human waves

We took the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka at a speed that blended all the colors outside the window into long flowing lines of light. Osaka was the capital of Tokyo right after an emperor united all of Japan, and built the famous Osaka Castle, and merchants and others sprang up their homes in the surroundings. All traces of that were bombed into nothingness, turned into a thing of the past, and all have been reconstructed with fake models as reminders of what once was, and concrete buildings of shopping and flashy neon lights of red-light and other entertainment districts.

After visiting the castle and walking down the shopping streets, we did karaoke last night, my sister, brother and I. I thought it was a significant moment that the three of us were together, singing The Little Mermaid:s Under the Sea...which was a song we all sang to watching the movie for the hundredth time and the hundred-and-first time. My brother gets crazy when he sings K, curling up and sticking his feet in his sky, screaming into the Mic.

Today we went to an Onsen - Japanese for Hot Springs. They separate the areas for Men and Women. Everybody is naked. This is a scene that one would never see in the US. Other things you would never see in the US is the formality and upbeatness of employees here, like the girl who passed flyers out to us today, if she were American she probably would have had *blah* and *boring* circulating through her blood in all her actions, passing things out meekly. Everybody gets really close and squished together in the Subway as well, when it:s rush hour and people need to squeeze in like clothes in an overpacked suitcase. New Yorkers would yell back and scream if they ever got pushed like that. America seems to have a culture of *personal spaces* and *personal bubbles* that are never to be violated or penetrated. It:s unfortunate, because riding that train, being encircled by hundreds of bodies was a heart-warming experience, like being enclosed in a protective womb, I didn:t have to hold onto anything because there was nowhere to fall too...the human waves of the train would catch me.