Sawa’s old friends

Today Sawa and I went into Yokohama to catch up with a  bunch of Sawa’s old friends. We bounced around a big shopping centre with Sawa’s friend Hiromi for a while getting some shopping/errands/omiyage buying done, then met up with Kei, Kazune and Masaki, had dinner and drinks, then went to karaoke. It was a lot of fun.

The only problematic thing was that they all went to international high school together, so were completely fluent in both English and Japanese, but they mostly spoke in Japanese. Because my Japanese isn’t at nearly that level yet, I had some trouble following a lot of the conversations. I met most of them 3 years ago when I visited Sawa in Japan, but ironically at that time, because my Japanese was not so good we mostly talked in English and I wished I had more of a chance to work on my Japanese. However, this time, I felt like I’m getting enough practice of my Japanese in Kyoto and I was more keen to get to talk on a deeper level with Sawa’s friends, but wasn’t able to because of the Japanese barrier.

In a way, it was even harder than talking with people who only speak Japanese, because in that case all I can do is try my best with my Japanese, but here sometimes people would talk to me in English if I was having trouble understanding, and I felt awkward trying to say complex things in Japanese and stumbling over them when we all knew that I could be understood if I talked in English, but it felt clumsy talking in English when they were all talking in Japanese.

I continue to be amazed by what a huge thing it is to be able to communicate fully with people in a language, and how frustrating it is to not be able to do so, despite the fact that I’m gradually getting better. Will I ever really be able to communicate with Japanese people in Japanese at the same level I can communicate with English-speaking people? I hope so, I think I probably could given a few years, but I don’t really know for sure.

In other news, in the morning we were watching some clips from the “nodo jiman taikai”, a televised amateur karaoke competition a lot like American idol (and older than it), and thought how cool it’d be if Sawa and I could sing together on it. We’re gonna try to look into it and see if we can do it. It’d be so cool! The only problem is, we’d really love to sing the “Come What May” duet from Moulin Rouge, but if I do get to appear on a Japanese karaoke show, I should really sing in Japanese.

We have to see how it all works out, but I have a song in mind, “Teru no uta” from Gedo no Senki. I’m also thinking about arranging it for the Zumbyes and/or me and Mike Kohl’s jazzey Japan-touring vocal quartet thing, so I think I’ll try to focus my first real compositional/arranging efforts since I’ve come to Japan on that song and see how I do.

Music revelation

Yesterday I just spent the whole day inside at Sawa’s place (much of it writing yesterday’s epic blog post). I caught up on lots of computer-ey stuff, had some delicious food and tea with Sawa’s family, chatted with them, studied some kanji took a bath, it was really nice. Also, in the bath, I had a revelation about my future.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do, and I really like music but I just don’t think I’m cut out to be a professional musician, and I’m more interested in how music relates to other things in society. I’ve also been feeling like I’m missing all the science and maths I used to like so much. And of course, I’ve been really into the Jared Diamond books I’ve been reading lately (Guns, Germs & Steel and Collapse) and thinking about them a lot. Jared Diamond’s underlying agenda behind his books, especially GGS, is to push the idea of using the comparative method to turn what are thought of as “soft” social sciences into “real” science based on data (although there is the inevitable chicken and egg dilemma when you can’t control all but one variables). I realized that I want to explore the “science” of music in one way or another, find out interesting data and analyze it and quantify and compare all the cool music and people’s reactions and cultures and things and explore music that way. I also realized that there is an amazing source of musical data already out there that’s just the kind of thing I’m interested in: Pandora.com

When it first came out I was really excited about it and contacted the founder and whatnot, but as I was really busy with senior year then I kind of forgot about it, but I think if there’s a chance I can get involved with them somehow or use their “Music Genome Project” data in some way, it’d be really cool and rewarding. Anyway, I’ll look into that and see how it goes, but I feel very excited about the idea.

So, that’s what it is. (thanks to Mike Kohl and Bruce Diehl for this awesome phrase. I like the sound of it, maybe I’ll always use to sign off.)

Dorm trip

Sorry I didn’t have time to update for the last few days. With Christmas and then this ryou ryokou (dorm trip) I didn’t have any time. It was a lot of fun, though!

24/12:
On the 24th (which is considered “Christmas” here) Sawa and I went into Osaka together for the first time to see Rent. There was nothing very Japanese about it – the cast was all Americans on their Japan tour, but it was awesome. Sawa and I both love the show a lot and we saw it a couple of years agon on Broadway. I had expected that it wouldn’t be as good as Broadway, but the cast was actually better than any I’ve seen on Broadway. It was really interesting to see how much more I got out of it and how much better I understood it when the cast was so good, even though I’ve watched and listened to it so many times before.

For dinner I made the same past dish I made with success a few weeks back, and Sawa made some garlic bread. We wanted to watch a movie and Sawa had never seen “It’s a Wonderful Life”, so we watched it and it was so great! It’s such a wonderful feel-good movie!

25/12:
On the real Christmas I talked to my family and made French toast for me and Sawa, then we went back to my dorm and had a nice cozy afternoon opening presents and drinking coffee, which went deliciously with the truffles I got Sawa.

At this point we realized that we’d made so much food over the last couple days and were leaving for about two weeks in a couple of days and needed to eat up all the left overs. We eventually did, but we still had a lot of uncooked vegetables we ended up having to donate to the ryosei.

26/12:
On the 26th I went to visit Fujikawa-san, because she was supposed to be coming to the Amherst Guest House for the first time since she’d been sick, but she wasn’t there and they thought she had gone back to her hometown.

I had a couple of unfortunate revelations about phone bills that day. First, I went to the bank and checked my account for the first time in a couple of months. I had just realized that I hadn’t got a bill from my cellphone company for a while. As I had feared, it turned out that after I signed up for bank account debit pay, they debited my payments without sending me any bill or anything. The bills ended up being way more expensive than I had expected and I didn’t get any kind of statement showing the breakdown, so I didn’t realize how much I was spending and have the chance to try to change my use or change my plan.

Also, the Amherst Guest house contacted me saying that apparently I’m supposed to pay phone bills for the last three months for the room phone I haven’t been using at all. When I first came, I asked Fujikawa-san to stop the phone for me, but I think she got sick before it was worked out.

So, the phone bill situation is not great, but everything else is pretty good. After those errands, I made French toast for the ryosei and we all ate it together for the first time in quite a while.

Then we started our oosouji (big cleaning). Our place is pretty filthy because it’s all guys and they’re not particularly conscientious about cleaning up. But, with Aimo’s help (a former Amherst house resident who for some reason helped us out even though she doesn’t even live with us any more) we cleaned the place from top to bottom and rearranged the rooms to make room for Ranbo to come live with us soon. He was also in the Amherst House but has been abroad for a year.

In the evening we were trying to meet up with Prof. Morse, the Doshisha representative at Amherst (he also was one of Sawa’s advisors for her thesis at Amherst) who was here for a week, but it didn’t work out. It’s too bad that we couldn’t meet when he was here, especially since he’s kind of the closest thing I have to a boss back at Amherst. Oh well.

For the rest of the night I just packed, got some amazingly delicious ramen with the ryousei, and helped them do some preparations, like going to get some alcohol and snacks for the trip. It made me kind of nostalgic; it reminded me of going to pick up stuff for the yearly Zumbyes parties we held. The emphasis at Japanese parties seems to be as much or more on the otsumami (snacks) as the alcohol.

27/12:
After a 4-hour sleep, we woke up at 5:30am and headed out on the dorm trip with 20 people: me and three friend peace house residents, 11 girls from Richards House and Hawaii House next door and 5 more guys from Hawaii House and friends of us Friend Peace House people (including me and Sawa’s friend William). About 2/3 were Japanese and about 1/3 were from abroad.

The onsen we were heading to was in Takayama, in Gifu prefecture, about a 5-hour drive from Kyoto. Since we were all so sleepy, we mostly slept in the car on the way, and during most of the driving we did the next day, too. On the way to the onsen, we stopped at a historical old village for food, sightseeing, and that great Japanese tradition of omyage (souvenirs). You’re always kind of supposed to get omiyage for people when you visit them or come back from trips, so we did a lot of stopping at omiyage stores throughout the trip. By the second day I was getting a little sick of them. We also did a lot of konbini kyuukei (convenience store breaks) to get food/snacks/stuff. I guess it was all good, especially for the drivers who probably needed a rest. At most activities we did it was hard to get people moving, which was probably just because we had 20 people on the trip and it’s hard to coordinate that many people.

