Entry one and I waste no time breaking my promise of a photograph-only blog, but I got a story to tell. I am seated next to a Japanese woman, a rather stunning one, on my 15 hour direct flight from jfk to narita. By hour 7 I find the courage to show this woman my meishi, mainly to see if her reaction would be that predicted by the dude who told me to get it in Kanji instead of the unimpressive katakana. Now with five days of Japan under my belt, I know hospitality and politeness is coded in the dna of Japanese women, but at that moment, man, I thought I had a shot. She excitedly pulled her Meishi out her purse. It turns out she is a news reporter and was in New York doing a piece on the broadway show In the Heights. I didn't think anything of it, but three days into Japan it occurred to me to show this meishi to a Japanese dude I befriended. He looks at it for about 10 seconds, then looks back to me with a confused face(head tilted, mouth frowned, eyebrows lowered) and says "what?". When I told him how I got it, he wanted to know everything about my interactions and observations of her. It turns out she's quite known in Japan, and my meishi with her supposedly poor penmanship, is my only souvenir.
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