Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Terebi Newsflash
Right now we're watching a show where food items go around on a sushi conveyor belt and people dressed in politically incorrect ideas of the costume (and fake noses) of various nations try to pick them up with chopsticks within a time limit. If they fail, two guys come out and spin their chair around while yelling incomprehensible things. There's also a song that goes with the game. After that appears to be another show where people dressed up in various costumes (mostly men cross-dressing; also a man in full gold body paint being C3P0) take turns swinging across a pool on a rope and trying not to fall in. Or not being able to avoid falling in. I'm not completely sure.
Ducks (January 30, 2008)
Today it was finally something approaching a comfortable temperature. It's amazing how much that does to make me feel good. I forgot that it's possible to walk around without freezing, grey weather keeping me from having any interest in it. I decided to look for water, so I took the train to Aratama-bashi because it's the only stop covered by my student card that has anything referring to water in its name ("bashi" refers to a bridge). I was successful in finding water - there was a small river, and there were even some ducks!
The light was very strange, but it made for an interesting walk. I found a drugstore and spent forever trying to figure out the difference between two type of makeup remover pads, and finally just went with the pink one. On the way back to the train I sat on the corner for a little while and drew the objects of interest on the opposite street - a tree, some powerlines and a slightly atypical lamppost. There was one group of high school boys on bikes who waited through five or ten lights on that corner, but other than that no one seemed to take any notice.
It's pretty typical, really. I would expect people walking past to notice someone drawing, or the girl at the hyaku-en store to say hi to me when I come there three days in a row at the same time, but in general the Japanese try not to make a scene or interfere with anyone else's personal space.
It's probably tied up with the way that they take extra notice of facial expressions and reactions in general. My host family laughs at me a lot, not because of mistakes I make but because of ways I react to things. Today they said I sounded like their little dog because I squeaked a little as I failed at eating sushi.
As I was walking home a group of guys biked past me. I didn't realize that they were foreigners until I noticed one of them looking at me funny. The only people that stare at me here, where I'm the anomaly, are foreigners who look like me. It makes sense, but it just made me laugh.
The light was very strange, but it made for an interesting walk. I found a drugstore and spent forever trying to figure out the difference between two type of makeup remover pads, and finally just went with the pink one. On the way back to the train I sat on the corner for a little while and drew the objects of interest on the opposite street - a tree, some powerlines and a slightly atypical lamppost. There was one group of high school boys on bikes who waited through five or ten lights on that corner, but other than that no one seemed to take any notice.
It's pretty typical, really. I would expect people walking past to notice someone drawing, or the girl at the hyaku-en store to say hi to me when I come there three days in a row at the same time, but in general the Japanese try not to make a scene or interfere with anyone else's personal space.
It's probably tied up with the way that they take extra notice of facial expressions and reactions in general. My host family laughs at me a lot, not because of mistakes I make but because of ways I react to things. Today they said I sounded like their little dog because I squeaked a little as I failed at eating sushi.
As I was walking home a group of guys biked past me. I didn't realize that they were foreigners until I noticed one of them looking at me funny. The only people that stare at me here, where I'm the anomaly, are foreigners who look like me. It makes sense, but it just made me laugh.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
January 29, 2008
Precautions
- Note the fire enough because this is a combustible material.
- Never use it because foam changes in quality to paints of oily.
- Do not apply it to sunlight for a long time because it is deterirated by ultraviolet rays.
- The guardian must attend it when the child below the elementary school lower grades makes the work.
- Use and wipe the neutral detergent off when you wash off dirt.
- Note the children's eating this.
- According to adandonment division of various place municipality when this is abandoned.
I had a great trip to my local 百円店 (dollar store) after school today. What I noticed most this time was the warning labels. I just didn't know that there was so much danger associated with styrofoam. My favorite is "Note the children's eating this". The accompanying Japanese says literally "Warn small children not to put this in their mouth". I don't really know how the passive "note" came about at all. The last warning occurred in some form on most labels, and it always came out funny. I suppose in English we do see "Dispose in accordance with local laws" or something, but the "abandon" verb used in a lot of these warnings makes the translation pretty odd sometimes.
There were some amazing things. I go to that store pretty often, but I hadn't really gone into the housewares and food section. There's a whole aisle of items to put in boxed lunches. I really wanted to find a use for the adorable tiny containers with animal heads on them, or the flexible straws that were decorated with giraffes. They didn't have any of those make-your-own packaged onigiri wrappers, with the tabs so you can pull it off and have the dry seaweed and the wet rice come together only at the moment of consumption. That was disappointing.
- Note the fire enough because this is a combustible material.
- Never use it because foam changes in quality to paints of oily.
- Do not apply it to sunlight for a long time because it is deterirated by ultraviolet rays.
- The guardian must attend it when the child below the elementary school lower grades makes the work.
- Use and wipe the neutral detergent off when you wash off dirt.
- Note the children's eating this.
- According to adandonment division of various place municipality when this is abandoned.
I had a great trip to my local 百円店 (dollar store) after school today. What I noticed most this time was the warning labels. I just didn't know that there was so much danger associated with styrofoam. My favorite is "Note the children's eating this". The accompanying Japanese says literally "Warn small children not to put this in their mouth". I don't really know how the passive "note" came about at all. The last warning occurred in some form on most labels, and it always came out funny. I suppose in English we do see "Dispose in accordance with local laws" or something, but the "abandon" verb used in a lot of these warnings makes the translation pretty odd sometimes.
There were some amazing things. I go to that store pretty often, but I hadn't really gone into the housewares and food section. There's a whole aisle of items to put in boxed lunches. I really wanted to find a use for the adorable tiny containers with animal heads on them, or the flexible straws that were decorated with giraffes. They didn't have any of those make-your-own packaged onigiri wrappers, with the tabs so you can pull it off and have the dry seaweed and the wet rice come together only at the moment of consumption. That was disappointing.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Homestay
We went to Korean barbecue for my sister's birthday. Above is my host mom Kaori, and my host dad, and below is me and Reiko, who just turned 12.
Reiko and Shelly:
Conveyor-belt sushi with my family:
Me and Reiko:
The kitchen in my house:
The kotatsu (amazing on cold days, which is every day):
The fish:
Shelly being put into a coat for her walk:
Sunday, January 27, 2008
January 28, 2008
January 28, 2008
Reiko had her English test yesterday. As soon as they got home, Kaori asked me to check her answers. The structure of the test was pretty strange. There were a bunch of choose-the-word-to-fill-in-the-blank questions, and then a set of weird problems where you were given a short dialogue with a five-word blank, and five words, and you had to put them in order and then mark the second and fourth word. Reiko was the best at that section, mostly because it wasn't either incredibly idiomatic English or difficult business jargon. Then there was some reading comprehension on boring and technical subjects, and a listening section that I wasn't able to check. I'm sure she did best on the listening, though. The answer choices were incredibly simple compared to the complicated choices in the reading sections. I was at first really surprised, because I assumed that reading would be simpler since that's the way it is in Japanese. But reading comprehension in English doesn't involve memorizing kanji, and the Japanese educational system is such that kids can "know" English and be completely unable to speak it. Besides that speaking practice doesn't start until 13, Kaori also said that although they're bringing in foreign teachers to teach English conversation, a lot of the teachers are still native Japanese who can't speak English without an accent, and bringing in more native English speakers would put them out of a job.
So although I keep worrying that I sound as bad in Japanese as they do in English, that may not be so. There are far fewer sounds in Japanese than there are in English, and most of them, with the exception of the r/d/l sound and the n/m sound (Jeremy, what are these called?) are sounds that we make in English, so it's not hard for us to speak. But we have so many different vowels, and overwhelming combinations of consonants, and weird sounds like "th" and "v" that aren't in Japanese. And then there's the r/l difficulty. Kate or Ksenia said that apparently the problem is that they honestly can't tell the difference at all. It's been tested, and both sounds apparently register as the same. I find that hard to understand since they sound so different to me, but I guess it's possible.
There are many mind-bending things like that. It's hard to get used to the idea that gestures don't necessarily have universal meaning, or universal implications. We were talking about confusion about Japanese gestures. The "come here" hand wave takes a while for me to get used to, because it looks just like the motion you would make to tell someone "no, no, stay there for now". Ksenia said she had the exact same problem. But some people get it right away. Likewise, a bunch of us found the crossed forearms accompanying "だめ" kind of offensive. In English, doing that is really strong, about as much as yelling at someone to get away from you. The other part of our discomfort is that when people do it, they appear to be trying to illustrate what they mean, even though だめ is one of the easiest and most important words. I get that feeling with my host mom, and it's awkward. In an effort to make me understand, she uses English words when she can, but because she doesn't know a lot they're all simpler words and thus I know them in Japanese. It feels weird, because I feel like I'm being talked down to. It also makes it harder for me because I have to constantly figure out whether her sounds are attempting to make Japanese words that I don't know or English words that I don't recognise. Muzukashii.
