美術部 (March 5, 2008)

Today I spent a blissful four and a half (!!) hours in the Art Club bushitsu ("clubhouse", but in reality a little room off a corridor of little rooms, each for different clubs). The room is amazing. It's like the takoyaki party was distilled and translated into art, drawing instead of playing Super Smash. I learned kurokki, which comes from "croquis" and apparently means something related to figure drawing. What we did was people in the club just took turns standing for three minutes. It was pretty tough because not only were they clothed, they even had like their coats on and stuff, so it was a little bit silly.

The girls also got really excited about reading my Japanese notes and textbook. It's always really telling to see how things are explained to students, especially between Japanese and English, where so many things like adjectives just do not have the equivalence that textbooks assert. It's been irritating me and my American friends that there are so few adjectives at our disposal. きれい means both "clean" and "pretty", 面白い means both "interesting" and "funny", うるさい means both "loud" and "annoying"...It's so hard for us to be as specific as we're used to being with the millions of words in the English language.