Finally, a lazy Sunday

Today Loren and I had a low-key day, much needed after the last whirlwind week. After sleeping 10 hours to catch up, I took her to Demachi Imported Goods to show her where I get my beans and get our free coffee and snacks with beans, then showed her the amazing mochi at Futaba.

After that, we parted ways because I had to go see my Noh teacher, and she went exploring the hundreds of little stores on Teramachi Road. Unfortuantely, it was raining pretty heavily today, which made that less fun, but when she went to see the cherry blossom illumination at Nijo castle later in the evening, it was apparently really gorgeous. I had to spend the evening and afternoon on my own catching up with all this email and some wedding planning stuff I’d had to put off during our hectic sightseeing earlier in  the week. We did meet back up for dinner, though, where I took her to Katsu Katsu Ton Ton, which seemed to be just what she needed to warm up after the rain and cold.

Incidentally, seeing my Noh teacher was kind of strange. I had been under the impression she was going to introduce me to some friend who made statues of Buddhas, and I had originally been planning on bringing Loren, but thought today that it might end up just being a lot of Japanese she wouldn’t understand, so thought she’d be better off exploring on her own. This turned out to be a good idea. Contrary to my expectation, there was no Budda-making friend, but I talked with her and another of her students (a middle-aged guy) who apparently had been interested in talking to me about music and stuff. He was cool, though, and it was actually very interesting to see another person’s lesson, to see that a) I was actually learning the notation and technique well in comparison and b) he seemed to have as much or more trouble making my teacher understand/listen to him, so it made me feel relieved that it’s not that my Japanese sucks.

I swear my Noh teacher just doesn’t listen when I talk to her! There may be some hearing problem, but it really just seems like when I try to explain something, she either starts talking about something else in the middle, or mis-interprets what I’m saying half-way through and starts off on another path. I don’t know what it is, but it can be very frustrating and make me feel like my Japanese must suck, but it was nice to see that Japanese people have the same problem!

Loren arrives, seniors leave

Oh dear, I’m sorry I didn’t update this for an entire week, but things suddenly got crazy. Loren arrived last Sunday, and it’s been really a blast having her here and showing her all around, but it’s also been incredibly busy. What’s more, Sawa was back, we had to do weddings stuff, and the ryosei had their sotsuryou (dorm graduation) party the night Loren arrived and this morning Ikuruto and Nikyu moved out, so it went from being this laid-back lonely-ish time when I was just around mostly on my own to a sudden overflowing of events.

One thing I really wish I was better at was organizing things to minimize the times when I have competing obligations to spend time with people. I always inevitably end up trying my best to please everyone but feeling like I fail everyone. I think Loren and the ryosei and Sawa do all appreciate and understand that I’ve been trying to spend as much time as I can with them, but I still feel guilty about not being able to spend as much time with each as I really want to.

Anyway, there’s been way too much stuff going on and I have too much catching up on sleep to do a really in-depth update, so I’ll try to focus on the main events and themes and photos:

23/3:
Sunday was the sotsuryou party. I hadn’t helped out as much as I really should have with preparation, but I had been feeling like I had too much with the wedding and it was getting done without me volunteering. A bunch of old Amherst House alums came back, and it was great to meet them and have them all see off Ikuruto, Mashu and Nikyu in style.

Saturday evening they sat around chatting and catching up all night (I crashed around 2 or 3) and during that made up new lyrics to this song to sing.

It was a really fun and powerful ceremony, and it made me think how great it would’ve been too have lived in the Amherst House with everyone around, and how sad it’ll be with just me, Hayao and Ranbo here from now on.

That evening I met Sawa, then Loren at the train station. As soon as Loren arrived, we just threw her giant suitcase in the cab with us and got a cab to take us to this sento to meet the ryosei. (We also got her her first meal in Japan: ramen)

24/3:
This day Sawa and I had Loren come watch us try on our wedding clothes, then we mostly showed Loren around our favourite Kyoto places: Eze Bleu, Bimota, even climbed Daimonji at sunset.

Unfortunately, later on that same day the ryosei all went on their own trip up, but I couldn’t go because we had to plan the rest of Loren’s trip. It turned out the kabuki theatre I had hoped to take her to was beginning a month-long rest, but Loren did have the great idea of going to see a baseball game, and we managed to book tickets to the opening game of the Hanshin Tigers’ season for Friday!

