Pressing Boundaries (Daniel)

     The next morning we woke up with the sunrise. This is no small feat in Korea, which, like Japan, does not use daylight-saving time. Already, the sun had been rising soon after 5:00 in the morning and I had been told that by summer it can rise as early as 3:30 in Japan. (Sarah and I were blessed with an apartment already furnished with long, thick curtains).

     Outside the streets were barren. We didn't see another person for several minutes. The weather was cold, and the red streaks of morning light were still fading. We stopped at a McDonald's for breakfast (Stomach -3 points). We walked quiet and tired, eating our Egg Mcmuffins. At about 6:30 I could finally feel some warmth from the sun. I was not the only one.

     As we approached one of Seoul's more centralized we began to notice the waking homeless population. We passed a group of three homeless men starting off their early morning drinking, smoking, and playing dice. They were sitting only fifty feet from a small ground story building into which dozens of homeless and impoverished people were cramming into for day labor. We passed several day labor centers. It was the first sign of how vastly different Korea really is from Japan.

     There are certainly homeless in Japan. Admittedly, this surprised me at first because I'd heard so little about issues like poverty, unemployment, mental illness, and drug addiction in Japan. Well, rest assured, these things are very real in Japan. But you just don't see them that often. Whether homelessness and its root causes are as prevalent in Japan as they are in the USA, I cannot say. I do know that Osaka is twice as densely populated as San Francisco and yet I see a homeless Osakan less than once a week, if even that.  When I do, they are usually curled up, asleep in some hidden corner of a train station. The only time I have seen begging was when a man approached me quietly and somberly, whispering his words.

     We were headed for Camp Kim, an old USO camp that led bus tours to the demilitarized zone between the South and North Korea. It turned out to be a single-story facility sitting with dusty windows and dull beige paint that hasn't been reapplied since the Korean War. It sits beside some withering shrubbery in the middle of modestly-sized parking lot. Had it not been for the walling around the complex and a giant USO sign I think we might have mistook it for a YMCA and kept on walking.

"Come for our restroom, stay because the gates are only opened on the half hour."

     We waited for our tour bus inside Camp Kim's lobby. It felt like the crowded front office of a Motel 6. Only there were no stale sweet rolls and gut-rot coffee. But there was a large crowd of arriving tourists and they were overwhelmingly American.

     This felt strange but familiar too me. Like Mowgli at the end of The Jungle Book, gazing upon other humans for the first time. I had grown accustomed to quiet reservation of the Japanese. I have come to enjoy hearing nothing but the constant stream of a language I don't understand. I find that I can choose to let it be soothing, like a continuous stream of white noise. Or when I want, I can watch the speakers for body language and listen to their tones and construct my accounts of their conversation. I enjoy projecting paranoia onto the wait staff at restaurants, as they look out upon their guests and quietly discuss which one might be the food critic that blasted their restaurant in the paper and which of that critic's dishes would be best to turn into "a spitter". Other times I see a young train attendant stop to politely remind a pretty girl of the train's cellphone restrictions, but I can hear that what he is really asking for is a single moment of her attention with a long shot hope that maybe, somehow, this could lead to something real.

     In Camp Kim's lobby, all I heard was loudly spoken English. I heard couples arguing about plans later that day. I heard a child, rather eloquently, trying to persuade his parents that their was still time to correct their folly and leave for the Gangnam amusement park. But mostly I heard listless complaints simply meant to fill up conversation like "Jeez, where could that bus be?" and "you'd think they'd have enough seats in this room for a full bus-load of people" and "I'll bet the bus doesn't even have a toilet, if I piss my pants it's gonna be everyone's problem." The last one was me. Luckily I was able to hold my bladder during our two hour bus ride to the DMZ.

      Our tour guide on the bus was a bubbly Korean girl, not much older than twenty, who barely had enough English skills to help someone find a supermarket. Despite this, her enthusiasm kept people engaged enough to listen as she tried to explain that the free way has military outposts every one hundred yards because spies from North Korea SCUBA all the way down the parallel, climb out of the river, and dart across the free way to escape into South Korean cities.

"I swear guys, I'm just holding onto this snorkel mask for a friend."

         It was already hard enough to understand. But some rude mid-Westerner, sitting one seat behind me, felt it was his patriotic duty to lecture the nearest stranger on the all the ways he could think of in which Barack Obama was using the U.S. Constitution to wipe his ass. This man, who for the rest of this story will be referred to by the alias of "Sergeant Dick-Cheese", did not seem to mind that this nearest stranger was a Korean man who also spoke very little English. Nor did he care that this poor Korean man, who was trapped in the window seat by Sgt. Dick-Cheese, was frantically glancing around the bus, as if he were either counting the number of stink-eyes they were getting or simply looking for any other available seat. All Sgt. Dick-Cheese seemed to notice was that periodically this man would shrug and nod in passive agreement, while wiping sweat from his forehead and gulping audibly.

