Back from Kyushu

I’m once again writing this on the night bus, although thankfully this time there was no last minute dash to get here. This time me and Rambo are on our way back from Fukuoka, where we had a short but very fun trip. It’s actually my fourth night bus trip in seven days, and by tomorrow morning I will have spent three out of the last four night sleeping on a night bus. It’s not as bad as I thought it might be, but I’ll be pretty glad to just recover for a couple of days in my own bed.

Anyway, here’s the rundown from the last couple of days;

29/1:
The night before (the 28th) Rambo and I caught the night bus from Kyoto to Fukuoka. We were on the bus for 10 hours, but fortunately I got the seat right in the middle at the very back, so I could lean as far back as I wanted without bothering anyone behind me and, even better, I could stretch my legs out far in front of me. Combined with the fact that I was mad sleepy from only getting 4-5 hours of sleep on the night bus from Yokohama the night before, I pretty much slept the whole way except for the three times the bus stopped to give people a chance to go to the bathroom, stretch, get food, etc.

Once we arrived, we met Haradashi, a former Amherst house resident who we stayed with. I met him briefly when he came to the Friend Peace House a few months ago, but I was really glad to get a chance to get to know him better, because he’s really cool.

I didn’t realize it, but it turned out that the following day (today) he was moving out of Fukuoka for good. He worked very hard the last three years (in the Japanese style – apparently he worked from about 7:30am-8/9pm, and this was fairly standard!) in some finance job, and now he’s saved up money he’s moving out and will soon embark on a year-long backpacking journey around the world. It sounds so cool.

Despite being about to completely move and change his lifestyle, rather than being frantically getting last-minute things done like I would have been, he spent the entire day of the 29th showing us around, and even rented a car to drive us around in and paid for most of our meals and drinks. Partly it’s this Japanese senpai-kouhai relationship thing where seniors treat the juniors and they do the same to future generations, and partly he’s just a huge baller.

It was great to have him show us around, because neither of us knew anything about the area, but he took us to all these cool spots, like this delicious ramen place for lunch, this cool shrine,

this neat walk out to these cool rocks (an excellent example of columnar basalt, if I’m not mistaken)

and this amazingly delicious and cheap sushi place at Fukuoka’s fish market. I’d say it was as good as the sushi I had at Daiwa sushi in Tsukiji, and for half the price (¥1800)

In between, we went to visit this out-of-the-way campus of Kyushu University, where Rambo is thinking about coming for graduate school (the main reason for this trip). It ended up being quite fun going along with him – it reminded me of my days as a tour guide at Amherst and talking with kids who were thinking about coming, but we were on the other side now.

It was way out in the middle of nowhere and was very austere and scary-looking, a far cry from the lush campus at Amherst with students everywhere and cute little shops. Apparently it was only opened up a couple of years ago and it’s mainly for engineering students doing research.

However, because of this, it looks like a great place if you want to do top-class scientific research, since all the facilities are brand-new and well-equipped. Personally, I think I would rather be somewhere more fun to live, but that’s just me.

While Rambo was talking with his potential future professor, Haradashi took me to this really cool café in this renovated old Japanese house, with delicious drinks and Japanese sweets.

After we got back and ate the delicious sushi, we went to a sweet sentou and had a nice long chat about all kinds of things, as I’ve found you so often get to do at sentou. Refreshed, we went to this nearby bar where Haradashi was having a farewell party with his friends. It was fun meeting them all, and I was very pleased with how my Japanese has come along that I could converse well all day with Rambo and Haradashi, and even did well meeting all these people at once.

30/1:
After getting back late from the bar, we slept pretty late and then basically spent the whole day alternately helping Haradashi pack, wandering around the local shops, and eating. After seeing Haradashi off at Fukuoka airpot, Rambo and I made our way to the Hakata train station, then wandered around, got some good and then escaped from the cold in this nice café, chatted for quite a while, and then finally got on the bus. After such a busy and intense day yesterday, it was nice to have a more relaxed day and be able to help out and see off Haradashi after he did so much nice stuff for us the other day.

Now I’m going to see whether I’ll be able to sleep as well on the night bus this time. The night buses have all been ridiculously hot, and this time I think I’m right next to the heater and even down to my t-shirt I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle it…

Oh, while we were in the café waiting for the time to get on the bus I finally looked through the photos that Junpei took on the dorm trip to the onsen in Gifu, so here are just a couple of the best ones from his roll.

Between trips

Sorry I couldn’t write anything in my blog while I was in Yokohama, but since I was there to see Sawa and we only had three days together, it seemed like a pretty silly use of that time to be ignoring her and writing in my blog.

It was really great to see Sawa and her family and of course the stuffed animal Shibe who dominates pretty much every conversation involving Sawa and her mother. I thought that this month apart would be really tough, but I think that the fact that we talk every night on Skype and got to have this weekend together and are going to the Sapporo Snow Festival next week has made and will make it not too lonely.

We didn’t do a whole lot, we mostly just hung around the house and made and eat delicious food and took baths and went on a couple of trips into Tokyo and planned the wedding. It was really nice. I like the way we’d do something during the day and then spend the evening at home eating food and drinking tea and taking baths and chatting with Sawa and her family, and it was all nice and cozy and reminded me of being back at home with my family in New Zealand on a cold winter’s evening.

Other than that, here’re the main things that we did over the weekend:

Friday 25/1: I arrived early in the morning on the night bus and went back to sleep when I got to Sawa’s place. She had work and some stuff she had to do with her grandmother, so while she was out I finished the last lecture about the linguistic geography of the world, while drinking lots of tea and eating some delicious gourmet ice cream. It is so interesting and I can’t believe how much more I know about the world now. The rest of the course is about religious geography, which I’m hoping will be equally fascinating because I also know very little about this, and probably should.

Saturday 26/1:
After a nice relaxing morning of lounging around eating delicious, warm things (it’s basically the coldest time of the year right now and a good time to be inside warming up), we headed into Roppongi in Tokyo to see “Earth” at the movie theatre. I was expecting such great things from it, and the cinematography was in fact phenomenal and the cute and awesome nature scenes they captured were really cool, but it kind of lacked large-scale unity and felt a little fragmented. The basic underlying theme was to follow the migration of animals as they went from the North Pole down to the South Pole, but since obviously there’s no one animal that does that it felt very fragmented as it jumped from polar bears in the North Pole to birds in New Guinea to suddenly the Kalahari Desert and spent a long time there, then suddenly followed a bunch of whales as they zoomed from around the equator all the way down to Antarctica. Also, when I heard the name “Earth”, I kind of thought it would be more about, well, the earth, rather than just a sort of very high-budget seris of Discovery Channel forays into a couple of classicly cool animals. I think it would would have been a lot cooler if they’d based their cool animal footage around something more constant and earthy, like following the flow of water or tectonic plate boundaries or something like that.

Since I had brought good old “obaachan no okazu”, our basic Japanese cookbook, Sawa and I made dinner Saturday night (with Sawa’s mother’s help, because it’s impossible to get her to just relax and let us take care of the cooking). We made buri teriyaki, an old favourite, and a new one: green beans with a sesame sauce. They were both amazing.

I’ve become kind of a sesame addict since I’ve come to Japan.

I really love the way Japan has this basic meal plan where you have your rice and your miso soup, and then you have any number of other things (okazu). It doesn’t really matter what else you have, because the rice provides the basic carbohydrates you need and the miso soup provides the protein and vegetables, so there’s no worrying about what to make to have a balanced diet, you just know whatever you make will be fine and delicious.

Sunday 27/1:
We went all the way out to Narita airport in the morning because, through some stupid quirk in the system, Shanghai Airlines – who I’m flying with to China via its alliance with United, whose frequent flyer miles I am using – doesn’t do paper tickets and they can’t send the tickets to me, so I have to actually physically spend the 3-4 hours and ¥7000 to get out there and grab them. It sucks, as does having to do a similar round trip commute twice into Osaka to get my Chinese visa paperwork filled out and then come back and collect it, but really with these international bureaucratic things you don’t have much choice but either going or not going. It’s a good thing I have so much free time and money and can afford to do all of this.

Afterward, we went to the infamous Yasukuni shrine and next-door museum in Tokyo to see for ourselves what it was like.

There were certainly a lot of things there that were a little shocking to me, like the statue commemorating the efforts of the Special Attack Members, aka Kamikaze pilots, and the way they described the Nanjing conquest as a highly disciplined and respectful attack, or accusing the United States of triggering the outbreak of the US-Japanese fighting by its oil embargo. It was certainly a very heavily propagandic tilt on the events. However, it also made me aware of a lot of legitimate reasons Japan had for its military actions (for instance, although it might be a stretch to say that the United States forced the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, the way I hear it in the US is always that the Japanese just decided one day that they felt like attacking the US because they thought they could eventually conquer the entire country or something. And anyway, what was the US doing in Hawaii anyway? They annexed it a few decades back and just took over the original Hawaiians themselves.)

