on TV. I find it generally easier to laugh at stupid things, but to understand the deeper emotions of something, you either need to fully understand, or have subtitles. Since even if I did have subtitles they would be in Japanese anyway, the first time I noticed this I was quite surprised. More so because I didn’t even realize what was happening until after the program was over and my mind was racing.

It was quite shocking.