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.