25/3:
At noon, Loren came with me to my koto lesson, and afterwards we went to eat some delicious tofu stuff and check out the Kitano-Tenmangu craft fair, which was very cute. Afterwards we took Loren to see our wedding place, but then had to send her off on her own while we spent a couple of hours on wedding meetings (fortunately, they were very productive meetings).

That evening, Nikyu, Ikuruto, Aimo, Ranbo, Sawa and I all went out to karaoke. I wanted Loren to be able to come along, and I think she wanted to, but in the end I thought it wouldn’t be best because it was like the final chance to go out as a dorm group and things had been weird lately with Ikuruto being very distant. I really wanted to do a bonding thing with them, but it would have been hard enough to have an outsider come along even if they could speak the same language. It turned out that this was definitely the right move, and the karaoke was really an amazing, I want to say transcendent, experience, but one that couldn’t have happened if it weren’t just the ryosei around. (Not to mention that Loren was jet-lagged and we ended up staying up until past 5am!)

I’ve rarely seen music have more power to bring people together (except with the Zumbyes, I guess) – it started off fairly mundanely, but for whatever reason about two hours in Ikuruoto started dancing a little and people started getting pumped up and the next thing we knew we were all dancing around and screaming along with the songs and just in a kind of frenzy of energy, maybe as carthasis to direct all the powerful graduation emotions. I thought maybe after 20 minutes or so people would be good and would be ready to leave, but they kept on going at that intensity for over another 3 hours!

After we slept for about half an hour, poor Sawa had to jump onto a bullet train up to Tokyo to get to work by 1pm. (When she was drinking the coffee I made for her that morning she actually fell asleep in mid-sip and spilled coffee down her shirt!)

26/3:
To be honest, Thursday, Friday and today feel almost like a big blur of intense, fun sightseeing, with a lot of talking with Loren about Japan, random abstract things, and our own lives. It’s great talking with her because we have very similar interests and styles. Among other things, we constantly interrupt ourselves and each other as we think of new things, but are both very comfortable putting a thread on hold to pursue another and then returning after it’s done. We’ve been drinking a lot of tea, especially maccha, which I had always liked the idea of but had never actually drunk much. Now, I think I’ve developed a taste and might start drinking it instead of coffee as it gets too late to drink coffee without worrying about not sleeping.

The sakura started blooming a couple of days ago, so we’ve been enjoying their amazing beauty as we bike through the Imperial Palace, down the Kamogawa, along Kiyamachi road, and all over town.

In addition to showing Loren around Gion, central Kyoto and today, Fushimi (Fushimi Inari shrine and the Gekkeikan sake factory), we went to the Hanshin Tigers baseball game with Williiam on Friday night. Here’s us with our friend who gave us photocopied sheets with the official Hanshin tigers cheers (that’s such a Japanese way of organizing cheers).

Oh, and on Thursday we went to the English club (they managed to get Kazuya, Nishiguchi and Nakao back for the first time in a while, I guess because Loren was here)

and to my Noh lesson. Loren confirmed that Noh was in fact incredibly boring, but was interested to see Engrish in its production stage as we created my Noh teacher’s charmingly incorrect English translations.

Strangely enough we also got to have dinner with Sawa and her boss, because for whatever reason the day after she made her sleep-deprived way to Tokyo for work, her boss and her came back to Kyoto so they could shoot some footage in next-door Shiga prefecture the next day. We had a delicious Kyoto obanzai meal with Sawa and her boss and Loren, and it was nice getting to know him.

We also managed to make two of our own meals (plus some more miso soup and rice), including one with Hayao tonight. (Here’s the buta no shougayaki we made the other night, with sake Loren got while exploringon her own)

Today Ikuruto and Nikyu finally moved out, and it was very sad. I had so much fun with them, it’s gonna be so strange not having them around. Hayao was really lonely, as they left, Rambo had to suddenly go back to Nagoya because his grandfather became ill, Jiiko went back to her home in Yokohama, and I was hardly around because Loren and I were out sightseeing all the time. I had been meaning to hang out with him that evening anyway, since I’d been neglecting him and the other ryosei a little bit, which worked out well because he really wanted the company. We also invited him over for dinner, where he and Loren talked a little (they were actually able to communicate much better than I had expected) and we tried to fatten him up as he definitely needs.

