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Last weekend was my goodbye party with all my friends living in Tokyo. A handful of UT students were in the crowd, and it was as nice a feeling as it had been almost 2 years ago when I first came to Tokyo, only to run around all night with the same friends I had back in Austin. It was much more exhilarating, though, to come halfway around the world and find that you still belong to something. It's something most tourists don't have.

It's been that feeling - only on occasion - for the last year. Anytime I took a break from my province, I hightailed it to Tokyo and called up everyone in the crew. In retrospect, those times were the ones where I was the happiest.

I've spent the last week in such a fashion. With nothing to do other than wait for a flight, I shacked up with various members of the Tokyo crew and got very adjusted to sleeping on solid floors. At night, the crew comes out to play and I get egged into another Red Bull, another can of coffee. And I wind up awake until the sun comes up. It's of great comfort to know that the Tokyo Crew will live on and just might be here the next time I come back.

Tonight's my last night in Tokyo, and I'm honestly a little relieved to be alone. Maybe it was the constant action and poor sleep of the last week, or maybe it's the peace and quiet of staying in a decent hotel for my last night. I'm acting like an old man - slouched on some bed or couch or other, hitting the spa for the relaxation, ordering room service, the whole deal.

It's a good chance to contemplate the closing of the 'Japan' chapter of my life. The first time I left Japan, I wasn't sad at all - I could feel that I'd be back before long. Sure enough, 5 months later, I had a contract in hand to spend anywhere from 1-5 years over here. But now that the contract is up and my bags are packed, it's hard to reminisce over the last year. Honestly, it's been utterly refreshing to get out of Shimane Prefecture, to the point where I'm quickly putting most of my life there out of mind. I'm too excited to get to the new thing. I could be reverse culture-shocked, but I'm too excited to see my friends. Too excited to start my new projects. Too excited to seek out a significant other that speaks my language to the point where you start inventing new words and meanings just to keep the communication on the same page.

Still, I'm ever-so-slightly nervous about leaving Tokyo. I love this city too much. This time, I feel like I'll be back - but it'll be a while. And when I get back, I've got a whole list full of people who will get calls the instant I land.

Right now, I can see the Tokyo skyline from my hotel room. It's gone from breathtaking (2 years ago) to feeling natural, feeling like home. With any luck, I'll see Mt. Fuji in the morning for the very first time.

Apple is going to tank in the next 5 years.

The great thing Apple had going 2 years ago with the Mac is on its way out. Even as I bought my very own Mac, I had the sensation that Apple's newfound awesomeness wouldn't last long. The famously rock-solid OSX is now buggy and unstable, the hardware is cheap Chinese-made garbage, and that's just the computers.

iPods are now harder to use and the software crashes. The AppleTV just isn't good enough when compared to what you can do with an Xbox 360, and the iPhone - while awesome on paper - is open to tons of problems outside Apple's control, such as AT&T's poor network management and billing headaches.

Apple's plan for world domination isn't working out like they hoped. The soon-to-be-famous MobileMe fiasco shows that they can't quite enter the 'service' market like they hoped.

Sorry, kiddos, but I can no longer recommend you Apple stuff like I've been apt to do for the last couple years.

The end has finally come. My one year on JET is all but done, and last Friday I formally said farewell to my little school.

I wrote a speech that I thought was splendiferous. I translated "all good things must come to an end" into Japanese and told the kids that my own dream at their age had been to come to Japan, so they could reach out and go for their dreams too. I also mentioned in passing that it was harder than I had expected to say goodbye to a bunch of rambunctious junior high kids.

At the time, it was a lie. A pleasantry. Japanese public speaking is nothing but lies and pleasantry, so I was doing my part to fit in.

But as the day wore on, it came to be true. Girls came into the teacher's room bawling their eyes out, crying things to the effect of "I can't believe he's leaving!" One of my poorest students, yet most enthusiastic, stuck by my side at every available opportunity. Then the letters started coming. A couple students came by to give me goodbye letters, and I had happened to write a letter to one of them, because she was one of The Special Ones.

The cat was out of the bag, so now the rest of the Special Letters had to get passed out. I had written letters to my 6 best students - not necessarily grade-wise, though they were all excellent students - but to the 6 who had really gone to the effort to communicate, to befriend me, to teach me as much as I had taught them. I told them just how talented they were and implored them to keep up their English with the ultimate end of getting out of Kawamoto. "The world is a wonderful place," I told all of them, "and America would love to meet you!"

