2001-07-24 - 2:20 p.m.
but I wasn't even thinking about nothingness (part 1)

A couple days before we left, I was talking to my shrink about some of the things about this trip that were troubling me, like me knowing almost nothing about the language or surviving in the culture. He said it could be very beneficial to be removed so entirely from your normal setting. I think he was right.

Yesterday after I finished writing the last entry, we went ten floors down to the mall to get something to eat. I also purchased one of the most fabulous commercial items I:ve seen here so far, a tube of dark red "lip gross." (Sad to say, someone apparently alerted their marketing department a few weeks ago, because some of the tubes already sported the much less intriguing correct spelling.)

Speaking of lips, there seemed to be quite a lip motif in some stores in The Cube--big, full lips on necklaces, rings, keychains--and also in the other mall, Zest, where I got a necklace that was a pair of fake-rhinestone lips in red, white, and blue. My dad tells me that one thing to keep in mind in relation to this is that Japanese women were historically supposed to have very small, demure lips, and the appearance of lips as a fashion motif in the youth culture is, like so many things, more than mere fashion.

We found a place to eat in the *other* underground mall in Kyoto Station, taking a picture as we did so of the pattern of the floor tiles. After reviewing yesterday:s entry, guess what the pattern was.[1]

My mom made note of the fact that there didn:t seem to be any fat people anywhere, which was not quite true, but certainly seemed so in relation to what you would see in an American mall. But, she added, some of these girls seemed to be a little too thin. I told her that anyone she saw who was at either extreme was so because of the Western influence.

She made another accurate observation, which was that many young women, while perfectly healthy, were wearing shoes they could barely walk in. Yep, I said. Also our fault.

After dinner we went to a huge bookstore nearby, one with a large section of English-language books. On "our" floor was a stereo playing "Revolver." The Beatles followed us again today in a more interesting form, when I realized that the background music in the cafe where we were eating lunch was not just any recording of pleasant unaccompanied bells, but bells playing songs from the soundtrack of A Hard Day's Night.

In the Weird Shit department, they really seem to like the theme song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang here. We heard it on a TV commercial for no apparent reason, and then heard the *dance remix* in the mall. Go figure.

continued in next entry...

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