Tomorrow we don’t have much scheduled, which is very good, because I really need to catch up on sleep and just give myself a rest from our break-neck sightseeing speed. I also have a huge amount of wedding/organizational stuff I really need to take care of.

That’s it for now – I think tomorrow I might try to get Loren to do a guest blog entry, so look out for that.

Graduation, karaoke, the mystery of the distant ryosei revealed

Last night I got back late from karaoke and was too tired to write my blog.

Yesterday morning we all got up early and went to take a pre-graduation photo with Nakano-san and Kooku-san outside of the Amherst Guest House.

The three graduates (Junpei (aka Ikuruto), Natsuko (aka Mashu) and Jun (aka Nikyuu))

Also, here’s me and Rambo with Sayak the day before.

She is wearing a hakama, as opposed to Mashu’s furisoude.

After that we left those three to their own graduations and post-graduation celebration with friends from their clubs and seminars, and I did my usual Nashinoki shrine/coffee/study/practice/more coffee thing, plus I went downtown to take care of some wedding stuff, and also set up this Facebook group to campaign for the Class of 2008 to vote Fujikawa-san an Honorary Class Member, although it seems like she’ll almost certainly not be well enough to actually go over there in person. I hope it works.

That evening Richards House had organized a final curry + karaoke party since many girls from there were also graduating or moving elsewhere.

The curry was amazing. I also talked with Sakura about what me and Rambo and Hayao had been talking about the other day about trying to work more next semester not just as individual dorms organizing things but have meeting as Full House sometimes and organize the events between all three dorms (and also to try to have everyone have a communal space to hang out in the Friend Peace House common room. In addition to just being a lot more fun, if we can build a big community here with a lot of interaction between Japanese students and exchange students, it’ll be good for Doshisha in general and help us argue to make Friend Peace House a permanent dorm.

After the curry party we went to karaoke and had an awesome time. I love karaoke.

People were getting really into it, too – Sayaka was dancing up a storm.

It’s a little conceited, but especially now that I’m not singing with the Zumbyes or any other official group, it’s nice to have a chance to sing in public sometimes and it feels good when people are impressed.

Today Aimo was here again and, as happens every time she’s back, she basically cleaned up the whole place for us, with a little bit of help once we realized she was doing it and felt bad. Other former ryosei are going to arrive later tonight and tomorrow for this “sotsuryou” (dorm graduation) party tomorrow, and they were all working on preparation, making signs, writing messages, etc. I managed to fit in my study and practice in a little bit between all the cleaning and preparations, but didn’t get to plan my revisd syllabus as I had hoped. Since Loren and Sawa are arriving tomorrow, and then it’ll get close to the wedding, I’m worried I won’t have much time to do a good job of it before I start teaching, but whatever, I’ll try to fit it in at some point.

While we were doing our preparations this evening, Rambo asked if I didn’t think that Junpei had been pretty distant lately. I was glad it wasn’t just me that had been feeling that, because pretty much ever since I got back from China I’d felt like there were only one or two times we’d really talked, and the more I tried to make small talk, offer him coffee, see if he wanted to do stuff, the more I felt like he didn’t want to hang out. I was worried maybe he was mad at me or something, but I think everyone seems to have felt the same, and that maybe it’s like a pre-graduation blues or something. Also, apparently he and Jiiko have been not talkling since she cancelled on coming on the ryo trip, which also explains a little why I haven’t seen Jiiko around much since then.

In general, it just hit me how different things in the dorm have been since that dorm trip. Till then we’d always be doing crazy events and going to sento and eating ramen and organizing stuff, but since then I’ve been traveling around a lot, Junpei and Nikyuu have been traveling around a lot, Hayao and Jiiko have been busy with shuukatsu (job-hunting), Mashu moved out and started her new job, and we haven’t been doing nearly as much stuff together. On the other hand, Rambo returned from Canada and he’s had a lot of free time, so I’ve ended up hanging out with him a lot. In fact, I’ve probably clicked the most with him, which is fortunate, since from next semester it looks like it’ll just be him, Hayao and me (with Jiiko still next door). It’s a little sad, but it makes me feel better to think that it’s mostly a product of everyone’s circumstances and not that relationships have. I think that next semester with a bunch of new students coming in and me, Rambo and Hayao making a big push to get everyone in the surrounding dorms to do stuff together and push Doshisha to let us make the Friend Peace House a permanent dorm, things will get more friendly as the new semester starts. Also, it might not be coincidence that it was just winter, and now as spring is just beginning everyone will just be getting naturally happier and more willing to frolic in the sun!

