Working and our Neighborhood

Nagoya is a pretty cool city. I've been to amazing Japanese and Chinese restaurants, nights out at karaoke (where I earned questionable fame as a singer of disney classics...) , and days wandering the markets and streets.

Now some of the schools I've been sent to have been quiiiite a ways outside of city life. For example, my very first shift observing an active teacher, I got a taste of real modern Japan. This is what I saw when I got off the train:

Yes. A rice paddy. Yet, my English school? Inside a huge two block long nation-wide chain shopping mall. Modern Japan is an interesting thing. While the cities have attracted mad amounts of high-end international names like Prada and Gucci and Apple, the smaller cities and towns rely on rice paddies and a huge shopping mall for sustenance. Think the Walmart effect on small towns in the mid-west in  America. I've asked students in these little towns what they do during a week and get answers such as "I buy my groceries everyday from Aeon Shopping Mall." "I buy all my clothes from Aeon Shopping Mall." "I go to the bank at Aeon." "I hang out at Aeon with my friends." "I walk around at Aeon cause there's nothing else to do."

Damn. Every time I hear this type of story from a student, I imagine a little American town next to corn and soy fields with a giant Walmart smack-dab in the center. Yea, there used to be little mom-n-pop shops where you could get home grown veggies, or hand sewn pants or medicine from a local pharmacy.   But how can I possibly go to these old places when I can save 25 cents at Walmart?

I sometimes worry that Japan is more Western than I originally thought....