Graduation and farming

Today was pretty action-packed. In the morning I went to the Doshisha graduation (not the main one, but their mid-year one), then I went out to the countryside with the elementary school kids and played around, then came back and hung out with the dorm people and celebrated the graduation of one of their former members.

I have to say, the graduation was not that interesting. It was interesting to see the differences between here and Amherst, but it’s bad enough sitting through graduation speeches in a language you understand well, so I was completely lost when it was in Japanese. Combine that with the fact that we couldn’t get a seat and had to stand the whole time and I was counting the minutes until we could get out of there. Still, it was definitely good to go to just see it and to bond with the other dorm mates.

Then Sawa and I headed off to the country side to meet the elementary school students where they were learning about farming. There was a pretty cool temple there that we swung through before going to the farm, but we felt kind of rushed so we didn’t really get a chance to savour the temple. Also, I’ve seen so many ridiculously awesome temples here I’m starting to develop immunity to how cool they are. The best part about this one was that at one of the statues of Buddha a monk was chanting and praying to it and it sounded really cool.

Playing with the kids at the farm was the best part of the day. We took a bunch of cool photos out there but I haven’t received most of them, so I’ll post them later. Anyway, I got to learn along with the kids how to plant a couple different kinds of plants, got to jump around in the dirt and see how could jump the furthest (me) and catch kourogi (crickets) and frogs and crabs with the kids as well as playing soccer and climbing in a treehouse. I was pleased to see that even in Japan the boys put up “no girls allowed” signs on their tree houses (just like one of my favourite Berenstein Bears books), although for some reason this one was only “no second grade girls allowed”.

So that was mad awesome. Then I came back and was super-hungry, which made it even sweeter when we all biked down to my dorm-mates favourite ramen place and had the house special, with delicious little clams in the broth.

It was so good, then we came back to the dorm and ate some sweet ice cream and had some wine and beer to celebrate the graduation. Oh, and today the weather was surprisingly cool, which was a big change from the sweltering weather we’ve had until now. The fall should be really nice, the autumn foliage is supposed to be ridiculously gorgeous.

(Sawa took this one, as well as the one of me making sukiyakidon last night, as you can probably tell by the fact that it’s much better than mine.)

Tomorrow I’m going to make my special french toast recipe for all the dorm mates, so I’m gonna get some sleep. Night!

Calligraphy

I forgot to mention that last night after we got back from the izakaya, Eli took Sawa and I for a surreptitious visit into the old Amherst House (the dorm that the Doshisha Fellow used to live in until just last year, along with a bunch of Japanese students). It’s built in the same style as all the dorms at Amherst, so it felt strangely familiar. It was very sad to see it empty and ready to be renovated. I’ve been gradually sussing out the situation behind this change, and it’s a very strange and convoluted story. Apparently, it all goes back for over 50 years and is the product of a falling out between the old dorm students and a professor who came over from Amherst and ended up staying for a long time. The result is that the university finally kicked out the dorm mates and decided to turn the dorm into an administrative building, and now they’re not sure what the future of the community of students who used to live in the Amherst House and the Fellow who used to always live with those students will be. However, I think we have a good chance of pushing to reestablish the same kind of feel in this new location and make it even better by making a community out of the other two dorms next door. But, I imagine there’ll be a lot of negotiation and difficulty in trying to convince the administration.

I spent some of the evening talking to one of the dorm mates about this whole situation, and just hanging out with some of the others. It’s been a little strange with the dorm mates; they’re all very nice, but I’ve kind of been hoping to have more bonding time with them, going out to eat or party or go on expeditions or something, and I’ve kind of hinted that it’d be fun to go do stuff together, but they seem to be waiting around for something. It’s kind of hard to read, and maybe it’s just a different culture, but I feel that if the situation were reversed and a new person came to live with me I’d make a special effort to do some fun stuff to welcome thom… Oh well.

Anyway, besides all of that, I went to the Student Activities Office to see about joining some student clubs. A couple of students from the calligraphy club came to meet me and very kindly showed me their room and demonstrated some calligraphy for me. It was so bad-ass! I don’t know if I can improve that much in just one year, but I definitely want to try, because it looks pretty awesome and it’d be great to be able to do. It’d probably improve my terrible handwriting too. The guys were really nice and friendly and showed me all around and told me to call them any time, to do calligraphy together or play basketball or whatever. I hope I can make lots of friends as nice as them.

Other than that, I just made sukiyaki udon with Sawa. Somehow I ended up not making dinner for the last week (first being spoiled at Sawa’s place, then being taken out to dinner for the last couple of nights and going out to dinner with Sawa on Tuesday after being too exhausted from playing with little kids to want to cook). I quite like the way this photo came out.