1st graduation

Last night after I wrote my blog I scanned a bunch of photos I’d been meaning to scan for a while, so here they are:

Photos of most of the peole in “Full House” (the Friend Peace House, Richards House and Hawaii House)

Group photos from our post-Christmas dorm trip

Photos from me and Marika’s joint “Welcome and Goodbye” party with the English Club

After I scanned those I hung out in the lounge for a while and went through a bunch of old photos to prepare a slide show for the wedding. Also, Jiiko came over and we all just kind of hung out and talked, which was nice.

Today was Nikyu’s graduation. We weren’t going to go, because we wouldn’t be able to see the actual ceremony or get much time to spend with him, but in the end, we went and managed to catch him as he came out. We picked up a dirty magazine from a local convenience store (there are heaps of them in Japan) and gave it to him as a graduation present while his friends were throwing him in the air. He then had to pose for a bunch of photos in front of his girlfriend and friends with it.

Tomorrow is Junpei and Mashu’s graduation, and we’re all going to go and take some photos together.

During the afternoon I again got about a half an hour of Japanese, half an hour of utai and half hour of koto in. Then Ranbo invited me to this dinner with Tatsumoto-san, and we went there and stayed for about 4 and a half hours. It was a little too long really – Tatsumoto-san can be very interesting but he can also get into little rants and keep talking for a long time. On the whole, though, it was delicious and fun, and it was good to see him and Nozawa-san (who I used to see every Friday at Doshisha) again, since I hadn’t seen them since the end of the semester. Throughout the long and pretty involved conversation I could understand most of the Japanese, which was quite a difference from when I first arrived and went to a barbecue at his place way back in October or so, but even so I spaced out for long intervals a few times. Oh, and I talked to Sawa on Skype, as I have usually been doing almost every night for a half an hour or so, although I sometimes forget to mention it.

All right, now for sleep, then an early start tomorrow for the graduation!

I got to sleep at 1am last night as I had hoped, but I guess my body still wants to catch up on sleep, so I didn’t get up till 11:30am. After about two hours to shower, go to the shrine, pick up some bread and korokke, make some breakfast and coffee, I did my hour of Japanese study and hour of Noh/koto practice.

Yesterday I got Fujikawa-san’s phone number from the Amherst Guest House and tried a couple of times with no success. I had mostly resigned myself to thinking that I couldn’t get in tough with her until she got in touch with the Guest House, but when I tried one more time today she had apparently just recently gotten back from the hospital. It was good to talk with her, although the news did not sound good. Apparently she’s still not in good enough condition to go out and meet people, and she didn’t make it sound like there was much hope she’d be getting much better any time soon. It’s really a worry, but unfortunately there’s not really much I can do except work hard on my own on the Amherst-Doshisha relation stuff that she’s always been so devoted to, try to organize for Amherst to at least recognize her, since it looks like she probably won’t be well enough to go in person, and just pray for her to get better.

Unfortunately, working on negotiations with Doshisha about the future of the Friend Peace House and the Fellowship looks like it’ll be a real challenge. They just keep making us go through bureaucratic hoops, and now won’t respond to my multiple emails and always keep asking for my time. It’s so infuriating. But I’ll play their game for now, but I’ll start amassing forces from those outside of Amherst and unleash them on Doshisha if they keep trying to drag their feet until it’s too late for us to bring new students into the dorm in September. If they refuse to respond even to all that, I think everyone is all for just taking over the Friend Peace House like they took over Amherst House a couple decades ago when Doshisha was trying to do the same kind of thing.

For the rest of the evening, I chatted with my friend Oli about his upcoming trip to Japan and booked a place for me and Sawa to stay on our wedding night, with a delicious break in between to go to Bimota with Hayao. (I was so proud to look up the booking and reserve it by phone all by myself!).