I was very glad I’d been doing so much looking at geography lately. One thing that had really struck me about the world’s geography is how wantonly the European powers had just sliced up pretty much all the habitable land in the world based on their own interests and bickering, and how almost all of the current problems of Third World countries can be traced fairly directly to the brutal colonial rule and the fairly arbitrary boundaries and governments they set up as they withdrew after World War II. Although the story they gave at Yasukuni was sort of one of Japan trying to protect the rest of Asia from the evil Western colonial empires ignores the fact that Japan kind of wanted to become its own colonial empire, the part about ruthless Western powers trying to dominate the “inferior” peoples of Asia and the rest of the world is certainly true. It was only after World War II that “Hitler gave racism a bad name” and they had to give up their colonial enterprises.

That night Sawa’s mum made this huge feast with wagyu steak and 13 separate meal items. Wow.

Anyway, after I got back I missioned out to Osaka to get my Chinese visa, which I managed despite leaving my Alient Registration in my photocopier/scanner in my dorm and forgetting to bring the information about the address of my friend (they just accepted the photocopy I had made and I fortunately had my computer with me and had the information on the hard drive). Here’s a photo I took while biking up the Kamogawa from the Hankyuu station back up to the Friend Peace house.

I had to miss my utai lesson to take care of that visa and my English conversation student didn’t show up for some reason, so I just drank some coffee, chatted with my family and Chris and repacked to get ready to head off on this new trap to Kyushu with Ranbo. The last two times I’ve ridden on the night bus have each been more cramped and harder to sleep than the last, so I’m really hoping this one is a little better, since as it’s my second night in a row sleeping on a night bus it could be a little rough.

Alright, gotta finish packing. Might not be able to update for another three days or so.

Night bus dash

As I write this I’m on the overnight bus up to Yokohama to see Sawa for a couple of days. I pretty nearly didn’t get on the bus, because Sawa explicitly said that the bus left at 11:50pm, when in fact it left at 11:20pm. Fortunately, I got there about 11:25, saw two missed calls from the bus company, then proceeded to dash madly around the back of Kyoto station with my baggage, trying to talk and listen to the directions of the bus guy in Japanese while desperately searching for the bus stop. But, fortunately, I made it, so everything’s cool.

Other than that slight near-disaster, today was a pretty sweet day. (I seem to be saying that a lot…) Basically I just had lunch at the English conversation club (only me, Takada-san and Fukushima-san, the smallest it’s been yet…but it was still fun), then Morita-sensei took me to meet Matsuura-san, then I spent the rest of the day studying Japanese, finishing some errands and packing for the trip (didn’t manage to practice shamisen, unfortunately).

The talk with Matsuura-san was great. She is the head of the International Office and she’s going to be my contact person from now on if I need any help with things (in addition to Morita-sensei). I guess they’re doing this because Fujikawa-san, who used to be the main point person for the fellow, is in pretty poor health and looks like she’ll basically go from being resting at home to permanently retired. It is really sad, she was so amazingly helpful to me in the very brief time that I got to know her.

Anyway, Matsuura-san was very nice and we had a nice chat, where I also learned that one of my other recommendations about the Fellowship was being implemented, namely that they’d start allowing Amherst students to study abroad at Amherst for only a semester as an option, rather than the current year-long only program. I’m sure more important people than me also had the same idea, but after the last two days of talking about various Doshisha-Amherst relations, I do feel like a bit of a baller because all the ideas I advocated for in my letter to Amherst are at least in the process of being implemented: a letter from President Marx encouraging the continuation of the Fellow living with Japanese students, free room and board for Nijima Scholars, and a single-semester study abroad programme with Doshisha. Not to mention that I understand all the discussion in Japanese and was able to actually have an effective role in the discussion. She also seemed very eager to help me find cool Japanese cultural activities and classes of all kinds.

Another great thing about meeting Matsuura-san: later in the day I emailed a bunch of people asking if they had any leads on getting access to a koto for when Sawa and I start learning in March from my shamisen teacher (koto’s really her main instrument), and so I thought I may as well ask her too. It turns out she used to play the koto and that her old koto is sitting in her attic which she’s happy to let us use! Sweet!

Today was really cold and there was a lot of beautiful snow.

I went on a short bike ride down to Nashinoki Shrine and through the Imperial Palace in the snow while waiting for Bimota to become less crowded. I had planned to fill up some water bottles at Nashinoki Shrine for the first time in ages, but either it’s frozen up or, more likely, they only allow the taps to flow during the day.

Bimota is really delicious. I can’t believe I’ve only been there 3 times since I got here. For only¥650 (¥10 more than my McDonald’s combo yesterday) I got this delicious full meal.

The deep fried hamburger part was ridiculous. Now that I’ve tried it, though, it’s gonna be so tempting to go there instead of spending all the time and hassle cooking to make something that ends up being only very slightly less expensive in terms of ingredients, if even that.

I also moved on through the Geography course today through the African and Middle Eastern Languages. It’s so interesting, and I can’t believe how much more I’m learning about the world and its countries and people and landscape. A couple of days or so ago I had only a pretty vague idea of any of the countries of the Old World besides China, the UK, Russia,  and maybe South Africa, and now I have a pretty good general idea of the location and people of most of the countries.

Oh, today I also finalized my end-of-semester grades and mailed them off. I had a good idea for when I teach my class next semester: Instead of having my students hand in written assignments most of the time, I’ll get them to prepare shorter things to be able to speak out in class, since I think they need much more work on pronunciation and actually putting their speaking into practice than they do with writing. If I specifically ask them to prepare to answer these questions aloud in class it’ll mean they’ll have no excuse not to, and best of all it’ll mean less grading work for me! Yes, I love these solutions where less work for me turns into more learning for the students and everyone’s happy.

Also, now that I have a good idea of the specific areas where the students tend to struggle with grammar (especially things like noun-verb agreement, using the correct tense or having the tenses agree, missing pronouns, missing prepositions)  I can choose one point to focus on each class and make sure they actually learn the correct way of using it so I’m teaching them something concrete there.

Oh, finally, I made my best coffee calligraphy yet. I’m completely convinced this will be a huge thing in the future.

Oh, and my English conversation student sent me a link to this new book about Karaoke called “Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon”.

Looks like a great way to start looking into it in more detail.Cool, now for a nice weekend in Yokohama!

Fellowship Talk

Yesterday was a pretty relaxed day. I got my hour of kanji study and shamisen/utai practice in and worked on planning the upcoming wedding for quite a while. Other than that, the main thing that happened was that the ryosei and I met with Prof. Morita about the future of the Friend Peace House. Prof. Morita agrees with us that the best thing is to have this new dorm become a kind of replacement for the old Amherst House where the Fellow used to live with around 15 students, and that we should be allowed to start accepting new students next semester, but we need to get permission from the gakusei shienka (the equivalent of the Residential Life office), and apparently for whatever reason they seem to hate the ryosei. However, we’ve talked a lot about this issue with people back at Amherst and President Marx put in a word for us and made a big concession on Amherst’s end to give free room and board to Doshisha’s Nijima Scholars in the future, so I feel pretty confident that we can convince Doshisha to let the ryosei make the Friend Peace House their new home and for the Amherst-Doshisha Fellow to continue to live with them here, since living with Japanese students is the best and most unique part of my experience here. From what I hear, most other exchange students in Japan end up living with mostly other exchange students and don’t have a lot of chance to interact with Japanese students, so I’m really lucky to have that chance. If we can’t get this plan to work out, though, then I don’t know what Chris will do next year when the last students here graduate and he’s left on his own. That would be really sad.

Later on in the night we discussed the issue with just the ryosei in the dorm. I couldn’t help but notice the difference between the first few discussions we had about the issue when I first came and had a lot of trouble understanding much of the complexities of the language and felt unable to really participate much – now my Japanese has improved a lot and I ended up kind of convincing them not to rebel and to push for an official recognition by the fall semester if not the spring semester. A few decades ago there was a similar problem at the old dorm and the students then just decided not to leave when the school told them too and continued to live there as fuhouryosei (illegal residents – basically squatters I guess) but collecting the fees they would have paid and putting them aside, and after a decade or so the school relented and agreed to let them become official again if they paid all the dues from the past few years. Junpei seems to really kind of be inspired by that example and seems to want to do that kind of thing again. I kind of support the idea if it really comes down to it and the Doshisha administration just refuses to recognize the importance of the Doshisha-Amherst connection after all our efforts, but I do think we have to try to make it happen through normal negotiation first if at all possible and only resort to that if everything else is exhausted, so I convinced the ryosei to go with me to talk to the gakusei shienka office and then with Doshisha’s President Hatta if that fails, and only if we’re refused after all of that to think about the fuhouryousei option.

I think this must be on a small scale a lot like what it would be like to be part of a fledgling country trying to gain independence from a repressive, corrupt government. It’s important to get strong backing from the international community and go about things in a manner that shows you’re in the right if you want to have a hope of independence, because if you don’t you’ll just seem like a terrorist organization and then no one will help you.

