Japan may seem to have it's so-called "strange customs," a tightly run society with more oddities than seem possible, and so many historical sights and hot spots to turn to, it makes Times Square look like a joke, its the people that really strike me now.On this short trip to Tokyo, I met some of the most interesting people by mistake. I suppose the ability to converse in Japanese fairly easily made the incidents more easy to come by, but I still found that every conversation with a new person I had, told me something about myself, and about life.
I could relate to so many of these strangers, more so than I thought I might have. I expect to relate to people at Kansai Gaidai, because like me, they have an interest in studying abroad and are around my age. These other people, however, ranged from 22 to 45 and all of them had an interesting story to share with me, and interesting advice to give me.
Even the two in the above picture, a Vietnamese artist and an English publisher, began talking to me when I was resting on the infamous Harajuku bridge, waiting for a performance to start. These two have been living in Japan much longer than I have, and had a very different and interesting perspective on Japan and Japanese culture to share with me. I just found it amazing, that so many people were comfortable starting conversations with me and so easily shared part of their lives with me.I suppose what I wanted to get at with this blog post, is that, I no longer see myself and Japanese people as very different from each other. Culture is culture and history is history, but people are fundamentally the same I think. There are shy people and outgoing people, there are crazy people and amazing people. There is no way to label everyone in one place, and no matter how hard we may try to categorize, there will always be exceptions to the rule.