With my friend Loren coming for two weeks next week, me staying in Yokohama for about a week after she leaves, showing my family around for a week or two around the wedding, showing my friends from New Zealand around for another week after that, and going to America for two weeks, I’ll have almost no time in Kyoto on my own between now and mid-June! Once we get back from the States, Sawa’s job craziness will be finished and the craziness of our wedding and US wedding celebration will be done, then we can take stock and figure out the rest of the year and start looking into jobs and stuff for when we go back to New Zealand. Also, that’s when I need to start seriously booking gigs and organizing stuff for this tour of Japan me and Mike Kohls are going to do with our jazz band! Whew. I can’t imagine what it’d be like if I actually had a real job and was trying to do this! How did I ever manage to get anything done back at Amherst?

Nikyuu and Kazuki return

Last night after I wrote my blog Nikyuu and Kazuki got back from their two week trip to Europe (Kazuki is squatting with us for a few weeks till he graduates and starts his new job, as is Emily, an exchange student who’s going back to Canada soon). The dorm feels a little more homey now that they’re all back and around, since with Hayao out a lot doing job-hunting and Junpei strangely solitary and of course Sawa in Yokohama it’s been a little lonely lately.

I got to bed late (2am) hanging out with them and ended up sleeping until 11:30 because I still hadn’t caught up on my lack of sleep from the weekend. We had wanted to go to a sento, but it was getting too late and they were in too much of a not-moving mood. Once I got up, visited Nashinoki Shrine, made some miso soup and rice and coffee and finally got started on studying Japanese it was already 2pm, and after studying for an hour, doing some errands, drinking some more coffee and talking to my parents, the next thing I knew it was time to grab another delicious meal at Bimota and go to my koto lesson.

My koto lesson went very well. It’s really encouraging how quickly I can learn with just 30 minutes or an hour a day of regular practice.

It’s very exciting that my brother and mum are about to come to Japan in a few weeks for 6-month stays themselves. It’ll be great to hang out with them while they’re here.

When I got back from that, I did a little more work on wedding stuff and am now about to chat with Sawa and go to sleep. That’s pretty much it for today.

Reiko’s Wedding

Sorry I couldn’t update for a few days, but Sawa was back for the weekend and I wanted to spend as much time as I could with her in the two short days she was here. I think in the interests of space and time I’ll skim over the weekend a little faster than usual.

14/3:
In the morning I got my hour of Japanese study and 30 min of noh and 30 min of koto practice out of the way early so I’d be done and able to chill w Sawa when she arrived. I met her at the train station and we proceeded to rush around Kyoto trying to do all the things she had to do in the short time she was back. After a tiny rest to have some coffee and snuggle and eat delicious chocolates I got her for White Day (in Japan Valentine’s Day is for girls to give guys presents, then on March 14th the guys give them presents back – of course it was invented by chocolate companies) we rushed over to meet Daisy and William who had come into town for Reiko’s wedding the next day! (Daisy came from Hong Kong). We had a delicious obanzai (Kyoto food) dinner at Nanohana,

showed Daisy and Kana back to Sawa’s place and desperately figured out/practiced the songs we’d sing at Reiko’s wedding the next day. Sawa and I sang a duet of “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” (Lion King version) and Daisy, Sawa and sort of me sang Kiroro’s “Best Friend” with special new lyrics Daisy wrote.

Thoroughly exhausted, we went back to the Friend Peace House and went to bed at 3am, giving us a full three hours to sleep till we had to get up and get ready to go the wedding!

15/3:
I finally shaved my experimental two-week beard for the wedding. Still haven’t cut my hair since I arrived, though, as you can tell by its unruly, goofy appearance. I guess since I’ve gone this long, I may as well hold out until a week or two before the wedding, then I’d better get a good haircut or Sawa will kill me.

The wedding was really cool! Here are my best photos from the wedding. The last one is me with the prize I won from bingo at the nijikai (after-party with friends)

It was my first real, serious wedding ever (I went to my friend Ali’s brother’s wedding many years back, but it was a very casual, chill, more of like a beach party. It was actually great fun, and I want to do something along those lines to celebrate when we’re back in NZ, but this was a serious, formal wedding with vows and speeches and suits and fancy food and flowers and all that stuff. As I know personally now, weddings in Japan are so so expensive! The wedding industry knows how to milk their position as midwives of the most important ceremony in a person’s life that ideally everyone only goes through once. In Japan, the wedding is really expensive, and guests have to give really expensive money gifts (¥30,000 per person!) and then the people getting married give them BACK gifts. And with these wedding venues, it’s all or nothing They won’t let us have photographer friends take photos, or use our own dresses, or things like that. It’s pretty fiendish. Apparently there’s a word in Japanese – “kekkon binbou” that means the poverty that comes when you’re in your mid-twenties and all your friends get married and you have to go to all these expensive weddings.