だめ (dame): uh.....I tried to explain this one before, our textbooks define it as "no good", but it really means bad, don't do, not good, broken and various other words in that general category
難しい (muzukashii): difficult
Reiko had her English test yesterday. As soon as they got home, Kaori asked me to check her answers. The structure of the test was pretty strange. There were a bunch of choose-the-word-to-fill-in-the-blank questions, and then a set of weird problems where you were given a short dialogue with a five-word blank, and five words, and you had to put them in order and then mark the second and fourth word. Reiko was the best at that section, mostly because it wasn't either incredibly idiomatic English or difficult business jargon. Then there was some reading comprehension on boring and technical subjects, and a listening section that I wasn't able to check. I'm sure she did best on the listening, though. The answer choices were incredibly simple compared to the complicated choices in the reading sections. I was at first really surprised, because I assumed that reading would be simpler since that's the way it is in Japanese. But reading comprehension in English doesn't involve memorizing kanji, and the Japanese educational system is such that kids can "know" English and be completely unable to speak it. Besides that speaking practice doesn't start until 13, Kaori also said that although they're bringing in foreign teachers to teach English conversation, a lot of the teachers are still native Japanese who can't speak English without an accent, and bringing in more native English speakers would put them out of a job.
So although I keep worrying that I sound as bad in Japanese as they do in English, that may not be so. There are far fewer sounds in Japanese than there are in English, and most of them, with the exception of the r/d/l sound and the n/m sound (Jeremy, what are these called?) are sounds that we make in English, so it's not hard for us to speak. But we have so many different vowels, and overwhelming combinations of consonants, and weird sounds like "th" and "v" that aren't in Japanese. And then there's the r/l difficulty. Kate or Ksenia said that apparently the problem is that they honestly can't tell the difference at all. It's been tested, and both sounds apparently register as the same. I find that hard to understand since they sound so different to me, but I guess it's possible.
There are many mind-bending things like that. It's hard to get used to the idea that gestures don't necessarily have universal meaning, or universal implications. We were talking about confusion about Japanese gestures. The "come here" hand wave takes a while for me to get used to, because it looks just like the motion you would make to tell someone "no, no, stay there for now". Ksenia said she had the exact same problem. But some people get it right away. Likewise, a bunch of us found the crossed forearms accompanying "だめ" kind of offensive. In English, doing that is really strong, about as much as yelling at someone to get away from you. The other part of our discomfort is that when people do it, they appear to be trying to illustrate what they mean, even though だめ is one of the easiest and most important words. I get that feeling with my host mom, and it's awkward. In an effort to make me understand, she uses English words when she can, but because she doesn't know a lot they're all simpler words and thus I know them in Japanese. It feels weird, because I feel like I'm being talked down to. It also makes it harder for me because I have to constantly figure out whether her sounds are attempting to make Japanese words that I don't know or English words that I don't recognise. Muzukashii.
だめ (dame): uh.....I tried to explain this one before, our textbooks define it as "no good", but it really means bad, don't do, not good, broken and various other words in that general category
難しい (muzukashii): difficult
テレビ(January 27, 2008)
January 27, 2008
I'm starting to get a little fed up with Japanese television. It seems that all we ever watch is shows following pairs of Japanese people as they travel to some place just in order to try food and slurpingly exclaim how うめ～ it is, or game shows where people make fun of each other and all the girls are shown as idiots, or documentaries that try to point out how bad foreigners are at understanding Japanese culture. They also like to show people crying, and close up on their faces. It seems like a personal encounter or emotional moment isn't complete if the Japanese person involved, always a girl, starts crying. One show had Japanese girls (I think there was one guy) going to different countries to live with families and show the viewers at home how unusual the culture was, although mostly the food, as usual. The important part was always the tearful goodbye. It seemed like the idea was that nothing had been gained, the friendships weren't important if people were able to leave without bursting into tears. I don't really understand. It seems that in a culture dependent on hiding feelings, they would at least allow their reporters some privacy.
Another interesting thing on that subject is that they often show a small image of someone's reaction to the documentary that's going on. So if no one in a scene of leaving is crying, at least there's someone at home who can be shown to be crying for them and their host family or friend or monkey or whatever it is they have to say goodbye to.
There was an entire show on people in other countries who were obsessed with Japan. They spent a while on the situation in Russia, and also went to America, Mexico, South Africa and some other places. It got pretty crazy, I must admit, but still I don't think that any of the misspelled Japanese was half as funny as the Engrish here. They had to search the world to find things that were mistranslated, but almost every single thing that is written in English here, with the exception of things originated by English-speaking people, is amusing. It made me almost angry that my host family was laughing outrageously at a few misplaced kanji by unsuspecting foreigners when, in a country where everyone learns English, there's so little natural English. Even their textbooks have おかしい mistakes.
There is some unexpected pride in the Japanese attitude. I'm used to it in Americans, but it surprises me when I find it here. It's generally a cultural pride, which is what is so unusual to me. I don't know many people who have pride in their culture as Americans, since there isn't much of one to speak of. But the Japanese are capable of an unspoken but authentically "we are better than you" attitude. It's never come out in a bad way. It's just surprising.
For fun things, though, right now the terebi is showing a Japanese girl traversing Ukraine trying to find the most beautiful girls. It's refreshing to hear my host family appreciating Western features, if nothing else.
Postscript:
It's hard for me to think entirely in English, so some things are easier for me to write in Japanese. Those things will be explained either in the text of my entries or here at the end.
うめ～ (ume~) Tasty, delicious. Generally a male phrase I think; the regular adjective is "umai"
おかしい (okashii) Strange or amusing. The fact that there are both definitions says something about Japan. In English we separate things that are unusual and things that are just funny. "Funny haha or funny strange?"
テレビ (terebi) Television
I'm starting to get a little fed up with Japanese television. It seems that all we ever watch is shows following pairs of Japanese people as they travel to some place just in order to try food and slurpingly exclaim how うめ～ it is, or game shows where people make fun of each other and all the girls are shown as idiots, or documentaries that try to point out how bad foreigners are at understanding Japanese culture. They also like to show people crying, and close up on their faces. It seems like a personal encounter or emotional moment isn't complete if the Japanese person involved, always a girl, starts crying. One show had Japanese girls (I think there was one guy) going to different countries to live with families and show the viewers at home how unusual the culture was, although mostly the food, as usual. The important part was always the tearful goodbye. It seemed like the idea was that nothing had been gained, the friendships weren't important if people were able to leave without bursting into tears. I don't really understand. It seems that in a culture dependent on hiding feelings, they would at least allow their reporters some privacy.
Another interesting thing on that subject is that they often show a small image of someone's reaction to the documentary that's going on. So if no one in a scene of leaving is crying, at least there's someone at home who can be shown to be crying for them and their host family or friend or monkey or whatever it is they have to say goodbye to.
There was an entire show on people in other countries who were obsessed with Japan. They spent a while on the situation in Russia, and also went to America, Mexico, South Africa and some other places. It got pretty crazy, I must admit, but still I don't think that any of the misspelled Japanese was half as funny as the Engrish here. They had to search the world to find things that were mistranslated, but almost every single thing that is written in English here, with the exception of things originated by English-speaking people, is amusing. It made me almost angry that my host family was laughing outrageously at a few misplaced kanji by unsuspecting foreigners when, in a country where everyone learns English, there's so little natural English. Even their textbooks have おかしい mistakes.
There is some unexpected pride in the Japanese attitude. I'm used to it in Americans, but it surprises me when I find it here. It's generally a cultural pride, which is what is so unusual to me. I don't know many people who have pride in their culture as Americans, since there isn't much of one to speak of. But the Japanese are capable of an unspoken but authentically "we are better than you" attitude. It's never come out in a bad way. It's just surprising.
For fun things, though, right now the terebi is showing a Japanese girl traversing Ukraine trying to find the most beautiful girls. It's refreshing to hear my host family appreciating Western features, if nothing else.
Postscript:
It's hard for me to think entirely in English, so some things are easier for me to write in Japanese. Those things will be explained either in the text of my entries or here at the end.
うめ～ (ume~) Tasty, delicious. Generally a male phrase I think; the regular adjective is "umai"
おかしい (okashii) Strange or amusing. The fact that there are both definitions says something about Japan. In English we separate things that are unusual and things that are just funny. "Funny haha or funny strange?"
テレビ (terebi) Television
Saturday, January 26, 2008
January 27, 2008
I have now gone to karaoke twice in two days. Yesterday was the IES Welcome Lunch, which apparently had an open bar and so most of my friends were drunk before 2 pm. So of course, we spent the early afternoon in a small box yelling at a screen at the top of our lungs. If Blogger image uploading were working for me, I would show you some of what that looked like. It was above an arcade, which in Japan are unbelievable. They're not as weird as the pachinko parlors, I think, but they're still extremely overwhelming.
After that we walked around Sakae in the cold, traversed the covered streets in Osu and had a failed meeting with the rest of our group because they were mostly trashed, so the three of us who weren't drunk or taking care of drunk people went for a long, leisurely dinner.
Also I saw my cute kitten again so I'm happy.
The terebi is talking about "West Side Monogatari", which I find very amusing.
Reiko is out taking her English exam, and, like a good Japanese mother, Kaori is also staying there with her. One of the things we were discussing last night at dinner was the way our host mothers treat our homework and studying, and why it makes us uncomfortable. Kate was saying that she has a lot of trouble because she can't sit at her desk in her room because of her leg injury, but if she does homework at the table in the main room, her host mother takes it as her personal job to make sure she corrects everything that Kate does. The reasoning behind this is probably that they want us to be able to do the best that we can, and don't want to feel that we have failed because of something that they could have given us. But the strange thing to me is that although ganbaru - doing your best - is so important, there's very little "teaching", and more telling. I find the same thing with my host mother. I had a list of kanji I needed to know for various small tests, and my host mother went over it with the dictionary, looking up every single word and showing it to me in English. I tried to explain to her that if she just gave me the reading, I could look it up myself.