Tomorrow should be a fun day. I’m planning to finally hang out with the other dorm mates and also to go with the elementary school kids out to a rice field. Should be awesome!

Admissions

Today was a lot of fun. I ended up spending most of the day with Eli Blomberg, my erstwhile Admissions office boss and basketball nemesis back at Amherst. He’s a very nice guy, but we’re both too competitive when we play basketball. Fortunately, there was no basketball involved today; instead we went to the first meeting of the English conversation club this morning, where I will chat in English and get free lunch once a week while I’m here in Japan. It was nice, they’re all really sweet and it’s really just a casual lunch table.

Eli was in Japan on the final leg of a whirlwind trip through Asia advertising Amherst to various schools. He was giving a talk to prospective Doshisha students who were interested in coming to Amherst, so I joined him and Reiko to give the students some more perspectives. It was really fun! It made me feel like I was back at Amherst as a tour guide, and I got talk to talk about what a good time I had and how sad it is that I’m not going there any more. There was one kid who seemed really cool and he also seemed to appreciate what I had to say. I loved the way he asked great questions, which is a rare trait in many students and especially so in Japanese university students (based only on my brief impressions and things I’ve heard). For example, he asked “what is critical thinking”, which although I really do think it is something that Amherst teaches, it is ironically used a lot in an uncritical way by tour guides (ie they say that Amherst promotes critical thinking, but aren’t necessarily aware of what exactly it means).  He gave me his contact info, so hopefully we can hang out in the future.

After that fun experience, Morita-sensei took us three and Sawa out for another delicious meal and drinks (although  a different place from last time). I am getting more and more into raw fish. Seriously, you people who’ve only had raw fish at sushi restaurants in America or New Zealand have no idea how much better it is in Japan. It’s not even the same thing at all. It’s so much fresher and better here.

Morita-sensei seems to enjoy being able to treat us to nice meals and drinks, and I sure as hell appreciate a delicious free meal at these awesome little Japanese places, so it works out very nicely. Some of you might not like this, but I even tried whale meat. I figured it’d be rude to refuse, and if I’m gonna be in Japan for a year I may as well try it once. It was interesting; I’m not sure exactly what it tasted like, maybe the closest thing would be beef, but it was very rich. I’m not gonna lie: it was pretty good. And apparently, it was caught legally, somehow it’s allowed if it’s caught for scientific research purposes and then eaten so as not to waste the meat. Sounds slightly dubious, but on a relative scale it’s a good thing. Anyway, I don’t think I’ll eat any more while I’m here, but I’m glad I tried it.

It’s strange, I haven’t really been doing anything resembling productive work for the last couple of days, I’ve just been having lots of meals and things, but I’ve been quite busy. I think I could definitely get used to this kind of life of attending events and dinners and things. One of these days, though, I really need to set myself a schedule to fit in all the projects I want to do while I’m here, and get myself into a daily schedule of studying Japanese and practising music and planning my classes and things like that. One of these days…

International Relations

Today was pretty chill, a nice change from yesterday’s chaos at the elementary school. After waking up late, Morita-sensei took me to meet the Chancellor of all the different schools within the Doshisha family (the final fat-cat in the trilogy I had to meet). He was very nice and seemed a little more genuine than the other two. I’d really like to have a job like his where I get a sweet office and sound important and get to make important decisions and not have to do much of the grunt work behind these decisions.

Then, after a nice coffee with Sawa at Papa Jon’s, I went to this seminar organized by the guy who runs the English language club I’ll be speaking it. It was on “international exchange” and he had this guy who was apparently quite a baller (president of some big company, high up in Panasonic, stuff like that) come talk about his life and experience, while a bunch of us with some international connection listened and then talked together. It was nothing spectacular, but it kind of felt like I was back in college discussing something in a class again and it was kind of a nice, nostalgic feeling. Best of all, after that was done we adjourned to this nearby restaurant to have some nice, free food and beer.

After that, I just tried to look up some wedding planning stuff, which mostly just scared me. There are so many little things to decide and it’s difficult to know where to start. Oh well, nice problem to have. Then I popped to over to Sawa’s place to have a nice hot bath (her place has a bathtub, whereas my dorm doesn’t). Pretty laid-back day, but I kind of enjoyed that.

