I wrote this article for JUSA's newsletter. It's basically the intro to a more in-depth article that I will post here some time in the near future.

America Blogs Japan!
By Asa Fox

Over the past few years I have become aware of more and more web-logs with Japan as their focus. From “Fruitsy” street fashion, to cutesy hello kitty, from accounts of teaching, to pictures of school girls’ underwear. But one thing that stands out among it all is the “assimulative” American.
Everyone knows that Japan is the cool spot to be. Robots and flashy hipsters, beautiful Geisha traditions, Samurai, old temples, and everything cute, clean and flavorful. So sometimes when people go looking for these things they are “… disappointed [by] how ordinary and Western everything seems”.
Livejournal.com user plastickitty says, “The real interesting things lay beyond the surface… And being more than an onlooker and trying to assimilate here, I think it's more important to use your outsider status to your advantage and keep creating and recreating yourself”.
Travel is more than just photo opps and Disneyland. The world traveler becomes an ambassador, a negotiator, a student and philosopher, not by choice, but by default. In pursuing understanding rather than tourism, a person has no choice but to seek a new outlook, and thereby, change.
On a local scale, “one aspect of America has always been its genius at incorporating bits from other cultures into its mosaic”, says eminent blog rocker imomus, “bits of American cities have certainly been “Japanized”: sushi bars have sprung up, Japanese bookstores and supermarkets appeared, whole parts of the West coast have become Pacific Rim Asia Towns”; but with adaptation comes a new internal world, a way of life and mind. Does this call for a “Culture-shock depressurization chamber”, or just to dive in like Paul Tesshin the American producer who gave it all up to become a Buddhist monk?
Travel, for many, is an exploration in the duality of the no man's land “interloper in all kingdoms” feeling, and it’s converse, many homedness that one can also feel.

photo:imomus in “Hatsuhana and shakuhachi”.