reverse culture shock

I left Japan on-time at 15:25 Sunday afternoon, flew 9 hours to SFO, landing at about 08:30... at which point United Airlines had their typical domestic service string of incidents by changing the departure gate no less than three times, then slipping the listed departure time from 10:25 to 10:50, to 11:05, then 11:10. The joke was on us though: once we boarded the plane, a telltale light had to be investigated, keeping us at the gate and seatbelted until nearly 13:00. At no point during any of this trip was I able to sleep, though I had a brief, alarm-controlled nap after I finally got to the Miyako Inn. I've had two hours sleep in the last 30 hours, so I'm a bit punchy. This may be amplifying some of the effect of what I've experienced today, but there is also the nature of the seriously weird, cultural flip-flop I've had being here less than 10 hours.

Pulling into d/t Los Angeles in a cab, the view is really stark. There are vagrants asleep on streets that smell strongly of old piss. Some are on cardboard boxes, some have camping tents (arrayed in a row, blue, looking more temporary than their Osaka improvised shelter counterparts, but similarly tragic), and some people are just on the concrete sidewalks. Most of them don't look dirty, but they don't look clean. They look like they were walking home from a job, and didn't quite make it, laid down, and now the grime of Los Angeles is drifting, accumulating on them.

The interior of a car I saw looked strange. The steering wheel was in the wrong spot, and I thought, "Oh, how weird. This one's an import." But it wasn't; it was a typical, American, left-side drive vehicle, and I had double-juxtaposed which side the steering wheel "should" be on.

Japan town in Los Angeles is called "Little Tokyo," and is on the edge of the bad area, bordering on urban nothingness. Pretty much everything was closed when I went to go grab dinner, including the place the front desk recommended. There is an open air mall that has been around since 1980; I remember coming there in 1985 or so and buying a lot of imagawayaki (kinda like pancake batter that has been cooked in a two-sided grill with red bean paste in-between). The whole place is pretty run down feeling; Los Angeles' restaurants are required to show their A, B, C, or F grade for cleanliness/hygeine in the front window of their shop. Oddly all the restaurants have a "B" rating, though there is an image of fastidiousness in Japanese culture that would seem to make this unthinkable. The truth is most of the places I eat in Osaka would probably get a "C" even though they're immaculately clean in the preparation area. It's a different way of thinking, and I wonder if that's what has struck so many of these places into that grade.

I ended up eating at a little Chinese place stuck between a Starbucks and a Schlotsky's. Dinner was sauteed cod and veggies with rice, ordered from a flirty waitress who was dancing all over the place. She was bamboozled by my Japanese cell phone, which is really strange; it's not a particularly tricky phone, but I guess it still kicks most American phones butts. She asked if she could see it, then she wanted to open it and play with it, which of course was no problem, but it was weird, culturally. The differences between service in the USA and Japan continue to amaze me; while the Japanese version of waitressing is consumately professional, it is sometimes nice to see some life and individuality in people with whom you're interacting, even briefly. The place had Anchor Steam and Newcastle Brown on tap, and she said that drinks were half price, so would I like the "bigboomersomethingorother... It's about 'yay' high," she said, gesturing about 20cm from the tabletop — sure.

A LOT of food arrived. As in, I could have fed two people easily, possibly three. One large plate piled with fish and veggies, a full container on the side of rice (I kind of miss that style of longer grain white rice, even though I know it's cheap as hell in comparison to regular Japanese pearl grain). But the real disconnect happened when the beer arrived: it was about as tall as she'd described, but twice the diameter I'd expected. Good grief. Not surprisingly, the 2nd half was easier going down than the 1st half. I took my time, and watched the laker game on TV. Brooke Shields is now shilling for Ford, and looks kinda plastic-surgery creepy now. Darth Vader is trotted out in Burger King commercials. Charles Barclay has become quite large. By the end of the beer, none of this seemed too weird anymore.

On the way back to the hotel, a guy asked me for change. He'd been hitting up people who were sitting outside the restaurant. It always bothers me when someone is asking for handouts from someone who can't easily get away. I know that's the point, but it seems really rude, so I don't ever cave in that case. I got almost to the hotel when a well dressed guy started asking me something, so he caught me. He gave me some story about how he'd just got out of jail and needed to get home -- ack. Trapped. I had a single dollar, so I gave him that; my resistance to panhandlers has weakened from my time in Japan, where there are none. There are plenty of homeless in Japan - too many - but they don't ever ask for money. As soon as I had put the dollar bill in the first guy's hand, the first guy appeared out of nowhere, apparently having followed me. Now that he saw I had given some money out, he got all weird and desperate. "Hey, watch this!" he said, and started trying to breakdance in front of me. I mouthed apologies and tried to keep walking, but finally ended up giving him the remainder of my change. Some of it was Japanese; I wonder what he'll do with it.