Flying monkeys

Wow, I am exhausted. Last night I didn’t write in my blog because I wanted to get some sleep before going to my first day teaching at the elementary school, but I still only got 6 hours sleep because I had to get up at 7am for the first time in a long time. As the day went on, I realized what a terrible mistake it is to not get a full night’s sleep before going to a school full of crazy little flying monkeys masquerading as elementary school children. It was ridiculous. These kids spend the whole day running around at full speed, screaming at me in Japanese and running at me and either grabbing my hand and pulling me in 8 different directions at once to come play with them or just flinging themselves bodily at me and attaching to me like the face-huggers in Aliens.

I mean all of this in a good way. These kids were so cute and it was awesome that they were so excited and wanted to play so much, but now I’m sore all over from running around with them all day and carrying up to three of them on my back/shoulders/arms at a time.

It’s all the Zumbyes’ fault.

When we came in June, the teachers here hyped us up and always played our CD and had them learn the words to one of our songs, so when we arrived they pretty much went crazy and have been waiting ever since for them to come back, so they focused all of their Zumbye attention on me. I wish I was as good at playing with kids as some of the other Zumbyes, I found myself sometimes just at a loss for creative games to play and just being able to interact with them.  But, it was great fun and reminded me how much more there is to teaching than just knowing what you’re talking about; especially with younger kids it’s all about getting them involved and getting them to have fun. I taught them to sing BINGO and they seemed to like that. I’m thinking I’ll have to brush up on my kids’ songs and maybe learn some Raffi songs on the guitar to sing with them.

(getting help with my Japanese penmanship)

In stark opposition to today, yesterday was very laid back. I had intended to do lots of catching up on emails and writing letters to people, but ended up getting distracted by online things a lot, as inevitably happens. I think the letter looks pretty bad-ass in Japanese, though, don’t you think?

Although I got a little done and it was good to have a chill day, by dinner time I felt kind of like I’d wasted a lot of the day screwing around, but when I came across this great cafe and cheesecake place just down the road from Sawa’s place, that turned it into an amazingly productive day on the spot. Although it was a little pricey, it was so nice to find a cute cafe with good coffee. Even cooler, the machine they use is this bad-ass manual hand-pumped machine. So sweet.

The cheesecake was amazing too.

Spekaing of good food, here’s a picture of a dinner we made at Sawa’s place in Yokohama the other day. Doesn’t the caprezza look sweet?

Oh, one other awesome thing today was that, as Sawa and I were biking through the temple a little after sunset on the way to show her this coffee place, we heard these strange sounds and stopped to listen. Some monk was chanting in the temple and then smacking the gong and whacking some percussion thing periodically, and it was such a cool feeling to just stop and listen. Kyoto is ridiculously awesome.

Of course, it seems like in my blog I make it sound much cooler than it really is because I just recap these exciting-sounding highlights, whereas in reality there’s a lot of mundane stuff and boredom in between, but still these awesome, random little things like monks chanting as I bike by and awesome coffee shops and hyper kids swarming me and playing onigoko (tag) and dodgeball together make it really worthwhile.

Into the woods

Did I mention my dorm is directly next to the old imperial palace? Yeah, well, it is. Today, after I got back to Kyoto I wandered through the imperial palace grounds on the way back to my dorm. It started raining really hard, but instead of going straight back I wandered down this little path through the woods and it was so gorgeous. I felt like Satsuki in Tonari no Totoro wandering through the woods in the rain and I thought at any moment I’d find a giant Totoro with a leaf on his head for an umbrella waiting for a flying cat bus. Sadly, I had no such luck, but I did come across a sweet little clearing with picnic tables in the shade of gorgeous trees. I’ve gotta come back there soon for a picnic!

Today was another sweet day in the land of the rising sun. This morning I went with Sawa’s family to her father’s parents’ grave for ohakamairi. Ohakamairi is when you visit your ancestors’ grave and sort of say hi to them and make sure they’re being well looked after. I realized that this is the first time I’ve been to any grave except for at an actual funeral. Ancestor worship is really a big thing in Japan, and it felt really nice that Sawa’s family wanted to include me in this intense ritual, since I’m just about part of their family now. I’m also glad that I got to go pay my respects to her grandparents before we get married. Sawa has one more grandmother who’s still going strong in Kyushu, and we’ll probably go visit her in a couple of weeks.

Since this weekend is the autumnal equinox, it’s one of the three times Japanese families do ohakamairi (the others are the obon holiday and the spring equinox). We brought special flowers for this purpose, came to the graveyard entrance (which I believe is Buddhist) and got some incense to burn. We walked up to the grave, put the fresh incense in a little area, put fresh water in and put the new flowers in, cleaned little bits of debris from the grave and then took turns washing the grave with water (a sort of purifying and cleansing and I believe helping cool down their spirits kind of thing related to the handwashing ritual when entering Shinto shrines-Shintoism and Buddhism are pretty much inextricably separated in Japan). I couldn’t take any pictures because you’re not supposed to take pictures of graves in Japan (part of the respecting ancestors thing, although I’m not sure precisely what it is about the photos that’s not good.)