Oh, one other thing I did was to look at my cellphone bills for the past few months that arrived the other day after I called and asked for them. It turned out that there was one particularly bad month earlier on (¥7,000 when my base plan is only ¥2,150) where I seemed to make a lot of phone calls and I think I sent some photos from my phone, which ends up costing a lot, but if I make a couple of adjustments on my plan (eliminate some unnecessary feature and nominate Sawa’s phone as one I can make cheaper calls to for a minimal price) and just be prudent in my calling and texting (texting is much more economical in Japan) I should be able to lower the bill pretty easily to around ¥3,000 a month or so.

Oh, I also had McDonald’s for the first time in six months (the last time was at 4am after being out in Roppongi clubs all night with the Zumbyes, a couple of hours before we performed at Tokyo DisneySea and, despite all odds, sounded awesome.) I was kind of thinking it would be a wonderfully nostalgic taste experience, but really the best part of it was bunching up the straw wrapper and squirting a little Coke on it with the straw and watching it unfurl itself like I used to do when I was a kid. The food was fine, but I really didn’t feel any desire to eat more of it any time soon. The Coke must have been the first soft drink I’ve had since I’ve been in Japan, and I was very glad of it. It feels so much better drinking tea and water and coffee all the time!

Sabbath, cult, etc.

20/1:
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to write my blog last night and the day before was my Sabbath. I’m finding it difficult to define the Sabbath for myself since I’m not really working, but my idea was that especially because I’m not officially working but have many things I want to do, if I don’t have a day where I’m officially free to do whatever, I won’t have the balance I need (and also to train myself for when I actually have work to do but need to give myself time to relax). However, the questions now is: what is work for me and what isn’t? I decided that I’ll avoid doing anything that I feel obliged to do, so I won’t schedule any things on Sundays, won’t do my kanji or music practice, won’t respond to emails or do chores or write my blog. In addition I will try to do at least something involving the outdoors. However, I already kind of failed on this point, because as I as about to head out the door for a bike trip to Arashiyama to see this old temple, I realized it was raining and wouldn’t be very fun.

Instead, I spent the day inside getting wa over-hyped kind of like Calvin spends his Saturdays, except instead of eating Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs I had like 4 or 5 cups of coffee and instead of watching cartoons I listened to two full two-hour lectures about geo. This was kind of a border case, because university classes seem like work, but I rationalized it that it wasn’t something I felt like I had to get done, but something I wanted to do, like reading a book I want to read, so it’s OK. I also did some planning of my trip to China, which was again arguable, but I felt like doing it. I dunno, I guess I’m a little worried that my time being stressed out at Amherst has made me so worried about getting so much done that I’m incapable of really taking it easy and not doing things I need to do. However, I was really enjoying excited about the trip and wanted to do it so I think it’s still OK with the spirit of my Sabbath.

I realize this probably sounds very strange in many different ways, but that’s just what it is.

Here’s one of the cups of coffee I made. I’ve always wanted to be able to make good latte art, and I think if I can make sweet latte calligraphy it could be the next craze. I’m getting there…

Remember, you saw it here first.

21/1:
Since I was way over-hyped and went to sleep at 3 and slept till 12, I ended up not being able to sleep at all. I had been thinking for a while that since I haven’t had McDonald’s in many months I’d like to eat it some time when it felt like the right time. After tossing and turning for a couple of hours, I got really hungry and suddenly realized it was the perfect time to go do so. Unfortunately, when I arrived, I realized that it was closed until 6am (it was about 3 or 4am). It was OK, though, because I got some cheap onigir from the conbini (there are conbini everywhere), walked to the Kamogawa river and ate it while looking out over the river where a few months back I accidentally mis-threw the Frisbee with the Zumbyes and lost it forever.

It felt great to be out there on my own in the cold at that ridiculous hour, especially after spending all day inside.

When I got back, I figured there wasn’t even any point trying to go back to sleep, since I had been invited to go to this random cult thing at 6am (more on that soon). I figured I should go hard or go home, so I made myself another cup of coffee and screwed around online.

At 5:40 Alec came by to pick me up, and it turned out that basically this thing he invited me to was a cult. To be fair, I kind of expected it when he said it was a “kind of new religion thing”, but I thought it’d be an interesting experience and planned not to drink any drinks they gave me.

It was called “shinnyoin” and I think it was basically a cult, in that it seemed weird, encouraged people to convert others, and seemed to be as much about the greatness of their leaders as it was about the greatness of the Buddha and transcendence (it was a Buddhist cult). However, they didn’t do anything to force me to join other than show me a video that left me decidedly unimpressed. I could see how people who are kind of lonely and uncritical in their thinking could be drawn in though… it would be comforting to have a simple thing to believe in and a lot of people to be with and chant with. Come to think of it, what are major religions really other than cults that managed to become very popular and stick around for a few thousand years?

The chanting part was kind of fun, although it was not too different from the chanting we did at the Buddhist temple in Kumano. Incidentally, later in the day I passed a guy advertising a restaurant and his sales pitch sounded almost exactly the same. The musical sounds of capitalism are pretty interesting in Japan, with a lot of people sing/chanting sales pitches, people always calling out “irasshaimase” and “arigatou gozaimashita” in interesting ways and all kinds of other things you’re supposed to say when providing services. I’m convinced that many of the shopkeepers do this kind of erotic breathy moan thing on the “se” at the end of “irasshaimase”. No one believes me when I tell them, but then we were walking along somewhere and Sawa heard it and admitted I was right. Also, when we went to Akihabara there was this guy rapping on the street ad I eventually realized he was rapping his cell-phone sales pitch. Crazy.

Anyway, this is getting very long, so I think I’ll try to speed through a little more now.
After I returned and took a three-hour nap I went to my utai lesson, then came back and had my English tutoring. We talked a lot about my recent idea to study karaoke as a masters thesis. It’d be great because it’s such an interesting and unique feature of Japanese culture, and to me much more creative and healthy than most other consumer leisure activities like drinking, shopping, bowling, etc. Also, everyone does it, even different generations and people who don’t sing. When Sawa, her friend and I went with Sawa’s dad and her friend’s dad, we all had a great time together. There are also lots of potentially negative things about it, tough, the main one being what Tadaya described as the fact that the best karaoke performance is a perfect copy of the original, and it’s not an original performance, really. There’s got to be a lot of data of all kinds because it’s such a huge industry in Japan.

That evening I made dinner for Hayao, Ranbo and Mashu.

Not including the time Sawa and I made dinner at her parents’ place, it was my first time making dinner in about a month. It was delicious, but it reminded me how long it takes to make food. It’s so tempting to just pay a tiny smidgen more and have someone else do all the work, although it is a nice feeling to make it yourself.

Oh, I also studied Japanese for an hour and practiced shamisen for an hour. It makes me feel really good to get it done, because it’s only a little but it’s amazing how much I get done when I just do an hour a day.

22/1
This morning I planned to get up early to do some things, but my sleepless night with three-hour nap caught up to me and I was deathly tired when I woke up, so I fell back asleep, woke up three hours later, fell back asleep again and woke up around 12:30p and headed off to Osaka to go the NZ Consulate to get the “certified true copy” of my passport.

Since I was in Osaka, I had planned to meet up with Reiko for dinner. Unfortunately, it took forever to actually meet, because of the modern-day method of meeting where instead of arranging a specific place and a specific time, people give a general place and plan to call when they get there. This never ever works correctly and it’s one of my pet peeves. I vow from now on to insist on a specific time and place whenever I meet people unless there’s really no way of that working. The ramen dinner was great, though!

When I got back I had my shamisen lesson. I realized all of a sudden that I won’t have another lesson for a whole month (since I’m going on a trip to Kyushu next week with Ranbo, to the Sapporo Snow Festival the week after with Sawa, then to China for two weeks!) When we finally get back to Kyoto I think Sawa and I will start learning the koto together, since my teacher’s main instrument is really the koto.

On the train to Osaka I studied my hour of Japanese and on the train back and after I got back I graded my students’ final projects and wrote up their final grades. It’s really a hassle to writ out individual comments for 33 students, but I always hated it when professors didn’t give me feedback beyond a letter grade after a whole semester of work in that class.

Incidentally, as something I thought about as I heard the familiar sounds of students zipping up bags and scraping chairs at the end of the iTunes geography lectures and that I wrote a letter to the editor about this as a student at Amherst, I vow as a professor to never give homework over holidays and in return I will not stand for it if students start packing up before I finish class.

Whew. I gotta keep this more updated and not blabber on so much. Oyasumi!

Oh yeah, here are my revised stats and graphs for my budget:

Last class, bathing and geography

Sorry I couldn’t update yesterday. Yesterday was a really great day.