(This post ended rather abruptly. But I we're going to Nara in the morning to see the temple and pet the docile, wild deer, and Sarah says I should sleep. The next post should conclude the rest of DMZ experience and hopefully the rest of the Korea trip. I'm finding I have more things to write about than I have time to write.)

Korean Trip - Day 1 - Part 2 (Daniel)

(This is the second part of Day 1 of the Korea trip. You can scroll down and read the first part, if chronological order is important to you. 
I don't intend to write about every day, but definitely the DMZ and eating the whole, live octopus).

We continued our haul down Den Den Town, looking for a place to drop our luggage for a bit. We passed a storefront that was crowded with oversized photobooths. They were big and white and sleek and to me, they looked like escape pods. I wondered why they were so much larger and more lustrous than their American counterparts, which in my memory are usually dilapidated phonebooths with a camera, a curtain, and a plastic pint of Popov at your feet.
Sarah recognized had heard of these photobooths from her newly made girlfriends.
 She excitedly explained that these booths allow you to look at your photos and edit them in all sorts of ridiculous ways before putting them to print. The advertisements in the room all featured smiling Japanese girls with disproportionate, blue-green eyes, and skin so airbrushed they seemed to be radioactively glowing. They looked like Bratz dolls.
You must understand that there exists a Japanese culture is obsession called kawaii. Simply translated, kawaii means cute. But in Japan the word has come to describe a cultural ideal of being adorable, sweet, childish, chirpy, docile, and even naive and eager to please.
Kawaii culture is one of the most easily recognizable aspects of Japanese culture in our international awareness. When you think of anthropomorphic characters like Pikachu and Hello Kitty, you are thinking of kawaii critters. When you think of anime, where the women talk in forced high-pitched voices, giggle constantly, and look up at the male heroes with childlike worship, you are thinking of kawaii characters.

Trapped again! Won't some brave man use his strong arms to rescue from this labrynth?

Much of this sounds akin to the behavior of Western girls six to twelve, but many Japanese women, as well as children, strive to be kawaii. I commonly see grown women with Pikachu or Mickey Mouse or Elmo on their pens, bags, umbrellas, and clothing. I get notes from my Japanese coworkers that are drawn with smiley faces and stars and hearts. Sometimes I see customers at our school who have an urgent need. Many of the female staff won't jog or even walk briskly towards them. Instead they let out a high-pitched squeal as though they are distressed by the urgency and the great distance they must cover. Then they begin to kick their legs up and to side in a bouncing trot while they put their hands up with their palms facing out as though they've never moved faster than a walking pace and are concerned they might topple over.

It is unclear to me whether or not this is a sexual ideal for women in Japan, but kawaii behavior is prevalent enough that even the women who don't commit fully to being kawaii still seem to embody some small aspect of it.
So when Sarah saw these photobooths, she seemed delighted by the opportunity to make kawaii sport of Brian and me. I was game.
We dropped our luggage at the front of the store and huddled into the booth, surprised by the roominess inside. There was a mirror and a large touchscreen display asking for our money. The machine ate 400 yen and then gave a series of rapid-fire instructions in Japanese. Next thing I knew the display board was showing a picture of Japanese girls flashing the V-sign and posing. Then time started ticking down. Only Brian seemed to realize what to do, he was mirroring the girls. Sarah was pointing at herself and shrugging while asking "Wait, am I supposed to...", and I was completely out of the picture  trying to figure out how to make the camera work.
Click
Our pictures could only get better better from there.
The three of us copied every pose the Japanese girls on our display screen modeled. We waved, winked, curtsied, threw up the v-sign, pouted our lips, and framed our faces in our hands.  We even began to improvise and make improvements on their poses. I blew kisses, Sarah covered her mouth while giggling, Brian batted his eyelashes. We were plenty kawaii already. But the work was not done. Now the great work of photoshopping began.
At first I stood over their shoulders, watching Sarah and Brian use the editing tools to enlarge our eyes, airbrush our skin, add lipstick to our mouths in shades from hot pink to bruised purple. Next, accessories were added. Fake eyelashes, cat ears, and the like. By the time we left, with our pictures fully remastered, we were barely recognizable.

"How did this picture of Maybelline's test monkeys end up in my photo album?" -Me in twenty years

Down the street we came across several young women dressed in maid outfits standing outside of a cafe and winking at people. Our American trainer at work, Bert, had warned us about these maids. They were no maids at all, but waitresses of a highly stylized branch of cafes known, unimaginatively, as "maid cafes".
 At this point, all I knew of maid cafes were the three things that Bert had told me about them:
1. They are staffed by women who dress like kawaii French maids.
2. These women act like maids and treat patrons as lords of the manor, waiting on them hand and foot, giggling a lot, and posing for pictures. So maybe not real maids, but you know, like how a vapid girl thinks a maid would act.
3. They are really awkward. Also, Bert advised from personal experience that no one ever schedule a lesson with their Japanese tutor at a maid cafe. "It's just horrible for everyone," he said.
Warnings be damned, the three of us entered the maid cafe. It was every bit as awkward as Bert had said.

