Discovery in Omachi!

So yesterday I was about to get in my car with all the stuff from my apartment I wanted to sell to Hard Off, a chain pawn shop in Japan and I spotted something unusual. It was a weird little cafe right near the parking lot I park in. It stood out because I thought there was nothing in the block that I live in. There's supposed to be a sushi place on the corner as there's a glass display with wax food and a sign saying 寿司 (sushi) but I have not once seen it open. Anyways, there's this place called Dungaree's and its an Asian cuisine tea/coffee shop that doubles as a jazz bar. I don't think live bands ever play there, but the guy that runs it seems to have tons of records in his collection. The food wasn't too bad (not amazing though) I ordered some "bean curry" which was apparently a recipe from India. I think he just heated it up in the microwave, but still it didn't taste too bad, so maybe someone had made it earlier in the day. The corner of the place after you enter has several shelves of jazz records and the wall opposite the entrance has all sorts of Buddhist icons, many of which look to be from central Asian countries, not Japan. After I started eating, the guy lit up a cigarette, turned off the sumo match in the background and put on a jazz record. The smoking everywhere is what is the hardest to get used to. Chain restaurants still have smoking and non-smoking sections, something that is a bit harder to find in the US now. But thee are also those places, usually which serve alcohol that are just completely smoking. The smell bothers me quite a bit, but I'm gradually learning to put up with it.

So anyways, the silence is a little awkward because I'm sitting at the bar and he's sort of staring out the window in a direction almost facing me. Then he asks me where I'm from, a frequent conversation starter used by Japanese here. When I say America, he tells me "oh, I've been to America twice. Down to Atlanta and then up to Memphis and around that area." "The other time I went to Detroit and then Colorado." Those seemed like such weird places to go to, not exactly major foreign tourist destinations, I thought. Then he talked about hearing all the country music on his trips. "Do you like that stuff?" I asked. "Well, I don't dislike it, but it's not my favorite." Then I told him how Johnny Cash was just about all the country I could stand.

"Do you travel a lot?" I asked. "Yeah, in fact last week I got back from Nepal." I asked him if he'd been to India and to the countries that the cuisines on the menu were from. "Yeah, I have been to all those places." Apparently he's been to China 9 times. "I road the train all over, one time I took it from Harbin up in the far Northeast down to Shanghai. During one part of the journey you come to this station which is the train station with the highest altitude in the world. The cars are old American ones with diesel engines since the climb is so intense. You get this terrible altitude sickness. Meanwhile the bathrooms are just holes in the floor filled to the brim with toilet paper, so it's really disgusting. I was told to use the bathroom in the other cars because mine was so stopped up. The food is awful, too just some peanuts passed out by an old lady every once in a while. China is really just an awful country." Then he told me about all the diplomatic trouble China causes internationally and how it had border disputes with Russia over some small islands in the middle of a bordering river and Russia was finally like "just take it." He said how dirty India was. "In Japan the street and store signs don't look particularly interesting but if you take a look at the road, it's really super clean, right? India and China are just so dirty though." At the same time I thought it was funny how even though he felt that way about China, he'd gone back several times. The best part was when he pulled out a map of China and Russia and showed me all the places he'd been.

He told me how he traveled to Berlin 4 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and some of the other places he'd visited in Europe. "French people and Chinese, I think are some of the most nationalistic and arrogant. More so the Chinese, though."

I think the most shocking thing about this experience was how there are really super international people here. Often times I tend to think of the people in Yamagata as "hicks" since they have never been abroad and some have never even been to Tokyo. Many people don't seem to know anything substantial about the rest of the world and stereotypes of people from other countries are the only thing many Nagai natives have to go by, it seems. In someways it is similar to rural America. But I still think the people here are nicer.