First off, I had my last class (since I had actually prepared in advance I was able to use my time in the train getting my hour of kanji study in). My students all presented their final projects (read short speeches out loud about which movie they thought made the best use of music, comparing it to one or more of the other movies we watched). I had been a little worried it’d be too much for them to handle and they couldn’t do it, but everyone at least made an effort, which is the important thing, and some did a really good job and had insightful things to say. Best of all, after the class finished, a couple of the students told me they wanted to have a class end-of-semester dinner with me, which made me feel really good. I mean, we all went out to karaoke before, but I instigated that and even offered them extra credit to come, but in this case they liked me enough to ask me of their own free will.

In general I’ve just been really pleased with how well the class has gone. I had such a negative preconception of Japanese university students when I come from everything I’d heard and read and been told about Japanese university students being lazy and not doing homework and whatever. But, when I put time into making my classes interesting and expected that they do the work, almost all of them really gave it a good try. I think the problem is much more that the teacher’s aren’t doing a good enough job making the classes interesting, which in turn may be because the system is set up so they don’t need to. It’s easy to see how when the system is that the professors don’t have to do much work preparing classes or grading and the students don’t have to try hard in class or on homework, everyone’s kind of happy with it, but it shouldn’t be that way. For example, one of the ryosei took the same class with one of the Amherst Fellows from three or four years ago and said that he just showed movies in class and asked a few questions while it was playing, and there was no homework. In fact, some of the students have told me that mine is the only class where they have homework… I can see how tempting it would be not to give homework, though… it’s actually pretty interesting grading them for the first 9 or 10 papers, then it suddenly gets really tiresome for the next 10 or 20.

When I talked to the head of the department about my planned syllabus, he suggested that it wasn’t realistic for me to get students to watch movies on their own for homework (or even set up a screening for them), and that I should just show excerpts in class. At first I did that, but later I asked the students to rent and watch the movies on their own and most of them did.

After my class, I stopped by the S-Cube student centre just to say goodbye since there was no peer mentoring. Just as I was about to leave, though, Kimura-san apparently got some kind of email offering free tickets to see this enka singer Fuyumi Sakamoto. She’s a real baller, one of the best in Japan (she was in the kouhaku utagassen at New Year’s and was probably my third favourite!) so it was so sweet to go see her for free! It was cool too, because it was my first real visit to a professional concert in Japan.

They started off with these manzai comedians (kind of like stand-up, but done in pairs), which I really didn’t understand at all. I was pleasantly surprised by how much the audience seemed to get into the concert and how much Fuyumi Sakamoto interacted with the audience. I hate the way music often becomes so separated between the performer and audience in many western concerts (ESPECIALLY classical music concerts) and I had kind of expected the audience in Japan to be more laid back than Western ones, especially since it was mostly old people, but they’d all yell out things some times and, of course, clap along (the Japanese LOVE clapping at concerts). Mostly it was on one and three, but there was one kind of reggae-style song and they actually clapped on two and four, so it’s not that they can’t feel that backbeat (as one of the ryosei claimed).

I was really impressed by the concert. She had such a great voice. I actually think I might like Japanese enka more than mainstream Japanese pop, because I think the Japanese voice is more suited to the kind of vibratoey sound because there is that tradition of Japanese music, and it’s less like they’re trying to fit Western sounds like many pop artists sound like.

When I got back, I made coffee for myself and the ryosei and talked with Ranbo about the worrisome future of the Amherst dorm and the strange disconnect between the administration and the students, and the general disconnect and lack of feedback between people in power and the people they’re in charge of in Japan (like the way the government doesn’t really reflect the people’s views). While I made the coffee Rick James’ “Super Freak” came on my iTunes and I couldn’t help but dancing like crazy. I don’t care who you are – that song is so damn funky, you just have to dance. I think that’s pretty much the reason that Little Miss Sunshine was so good.

Finally, before I went to bed, I folded laundry, chatted with Sawa and booked my plane tickets to China with my frequent flyer miles. This time and the time I called them a couple of days ago I noticed a subtle but very important difference between previous times I’ve called United to book things: there was still the same automated voice screening system that they make you go through and that never helps you do what you want to do and I still had to tell it to let me talk to an agent, but when I did that, I was immediately transferred to an agent with a very Indian accent, instead of waiting for like 20 minutes to talk to someone from the South or something like I usually have to do. I guess I just experienced first-hand the outsourcing of American jobs to an Indian call centre. I have to say, it seems great to me, because in the past I’ve always loathed and feared the times I had to call United airlines (or any US company) for “customer service”. I don’t really understand economics well enough to think about whether it’s a good thing for either the world economy or America’s, but I’m happy for now.

Today I had a nice relaxing day. In the morning I finally talked to my mum on Skype for the first time in almost a month, and that was very nice. Afterwards, I got in my hour of kanji practice – finally took my kanji test and am now set to start learning new kanji again – and hour of utai and shamisen practice. Afterwards, I had some coffee and listened to the second lecture in the Geography of World Cultures podcast. I was just going to listen while I drank my coffee, but it was so interesting I ended up sitting through the whole two hour lecture. (It was about the Indo-European language family). Getting to learn about a new culture by being in Japan, plus reading Guns, Germs and Steel ,has made me so interested in all the different cultures and languages and people (and music!) out there. That’s one reason I’m excited about this upcoming tirp to China – I’ll learn all about another new culture (that had so much influence on all the other cultures in Asia and even the rest of the world), and it’ll be my first time trying to travel in a country I’m not mildly comfortable with the language. Also my first real solo travel adventure. It should be a very worthwhile experience, even I do have a few troubles and mix-ups along the way.

After that, I got a call from my old Japanese friend Shinji who stayed with my family in Wellington. He was in Kyoto all day but I missed his call and couldn’t figure out how to reply to his message, so in the end I rushed down to meet him and only got to see him for like 5 minutes before he had to leave, which was sad. At least we got to do our special handshake, though…

After dinner and a nice bath at Sawa’s place (I went there to pick up her mail, since she’s up in Yokohama), I took care of some emails and booked a restaurant for a get-together next weekend with the Amherst alums in the area. Then, the ryousei decided to head off to a sentou and even though I had just taken a bath a couple hours before I went again and it was good fun.

Waaah, I wrote way too much. Anyway, tomorrow I won’t write anything because I’m going to try to obey my Sabbath. I’m thinking of going on a bike trip out to the Arashiyama area, since I haven’t been there yet. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow, but that might just make it more exciting and cool. I haven’t got a lot of exercise lately, so it could be good to motor it out there in the snow and get a good workout.

Skyping it up

Today was another day inside without any real obligations beyond the English club. In fact, other than English club and a brief trip down the road for dinner, I didn’t even leave the dorm. It felt pretty good, actually, especially since it was really cold. It actually started snowing for the first time since I’ve been here – pretty heavily too.

Unfortunately, it all melted as soon as it hit the ground… I really want to see Kinkakuji with snow on it. I’ve seen it like that in lots of pictures, but apparently it never actually falls like that, they must have taken it on one of the few years they had that kind of snow fall or something.

The English club went well. It was the first one without Sawa, and I was worried it would just be me, Takada-san and Fukushima-san, but one other person did come and it was actually pretty fun. Apparently, January is pretty busy for the staff too, although that’s what they said about December…

I used my leisurely day to make a whole lot of phone calls on Skype – to family, and friends in the US and in NZ, frequent flier booking agent in US, Sawa in Yokohama and even my friend who’s currently in China. We talked about all kinds of things, mostly catching up on things and figuring out whether or not people were coming to Japan either for the wedding or separately. Oh, and I finally got in touch with Chris and talked about the details of the fellowship and his busy life finishing up at Amherst. The three or four or five hours I spent didn’t cost more than about $2, thanks to the sweetness of Skype. I love the internet.

It looks like everything is in good shape for me to redeem some frequent flyer miles to China, leaving on Feb. 11th, hanging out with my friend Joe and his Chinese wife Yuran in Nanjing for a week, then traveling around on my own for a week or so, probably spending some of that time in Shanghai with my friend Ding who used to be in the Zumbyes with me. I’m very excited for my first trip to China, and in fact my first trip to a country where I don’t speak the language. Hopefully it’ll be a fun challenge, but not so much of a challenge that I regret it.

In between all the phone calls, I got my hour of kanji study and hour of utai/shamisen practice in, which felt good.

Oh yeah, in between all the virtual talking, Yuka came over and we had coffee and talked for about an hour and a half, a sort of follow-up to our long chat a couple months ago with Hayao about her relationship with this guy from Finland. It felt just like coffee hour back at Amherst, and I was very pleasantly surprised to realize that I understand almost everything we were talking about! Also when I went to Bimota for dinner (a really good and cheap place just down the road that I’ve somehow neglected until now) and chatted with the chef and a lady who came in I also was very aware of how much my Japanese has improved since I’ve come. That felt very good.

Oh, and Yuka baked some delicious cinnabon buns for when she came over, which went amazingly with the coffee.

