Globe Corner Blogs

I was surprised to learn that a young Western woman with little to no knowledge of the language and no special skills can find a well-paying job in Tokyo. No, it’s not in the industry you might have just thought of. It requires the looks of a model, the personality of a friendly bartender, the ambition to earn money of a Vegas cocktail waitress and the level of nonsense-resistance of a mental ward nurse. Add some babysitting skills, a good liver and an ability to keep very late hours, and you’ve got it. This kind of a job may never get a name in English, but in Japanese it is called geisha.

Of course Japan has drastically changed since the Edo era and a geisha’s job requirements have changed too, but the essence stayed the same. You entertain and pamper your guests, and you get rewarded according to your level of professionalism. A fashion model and a true journalist at heart, Chelsea Haywood decided to try the job first-hand and document her experience in a book 90-Day Geisha.

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Real World - by Natsuo Kirino

Many readers who express an interest in Japanese literature are already familiar with Natsuo Kirino’s fascinating work. Her recent novel, Real World, reads like a social study carefully disguised as crime fiction. The crime itself, a murder, slowly makes its way out of the picture, revealing other dangers, and rushing the story forward like a Tokyo bullet train.

The main characters are high school students with few bonds to each other and whose aspirations are as mundane as to simply live a peaceful life. Unfortunately, that is not meant to happen, and their worlds are doomed to be invaded by all the threats of the real world imaginable: school girl-obsessed creeps, fortune tellers, marketers, shallow pop-culture, alienated parents, personal disasters they have no idea how to cope with, smothering relatives and peers forcing them to study, study, study until you “spit up blood”, study “like you are going to die.” Continue Reading »

Tuna at Tsukiji market

As almost anyone will tell you, the Tsukiji fish market is a must for your first, jet-lagged morning in Tokyo. The subway starts running around 5:30am, so by 6:00 we were surprisingly awake and already weaving through endless rows of oysters, sea urchins, crabs, and various other sea creatures I had never even heard of. We were lucky to catch the tail-end of the tuna auction, watching successful bidders haul off fish more than twice their size–we later observed the enormous fish being halved and quartered into manageable chunks with a chain saw. We also stopped to admire an old man slicing eels from head to tail in one smooth motion, the fish still wriggling as he nailed them down. I must say I have never been more impressed by a market (and I am a fan of markets in general). Perhaps most impressive is that the innumerable heaps of seafood will be gone in just a couple hours, bought up by wholesalers and restaurants–the market will be completely empty by 1pm. And while tourists are a common sight at Tsukiji, the market is not a show for visitors (unlike, say, the floating market near Bangkok); if anything, bewildered foreigners are a nuisance, always barely avoiding getting run over by the little motor-powered fish-transporting carts. Continue Reading »

Let's Go Thailand

This is my first contribution to the Globe Corner blog — unfortunately grad school usually leaves little time for reflections on travel (I should really find a dissertation topic that will allow me to collect data in some exciting locale…), but today I’m finally done with work for the summer, and in about seven hours, I hope to be completely packed and on a plane from JFK to Tokyo. Tokyo will be my first stop on a three week trip, which also includes Hong Kong and a beach in Thailand (TBD: I have a flight into Krabi and some vague desires of white sand and warm water.)

This whirlwind tour of half the continent will be the exact opposite of my last (and first) trip to Asia, as a researcher-writer for Let’s Go Thailand. I spent two months in the north of the country, combing the region for guesthouses, bus schedules, and cooking classes. I was traveling alone, moving every other day, and visiting every last wat (monastery) in each town on my route. I got to know the region extremely well, and in fact, the north is synonymous with all of Thailand for me, since I had to return to the States almost immediately at the end of my route, and never got to see the rest of the country.

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