I wrote this a month after coming to Tokyo. It pretty much sums up how I felt back then, riding trains to and from work in a city that just never seemed to end. While I am quite a bit more literate in Japanese than I was back then, I still find myself drowning in kanji on a regular basis.
Ode to Tokyo
Strange days in a
Tokyo haze
Cars far too big for the narrow streets
speed by me
As I sit staring out the train window at the bright lights of a city so huge,
So foreign, so hard to believe...
Is real...
I'm really here in this crazy
trippy
world
of manga and Keropi ~
Hello Kitty greets me from every angle
Every surface covered in flourescent flashing
"Buy This!"
"Buy That!"
I can't read what it says,
But I get the gist...
It's all the same, no matter where you go,
but different.
Hiragana, katakana, kanji ~ all sprinkled together like one big bowl of Alphabet Soup,
but it's bizarro Alphabet Soup that I can't read...
Illiterate, everywhere I look is something else I can't read...
But even if I could, would I understand?
This culture shock, shocks the system, culture walk into the Land of Oz...
Odds and ends that don't match ~
East meets west, old and new, grey and seizure-causing colours make up this crazy city known as Tokyo
Bright lights in a haze of starry night...
This is Tokyo.
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