Finally, in the evening I finally got around to tidying up my budget and analyzing it a little bit. Here are the results:

It seems that I’m doing much better than I had expected, a lot of of it because I’ve saved a lot of money on food by all the times I get treated to meals. The other area I’ve saved money on is my research/teaching budget, although this is a little misleading because I actually subtracted the money I’ve been earning through my English conversation tutoring from that expense, which really isn’t the best way to do it… Also, I haven’t had to buy a shamisen or any instrument as of yet, which is the other reason that value is so low. So, it looks like I’m on pretty good track, although I should be careful if I do a lot of traveling for the next half that I don’t overspend on that (with the China trip, etc.)

Actually, I should probably tweak a couple of things with this budget, but I’ll leave it as is now and maybe update it tomorrow. Right now I need to get some sleep before my final class tomorrow. Night!

Errands and world music

Today was another day of catching up/errands. In the morning I got my Eze Bleu I had been craving, then spent an hour of two on Japanese and shamisen and did various errands: tracking down this “justice of the peace” or whatever to get the wedding forms taken care of (it turned out to not be quite as bad as I thought – I just have to go to Osaka and pay ¥3600 – way more expensive than it should be to get a signature, but better than I had feared.), I got the cellphone people to send me the bills for the last few months so I can figure out why it’s so expensive and maybe change my plan, looked up some travel/plane stuff to try to plan my trip to the Asian continent (it turns out I have enough frequent flyer miles to go pretty much anywhere! It’s just a matter of figuring out how to book it – it seems particularly hard to get flights to China for some reason…). I also looked at some cool videos of world music on the Smithsonian Global Sound part of iTunes University. Music is so cool! If I can swing a way to spend lots of time playing cool music with cool people and write stuff about it, it would be a good life.

I also finally got a chance to talk to my family after not being able to talk to them for most of the last three weeks. My brother just got this job as the only white guy in a Japanese restaurant back in Wellington and it sounds like he’s experiencing a lot of the same problems/challenges I experience here in Japan (with language and feeling like a clumsy gaijin) and back when I worked at a restaurant in Wellington right down the road from where he works (being clumsy as a waiter, the fiendish bike back up the hill to get home). Also, it seems that my package I sent to my family for Christmas finally arrived. That was good, because I was almost certain something had happened and I’d have to look into it and it’d be another hassle to deal with.

For lunch I got some delicious cheap karaage from the demachi arcade and the most amazingly delicious and cheap korokke ever from that amazing tofu place. ¥35 is such a good deal. Also, Ranbo told me that apparently he knows the old woman who works there and if I tell her I’m friends with him I might be able to get an even better deal or get the leftovers at the end of the day!

In the evening, Ranbo and I went to this percussion café we heard about when we went to the ethnic instrument shop. It was really cool and groovy, with lots of cool drums and instruments and books and a nice, unique feel like lots of cafes in Wellington, and unlike all the chain cafes there are around. It was fun talking to the staff there about music and whatnot. Apparently they have percussion jam sessions every other Sunday, so we might try to come down and jam this weekend.

And now, it looks like I’ll actually be able to get to bed early tonight and wake up at a good hour tomorrow without an alarm clock!

Oh yeah, and I talked to Sawa again this evening and she got her translation job! It sounds really interesting and like a lot of fun and a great learning experience. Also, we’ll probably still be able to go to the Sappora Snow Festival together, and this’ll give me more of an incentive to actually organize a trip to Asia, so it all looks like it’ll work out great!

Back to the usual routine

Today was the first day since around Christmas where I’ve been in kind of my old routine. I woke up early to practice utai before my lesson, and was all excited to start off the day with some delicious bakery food and coffee, until I found that it was shut and remembered that it was a Tuesday, meaning my two favourite places – Eze Bleu and Futaba (the mamemochi place) – were closed. Also the awesome tofu place in the Demachi shoutengai.

Oh well, I ate some cheap and fairly mediocre food from a conbini and had some coffee and did some last-minute utai preparation (as is my wont). The lesson actually went very well, considering. I even managed to pass on this mushy persimmon I got as an omiyage as an omiyage of my own to give to my noh teacher, which was good because I don’t like persimmons. For some reason people keep giving me them, though. My noh teacher gave me a mandarin, which I thought was a pretty good trade.

I had been feeling that my learning curve of interesting things was leveling off, but today she started teaching me some cool new things. Until now its all been “tsuyogin”, which is more like chanting, but today we started a passage with “yowagin”, which is a little more lyrical. It’s still all kind of mostly chanting, and watching Noh is pretty boring, but I still think I’m getting a lot out of the lessons just from learning different kinds of Japanese old notation, reading handwritten kanji, and even just getting me vocalizing to keep up my voice, especially now that I’m not doing chorus any more.

I had nothing else planned until my shamisen lesson at 8, so other than two hours of so of trying to catch up on all the shamisen I couldn’t do over the break and an hour of the same with kanji, I caught up on emails and some NY Times articles, and tried to sort out some beuraucratic paperwork about the marriage registration. As always happens, there’s one step in the process that looks like it’ll be a real pain: getting a “certified true copy” of my passport, which can only done by a lawyer or a “Justice of the Peace”, whatever the hell that is. It would be enough of a hassle trying to do in a place where I was fluent in the language, but it might be even harder here. However, there’s this international exchange center that seems to do free consulting about immigration and things like that for foreigners, so I’m hoping they might be able to help me out.

After my shamisen lessonm, we had our last official dorm meeting of the year (although we’ll have one next Wednesday after we meet with Prof. Morita to talk about the future of the dorm). Unfortunately, Rambo was mad late because he was off at his first drum lesson. Afterwards we went and got some ramen from Tenichi (Tenka Ippin) which was so rich and delicious.

We were going to go to a sentou afterward, but it started raining. However, since Junpei came all the way out to the ramen place to meet us, we felt we should go somewhere, so we went to the shower in the student center nearby. There was really no point in going there when we had a shower back at the dorm, but we went any and it was really fun, although very homoerotic, since there were four of us and only three showers and one bottle of shampoo and toothpaste, so they ended up trying to attack each other with the toothpaste, which kind of burns your skin and gets stuck in your hair and won’t come out. But, that’s one thing I really like about these ryousei, is that they have a kind of “let’s have fun with stupid things” attitude, like when we played hide and seek, and the most boring things can be fun with them.

Unfortunately, the late dorm meeting and ramen and shower ruined my plans to go to bed nice and early and get up well rested but early tomorrow and get lots done. It was worth it, though.

Kumano

I just got back from Kumano, and it was amazing. This picture probably sums it up the best.

But, anyway, back to Saturday:

Sawa headed off on Saturday back to Yokohama, where she’s taking the second part of the United Nations English exam, having an interview with this visiting documentary filmmaker from the States. If everything goes well, she’ll get this job translating and researching for him. Unfortunately, that means that she’ll have to stay up in Yokohama for up to a month. It’ll be pretty lonely, but it should be a great experience for her, and it might end up being good for me anyway to make me have to fend for myself more. I think I really have to just go for it and get some tickets to Asia and wander around and do cool things. I’m worried because I don’t know how to go about doing that, but I think the key is to just go for it and see what happens. I will try to do a little research and figure out what’ll be best, though.

Anyway, in the morning I picked up some delicious bakery stuff from Eze Bleu and made some delicious coffee, then we went to Watabe Wedding to try on our Japanese-stye wedding stuff. Sawa ended up going with this really cool kimono that suited her very well, and I got this really sweet hakama that’s “Mt. Fuji style” – it’s wide at the bottom and thins in to the waist, and is blue at the bottom and fades up to white at the top, just like the snow on Mt. Fuji. It’s gonna be pretty sweet getting to wear that AND change into a tuxedo.

After that, we said goodbye and I headed off to meet Kimura-san to drive off to Kumano and Sawa headed off to Yokohama.

In the car we listened to a lot of music – some of my picks and some of his – and talked a lot about music. He had some really cool CDs, including this cool one of Okinawan music. Okinawan music and culture in general seems really cool and different from mainland Japan. Sawa and I have been talking about trying to gothere after our wedding.

It took about 5 hours to get there, and we stopped at an onsen when we got there, so it was about 8pm by the time we arrived. I actually didn’t know where we were going when we left, just that we were going to Kumano, but it turned out we were going to this temple where this crazy crazy monk lives. It’s the same place the students went to on the Empower trip back in Novemeber that I really wanted to go on but missed out, so it worked out great!

This monk was so crazy.

(Although he is a monk and has a very hippy philosophy, he also really likes North Face…go figure)

He was really really nice and incredibly fun to hang out with, but he was very demanding too. He loves to talk and apparently he talks about crazy things and his ay of talking is very hard to follow. Not only that, but he likes to ask interesting questions and demands interesting responses, so if I don’t understand his questions or can’t think of a good response, I feel like I’ve failed and wasn’t cool enough for him, so it was kind of tiring trying to concentrate and follow him. He was also pretty arrogant (in a good, joking way, but still arrogant) and was always saying how good the food was we were eating. He was really excited about everything, which is awesome, but it was hard to keep up the excitement and constantly raise everything and be excited all the time. It makes me want to work on my Japanese so next time I meet him I’ll be able to understand him better. I think he has a lot of amazing things to say.

