A Look into Hamby’s Life

There are two main reasons I decided to visit Japan. The first was that I wanted to do another extended trip to a foreign country, the second was that I wanted to visit my good friend Chris Hamby. We went to college together and are Delta Sigma Phi fraternity brothers. I would not travel across the Pacific Ocean for just anyone.

I’m going to use this post to attempt to explain what his life is like here in Japan from an outside perspective. If you were to ask him what it is like to live here he would give you a very one sided jaded account (which he would probably admit).

While Nagoya is the third largest city in Japan, it doesn’t have many tourist attraction which would attract western visitors and as a result, there are very few English speakers in the city. He sometimes goes days without speaking a word of English to anyone. It’s really rough on him.

He really misses everyone back home and tries his best to know what is going on. It is my estimate that he consumes at least eight to ten hours of American media every day. It is really amazing what you can get through the internet. At home he watches certain shows like the NBC Nightly News and the Daily Show every single night to keep in touch. He subscribes to countless podcasts and has his iPod headphones in at all times. In this regard he has assimilated into the Japanese culture. Riding subways and walking down the streets, 9 out of 10 people are wearing headphones. For him it doesn’t really matter if he has his headphones in, it’s not like someone is going to randomly talk to him. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen here.

The amount of American media Hamby consumes is really incredible. One one hand he is probably more aware of news than many people living in America, but at the same time he lives in this pop culture bubble that leaves him oblivious to the zeitgeist. A good example of this would be when we watched the Larry King interview of Lady Gaga. Before it started he admitted he had only heard one of her songs and didn’t really know that she was a huge deal in the U.S. (and Japan for that matter, I hear here music everywhere here). He had never seen any of her music videos, even though the Bad Romance video is the most popular of all time on YouTube. He then asked what the deal was with that Justin Beiber kid, which made me realize, maybe missing out on American pop culture isn’t always a bad thing.

His girlfriend Mandy says he lives like a monk. If you replace lots of reading with some reading and a lot of television, video games, and podcasts, then the term is very accurate. I asked him what he misses most about America and he gave me the following list: pizza, American food in general, driving his car, his friends, grass (even mowing the lawn) and Mandy. The man misses mowing the lawn, go figure. Goes to show, it is the little things that count.