My address!

I am brewing up a big update on the many wonderful things that have happened this past week!
But in the meantime:




Jaremie Forsman
1787-2 Tochimoto-cho
Sano-shi, Tochigi-ken
Japan 327-0312



My home telephone # is 090-3593-6545


My host parents names are

Mom and Dad

lol

I'm just kidding! Just because I don't know my grandpa's name so I call him "grandpa" doesn't mean I am so horrible as to not know my host parents'!

(Mom) is Michiko Urano
(Dad) is Takashi Urano

If you wanna talk, call my cell phone from Skype. 090-2940-9188
but make sure you select "Japan" so that skype can fill in Japan's area code for you.

If there is an emergency so that for some reason you need to call my host parents, don't fret. They understand English.

:)

More soon!

let us die young or let us live forever

Ohhhhh dear. I do not want to grow up. How did this happen so fast? Why am I sitting here at 10:28 at night in my host families kitchen searching for answers to my life...on the internet? Ahhh ENGLISH!!! Why did I type "host families kitchen"??! That doesn't even make sense!
I have given up on being a game designer, again. For the time being, anyway. I know what my problem is: I don't have just one passion. People that are, for example, really passionate about writing and writing only naturally will become writers and will be writers until they die, happy and fulfilled. I have never had a consistent passion last for more than a few years.
I am such a skippity person. My hobbies change weekly, my goals...daily, and even my thoughts come and go in frenetic three second blurbs, before they are replaced with a massive torrent of 983 other thoughts to fill their place. I can't stick to plans well. I hate schedules. I was not made for conforming into a single work-droid who follows the pressures of the world around her and lives her life on the same line from birth to death. I don't FIT IN BOXES!!! I will passionately commit to something, put all my effort into it, see it through till the end, and then once it is finished put it down as a good experience and completely change course and try something new.
How can a person like that be expected to choose a career to follow for the next fifty years? I could choose a career for a three year chunk, maybe even make it four. But the thought of being pinned down to the SAME thing year after year terrifies me. This world is too beautiful and fascinating a place not to experience every bit of it.
And I am already so old. Please, please, dear sixty-five and seventy year old readers; please do NOT chastise me. I am old. I am seventeen and I was sixteen three minutes ago and fifteen an hour ago and twelve last week. I'm gonna be fourty-five and trapped tomorrow and I'm going to die of old age in a month. My life is slipping through my fingers like sand. No, not like sand. Like water.
I feel like I am a little ship with no sails in the middle of a stormy sea. I can't grasp a direction in life. And going the way the wind takes me has always worked for me in the past. But now the world is telling me I have to grow up and choose a career and I about wanna PUKE. I have to drop anchor, right now. "Oh, not right now, you have PLENTY of time...you're so young yet!" But no, I am a Junior in high school, so at this exact moment I have to choose a college and a major.
I want to learn some card tricks and take some singing lessons so I can pack up my host dad's guitar and like, a spare sweatshirt and go live as a street performer. That is living. And also the voice of ignorance, I know.

See, that's the thing about me. I am perfectly equal parts realist and idealist. I will come up with an excellent idea and then immediately shoot it down.

I don't know how to choose my career. I am talented at art, I love math and solving problems, reading comes as naturally to me as breathing, I have determination and people skills, I am comfortable with my ability to speak Japanese; I am going to learn Spanish next and then Mandarin Chinese, I have a knack for computers...

I am a well-rounded Jack-of-All-Trades. One who doesn't necessarily prefer one trade over the other and is being presented with the need to choose, and choose one for life.
What on Earth am I going to do with myself?
I would love to come back to Japan, but maybe not live here. I don't want to be old.
My youth is slipping out of my grasp and I am so worried about that fact that I am spending all my time worrying and not enjoying my youth as I have it now.

I have not been this disoriented in a long, long time.

Somebody please advise me.

東京 ３月１日 (Tokyo, March 1st)

I am typing this from the teacher's lounge at school right now! I brought my laptop in to school because the best thing ever is going on right now: TESTING!
I.LOVE.TESTING.
The entire student body is having a giant testing thing. It starts today, and is three hours long, and then tomorrow is another three hours and Friday is the last three hours. On top of that, after tests each day we get early dismissals! That's not even the best part: the best part is that I don't have to take the tests because I'm the foreign kid who can't read kanji and has her own studies to attend to. So I get to use my laptop in the teacher's lounge for three hours, and then we all eat lunch and go home.
YESSSS!
But that is not the point of this blog. I am going to write all about Tokyo, cause I went there again on Saturday and saw lots of places.

