This must be the trip for which I've done the most preparation and felt the least prepared, and the one during which I've felt both the most viscerally engaged and the most like I'm somehow collecting impressions to be experienced by some other me later. I'm fixating haplessly on every detail, as if the language shock has fried all my gauges of significance. A college track team surprises us around a corner and I squeak at missing the shot. B laughs at me. "All those people are is Japanese!" It's true, there's no Grand Canyon here, no Eiffel Tower, no Sagrada Familia. I've come to see everything, ruefully reluctant to grandly and inevitably fail.