Later on, we stopped and went for a half-hour-ish walk to see this waterfall. It was way up in the mountains next to a ski field, so there was so snow everywhere. We did a lot of playing around with the snow: having snow fights, sliding in the snow, just jumping around, trying not to slip on the ice. It was really a great time.

I had been keen to go walking outside, and it was great walking with people I didn’t know that well and getting to know them better, and everyone was very freely moving back and forth and talking to different people and laughing and having fun in the snow. I love those kind of trips. It was a lot like when a bunch of the dorm people went for a walk up Daimonji – I think there’s something about going on walks that makes for good conversations and getting to know different people.

After that, we headed on to the onsen (natural hot spring) and arrived a little after sunset. I couldn’t believe how awesomet this onsen was! When I think of Japan I think mostly of busy modern cities and of lots of beautiful old cultural buildings and sights and things, but I don’t think too much about pure natural beauty, but there really is a lot of it.

The onsen was nestled in between the gorgeous snow-covered mountains of the Japanese Northern Alps without any other places in sight.

It had a gigantic coed outdoor hot spring (rotenburo) with all these awesome rocks (including this one in the middle that was just like Pride Rock from the Lion King!), as well as indoor single-sex baths, each attached to another rotenburo. They also served us all an amazing dinner and breakfast.

(The nearby area of Hida is famous for it’s beef, which was part of our dinner)

The whole trip, including renting cars to get out there and back, only cost us all ¥20,000 each, which seems like a steal considering how awesome it was.

The first thing we got there was head to the giant rotenburo. It’s actually very rare to have coed baths in Japan, since you usually go to the baths completely naked except for a hand towel (here the girls got towel things to wear in the bath and the guys just had to use their hand towels). The ryousei had specifically looked for a coed one so everyone could all hang out together and not have to be separated, but although as you might expect everyone seemed very excited about it, when we actually went in there everyone was quite awkward and mainly split up into guys and girls groups. If the onsen was smaller it might have been easier for everyone to interact, but because it was so huge it was easy to spread out.

Throughout the trip I was surprised by the difference in interactions between guys and girls in Japan compared to New Zealand or the States. I think at times people in the states can be a little too open about sexual things, but it definitely feels like in Japan everyone could stand to be much more open. When we played Never Have I Ever later on, the Japanese people seemed to find the sexual stuff a little uncomfortable, especially the Japanese girls. I think there’s quite a double standard, where it’s OK for the guys to talk about it, but the girls are supposed to be very pure and innocent.

Anyway, the most of the evening and the next morning we mostly alternated between hopping in and out of hot tubs and eating amazing meals. The whole thing was so luxurious; the only thing that would have made it more luxurious would have been if we had more time to sleep in. We were on such a tight schedule to make the most of the trip I only got another 6 hours of sleep. It was OK, though because I did a lot of sleeping in the cars and crashed for about 2 hours after dinner. Yeah, it was pretty decadent.

It felt very fun to be on a trip like that. It felt like being on a camp or something with all the events and meeting new people and games and having cool random conversations with people and seeing interesting relationships developing or failing to develop between the various trip members. It was also really great getting to speak and listen to so much Japanese again after not interacting in Japanese very much for the last week or so, although at times it was a little frustrating, because I would realize again how far I still have to go.

After that awesome first day, the second day was slightly anticlimactic. There was a lot of driving, and stopping at places for omiyage stuff, but it was less interesting than the other day and it was also less of a novelty. In the car we had some fun talking about our future dreams and relationships and telling ghost stories, but after a while I think it was hard to keep up the conversation with two native Japanese in the front and the three of us in the back having more limited skills, so eventually they ended up talking a lot together towards the end. Actually, Sawa had the same thing in her car and now that I think of that that always seems to happen on long car trips, whether there’s a language barrier or not.

Sawa and I needed to be dropped off in Nagoya on the way back so we could hop directly onto the Shinkansen and go up to Yokohama. The plan was to all eat together in Yokohama and say goodbye, but we got there later than we had expected and had a lot of trouble getting parking. By the time we were all there, we were in danger of missing the last train and of course we suddenly realized there was no way we could fit 20 people into a restaurant. In the end, it ended very sadly with everyone splitting up and planning to come back in half an hour to say goodbye, then we realized separately there was no way we could make it and we just left and said goodbye to the people we could find and tried to text the others and tell them sorry. It was really a shame, because the trip was really great, but it was a kind of stressed out and anticlimactic ending.

Finally, we arrived at Sawa’s place a little before midnight, talked to Sawa’s parents and gave them a Christmas present of some framed photos of us all. Sawa and I crashed and got to sleep in, which was really nice. Now we’re all set for a week and a half or so of staying here in Yokohama, doing New Years-eystuff with Sawa’s family and catching up with some of Sawa’s friends and some of my own. It should be a lot of fun!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Season’s greetings from Kyoto, Japan, where I’m about three and a half months into my year as the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow, an incredibly sweet deal I got from Amherst College after I graduated in May. My only serious responsibility is teaching a class on English and English-speaking cultures to a bunch of first-year students at Doshisha University once a week, which is a lot of fun and great experience for me, since I’m planning on probably going into teaching in the future. In the rest of my copious spare time, I’ve actually managed to keep very busy with all kinds of different fun things, especially on studying Japanese and trying to learn about Japanese music. I’ve started learning the shamisen (kind of a Japanese banjoey thing) and utai, which is a singing/chanting recitation of Noh play texts. I’m also spending a lot of time hopping on my bike and exploring the gorgeous sights of Kyoto and doing random things with my fellow dorm-mates and student clubs, as well as learning to cook Japanese food (and just learning to cook in general). And of course, as I think I’ve told everyone, Sawa and I are getting married in April and we’re trying to get everything prepared for that!

I’m still keeping my ridiculously detailed blog of all my daily events with lots of photos, so if you’re keen to know more about my life here, feel free to check out http://patsavage.wordpress.com
I hope you’re having wonderful, warm, merry Christmases! I hope to see some or all of you at the wedding in Japan and/or the celebration in the US (or even the one in New Zealand a few months later on). If you ever want to come visit Japan at other times besides the wedding, I have quite a lot of relatively free time to show people around!

Lots of love and holiday cheer,
Pat

PS Here are some of my favourite photos from my time in Japan so far:


(The first meal I made from my completely Japanese cookbook – teriyaki chicken and soy sauce-y spinach)


(Practising the shamisen)


(My calligraphy on display with the other students at the Kenninji temple)


(With two geisha at a ridiculously decadent meal paid for by Doshisha)


(Eating ramen with Sawa and my friends from the dorm)


(Drum battle with one of the musicians at a local festival)


(Sightseeing in Nara as the first maple trees start to turn brilliant red)


(Learning the basics of calligraphy from the students at the local elementary school)


(The blackboard after teaching my first solo class ever!)


(Sawa and I making our own wedding rings)


(Munching down on a MOS burger in an uncontrollable frenzy – nevertheless I managed to lose 9 kgs in the first two months here, I think from a combination of the healthy food, small portions, biking everywhere, and lack of an all-you-can-eat ding hall a 5-minute walk away)

Shodo exhibit

Before I forget, here’s the photo of the eggplant and okara dinner I made the other day.

I had a little trouble sleeping last night because I slept so friggin’ long yesterday, but in the end I woke up at around 10am feeling like I was back in a healthy biorhythm. With a nice breakfast of eze bleu and some coffee, it was another great start to the day.

After that, Sawa and I headed downtown to Kenninji to see my shodo (calligraphy) exhibit. Sawa took a bunch of drive-by photos on her bike on the way down, so finally here’s a photo of me biking through the streets of Kyoto.

The shodo exhibit was cool. I guess before I always thought of shodo as a very formal thing where it was about forming the characters the right way, like the masters did, but a lot of the students make into a very creative visual form. One guy even made the bulk of his not letters at all, but a picture he drew using the brush and watering down the ink in different amounts. Here’s my work.

After that, Sawa and I wandered around Kenninji, which is apparently the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto. It was really pretty. Here’s a cool photot that Sawa took of the space between the wooden porch and the rock garden. It reminds me a lot of the geological survey layer stylizations we had to look at in Intro to Geology…I think I might send it to my old geo professor.

Afterwards, we wandered through Gion, which strangely was my first time there. It’s a very famous old entertainment district in Kyoto that still is mostly traditional shops today. It’s especially famous for its maiko (apprentice geisha). (It’s where I’ll be pulling a float in the Gion matusir in July!). For some reason, cars are allowed to go through and it’s really crowded with them. I thought this photo Sawa took captured some of the air of walking down Gion nicely.

