Let’s see if my mind has cooled off a bit from last night; perhaps I can share some things with you properly.

Remember the streets I told you about—the tangled, twisted, haphazard mess? Well, the trains, notorious for being the most organized in the world, appear to be the same mess that the streets are… but don’t be fooled.

“Sumimasen!” “Sumimasen!” is all you hear on trains, that are so crowded that one cannot sit down, let alone have a single inch of personal space. “Sumimasen” means excuse me, and without it you could end up stuck, sandwiched between businessmen peering out the windows as you watch your stop fly by at 50 m.p.h., a mistake after which the only hope is a taxi back home—and they’re not cheap.

The stations themselves are pieces of artwork, a starburst of color, exploding at the seams just like Tokyo itself.

Colors that have been kicked out of the rainbow find their home here in Tokyo, and in the stations; the rebel colors, so exotic that the border on illegal due to their euphoric effect. If Shinjuku could be called a visual mindfuck, then the train stations rank just below that description in their radiance. So many strange hues mixed with strange words, compounded of course by the thousands of commuters stuck in the bowels of the train tunnels; tunnels that are blindingly bright from all the overhead fluorescence—though the sun sets at 5 p.m., there is no night here, no darkness.

The sky is simply a great black ocean that happens to rest above us instead of below, yet unless one craned his head perfectly vertical, he wouldn’t know it existed.

If only I could capture this properly in words.

The feeling that this place exerts upon you is one that shuts your senses off completely; you want to pinch yourself and wake up, but you can’t. It really is that unbelievable.

Shinjuku is full of people, bursting with humanity so diverse yet so much the same… Everyone here is Japanese, perfectly homogenous. People like me are rare, foreigners are hard to spot. Last night in Shinjuku I perhaps counted one other foreigner, but it could have easily been a Japanese person confusing me with his wardrobe. Their society is a society of one race, starkly contrasting with that of the United States where in a grocery store, even in Lincoln, one can enter for five minutes and encounter five different languages.

Here, it’s all Japanese. Language and people.

“She is hot,” Takayuki said to me on the crowded train, inches from the girl he was referring too.

I wanted to “Shhh” him, but there was no need. It has yet to sink in that precious few Japanese people can understand English well enough to comprehend it spoken quickly and colloquially.

“She is hot,” I said later, at the Conmini, to Takayuki.

I was referring to the cashier who was counting out change for the snacks I had purchased. Takayuki concurred with me, and the cashier had no idea what was said. Clueless.

This is something I will never get used to, yet it’s like being in on some amazing secret that belongs to me, my student companions, and my Japanese friends.

Japan is a pretty amazing secret, too.

Discover it as soon as you can.