Packing up my suitcases the day before I left was a difficult ordeal. My amount of souvenirs and other personal items had greatly accumulated during the past nine months, and one of my suitcases was a kilogram over the weight limit. But I was not forced to pay any overweight luggage fees at the airport. The flights were tedious, and the one from Osaka to San Francisco was a little over ten hours. I was relieved to finally arrive home late at night yesterday evening.

I am already experiencing a lot of culture shock. I miss the polite atmosphere and indirect way of talking that are characteristics of Japan. It's also odd to look around and see that everyone looks similar to me here, as opposed to Japan, were I easily stood out from the crowd when walking down the street.

Thank you for reading my blog and keeping up with my adventures in Japan throughout the past nine months, I appreciate your support and interest!!!

My last few days in Japan were spent in Kobe saying goodbye to my Japanese friends and foreign exchange student friends. I met up with friends for lunch and dinner, and every time I would eat with someone, they'd always ask me what kind of food I wanted to eat in case there were any foods I wanted to taste one last time before I headed back to the U.S. and was no longer able to indulge. But I always answered "washoku," which means Japanese food in general. I will definitely miss eating white rice and raw fish and seaweed on a regular basis once I return home.

Saying goodbye to my friends was difficult. I know I can keep in touch easily with the Internet, but who knows when I'll return to Japan, it may not be for another few years! However, I am determined to return after all the language study and culture study I've put in over the past nine months. It would be a shame to not utilize my knowledge, and there's still much more to learn!

This past weekend in Tokyo, Shoji and I went to the Asakusa district, home of the famous Myoujin Shrine. We had no idea that on the precise weekend we chose to go there would be a famous festival called Kanda Matsuri, so we arrived and the shrine area was extremely crowded with festival goers, stands selling food, and festival participants, including some playing musical instruments. There was also an unending parade of portable shrines winding through the shrine complex. This festival is held to display and carry the portable shrines with the purpose of pacifying the Shintou gods, but it also brings the community (maybe the larger community of Japan) together to celebrate.

In addition, Shoji and I went to Tokyo Tower, a famous Tokyo landmark known for its great views, to check out the Tokyo skyline. We also saw the famous Super Dry Hall (with the unique golden statue sitting atop it) on our way to the festival in the Asakusa area. This building was designed by a French architect and belongs to Japan's popular Asahi Beer Company.

I have added some pictures from my recent travels, so please check out this blog entry and other recent entries to see various photos!

This past Monday and Tuesday I toured many shrines and temples in Kamakura and in Tokyo. I went with a family friend whom I had just met for the first time. He married a Japanese woman and is living in Tokyo doing work as a translator.

In Kamakura I saw a giant Buddha (it was a very tall statue, and I was able to enter the statue and see the inside as well). In Tokyo I went to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine where war criminals and other personages from World War II are enshrined.

After returning from Okinawa, the next day my program held a farewell party for all of us foreign exchange students. There was a nice lunch, speeches by several students and important people from Konan University, and a few musical performances (I performed a piece on the violin). The very same day I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Tokyo. I have since spent the past few days meeting up with various friends and sightseeing in the Tokyo area. If you recall my earlier blog entry about maid cafes, well, I wanted to see how things really are, so on Sunday afternoon I headed to a maid cafe in Akihabara. Many people go to maid cafes, but some of the regular customers are unmarried, working men who have a lot of money and no wife and children on which to spend their money. In addition, however, there were many women customers waiting in line at the maid cafe my friends and I picked out. The maids were dressed not in a sexy manner but in a cute manner, with their bodies were well covered. We had some maids welcome us to the cafe, take our order, and bring us drinks, but aside from that, the interaction was limited. As in most cases, the more interaction one wants to receive, the more money one must pay, so my friends and I resigned ourselves to watching the maids interact with other customers who were willing to pay more money for conversation, drinks, and food. One rather alarming part of the visit was the sign posted in Japanese at the entrance of the restaurant. The sign included a list of actions that were prohibited for customers of the maid cafe. Some of the actions included: 1) Asking the maid what her working shift hours are 2) Taking pictures of the maid with your cell phone, camera, etc. 3) Asking the maid for her contact information 4) Waiting outside the cafe for the maid to arrive or leave work 5) Following the maid home from work, or any other stalker-like behavior These prohibitions suggest that this sort of behavior is rampant within this line of work. Although the pay is good, I wonder why the women who work as maids put up with these sorts of work-related risks.

This past week I took my first trip to Okinawa. Naha, the biggest city on Okinawa's main island, is filled with buildings and is very crowded. Even though most of the buildings were constructed after World War II, in general the city's buildings looked rather old and worn. Also, Okinawa seems to be missing some of the wealth that is characteristic of Japan thanks to its strong economy and the economic bubble that occurred in the 1980s.

I went with my host mother from four years ago who lives in Chiba city, and once we drove out of Naha and up north, the scenery turned to subtropical plants, sandy white beaches, and the beautiful aquamarine-colored sea. In addition to doing a lot of sightseeing at historical places such as two castles, I also spent a day doing marine sports on a small island to the northwest of Okinawa's main island. I tried parasailing and went up forty-five meters above the ocean for a stunning view of the surrounding islands and ocean.

On the last day I met my former host mother's friend, who is Okinawan (Okinawans are different from Japanese, as Okinawa was formerly its own country), and we saw a traditional Okinawan dance performance. Many people living in Okinawa can do what's called a finger whistle, where you place your thumb and index finger in your mouth and blow to create a whistling sound. I had some of the dancers teach me the technique after the performance, but I'm still unable to do the finger whistle. My host mom, her friend, and I also discussed the situation of the American military bases in Okinawa, but of course opinions are very divided. It seems that some Japanese still want United States bases in Japan to help protect Japan since it does not have its own military, but right now all of the bases are in Okinawa, so people are suggesting that some of the bases be moved to other areas of Japan. However, no one will volunteer their own area for a military base, so nothing's being done yet.

I recently completed two essays, one for each of my Japanese Culture Studies courses. I'll give a brief summary of each essay in order to provide an example of what I've studied in both courses.

For my Society and Law course, I wrote about the drive for gender equality here in Japan. I looked at it from a legal point of view: what laws have been passed, and how progress toward making the law into reality is measured. As recently as 1999 Japan passed a law laying down its basic standards for a gender equal society and how it wanted to achieve those goals. The law emphasized combined efforts from national, prefectural, and local governments, as well as assistance from foreign countries that already have a established a standard of gender equality. After ten years, a cabinet office dealing with gender equality conducted a survey and other research to see how close the country is to realizing the ideals of the '99 law, but progress is slow. Since this was not a research paper, I did not come up with an actual thesis and prove it, but I'm thinking that Japanese society in general does want gender equality, it will just take time and conscious effort to change social practices and citizens' attitudes.

In my Literature course, we spent a lot of time discussing how women were portrayed in Japanese literature. They are often sacrificial characters that die to save a male character, or they are portrayed as helpless and at the mercy of an overbearing, power-hungry male character. However, the two women in the stories I chose to compare and contrast in my essay were both temptresses and full of evil passions, endangering the piety of the monks whom they encountered in the stories. In one of the stories, the monk is seduced by the woman, but when he breaks his promise to marry her, she turns into an poisonous snake and kills him. In the other story, the monk is just about to return to the woman's cottage and renounce his religious vows in order to be with the woman when he meets an old man who talks him out of his rash decision. At any rate, women are not often portrayed with much power in old Japanese literature, but if they do have power, they seem to often use it in a terrible way.