Thereafter, the letters started to pour in. One student would be seen giving me a letter and the rest scrambled to write quick notes on their cute stationery notepads saying 'thanks' and 'come visit us!' But a few had gone to some extra effort. Of the Special Six, three were boys, so they didn't write anything. But of the remaining three, two had prepared small gifts for me in advance. One was a simple 'Thank You' done in traditional calligraphy style, and another was a note accompanied by a little Beijing 2008 Olympics mascot keyring - very cute, considering the student was ethnically Chinese.

None of the boys wrote me letters, save the lone special ed student. But I received many hugs and repeated "Dont go!" cries from the boys of my best class. I was honestly pretty floored by the love and support I was receiving. I had tried to be a teacher by personality for the last year, a role model in the same sense that my older brother was for me when I was a munchkin.

On the last day, I learned that it had worked.

Lunchtime came, and I had gotten an ego boost, but the "it's hard to say goodbye to kids" line was still a lie. Lunchtime went, and it had come time to really consider saying my last sayonara for good and getting out of school. After I left, Japanese formality would dictate that I was not to come back to the school again. Delaying it, I went on one last run around the school, checking into band practice, volleyball practice, baseball practice.

It did get really hard to say goodbye right at the end. It hit me that I did have an impact here and I nearly became overwhelmed by the guilt of leaving these kids behind after just one year of having that impact. But it was the hardest when I hit the band practice room.

Rika [name changed], my absolute best student, the best of the Special Six, was in the band room, but she wasn't tuning up. She sat on the floor in a corner, her elbows propped on her knees, her face covered in her towel. While other girls had bawled all morning, she had been strong and kept her wits. But the ultimate moment of sayonara, that was too much for her to handle. She was clearly crying underneath her towel, and she was doing her absolute best to hide it.

As I left the room, I managed to stare at her intently enough to get her attention. The towel came down, revealing a tear-filled face, and I mouthed a 'sayonara' across the room directly at her as the very last thing I did before stepping out.

And that was when it became incredibly hard for me to say goodbye. The amount of power one wields as a teacher really can be unbelievable at times. I could tell I had a good effect on little Rika, especially embracing her interest in English, but the one thing that brought me to tears all day was her tears. That I could cause that much pain was something I hadn't expected even on my most self-confident of days.

From there, it was all downhill. When it came time to shake teachers' hands and say 'sayonara' to them, I really did get clouded up by the tears. It wasn't like any other time I had teared up before in my life. It was somehow less... voluntary.

The end came and went before I even knew it. It was an end that I had looked forward to for at least 6 months. And my last two weeks of work had been a nightmare of Japanese passive-aggression and boredom. But seeing my own departure through my kids' eyes, I thought (and still think) how could I have looked forward to this?

I know that I have a lot to look forward to - I have fun travels ahead, followed by the promise of taking a great risk at an incredible job, not to mention rejoining the civilized world and eating Mexican food. I can only hope that one (or more) of my kids follows suit, because the matter is now unfortuately out of my hands.

OK, here's the truth behind why I learned Japanese, majored in it, and came to Japan:

Games.

I've usually said that's my reason for studying the language, but I'd try to mute it by saying it was my dream 10 years ago, when I was a pre-teen reading gaming magazines about Japanese design luminaries, and thinking I'd like to someday pick the language up, as if on a whim.

Truth is, that dream never faded. Not for a second. Games were my encouragement when Japanese studies got difficult. They were my primary motivation to come to Japan in the first place.

Over the last year, I've gotten to live the dream. And I don't mean by buying tons of games as if I were an anime collector fresh off the train to Akihabara. My dream from 10 years ago was to play a Shigeru Miyamoto game in its original form.

If you don't know that name, you certainly know his work. He's the guy behind Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, the Wiimote, and most of the other Nintendo classics.

A little over 6 months ago, the dream had become reality: I picked up a Wii and Super Mario Galaxy. And today, I finished it.

In those several months, I learned a lot about that dream and what it meant. The game's Japanese certainly gave me a few chuckles, but I learned that over the last 10 years game translation has come a long way. Whether you're playing Mario, Gran Turismo, or Metal Gear, English ain't all that bad. I'm holding off another month on this year's big game - Metal Gear Solid 4 - for that exact reason.