We stopped at a kanmidokoro (sweets restaurant-ey thing) for some delicious (if a little expensive) mochi treats. It was so good! It was fun cooking the mochi over the little brazier, it felt and even tasted a lot like roasting marshmallows, at least as far as the texture was concerned.

By the time I got home, it was dark. I think yesterday or the day before was the winter solstice, which I always think is good because it means that from now on every day just stays bright later and later. I did some final Christmas wrapping for a little while, then went to play basketball.

You might have noticed I didn’t mention anything about playing basketball for the last three weeks…that’s because I kind of forgot about it. First, they didn’t have practice the week after I first went, and by the next week since I hadn’t been used to going in the first place, I just forgot about it. Today was a lot of fun, though – there were more people and so they seemed to play more intensely, and the level was a little higher. However, sadly, it seems that this might be the last practice until March! At the least, though, I’m invited to a shinnenkai (new year party) with them in a couple of weeks.

Sawa made a delicious sukiyaki dinner with the leftover vegetables and stuff from the nabe party, and we made up some cookies from the batter we had left. Did I mention I made cookies for my students the other day? Well, if I do say so myself, those cookies were one of the best batches I’ve ever made, and it’s such a joy to eat them freshly cooked with a cold glass of milk. Life is good.

Finally, I headed back to my dorm, finished off my Christmas preparations, practiced shamisen just for 30 minutes, wrote my blog and am ready for my first Christmas in Japan ever tomorrow (the 24th being the big day here in Japan).

Night!

Sleep day

Here are a couple of photos of me, Sawa, William and Reiko at the nabe party last night. It was so good!

I said I would sleep in and I sure stuck to my word. I slept from 2am to 2pm, then after waking up, having a nice breakfast of leftovers from Friday and helping Sawa edit her CV for this cool potential job she might have translating for a documentary about Japan’s self-defence force, took a nap for 2 more hours! I think I really did need the sleep, though.

Because I slept so late, I didn’t have time to go visit my calligraphy exhibit (which is fine because it’s also happening tomorrow). Apparently the temple we’re having it at, Kenninnji, is really famous. I’m excited to go check it out tomorrow!

After heading back to my dorm, I spent the rest of the evening doing some Christmas present stuff, having a couple of cups of coffee with Sawa and eating a dinner of the delicious left-over nabe while watching an episode of Family Guy and a dessert of these delicious crème things Reiko gave us at dinner yesterday. Oh yeah, I did manage to get my hour of shamisen practice in and maybe half an hour of Japanese study too.

I didn’t spend a thing today! I’ve been keeping a pretty detailed budget since coming and I think so far I’ve been spending a lot less than I had budgeted, which is great. I want to do some more traveling around Japan and Asia while I’m here, but I was worried I wouldn’t have enough money since I wanted to be sure I had enough for my stuff, but I think I’ll be able to do both based on my spending so far.

I’ve decided I really really want to try to get on a good sleep schedule now, so I’m gonna try to have a strict 1am bedtime from now on. We’ll see how well I can stick to that, though…

Nabe party!

I didn’t get a chance to update my blog last night because I was up late slaving away making home-made chocolate chip cookies till late in the night for my class for our Christmas party today.

Earlier in the day yesterday was pretty normal – just English club lunch, tutoring, talking to my family and making dinner. The dinner was a mixed bag: the nasu no dengaku (eggplant with miso sauce) was absolutely delicious, but the unohana was pretty bad because I accidentally got powdered okara instead of fresh okara, and then proceeded to put in 2 tablespoons of soy sauce instead of 2 teaspoons.

Now that I’ve finally finished Collapse, I started reading “Invisible Man”  for the book club that me, Sawa and Marika are starting. It’s pretty cool, but it’s actually been a while since I read fiction that was so complicated and full of allusions and hard to undrstand. It’ll be really fun to read it and talk about it with others who’ve also read it though! I miss school…

For the rest of the evening I made the cookies. I was in an especially clumsy mood, spilling cookie batter all over and dropping the plate on my toes, and then trying to pick up the hot tray with my bare hands. It’s a miracle I made it through alive. The cookies ended up being friggin’ delicious though, and my students seemed to appreciate it today.

My class went very well: they seemed to enjoy having a casual Christmas party. The best part was that this time they actually were able to present their raps (after I gave them a few minutes to practice with the instrumental background) and they all gave it a really good try, it made me really happy. The only bad thing was that, although I had thought it would be fun to play a Christmas-themed charades, I thought it would be great to get them to write down their own words but failed to anticipate that all students would write the same four or five things. But, I think they forgave me that blunder, and it was a good end to the year. I also didn’t give them any homework over the holidays, because I hated it when my professors gave me homework over the holidays, and I think they appreciated that too. There are two more classes after New Year’s and then I’ll be done with my first semester teaching!

After class, I had my peer mentoring hour but I ended up spending that time learning how to do shoumyou (Buddhist chanting) from one of the students. It was really cool! Also, my learning Noh utai helped me understand the style and the notation of this a little bit. This guy’s parents run a temple and sometime I might be able to go there and practice singing with the monks!

I had to live my peer mentoring a little early to do some shopping before our bounenkai. Although it was rushed, it was fun shopping hrough the nearby Demachi shoutengai (Demachi arcade) with its cute little shops specializing in their own little things (a tofu shop, pickled things shop, dried things shop, poultry shop, red meat shop, etc.) and with people like the guy at the fish shop who remembered my last purchase from a week ago.

We brought that all back to my dorm and quickly whipped together and heated up a big pot of soy milk with miso, salt and sesame where we cooked all kinds of meat, fihs and vegetables. It was my first nabe party and my first bounenkai combined into one! Unfortunately, most other Amherst alums living in Kyoto couldn’t make it on such short notice and one was two hours late, so it wasn’t very different from previous times we’ve hung out with William or Reiko, but it was still fun eating and going to karaoke, and next year we’ll try to plan something a little more in advance.

When we got back there was a slightly weird thing with an irate neighbour sneaking in the gate as me and Sawa returned and yelling something at my dorm mate and his friends who were having their own bounenkai in the dorm. It seems they were being loud and keeping him up or something… I hope nothing too bad comes of it…

Now I’m pretty tired from a busy week and only getting 5 or 6 hours of sleep last night, so I’m gonna take a nice hot bath and then sleep in tomorrow!

Juujitsu shita ichi nichi

Today was, as we say here in Japan, a “juujitsu shita ichi nichi” (full/fulfilling day). So much fun cool stuff and exciting new things!

First we went off to Shugakuin-rikyuu as planned. It was really just gorgeous, and completely free (even transportation, because we biked the half hour up the Kamo river to get there)! I still can’t believe we can get free tours on a day’s notice, or even on the day most of the time, apparently. Sawa was fiddling around with this new 6×6 film camera she picked up in Hong Kong and has been tinkering with, so I took a bunch of photos with her digital camera (like the pond above). On the way, this old dude who had lived in New York for a couple of years started talking to me in English and we chatted for a while.

I hope I’m as friendly and outgoing as that when I’m older (in fact, I should try to be more like that right now!)

Afterwards, we were starving because we just had a tiny bowl of porridge each, but we found this awesome bakery on the way back on Kitayama-doori. The bakeries in Kyoto are awesome! Apparently it’s the place where everyone comes to apprentice (lucky for me!).

When we got back, we had some coffee with mamemochi and took a lovely nap (my first in a while) which felt so good. It was supposed to only be 20 minutes but ended up being an hour and half because I managed to sleep through my alarm (which I never do).

We had been planning to go have Sawa teach me the finer details of taking photos (all the technical stuff about apertures and shutter speeds and ISO and whatnot), but since it was getting dark now we didn’t have that much time. I did get to experiment with some cool long-exposure stuff – I really love photos that play around with blurred subjects and backgrounds and whatnot. Here are two photos of the same intersection, one with the camera stationary and one with it following the car.

We tried to book a restaurant for our planned bounenkai with the other Amherst alums on Saturday, but after calling about 10 or 15 places and not having any openings, we realized that, in a country with 130 million people who are super organized and like to do things like going to restaurants and on vacations and things, you have to be way on top of booking things. However, we decided after not finding any openings to just have a nabe (pot) party at my dorm with the nice warm kotatsu and everything. Nabe parties are apparently a big thing in Japan. We did manage to book a karaoke place, so we’ll go there afterwards and have a great time.

