hdi and yama-ya foreigners

from now on i wont bore people with any details (or lack thereof :) regarding so-called spiritual journeys or epiphanies. ill keep it strictly about living in japan and the random thoughts/events that i come across in my daily life here.

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so i browse thru mainichi shimbun, the nytimes, cnnworld and bbc news online every morning before work and while reading a couple of bbc articles about the dangerous environmental and social costs of china`s communist-style of capitalism-pretty interesting stuff-i learned that china is ranked 94th in the united nations human development index (norway, sweden, australia are 1st,2nd,3rd). just to put this in perspective, jamaica the poorest country in the western hemisphere is ranked 79th and hong kong is 23rd. other interesting facts from this index: luxembourg ($61,190) has the highest gdp per capita not the us ($35,750); sierra leone ($520).

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japan is the true pioneer of reality tv...years ahead of the western world. i knew that from my stay last summer but over the weekend i watched their version of americas next top model and home extreme makeover, and it was very clear that they are far far superior than the us shows.

on a different note i discovered a better supermarket (yama-ya) with lots of international foods and for cheap too. i also realized that only in japan can you hear tweet and rkelly while buying cereal :) anyway there were 3 other `foreigners` shopping... indian-japanese i think. ive only seen a handful of non-japanese people since my arrival; less than 1% of the population are foreign citizens (sounds like an oxymoron to me) and the majority are chinese, korean, and indian, naturally. because of this its understandable that my walking the streets of ayukawa would create such interest in both children and adults. i too would probably stare rudely in surprise if i saw a black person on the hitachi train.