It makes things a little difficult. I had to do an online listening practice while this computer was still at Apple, but I didn't want to ask to use Kaori's computer because I thought that would be an imposition. Instead, I decided to go to school early to do it on the school computers before the 9am deadline. But instead of telling my host mother the reason why I had to get to school early, I told her that I had to practice with friends for a speaking test, because I knew that if I told her I was going to use the internet she would have offered hers. There's a funny, weird dynamic there. Kate understood completely when I told her last night. That's kind of just what we have to do.
After that we walked around Sakae in the cold, traversed the covered streets in Osu and had a failed meeting with the rest of our group because they were mostly trashed, so the three of us who weren't drunk or taking care of drunk people went for a long, leisurely dinner.
Also I saw my cute kitten again so I'm happy.
The terebi is talking about "West Side Monogatari", which I find very amusing.
Reiko is out taking her English exam, and, like a good Japanese mother, Kaori is also staying there with her. One of the things we were discussing last night at dinner was the way our host mothers treat our homework and studying, and why it makes us uncomfortable. Kate was saying that she has a lot of trouble because she can't sit at her desk in her room because of her leg injury, but if she does homework at the table in the main room, her host mother takes it as her personal job to make sure she corrects everything that Kate does. The reasoning behind this is probably that they want us to be able to do the best that we can, and don't want to feel that we have failed because of something that they could have given us. But the strange thing to me is that although ganbaru - doing your best - is so important, there's very little "teaching", and more telling. I find the same thing with my host mother. I had a list of kanji I needed to know for various small tests, and my host mother went over it with the dictionary, looking up every single word and showing it to me in English. I tried to explain to her that if she just gave me the reading, I could look it up myself.
It makes things a little difficult. I had to do an online listening practice while this computer was still at Apple, but I didn't want to ask to use Kaori's computer because I thought that would be an imposition. Instead, I decided to go to school early to do it on the school computers before the 9am deadline. But instead of telling my host mother the reason why I had to get to school early, I told her that I had to practice with friends for a speaking test, because I knew that if I told her I was going to use the internet she would have offered hers. There's a funny, weird dynamic there. Kate understood completely when I told her last night. That's kind of just what we have to do.
January 25
私のパソコンが直した！！！
For those of you who don't understand or who can't figure it out from the situation, my computer was fixed :) They even replaced my data for free, although not my applications, which means I'm writing these entries in TextEdit from now on. But it could be worse.
The funniest change is that I now try to use shift-7 to make an apostrophe. It's actually pretty hard for me to do it the normal way. Perhaps it will get better.
Today's events started off a bit badly, but ended up awesome. My last class was sumie, and I was failing at making leaves correctly and it really upset me. Then we had to spend forever waiting around for people who took way too long to get there. It was around 6 pm by the time we left. We got to Osu and it was around 7 pm when we split off to eat. I went with Ksenia and Nathalie and Natalie to a たこ焼き屋(takoyaki is kind of fried balls with octopus inside). It was just closing, but they let us order provided that we didn't want rice. I had the most delicious yakisoba ("fried noodles", more like stir-fried noodles with cabbage and meat and tasty sweetish sauce). It was actually less sweet than usual, which was perfect for me, and had cayenne or something on it which was really tasty. The two guys working there were really sweet. I tried to ask them if I could take a photo of them but I think I asked wrong. So there is an amusing serious of photos of two confused 店員.
Nathalie:
Ksenia:
Natalie:
The guys:
After that, we wandered around the covered street in Osu while waiting for the other group to contact us. We took purikura in an arcade. I hadn't experienced the drawing-on-photo-stickers thing, which was kind of weird but cool. I think those photos are made for Japanese faces, but that makes sense. We looked a little weird and blotchy. Anyways, its something of a fad here so it's pretty important. They work similarly to American photo stickers, but more awesome. At home, you just stick your heads in a booth and smile and it takes the picture and prints a bunch of stickers of that image, and the fanciest thing you can do is choose your border. Here, you choose your background as well, and take a whole bunch and then choose maybe six that you want. Then you go around to a screen where you look at the six photos and add preset images or write on the pictures. I don't think I can scan the resulting photos, but they're pretty amusing.
We took our time getting to Sakae. We stopped at a pet store that was selling only the most adorable and tiny puppies and kittens. I snuck a photo of a sleepy kitten.
We met up with the rest of the group (John, Stephanie and Danielle) as they were reserving a karaoke box. Ksenia was a little annoyed because we could have gone to a cheaper place, but it definitely ended up being fun. Even though we were only ordering English songs, they all had katakana transliterations of the lyrics above the English lyrics, so that Japanese people who can't read English but yet want to sing something resembling an English song can sing along. We tried to, and it was pretty funny.
Ksenia, Natalie and Nathalie:
Natalie and Nathalie:
Stephanie and Danielle getting into the Li'l Jon:
Ksenia and Jon:
Nathalie and Danielle being cute:
I'm really happy about my friends. I don't have to follow them around - they seem to have a reason to want to hang out with me. And there's a lot of them. My host mother asked me who was my closest friend at the moment (naka no tomodachi, or "inside friend") and I honestly don't know, which is kind of unusual for me. But it's super fun.
On the subway ride there:
Jon, Nathalie and Soren
Jesse, Jeremy and Jon:
Jeremy, Jon and Nathalie in a typical expression:
I had a long chat with my host mother after coming back. We talked about Japanese programs in English education and how they suck because they don't start speaking practice until age 13, which I think is likely too late to develop the extra vowels and sounds that you need for English. Maybe the government wants all Japanese to have an accent in English...? I have no idea. I learned that Reiko started her English education at 11 months, and apparently her first words in English were, in an attempt to copy an instructor's "My name is Reiko", "Mayonnaise is Reiko".
Kaori also told me that she thinks I've been getting better at Japanese. I'm really happy...! Yesterday she told me that I should call her "Kaori" instead of "Kaori-san", which made me happy - although, this being Japan, that emotion was immediately followed by worry about whether I had been doing it wrong the whole time instead of progressing towards a point at which I could drop the suffix. Sigh...There are SO many things to be done wrong.
But at the same time, there's a lot of fun. At one point Kaori asked me something along the lines of 「クラブに入った？」("Did you enter the club?") and I assumed she meant the 南山写真部, the photo club at school, so I replied that I'd sent an email but hadn't gotten a reply. She shook her head and clarified that she meant the ID Bar, a club in Sakae that the students like to go to sometimes, and laughed that "This is the weekend - this isn't the time to talk about school things! The week is for school, and the weekend is for play". Having just finished a unit on complaints, specifically host mothers complaining about their students not helping out or not coming home early enough or not doing all sorts of good-student things, I was relieved and pleased.
For those of you who don't understand or who can't figure it out from the situation, my computer was fixed :) They even replaced my data for free, although not my applications, which means I'm writing these entries in TextEdit from now on. But it could be worse.
The funniest change is that I now try to use shift-7 to make an apostrophe. It's actually pretty hard for me to do it the normal way. Perhaps it will get better.
Today's events started off a bit badly, but ended up awesome. My last class was sumie, and I was failing at making leaves correctly and it really upset me. Then we had to spend forever waiting around for people who took way too long to get there. It was around 6 pm by the time we left. We got to Osu and it was around 7 pm when we split off to eat. I went with Ksenia and Nathalie and Natalie to a たこ焼き屋(takoyaki is kind of fried balls with octopus inside). It was just closing, but they let us order provided that we didn't want rice. I had the most delicious yakisoba ("fried noodles", more like stir-fried noodles with cabbage and meat and tasty sweetish sauce). It was actually less sweet than usual, which was perfect for me, and had cayenne or something on it which was really tasty. The two guys working there were really sweet. I tried to ask them if I could take a photo of them but I think I asked wrong. So there is an amusing serious of photos of two confused 店員.
Nathalie:
Ksenia:
Natalie:
The guys:
After that, we wandered around the covered street in Osu while waiting for the other group to contact us. We took purikura in an arcade. I hadn't experienced the drawing-on-photo-stickers thing, which was kind of weird but cool. I think those photos are made for Japanese faces, but that makes sense. We looked a little weird and blotchy. Anyways, its something of a fad here so it's pretty important. They work similarly to American photo stickers, but more awesome. At home, you just stick your heads in a booth and smile and it takes the picture and prints a bunch of stickers of that image, and the fanciest thing you can do is choose your border. Here, you choose your background as well, and take a whole bunch and then choose maybe six that you want. Then you go around to a screen where you look at the six photos and add preset images or write on the pictures. I don't think I can scan the resulting photos, but they're pretty amusing.
We took our time getting to Sakae. We stopped at a pet store that was selling only the most adorable and tiny puppies and kittens. I snuck a photo of a sleepy kitten.
We met up with the rest of the group (John, Stephanie and Danielle) as they were reserving a karaoke box. Ksenia was a little annoyed because we could have gone to a cheaper place, but it definitely ended up being fun. Even though we were only ordering English songs, they all had katakana transliterations of the lyrics above the English lyrics, so that Japanese people who can't read English but yet want to sing something resembling an English song can sing along. We tried to, and it was pretty funny.