For dinner, the English club held a “Welcome and farewell party” (several-months-delayed) for the transition of the Fellow from Marika to me. That was a lot of fun. We mostly spoke in Japanese this time, but we’ll be having our next meal together tomorrow at lunch time anyway, so we can talk more in English then. It’s always a strange mixture of both, anyway.

Back at Sawa’s place, we both took nice warm baths, which was great because it’s getting really cold here in Kyoto. I finally finished Collapse (the cover and pages are getting all messed up because I read so much of it in the bath. It was such a great book! Afterwards, Sawa patiently listened while I spent like an hour recapping the main argument and development of the book. It was pretty geeky, but it felt very good to review the book and get closure instead of that sad feeling when you read a good book and then you just finish and it’s over and you move on.

While I was all excited about geography and whatnot, I saw an article on the NYTimes website about iTunes University, which I was really excited about when it first came out and had been meaning to check out more. I really think it’ll become a huge, potentially revolutionary thing – providing top-quality university education for free to the world through the miracle of the internet! Anyway, I found this course about the Geography of World Cultures that looks really cool and I think I want to actually try to take. When I looked at it, it said it was “map-intensive”, and I’ve been wanting to learn more about maps of the world lately, but then I thought “oh, but I won’t be able to see any maps if it’s just an audio file, when all of a sudden I saw that they somehow put in maps into the “album art” area and it changes to a new map as the lecturer moves to a new part of his lecture! It’s so cool!

So yeah, it was a sweet, sweet day.

Productivity

Although you wouldn’t have expected it from the way I keep saying I’ll do things the next day, today was actually very productive. I did laundry in the morning and booked Sawa and I on a tour of Shuugakuin-rikyuu for tomorrow.

Shuugakuin-rikyuu is supposed to be this gorgeous old palatial grounds that’s so cool, the Japanese aren’t even allowed to go into it. It’s very strange, but even though it’s funded by Japanese tax-payers, they preferentially let foreigners visit it with only a day’s notice, while Japanese have to wait for something like a year! I guess it kind of makes sense as a way of advertising Japan, increasing tourism and because foreigners usually only visit briefly, but they’d never get away with something like that in the States (probably not New Zealand, either).

Anyway, after that I studied kanji, aced my self-quiz and sent off a Christmas package to my family just in time before the post office closed. In the evening I had my shamisen lesson. I’m really loving practicing the shamisen: I’m improving so quickly and it’s cool to finally be learning a new instrument. I don’t know how practical it is, since I’ll never become a master at this stage, but it’s great to have this kind of position where I can afford to do fun things like this. I also think it’ll be an irreplaceable way of understanding Japanese music  more deeply, and the fact that it’s a much more unique instrument than piano or singing means I might have more opportunities to play or teach it at random future opportunities, even though I’ll probably never be that great.

After my lesson we had a dorm meeting and now I’m off to bed to get up to go to Shugakuin-rikyuu tomorrow!

Invitation to the Gion Matsuri!

This morning I chatted with my good friend Loren. It was great to talk to her again, and it turns out she’s going to be able to come visit me in Japan next March! I’m so excited! It’ll be great to see her again and fun to show her around Japan. It might even motivate me to go see all the cool places that I figure I’ll get to see eventually and might end up leaving Japan still thinking the same thing… The timing is great because spring will just be beginning but I’ll be on the tail end of my nice two-month holiday from teaching classes.

After some last-minute utai practice, I went off to my lesson, which went pretty well. We finished off Hashi Benkei, my second noh play and she gave me a new one to work on over the Christmas/New Year’s break (I won’t have another lesson for about 3 weeks). Hashi Benkei was a pretty cool story – it’s about this warrior monk and this young dude who have a swordfight and the young dude somehow kicks the other guys ass and I think kills him (it’s really hard for me to understand the details, because it’s all in old-school Japanese) and then takes his retainer for his own. Afterwards, my teacher gave me some sushi she made, which was especially delicious because I hadn’t had any breakfast at all.

When I got back, Sawa and I had some coffee and finished off the Mister Donuts. Sawa brought back this nice stainless steel frothing pitcher from Japan so we can finally make awesomely frothed milk! Sawa made this today:

After that, we had a slightly scary talk about future things, jobs, life, living in different countries, etc. It’s weird, whenever I think about careers and the future and things I either get very excited or very worried. We’re both a little worried about what will happen in the future with where we live, because wherever we end up we’ll have to be away from one of our families, and although we like the idea of moving back and forth every few years, realistically it won’t be so easy to do. But, I think that these things work themselves out in the end and I’m sure it’ll be cool.

After practicing shamisen and getting a little Japanese study done, we had to head off to this lecture and dinner organized by Takada-san, the head of the English club we go to every week. The lecture was very hard to understand, but I could get some of it and Sawa helped translate most of the rest. Among other things, I was interested by her suggestion that it’s good for exchange students to get arubaito (part-time jobs) to understand that part of the culture and interact with Japanese. I had been avoiding that because I thought it’d be wasting time I could spend doing my own stuff, but I think it might be a good experience (and give me more money).

The dinner afterwards was nice (and free!), although there was not quite enough to really fill me up completely. It was a little awkward, as many of these little mixer things with people you don’t really know can be, but all the awkwardness is woth it when you meet cool people or make cool connections, and that happened today when this guy I met told me that every year he gets to choose a couple of people to pull one of the floats at the Gion Matsuri (the most famous festival in Kyoto) and he invited me to pull it! Yes! I love getting to do those kinds of thigns! (It was a good thing I brought my business cards this time, since I forgot to bring them to the Symposium I went to last Sunday)

I still didn’t get any of the things I’d been meaning to do done, but hopefully I’ll do them tomorrow. I am very glad, though, that I keep getting a little shamisen practice and Japanese study done each day, because I know that if I put them off in favour of various other random chores I’d never end up doing them, and it feels very good to be getting a little better at the shamisen and Japanese every day.

Impromptu Amherst reunion

It was indeed glorious to sleep for as long as I wanted (11 hours), then wake up and have not one but two cups of coffee along with two donuts (Mister Donuts donuts that I got from the Christmas party) and a couple of truffles. Since I got up so late and had such a luxurious “morning”, after an hour of shamisen practice and an hour of studying Japanese, it was already time to head off to meet William for dinner.

By a wonderful coincidence, we got a text from Reiko (our friend from Amherst who lives in Osaka and have been meaning to catch up with for a while) saying that she was in Kyoto with Rei (another friend from Amherst) who, unbeknownst to us until today, is moving to Japan and was coming through Kyoto for today only. The timing worked out perfectly and we had a delicious and, for its price, incredibly cheap meal at this dim sum place called Din Tai Fung, finishing just in time for Rei to catch his shinkansen up to Tokyo.

It had been my turn to figure out what to do for dinner since Sawa has usually been doing that when we go out. As I mentioned before, a few weeks back we got this Zagat’s guide to the restaurants of Kansai region (Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe). It has this sweet set of lists ranking restaurants in various ways. This restaurant was one of the top ones in the list of “best value for money”, and it didn’t disappoint at all. I’m so happy with this book and I’m looking forward to checking out more of its recommendations!

Apparently, December in Japan is full of “bounenkai” (end-of-year parties, or literally “forgetting the year parties”. I haven’t been invited to any yet and was hoping I wouldn’t miss out, but then Reiko suggested that we have a bounenkai as our long-delayed party with the other Amherst alums in the Kansai area, which should be a lot of fun. I ended up volunteering to do the planning, which is only fair since I have the most free time. Hopefully I won’t make too big a mess of it, although trying to figure out and book things in Japanese will be a bit of a challenge. Really, though, it’s hard to go wrong with food, drink and karaoke!

Sorry I didn’t update for a couple of days. On Thursday, I had the English club lunch as usual, although without Sawa for the first time. On the way back, I was struck by the beauty of this pretty carpet of leaves.

Most of the leaves have lost their glorious colour and fallen now, but it’s still beautiful here.

I again did a little shamisen practice and studied Japanese, then headed down town to do some Christmas shopping stuff. Unfortunately, I miscalculated and realized as I was about to head home that there was no way I could carry it all on my bike, so I had to pay money and waste time taking the subway home and back, then pick up my bike and ride back.

Actually, because of that I ended up being a little late to meet Sawa after she arrived back from Hong Kong! Whoops! But, it was OK, because we got to eat delicious cheesecake and mamemochi and tea.

