Blogging: The epitomy of ego

Who are blogs for anyways. Answer me that.
Anyways, I write this for you. You who is reading this. But anyways, I write this mainly for my friends at home, whom I think want to hear updates on what Im doing in this country. But maybe they don:t want to hear. In which case, why do I bother? Why do I bother other than the fact that I have no classes for 2 week blocks around test time and am stuck at a desk with Japanese study books and a computer. well, thats your answer. Or maybe its my answer. Maybe I write this for me so that I can convince myself that my time in Japan is actually happening and I can validate it by uploading data. Who am I other than the data that surrounds me? Maybe thats why I'm here, to give myself more data.
I wrote a letter to Abby today and thought I would post part of it here for well...in honesty, simply because I think its interesting and this is a blog and thats what you do on blogs. you fill in the gaps.
"Its mountain vegetable collecting time in Japan. It is sad because none of the younger generations seem to go out an collect mountain vegetables like their parents. I can see this slow paradigm shift just by looking at a cross section of generations. I wonder when the day will come that no-one knows which mountain vegetables to pick anymore. After reading "Omnivore's Dilemna" (and before reading it too) I feel this dissattachment from the food we eat is increasingly imminent in Japan where packaged food is ridiculously widespread and few people have time to cook meals for themselves let alone gather it. (exempt from this are the Obachans and housewifes and farmers who are the ones still gathering the mountain veggies.) Japan is becoming, and I hate to say this cliche of westernization, so I wont, I will simply say, it is becoming a faster society. A society of convinience. I hate to generalize and to make broad statements based on a few scattered examples I have seen in my limited world of Nagai, Japan, so if you are reading, take this at face value. Back to the generational cross-section. Of all the Japanese people I know, the ones I know the least about on the inside are the students. Sometimes I get the occasional personal divulgence from them, but I always feel like something is hidden. There is something that I cant quite seem to get. Perhaps it is because I am an outsider to their culture. Its hard to really know what goes on in the Japanese student's mind. It seems very similar to the American student's mind yet there is this certain element of innocence and naivete attached to it that is lacking in the American students' mind. There also appears to be an incredible sense of conformity to social norms and groupthink. I went to the table tennis match on saturday and when our team lost, many of the girls were crying. One girl was crying especially hard because her game was very close and she felt as though she had lost it for the whole team. She is actually one of my favorite table tennis friends (although not the best student) she always talks to me at practice. I gave them all hugs and comforted them but there wasn:t much I could say or do other than that. It was at that time that I really felt more like a teacher than a friend. I had not played with them, I didn:t share their pain in loosing. There are so many moments at this job where I feel like one of the students. It was curious to have a teacherly moment that all Japanese teachers experience daily in their roles as teachers/caregivers/parents to these students. These students that they see almost more than the actual parents see the students.
So Ive kind of deviated from the original letter I wrote to Abby and have gone off on multiple tangents. But I:m just going to end this on a tangent of the tangents. In conclusion: American and Japanese students should pick more mountain vegetables.