First off, there are a few misconceptions about Tokyo, the biggest being that "Tokyo is a big city in Japan."
Tokyo is not big. Tokyo is a behemoth that is so colossal it isn't even referred to as a city, but a "metropolis." I took this picture off of Wikipedia so you could see how big it is, from satellite:



Tokyo is not so much of a city as a separate universe. It is composed of 23 cities, or "wards." I went to five of them with my host parents! *I am not exactly sure if these places are the wards, they could be smaller subsections...
We went to Asakusa, Harajuku, Shibuya, Akihabara and Ginza! I've always, always wanted to go to Tokyo. It kind of swamped my mind, I have to admit.

If you want an idea of it's massive amount of people, Minnesotan's, this is for you:




Those pictures are not quite to scale, but close enough to give you an approximate idea of the size difference of Minnesota and the entirety of Japan. Now take it one step further and realize that Tokyo is about the size of that circle that says "Tokyo." Compare that to the Minnesota map and think about this:
Minnesota's population is 4.9 million people. Tokyo, that tiny little circle,'s population is 8 million people. That is a little under TWICE Minnesota's population.

WOWWWW.

I will post pictures up of each place I went to. The rest of these pictures I took with my own camera. The ones above are from the net.

ASAKUSA:
Asakusa was Tokyo's party district in the 1900's. It was the liveliest, but now is mostly famous for it's temples honoring Buddha, and the big, red "Thunder and Lightning" Lantern.







SHIBUYA:
Shibuya is Tokyo's most popular shopping district. It is famous for that HUGE street intersection that has huge stores on all sides and can be crowded with thousands of people going back and forth. My favorite part of Shibuya, though, actually my favorite part of all Japan, is the story of Chuken Hachiko. (Loyal Dog, Hachiko):


Hachiko was an Akita dog, *(This picture is taken off of the internet. It is an actual photograph of Hachiko.)
Hachiko was an Akita owned by Ueno Sensei. Every day, Ueno Sensei would go to work and every day, at 3:00 PM, Hachiko would walk alone to the train station and sit and wait for his master. They would go home together and the cycle would start all over again the next day. One May 21st, when Hachiko was a two year old dog, his master had a stroke and died at his job. Unknowing, Hachiko went to the station to pick his master up. When he didn't show up, Hachiko waited all night, until the very last train left the station, and then returned home by himself.
The next morning, onlookers noticed that Hachiko was at the station again, at 3:00 PM. He again waited until it got dark and all the trains had left before walking home alone.
This routine of Hachiko coming alone to the station and waiting, continued...

For ten years.

Every single day, even through the pains of arthritis, as Hachiko had become a very old dog, he would still come alone to the station, wait, and then come home alone. This dog became a national sensation. He would come to the station at Shibuya, and wait in the exact same spot. People would come and give him food and pet him and cheer him on.
On March 7, 1935, after ten years of waiting for his master, "Loyal Dog" Hachiko was found dead in the very spot he had waited.

How is THAT for a story? It was such an expression of true loyalty and I, along with the rest of Japan for years and years, was extremely moved by it.

They erected a statue after he died, but when World War II came they had to melt down the metal to use for weapons. They rebuilt it though, after the war. It stands in the very place where Hachiko waited for ten years.

I TOUCHED IT!!!



It is such a sweet story.

AKIHABARA:
Akihabara was great!!!! It is the nerd center of Japan. (I FELT RIGHT AT HOME) It is Tokyo's "Electronic Village" except that it is more of a universe than a village, in terms of size. It is a giant collection of stores, most of them used electronics stores, all meshed together and full of foreign people looking for cheap computers. I bought a 2 Gigabyte SD card for my camera, for 3 and half bucks! (400 yen) It was sweet!




My attention span is waning so I am going to just post the rest of my pictures from Tokyo all right here.




















Now you're caught up on my Tokyo adventure!

Jaaa neh.