Japanese Versions

Last Saturday I went to one of the malls in town, a place called Ario. It has no movie theatre and, unlike American malls, Japanese malls never seem to have anchor department stores. The food court did have a surprising number of American restaurants, including a McDonalds and a Burger King as well as a Subway. I hadn't been to a Subway since leaving the U.S. so I ate there. There were no footlongs on the menu because the country uses metric and because the Japanese don't like large portions. The regular sandwich looked roughly equivalent to a six inch. I got the cheapest one, which was a tuna sandwich at just over 700 yen, with fried potatoes and coke coming to just over 800 yen, a bit over five dollars. So no five dollar footlong here, though I heard the footlong is now just over six dollars in the U.S. Still, since the tuna sandwich was the cheapest on the menu, that means Subway in Japan is on average probably more expensive than it is in the U.S., at least in this town. I imagine it can only be more expensive in a major city.

It was a nice mall and I was pleased to see their grocery store had Guinness stout. I've noticed that the quality of the beer selection is inversely proportional to the quality of the liquor selection in most stores here. If they have a good selection of beer, they have a weak selection of whiskey. If they have a good selection of whiskey, they have a weak selection of beer. I tend to enjoy beer only on hot days and it was a cool, rainy day, so I didn't buy any, opting instead to pick up some Tullamore Dew at an excellent nearby liquor shop (which has a weak selection of beer).

Rounding out my nostalgic Saturday, I stopped at a nearby Starbucks and ordered a tall drip coffee for just over 400 yen, roughly comparable to the average three dollar price in the U.S. Nowadays, if I get a coffee when I'm out, I tend to opt for a vending machine, where it's usually around 150 yen. But a sparsely crowded Starbucks on a rainy day is invaluable. I stayed there reading Marius B. Jansen's Making of Modern Japan, published in 2000, the year of its author's death. Marius B. Jansen shares a birthday with me, April 11, though he was born over fifty years earlier, in 1922. Born in the Netherlands and raised in the U.S., he was a professor of Japanese history at Princeton and in the aftermath of World War II had a role in the Occupation of Japan. He was the first foreigner to receive the Distinguished Cultural Merit Award from the Japanese government.

The book, as its title suggests, is fundamentally teleological, constructed in such a way as to explain why Japan is the way it is to-day (or in 2000), beginning with a narrative of history starting with Sekigahara, a battle in 1600 that began the Tokugawa era. I've been surprised how useful the book's insights are to my own life and situation and, in descriptions of Japanese customs and behaviour in the 18th and 19th century, I've been gaining a better understanding of the culture I interact with daily.

I first heard of the book from a mysterious YouTuber called Apostolic Majesty who has a number of really good lectures on his channel on history, The Lord of the Rings, and Bethesda games.