>>Kobe City<< （神戸）

I went to Kobe the other day. Kobe, Osaka and Kyoto are the three large cities that make up the Kansai area of Japan. Kansai is one of the main metropolises of Japan – Tokyo is the other. I rode the train mostly standing up for the one hour long trip from Kyoto with my host mom and her friend Mieko. During the ride, the three of us chatted in Japanese and broken English about my host brother’s obsession with his girlfriend (an odd topic, especially with both women lacking the English vocabulary to express themselves).

I didn’t bring it up, but I guess there was a “rainy day” period according to my host mom when the girlfriend lived at our host house with my host brother perpetually. They ate together, and slept together, and bathed together, and picked each other’s teeth, and she never left. Her parents started to get worried and it wasn’t a great turnout between the families. Well, not much has changed – they still spend all of their free time in each other’s company. I think the girlfriend had some trouble in school which explains why she is almost twenty and still in high school. I got off in Kobe by myself and my host mom and her friend continued onwards towards tea and conversation elsewhere. I didn’t get to hear the rest of the Murata family soap opera.

Kobe was very nice, especially the breeze near the bay. I first walked through covered shopping area called Motomachi, which is similar to Teramachi in downtown Kyoto. I stopped in a Yamaha Music store and they had this huge organ synthesizer hybrid that a store worker was demonstrating on. She had all the presets selected and played the theme from James Bond with a huge amount of auto-accompaniment generated form the keyboard in real time. It sounded professional, like a hyped up dance remix of 007. It was very neat.

I proceeded to the China Town area of the city, which Kobe is very famous for. This area wins the award for the most crowded place I have been to so far (and in Japan that’s saying like this is saying a lot). You had just enough room to inflate your stomach to breathe and rest your face on the sweaty back of the neck directly in front of you. Somehow or another (I don’t know how) I managed to order fried goodies like Peking Duck burgers and grilled rice balls, duck into a semi-packed alley and scarf down my food like a squirrel. I left the China Town area as fast as possible and snapped a few pictures.

My last stop was the Bay Area Harbor. This area was quite nice because you caught the breeze of the sea and it wasn’t nearly as crowded. There were various touristy things like a helicopter ride and boat tours. I didn’t do any of them, because it was hot and my feet hurt.

There was a flea market going on in the harbor. A cotton candy vendor at the flea market got mad at me. I was all set to buy some cotton candy (I love cotton candy). I selected my bag but then realized that it had been sitting outside all day and the once fluffy cotton was now a depressing clump. I put the bag back on the rack and the vendor came over yelling “NO, NO, NO” and waving his hands at me. I was hoping to get into my first fight in Japanese, but the cotton candy vendor figured it wasn’t worth it. I left empty handed. Later I saw a little boy pick up a plastic accordion toy he was going to buy and push it together, producing a faint sound. The owner of that flea market stall came over, smacked the boy on the head, and cursed him out in Japanese while throwing the accordion back into the pile of toys. It must just be something about flea markets that bring out the best in people.

As I left the harbor, I saw a white gaijin performing for a large crowd of Japanese people. He was cracking jokes in Japanese (though they were obviously rehearsed) as he made balloon animals and performed simple magic tricks. Well, at least there’s a future for Japanese majors like me in the Kobe street entertainment industry.

B.E.W.