Upon entering, every maid in the room turned to look at us and immediately began singing right at us. And the patrons, oh, they were the worst part of it.
They appeared to be a conglomerate of the lonely and maladjusted, seeking some distorted idea of intimacy. In total there were about eight. Most of them were sitting on their own. One table had a pair of friends, a morbidly obese man and a man with physical disabilities that left him confined in a wheelchair. They were wearing the same black, band t-shirt, and in the same size. They were sharing a banana split.
One man, sitting on his own, stood out because he was smiling and seemed to be genuinely enjoying the experience.
I realized that none of the other patrons were smiling. They all seemed to be suffering from some silent discomfort. A sense of shame hung over the cafe patrons. I don't know how long they'd all been sitting, stewing in their sheepish unease, but once we entered, they all stared at us. It was as if focusing on our discomfort helped them to ignore their own.
Neither Brian, nor Sarah, nor I could do much but grin bashfully at the spectacle, in which we found ourselves in the spotlight.  That's when more singing maids began pouring out of the backroom.
The whole routine would have reminded me of "Be Our Guest" from "Beauty and the Beast" if only we'd had peppy singing silverware instead of peppy singing girls in ridiculous costumes, and if only we'd had an outcast demon-prince to dine with rather than socially outcast nerds ogling us and visibly scratching their balls through their pants.
A maid, who became our maid, helped us to our seats. She gave us an English menu and an English list of rules. She read the rules to us in the most kawaii English she could muster. She sounded like a child begging her parents with baby-talk to let her go to a sleep-over. Some of the rules included: mandatory order of at least one drink or dish, no taking photographs (though you can pay for a photograph with a maid), and absolutely no touching the maids (which appeared to be a legitimate concern with some of the patrons).
Then, our maid flipped our menus to the back where there were a several pages of song lyrics written in Japanese and English.
"We light these special fire of our hearts, to show now the great spirit we enjoy for," is akin to what our maid began to say. (I've found that direct Japanese to English translations, at best, can be understood in a very general sense, but at their worst, these translations sound like the reading of refrigerator magnets.)
"A spell for fortune times make happy the many," sounds like something she might have said, and as she did, she pulled out a fake candle. Its body and wick were cheap plastic. When she blew into the candle, the cheap plastic wick lit up. Later I would figure out that it had sensors that responded to air current and turned on the LED light in the wick.

Sarah masters the dark arts of LED

After our maid left the table and our spectacle subsided, we were left to the same silent awkwardness that the other patrons had been experiencing.
Occasionally our maid would come to fawn over us or bring our coffee, making very kawaii decorations with the whipped cream. Now and then one of the patrons would pay for something that required the whole maid staff to come out and sing.
Mostly we just sat there, making chit-chat, while chuckling and trying to distract ourselves from the uncomfortable shenanigans all around us.
Finally, a curious, young Japanese couple poked their heads inside, seeming unsure of whether they even wanted to enter. A maid quickly swept them up and led them to a table as she and her colleagues, appearing out of the back, began to sing a song of welcoming. I was all too relieved to turn my head and watch their awkward grins, that seemed to me, to be hiding a grimace. And I was in good company.

-                -                   -

That was our last major stop before the trek to Kansai Airport. It actually took us longer to get from downtown Osaka to Kansai Airport, located in outer Osaka, than it took us to fly from Japan to South Korea.
However, getting from Incheon Airport, 30 miles West of Seoul, to our hostel in downtown Seoul was no easy task. We were frequently lost and the few words of Japanese that Sarah and I had learned were suddenly useless.
I, too, was of no use as my stomach decided to punish me for choosing a dinner of room-temperature sushi from the airport convenience store. I was looking forward to laying down when we finally got to the hostel. Brian had rented a private triple room, which I thought sounded rather fancy.
However, when we finally did make it to our hostel we found that the Korean definition of "a triple" is a bunk bed and just enough ground-space for a third person to lie down on. The hostel owners, not wanting to skimp on any amenities, left a camping mat under the bunk bed. I volunteered for ground duty as Brian had rented the room and experience told me that things would be even worse for me if I let Sarah take the floor.
As I formed my blankets and mat into a man-nest, Brian researched information and images of Korean centipede species. With a sadistic glimmer in his eye, he introduced me to the Korean House Centipede:

Also known as the "Money Bug" because they used to terrorize only the wealthy who could afford to have heated floors. Of course, with modern and affordable home heating, these centipedes have become much more egalitarian with their terror campaign

I put a blanket under me and folded it several times, hoping to put some vertical distance between me and the floor. As Brian and Sarah fell asleep, I foolishly continued Brian's research on my phone. I discovered the Ethmostigmus Rubripes and Scolopendra Subspine; these two species are closely related and have been aptly nicknamed "The Giant Centipede":

Fun Fact: They're venomous the only species of centipede with human death attributed to them!

In the West, parents lie to their children when they tell them that Santa Claus is real. In Asia, parents lie to their children when they tell them that there are no monsters under the bed.