Now that I'm back in the U.S., use of the future tense in these posts seems a bit odd, but I'm sticking with it for the sake of consistency. I've done over 800 posts in the future tense and swapping now just feels wrong. If it helps, you can pretend I'm still in Japan, or figure that I'll miss these things later but I'm too shell-shocked by being home after 23 years to know what I think and feel. At any rate, this post is courtesy of having been home for about a month and realizing just how much older everything is here than it was in Japan. While I, at times, felt that the constant revamping of everything in Japan was a monumental waste of material (especially the way that people's houses were relatively disposable and torn down and rebuilt about every 30 years), I sometimes feel like many things here are rundown, dirty, and beat up. There has to be a balance between refurbishing too much and doing so too little.
I (will) miss the newness of things in Tokyo and how things felt clean, fresh, and smartly turned out.
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