However, for all the glitz and slight grudge I have against the wedding industry, the ceremony was really touching. Interestingly, towards they played this song that felt familiar but I couldn’t place, and I was filled with a powerful sense of nostalgia. I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I asked William and he told me that it was the song from the end credits of The Land Before Time! Then it all came back to me and I realized it was so powerful because I watched that movie so many times when I was a little kid and it was the first movie my parents ever took me to and it reminded me of how much they cared for me. (If you’re reading this, Mum and Dad, thanks! I love you! I really do appreciate all you’ve done for me!)

It worked out pretty nicely that this fell a month before me and Sawa’s, as it was the best possible way for us to figure out how to plan our own one!

16/3:
We got back around midnight the night before and crashed, exhausted from the 3 hours of sleep and the emotion of the wedding. Unfortunately, we had to get up at around 6am again to have time to make coffee and snuggle before she had to leave Kyoto once again to get to Itami where she had to be by 8 or 9am for filming for her work.

(Back in our last year at Amherst I came up with the greatest idea ever: Mandatory Snuggle Time. We were getting so stressed out with the intensity of senior year and could never find time during the day to just relax together without having other things to do, so we decided that every day, pretty much no matter what we’d get up an hour before we had to and I’d make coffee and play the opening song from Beauty and the Beast and we just snuggle in bed and drink coffee and talk and don’t worry about all the stuff we have to do later on. Sometimes we read Calvin & Hobbes or listen to stand-up comedy or whatever. It is the best part of every day.)

This new job of hers translating and coordinating and all-purpose assisting for this PBS documentary about the Japanese self-defence force is really awesome, but she’s getting a little over-loaded with the volume of the work and the lack of rest time. Then with her hard-won two days this weekend, she was busy the whole time with the wedding and everything and got even less sleep than usual! I hope she’ll get a reprieve toward the end of the week when the camera guy flies back to the States.

Anyway, I had no such obligation, and since it was Sunday I in fact had no obligations. I went to Nashinoki Shrine and got my water and made some coffee, then spent the rest of the day relaxing, drinking coffee, reading Musicophilia, playing a little guitar by the Kamogawa, having lunch with Kana and Daisy before they headed back to their respective cities to start work the next day. I also looked up a bunch more random music stuff on YouTube. I’m so amazed by what an awesome music listening/studying/watching/learning source it is, and that I never thought to use it to find and listen to music before. I can listen to cool random instruments I’ve never heard before, see performances of singers I’ve never seen, listen to songs to learn (which I had to do to sing Best Friend at Reiko’s wedding), look up classical pieces as they appear in the great but very classical-centric Musicophilia, put on random pieces in the background while I’m reading/hanging out, or whatever. I think when I get a chance soon I’ll put my thesis recording up there so other people can listen to it, now that it’s been taken off my obscure old thesis site.

17/3:
Today was back to my usual routine. Since I had actually practiced every day except Saturday (the wedding) and Sunday (my Sabbath) for the first time in a long time, I was pleasantly surprised by how much better I was than usual and how much more I got out of the lesson. I definitely want to keep it up. After I got back I did my hour of Japanese study and 50 minutes of koto practice.

After that I started making some headway on a plan I thought of on Sunday: getting Fujikawa-san to be voted an Honorary Member of the Class of 2008 and get her a flight to Amherst for the ceremony, since she’s devoted her life to improving the relations between Amherst and Doshisha and has never even been there herself. It’s especially important to me now that she’s in such poor health and might not be able to go for much longer. It’s actually a plan Marika suggested way back in June, but I never got around to looking at the details and had not been sure of what to do about the funding. The other day I realized, though, that even if we cant convince the school to pay for it (which is quite likely), we can just raise money from people who think it’s a worthwhile cause, and get the Zumbyes who experienced her awesomeness to use concerts to raise money. And fortunately, I have a large lump of money from my Fellowship, which I can use to guarantee we can have the funds and hope to get reimbursed for from other fundraising. Even if I don’t make any back through fundraising, though, I would be happy to donate it to this cause and just work as a host or something to make the money back. I can’t think of a better use to put Amherst-Doshisha Fellowship money for than for Fujikawa-san, who – despite it not being her job at all – was essentially the de facto coordinator of the Amherst Fellowship and Nijima Scholarship while the Doshisha Administration pretty much seemed to neglect the programmes. There are two weeks till the Class of ’08 votes for Honorary Class Members, so for now I’ll just try to use my connections at Amherst and lobby for people to vote for Fujikawa-san. Facebook is great for this kind of thing.