It was really an amazing place, though. Basically we spent the whole time eating, drinking, enjoying nature, praying, making food, singing, talking, bathing, cleaning and sleeping, usually some combination of the above at the same time. I don’t think most monks drink alcohol, but this one certainly does. He also grows and makes all kinds of his own food (rice, vegetables, mushrooms, makes his own pickles, etc.) so we went and picked mushrooms and vegetables and then made delicious food from them.

A couple of times a day he put on his cool monk robes and we went to the temple part and lit candles and prayed and did some improvised singing and he blew on his conch shell. The monk loves gospel and jazz and he encouraged us to improvise and sing around the prayer song he sang. It was so much fun. It was just like the singing we did a lot in the Zumbyes at rehearsals or when we’re just hanging out and want to sing, or when I was cleaning the dorms and we sang while we cleaned.

On the second day, after waking up and doing some cleaning, Kimura and I grabbed our shamisens and the conch shell and some snacks and went on an hour-long hike up to this amazing rocky outlook. I learned how to blow the conch shell – it was an amazing feeling. (Here’s Kimura blowing it)

Just blowing into this shell produces such a powerful sound it shakes the rock. Blowing it and looking up to the hill on the other side of the valley I felt like some kind of soldier from an old army or Lord of the Rings or something, signaling to the regiment up on the other hill to begin the attack.

We also busted out our shamisen (actually, my shamisen and his sanshin) and played and sang, and ate the delicious mamemochi we brought. It was pretty much perfect.

This morning we headed out after a delicious breakfast. On the way back we stopped at this cool bay and wandered out onto the rocks. Unfortunately, it was a little too cool – it was freezing with the wind. It actually reminded me a lot of Wellington. But it was really cool and we played the shamisen and sang a little and ate a quick lunch of cheap chirashizushi we picked up at a road-side stand.

As we were driving back, we passed this huge scary-looking place that stretched on for miles and looked like Zion from the Matrix or something.

It turned out to be some kind of giant chemical factory or oil refinery. It was about as much of an opposite from Kumano as I could imagine and it looked so scary and awful. But, the strange thing is, more likely than not I may be using and enjoying the products that factory was making, and we might even have been using the very oil it was extracting to fuel our car to drive out to Kumano for our awesome time. What a strange world.

Afterwards, we went to his wife’s parents house to meet his wife and baby and had a delicious dinner with all of them, then came back to Kyoto. It was a really fun trip.

I was supposed to have my first utai lesson of the new year today, but because of the trip I got my teacher to change it to tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, with all the holidaying and traveling I haven’t managed to practice even once since my last lesson almost a month ago. Likewise with the shamisen (except for on this Kumano trip), for which I also have my first lesson of the new year tomorrow, so I’d better get to sleep so I can wake up early tomorrow and do a little practice.

Back in Kyoto

Sorry I once again failed to update for several days. I’ve been busy having lots of fun, as usual. I won’t be able to update for a couple of days again because I was just invited today on a two-night trip to Kumano with Kimura-san, the cool guy who I met randomly at Amherst several years ago and who lent me my shamisen. I don’t know exactly what the plan is, except that we’ll bring my shamisen and his sanshin and we’ll jam, and I’m sure whatever else we’ll do will be fun because he’s a really cool guy. Unfortunately, it means I’ll have to leave straight after Sawa and I try on our Japanese-style wedding clothes tomorrow and it will be kind of a hurried goodbye when she might not be back in a month if her interview goes well. However, that’s what it is, and we’ve spent so much time together these last few weeks it’s not too bad.

Anyway, here’s a day-by-day update of the last few days:

8/1
Sawa and I went on a day trip to Kamakura, a former military capital during the feudal period before the Shoguns unified Japan. It was good that we waited to go, because the weather the day before was not great, but it was amazingly warm the day we went. We went for a hike in the hills (the first I’ve been on for quite a while) and it was warm enough to just wear a T-shirt.

In addition to the hike, we saw the big, famous Buddha

and went to the big shrine. It was a very interesting blend of commercialism and tradition, encapsulated well in this vending machine where you can buy omikuji (fortunes for the new year)

That night, Sawa and I made dinner after many days of being spoiled by Sawa’s mum’s great cooking and being taken out to delicious dinners. We made our own Italian specialties: my eggplant & mozzarella pasta, Sawa’s garlic bread and my Caesar salad. They all turned out pretty well (especially the Caesar salad).

That night we took the night bus back to Kyoto for the first time. We were a little worried about it’s being sketchy, but the sketchiest thing about it was trying to find it: there’s a big not at all well-marked area with lots of buses randomly parked and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. Also, the toilet in the bus was so small I had to bend almost in half and I was pretty much wrapped up one wall and against the ceiling while I used it. Oh, and the heater was on ridiculously hot for some reason. Other than that, though, it was quite nice, and it was about 3 times cheaper than taking the bullet train. It would be especially useful for people traveling, because it simultaneously functions as transport and a night’s accommodation.

9/1:
After arriving back in Kyoto at 6am in the morning, we went back to sleep for a few hours, woke up and had a nice latte from our espresso machine for the first time in about two weeks. It was so sweet.

The final ryousei, Rambo, had returned from Canada a couple of days before, and I made him some coffee too and we chatted and I went with him to this cool ethnic instrument shop on Teramachi douri. He seems like a great guy, and I was very glad I was able to spend a lot of time with him when I first met him, because I felt a little bad when I didn’t spend so much time with the ryousei when I first arrived in Kyoto. Later that evening, Andre Deckrow also happened to randomly be in Kyoto, so he, Rambo, me and this other former Amherst House student Chinkovsky (don’t ask about all the weird nicknames…) all went to a café and chatted.

Afterwards, I finally graded my students’ Christmas raps (very cute) and got some good sleep (I’m trying to start the year off well and have a decent bedtime like I’ve been meaning to do. I want to get in the habit of sleeping around midnight and most importantly, using my alarm clock as a safety device and trying to just wake up naturally if possible.)

10/1:
We had our first English club meeting of the new year. Sadly, there were only me, Sawa and the two others who are always there (Takada-san and Fukushima-san). I think most of the others might not have remembered it was on, because I don’t think anyone sent out any emails… oh well, it was still fun.

Afterwards, we went to the wedding place to meet with the planner person and discuss lots of details. So many details! Honestly, I really don’t care that much about a lot of the small details, but fortunately Sawa does and she’s taking care of most of that stuff, while I’m going to worry about our American wedding celebration stuff, which is good, I think.

The other day, Junpei mentioned this cool photography exhibit of the “Best of the World Heritage Sites.” Since Sawa and I both would like to see lots of cool places in the world, we went to Osaka to check it out. It was really really cool, although I wouldn’t have gotten much out of it if Sawa wasn’t there to translate the captions and explain what was cool about all the places.

Afterwards we had delicious but overpriced drinks from a café in the department store and then met up with Reiko for Okonomiyaki dinner. Oh yeah, on the way out there I suddenly got a hankering for Haagen-Dazs and we had some to tied us over until dinner, but then after dinner Reiko suggested we go to Haagen-Dazs for dessert and I gladly had my second Haagen-Dazs of the day. The other day, Sawa’s friend Hiromi told us of what’s an apparently new word among Japanese youth: “hageru,” meaning “to eat Haagen-Dazs” (“hage” from “Haagen-Dazs” and “ru” being a usual verb ending). I think it’s a wonderful word, except that it also means “to become bald,”” which could be awkward if people get confused.

11/1:
Today was a pretty usual Friday. I taught my first class after the break. It was also my second to last class. Since for the final class I’m having them all present a short essay out loud (from memory), we spent today reviewing all the stuff we’ve done in the semester and showing them how I want them to try to frame their essay. I’m having them explain which movie they felt best used music to enhance the rest of the movie, and compare that with the ways at least one other movie used it. I’m not sure how well they’ll be able to do, because it’s kind of complicated, especially in a language they can’t speak that well, but they all seemed to be positive about it, kind of like “wow, that seems hard, but I think that from everything we’ve done so far I might be able to do it”, not “wow, that’s way too hard, what are you thinking, assigning us that?”. I guess we’ll see next week. Incidentally, since I didn’t give them any homework over the break (I hate it when professors give homework over breaks! It’s not a break if you have homework to do!) I don’t have to grade anything this week. Yes, everybody wins!

Apparently, my usual 1.5hr of peer mentoring isn’t needed during these last two weeks of classes, so I left early. Since Sawa’s heading back to Yokohama tomorrow, we decided to have a nabe party tonight, and I got back just in time to help Sawa with the shopping and preparations for that. We also made takoyaki (fried octopus balls). Here’s me chopping up an octopus.

It was really delicious and it was good fun to eat with everyone.

