Don't Try This At Home--Or Anywhere, Really

There's a somewhat longer post below and some new photos over at the flickr site, but I just came in from "going to shopping" (an obviously incorrect English grammatical construction that apparently can't be removed from Japanese students of English) and for some reason felt compelled to blog the fact that one shouldn't, if one is a relatively normal-sized American, go to shopping for jeans in Japan. First of all, I'm not in the best of moods (see below) and secondly, the height differences between Americans and Japanese puts the waist of all Japanese pants at about pubic bone level on most Americans. This means that all ten kilos that I've gained in Japan (and which are centered around my belly) hung over the top button of every pair of pants that I tried on. Nothing like the belly fat hangover to make one feel like an elephant.

Part of that feeling is just my being an American girl in the land where all the women are five foot nothing and the size of your average American nine-year-old. Honto, a couple of months ago, I was cleaning up The Kaisha lobby and came across a copy of an American fashion magazine that one of the teachers had put on the shelves. I opened up the magazine and was astounded at how fat the Western models looked. Of course, everyone knows that those models are often shockingly underweight, but after six months in Japan my perception had so changed that I looked at Kate Moss and her colleagues and thought, Well, they could stand to drop a few pounds. A few pages later, there was a picture of Catherine Zeta Jones and she looked huge. The funny thing is, she's probably a size six. Here, a size six is pushing it. My coworkers are size zero or two. The biggest is maybe a size four. At size ten, I feel like a giantess.

Ah, I'm ready to see Americans again!

More negativity below--and some new photos over at flickr!