It’s interesting that the Japanese have such a strong ancestor worship culture, because according to Guns, Germs & Steel (which I finally finished on the shinkansen back!), ancestor worship tends to be more widespread in smaller tribal groups and larger states tend to encourage religions that support an all-encompassing God, partly as a way for strangers to feel a common bond and partly as a way to motivate soldiers to sacrifice themselves for a cause. Paradoxically, Japan is famous for both of these things (communality and fanatic nationalism), but I suppose that maybe their official belief (until the end of World War II) in the divinity of the Emperor’s line must have held that function even while individual families also revered their own ancestors. Japan has got to be the most unique, paradoxical place ever.

After the ohakamairi, I headed back to Kyoto to get back in time to go to this birthday party of a friend I made in Kyoto, leaving Sawa to stay with her family in Kyoto for another day. I met this guy (a fellow gaijin (foreigner) in June when the Zumbyes sang at Doshisha-he came to translate for us. We then saw him when we were out eating okonomiyaki and then last week I ran into him crossing the street. He’s a really nice guy and he invited me out to a birthday dinner with his Japanese friends and then to karaoke after that.

Now, I’ve been trying for the last two weeks to find someone who plays the shakuhachi (bamboo flute) or figure out a way to get involved in the hogaku (traditional Japanese music) club here with no success. So what should I find out at dinner but that this fellow gaijin has been playing the shakuhachi for 6 years and is a member of the hogaku club. He busted out his shakuhachi at the restaurant and played a little bit and showed me how to play it.

I couldn’t even make the simplest sound.
However, I’m definitely gonna work at it and I’m sure I’ll get it. He’s going to introduce me to the hogaku club people and his shakuhachi teacher and hopefully I can start taking lessons with him. I’m so excited to chill out on the banks of the Kamo river and practice the shakuhachi while people go passing by and the seasons change day to day. Yay!

The Feast

I spent most of today planning the upcoming wedding and then feasting with my future in-laws. It just so happened that this place we’re thinking about having the wedding happened to contact us the weekend we were both in the area and free, so we got to do our first primary source research at this venue. It was so incredibly scary. Neither of us has any of idea of what is involved in planning a wedding, and our parents don’t seem to have that much of an idea either. Not only that, but we have to learn not only what the deal is like in one country, but in two other ones on opposite sides of the world, and figure out how to reconcile the cultural expectations of people from each continent, not to mention planning some kind of post-wedding parties in America and New Zealand and probably some kind of continent, and figuring out how to pay for this all. Of course, I shouldn’t be complaining about this because it’s an amazing problem to be afflicted with, but still its pretty intimidating. You can see why the marriage industry is so lucrative, because it’s such a big deal for people and (almost) everyone comes into it with no idea how it works, and by the time they’ve gone through it once and become an expert, it’s too late and their hard-won knowledge is useless unless their marriage goes terribly wrong.

So, after that we wandered around Yokohama a litte and went to this shopping mall, where we got a sweet bowl with which to drink coffee from my espresso/sewing machine when it arrives (the mail the other day turned out to be a false alarm). We also stopped by the Ghibli shop, where they had all the cute Totoro dolls and pencil cases and calendars and stuff.

However, I’ve already acquired pretty much all the Totoro paraphernalia a guy could want between my last couple of trips to Japan and Sawa’s mother always sending me Totoro gifts (I now have a Totoro-themed T-shirt, pencil case, two coin pouches, three ties, a tie clip, various pens/pencils, a plethora of calendars, CDs and probably anything else you could think of. Oh yeah and a Totoro-themed coffee bowl that Sawa painted for me herself. Wow, I am such a loser. But I don’t care, Totoro is awesome.)

After that, Sawa’s grandparents and parents met up with us and took us out to a delicious feast at this Japanese restaurant. It was really phenomenal. We were there for about 4 hours in total and just kept on eating and drinking at a very slow rate so we savored each bite and I learned all about the different foods and we talked a lot. I was amazed at how well I could keep up with the conversation. All the food was so beautifully and elegantly displayed (check out the hand-sliced radish spiral) and it used all these great seasonal ingredients.