The next day I had to teach my class. After not going too well last week because I wasn’t really prepared, I had prepared well for this class ahead of time and it paid off. It was a great class, if for no other reason than that I got my own private pleasure out of making Japanese university students rap along with Dr. Dre and Tupac to “California Love”. I had them figure out/taught them about the way it worked, especially the way it used rhyme and metre. It actually reminded me for the first time in a long time what great poetry hip hop can be, even just in the sounds of the words even if the words aren’t very poetic (unfortunately, although there is some great poetic lyrics, most of it, especially the popular stuff, is just horrible). Anyway, that went well and next week I’m gonna actually make them perform their own raps about Christmas, then we’re going to have a Christmas party! Fun!

Saw made a delicious steak dinner and then we watched Ratatouille. It was so cute! I loved it! It was cute and cheesy, but in a nice way and the dialogue and flow was really good. It also made me excited about cooking and made me crave cheese.

So, this morning when I woke up I went to Eze Bleu and picked up a block of camembert and some sourdough bread along with some other stuff, and it was awesome having it with coffee and some truffles that Sawa brought back from Hong Kong.

I then had to head off to the elementary school to help play piano for their choir in their Christmas performance. All the parents were there (it was just like when the Zumbyes sang there, and made me all nostalgic) and the kids acted out a Christmas pageant and where just ridiculously cute. I was pleasantly surprised when all of a sudden they reimbursed me for all the train fares I had been paying to go out there since I started coming out in November. I think it was because I mentioned a few weeks ago when I was talking to the Amherst representative that it might be nice to not have to pay to go out there to donate my time, but it wasn’t a big deal, and it’s pretty amazing how attentive people in Japan are to tiny suggestions and doing little errands and obligations that they commit themselves too. At Amherst it was so much trouble just getting people to do the minimum that they are required to do!

Oh, and yesterday my bike was taken by the traffic wardens once again, so after that performance I had to go and retrieve it and pay them ¥2300 again. I really shouldn’t have parked it there, it only would have saved me about 10 minutes of walking all told, but I didn’t think they ever took bikes from that area. From now on, I’m gonna try not to take any chances.

I can’t believe how great the service in Japan is. Even at the bike pound, the employees there are really friendly and chatty and apologize to me for the inconvenience of me having to pick it up, instead of being stern and making me feel like a serial murderer like they do in the states when you have to deal with government agencies.

When I got back I made dinner for the first time since my huge failure last week (my third attempt from the Japanese cookbook we bought the other week). I’m pleased to report that this time it was delicious! (teriyaki buri (yellowtail) with whatever vegetables we had lying around, grilled, plus of course rice and miso soup)

After that we went off to this Christmas party hosted Richards House (the girls’ dorm next door).

Unfortunately, we realized that we shouldn’t have eaten such a big meal, even if it was delicious, because they had a whole meals worth of snacks at the party. It was very fun! It started off a little awkward, and at one point a group of exchange students started playing a game in English that seemed to be really alienating all the Japanese people, but then we all played a game of charades together, which was a lot of fun, and we all sang Christmas songs and had a grand old time.

The charades was great, because I had been trying to think of a game to play with my students for our Christmas party, especially since the West Wind Blows that was so much fun at first is getting a little old since we play it every week at the beginning of the class.

Since I had to get up early to go to the elementary school this morning, I haven’t got enough sleep for a couple of days, so I think I’ll crash now and sleep for as long as I can. Yes! I love doing that!

Shodo

I had been hoping to try to start going to sleep earlier this week, but I kept on staying up later each night trying to finish whatever I was doing and not have to finish it the next day, so I ended up going to bed about 3am last night and waking up at noon today. I need to try to counteract this trend…

Anyway, after I woke up I grabbed some breakfast from Eze Bleu as usual and went to the shodo club for the first time in over a month. The other day they contacted me and asked me if I wanted to display something at this upcoming presentation, and I figured why not? I learned the rest of the Niijima Jo haiku I had been trying to learn last time: “yuuai no/ hikari no yadori/ umi koete” (“a dwelling place/for the light of friendship/crossing over the sea”), which I think is a really cool little haiku. It was fun to do again and I’m glad I got pushed into finishing that project. I left my final final copy there, so I won’t have a photo till later, but here’s a photo of an alternate one that I made.

Afterwards I grabbed a burger from MOS burger, headed back to the dorm, practiced shamisen and studied Japanese for an hour. It feels so good to be sticking with my schedule of doing a little study and practice every day. I want to learn all the names and locations of all 47 Japanese prefectures, so that was what I worked on today.

It was raining and gloomy out, so it was a good day to be inside doing these things. For dinner, I went down the road to katsu katsu ton ton again, and this time made sure to order a dish that actually had pork cutlets. I ordered katsudon, which has always been a favourite of mine. It usually comes in a little rice bowl, but today’s one was enormous and sprawling and awesome.

It made me extremely happy.

Afterwards I just hung out around the dorm all night working on planning some Christmas presents. I was kind of hoping to do a lot of hanging out with the ryosei and other students around who I don’t hang out with as much while Sawa was gone, but they’ve been a bit busy, and the weather’s been pretty rainy, and I’ve kind of just been enjoying having some alone time and catching up on things I’d been meaning to do for a while.

Customer service

I had a nice day here, I slept nice and late, finally got a few errands done. I finally picked up the official copy of my alien registration card (only about two months late)I also paid all my health insurance for the next few months (because I realized I didn’t pay the last payment on time and I figured I may as well just pay it all now). I just finished calling the US about my mail insurance and banking. First, I tried to find out how to file my insurance claim for the mildly broken water filter on my espresso machine and the only way is to call their help centre in the states. I did that, and had one of those automated voice things that asked me for my number. I couldn’t figure out what number it was at first, but eventually I finally figured it out (no thanks to them), but when I gave them the number they just told me that it was delivered to Japan last month, which I already knew, and refused to give me any options to file an insurance claim. When I tried to ask for customer service, the automated voice said “customer service is not an option at this time”, so I started swearing at the stupid mechanical voiced woman and doing everything I could to get to customer service, but to no avail. Eventually, the automated voice woman hung up on ME! The nerve! I got so, so sick of trying to deal with the impenetrable thicket of defenses they’ve set up around actually contacting anyone about customer service that I just decided it’s not worth it, I’ll just enjoy the fact that I’m now in Japan where the service is, if anything, too good.

I think there’s a little bit of a “giving fish without teaching to fish” problem in Japan tied up with their excellent customer service. For example, today at the bank and in general, I often find that if I ask for help, the customer service people will do whatever I wanted help with for me. This is great, but it means that the next time I come in I don’t have any better idea of how to do it, and will just have to ask them for help again. I think that this type of phenomenon is pretty widespread (for example, university classes are mostly lectures, without much critical thinking or having the students figure out how the answers for themselves).

For lunch, Junpei told me about this burger place called “Freshness Burger” that was supposedly started by people who used to work at MOS burger but wanted to do better. I was pretty excited, and it was good, but it wasn’t worth the extra price, and I think I actually like MOS burger better, just because of its delicious sauce. Here’s a photo of the giant burger, though.

My shamisen lesson was fun. I really like my teacher and it’s fun practising, so it’s always nice and I don’t feel guilty about not practising like I often do with my utai teacher and sometimes did at Amherst.
Oh, and I planned my class for Friday! I had meant to do it over the weekend, but better now than late on Thursday night! I think this week’ll be good, I’m gonna teach them how to rap to “California Love”, which is a pretty sweet song.
I feel very good about my self because I got totally up to date on my kanji yesterday, and did an hour or so of study today. If I can just keep up doing a little day, I think I’ll feel good about screwing around and enjoying this sweet year the rest of the time!

