Japan – Much That Is Fair

So Long, Tokyo

In memory of Rachel Greenberg, z”l, who loved travel in all its wonders and oddities.

Despite all the glamor of our gallivanting around the past few weeks, my last week in Tokyo was primarily logistical: moving suitcases, unpacking in my friend’s new apartment, running to the same grocery store half a dozen times for various supplies of one kind or another. We end as we started on this point: these too are valuable learning points, maybe even more so than the parks and the museums and the other fun stuff. I am enthralled, for example, with the drying function in my friend’s new shower room, where you can hang up laundry and leave it drying under blasting hot air for a few hours instead of having a dryer. (See below if you are interested in the various useful and perhaps less useful tricks of the trade I have picked up in the last month). And it was with no small amount of chagrin that I said farewell to our local coffee shop and bakery, both of which were small, unassuming, and of an excellence that we found nowhere else in Tokyo.

On Atonement

A Journey South

One commonality shared between Judaism and much of East Asia: the lunar calendar. Sunday night I looked up at the nearly-full moon and the first thought that came to my mind was that the month of Av was scarcely more than two weeks away, with its major fast day on the Ninth in commemoration of the destruction of the Temple, and the subsequent seven-week countdown to the High Holiday season. (To any of my rabbi friends reading this: sorry for the inevitable blood pressure spike). In short: Yom Kippur is coming!

The Day of Atonement has been on my mind a great deal this week. As a memory scholar, there was one place in Japan that I wanted to go above all others, one place that my friend informed me she would not accompany me. That place, of course, was Hiroshima.

Land of the Rising Sun

A plug for the American experiment, in these troubled times: rarely, I think, do we consider the remarkable way it brings people from entirely different walks of life together. Too often we take this for granted and spend most of our time trying to find people who share our life experiences, rebuilding our adult communities so that we are mostly surrounded by the people with whom we have the most in common. I rely heavily on those communities myself – but those are not what have brought me to Japan.