Seasonality is a big thing in Japan, and I’m really glad I’ll get to be here for a full year to experience all the different foods and scenery and holidays and things of each of the seasons. It’s very different from New Zealand where there’s just summer where it’s really nice and fun to go prancing around outside, and then the rest of the year where it is different shades of rainy and damp and windy. I’m really looking forward to the beginning of autumn, though, since then the excessive heat and humidity will end and the mosquitoes will start dying en masse (ha ha ha, demon mosquitoes) and the leaves will turn gorgeous colours.

Tomorrow I’m heading back to Kyoto to make it back for a birthday party and a music festival. I’ll definitely finish Guns, Germs & Steel on the shinkansen on the way back and then maybe I can finally move on and actually focus on studying Japanese, since I still won’t stop blabbering about it to anyone I talk to for more than a few minutes and I keep on putting off my Japanese study to read more of it.

Night!

Yokohama

Today Sawa and I hopped on the shinkansen (bullet train) and made our way up to her parents’s place in Yokohama. It’s weird, even though I haven’t been doing any real work at all, it still feels all relaxed and free like I’m going on a holiday from work or school. It’s probably because I didn’t have to cook dinner or do the dishes and Sawa’s mum made us a delicious feast of tender Japanese steak and Italian-style tomato, mozarella and basil. I even tried a little bit of natto, the infamous fermented soybean dish that is the bane of all gaijin (foreigners) in Japan. I tried it 8 years ago when I first visited Japan and couldn’t stand even a single bite, but this time it wasn’t that bad at all. I’ve come so far from the days when I would only eat plain spaghetti with parmesan cheese. I think a big part of it is all the times I’ve been to Japan and been treated to weird exotic foods and couldn’t refuse because it’d be rude. Anyway, it’s great to be able to eat all these interesting things, and the Japanese seem to really appreciate the fact that I try them out and don’t ask for a Big Mac or anything like that.

For dessert, we had this amazingly delicious goma dango (sesame dumpling). It was so good!

Unfortunately, my camera ran out of batteries as I was taking photos of the feast so I might only be able to upload a couple of photos of this trip taken from my cellphone.

Other than that, I’ve mostly just been reading Guns, Germs and Steel. It’s so good! In fact, I think I’m going to order the follow-up book, “Collapse”, on Amazon.com right now.

Done.

I even tried to proselytize Sawa’s mum and dad about how good it was. It was pretty hard trying to summarize in Japanese, the argument of a 400-page book explaining how the history of all of the peoples of the world followed almost inexorably from their geography and the availability of local flora and fauna for agriculture, but I certainly did my best. It helped that Sawa could translate when I ran into trouble with words like “domestication”.

The other exciting thing today was asking Sawa’s father for her hand in marriage. I was really worried about it, because Sawa was worried her father might not feel that we’re really engaged unless I ask him for her hand in marriage (“musume san wo kudasai,” or, literally, “Give me your daughter”). So, I was freaking out, wondering how one would casually lead a conversation in such a direction that this wouldn’t feel really awkward and failing, but then it turned out that he already seemed OK with it and gave us both an engagement present of travel coupons to go somewhere cool in Japan. It was really nice of him, and made it easy to transition to the awkward question, and he seemed to appreciate that I did that.

I’ll leave you with one final observation: In Japan, the toilet rooms are separate from the bathrooms. Why is it not like that in the West? Having the toilet in with the shower means you can’t go to the bathroom when someone’s taking a shower, and even worse is the issue of poop mist (kudos to my roommate Oren for coining that phrase last year).

Fat Cats

So today I mingled with the fat cats. Two fat cats to be precise. One was the president of Doshisha University, and the other was the Chairman of the Board of Trustees. Well, mingled might be a strong word. Perhaps, “met briefly and made idle small talk with” would be more appropriate. Still, it’s pretty cool:  I never even spoke to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Amherst. I’m also meeting the Chancellor next Thursday to complete my introductions to the bad-ass trinity of Doshisha.

My new business cards arrived just in time for me to present them ceremoniously, Japanese style, to the aforementioned fat-cats. They’re so cool! I would put up a picture but I haven’t got the technology with me write now. Suffice it to say, it is such a cool feeling to have my own official business card with my information in English AND Japanese (one language on each side).

After that Sawa and I went on a shopping trip to acquire some necessities for my room, like a mattress that doesn’t feel like a slab of wood, a second chair, speakers, a printer, etc. It’ll be nice to have them.

