Flying Rice Dumplings...or Ramen

"Luck is like having a rice dumpling fly into your mouth." ~ Japanese Proverb

My first Japanese meal - on the plane from Korea to Narita :)

Our second night in Tokyo, I return from some alone time I made to explore the other districts, and of course I and the other two girls are starving. So we hit up this ramen shop that has claim to fame for being cheap and tasty. Closed. But this little Japanese lady, who sees our disappointment, beckons us to follow her down this dark little street to another restaurant. Despite the What are you doing following a strange old lady? thoughts running through my head, my feet keep their pace, and we actually arrive at a nice little sit-down restaurant. But as we peer into the plexi-glass window filled with the plastic exemplas of food and respective prices in Yen (an inevitably convenient practice in Asia), we quickly realize this is a little out of our starving student budget, and turn around. But as soon as the lady realizes we are about to bounce, she comes to the door and waves us inside. “Uh, no,” I explain in awkward and broken Japanese, “it’s a little too expensive.” “No, no,” she responds quickly. “Service. Service.” As we take our seats at a large round table, I’m wondering why she made reference to “service,” an Asian practice where you just do something nice for someone at no charge. Then I realize she is buying us dinner. All three of us. With a pleasant little smile and clasped hands – reminiscent of my own grandmother – she orders all of us generous bowls of ramen and tells us about her daughter who is doing a home stay abroad in Canada (I think that’s what she said, at least. I am still perfecting my Japanese, after all), and then thanks us for allowing her to eat with us for company. What? Thank you, ma’am! Not only is this meal giving me a lovely first taste of quail egg and octopus (it’s ok, they were just small accents to the soup) but I get an opportunity to see how giving others can be. And how I should be.

Me with two of the other interns

But this is not all! I’m late (haha, uh we could just stop here but this is a good story) getting ready for work and so the other girls give up on me and leave. I think I have the office route enmapped in my brain, but I am tragically mistaken. I end up on the wrong subway train about an hour out of my home district (oh isn’t it lovely to be me this morning!), when I finally realize the train is not headed for Iidabashi station. I begin asking directions from two adorable little Japanese people sitting on either side of me, and the lady, headed for the airport, “has time” before her flight and so takes me out of her way not only to the station but to the ticket office I need to go to in order to transfer to the JR line. Then she simply smiles and waves goodbye, toting her suitcase and personal carry-on item behind her.
Shinjuku district - pretty at night, eh?

The stories don’t end. Ok, I love love love America. It is my home and I honestly feel it is a great country. But this most likely would not happen in the States. When I was there, I was in the mindset of taking care of my own needs first, and never felt bad about it. I was always studying, exercising, polishing my resume, etc – just making sure I was headed in the direction of my goals and building up self-reliance. I only baked bread for others or called the fam when I had time. Would it have killed me to go out of my way for someone once? I’ve just felt so humbled as I’ve been served by these people – who don’t know me, by the way – without even regarding it as an inconvenience. Along with the things I had planned on returning to the States with – a greater acquisition of the language, an increased global awareness – I’d like to add to my bag a greater degree of selflessness, Japanese-style.

And this bowing thing. It’s so much more sanitary than the handshake thing we have going on in the West.
At the shrines in Ueno