Having Rambo back now it feels like we’ve got a good critical mass and things have been very fun. After dinner we taught them how to play Celebrity, a great game Sawa and I loved back at Amherst. It worked very well. My team lost, so we had to do a “batsu geemu” (punishment) and we had to make a up a skit and it was all good fun.

There you have it. Now, I’m off to sleep.

Kanji stats and

So, the weather wasn’t really that great today and we slept in kind of late, so we decided to just gorogoro suru (laze around) today and it was great. We went to a cafe, where it was great to have coffee, but it was so smoky! Many cafes and karaoke places and whatnot are very smoky here, because people smoke a lot more than in the US or NZ, but more importantly because they haven’t banned indoor smoking. It’s one of those things where I never realized how nice it was to have smoke-free places until I came to a place where they don’t have them. It’s really annoying, and it gets stuck in your clothes and you smell like an ashtray for days.

We also watched “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, which I had never seen before, and it was very cute. I love how Jack is all excited about his Christmas plans, and then he fails horribly, and he’s just like “oh well, that was so much fun, and I don’t care that I failed, it was a great experience and now I’m excited to go do things I’m good at!” I hope I can follow his example and have such a positive attitude!

In the evening, we watched this programme called “kasou taishou” while we ate a delicious dinner. It’s a really cool programme they do I think two times a year where amateurs perform skits involving interesting costumes and props. Some of them are really good and really creative. I think the Zumbyes could get a lot of inspiration for our own skits from watching it.

Today I had a strong urge to quantify/analyze data since I’ve come to Japan, like tracking the number of kanji I’ve learnt over time, or my weight, and my spending, and even see if any of them correlate. I actually didn’t have the motivation to do it, but I think I might try once I’m back in Kyoto. It is nearing the point where I get my second lump sum Fellowship payment, so I think it’d be good to take a look at how I’ve been spending my money and think about if and how I should adjust that for the rest of the year.

Just to update, I put on a little weight since I dropped 9kgs (I think I was especially skinny then because I had been sick and didn’t have much appetite), so now I’m back to 74/75kgs – about the weight I was four years ago when I left NZ, 5 kgs lighter than when I came to Japan, but 4kgs heavier than my skinniest point in Japan a month or two ago.

Also, I did finally count the number of kanji I know the other day. I know (or should know with a little revision) 1362 kanji out of the 1945 jouyou kanji (those officially approved by the Ministry of Education as the ones people should know, after which people should put furigana above the kanji to make the reading clear). It took me 1900 words on my own study list to reach this, so given that I started methodically at kanji #342 (after shoring that up with 192 supplementary words), it works out that learning five words on my list on average translates to learning roughly three kanji ((1900-192)/(1362-342)) = 1708/1020 = 1.7 : 1. Based on this figure, I went back and calculated my progress learning kanji since I started my current program with Tawa-sensei 1st semester of my senior year. Here’s the resulting graph:

For some reason it was surprisingly fun to do graphs and numbers again.

Hopefully sometime soon I’ll get the chance to analyze my finances so far.

Anyway, tomorrow we’re actually gonna try to go to Kamakura, so I’m gonna get some sleep. Oyasumi!

Singing and meat

Today we made up for our early morning at Tsukiji with a nice 11 -12 hourish sleep. After a relaxed morning, we went to karaoke with Sawa’s friend Mana and Mana’s friend Jason, who’s in Yokohama for a year at this language programme. It’s the same one Jeff and Andre (Amherst grads we hung out with for a little in Kyoto) are going too, and it sounds like the kind of thing that, if I feel like I need to learn more formally and can get a Fellowship, would be very worth doing at some point.

Sawa’s dad and Mana’s dad also joined us for the first half of the karaoke. Mana’s dad is a professional bass player and singer, so it was quite impressive to hear him. It turns out that enka style singing is really popular in Japan for pretty much everyone over the age of 30 or so (probably half of the singers at the kouhaku utagassen sang enka), and Mana’s dad was really good at it. It was a lot of fun, but my voice started struggling after an hour and a half or so. I’m still glad I quit the chorus, but I should really make sure I do more singing on my own to keep my voice in shape. I think I want to make myself a playlist on iTunes of songs that I want to sing for karaoke, so I can practice them and also so I remember which ones I want to sing, because whenever I’m in the karaoke room I always forget what songs I’ve been wanting to sing, and I always end up singing the same ones.

After karaoke, we went to a yakiniku place Mana used to work at, and it was amazing – even better than the Kyoto ones we went to. After that we went to an izakay for some drinks, talked about a lot of random stuff, including kendo, which Mana and Jason are very passionate about, and then headed back. Tomorrow we’re planning to go on a day trip to Kamakura, providing the weather holds up.

Markets

Today we woke up at 4:30am to catch the first train out to Tsukiji, the fish market in Tokyo where the best sushi in the world is. We were going to take William to Daiwa sushi as I said last post, but when we arrived there it was closed, and after standing in line for the other great sushi place next door and finding that it would be a FIVE HOUR WAIT we decided to find a sushi place a little further from the main tsukiji market. Apparently there were a number of contributing factors for the huge lines: Daiwa sushi was still closed, it was the first day Tsukiji was open for the new year (one tuna sold for over ¥6,000,000 or around $60,000!!), so there were lots of visitors and they had nothing in stock other than the freshest catch of the day. Also, being just after New Year’s, there were a lot of tourists. I’ve never seen so many foreigners anywhere in Japan!

Anyway, the other place we went to was still delicious and fresh.

After that, we walked through the market, which is really cool because it’s so bad-ass – there are all these flatbed motorcarts zooming around almost running you over

and people slicing up giant tuna and live crabs moving around in their trays and fish blood all over the floor. It really makes me wish I could have a go at al the different stuff and actually learn how the fish I eat gets from the sea into my mouth.

The rest of the day was supposed to be a family day with Sawa’s parents to enjoy the last weekend of leisure before the new working year started back up in full force. After returning to Yokohama, we went on a visit to a very different kind of market, one even more foreign and frightening to me… a shopping mall trip to go clothes shopping. I’ve been meaning to get a nice jacket for a while and Sawa and her mum were excited about helping me get one. Basically, me and Sawa’s dad were just dragged along in the jets-stream of women on a shopping mission, and I was glad, because they picked out a good jacket and if I had been forced to try alone I would’ve melted down in the middle of the mall and cried, because I become crippled by fear and indecision when forced to buy the smallest things, like toothpaste. Here’s my in my slick new jacket and sweater.

Afterwards, we had delicious ice cream at this sort of Cold Stone-like place that uses Japanese ingredients. I had them mash in green tea, shirotama (mochi balls) and azuki for a delicious ice cream.

I had been feeling kind of Japanese-fooded out with all the sushi and New Year’s osechiryouri, so it was pleasant to go to an Italian restaurant with lots of olive oil and then some delicious coffee to finish it off. Sweet.

Afterwards, we went to a nearby super sentou place, kind of a mix between a sentou and an onsen, which was awesome and had all kinds of cool, different luxurious bathing opportunities, like the ganbanyoku where you lie on your back in a kind of mild sauna for about half an hour and kind of space out and sweat out toxins in a much more mellow manner than a sauna. Also, there were two saunas. I went in the one where you rubbed your body with salt. I don’t know what it does, but it just felt bad-ass to do it. And of course, it was great to have the usual iced coffee afterwards. We actually randomly ran into Sawa’s friend’s family. I’ve only met her once, and we were planning to meet up with her again tomorrow, and then randomly we ran into her and her entire family just as we were entering. Her father was very nice and explained cool onsen stuff to me, like the salt place. It’s very weird meeting people for the first time when you’re naked, but it’s also kind of cool and makes it feel more real.

When we got back we watched the second part of the double-header of Nodame Cantabile, the Japanese soap opera about classical music that we watched a little of last night. It’s pretty cheesey, but cool. I think it’ll be good for me to watch more TV – I think I’m starting to get to the point where I can follow things enough to start enjoying them and have them not just be a chore.

OK, these posts have been getting really long, I think I need to try to chill out from now on. Thanks if you read this far. Now to catch up on the sleep I missed out on last night!

Tokyo sightseeing

Sorry I wasn’t able to update my blog yesterday. I thought I’d have a lot of free time to do all kinds of things on my own while in Yokohama, but we’ve actually ended up being somewhat busy visiting Sawa’s family and doing sightseeing and eating good food and stuff. This is a very good thing.

3/1:

Yesterday, the morning was actually very relaxed – we just caught up on sleep, had a delicious breakfast including this s’more croissant

and watched some of Sawa’s old home videos from her performances in Disney musicals in primary school. She was so cute as a little Zazu and Radcliffe!

We left around 3 or 4pm for a very early dinner with Sawa’s aunt and cousin on her father’s side I hadn’t yet met (except the aunt very briefly).

We had sushi (for the second night in a row, after not having any for a month or so!) at this amazing sushi place. They also had nabe (soup in a pot), where I tried anglerfish for the first time. Interesting, but the toro and other sushi were better.