Even more excitingly, my new espresso machine has arrived and I should be able to pick it up tomorrow! I’m so excited, I can’t even begin to describe it.  The coffee here has been pretty terrible so far. The worst was this place called Cafe du Monde (?) in Kyoto station: they charged about 350 yen (~US$3.20ish) for a cup of coffee that I swear was made up from the same dehydrated powder stuff I bring when I go tramping in the wilderness for days. The only problem is, I got a message from the eBay seller I bought the machine from saying, cryptically: “Did you receive a sewing machine item in lieu of espresso machine?” Needlessly to say, this makes me very uneasy, but I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

After the shopping, Sawa and I went to this yakiniku place for dinner. Yakiniku means cooked meat, and that’s literally what it is. You go in, you have a little charcoal grill thing in the middle of your table, and you order different kinds of raw meat and they bring it out to you, seasoned deliciously and cut into thin strips, and then you throw it on the grill, pick it up off the grill with chopsticks and pop it straight into your mouth. It’s amazing. We were wondering why this never caught on in America-I mean, Americans love their meat-but realized that the sloppy service, poor food safety and excessive litigation in America would lead to a frenzy of food-poisoning lawsuits. It’s a shame, because it was really an amazing meal. Japanese beef is so tender and juicy. Mmmmm…wagyuu…..

Finally, I went back to the dorm and met a few of the exchange students from the dorm next door. They were very cool. I went out to a bar with one of them from Canada, had some Japanese beer and nigorizake (sake that’s cloudy with lots of unfiltered rice sediment) and learned about some interesting places in the city. He had apparently gone wandering over the mountains for four hours the other day to Lake Biwa (the largest lake in Japan), using only his memory of looking for a trail on Google Earth and a process of trial and error. I gotta go exploring with this guy.

Tomorrow Sawa and I are going to hop on the shinkansen (bullet train) to her parents’ place in Yokohama to spend the weekend there, so I may not be able to blog for the next couple of days. However, I’ve decided in order to motivate myself to keep this blog up and in order to have produced at least one thing tangible by the end of my fellowship, I want to keep up this blog almost daily and make it into a hard copy journal at the end of the fellowship, to give to the Amherst library for any future fellows to have an in-depth look at day-to-day life and for anyone interested in the relationship between Amherst and Doshisha. Maybe if you comment on it you too can be immortalized? In no less a place than the Amherst Special Collections Archives….

Among the rice and lotuses (lotii)?

Today I got to visit the campus I’ll be teaching at starting in two weeks. It’s actually a good thing I only teach there once a week, because it takes almost an hour and a half just to get there, including a final 15-minute walk up a steep hill with almost no shade, which in the blazing sun today and my nice clothes was no fun. It’s off way in the south of Kyoto in quite a rural area. After I got off at the train station I had to walk by a couple of rice fields and lotus fields to get there (at least I think it was a lotus field…)

When I arrived, it turned out they just wanted me to give a two-minute speech in front of the rest of the faculty of my department introducing myself and then I was done. It seemed a tad inefficient… However, after that someone showed me around the campus, which was nice. They showed me the room I’d be teaching, but when we entered we were surprised to find a bunch of Japanese b-boys breakdancing in the middle of the classroom. I felt kind of awkward busting in on them and having them wait around patiently for my guide to show me the facilities and then resume their breakdancing.

I have to get up early tomorrow, as I have a big day of meeting important people (the president and the chairman of the board of trustees!) so I’d better get some sleep. Oyasuminasai!

Dorm mates

Today was pretty mellow. I went to the elementary school as planned, but I didn’t really do much there, just met up with the main teacher and talked about the kinds of things I could do when I start teaching there next week. I also got to look through their sweet library filled with cool Japanese kids books, and even check out a book of Japanese kids’ songs complete with CD for my “research”.  I couldn’t play with the cute little kids because they still are obsessed with the Zumbyes since we came and sang their in June and we wanted to surprise them  by giving them a big stack of cards drawn in crayon by the Zumbyes when I officially come next week, so I had to sneak around stealthily avoiding their gazes.

It’s a little lonely around my dorm, since most of the students are still off on summer vacation. My one dormmate who was here when I arrived mysteriously vanished about 5 days ago without saying anything-I think he’s off seeing his girlfriend or something-and the other one who arrived after I got here has been working crazy 12+hour shifts running through the city pulling tourists around in jinrikisha (human-powered carts), so he pretty much gets home late and crashes. I didn’t even think people still used jinrikisha these days!

When my dormmates are around, they seem strangely lethargic, and don’t seem to want to do too much exciting things till everyone gets back. I don’t think it’s that they don’t like me or don’t often do exciting things, because when I came in June we went off to karaoke and public bath-hopping and lots of fun stuff. It seems more like the system in Japan is the reverse of the states: during the summer the students work their asses off doing part time jobs and don’t mess around too much, and then when the semester hits it’s time to chill out and have fun and not work too hard. The Japanese university system is, by all accounts, very bad for motivating the students to work, so I think I’ll have my work cut out for me when I start teaching classes (well, class) in a couple weeks.

