Okay, what were all my prejudices, never having been to Japan? They eat a lot of rice and a lot of fish. They are very disciplined. Technology is well appreciated, especially camera technology, and cellular phones. They like American music. Nose blowing in public is shunned. They are not obese, not violent. There is some prostitution, and there are some toilets that spray hot steam at your butt. Marriages are pre-arranged, or was that 19th Century China? Anyway, prejudices are based on truths, but they leave out an important phenomenon: being there. When you are there, and feeling in the moment, you find that humans are humans, with aspirations, frustrations, passions. It is a homey feeling, like being at home. Sure it's exotic, and people look different, but wherever you go, you can find people just being there.

The hotel is half a mile long. Normally for skiers, it is currently the container for scores of rock bands from different countries. Black shirts, shagged hair, tattoos which have been pierced, tired eyes, laminated passes, rugged boots, after-five shadows. I have the feeling of wanting to get out. So each day I go on my standard twelve minute run. And each day I find myself around the corner from that mammoth lodge, witnessing a surreal and unexpected ritual: Japanese children practicing various horns [The rest of the story is made up, fake, fictional, farcical, inconsequential, unsubstantiated].

So one of these hornish people is sitting, with music stand, in what I've been calling, "Tuba Alley," which must be part of some neighborhood music camp. His Tuba is uttering, at the request of his fingers and lungs, a mathematical but ethereal sequence of low notes. With discipline in mind and rice in stomach, this recital is Tuba Boy's way of just being there. I envy his meditation more than his notes, but I also imagine his notes being used later as the basis of a bass line. So I commit them to memory and sure enough I find myself midjam, midafternoon, busting out the aforementioned tones. And to me, that was Japan. A Japan I couldn't have imagined until I got there.

The moral of this story is that even if a bass line, or a story, is adlibbed a bit, it still can remain intact, and even seem exotic and profound, as long as you embrace the concept of being in the moment. Now I'm in New York, home of skyscrapers, subway tokens, homeless people, nightclubs, photographers, and showtunes.