Ksenia, Natalie and Nathalie:
Natalie and Nathalie:
Stephanie and Danielle getting into the Li'l Jon:
Ksenia and Jon:
Nathalie and Danielle being cute:
I'm really happy about my friends. I don't have to follow them around - they seem to have a reason to want to hang out with me. And there's a lot of them. My host mother asked me who was my closest friend at the moment (naka no tomodachi, or "inside friend") and I honestly don't know, which is kind of unusual for me. But it's super fun.
On the subway ride there:
Jon, Nathalie and Soren
Jesse, Jeremy and Jon:
Jeremy, Jon and Nathalie in a typical expression:
I had a long chat with my host mother after coming back. We talked about Japanese programs in English education and how they suck because they don't start speaking practice until age 13, which I think is likely too late to develop the extra vowels and sounds that you need for English. Maybe the government wants all Japanese to have an accent in English...? I have no idea. I learned that Reiko started her English education at 11 months, and apparently her first words in English were, in an attempt to copy an instructor's "My name is Reiko", "Mayonnaise is Reiko".
Kaori also told me that she thinks I've been getting better at Japanese. I'm really happy...! Yesterday she told me that I should call her "Kaori" instead of "Kaori-san", which made me happy - although, this being Japan, that emotion was immediately followed by worry about whether I had been doing it wrong the whole time instead of progressing towards a point at which I could drop the suffix. Sigh...There are SO many things to be done wrong.
But at the same time, there's a lot of fun. At one point Kaori asked me something along the lines of 「クラブに入った？」("Did you enter the club?") and I assumed she meant the 南山写真部, the photo club at school, so I replied that I'd sent an email but hadn't gotten a reply. She shook her head and clarified that she meant the ID Bar, a club in Sakae that the students like to go to sometimes, and laughed that "This is the weekend - this isn't the time to talk about school things! The week is for school, and the weekend is for play". Having just finished a unit on complaints, specifically host mothers complaining about their students not helping out or not coming home early enough or not doing all sorts of good-student things, I was relieved and pleased.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
南山
I'm finally just about used to being here at Nanzan. I have a general schedule for when I have time to go on the internet, so I may be able to update this blog again finally.
The problem was that my laptop died after bringing it to school and back, and when I took it to Apple they said the hard drive would need to be replaced. So I haven't had a laptop in a while. I don't really have internet at home, but it's been convenient to write blog entries on my laptop and then post them when I can get on the internet. So I'm sorry I haven't been updating, and it certainly does not mean that I haven't been doing anything interesting.
The problem was that my laptop died after bringing it to school and back, and when I took it to Apple they said the hard drive would need to be replaced. So I haven't had a laptop in a while. I don't really have internet at home, but it's been convenient to write blog entries on my laptop and then post them when I can get on the internet. So I'm sorry I haven't been updating, and it certainly does not mean that I haven't been doing anything interesting.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
January 15 - Adventures in Technology
Today was our LAST day of orientations! The first was the orientation on how to use the email system, which I hope to never have to use again. The best part was the insanely strict password system. Here are the exact rules we were given for choosing a password:
1. It must be 8 characters
2. You may only use numbers, letters of the alphabet and/or special symbols.
3. At least one letter or symbol should be included in the first 6 characters.
4. At least two letters (upper case and lower case) should be included in the first 6 characters.
5. The first symbol should not be a slash mark.
6. It should not include the username. It should not include the username written in reverse.
7. It should not include words found in the dictionary
8. It should not include all or part of your name.
9. At least three characters in the new password should be different than the old password.
And on top of all this, the password has to be changed EVERY MONTH or your account is suspended.
I thought perhaps these were just guidelines for making a hack-proof password. But no. The computer system checks your potential password, and if it thinks that it might possibly fall into any of these characters, you get a NG next to that category and you have to try again. My friend noticed that the only way to remember a password like this is to write it down, which then makes it a whole lot easier to steal. I think I’m just going to write mine on my hands in defiance. For some reason the whole process ended up really upsetting me.
Also fun was the message that you get when you FINALLY come up with something that couldn’t possibly make any sense in any imaginable language: “The new password that you selected is fairly complex. However, please be cautious, as someone could discover it depending on the dictionary they use”. My password is a collection of random letters and symbols. I want to see that fucking dictionary.
1. It must be 8 characters
2. You may only use numbers, letters of the alphabet and/or special symbols.
3. At least one letter or symbol should be included in the first 6 characters.
4. At least two letters (upper case and lower case) should be included in the first 6 characters.
5. The first symbol should not be a slash mark.
6. It should not include the username. It should not include the username written in reverse.
7. It should not include words found in the dictionary
8. It should not include all or part of your name.
9. At least three characters in the new password should be different than the old password.
And on top of all this, the password has to be changed EVERY MONTH or your account is suspended.
I thought perhaps these were just guidelines for making a hack-proof password. But no. The computer system checks your potential password, and if it thinks that it might possibly fall into any of these characters, you get a NG next to that category and you have to try again. My friend noticed that the only way to remember a password like this is to write it down, which then makes it a whole lot easier to steal. I think I’m just going to write mine on my hands in defiance. For some reason the whole process ended up really upsetting me.
Also fun was the message that you get when you FINALLY come up with something that couldn’t possibly make any sense in any imaginable language: “The new password that you selected is fairly complex. However, please be cautious, as someone could discover it depending on the dictionary they use”. My password is a collection of random letters and symbols. I want to see that fucking dictionary.
Monday, January 14, 2008
英語の話(January 13)
Let me just say that I LOVE being an English teacher to Reiko. Right now I’m warming my feet under the kotatsu, listening to Reiko read from her practice English exams and coordinating with her questions to me about the vocabulary and her mother’s explanations of what she doesn’t understand in Japanese from the answer book, and my sudden understandings and clarifications in broken Japanese. I hope we don’t confuse the poor girl too much, especially when Reiko changes what she says from the full English that we speak together to the Japanesese-ified English that she translates to her mother. “Arrival” becomes “alaibaru”, “laptop” becomes “pasokon” (personal computer). And her mistakes are sometimes amusing. “Distinction”, she asks me. “That’s like the animals that are dying, right? No! It’s the animals that are already dead. No?”
But it’s incredibly interesting. As Reiko translates the example sentences from English to Japanese so that her mother knows she understands, I learn a lot about simple ways to express ideas in Japanese. Answering her questions about the difference between words can be fun – I got to brush up on my Japanese in explaining the difference between “interpreter” and “translator” (「通訳」と「本訳」). But it can also be really difficult. It doesn’t help that my brain is getting increasingly confused by using Japanese so much, so that I start to forget idiomatic English and natural pronunciation.
I asked Reiko a difficult question today. I’ve been wondering how my friends and I sound to Japanese speakers when we’re chattering away in English. I’ve been told that it’s the hard “r” in English that speakers of other languages make fun of, since it’s not present in too many other languages. I feel like English probably sounds pretty crude. I also asked Reiko about how it sounds to her to hear foreigners speak Japanese, like me at the dinner table. She said that she knows how it sounds different, but she can’t explain it. She asked Kaori, who had to think for a bit before responding “かわいいと思う” – “They sound cute”. Well, I certainly would prefer to sound cute than crude. This only contributes to my general preference for Japan over anyplace else.
But it’s incredibly interesting. As Reiko translates the example sentences from English to Japanese so that her mother knows she understands, I learn a lot about simple ways to express ideas in Japanese. Answering her questions about the difference between words can be fun – I got to brush up on my Japanese in explaining the difference between “interpreter” and “translator” (「通訳」と「本訳」). But it can also be really difficult. It doesn’t help that my brain is getting increasingly confused by using Japanese so much, so that I start to forget idiomatic English and natural pronunciation.
I asked Reiko a difficult question today. I’ve been wondering how my friends and I sound to Japanese speakers when we’re chattering away in English. I’ve been told that it’s the hard “r” in English that speakers of other languages make fun of, since it’s not present in too many other languages. I feel like English probably sounds pretty crude. I also asked Reiko about how it sounds to her to hear foreigners speak Japanese, like me at the dinner table. She said that she knows how it sounds different, but she can’t explain it. She asked Kaori, who had to think for a bit before responding “かわいいと思う” – “They sound cute”. Well, I certainly would prefer to sound cute than crude. This only contributes to my general preference for Japan over anyplace else.
January 13
I am sorry that I haven’t been updating this in a few days. My internet schedule is generally that I ask to use the net maybe once a day, and use that time to reply to emails and publish entries I’ve written a day or a few days before. So in the evenings after Reiko and everyone go to bed, I write about my day and publish it to the blog the next time I get the internet.
Yesterday I woke up at 6 in the morning feeling extremely uncomfortable, like my head was lower than the rest of me and I couldn’t get comfortable. I ended up pretty nauseous and threw up. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep because I felt too sick. I ended up curling up next to the space heater with “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, and falling asleep in a ball on the floor. Eventually I got back into bed, and slept until I was woken up by John calling my cell phone to invite me to go to 名古屋こ水どく館 (Nagoya Aquarium). I really wanted to go, but I ended up being sick most of the day, and just hanging around the house and sleeping most of the time. But in the evening we watched an amusing movie called “Bubble e Go” (バブルへGO), which was like Back to the Future but with the 90’s in Japan (thus pre-bubble-burst), and a laundry machine instead of a car. It was…pretty amazing.
Today I went to Sakae with Natalie, Nathalie, Kate and Ksenia. Right outside the subway exit, some guys were dancing around in a park.
