Recent Observations

--Japanese kids go to school ALL THE TIME. I pass uniforms at 9 pm on Friday night, 8 am on Sunday morning...

--I see far more high-school girls out in uniform than high-school boys. I am beginning to suspect that they just like the pleated mini-skirt look. (For the record, high-school uniform skirts leave nothing to be desired in terms of fulfilling testosterone-fueled fantasies of Asian schoolgirls. Also, schoolgirl prostitution laws have only remarkably recently started being enforced. How depressing.)

--There is no way to feel whiter or blonder than to be walking through the city when the Nationalists show up to spew their rhetoric that I can't understand but am told details their hatred of everything foreign. Such as me.

--If you are foreign in Japan and you pass another foreigner on the street, you smile and nod, even if you don't know them. There is a camaraderie born of knowing that one of the two of you probably just had a baffling interchange with a store clerk, and that you're both afraid of the Nationalists.

--Sendai has decided that it is time to be autumn now. Last weekend, the temperature dropped 15 degrees in the course of 48 hours.

--Japanese sweaters and fall coats are extremely expensive.

--Miso soup is a good thing. Natto is not.

--The fastest way to make Japanese middle-schoolers laugh is to tell them what we eat for breakfast in America.