osaki ni shitureishimasu: Where were you?

Where were you when Bush claimed victory? I think this one has the potential to be one of the "where were you" questions of all time.

I was in Nakayama, attending a party celebrating the 10th year anniversary of the sisterhood between Nakayama, JP and Temecula, CA.

I had a horrible time. The Temecula folks were stiff and unfriendly, I made more smalltalks with the Japanese people there. They were also very judgemental and full of "We in America does X differently, and better" attitudes. Not surprisingly, they were mostly city officials and politicians. As for the Nakayama people there, I recognized a lot of their faces and remembered the events where I met them, but couldn't recall any of their names. So it turned out to be pretty awkward. Exchanged a few numbers with women in the housewife age group who wanted to practice English and was invited to another party tomorrow. I just wanted to come home and sleep.

Which I will do now. Fuck the election, contrary to what a lot of people believe, it's not going to be the end of the world.

(updated: 11/13/04)

Before the unvealing of the decennial plaque. At the party, the fatman on the left insisted proudly that he was once the mayor of Temecula. Extremely unplesant man with mouthful of bad breath and rah rah USA. Obviously, he voted Bush.

Few noted comments from this unpleasant fat man. "The fact that we have little legues and that these Japanese kids don't have formal baseball training until middle school is why MLB is fundamentally better than JLB." He's wrong, of course: the Japanese elementary schools have baseball teams and coach, and Americans have frames to support, for example, bellies of his size. Just such a stereotypical American thing to say. "The American bottom-up municipal governement system is better than the Japanese top-down municipal government system." He's probably right, Japanese local governements have to petition for funds from the central government, which seems like a system designed for corruption to me.