More kanji

Today I ate at katsu katsu ton ton, and I was all looking forward to having some nice meat after yesterday’s failed vegetarian meal. I got all my items laid out, had the bowl, the cereal, the spoon, the TV, the newspaper, the napkin, everything was ready to go… I had a few bites of rice, then some pickles, some lettuce, some miso soup, some korokke, then was ready to bite into the sweet, sweet meat… As I bit into it i realized it was not a sweet sweet pork cutlet, but another korokke that looked like a pork cutlet. Instead of ordering the katsu and korokke, I ordered the korokke katsu. Waaah. It was still delicious, but it was kind of sad.
Today was a little lonely again. However, I think it’s good for me to have Sawa away sometimes to remind me how lucky I am to be with her the rest of the time. Also, I’m getting a lot done – today I studied kanji for another 4 hours or so, took my test of the last 200 kanji I learned and am all caught up and ready to start on a regular hour-or-two-a-day study schedule. Tomorrow I’m planning to clean my room (including the mess of coffee beans I spilled behind the dresser yesterday), pay my health insurance and plan my class for Friday.
Oh, and I had my utai lesson today and got “Invisible Man” from the Doshisha library to read for the book club me, Sawa and Marika are starting. I browsed around a little while I was there and tried to find some music. It seems much less convenient than the Amherst library, because everything is divded between the two campuses which are mad far away. Not only that, but within each campus, instead of having all the books in one main library, it looks like many departments have their own libraries. I guess it goes along with the way that at Doshisha and Japanese universities in general, students have to choose their major straight away and end up partitioned into their departments and there’s not a lot of centralized organization between the departments.

Jazz concert

I had a pretty terrible cooking experience today. It was my first time cooking since Sawa left, and I thought I’d eat the left-over miso soup and make some fried rice with the left-over ingredients using a recipe from my “obaachan no okazu” cookbook (“grandma’s dishes”). However, the miso soup tasted awful, it had been sitting around in the fridge way too long, and I think the shiitake were bad, too, because they had a funny sour taste instead of their usual delicious mushroomey taste. I picked them out and threw them away after a few bites. Also, I knocked the cutting board into the sink twice, the first time scattering minced garlic and onions into the sink with all the ginger peels. It was pretty sad. And I didn’t put any meat in, so I was left feeling incomplete. I cooked up the last of the cookie batter, which was good, but I still felt like something was missing…

I was in not that great a mood anyway, partly because it’s a little lonely without Sawa around. Also, I went to the concert with the jazz big band and a few other jazz groups, which I thought would be an hour or two, but turned out to take five hours!! It wasn’t actually too bad, because all the groups were really good, but it sure was long. The big band was ridiculously good. However, it looks like I won’t be able to play in it for a variety of reasons: it’s too late in the year for their schedule, they don’t usually have a singer and their repertoire is instrumental, and also it’s probably a bit out of my league. I might be able to sing with some other group, though. I think, though, that since the end of the semester’s getting near, probably any new groups I want to do seriously will have to wait until next semester starts in April, which might be a good thing so I can just focus on my Japanese and the things I’ve already got going.

I studied some more Japanese this morning, and also practiced my shamisen. I’m starting to get blisters on my fingers! I learned this cool technique where you kind of slide your finger to bend the sound…well, it’s hard to describe, but trust me, it sounds bad-ass. I also did my laundry, although I forgot to take it in…I guess I’ll leave it out for another day.

I have my utai lessons tomorrow, but haven’t actually practiced this week…whoops. I’d better do some last-minute preparation before I go to sleep.

Seminar

Yesterday, Sawa headed off for Hong Kong in the morning, and I headed to Kyo-tanabe campus for the day to teach my class.
It didn’t go particularly well. I had asked them to make up their own rap after we watched Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, but I guess I severely overestimated their abilities, because no one was able to. For the first few lessons I did a lot of teaching specifics, like about rhyming, but lately I’ve been trying to do more dicussing themes/concepts. It looks like, for hip hop at least, I need to go back to more specific stuff and take them through the steps. Unfortunately, that’ll mean putting in a little more time preparing lectures, but I think it’ll pay off.

Also, ever since our class trip, where I chatted with them in Japaneses, I’ve been using a lot of Japanese in class. At first it seemed like maybe a good thing, because I could make sure they understood more difficult concepts, but I think they might be relying on it now and not challenging themselves at English. Time will tell whether this is a good thing or whether I should have stuck with almost exclusively English.

At my peer mentoring time, I was chatting with this guy whose parents run a temple, and next week he’s going to teach me how to do Buddhist chanting!

When I got back I made good on my plans to eat MOS burger (delicious!) and followed that by eating the leftover pumpkin pie and baking a few chocolate chip cookies from the leftover batter from the Matsueda Matsuri, then hopped in a bath for a loooong time and read Collapse. It was very relaxing!

When I got back to the dorm, some of the exchange students in the dorm next door were having little parties/gatherings. I hadn’t hung out with them for a long time, so I went over. It was nice to catch up with them and commiserate a little about the difficulties of being a gaijin in Japan. However, I’m glad I haven’t been hanging out with them too much, because I’ve often noticed that other foreigners in Japan end up creating little English-speaking communities, don’t interact with Japanese and improve their Japanese much, and seem to end up being very bitter about Japan. I don’t want to end up like that. I think it’s a huge plus that I get to live in a dorm with Japanese students.

On the other hand, after that party, I went down the hall to another one hosted by one of the exchange students (whose Japanese is very good) and there were a bunch of Japanese and everyone was speaking Japanese, so the situation obviously varies. For some reason, they were doing old pro-wrestling moves, which was great fun for me to bust out my sharp-shooter and figure-four leg lock from when me and my friends used to be into that about 8 years ago.

Today, I had a nice sleep in, a couple of lattes and some bread, then went to this 4-hour seminar about the Japanese student support services. It was kind of interesting, although there was a lot of waffling on. There were two visitors from American universities, and their talking about American university student life, freshman orientations, etc. made me very nostalgic for Amherst.

It seems that there’s a lot of trouble getting students engaged and connected with university life and other students in Japan. I think there are a whole lot of issues involved, but what surprises me the most is that students don’t seem to care about their grades much because employers only care about where they went to school, not how well they did there. I don’t understand it, but I think the whole situation is tough because there isn’t really one area that’s an easy fix, the whole educational and social institutions need to gradually change all around to improve it.

Afterwards, there was a reception with good food and drinks, but it was quite awkward because almost everyone there was over 50 and I didn’t know anyone. I ended up spending most of the time chatting with the one other young person.

When I got back, I practiced shamisen and then finally spent about 4 hours catching up on my kanji studying.

Matsueda Matsuri!

OK, sorry to fall behind on the blogging again. To make up for that, I’ve got lots of photos on this post, like this one of me just destroying a MOS burger. They’re so good! Sawa’s leaving tomorrow for a week to visit a friend in Hong Kong, which will mean both that she won’t make meals half the time and that I won’t have any incentive to make nice food for someone, so I think I might end up eating lots of MOS burgers…  mmmm…

So anyway, my planned massive bike trip around Kyoto on Monday fell through because it was raining. Instead I think I just kind of screwed around, practiced shamisen and utai a little and made this meal.

The next day (Tuesday) I slept for about 12 hours, which was extremely nice after not getting a lot of sleep the week before. After doing some chores, I went to meet Sawa at Koudaiji to see the kouyou (autumn leaves). It was so nice, especially since it was one of the last chances I had to see them. I had been all excited about seeing them, but then last week was the peak week and I was all busy with the stupid chorus rehearsals, and the bike trip yesterday fell through, and I was worried I’d never get a chance to see them. We went just at sunset, saw the sunset behind the Yasaka tou and then saw the “light up”. Light ups are a big deal in Japan, whether it’s of kouyou, Christmas trees, and other stuff. The Japanese really have a good aesthetic sense of light and shadow, so it’s pretty bad-ass.

Afterwards, we stopped at MOS burger, where I had two of those burgers you saw me destroying. I went straight to my shamisen lesson, which was my first in three weeks because my teacher was off in Bulgaria performing. Apparently she’s a huge baller at the koto (the shamisen isn’t her main instrument) and performs all over the world. She’s also really nice, so I’m really glad I somehow ended up taking shamisen lessons from her. Once I get settled into the shamisen, I might start learning the koto from her also. She’s never been to New Zealand, though, so I might try to organize something for her when I eventually go back there. I also think it might be cool to compose something for her later on, if I think I could and if she’d be interested.

I was very happy – and she also seemed happy – at my progress on the shamisen. I think it helps a lot to have so much music experience, and it’s really fun for me to learn a new instrument with completely different music after so long doing piano and singing. I did try learning saxophone a few years back, but that was a little frustrating because there was so much learning about embouchure (mouth position) technique that it was frustrating.

When we got back, we had our usual weekly dorm meeting, at the end of which we put up a Christmas tree in the lounge.

At first, we were like “well, I guess we should put it up… oh but it’s such a hassle…” but once we got started we got all excited and it was fun.