We didn’t have much shopping success, as most of the stores we found were too expensive, but it was fun to look around. We found a fabulous goth pink-and-black tutu-corset thing that everyone wanted me to try on, and some more interesting clothes of that type at the top of a huge department store. It’s very expensive to be goth in Japan, though. Some guys were dancing in the park when we got out of the station: I remember trying to explain “goth” to Hiroe. She was completely mystified until we correctly pronounced “goshikku”, the Japanese transliteration. It’s amazing how much English is in Japanese now, and yet how much it isn’t English.
I didn't realize you could make a sexy Mad Hatter outfit:
View of Sakae:
On my way home, I mistakenly got out at the wrong exit, but immediately noticed that there was a 百円 store nearby. Hundred-yen stores in Japan are even cheaper than dollar stores in the US…☺ Going in was interesting. There was a certain attempt to weed the typical cheap products into a slightly more cute or well-presented look closer to the Japanese aesthetic, but almost everything was made in China or Thailand. You go fourteen hours away, and still dollar stores have the same items. I wasn’t sure whether to feel at home or let down.
Yesterday I woke up at 6 in the morning feeling extremely uncomfortable, like my head was lower than the rest of me and I couldn’t get comfortable. I ended up pretty nauseous and threw up. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep because I felt too sick. I ended up curling up next to the space heater with “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, and falling asleep in a ball on the floor. Eventually I got back into bed, and slept until I was woken up by John calling my cell phone to invite me to go to 名古屋こ水どく館 (Nagoya Aquarium). I really wanted to go, but I ended up being sick most of the day, and just hanging around the house and sleeping most of the time. But in the evening we watched an amusing movie called “Bubble e Go” (バブルへGO), which was like Back to the Future but with the 90’s in Japan (thus pre-bubble-burst), and a laundry machine instead of a car. It was…pretty amazing.
Today I went to Sakae with Natalie, Nathalie, Kate and Ksenia. Right outside the subway exit, some guys were dancing around in a park.
We didn’t have much shopping success, as most of the stores we found were too expensive, but it was fun to look around. We found a fabulous goth pink-and-black tutu-corset thing that everyone wanted me to try on, and some more interesting clothes of that type at the top of a huge department store. It’s very expensive to be goth in Japan, though. Some guys were dancing in the park when we got out of the station: I remember trying to explain “goth” to Hiroe. She was completely mystified until we correctly pronounced “goshikku”, the Japanese transliteration. It’s amazing how much English is in Japanese now, and yet how much it isn’t English.
I didn't realize you could make a sexy Mad Hatter outfit:
View of Sakae:
On my way home, I mistakenly got out at the wrong exit, but immediately noticed that there was a 百円 store nearby. Hundred-yen stores in Japan are even cheaper than dollar stores in the US…☺ Going in was interesting. There was a certain attempt to weed the typical cheap products into a slightly more cute or well-presented look closer to the Japanese aesthetic, but almost everything was made in China or Thailand. You go fourteen hours away, and still dollar stores have the same items. I wasn’t sure whether to feel at home or let down.
January 11
I almost forgot how cold my room can get. The effect of heat is amazing. As I get warmer, I get so much happier. It’s so easy, I almost forgot. The other day on campus we walked through a patch of sunlight and it lifted my mood in just the same way, and I said Oh! The sun is just like a space heater! and Kate looked at me and said Yes, Emily, you could say that, in fact the sun is the original space heater.
I could write a book on gaijin travel patterns. We’re like freshmen, we travel in herds. But really it’s more like sheep. We had to get from one building to another today, and first we all followed Brian because he was in the front, but he kept saying that he didn’t know where he was going. This is about forty people we’re talking about. Next this enormous group found the right building, but after entering kept going right to following someone into the girl’s bathroom. Half of us were almost to the stalls when we realized we probably should have been going a different way. The worst part was having to walk back past amused Japanese students who were waiting outside their classroom and watching our blunder.
Nanzan might be the ugliest college campus I’ve seen. I will take some photos of it on Tuesday to explain to you, but it’s almost unbelievable. I wouldn’t mind if it was a good kind of industrial, but it’s just a we-don’t-even-want-to-finish-up kind of industrial. The buildings look like List Art outside and are grey and cavernous and cold and unfinished on the inside. On Friday we tried to find internet in the computer building, which turned out to be a whole bunch of floors with ugly, windowless rooms with ancient computers and cubicles. The computers weren’t quite the relics from my dream, but they were pretty old.
I could write a book on gaijin travel patterns. We’re like freshmen, we travel in herds. But really it’s more like sheep. We had to get from one building to another today, and first we all followed Brian because he was in the front, but he kept saying that he didn’t know where he was going. This is about forty people we’re talking about. Next this enormous group found the right building, but after entering kept going right to following someone into the girl’s bathroom. Half of us were almost to the stalls when we realized we probably should have been going a different way. The worst part was having to walk back past amused Japanese students who were waiting outside their classroom and watching our blunder.
Nanzan might be the ugliest college campus I’ve seen. I will take some photos of it on Tuesday to explain to you, but it’s almost unbelievable. I wouldn’t mind if it was a good kind of industrial, but it’s just a we-don’t-even-want-to-finish-up kind of industrial. The buildings look like List Art outside and are grey and cavernous and cold and unfinished on the inside. On Friday we tried to find internet in the computer building, which turned out to be a whole bunch of floors with ugly, windowless rooms with ancient computers and cubicles. The computers weren’t quite the relics from my dream, but they were pretty old.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Mailing Address
This is the address at my host family's house, so please don't send anything dangerous or suspect, but I would love to get letters!
Emily Garfield
4-15-11 Yutaka
Minami-ku, Nagoya-shi
Aichi 457-0863
Emily Garfield
4-15-11 Yutaka
Minami-ku, Nagoya-shi
Aichi 457-0863
読み方
Please read the entries chronologically! I've posted them in typical blog format, with the latest ones closest to the top, but it will make a lot more sense if you read them from the first to the last. Thanks!
January 10
January 10, 2008
I dreamt that I was shown the computer labs at CJS and they were full of the ancient Macs that TH and Tekserve have as curiosities. There was a lot more in my dream, but I slept pretty well.
Kaori-san (I don’t know what to call her to her face – I called her 川口さん(last name, rather formal) a couple times, but I’m not sure what she wants to be called) was surprised that I slept well even without the electric blanket or the heater or anything. I think she’s a little worried that it might not be good for me… I’ll see. I just don’t think that I need to use the 電気 for an entire night while I’m not really getting the benefit of it consciously.
Japanese 紅茶 (black tea) is so weak that I’m having no trouble drinking it without milk or sugar. This is unprecedented for me. Usually that’s only true of green tea, and peppermint.
I got up an hour earlier than I needed to, and didn’t realize. I guess midnight calculations of time while still with じさぼっけ (jetlag, literally “time-difference stupidity” I think ^^) aren’t too accurate. Well, more time for 勉強 (studying – an indispensable all-purpose term, for expressing yourself as much as endearing yourself to your host mother…)
I dreamt that I was shown the computer labs at CJS and they were full of the ancient Macs that TH and Tekserve have as curiosities. There was a lot more in my dream, but I slept pretty well.
Kaori-san (I don’t know what to call her to her face – I called her 川口さん(last name, rather formal) a couple times, but I’m not sure what she wants to be called) was surprised that I slept well even without the electric blanket or the heater or anything. I think she’s a little worried that it might not be good for me… I’ll see. I just don’t think that I need to use the 電気 for an entire night while I’m not really getting the benefit of it consciously.
Japanese 紅茶 (black tea) is so weak that I’m having no trouble drinking it without milk or sugar. This is unprecedented for me. Usually that’s only true of green tea, and peppermint.
I got up an hour earlier than I needed to, and didn’t realize. I guess midnight calculations of time while still with じさぼっけ (jetlag, literally “time-difference stupidity” I think ^^) aren’t too accurate. Well, more time for 勉強 (studying – an indispensable all-purpose term, for expressing yourself as much as endearing yourself to your host mother…)
January 9
January 9, 2008
Meeting our host parents was very amusing. First there was the Entrance of the Gaijin Bus, where we backed a bus full of foreigners right through the gates to Nanzan, past the clop-clopping well-dressed Japanese college girls. Then we were all herded (with our luggage) to a room in the school where we sat, like puppies, to see who would be chosen. One by one we were called when pretty Japanese ladies came through the hall and to our room. We could see them for about two minutes before they came, so everyone was guessing who would be Next, and fretting, and どきどきしてる(onomatopoeia for heart-pounding: “dokidoki”), and 心配してる (worrying). The four girls (me, Nathalie, Ksenia and Kate) were in the corner together for a while, since they seemed to be picking off the boys first. John noticed that everyone who had sat in the corner of the room still remained, and said we looked like cattle in a truck or something. It must have looked funny.
My host mother is really cute. She talks very quickly, so I can usually understand what she’s saying mostly (it’s a little under 50-level, with some other vocabulary thrown in) but I’ve been so overwhelmed that I don’t actually end up saying much besides “yes” and “thank you”. I did ask a few questions, but nothing very elaborate because I can’t really keep to her pace. It’s only the first hour. In about half an hour I go up to have udon…! She seemed surprised that I liked Japanese food. Well, I won’t be so excited about it in another few months, I’m sure, but for now it’s good. She was especially excited that I liked sashimi…! Apparently I’m their fourth 留学生 (study-abroad student), which is cool.
