Right, I'm in Osaka. This is going to be a difficult post - the apostrophe is carefully tucked away above the 7, requiring a complicated combination of keys to oblige. Also, the colon is not where it should be and there is an amazing button which, if pressed, converts every letter I type into its Japanese equivalent. As for dashes - these are almost impossible to achieve.

I feel better about being here now, but on the trip across I was in a vile mood. Depression vied with a curious feeling of dawning stupidity. Why was I going, after all? I'd spent much of my going away party insisting that I wasn't going to find myself (solemn doses of reality at 3 am in bed in Melbourne do just fine for that) and that travel for that purpose was stupid. Wherever you go, there you are and all that. I spent the rest of the party attempting to persuade my friends that yes, they'd miss me and they'd better bloody well tell me so. I have a group of up and coming young journo friends (hi, Ben, Pat, Andy and Melinda) who largely dislike being touched, whereas I have to touch my friends, most of the time and hence our last parting meant that they had to submit to me hugging, lifting, poking and generally making a nuisance of myself. In retrospect, I wouldn't have been displeased if my going away ended up as one gigantic flesh pile (yes, clothes on - please!) in order to make me feel as wanted and alive as possible. Mind you, it would have been nicely ironic if the pile had dissolved, giggling and grumbling, to reveal a suffocated doug. Anyway, the past month has been wonderful, with much carousing and many people asking why, exactly, I was going, and I didn't know anymore. I think the reason I'm here now is a combination of stubbornness and inertia.

The night before I left, I was planning to sneak out of the family home (so as not to risk my mother's disapproval, which stimulates my guilt gland remarkably well. How old am I?) and go out to Cherry for one last dance. All of my housemates came along and we danced wildly and badly for other people's amusement, bordering on debauchery. Time flew, I confessed to my housemate that I had a large crush on her (surprising and not surprising at the same time) and suddenly it was 5.30 and the plane left at 8 and I drove home, tired and happy. An hour later, I was on the plane, bundled off too fast to think, a little sadness seeping in as I said goodbye to my family and friends (instant empty nest syndrome for my parents cos I'm here with my brother) and an hour later we were in Sydney, eight hours later in Vietnam and five more flying hours to Osaka.

We were in Vietnam for six hours or so (why the flight was cheap) and this meant a free hotel, which meant negotiating Vietnamese immigration (self important little men with gigantic green caps tilting upwards to the roof and military ranks on their shoulders), a half-hour bus ride, and a brief hour in a hotel before we had to reverse the process and catch our flight. Bizarre. Vietnam, even briefly, was amazing - the sheer quantity of scooters and bikes on the street was incredible, a cacophony of horns and tyre squeals. It's amazing how constrained our road rules are - all refined, distanced, so that we don't actually have to come into direct contact with each other at any time, whereas Vietnamese riders are constantly aware of themselves and other riders. They flow around obstacles like our bus as if they are water; traffic lights are generally suggestions, and after hours, many lights flash orange and it's all on - might makes right, and riders form spontaneous mobs in order to charge across an intersection, forcing other traffic to stop and allow them through. It makes amazing viewing. We took a quick walk away from our gecko-festooned hotel: shoe shops with the wares dangling by their laces from the ceiling, tiny children playing with tin foil in gutters, old men looking at us with the memory of the American war reflected in their pupils, token Communist posters losing out to the lurid mobile phone ads, traditional temples beefed up with neon strips, everywhere people sitting squatting standing talking, tuk tuk drivers asleep in their seats. Why has it been so long since I left Australia? Why do you have to leave to realise that ours is only one method of living together in a society?

It was almost an anti climax after that to land in Osaka. Pre-dawn, Japan's cities were furiously lit, in counterpoint to the dark mountains behind. The darkness shrank as we flew in over Osaka - great plumes of smoke, mammoth container ships, grey concrete everywhere - and my heart sank. The bus trip to Hirakata did nothing to shake that impression. The outskirts of Osaka look as if Dante was restricted to grays in his imagining of hell, greys and the emotional palette of boredom alone of all the torments. Apartment boxes amidst acres and acres of ports, transit places, limbolands. At least airports are confined on the ground; their limbos looping high above the world, largely invisible, but ports sprawl and loiter and generate housing clusters like mushrooms. But then we passed through the looking glass for a second time, away from the true boondocks, and hit Osaka proper; still a concrete wonderland (it was bombed to shit in WWII and you can still see it in the way very old Osaka residents look at me - they remember their glory days) but concrete interspersed with tiny rice paddies in the middle of the city, rice paddies jostling with Toyota stores, electronics boutiques, temples down back streets, small sculpted pines growing rogue.

I need a digital camera. There are so many points of wonder.