Afterwards I spent an hour or so studying the noh play I’m learning, in preparation for my lesson tomorrow. It’s friggin’ hard! It’s kind of like I was a Japanese person trying to study Shakespeare – I think it’s from around the same time period (16th century), and has equally archaic vocabulary, grammar, and puns. It is cool, though, and it’s copies of original handwritten manuscript, which is giving me needed practice at reading normal scribbled handwriting, which you see on signs all over the place and is completely different from type set in books, newspapers, emails, etc.

Yesterday (Wednesday) was the day of the Matsueda Matsuri. A matsuri is a festival, and a while ago the ryosei explained to me about their “Ueda Matsuri” (dinners at the house of Ueda-san, who used to make food for them at the old Amherst house). We had been talking a while ago about having the ryosei over to Sawa’s apartment and cooking a big meal, when I came up with the name “Matsueda Matsuri,” which I thought was great (Sawa’s last name is Matsueda).

In the morning, though I went to my utai lesson. Although my teacher’s not that great, I think I’m starting to pick up the style and the meaning of the different symbols, which made me feel good. I can’t complain too much, because she’s giving me the lessons for free, and in return I just help her a little with English translations. She also often gives me little presents of food, makes tea, and gave me the tickets that got Sawa and I into Koudaiji for free the day before, so it’s a pretty sweet deal.

Sawa had spent the previous evening and all of today baking pie crusts, making ratatouille and preparing this pork and apple dish she made up. I helped out a bit, but she did most of it. At 7 the ryosei came over, dressed up strangely, and we had an epic feast. It was really delicious and it was so much fun to do a big thing with them after not doing anything like that for over a month or so. The food was a big success, especially the pies. I only found out afterwards that it was the first time Sawa ever made any pies at all! I couldn’t believe it.

Afterwards, we headed out to karaoke. We were very surprised when they asked us for ID there (they never do that in Japan!), so since two people didn’t have ID we couldn’t do the all-you-can-drink thing they usually have. But, we still went anyway and had a lot of fun. In fact, it was the most high-energy, crazy karaoke session I’ve ever been to! At the end we were all standing up dancing around and pretending we were at a concert of whoever was singing. It was great fun. The ryosei are a really cool bunch of people. They love doing crazy, spontaneous things, which I love too, and which I think is quite rare for Japanese, although it’s certainly possible that everyone’s actually like this and I just don’t know them well enough to see that side. I don’t think that’s true though, as I’ve had this impression of the ryosei from the first day I met them when they were having an okonimyaki party outside and then invited me to come to the sentou with them.

Today (Thursday), Sawa and I went to the English club, which was nice as usual. At first there were only the two of us and the one main guy, which was sad, but three people arrived late and that was better.

Then I did the huge pile of dishes left over from the Matsueda Matsuri, wandered through the gosho back to my dorm, taking a couple of photos of the gorgeous kouyou along the way, had my weekly paid English conversation hour, and settled down to write this blog. This is actually a photo that Sawa took of gosho at another time, with one of the cool picnic tables we sometimes ate our delicious Eze Bleu pastries at before it got cold.

The weather’s been actually pretty similar to Amherst (although a little milder): crazy hot and humid until a little into October, really nice for about a month, then got suddenly very chilly in early November and looks to stay cold until about late March/early April.

Now, I’m off to meet Sawa downtown for a meal downtown at Shijo. We figured we should go now to this Chinese restaurant we’ve been meaning to go to for a while, since once she gets back from China she probably won’t appreciate it as much.

Finally, today I got some great news: Chris Gillyard (who I wrote the recommendation for a few weeks back) got the Doshisha Fellowship! He’ll have so much fun! Also, if I do end up spending a couple more months in Japan after my Fellowship ends and he takes over from me, we can hang out and have a blast in Kyoto and I can teach him all the cool things and places I’ve found out about. Fun!

Oh, by the way, here’s a photo of me singing with the chorus on Saturday:

And here’s the lovely view from my window of the momiji (maple leaves)

Chorus is over

(I finally uploaded this photo from when Sawa and I went to make our wedding rings. Sawa has forbidden me from showing the actual designs on the rings, so you’ll have to wait to see them in person, I guess!)

I’m very sorry for the long absence, but I was just so swamped this last week with these chorus rehearsals and our concert. Ultimately, I’m glad that I stuck it out with the chorus and performed in the concert, because I learned a lot about Japanese groups, but I’m very glad that it’s over now and I’m very excited about quitting and being done with it, because it was a very frustrating experience.

Anyway, let me recap the last few days:

Wednesday, 28/11:
I used this one day without chorus rehearsals or class to check out the Eve festival a little more. Sawa and I and a couple of the students who live around here went to my dorm mate Hayao’s band’s performance. I was very surprised at the audience there; it was completely different from the apathetic audiences I’d described the other day. This one was, if anything, excessively intense. There were all these guys (only guys) with their shirts off jumping around like crazy and cheering along with the band and trying to take each the shirts off of the guys who hadn’t already taken theirs off. It was very homoerotic. Apparently, they were all kouhai (younger members) of the club that Hayaos band is part of.

After watching for a while, I decided to take my shirt off and join in, and Junpei followed me in. Here’s a photo of the two of us jumping around with everyone else.

Junpei was crazy, at one point he came flying into me and knocked my head into someone else’s head. It was a lot of fun.

After that, we went around eating lots of food, checking out other bands, occasionally running into my students, who seemed slightly weirded out seeing me outside of class. I wonder if any of them saw me jumping around with my shirt off…

Later on, Sawa and I went to this Japanese hip-hop show, my first one in Japan, although I read a book about Hip Hop in Japan. It seemed pretty similar to hip hop shows elsewhere, except that everyone was Japanese. However, they didn’t seem to be as comfortable with the whole crowd participation thing, which to me is a pretty key part of hip-hop, so the whole thing lacked energy to me. It didn’t help that I could hardly understand any of the lyrics, which is kind of the point of hip-hop, although Sawa could understand them and thought they were fairly bland. I think it’s kind of cool that they adopt hip hop words and make them Japanese (like respekuto suru to mean respecting something) but when they borrowed English profanity like “shit” and “motherfucker” it just sounded silly in their Japanese accents.

When we got back, we ended up having an impromptu 2-hour-ish photo viewing session with Junpei. He’s really into photos and has lots of cool ones. It turned out that he had some cool photos from when I first met them all back in June and we had an okonomiyaki party and went to a sentou

.

He also had a great one from when we all went to Daimonji a month or two ago.

Thursday, 29/11:
I basically had a chorus rehearsal all day (1:30-7:30, plus a 45-minute commute each way). I realized that what I really really hate about the chorus is this one sort of sub-director who’s completely incompetent. Because she’s so bad, we end up having to spend even more time on her stuff, but we never get anywhere because she doesn’t really know what to do and no one seems able to speak up or take over. I asked someone in the group why she was director and he explained that they choose early on and I guess in this case everyone knew they made a mistake. What struck me, though, was that, at least at Amherst, in this kind of situation the people in the group would pretty quickly become disgruntled, and talk amongst themselves or one of the higher-up directors and find a way to end it, because it’s just such a waste of time. But, just like the government in Japan (I think), it seems that everything is much more top-down and there’s not a lot of feedback from the people being ordered around to the people in charge.

So that was really no fun. In the morning, though, I did have some more of those delicious mamemochi (here’s a photo of Sawa with some coffee, mamemochi and fukumamemochi)

When I got back from chorus I had a lot of work to do rewriting the lyrics for my composition to send off by the next morning. However, when I got back Junpei was about to go off to a sentou, and I felt like I could really use that after a long frustrating rehearsal, so I went with him and his friend. We ended up spending ages there, especially like 45 minutes just sitting in this routenburo (outdoor hot pool) where we talked almost exclusively about food. It was very fun, and I was able to participate in most of the discussions and keep up with them, which was great. However, when I got back at about 12:30 am I then had to stay up until 5am finishing off my composition stuff.

Friday, 30/11:
After getting 3.5 hrs of sleep I headed off to teach my class. It ended up being great, despite having done almost no preparation, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it now and the class is more used to what I expect from them. Unfortunately many of them didn’t/couldn’t do the homework this week of watching Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, but the ones who did seemed to really get a lot out of it, and we still had a good class. At one point, I played them this freestyle that me and my friend Ali recorded a couple years ago back in New Zealand, and they all seemed to have a good laught at that.

After my class at my peer mentoring session, this student came and chatted with me for a full hour and a half about nothing in particular. It was a little strange, and there were lots of awkward pauses, but I guess it was cool. Unfortunately, once the adrenaline from teaching my class had worn off (I always get very energized teaching that class) I was exhausted and pretty much just wanted to sleep the whole time.

