Zen Meditation, Bankruptcy, Vomit

Just writing to send a brief update before I leave for a vacation tomorrow.

One of my goals here was to learn about Buddhism and meditation, so I found a Zen group on the website Meetup.org. The organizer took me to a Zen meditation session at a temple and it was a very surreal experience. I can’t accurately re-create the experience with words but I will just say that it was very refreshing. The inside of the temple was BIG. It had large rooms, and long hallways and, in Japanese fashion, shoes were not worn inside. I’ve become accustomed to constantly being in small spaces in this packed city so the space of the temple alone was pleasurable. Long story short, I came away feeling like the meditation had been real life and Tokyo is just dream life. After emerging I became acutely aware of things like the masses of people on the streets wearing suits, the thousands of advertisements sucking up my attention, and even people absorbed in video games on the trains. Tokyo actually felt like a dream – kind of a fake reality. I enjoyed the meditation very much and look forward to more sessions in the future.

In other news, one of the other dominant English schools in Japan, GEOS, collapsed last week. This means that there are a couple thousand English teachers on the streets now and many frustrated students who didn’t get refunds for their contracts. This is a nasty pattern after a different major school, NOVA, collapsed two years ago. Although the truth could never be known, the finances of my company are supposedly well managed so I’m not worried about it. In fact, the school is basically part of an oligopoly now – yikes!

I will end with a little anecdote. Every week on the trains I see people, old and young alike, who have drunk themselves to oblivion. Last month on the train I saw an older man and his sweetheart, who he was embracing, lose their balance and fall completely flat to the floor. Last week, however, tops anything else I’ve seen. I was on the train chatting with a stranger in bad Japanese when I heard behind me the sudden splash of liquid and chunks. I turned around and just three feet away someone had thrown up in the middle of the floor on the train. The bad part, however, was not the vomit on the floor, but the vomit covering the poor victim in a nice suit who the assailant had thrown up on. The situation was awful and shocking. In my humble opinion, no matter how drunk you are, if you are going to throw up, you should have the decency to LOOK DOWN and not throw up on someone else!

Tomorrow night begins a one-week vacation known as Golden Week. I will be hopping on a bus with a Japanese friend down to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara for the week. We have no hotel reservations yet and Golden Week is one of the busiest travel times in Japan, so we may be sleeping in Internet “Manga cafes.” They are very cheap, provide private booths and, apparently, many of them even have showers!

Just wanted to get this quick message out before taking off.