I remembered a very realistic dream I had last night, so I gotta get it down before I start the day.
I was still in Japan, but this time I was with my mom and sister. We had a car and decided on our last day of our trip to drive north to Miyajima, the American country on the northern side of Honshu.
We passed through Japanese/American border control, and as we crossed we were already picking up American radio stations. We felt a little rushed for time and we were arguing about what to do so we could get back to Tokyo and catch our flight home.
Japanese America was pretty much a mix of a Japanese town and an American town – American roadsigns with a Tokyo street layout (less gridlike, kind of jagged, lots of train tracks) – but there were also some steam elements that made it feel like it was an early 20th century kind of place.
We decided to go for some American food, so we stopped off at a giant shopping center over which a train station was situated. There were very long, somewhat narrow hallways with restaurant booths on either side, where places like McDonalds, Burger King, and Pizza Hut (which also served meatloaf) had all their food lined up and you could pick them all out in a tray fashion. All the food looked better than it actually does in real life – probably because Japanese restaurants always have plastic food outside their restaurants. Most of the workers were Japanese. There was also a Japanese-style bakery (another tray-type store where you pick out a number of pastries with some tongs and pay at the end). I couldn’t find anything good to eat and I remember going down that hallway for quite a long time until it was time to leave.
Somewhere during that time, though, I had gone to the second floor of the shopping center, where there were giant gymnasium-size rooms with a lot of arcade games and basketball courts scattered around in a kind of haphazard fashion. The games were modern – they had Street Fighter IV, which is only out in Japan right now – and there were a lot of DDR machines.
That’s about all I remember. It was truly a Japanese-American hybrid; a good estimation (minus some weird dream impossibilities) of what an America-controlled country would be like if it bordered Japan. Okay now I’m late for work so goodbye.