Well, I couldn’t sleep all that long after all. Not because I wasn’t tired, but jet lag makes things kind of crazy the first couple days after a trip across so many time zones, so I was up and out and about fairly early.
The cherry blossoms aren’t quite out yet. It seems a little cold for spring and that might be delaying them a bit. I'm looking forward to seeing them. That's a Japanese experience I remember well.
Everything seems very familiar, but slightly off. I get strong feelings of deja vu, but can see a lot of new things as well, some kind of subtle.
One of first things I noticed is that the fashion for Japanese girls this year is black stockings, sometimes 3/4 length, with short skirts or shorter shorts. If these girls were in the U.S., it would be kind of a hooker look. Seriously... Now that I think about it, there have been variations on this look for a couple years. I remember a Japanese girl at my university in California who dressed like that a while back. She had to be warned that walking down the street looking like she did was going to get her a lot of unwanted attention from guys driving by. The thing is, the cultural awareness doesn't seem to go that way here, so no one thinks like that, or not often, anyway. In Japan, if it’s the fashion, then everyone is wearing it, so it's all right. For Americans, it's a bit of a shock. I'm certainly not the only one to notice this. There are plenty of websites dedicated to Tokyo fashion. Check them out Just be careful what you google, if you know what mean.
It doesn’t take too long off the plane to start spying the similarities in style, especially among the high school and college-age kids. A lot of the guys have got a long hair thing going on, usually all in the same cut. Being different together.. I’ll try to get a picture because my description wouldn’t do it justice. It's like a boy band look and I'm sure the pop scene has a lot of influence on the style. Not all the guys have it, of course, but I’ve noticed it often enough to sense a trend coming. Of course, I just got here, so maybe I’m witnessing the tail end of the style rather than the beginning... And don't get me wrong. I have longer hair than most of them so I'm not criticizing, just commenting.
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