Sinking into the seat, after back to back nights in airports–one in Uzbekistan and one in Narita (outside of Tokyo), with my two bulky bags leaning against me and a huge content with life smile implanted across my face, still leftover from Turkey. I look around at all the foreign faces and think to myself how this place is more unlike any place that I have ever been to. New Japanese friends

It’s 7 a.m. on the train to Tokyo; the cart is filled with people on the way to work wearing ties and professional looking skirts, everyone in complete silence, half the people close-eyed seemingly dosing off, half staring directly at the empty space in front of them. I can’t tell whether or not they are actually deep in thought or just zoning out, but I suspect the latter. With a matador-cape red polyester shirt, white capri wind breaker pants with red wine stains all over them, hiking shoes, signature Carolina blue headband pulling my otherwise strangely unkempt brown hair back, a comparative body size that made me look like Godzilla, and a ‘warm’ olfactory greeting from a shower-less past half a week, needless to say, I probably stuck out a little. Some people advocate that while traveling, one should try to tone down and conform a bit to the particular culture at hand. Well, fuck that philosophy–for some reason, I don’t think that I would appear much less freakish here if you stuck me in a kimono with a bowl of ramen noodles and chopsticks in front of me.

This past week has been a much needed period of recuperation, spent at the cozy confines of old college friend Kevin’s apartment in the tiny town of Yasugi in the Shimane province. To the readers probable dismay, this entry won’t have any photos or Jefferey-esk stories, mainly because I haven’t really been putting my self out there to experience or shoot them; its more been a week or rest and relaxation. With the exception of a few days that I went to school with Kev and helped teach his English classes, during the days I’ve just been reading voraciously–raiding his fresh and new supply of books, enjoying the free internet access, getting back into current events and the markets, and planning the rest of the trip.

To give my impressions of Japan would seem a tad ill conceived, as essentially all of my time has been spent in the most rural of the 47 Japanese provinces. To generalize my biases to all of Japan would be akin to visiting Redneckville, Alabama and proclaiming that Americans regularly partake in incestuous relations and drunken cow-tipping.

Needless to say though, Japan is a completely foreign place, by far more so than any other country that I have visited. Many westerns have heard about the Japanese attention placed on the group, the general society at large, over the individual, as well as the process rather than result driven perspective of everyday life that Japanese culture embraces. Moreover, Japanese xenophobia, the failure of accepting foreigners, gaijin they affectionately call them, as one of their own is also well documented. Experiencing these things first-hand, as well as listening to the stories of the many ‘resident foreigners’ like Kevin who has been living here for over a year and speaks close to fluent Japanese, gives one the strange and unique feeling of being a lost outsider. (if interested in the topic of these topics, check out this fascinating article analyzing Japanese xenophobia: http://www.bigdaikon.com/mystory-20030304.shtml).

I could go on about peculiarities of Japan for a while–it really is a strange fascinating place–but there are a few things that I view as more important and pressing to convey to you now: the existence of a couple of great resources that I just recently discovered. One is a traveling organization called Hospitality Club (www.hospitalityclub.org), with almost two hundred thousand members worldwide, is an organization much like Servas, with a similar emphasis on friendship, inter-cultural exchange, and as the name suggests–hospitality, but with a much younger membership base, fifteen times more members, and the kicker…its free!! As the membership numbers seemingly increase by the day, HC is an organization which helps you see the world shrinking in front of your very eyes. As Tom Friedman’s most recent book proclaims, The World Is Flat!

The second great resource is actually more of an idea. I first stumbled across it while speaking with Mel, my Turkish friend who I had a layover with in Uzbekistan. En route to Seoul, Korea to reunite with his martial arts Master, Mel, with his baggy linen pants, brillo-pad-eske brown hair, slim tall frame and gaunt tanned face, says to me in impeccable English with a hint of a Turkish and French accent: “And you call yourself a Traveler? Without ever Hitchhiking?!?” He looks at me with a smile of disbelief as I tell him how my mother hitchhiked across much of the world in her younger days, and I toyed with the idea slightly before, but for whatever reason never gave it that much consideration. “Man” Mel continues, “hitchhiking is THE way to travel and if you want to really see the world. You meet so many people…the real people, man. Later this year I’m planning to hitchhike from Istanbul all the way to India.”

From there on it was written: I am going to incorporate hitch hiking into one of my means of transportation while traveling, starting in one of the most expensive places in the world for getting from point A to point B: Japan. I don’t know why I didn’t really consider it earlier; hitchhiking is WHAT I WANT: meet the locals and here their tales, the adventure and uncertainty of it, and also, the cost isn’t too out of line with my value-centered conscientiousness either ( Check out the five-year hike around the world journey of Kinga and Chopin: http://www.geocities.com/kingachopin/main_eng.html. Go through the ‘Inspirations’ portion; it’s well, really inspiring.)

So there you have it folks, consider this journey of mine revolutionized. With the tandem of Hospitality Club friends potentially at every corner of this great globe, and now a new means of getting there, who knows where this little trip of ours will take us!

Next entry: hitchhiking across Japan.