At one point during the ride she gasped and said “Oh, I forgot to tell her about the dog”, and said that she had a large and very dangerous dog in their house, and sometimes she bites 留学生, and I was suitably concerned. She kept this up as we went up to their section of the house, telling me to stay quiet, whereupon I met the tiniest, most harmless dog in the world. She’s really cute, and she gets super excited and stands up on her hind legs and looks happy. I said I had been 心配していた and Kaori laughed.
I have my own little suite. It’s amazing. I was expecting to have to share a room or something, but actually their house is pretty big for an apartment.
There is a wireless I can get from here, but it doesn’t work. It conks out every thirty seconds, in a very regular pattern. Any advice? I’m pleased though because it’s password-protected, so I just guessed that the password might be the name of the wireless and I was correct! ☺
I learned something interesting right now, what was it. My host mother was talking about signs with incorrect English, and I told her we found a lot of チーシャツ(tshirts) with odd English, and she laughed and said Yknow, when foreigners come here with Japanese characters on their shirts, it’s usually pretty incorrect too. And tattoos, as well. Of course, this is all said in Japanese, since I don’t think either my host mother or my host father speak English. Maybe a tiny bit, like I heard “third floor” and “direct” (which keeps confusing me, since I expect it to be Japanese).
Apparently the 10-year-old just came back from being in Australia for a year…? I couldn’t quite catch what she was saying about the dates, but I think that’s true. So I guess I’ll be chatting with her a lot in English. Her mom said she’s good at English, but with an Australian accent :-p
So it seems that I will have to come home directly from school pretty often. I don’t really want to do that; I’d rather hang around in Nagoya or something. I want to go back to where we were in the hotel. I also want to get an electronic dictionary, since my paper one isn’t very good and certainly doesn’t recognise kanji input.
もうちょっと後で (a little later)：
We just went to get my Alien Registration Card and health insurance. Gya. I still don’t really understand what’s expected from me, and I hope the 10-year-old comes home soon so I can have an interpreter. It’s hard to realize that I really can’t make myself understood in any way besides Japanese for most of the people I’m around outside of school. It’s crazy.
Tomorrow is the placement test!! I want to do well, but I also want to unpack and nap instead of studying kanji. In the car I listened to stories about Reiko and learned that karaoke means “empty orchestra”, which I think I had learned before but forgot, and asked about what accent of English kids learn in Japanese. And I feel like getting a recognizable tone is almost as important as having a lot of vocabulary for Japanese. I want to sound like them.
Language is confusing…I was being introduced to a few friends who were outside, and one of them asked in English where I came from, but my brain found it easier to reply to him in Japanese. It’s a very difficult language to switch in. Either I can think in English or I can think in Japanese. I don’t know if I’ve dreamed in Japanese yet, but I’ve certainly woken up with it in my head.
More boots may not be possible with my current situation. I told my host mother I had five pairs of shoes and I think she thought I must have mistaken the words. So I lied and said I had four, and she cleared space in their shoe closet for three. Apparently it is だめ (honestly hard to translate, even though it’s the simplest word, but it describes something that you’re not allowed to do (as in cultural rules), that is impossible (as in a closed street), that is too difficult (as in Japanese)) to store shoes in your closet.
夕食の後 (after dinner)：
Ah. The end of total-immersion Japanese for the day. 英語の音楽を聞いて、英語で書くつもり。。。Except I have to study. Lots and lots of kanji. Kaori-san said that she thinks I’ll be able to make 500, but I don’t think that’s true. There’s too many kanji that I don’t remember in 400, even though I learned all of them.
Half of every sentence I write now is thought out in Japanese.
Reiko-chan really does have an Australian accent. Her mother was mostly surprised about the vowels (she was making fun of “can’t”), but what gets me is the insertion of “r” sounds, like at the end of “no”. I don’t know what that’s called. ジェレミー、手伝ってくれない？ I’m sure you have some idea, as a linguist. Wish you were here. Study-abroad should be required for linguists, I think. It’s amazing.
It’s only the first week, so I should withhold judgment for now, but I really do think that Japan encompasses everything I ever wanted. I don’t like being embarrassed, so wearing the wrong shoes in the wrong places has made me a little uncomfortable today, but I really do think that there’s a place for shame and deference. Other people do know better than you do. And keeping houses clean is good, and not being loud and obnoxious is a virtue. Stupid gaijin. And the beautiful things are SO beautiful, and really everything is beautiful. The girls always try to look nice, and everything you can buy is pretty, and packaged nicely, and presented well. And the gardens are so beautiful, both the historical, sacred ones and the little tiny plots of green things in little tiny yards of little tiny houses. The houses are amazing. They’re not generally symmetrical like a lot of ours; they’re well-designed and pleasing to the eye. I like the colors and the light here. It’s mostly subdued, outside of the flashy advertisements and pachinko arcades, so they use subtle variation to make design. Also I like telephone wires.
“Unbelievable” is a word I’ve been using a lot.
I haven’t experienced the bad, loud, loose parts yet. Our orientation booklet had a whole section on avoiding being groped by drunk men in the trains, and what to do. (Apparently you’re supposed to yell and then take them to the police, which seems counterintuitive – the last thing I would want to do is be anywhere near them!) It could be 違う (not so, otherwise, wrong), but I’ve also heard that the Japanese use drinking as an excuse for anything, since things you did while drunk are ignored in work the next day. That’s a bit frightening.
Heat is fabulous. There isn’t central heating in Japan, and 電気 (electricity) is expensive, so rooms have single heaters. Mine also has a larger unit, which I feel bad using. I’m still getting used to hearing “AC” to mean heat. I have a small space heater pointed towards my desk, and I like it very much. My room is colder than the outside air, for some reason.
I wonder why I always get hungry only a few hours after eating. I ate so much tonight, I wanted to eat more because it was really good and because Kaori-san made a ton of food. We had sukiyaki, which is fabulous. She put some kind of meat fat in a hotpot and fried beef in that, as well as mushrooms and cabbage and noodles and tofu, with sukiyaki sauce. Then we took the food from the pot when it was ready and dipped it in a bowl of raw egg and ate it. With the raw egg, it was amazing and tasty but I’m surprised that my stomach hasn’t been protesting more. I hope they haven’t heard of salmonella here yet.
I won’t have to get up at 7 tomorrow! The test is at 9:45, so we’re leaving the house around 9, so breakfast is about 8:30 or something. I don’t think it will take me that long to eat トスト (toast), but oh well.
Apparently my host mother really likes American dramas. It was fun trying to understand the Japanese transliterations. “Gilmore Girls” is especially hard to say in Japanese-style English.
Meeting our host parents was very amusing. First there was the Entrance of the Gaijin Bus, where we backed a bus full of foreigners right through the gates to Nanzan, past the clop-clopping well-dressed Japanese college girls. Then we were all herded (with our luggage) to a room in the school where we sat, like puppies, to see who would be chosen. One by one we were called when pretty Japanese ladies came through the hall and to our room. We could see them for about two minutes before they came, so everyone was guessing who would be Next, and fretting, and どきどきしてる(onomatopoeia for heart-pounding: “dokidoki”), and 心配してる (worrying). The four girls (me, Nathalie, Ksenia and Kate) were in the corner together for a while, since they seemed to be picking off the boys first. John noticed that everyone who had sat in the corner of the room still remained, and said we looked like cattle in a truck or something. It must have looked funny.
My host mother is really cute. She talks very quickly, so I can usually understand what she’s saying mostly (it’s a little under 50-level, with some other vocabulary thrown in) but I’ve been so overwhelmed that I don’t actually end up saying much besides “yes” and “thank you”. I did ask a few questions, but nothing very elaborate because I can’t really keep to her pace. It’s only the first hour. In about half an hour I go up to have udon…! She seemed surprised that I liked Japanese food. Well, I won’t be so excited about it in another few months, I’m sure, but for now it’s good. She was especially excited that I liked sashimi…! Apparently I’m their fourth 留学生 (study-abroad student), which is cool.
At one point during the ride she gasped and said “Oh, I forgot to tell her about the dog”, and said that she had a large and very dangerous dog in their house, and sometimes she bites 留学生, and I was suitably concerned. She kept this up as we went up to their section of the house, telling me to stay quiet, whereupon I met the tiniest, most harmless dog in the world. She’s really cute, and she gets super excited and stands up on her hind legs and looks happy. I said I had been 心配していた and Kaori laughed.
I have my own little suite. It’s amazing. I was expecting to have to share a room or something, but actually their house is pretty big for an apartment.
There is a wireless I can get from here, but it doesn’t work. It conks out every thirty seconds, in a very regular pattern. Any advice? I’m pleased though because it’s password-protected, so I just guessed that the password might be the name of the wireless and I was correct! ☺
I learned something interesting right now, what was it. My host mother was talking about signs with incorrect English, and I told her we found a lot of チーシャツ(tshirts) with odd English, and she laughed and said Yknow, when foreigners come here with Japanese characters on their shirts, it’s usually pretty incorrect too. And tattoos, as well. Of course, this is all said in Japanese, since I don’t think either my host mother or my host father speak English. Maybe a tiny bit, like I heard “third floor” and “direct” (which keeps confusing me, since I expect it to be Japanese).
