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Daily Journal
Monday-Tuesday, November 13-14, 2000 11/13/00 4:30 PM Pacific Time I am four hours into our flight. 
The plane is a 747.
There are 10 seats across (3-4-3) with two aisles.
There is a second floor for "business class customers"
and the first class passengers have a sleeping pod.
The stewards and stewardesses speak English, Thai,
Cantonese, Spanish, Japanese, and French. The movies
being shown are Frequency, Small Time Crooks, and The
Patriot. I've seen them all, so I choose to read
instead. 
The pilot has just announced that we are
along the coast of Alaska...only seven more hours to
go!
9:30 PM Pacific Time My watch reads 9:30 PM and the sun is still shining brightly above the clouds as I look out the window. How can this be? If we kept flying around the world, would it stay light forever? Did I follow the sun today? Two more hours 'til touchdown, then I'll reset my watch. 
I left San Francisco at around noon on
Monday. It will be Tuesday, 4:20 PM when I arrive in
Japan. Time sure does fly!
11/14/00 Tuesday 6:30 PM Tokyo Time We are riding in a chartered bus from the Narita Airport to our hotel in Tokyo. Customs went smoothly. My passport was checked, my baggage collected, and then I was on my way. As I look out the window, I notice the trucks have green lights on the front above the cab that go on and off. Our Japanese guide tells us that they light up according to the speed of the truck. One light may mean 50 miles/hour, two lights 60 miles per hour and so on. This way, a police officer knows how fast they are going just by looking at the lights. It is the Japanese way of keeping trucks from speeding! 11/15 Wednesday 4:30 AM Tokyo Time (from now on) As tired as I was after staying awake for 25 hours yesterday, now I can't sleep! My head is full of the thoughts that I want to write about last night. I remember when I read about this program, they called it an intense immersion into Japanese culture. Well, last night, I was totally immersed. A group of us met outside the "Green Room" in the hotel to have, what we thought, would be a light dinner with a former Japanese Fulbright Scholar. As we entered the "Green Room" each of us was given a table number and introduced to our hosts for the evening. Students, now I know how you feel when I split you up from your friends when we do group work! All of the teachers were crying because we couldn't go to dinner together! I was seated at table #15 with Hiroko Sasaki, an illustrator, and her husband Hisao Sasaki, a journalist. With me was Bill Gilbert, a high school math teacher from Massachusetts. I exchanged business cards with the Sasakis. I remembered to accept theirs with two hands and to keep it out and look at it while we spoke (as a sign of respect). I handed them my business card with the words facing them and bowed. It's a good thing I've been reading about their customs so I knew the proper business card etiquette. The four of us walked across the street to a Japanese restaurant. The restaurant was on the 7th floor of an office building that also seemed to be a shopping plaza. As we entered the restaurant's lobby, I removed my shoes and stepped into a little alcove with tables. I am sorry that I didn't have my camera, but I will try to explain the room. We walked on the floor, which was also our sitting area to get to our places around the table. Under the table, the floor was sunken, so when you put your feet under the table you felt as if you were sitting on a bench. However, you really were sitting on the floor! I'm sure I will get to another restaurant that is set up like that, so I will take a photo then. On to the food....first a dish what looked like yogurt. "It's tofu, very healthy for you," Sasaki San told me. It had the consistency of custard. I picked up my chopsticks and dove in. I wasn't sure how I would get it to stay on my chopsticks, but I did manage. It was delicious, not like any tofu I've ever eaten! Sasaki San asked me if I needed a fork...I guess he was watching me maneuver with my chopsticks! I told him I needed the practice with the chopsticks. Next came a dish with a soggy looking cube of something with a radish and onion decoration. Luckily it was only a one-inch cube, and I gobbled it quickly. "Do you like sashimi?" "Oh, yes!," I lied. It's a good thing I tried sushi before I came to Japan. I was prepared. The sashimi was raw whitefish. I mixed my wasabi (Japanese horseradish) with my soy sauce (which was the best I ever tasted) and dipped my fish in. It wasn't bad. I was proud of myself for getting the four slices down my throat! Each time, another dish was brought to the table, Bill, the math teacher, kept saying, "I thought you said this was going to be a light meal!" I watched him as his face kept turning redder and redder as he tried more and more new foods. Our next course was grilled fish. Hooray....cooked fish! I thought I was safe. The tray arrived with the following: squid, octopus, sardines, and some other things that they could not translate into English. I made sure that blowfish was not among them. The sardines were crunchy and the octopus was chewy and I almost finished what was on the plate. But that wasn't all! Did I tell you that we had just eaten 5 meals in the last 12 hours on the plane! Next was the shabu, shabu. Now I was excited! I tried this last weekend at a Japanese restaurant in Philadelphia. A panel in the center of the table was removed, and there was a burner. The waiter brings out a big ceramic bowl filled with a liquid that appeared to be chicken broth. The heat is turned on and the broth begins to boil. We dip in raw chicken with our chopsticks and swish it around for about 30 seconds and it cooks. Then it gets dipped into a soy sauce that we have added red pepper paste and scallions to. That cools it enough so we can eat it. Also in the broth, Sasaki San puts all kinds of vegetables, things that you would not find on your plate at home- seaweed, radishes, and other unnamed green things. This was all delicious. When we were done eating the chicken. The waiter brought bundles of noodles. They looked like bunches of angel hair pasta. There was also a container that looked like a piece of celery that had a ground chicken mixture in it. Sasaki San dished pieces of this mixture into the broth to make meatballs! It took no longer than one minute for the noodles to cook...and then we had our spaghetti and meatballs- Japanese style. Yum! This was my favorite part of the meal. Of course, by now I was very full and decided to try out my Japanese and asked where the bathroom was. "Otayarai doko-ni, arimas-ka," I asked. "Very good," Sasaki San says. I ask if I should put my shoes on to go to the bathroom, but was told that there were slippers next to my shoes to use. Okay, I've got to get this experience over, I thought. So I put the slippers on and went looking for the bathroom. I did not find it right away. It was not in the restaurant. It was out near the elevators. I did not see anyone's shoes or slippers outside the bathroom door and I heard talking from inside, so I decided to wear the slippers in. (In a home, there are special toilet slippers to put on.) Okay, I was safe...the office girls had their shoes on inside the bathroom...whew! Of course, I got a little lost getting back to my table. It seems as though there were four restaurants on the same floor, all looking rather similar to me. After three wrong turns, I found the right spot and was ready for dessert. A scoop of green tea ice cream was waiting for me. A refreshing end to a very interesting evening! By the way, the conversation was wonderful, and I will save what I learned from the Sasakis for another time. The sun is coming up and I need to get ready for my first full day of activity in Japan. Ohayo gozaimus! 
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