Afterward, we went back to their a little cluttered but very cute home, had some tea, coffee and stuff and chatted. Sawa’s aunt is a very interesting character, sometimes very strange, like when she basically ordered me to eat the shrimp she put out despite my protests that I was very full from the big dinner we had just had, but her heart is in the right place.

When we got back, we watched some of this cool karaoke show where they have people try to sing the most popular karaoke songs from their youth (chosen at random) without lyrics. Then, we watched the Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney), because I’d only seen it once when I was little and we had been thinking about it. Some of the themes and the story was very interesting, but the songs just weren’t as catchy as Disney’s golden era ones, and it just felt a lot more forced and less free than the older ones. So sad.

In the evening, I finally started thinking about the wedding planning stuff again – Sawa was working on wedding invitations and I finally thought of the best way to organize our combined family/friend get-together in May and not miss the Zumbyes’ alumni concert: have the party before and then go with everyone to the concert.

4/1:
Today we went into Tokyo and met up with William, who’s visiting Tokyo for a couple of days. We went to Akihabara first, where I’ve never actually been before. It’s famous as the centre of otaku culture, which is kind of weird and creepy and based on unhealthy obsessions with anime, manga, computer games and strange fetishes. It’s too bad that that’s one of the main ways that Japanese culture is being conveyed to the rest of the world.

In that vein, we went to a maid café for lunch. Maid cafes just got popular within the last year or two, and I guess the idea is that it’s kind of an ego-pleasing fetishey set up where the scenario is that you’re the master (“goshujinsama”) of some place and you have fairly scantily dressed maids welcoming you home (“okaerinasai”) and serving you, and even girls dressed as boys (“garcon”) as your chefs. In the abstract, this sounds really creepy, but in fact, other than the maid costumes, which were kind of a mixture between French maid outfits and schoolgirl outfits and anime clothes, it seemed a lot like any other café. The other thing that was different was that there were certain more expensive items on the menu that they would do extra service things for you, like blow on your food to cool it off and then feed it to you. There were also some “challenge” things. For example, one guy had to try to drink a big pitcher of beer before the maid downed a small glass of iced tea. If he won, he got to take a picture with the maid (you’re not allowed to take pictures otherwise, hence the lack of photos here), but if he lost she would slap him. Fortunately for him, he won, but I was amazed.

For myself, I tried to do the “pancake challenge”, where I had to eat a stack of pancakes in less than 5 minutes without drinking any water. It seemed double until I had a few bites and realized how friggin dry those pancakes were! My challenge didn’t have a slapping component, except for the metaphorical slap of the extra price (about twice the price it would’ve been otherwise). I kind of wished I did though – it would’ve been a better story, and I needed some kind of closure!

After that, we went to the much more upscale Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi, where I went last month with Sawa’s family. It’s very “oshare” (classy) – we noticed a strange pattern on the floor (less than a year old) and realized it was all the impressions from thousands, maybe millions of high heels. We saw this cool art exhibit on the theme of “water”. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised lately by the speed with which environmentalism has changed from a fringe, “hippy” movement to something that everyone suddenly is passionate about and businesses compete to show who’s the most environmentally conscious, and upscale places like thishave environmentally themed art exhibitions! Some of it was very pretentious, but some was very cool, and at least the whole idea was a positive one.

Finally, we went to Yokohama, where we walked around Chinatown and had some delicious food. It was my first visit to a Chinatown anywhere in the world, and I was surprised by how much cleaner and more organized it was than I had imagined. Apparently, that is really unique to this Japanese version.

Anyway, I have to get to sleep, since we’re getting up at the ungodly hour of 4:30am tomorrow to go take William to Daiwa sushi a the Tsukiji fish market, this amazing place we found out about in June when we came with the Zumbyes and has made even the best sushi I’ve had since in Japan taste only so-so. So, for now, that’s what it is.

Sawa’s grandma scares the crap out of me

Today we went on a trip down to Kyushu and back to visit Sawa’ grandmother again. I’m pretty sure it’s the first time I’ve ever flown somewhere and back on the same day.

We had to get up really early (5am) and had a long trip down there and back for only an hour or so with Sawa’s grandma, but it was very good to see her again. Apparently, last time she had been very much not her usual self and Sawa was quite worried, but apparently it was the after-effects of a fever and this time she seemed much healthier and sharper. A little too sharp, really, because although last time she seemed not to have any issues with our marriage plans, this time she seemed a little scary. She was telling me not to try any funny business and saying that it was a little soon after graduating for us to be getting married. However, I’m glad she’s feeling better, and I don’t think she really is that upset, she’s just a very frank person (apparently). Still, it was kind of scary, especially since I couldn’t quite understand everything she was saying but didn’t want to show it too much.

Anyway, it was good to see her, and we walked around a little bit. Kyushu is very beautiful, lots of pretty coast and remnants of old volcanoes (it’s very volcanically active, hence it’s famous for its hot springs). There was this cool old castle that you could actually see very well from Sawa’s grandma’s window in the hospital!

On the way back, we had an amazing sushi meal at the station of fresh, local, seasonal sushi, including my first taste of fugu (blowfish) (but not the poisonous, expensive, kills you if you eat it wrong kind – that’s just the liver, apparently). It was incredible.

It was especially good because, although the vegetables and tofu and stuff in Kyoto is really delicious, it’s hard to get good, fresh seafood there.

New Year’s in Japan!

Here are a couple of late photos:

(late Christmas dinner with Sawa’s family)

(dinner with Sawa’s old high school friends)

For New Year’s Eve, yesterday Sawa, her parents and I went to her grandparents’ house.

The best way to describe New Year’s Eve in Japan is as a healthier version of Thanksgiving. In both cases, all the family get together, eat a whole lot of food, then watch TV. However, in Japan, all the food is much healthier (although not quite as satisfying to pig out on, I must say, although it is delicious), and each little dish has its own symbolism. Also, instead of going into a food coma and watching football, the family all watch the kouhaku utagassen, an end-of-the-year all-star sing-off between the white (guys) and red (girls) teams. (I continue to be amazed by how boys and girls in Japan are like oil and water – even during the middle of the show the men moved into the living room to watch it while sitting in the horikotatsu – an amazing invention like the kotatsu that’s so awesome in my dorm, but it has a sunken area in the floor so you can sit in it comfortably.)

I had been looking forward to this for a while, and it didn’t disappoint in how interesting it was. It was a tad disappointing as far as the quality of some of the singers, but I don’t really watch that many pop competitions in the US or NZ and I’m sure that the phenomenon of pop singers who are much more about the image than the singing is just as common in the West. There were a lot of really awesome singers, though. My favourite was this guy named Kiyoshi Hikawa who sang this cool fishermen folk song. There was also this woman named Youko Nagayama who sang a really cool enka song and accompanied herself on the tsugaru jamisen, a cooler variant of the shamisen that became very popular recently with the Yoshida brothers. I think I might try to learn that style soon as I get better at the kouta style I’m learning.

Another highlight was Masaaki Akigawa singing “sen no kaze ni” (“into a thousand winds”). I’ve heard this song everywhere since I’ve been in Japan and assumed it was a classic old song, but apparently it was actually quite recent. I’m not sure if it’s true, but apparently it was written by someone who died in Sep. 11. Anyway, it’s a cool song and blew everyone away.

The other interesting part was this song by a guy called “Gackt” who also plays a samurai in a television drama. For some reason, he performed this death-metalish song with all these samurai images and thousands of people dressed as samurai chanting and rocking out. It was like a scene from Lord of the Rings, except with samurai instead of Orcs. It was pretty impressive, but it was also like “what the hell is going on?”

This morning, after a delicious breakfast of left-over sechi ryouri (just like left-over turkey) and ozouni, we went for a hatsumoude (the first visit to the shrine of the new year). Everyone does this, and we were lucky in that we only had to wait for about 20-30 minutes to get into the shrine, it can be as much as a couple hours at really famous shrines. Everyone goes in, rings the bell and prays for good fortune in the new year and also buys some lucky charm things to bring good fortune and also the chance to win some lottery prize things. I messed up the bowing-bell ringing-bowing-clapping-praying pattern despite having practiced it – I just got too excited when it was my turn to ring the bell and rang it straight away. Hopefully I didn’t ruin my luck for the year.

In the afternoon we got into the horikotatsu and they taught me how to play mah-jong. The team of me and Sawa (actually just Sawa, occasionally using me as a puppet) cleaned up thanks to a couple of lucky hands.

In the evening we went to a fabuluous Chinese restaurant on the 68th floor of the Landmark tower in Yokohama. We arrived just as the sunset was at its most gorgeous and got to enjoy a delicious meal with this gorgeous view in the background.

I also got some otoshidama (New Year’s gift money), so I’m really being spoiled way too much. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I want to use this amazingly free time I have right now to travel while I have the freedom, so Sawa and I might put our otoshidama toward that.