Apparently the 10-year-old just came back from being in Australia for a year…? I couldn’t quite catch what she was saying about the dates, but I think that’s true. So I guess I’ll be chatting with her a lot in English. Her mom said she’s good at English, but with an Australian accent :-p
So it seems that I will have to come home directly from school pretty often. I don’t really want to do that; I’d rather hang around in Nagoya or something. I want to go back to where we were in the hotel. I also want to get an electronic dictionary, since my paper one isn’t very good and certainly doesn’t recognise kanji input.
もうちょっと後で (a little later)：
We just went to get my Alien Registration Card and health insurance. Gya. I still don’t really understand what’s expected from me, and I hope the 10-year-old comes home soon so I can have an interpreter. It’s hard to realize that I really can’t make myself understood in any way besides Japanese for most of the people I’m around outside of school. It’s crazy.
Tomorrow is the placement test!! I want to do well, but I also want to unpack and nap instead of studying kanji. In the car I listened to stories about Reiko and learned that karaoke means “empty orchestra”, which I think I had learned before but forgot, and asked about what accent of English kids learn in Japanese. And I feel like getting a recognizable tone is almost as important as having a lot of vocabulary for Japanese. I want to sound like them.
Language is confusing…I was being introduced to a few friends who were outside, and one of them asked in English where I came from, but my brain found it easier to reply to him in Japanese. It’s a very difficult language to switch in. Either I can think in English or I can think in Japanese. I don’t know if I’ve dreamed in Japanese yet, but I’ve certainly woken up with it in my head.
More boots may not be possible with my current situation. I told my host mother I had five pairs of shoes and I think she thought I must have mistaken the words. So I lied and said I had four, and she cleared space in their shoe closet for three. Apparently it is だめ (honestly hard to translate, even though it’s the simplest word, but it describes something that you’re not allowed to do (as in cultural rules), that is impossible (as in a closed street), that is too difficult (as in Japanese)) to store shoes in your closet.
夕食の後 (after dinner)：
Ah. The end of total-immersion Japanese for the day. 英語の音楽を聞いて、英語で書くつもり。。。Except I have to study. Lots and lots of kanji. Kaori-san said that she thinks I’ll be able to make 500, but I don’t think that’s true. There’s too many kanji that I don’t remember in 400, even though I learned all of them.
Half of every sentence I write now is thought out in Japanese.
Reiko-chan really does have an Australian accent. Her mother was mostly surprised about the vowels (she was making fun of “can’t”), but what gets me is the insertion of “r” sounds, like at the end of “no”. I don’t know what that’s called. ジェレミー、手伝ってくれない？ I’m sure you have some idea, as a linguist. Wish you were here. Study-abroad should be required for linguists, I think. It’s amazing.
It’s only the first week, so I should withhold judgment for now, but I really do think that Japan encompasses everything I ever wanted. I don’t like being embarrassed, so wearing the wrong shoes in the wrong places has made me a little uncomfortable today, but I really do think that there’s a place for shame and deference. Other people do know better than you do. And keeping houses clean is good, and not being loud and obnoxious is a virtue. Stupid gaijin. And the beautiful things are SO beautiful, and really everything is beautiful. The girls always try to look nice, and everything you can buy is pretty, and packaged nicely, and presented well. And the gardens are so beautiful, both the historical, sacred ones and the little tiny plots of green things in little tiny yards of little tiny houses. The houses are amazing. They’re not generally symmetrical like a lot of ours; they’re well-designed and pleasing to the eye. I like the colors and the light here. It’s mostly subdued, outside of the flashy advertisements and pachinko arcades, so they use subtle variation to make design. Also I like telephone wires.
“Unbelievable” is a word I’ve been using a lot.
I haven’t experienced the bad, loud, loose parts yet. Our orientation booklet had a whole section on avoiding being groped by drunk men in the trains, and what to do. (Apparently you’re supposed to yell and then take them to the police, which seems counterintuitive – the last thing I would want to do is be anywhere near them!) It could be 違う (not so, otherwise, wrong), but I’ve also heard that the Japanese use drinking as an excuse for anything, since things you did while drunk are ignored in work the next day. That’s a bit frightening.
Heat is fabulous. There isn’t central heating in Japan, and 電気 (electricity) is expensive, so rooms have single heaters. Mine also has a larger unit, which I feel bad using. I’m still getting used to hearing “AC” to mean heat. I have a small space heater pointed towards my desk, and I like it very much. My room is colder than the outside air, for some reason.
I wonder why I always get hungry only a few hours after eating. I ate so much tonight, I wanted to eat more because it was really good and because Kaori-san made a ton of food. We had sukiyaki, which is fabulous. She put some kind of meat fat in a hotpot and fried beef in that, as well as mushrooms and cabbage and noodles and tofu, with sukiyaki sauce. Then we took the food from the pot when it was ready and dipped it in a bowl of raw egg and ate it. With the raw egg, it was amazing and tasty but I’m surprised that my stomach hasn’t been protesting more. I hope they haven’t heard of salmonella here yet.
I won’t have to get up at 7 tomorrow! The test is at 9:45, so we’re leaving the house around 9, so breakfast is about 8:30 or something. I don’t think it will take me that long to eat トスト (toast), but oh well.
Apparently my host mother really likes American dramas. It was fun trying to understand the Japanese transliterations. “Gilmore Girls” is especially hard to say in Japanese-style English.
January 8
January 8, 2008
Today we went to Meijimura, a slightly eerie concept: buildings brought from various places (Japan, but also Seattle and Hawaii) to illustrate what things would have looked like in the Meiji era. For those who don’t know, what makes it so eerie (besides that these buildings are from various places) is that during this period, Japan was starting to be infatuated with Western architecture and clothing as status symbols, so the juxtaposition gets to be pretty weird. But there was a really cool turn-of-the-century darkroom, in one of the traditional Japanese houses! I’m really pleased that I learned the kanji for darkroom recently (暗室), or else I would not have been able to find it on the map. There are a few people who know some English here, but for the most part signs and everything are all in Japanese. I really wonder what darkroom processes that poet was using. The sign didn’t think it was important to list.
ほしいなこと:
1. Boots. All of the girls in Nagoya (ALL of them) look really cute. Not in a かわいい way, but just really well put together. And there’s LOTS of boots. I’m sad that I didn’t bring mine. But I’m pleased that I won’t have a hard time trying to look cute.
2. A cell phone charm, to remind me that my phone belongs here and should be used. I haven’t called anyone yet, although I suppose I should.
3. More stationary and more stamps. I’m really pleased with my anthropomorphic tofu stationary, but I know I’ll want to write tons of letters. I already want to write a letter every five minutes.
4. An electronic dictionary. They seem incredibly useful and portable and fast, and my paper dictionary doesn’t even have “ninja” in it. Also you can look up kanji – you just write the kanji on a screen and it finds what it might be and also words it could be in.
5. Paper, to teach Brian how to make shuriken. I can’t believe he doesn’t know. I have to get him in touch with Dylan, I think they’ll both save the world together as spiritual ninja.
Today we went to Meijimura, a slightly eerie concept: buildings brought from various places (Japan, but also Seattle and Hawaii) to illustrate what things would have looked like in the Meiji era. For those who don’t know, what makes it so eerie (besides that these buildings are from various places) is that during this period, Japan was starting to be infatuated with Western architecture and clothing as status symbols, so the juxtaposition gets to be pretty weird. But there was a really cool turn-of-the-century darkroom, in one of the traditional Japanese houses! I’m really pleased that I learned the kanji for darkroom recently (暗室), or else I would not have been able to find it on the map. There are a few people who know some English here, but for the most part signs and everything are all in Japanese. I really wonder what darkroom processes that poet was using. The sign didn’t think it was important to list.
ほしいなこと:
1. Boots. All of the girls in Nagoya (ALL of them) look really cute. Not in a かわいい way, but just really well put together. And there’s LOTS of boots. I’m sad that I didn’t bring mine. But I’m pleased that I won’t have a hard time trying to look cute.
2. A cell phone charm, to remind me that my phone belongs here and should be used. I haven’t called anyone yet, although I suppose I should.
3. More stationary and more stamps. I’m really pleased with my anthropomorphic tofu stationary, but I know I’ll want to write tons of letters. I already want to write a letter every five minutes.
4. An electronic dictionary. They seem incredibly useful and portable and fast, and my paper dictionary doesn’t even have “ninja” in it. Also you can look up kanji – you just write the kanji on a screen and it finds what it might be and also words it could be in.
5. Paper, to teach Brian how to make shuriken. I can’t believe he doesn’t know. I have to get him in touch with Dylan, I think they’ll both save the world together as spiritual ninja.
January 7
January 7, 2008
Breakfast today was a set meal, not the buffet. They had this amazing technology for getting butter and jam onto bread at the same time. Both were in a little packet, and you break it and them squeeze it so that ribbons of each come out from each side. It took me a while to figure out that you could cheat the system by just squeezing one side at a time.
Today on our way down to the post office (where we waited forever for Nathalie to fail to get her traveler’s checks cashed) we stopped in this cute little shop of hand-made beads, and the little old man who was melting glass there started talking to us in Japanese about the history of beads and the history of the town (five-hundred-year-old buildings…!). I should have bought a bead, but they were all ¥1000 or over.
We eventually got to the デパート (department store), which was AMAZING. Everything the Japanese make is beautiful. It seems that if something isn’t beautiful, they don’t feel it’s worth making. I found a purse and some fabulous stationary.