And sometimes, the Nintendo magic just ain't what it used to be. Super Mario Galaxy is a wonderful game, but it's a solid 9 out of 10 that should have been a perfect 10.

It may sound like 'so far, so jaded,' but today there was a big, big upswing. The credit roll.

As soon as I got that 60th star, killed Bowser, saved Peach, and saw the game's plot resolution with those cute little star characters, the credits came down the screen.

For the first time in my life, in Japanese.

The first name in the list: under Design Director, Shigeru Miyamoto. The guy who started it all for me. The inspiration to me, countless gamers, and even a few legendary modern designers.

But when it came across the screen, it read:

宮本　茂

and that's a good thing. That name may be hieroglyphics to you. Hell, this entire post may be Greek to you. But to tell you the truth, I'm getting an ever-increasing grin at the knowledge that today I accomplished one of my life's greatest dreams.

I spent last weekend in Osaka with 'the boys' from my prefecture - 3 fellow guys who I regularly play Airsoft games with. We went to Osaka with the express purpose of playing at one of Japan's rare indoor Airsoft arenas. As promised, it was awesome, but this isn't a gun geek post. This post is about the break I took one afternoon to head to Kyoto.

Kyoto is only 30 minutes from Osaka by train, so I had no excuse not to go to my friend Eri's piano contest happening on Saturday afternoon. The world of piano is a funny thing, it seems.

As this was a contest, I saw a rapid succession of several players, mostly girls, dressed mostly in black with the occasional white, who each played for 6 minutes before a small bell rang, the players stopped mid-note, and quietly walked off stage. No applause was allowed.

The players were obviously talented, but you could hear a wide disparity in skill. The less talented (or more nervous) players paused before notes that were big steps across the keyboard. Most aspired to what seemed to me to be the current fashion in piano playing: schizophrenia. I turn my TV onto the NHK Education channel pretty often at night (I only have 5 channels) and more often than not it's classical music, and there's usually a special place, front and center, for a fat pianist with an impossibly long Eastern European last name and a penchant for overacting as he plays: tender baby Jesus facial expressions for legato segments, Furious Anger for the forte. It strikes me as lame every time. Yes, I know that piano comes from pianoforte, which means 'soft' and 'strong' at once. But Mr. Nagaheekamapouliskov seems to have forgotten everything that comes in between. And yet this guy's on-off-switch style of playing is all the rage, telling by what I see on TV. And it's ugly.

But then in stepped Eri. I knew she was playing Debussy, a composer known for his expressions of smoothness and grace, but that was all I knew. She arrived for her 6 minutes dressed in a gorgeous pink dress, a pearl necklace, and meticulously done-up hair. Honestly, she'll be hard-pressed to look that classy on her own wedding day.

And it was everything I could have hoped for. With the weaker players, you could see the fear in their eyes, the fear that the piano might somehow betray them and PLONK out the wrong note. Eri didn't show a hint of it. She looked as she should: the piano was her tool, her instrument to control. And she played like it too. Weaker pianists play with their fingers. She played with her whole arms, her wrists smoothly but firmly commanding the piano to do her bidding. The resultant sound was beautiful: a full dynamic range, a smoothness that any player should aspire to play with, a sound that Debussy himself may have thought of when composing. She was the only one who didn't sound like Mr. Nagaheekamapouliskov, and that was a good thing.

Except I was wrong. The performance was a train-wreck. She spent 15 minutes being let into by her piano teacher before she could even talk to me or her own mom and sister who had come to watch. That teeny flower bouquet I brought along in the interest of tradition could wait. She had blown it.

As she finally stepped outside to talk to us, apparently she had known it all along. She had "given up right after [she] started." Wait, what? This performance that I had concluded was awesome was in fact her not cranking it to 11. It was her choking. She was too jittered to carry a regular conversation, so she sent the family and me off to have coffee together without her while she stuck around to await her 'miserable' result.

The result, according to a text the next morning, was a 'miserable' 5th out of 14 players. The top 4 were set to advance on to some other competition. For Eri, the score was some minor solace - she still did well despite totally blowing it. For me, the score made perfect sense: beautiful performance, but not what The Piano-Playing Establishment is looking for.

Eri, by the way, just accepted a job at Yamaha as an in-house piano instructor. I still don't understand why Yamaha employs them, but more importantly she's now technically a professional pianist. Take that, Establishment.