That’s pretty much it for today. I hope I didn’t get anyone’s hopes up after my first action-packed posts; I don’t think life here will usually be quite as exciting as that.

Getting cultured

Sorry I didn’t post anything yesterday, but you see it was the Sabbath. Don’t worry, I’m still not religious, but I do think those old Judeo-Christians had a good idea going with that. It actually seems much harder to make myself have a Sabbath day without being able to justify it by my religion, but I do think it’s important to give myself a day where I’m not allowed to do anything that I feel obligated to do, so I can enjoy the things I never do because I’m too busy.

Yesterday was sweet: Sawa and I were meeting up with William Chen, who graduated with us and also moved to Kyoto. We were trying to think of something to do, when we came across this Kyoto Arts Festival that was free, happening right when we were planning to meet him, and exactly the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to find in Japan to get me started on understanding Japanese music: a festival type thing with lots of local music and other performance groups of all different kinds, from folk singers depicting old rice planting rituals

to modern day hip-hop dance and Japanese a cappella.

It turns out that a cappella in Japan is pretty much the same as a cappella in the states. You Zumbyes who had to sit through all those ICCA competitions know what I mean.

Before we headed out, Sawa and I made onigiri, which made me feel pretty bad-ass. They’re basically the Japanese equivalent of sandwiches, in that you take your staple food (rice instead of wheat) and put in some other shit in there to make it taste good, and pack it along to eat for lunch. I’m still not very good at making them so they look pretty amateurish, but they tasted pretty damn good (especially the one with garlic miso sauce!)

Today was a national holiday (Respect Old People Day!) so I just slept very late and didn’t really do anything much except cook up some leftover yakisoba and watch Death Becomes Her, a hilariously bizarre movie from the early 90’s featuring an almost unrecognizable Bruce Willis playing an emasculated middle-aged plastic surgeon to the dead. Yeah, very weird.

Tomorrow I get to go to the Elementary School I’ll be working at a little. The Zumbyes sang for them when we came in June and they treated us like friggin rock stars, and I’m really excited to see them again. They’re so cute!

Temple-hopping

Kyoto is a gorgeous city. Everywhere you turn there are bad-ass old temples and shrines that have been around for hundreds of years. Another amazing thing about the city is that it’s really flat and laid out in a perfect grid aligned N-S and E-W, so it’s amazingly easy to bike around anywhere, saving money and keeping my body and the environment healthy, and even someone as clueless as me doesn’t get lost with the streets laid out so perfectly.
Today, though I mostly got around by bus, because my old friend Yuko who homestayed with my family for a year back in Wellington when I was 17 came to visit and we went around the city to the Kinkakuji and Ryouanji temples, then off for ramen and karaoke in the evening. One of her friends also came along, and although this was the first time I met her, her face looked a little familiar. Somewhere in the course of the day we realized that she’s a flight attendant for All Nippon Airlines who often flies back forth between Osaka and China, and that I stopped in Shanghai before flying into Osaka on ANA when I arrived the other week, so she had probably already served me some crazy Chinese airplane breakfast food before we even knew each others’ names. Small world.
Neither of them had been to the Kinkakuji (golden pavilion) or Ryouanji, and since they’re right next to each other we went to see them. I’ve now managed to see them both 4 times (once every time I’ve visited Japan)! I really do like them, because they’re so gorgeous, and they complement each other so well. The main feature of Kinkakuji is this giant, gleaming, decadent, penis-compensating structure.

On the other hand, the main feature of Ryouanji is this big rock garden that’s mostly just empty negative space, along with moss and trickling water and a pond full of lotuses (that’s the picture at the top). They’re both really beautiful in completely different ways.

After the temple-viewing we plowed through a bowl of ramen each and went for a lightning one-hour karaoke session.

One hour may seem like long enough for some people, but the one time I went with Sawa and her friends we went for SIX FRIGGIN HOURS. She didn’t warn me before hand, either, so I kept wondering “so…one more song? Two more songs?” for about 3 or 4 hours.
Anyway, karaoke was great fun, although my voice was mad out of shape. I couldn’t hit any of the high notes I could hit three months ago. However, I plan to do mad karaoke this year, so I’m sure my voice’ll get back in shape soon enough.
That’s it for today. I found out (correction, Sawa found out) about this awesome free festival happening at Kyoto station tomorrow, so I’m pretty psyched for that. Stay tuned for details.

