I recently came across my first journal entry written in Japan, penned on a train as I rode north toward the city that would be my home for the next 12 years...
Sept 10, 1994
Train through the countryside toward Yonago. Rice paddies give way to mountains. Running along rivers, blue herons everywhere. Villages nestled between hills. Scarecrows with straw hats bent over rice. A baseball game in a small city. A VW beetle welded to a ramp appears ready to hurdle the stream. A woman bends to pick rice while her husband sits on a tractor nearby scratching his forearm. A trainload of sleeping Japanese pulls alongside. Piles of rice dry in the sun. Trees hide a small shinto shrine. Fishermen wade in streams, casting a line from a rod over four times their height.
On the turntable: The Rolling Stone, "Stripped"
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