March 3, 2018 (Tokyo) by Tosh Berman

March 3, 2018, Tokyo

A dear friend of mine claims that jet-lag doesn’t exist.  Therefore I don’t have a reason for falling asleep in front of a bowl of miso soup.  What woke me up was the sound of the bowl breaking, and finding a piece of tofu on my eyebrow.   As I raised my head, I noticed other customers at this elegant restaurant was looking at me in such a manner as looking at a public drunk.  Speaking which, the sake glass remained unharmed to this mishap.   I do what I normally do in such situations by pretending nothing happened.  If one can do this with great conviction, you can get away with murder.  For example, President Trump uses this technique over and over again.   The idiots of the world stand significantly against embarrassment. 

I’m here in Tokyo to specifically write for a publication I work for which is Facebook.   They recently made changes in their format, due to Russian activity on their site.  From now on they will only hire professional writers to do the posts.  Which means they send me to foreign lands, as well as time-to-time write for individuals who use Facebook as a social platform.  There are countless people who are real, but they hire me to handle their posts.  So, I ask them if there are significant changes in their lives, which can mean a death in the family, moving from one location to another, or a new job, stuff like that.   It keeps me busy but the beauty of it with the power of the laptop I can pretty much do my occupation anywhere in the world unless someone pulls the plug out of this Internet thing. 

Tokyo is an exciting city due that they have buildings.  They have lots of buildings. Some even have windows where one can look at other buildings in their space.  As one can gather, some streets lead to these buildings, and some have front entrances.  Sometime today I’m going to enter one of these buildings to see what’s up. 

Meanwhile here are photos of me on Singapore airlines.  No seats were available, so I pretty much had to stand up in their small bathroom for 11 and a half hours.  The coach section is tight space wise, but if you occupy a bathroom, there is leg room and tiny room for a small hand-luggage.   The consistent knocking of the bathroom door gets annoying, but again, and like above, I just pretend nothing is happening.

Not able to speak a word of Japanese, except “ah-so,” which I understand can be even Chinese, but I’m not sure about that, is a stumbling block in business meetings as well as trying to find something to eat.  I have always read about how great their vending machines are, and I found a machine in an arcade. It is one of those claw things, where if you put a few hundred yen in the thingy-twiggy you can with some skill, grab food out of the closed-off section, which my understanding is to protect the food from outside germs.   I managed to get a piece of bread, and apparently, it doesn’t taste like any bread I have eaten before.  Still, when hungry, you have to keep your chin up and just pretend nothing happened.