Afterwards, I was starving , so I stopped by MOS burger and had my first burger I’ve had anywhere for a while. It was really bloody good. Granted, I was starving, but they really do a good job there.

Anyway, after that I finally went to the gagaku (really old Japanese court music) rehearsal that I had been meaning to go to for weeks with this really cool woman who works at the Doshisha student support office. It turned out they had a concert the next day, so I got my own private dress rehearsal-ish performance. I didn’t realize that gagaku usually involved a dancer in addition to the instrumentalists, and it even seemed like the dancing was the more important part, at least judging from the stage set-up.

In Western music, the dancing tends to be kind of an optional addition to the main music, but in much Japanese music, the dancing seems to be at least as important, if not more important than the music. I think dance and music have historically been inseparable in most cultures until recently in Western cultures.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why we have music, and what kinds of cultural/economic functions it serves. As much as I love music, I’ve never really understood why I like it so much or why other people like it…

Saturday, 1/12:
This was the big day of the concert. I was very surprised when they told me I had to meet there at 10:30am (7 hours before the concert started!) because usually at Zumbyes concerts we might meet up two or three hours ahead of time, max. Unbeknownst to me, we were going to have an entire, 6 hour rehearsal, complete with singing, prior to our concert (which was about 2.5 hrs long)! This just seemed completely inefficient to me, since it just tires out our voices and everything else and makes us not sing as well during the show. However, apparently, this is normal in Japan, and not just in music but sports and things too. To me, this adds to this image I’ve developed with this chorus that Japanese groups tend to emphasize quantity over quality, feeling that if they put in enough time, regardless of how they spend that time, then they are guaranteed to get better. Thus, they seem to spend unnecessarily long times at their rehearsals and things, while not being very efficient at them. This is especially frustrating for me, because I’m kind of anal about efficiency and I’m always looking for ways to get more results with less work.

So anyway, the concert came and there was a fairly big audience (the 1,000 person hall was about 2/3 full, maybe? The concert went fine, but I was surprised that, athough the directors took their bows, they never acknowledged the chorus and the chorus never bowed at all. It was like we were just some raw material they were using to perform. Although we sounded fine, I never felt throughout the performance like there was any emotion in any of the songs, and judging by the polite applause of the audience, neither did they. At the end of the concert, I felt thoroughly unmoved, and looked around at the faces of the others to see if they were feeling something I wasn’t, but everyone just had very blank expressions.

To make things worse, there was the usual stupid classical music traditions of not clapping between movements, which is just dumb if you ask me, and of having the soloists go off stage and come back on, and then go off and come on, and get flowers, and then to do an encore, even thought no one in the audience actually wants any of these things to happen. It’s so stupid! They spent even longer on this than usual, in inverse proportion to the audience’s enthusiasm. While this was going on, a girl in the choir fainted, I guess from being exhausted at having spent the whole frigging day standing up and singing.

After the whole thing was done and we did our two encores, we then ran outside and sang some more as the audience was leaving! Very badly! Hadn’t we done enough to the audience at this point?!

After that, we went to a reception where a lot of their alums came and there were a bunch of speeches (and good food!). In all the speeches everyone said what a wonderful concert it was, and I was just thinking “wait, are you kidding?”

Anyway, after that we went to a bar for drinks. That was pretty fun, and I got to experience the Japanese tradition of lots of chanting for each other to drink. However, while it was fun, it was a lot more like “yay, I’m glad that was over, let’s all get drunk”, not “yay, that was a wonderful experience. I’m glad to have shared it with you all, let’s drink to celebrate!”

This whole experience was especially depressing to me after being in the Zumbyes and feeling what a wonderful experience it is to sing fun songs really well with a bunch of guys you really like, make the crowd really love it and just have so much fun while doing it. We also put a whole lot of time into preparing for shows, but it’s all time well spent and it’s all fun because we all enjoy it. This chorus was like completely the opposite of all of those things, except for the huge amount of time that we spent preparing.

Whew. Anyway, as I said, I’m actually glad I stuck it out through the concert for a couple of reasons:
-I had a similar (although not as extreme) experience with the Amherst Concert Choir the semester I joined it, but I had always felt like maybe it was just because I didn’t put in enough time in memorizing the music and working at it. This time I was feeling intimidated by all the music we had to memorize, but I put in the work and memorized it and still found it completely unrewarding.
-I got my voice back into singing shape, so now I can use that momentum to do my own singing that’s more fun, or maybe join another singing group. Apparently, Doshisha has a nasty big band, so it could be really cool to sing for them.
-I learned what it’s like to be part of a Japanese club going through all that preparation and the main event and the celebrations afterward.
-I learned a lot of things that I could compare with the Zumbyes and appreciate the differences. I think it’s important to be involved in both successful and unsuccessful organizations, so you can compare them and appreciate the things that the successful organizations do that unsuccessful ones don’t.

Oh, by the way, the best part of the day was when I ran out for a quick lunch break and happened to come across this place they were giving away free miso soup and mochi sweets with fresh mochi. The best part of all was the I got to pound the mochi myself, which was something I had been wanting to do really bad since I got here, and was afraid I wouldn’t get to do! What you do is, you take fresh rice and put it in a big mortar-like thing and whack the crap out of it with a giant wooden sledge-hammer. It was awesome.

Sunday, 2/12:
After getting back late from the nomikai the night before, I woke up late and had to rush off to this commitment I had to play the piano for the elementary school kids’ choir. It was quite fun. I especially enjoyed seeing the kids trying to sit through the classical performance before they went on stage. They totally couldn’t handle it. They were fidgeting around like crazy, punching each other, slamming the seats up and down, and as soon as they were free they just went zooming around like crazy. Man, I wish I had that kind of energy. But it did make me happy, because I always fidget myself, but now I think that’s just the child in me, and I always want to try to stay as child-like as I can.

Later, Sawa and I finally got to catch up with Marika (last year’s fellow) now that her crazy travels have finished. It was very nice, and we decided to start a book club, since we were all missing the intellectual engagement of Amherst! We’re going to try to read The Invisible Man by mid-January.

I had to leave early from that because I was going to my first practice with the basketball team! I was very excited about finally playing basketball again, although I was prepared for them to be pretty bad.

It turned out that they weren’t as bad as I thought, but they were a lot more slack than I had expected. Wheneve I’ve played basketball in the past, either pick-up or on a team, regardless of how good everyone is we always played really hard. Usually we’d keep score and play games, then either the losing team goes off, or if there’s just two teams, we just keep playing and playing until everyone is too exhausted to play more. At this club, however, they didn’t keep score, they just timed ten minutes for each game, then stopped midway through a point when the ten minutes was up. Then, they’d takea big long rest. They probably spent as much time resting as they did playing! When they were playing, they weren’t playing very intensely either, so although I was there for two hours, I barely broke a sweat. Again, this seems kind of like the Japanese club mentality of the chorus, where it’s about quantity, not quality. Adding to that, I think, is the fact that Japanese groups like this are as much about having a group of people to hang out with as they are about the activity that’s involved. That also seemed to be the case when I went to the shodo club that one time.

Which brings me back to…
Today (Monday, 3/12):
It felt wonderful to wake up and not have to go to any rehearsals of any kind. After some nice coffee and breakfast from Eze Bleu, the delicious bakery just down the street, I practiced shamisen and utai for a little while then settled down to catch up on this blog.

I’ve been going to Eze Bleu way too much. It’s relatively cheap, especially for how good it is, and I can afford it right now with my fellowship money, but really I probably shouldn’t be getting used to having such luxurious breakfasts. However, I do think that eating food is the one thing that you really have to do to live, so it’s worth spending a little extra money to enjoy it. I dunno.

And there you have it. Now that I’m finally back up to date and am done with this chorus, I’ll try to be much better about updating this. I’m also really looking forward to finally, actually, seriously studying Japanese. I keep saying that I will, but I really think I’ll be able to now, and I think that learning Japanese is the most important thing I can get out of this year here, so I want to do a good job of it. If I can just study for an hour or so a day, all the rest of the time I’m talking and looking at signs and stuff I can be solidifying my study, but if I don’t put in that study I’ll miss the chance to really improve as much.

(Oh, I was going to go on a bike ride today but it ended up raining, so it looks like we’ll have to postpone that. I hope I’ll get to see lots of the kouyou before it’s too late… I didn’t get much chance last week (which was the prime week) because of all the chorus stuff)