Culture Shock, U.S.A.

"This," I said, "tastes like America."

"Have a few of those every week," says my sister's boyfriend, "and you'll look like America." He's right. On my first night back in the States, I'm out with my family, and we're eating all together for the first time in well over a year. The sandwich, a New Orleans style po' boy, is gigantic. It's a hulking log of meat and sauce, dripping untold calories onto my hand, plate, and table. It's gigantic. Everything is gigantic. The chairs we're sitting in, the heavy table before us. I get up from the table to use the restroom, and am surprised by the cavernous hallway and the restroom that's almost as big as my Japanese apartment. America is immense.

I'd grown accustomed to Japanese things for the past two and a half years. I'd grown accustomed single servings of chicken on sticks, and bowls of miso soup that you can hold easily with two fingers. I'd grown accustomed to theater and bus chairs that forced me to draw my Western shoulders inward, and my single room apartment. I'd grow accustomed to sleeping in a cozy, coffin-like loft where my head brushed the ceiling when I sat up on my futon, and comic books that fit nicely in the back pockets of my jeans.

All of this compactness was enough for me, and I was happy with it. Of course Tokyo itself was a sprawling mass of land and light, a technological megalopolis unlike anything else. But the soup and futons and comic books... I'd readjusted and recalibrated my perception. These foreign things became normal for me.

Now, though, I held a sandwich that was a veritable culinary barbell, dripping lakes of sauce that I wiped up with the immese acres of a white napkin. Outside, cars like tanks rolled by on wide, wide streets, and people walked with an enormity that surprised me. Of course there are obese people in Japan, but they are not the norm. Back here, even in a healthy, liberal city like Portland, Oregon, I was taken aback by the sheer size of some citizens, their presence broadcasting to me visible reminders of America's bounty, greed, pathologies, and wealth.

I felt like an outsider, seeing these things the way I did. I'd imagined my return, oftentimes during bouts of Japanese homesickness. I'd imagined striding through the airport gate, hugging people who'd come to greet me, sipping down Oregon beer and basking in the warm, familiar glow of the American Northwest. I did not anticipate the disorientation.

That familiar glow, though, came soon enough. My brothers invited me to go biking with them to downtown Portland, and at first I thought that it would be a huge undertaking. They assured me, though, that getting there would take maybe twenty minutes. I didn't believe them, but hopped on my bike anyway. They were right. We zoomed, mostly downhill, through bike lanes and wide side streets, crossing one of Portland's several bridges and soon enough found ourselves sharing the road with chic pedestrians and electric streetcars. Here, my surprise was reversed. I was impressed by how compact Portland is, by how bike friendly and pleasant it is. I once tried to bike through downtown Tokyo, through Shinjuku. Terrible idea. Downtown Portland, though, is a biker's urban paradise. There is no need for a car here.

We rode about, reaping the benefits of the progessive urban planning. Later, I walked across a different bridge in midday sunlight with a friend of mine, and was thrilled by the riverside's greenery. I began to feel it a little, a little of that thrill that I thought about, knowing that this place, this green city with it's bike trails and light rails, is my home, if only for a short time.