The other day, in search of an Internet connection, my Japanese teacher took me to a manga café in Asakusa, a Tokyo neighborhood. Earlier, she’d been trying to describe to me the quintessential Japanese comics-and-anime geek. “He was the one in high school who was always by himself, collecting figurines,” she said. “A little bit weird. He didn’t know how to talk to girls.”

The café was on the second floor of a little building near the subway station. We pushed a button on the sliding glass doors. In front of us, renting a private room with a PC, was a man in his early twenties, hunched over geriatrically, pants belted at the ribs and a finger knuckle-deep in his left nostril. My teacher—pretty, prim, a fan of golf—turned to me and whispered behind her hand, “Otaku.”

The café had a wall of junk food for sale, and a library of books and DVDs to rent, and even a shower. (Some people actually live temporarily in the cafés—weekend visitors to Tokyo who can’t afford hotels, girl runaways, temporary workers with no place else to go.) In the “open space,” where we went to use the Internet, a man was slumped over a desk before a window, fast asleep, a paper cup of free coffee cooling at his elbow.

That same day, Taro Aso, a manga fan—he says he reads ten a week—became Prime Minister. I was talking about it with an Israeli anthropologist who teaches manga and anime in Tokyo and she shook her head anxiously. “I hope he’s not otaku,” she said. “They are terrible at verbal communication.”

Aso seems to be doing O.K. so far on that front (he got laughs at the U.N. last week). His pick for Transport Minister, on the other hand, might be a closet manga fan. He has already resigned, after saying that Japanese people “do not like nor desire foreigners,” and—to the exclusion of the indigenous Ainu and the Korean population, among others—repeating the old national myth that the country is “ethnically homogenous.”

A common complaint about personal blogs is that they’re obsessive, self-referential, and narrow. They are, people say dismissively, about what the writer had for lunch. There is an arena in which that is manifestly, explicitly true: the world of bento blogs—blogs devoted to the Japanese art of arranging a lunchbox. There are online communities devoted to bento feats—contests for the execution of a theme, like “I love the 80s” and “Mario Bros”; there are Japanese housewife blogs; and North Americans like La Carmina, who espouses Gothic Lolita-style, or GothLoli, and is working on a book for Penguin that will be called “Cooking Cute.”

Since a post about cute stuff in Japan wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the mouthless cat, here are some stunning Hello Kitty bentos, an example of charaben (or kyaraben)—i.e. character bentos.

The 3-D scene—post-bento, you could say—was documented last spring in the food section of the New York Times.

Today, at the Nippon Press Centre building, big men in bad suits with earpieces: the international symbol for bodyguard. The five candidates for the Presidency of the Liberal Democratic Party, the conservative party that has held power with little interruption since the mid-fifties, were giving a press conference. The winner of the election, which will be held on September 22, is almost certain to be chosen as the next Prime Minister. So here was Yuriko Koike, the female candidate, in a white suit and black turtleneck, with a pale aspect and roughed-up, Hillary-ish black hair, surrounded by four tawny male competitors in dark business attire.

“As the first female defense minister, I have been concerned with the safety and security of the Japanese people. To clearly defend our national interests, I have exercised my leadership,” she said, Condishly, when asked if, like Hillary Clinton, she could transcend gender and present herself as the best candidate on the merits of her political wisdom. But, she went on, “As a woman, I will be able to put myself in the shoes of the common people. Working women, working mothers, they are struggling and suffering, they want to have babies and are wondering, Is Japan safe enough to bring babies into society?” That was somehow very Sarah Palin, another high-office candidate with whom she’s been compared. Talking economic reforms, she invoked Thatcher—seek out waste within the government.

Around the same time, Junchiro Koizumi, the former Prime Minister, and Koike’s mentor, endorsed her, though she is currently in third place, with only eight per cent of the vote.