It begins…

So, despite promises of starting a meticulous daily blog once I arrived in Japan, it’s taken me over a week to get this thing going. Since this is my first blog, I apologize if it’s a bit amateurish. This first post is also pretty long, since I’ve got a lot to catch up on. I promise after this I’ll keep it a lot shorter.

A lot has happened since I arrived. Most importantly, Sawa and I got engaged on Monday! I had the Zumbyes call us up after they finished singing in the freshman show last Sunday and wake her up with a musical proposal (the time difference worked out perfectly). Then I made French toast-the only thing I’m really any good at making. That and chocolate chip cookies.
Were planning to try to have the wedding next April or May here in Japan, but to have separate celebration things in Amherst, Massachusetts and Wellington, New Zealand so we can celebrate with our friends and family in those places. It’d be great to have a party in Amherst in June when all of our recent graduate friends can come back for this first Amherst recent alumni reunion thing. More details to come.

Speaking of cooking, I’ve become strangely interested in cooking lately. It all started when I realized I’d be living on my own this year without being spoiled by having a dining hall I could go graze at or parents to cook my food. So I started reading a cookbook and teaching myself to cook and reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma, a great book about the modern food chains that we eat from. That lead to reading Guns, Germs and Steel, which is all about the environmental history of everyone in the world and how the development of agriculture happened and how the different development on different continents lead to the modern-day disparities between different races and nations. It’s really friggin’ interesting, I keep on talking to everyone I meet about it, probably way too much. Anyway, now I’ve become really fascinated with the things I eat and how they got to be there and learning how to make foods from the basic ingredients they’re actually made from instead of from packets that have been pre-made by the food industry and have weird ingredients in them. I’m sure that if I ever get a real job that requires me to work a full day, I’ll start hankering for the convenience of more processed food, but I’m starting to get used to the life of not having a real job after working 15 hours a week as a “composer-in-residence” for 5 weeks and now living in Kyoto as the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow, where I’ll start teaching one 1.5hr class a week in October. I think I’ll try to angle for these kinds of lifestyles for the rest of my life.

I do have big plans for the rest of my time, but I haven’t really gotten around to starting any of them. In addition to my “research” into Japanese music (listening to lots of music, going to concerts, learning the shamisen or shakuhachi and Japanese singing), I want to try to really become completely comfortable speaking, reading, writing and listening in Japanese. I also want to learn to cook Japanese food. And of course, I want to explore all over Japan and just try to understand the culture by living here and traveling around. It should be a pretty sweet year. We’ll see how much of my goals I actually manage to get done…

So far, I haven’t done too much exciting stuff here in Kyoto. I did a lot of sightseeing when I was here in June with the Zumbyes on our Japan tour and on my own the week after they left. I’ve mostly been taking care of paperwork stuff, cooking a little bit and getting settled into my new accomodation.

I don’t want to babble on too much, so I’ll just share a couple of pictures from the last couple of days.

The first one is this sweet shrine about a minutes walk down the road from my dorm.

It has this awesome fresh-water spring where people can go fill up drink bottles for free. I love it, I feel a little more connected to nature collecting water from somewhere it naturally wells up and carrying it back to my dorm with my own power, rather than having it getting processed through this municipal water supply thing and pumped to my dorm. The one drawback is that being a wet, shady place where lots of people stop to fill their drink bottles is a mosquitoes heaven.

The other three pictures are from last night, when Morita-sensei, the Amherst representative at Doshisha, took me, Sawa and Reiko out to a delicious banzai (local Kyoto specialty food) restaurant.

The food was ridiculously good, as was the beer and sake. It seems that in Japan people really like to take you out and treat you to delicious meals and drink lots with you; another professor had actually taken me out to another (Italian) restaurant for a delicious meal and beer. I could definitely get used to this kind of life. The pictures are of the four of us and some delicious katsuo (bonito) sashimi.

Today another professor took me and Sawa out to this sweet soba (buckwheat noodle) restaurant where they ground the buckwheat and made it into noodles on site. It was awesome. Everything was made from soba, from the soba itself (obviously) to the tea, to the ice cream for dessert.

To finish this train of food-related stuff and end this unnecessarily long first blog entry, I’ll include a picture of the yakisoba and miso soup that Sawa and I made for dinner tonight. She’s got her own apartment with a nice kitchen (much better than my dorm), so you can look forward to many more pictures of my ongoing attempts to learn Japanese cooking.

Thanks for reading this far if you managed it. I promise I’ll try to keep it shorter in the future.

Although Japan is great, I really miss all you friends and family back in New Zealand and America. Hope some of you get a chance to come by sometime while I’m here.