Yomikata: Clouds-->Kanji-->People

Clouds: almost at eye-level from the bus...

...and unbelievably solid.

As I descend into Kansai International Airport, there seems to be more sprawling city, clouds, and sea than there is visible land – and what land there is to see juts up in surprisingly sharp ridges, the backbone of a geology completely different from any I have known.

Not your typical American lawn...

Even the clouds here are different – much lower and flat-bottomed, with a distant solidness that seems to invite the touch of the eye and the click of the camera.  The clouds, in fact, have continued to fascinate me long since my first landing – their proximity thrusts me into a Miyazaki film, and I hear the version of “Country Roads” from Whisper of the Heart swell in the background.  Likewise with the heat, the 蒸し暑い-inspired desire to constantly be jumping back in the shower after riding my single-gear bicycle up the hill to school.  The emerald fields of rice, sweet-smelling in the hot air, crammed in between curious, close architecture, are so unlike the sprawling lawns of the American suburbs.  My first instinct is to discard my former environment like a worn-out lover, to take up wholly with this beautiful, foreign, cinematic, clean, sweaty place – but how?

My first impressions of Japan reveal as much about me as about the country.  I am still a little 恥ずかしい, in love with the unique environment I have been allowed to enter, but unsure of how to understand the people whose daily existence is here.  Thus, this blog marks my first foray into formal anthropology.  Since my landing three weeks ago, I have moved beyond these immediate impressions of the weather and the landscape and the architecture, to begin to engage with the people who inhabit it.  I see the signs around me, and every day is a lesson in how to read them – both those written, literally, in Japanese, and the deeper meanings written in the Japanese people themselves, in the way they interact with each other, their environment, with me.

Light to capture...

...kanji to read...

...people to engage.