Writing will be slow right now, since the girls are all watching RENT. We have a girly group now (Natalie, Nathalie, Brittany, Kate, Ksenia and I hang out together often, and they’re all awesome). We went to the onsen again tonight. I find I get anxious in the hot water, because it’s harder for me to breathe. But it’s a fun experience.
The evening was a sort of worrying experience though. It hadn’t occurred to me to try to replicate frat parties in Japan, but apparently the other group that I don’t usually hang out with wanted to go to karaoke, so I followed because some of my friends were going, but it turned out that they were going to get alcohol at the デパートfirst. So by the time we got there, they were still coming back. We checked in the place, but they told us that they weren’t open. When the rest of the group came back with all their drinks, we tried to tell them that we’d been told that it was closed, but of course they decided they wanted to check for themselves. And apparently they were told that also they weren’t welcome because they had brought drinks last time. College students….It was, for lack of a better word, a sobering experience.
Things I Didn’t Know:
1. You can write a song using a seven-note melody lifted from another song, but if it’s eight notes, it’s plagiarism.
2. Pakkupakku, onomatopoeia for eating quickly and steadily, is the origin of “pacman”.
3. You have to take off your shoes when you go in a changing room. You also have to try on the clothes on top of your existing clothes. This makes us wonder what the protocol is for trying on shoes.
4. You can’t step off the raised platform of a house with your socks, and you can’t put your shoes on the platform. So you have to make sure to have your shoes right there and facing the right way, and not overbalance (like I often do).
Breakfast today was a set meal, not the buffet. They had this amazing technology for getting butter and jam onto bread at the same time. Both were in a little packet, and you break it and them squeeze it so that ribbons of each come out from each side. It took me a while to figure out that you could cheat the system by just squeezing one side at a time.
Today on our way down to the post office (where we waited forever for Nathalie to fail to get her traveler’s checks cashed) we stopped in this cute little shop of hand-made beads, and the little old man who was melting glass there started talking to us in Japanese about the history of beads and the history of the town (five-hundred-year-old buildings…!). I should have bought a bead, but they were all ¥1000 or over.
We eventually got to the デパート (department store), which was AMAZING. Everything the Japanese make is beautiful. It seems that if something isn’t beautiful, they don’t feel it’s worth making. I found a purse and some fabulous stationary.
Writing will be slow right now, since the girls are all watching RENT. We have a girly group now (Natalie, Nathalie, Brittany, Kate, Ksenia and I hang out together often, and they’re all awesome). We went to the onsen again tonight. I find I get anxious in the hot water, because it’s harder for me to breathe. But it’s a fun experience.
The evening was a sort of worrying experience though. It hadn’t occurred to me to try to replicate frat parties in Japan, but apparently the other group that I don’t usually hang out with wanted to go to karaoke, so I followed because some of my friends were going, but it turned out that they were going to get alcohol at the デパートfirst. So by the time we got there, they were still coming back. We checked in the place, but they told us that they weren’t open. When the rest of the group came back with all their drinks, we tried to tell them that we’d been told that it was closed, but of course they decided they wanted to check for themselves. And apparently they were told that also they weren’t welcome because they had brought drinks last time. College students….It was, for lack of a better word, a sobering experience.
Things I Didn’t Know:
1. You can write a song using a seven-note melody lifted from another song, but if it’s eight notes, it’s plagiarism.
2. Pakkupakku, onomatopoeia for eating quickly and steadily, is the origin of “pacman”.
3. You have to take off your shoes when you go in a changing room. You also have to try on the clothes on top of your existing clothes. This makes us wonder what the protocol is for trying on shoes.
4. You can’t step off the raised platform of a house with your socks, and you can’t put your shoes on the platform. So you have to make sure to have your shoes right there and facing the right way, and not overbalance (like I often do).
January 6
January 6, 2008:
We’re currently in a ryokan (traditional Japanese-style inn) so it’s expected that there’s no wireless around. I will have to post entries after we get back to Nagoya, possibly from the school.
Today we had to get up for breakfast at 7:30, which was not difficult with jetlag; I woke up sometime around 4am, when it was still completely dark outside. I almost fell asleep in the subsequent Japanese class, and I’m almost too tired to function right now, although it’s only 9:30.
After class we had a shorter-than-usual break for lunch – we went to the “toast restaurant” (the cheaper of the three available restaurants in Inuyama) and almost everyone got yakisoba. I have been finding a lot of Japanese dishes unnecessarily sweet, which is disappointing; I was hoping that fried noodles would be salty. What looked good was the “toast”, which was made with these enormously thick pieces of bread. Perhaps tomorrow. We still have a few days here before we go back to Nagoya.
Then we walked up the hill to Inuyama Castle, which was beautiful. It’s the oldest castle in Japan, did you know? I think that’s what it was. The view from the slightly shaky walkway-balcony was unbelievable. The castle is on a hill already, and so the view from the top of a castle on the top of a hill…
For Dylan - real armor in a real castle! It's even better than the Met!
After that we went to Joan Teahouse, which had some beautiful pristine Japanese gardens. The Japanese phrase いい感じreally makes so much sense with so many of these places. It literally means “good feeling”, but it’s very descriptive when used in the sense of “picturesque”. A lot of Japanese aesthetic setups (gardens, houses, etc.) seem to be made with the idea that they create harmonious pictures. It’s so close to framing a shot in photography; it must be easy to shoot pictures of Japan…!
The Japanese think through everything, even in the fifteen hundreds. The tea house had a very small, square, raised door that you would really have to crouch to get through. I figured it was so that you had to bow your head and show respect, which is not unlikely, but the real reason is even more thoughtful. The katana carried by warriors would be too long to fit across the narrow opening while strapped to someone’s back, forcing warriors to lay down their weapons when entering the peaceful place.
I am seeing things, out here in the hallway because my roommates are already sleeping. This is not good.
After the teahouse (and after waiting around chatting for about half an hour before we realized that actually, we were the last group and everyone had already gone back so we were not in fact waiting for anyone – oops!) a group of us wandered around by the river. That may have been my favorite part of the day. There was a lot of “oh my god, we’re actually in Japan” moments, which are cute. Because we were just playing around in an entirely foreign country. I do wonder how much they resent us running around being noisy. But the other students are fun, and even if we do speak English most of the time, they’re extremely funny and we’re almost always laughing. It’s like the best parts of Japanese class, twenty-four hours a day.
And there was the most beautiful, Japanese postcard sunset. I haven’t figured out how to get Blogger to want to post my photos, but that needs to happen very soon. There was also an island that happened to have a window in it.
I continue to see things that aren’t there. I think I will have to sleep.
Later:
Here are some more photos from that day:
We’re currently in a ryokan (traditional Japanese-style inn) so it’s expected that there’s no wireless around. I will have to post entries after we get back to Nagoya, possibly from the school.
Today we had to get up for breakfast at 7:30, which was not difficult with jetlag; I woke up sometime around 4am, when it was still completely dark outside. I almost fell asleep in the subsequent Japanese class, and I’m almost too tired to function right now, although it’s only 9:30.
After class we had a shorter-than-usual break for lunch – we went to the “toast restaurant” (the cheaper of the three available restaurants in Inuyama) and almost everyone got yakisoba. I have been finding a lot of Japanese dishes unnecessarily sweet, which is disappointing; I was hoping that fried noodles would be salty. What looked good was the “toast”, which was made with these enormously thick pieces of bread. Perhaps tomorrow. We still have a few days here before we go back to Nagoya.
Then we walked up the hill to Inuyama Castle, which was beautiful. It’s the oldest castle in Japan, did you know? I think that’s what it was. The view from the slightly shaky walkway-balcony was unbelievable. The castle is on a hill already, and so the view from the top of a castle on the top of a hill…
For Dylan - real armor in a real castle! It's even better than the Met!
After that we went to Joan Teahouse, which had some beautiful pristine Japanese gardens. The Japanese phrase いい感じreally makes so much sense with so many of these places. It literally means “good feeling”, but it’s very descriptive when used in the sense of “picturesque”. A lot of Japanese aesthetic setups (gardens, houses, etc.) seem to be made with the idea that they create harmonious pictures. It’s so close to framing a shot in photography; it must be easy to shoot pictures of Japan…!
The Japanese think through everything, even in the fifteen hundreds. The tea house had a very small, square, raised door that you would really have to crouch to get through. I figured it was so that you had to bow your head and show respect, which is not unlikely, but the real reason is even more thoughtful. The katana carried by warriors would be too long to fit across the narrow opening while strapped to someone’s back, forcing warriors to lay down their weapons when entering the peaceful place.
I am seeing things, out here in the hallway because my roommates are already sleeping. This is not good.
After the teahouse (and after waiting around chatting for about half an hour before we realized that actually, we were the last group and everyone had already gone back so we were not in fact waiting for anyone – oops!) a group of us wandered around by the river. That may have been my favorite part of the day. There was a lot of “oh my god, we’re actually in Japan” moments, which are cute. Because we were just playing around in an entirely foreign country. I do wonder how much they resent us running around being noisy. But the other students are fun, and even if we do speak English most of the time, they’re extremely funny and we’re almost always laughing. It’s like the best parts of Japanese class, twenty-four hours a day.
And there was the most beautiful, Japanese postcard sunset. I haven’t figured out how to get Blogger to want to post my photos, but that needs to happen very soon. There was also an island that happened to have a window in it.
I continue to see things that aren’t there. I think I will have to sleep.
Later:
Here are some more photos from that day:
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