One of the candidates in the race for Prime Minister of Japan—following the surprise resignation of Yasuo Fukuda—is Yuriko Koike, a former television anchorwoman who speaks Arabic. Koike, the defense minister under Shinzo Abe, has been called “Japan’s Condoleezza Rice,” a comparison which caused her to give herself the nickname Madame Sushi. (According to the Japan Times, “Japanese critics dubbed her ‘Madame Kaiten (conveyor belt) Sushi’—someone who goes around and around until picked up—in reference to her record of switching political parties, as well as districts and political sponsors.”) Koike, who is single, has no children, and is the former minister of the environment (and, as such, an advocate of the Japanese “waste-not” ethos of mottainai), is now, improbably, being compared to Sarah Palin, who prays to God for oil pipelines. If Koike is elected, she will be the first female Prime Minister of Japan.

Aesthetic observation No. 1: the Japanese bathroom mirror. I landed in Tokyo this evening—a muggy, pale light hooding the city—and took up residence at the International House of Japan, a mid-century masterpiece built on the grounds of an old mansion, in a quiet part of Roppongi, between the Tokyo Tower and the tower of Tokyo—that is, the glamorous mixed-use development known as Roppongi Hills.

I went for a sushi dinner with a Japanese friend, at a quaint neighborhood place that felt like the Sixties: working women in belted dresses, a family shrine (purified paper and straw) in the eaves, people smoking. There was a little boy talking on his cell phone, which I also liked seeing. We mostly ate what my friend called “blue skins,” the family of fish with the silvery backs. On the way home, she showed me all her favorite rice-cracker shops, common as Starbucks, which I also saw. (Also, an apartment building called the Oakwood. Could this possibly be a reference to, or a relative of, that L.A. chain of “temporary furnished apartments,” where divorced men and child actors live?)

Back to the mirror: I came home to take a shower before bed. It was a long shower, and when I got out, the whole bathroom was fogged except for a lovely oblong window in the center. I noticed it when I went to brush my teeth and thought, tired from travelling, that maybe I’d cleared it myself with a towel. Then I realized, No, someone had done this for me, and it felt like a little gift. Itadakimasu.

I’m leaving this morning for Toyko, where I’ll be for six weeks, writing. I’m taking my camera. Check back with me later this week for glimpses of the city. And send ideas!

I don’t know why this stopped me—maybe because I thought all such search missions were conducted on Craigslist nowadays, or because the last flier I saw posted in my neighborhood was for a chihuahua (five-thousand-dollar reward, if memory serves, and possibly Paris Hilton’s)—but I pulled over at the sight of this flier on a telephone pole near my house:

I got up close to read the small text at the bottom: “I meant to give you my contact information as ‘our paths’ might not cross again in the near future so I had my son put up this sign as a shot in the dark. Would love to speak with you again.-Jan” (She left an e-mail address and I wrote to it; no word yet on what passed between them in the parking lot at the Grove.)

It filled me with pathos—her son—and made me shudder (the Lexus, the Grove). Then my neighbor came out and confronted me because he thought I was a paparazzo.

The artist Ed Ruscha—icon of Venice, California—has made a career of documenting the transforming city. “Then & Now,” a book composed of two sets of photographs—one taken in 1973 and the other in 2004—of every lot on Hollywood Boulevard, from the 8800 block to the 4500, is a three-decades-long time capsule. The later photographs show houses where there once was hilly scrub, vegetation grown thick and obscuring, taper-like cypresses fattened to pear shapes, and more fences. Little fifties ranch houses have lost their everyday suburban feel and now look like gems of Modernism. On the whole, there is a greater sense of privacy and withholding.

Now the creep of time has found Ruscha where he lives. The New York Times reports today that the empty lot behind Venice’s bustling Abbot Kinney Boulevard used by Ruscha and fellow Venice artist Laddie John Dill for thirty years as an open-air studio will be paved by the city and become a parking lot. (Dill fenced it in and appropriated it, the Times says, to keep out “a growing coterie of drug dealers, prostitutes, and vagrants who were encroaching on his work space.”) An editorial in VenicePaper points out that without Ruscha and Dill the area might never have become a place that needed parking space for shoppers: “Between the two men, they have helped put Venice on the map, changed the way the world sees our community, elevated its place in the artworld and supported a multitude of Venetians and local businesses.”