Parking

In most big cities around the world, the question of where to park is quite a conundrum. You can't park in DC on the street during the week for more than 2 hours without DC license plates. In cities like Boston, you have to pay for your parking spot in front of your house. Tokyo and Osaka are much the same, but you park in a designated lot somewhere in your neighborhood.

How about for those of us without cars here in Kyoto?

While I lived in the hinterlands of Gunma, I was pretty much able to park freely where I wanted. Next to stores or other places, there almost always was a place to put your bike. If there wasn't, there was always a place nearby to put your motorless Harley with a basket.

Here in Kyoto, I was given a sticker to put on my bike when I got my apartment. Apparently there is also a sticker for school although I never got one and have had no problems. The parking situation came to a head the other day when I parked my bike at an apartment complex to which I had no sticker. "Oh no!" you may be thinking, but if they take away my bike, I have to take a bus down Kyoto Station and walk another 5 minutes to the compound, and then pay a little more than $20 for all of their troubles of putting my bike on their truck and storing it. When I went down to my bike to go back to school, there was a note on it with the message:

"You do not have a sticker.
Please take 500 yen to the apartment complex owner (who lives next door).
Your bike number has been recorded."

This note assumed that I was an attendant of this complex because the 500 yen is to purchase the official sticker; I think of it as a 500 yen fee to join the cool club. It is wrong and subject to penalty if caught, but I joined the cool club to give me the added freedom of parking here. My other option is to park nearby in front of a convenience store and hope the cops don't come by and take my bike to the compound....

Parking in cities is difficult no matter what form of transportation you use.

Trends

Humans are animals and animals travel in packs. If you don’t believe that or you believe that you are different from everyone else, take a hard look at your life and the iPod you own; everyone is less unique than they think. Trends rule our life and guide us in all of our decisions. The financial stimulus being debated in Congress now came from a trend that has (re)arisen lately in the economics world that this type of recession requires a big dose of government spending. That doesn’t mean that those from the anti-tax days won’t put up a fight as they see their trend go to the wayside.

Anytime you worry about Walmart, remember Kmart. Whenever you worry about Google, remember AOL. My only advice to people is to figure out when the trend has peaked and try not to get trampled on the way down. Such foresight would make anyone super-rich.

With that in mind, the stereotype of Japanese people is a group of people that move in packs. If you go out with a group of Japanese people, you’ll notice that they usually defer to the next person when asked where they want to go or what they want to do. This “group” identity is seen as a unique characteristic of Japanese people.

I bet in similar situations, you the reader defer to the group unless you had something really in mind.

Well, in case you were wondering, the trend right now in Japan for girls is to wear boots, tights, and some sort of shorts or shirt. The comparatively mild weather over here in Japan allows people to look fashionable outside of a sweater.

One combination that is dying off right now is the jean shorts with sheep-skin trim (and tights/boots see pic). I went from seeing at least three or four girls every time I went out wearing those shorts to one or two times a week. It seems that the trend is on the way out. That doesn’t mean that the tights and boots have gone with those shorts. I’ve seen jean shorts without trim and the ever popular brown or gray shorts that are always accompanied by tights and boots.

Kintama still prefers his jeans/T shirt combo that he has been sporting, well, his entire life. It costs money to hop on and off trends like trains on your way across Japan; money I can’t spare on some fleeting moment in time. The decline of these shorts will happen just as comedy stars such as hard gay (HG see youtube video) have become distant memories.



However, people around the world love the heat of that fleeting moment and as long as time goes on, people will be hopping on and off that train; it doesn’t matter if you’re in Japan, Europe, China or the U.S.