hasanhujairi[dot]com

Looking out the window on the train between Kokubunji Station and Kunitachi Station (where my university is located), I spotted someone with what translates to “two birds with one stone” written on the back of his shirt waiting on one of the platforms. At first, I laughed to myself a little because I had completely […]

John Lennon wrote “Across the Universe” in 1967, when he was 27 years old. This kind of makes me wonder.
Freddie Mercury was 29 when Bohemian Rhapsody came out in 1975.
Robert Plant was only 22, while Jimmy Page was 26 when they penned Stairway to Heaven.
Albert Einstein was 26 when he published his 1905 paper entitled […]

Yesterday:
The army of policemen and their bomb-sniffing dogs waltzing through the veins of Shinjuku Station made me feel uneasy, not because of their presence (and in large numbers), but because I was the only one who seemed to notice them. This can only mean one thing: The G8 Summit is in town. Well, not really […]

I stayed up till 6.00am this morning, preparing for a presentation I had to give at 10.35am. With less than three solid hours of sleep, I went to class, passed out the handouts and started presenting in my “I’m too sleepy to think” version of Japanese, but I miraculously managed to get my points across […]

Last night as I was walking around a part of West Tokyo, I saw many people dressed like hippies, and I asked myself, “Where do those guys do their shopping for their hippie-style clothes? Is there a hippies’ goods store or do they make everything at home?” I then asked myself about how the act […]

(The Sechuan Earthquake)
I was walking on campus when I noticed dozens of Chinese students from my university collecting donations for the terrible earthquake-hit region of Sichuan. It was odd having gangs of donation collectors strategically standing at every entrance to the university campus, running up to passers-by, asking for donations. This odd sensation, however, was […]

I’m in Bahrain now on a pseudo-vacation. I arrived here at an ungodly hour this morning after spending 24 hours in Istanbul. During those 24 hours in Turkey, I decided to be as close to being an istanbullu as I could.
In the hotel in which I was staying, I was immediately put off by the […]

Here in Tokyo I seem to have developed a habit of buying too many notebooks, usually at the beginning of something new. By ’something new’, I mean moving to a new place, starting a new semester, travelling to a new destination or starting a new project of some kind. I don’t buy any notebook from […]

I’ve been in Tokyo for nearly three years, and I still don’t think I understand half of what’s going on over here. This concern of being lost in translation was confirmed earlier this evening during a walk I took around Shinjuku Station.
Shinjuku Station is a monster of a station. It’s got hundreds of mouths and […]

Ezra Pound put it beautifully:
In a Station of the Metro
THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

I find train stations to be both symbolic and microcosmic at once. I get a rush every time I walk into a train station, no matter how many times I’ve passed through it before. […]