(I used to be pretty skeptical about Facebook at first, but now that I’m away from Amherst and all my New Zealand friends are joining, I love it. It’s so great to keep in touch with friends and organize things (like my thesis) and get contact info and things like that.)

Oh, and today I went to Bimota for the first time since Thursday (if you can believe it) and it was like a drowning man getting a breath of air. It was heavenly.

Coffee party

Last night after I wrote my blog, I also chatted with Sawa on Skype and decided to get my taxes over with after Mum reminded me that I did in fact have to do them despite not being in the States. Note to self: don’t use Complete Tax again because after offering it free for people under $50,000 for the first year, they sneakily added a minimum income eligibility cut-off in a way that makes you not notice it till you’ve spent two hours filling it out and it’s no longer worth saving the $25 to go through a whole new hassle getting another free service.

Today I woke up at 8:30, did my morning Nashinoki Shrine routine and then studied for and took a new kanji quiz for the first time in over a month. It feels good to be back on track with my Japanese study, since in the end Japanese is really the most important tangible skill I want to get out of this year.

I went to the English Club lunch as usual – again there was only myself, Takada-san and Fukushima-san. There’s no club next week because it’s a holiday (shunbun no hi – the vernal equinox), then the week after Loren will come along. They’re going to try to revitalize the slack members to get them to come along for when Loren comes.

After lunch I practiced noh for 30 minutes and koto for 30 minutes, and spent another hour each on wedding/nijikai stuff and email/errands. Oh, and while I was enjoying a coffee break, I realized (late, I know) what an amazing resource YouTube is for learning about music. a) you can listen to almost any song for free without having to buy or even hunt it down, and b) it has video, so you can see the them perform, which as I’ve said is something I think is important and missed out when people try to study music. I’m so used to just listening, I often don’t even know what some of my favourite singers look like, let alone how they perform. Among other things, I watched this kick-ass video of Stevie Wonder performing Superstition on Sesame Street. That show was so amazing.

Tonight we also had the first inter-dorm get-together I organized. (Here’s the poster I made – after Ranbo corrected my mistakes and gave me an incredibly harsh 85/100 for a couple of minor mistakes.

It was a coffee/hot chocolate/maccha latte party and all the girls from Richards brought delicious sweets they baked.

It was a lot of fun, although for the second time everyone bailed out on going to karaoke. Instead they went to Daimonji, which I kind of wanted to do, but in the end I bailed out partly to be able to chat with Sawa, but also because it started raining and it was a little chillly I was just a little tired.

My globe continues to be a popular conversation starter. I put my favourite playlist of random music I really like but isn’t necessarily always appropriate for any given occasion. People were weirded out when “When David Heard” – a 12-minute intense modern choral piece that occasionally sounded, in the words of the new American exchange student Derrick “like Satan was about to exlode out of the speakers” – but I didn’t know how to stop it without interrupting the photo slide show. However, I was vindicated when after the final notes died out, the opening riff of “Super Freak” came on and of course I had to start dancing around, because as I mentioned before it’s impossible not to dance to that song.

Chill day

I’m writing this earlier than usual (9:30pm rather than last thing before I go to sleep) because I always end up staying up later than intend to writing my blog, and I figure there won’t be much difference between writing around 9 or 10pm every night and writing before I go to sleep.

I got a bunch of photos from Junpei of our plum blossom viewing trip that are much better than mine, so here are three of them:

(Mashu posing for surreptitious photos while I was chatting with a Spanish professor I often see at Doshisha.)

Biking through gosho (the imperial palace) is awesome… except that the gravel can be a little slippery. Sawa nailed herself once trying to turn too sharply and skidding out.

Today was another day of normal routine: I got in an hour of Japanese study, 30 minutes of utai practice, 30 minutes of koto pratice, and about 2 hours of running errands and catching up with emails. I had to plan this coffee party thing tomorrow, which I did, including drawing some posters up in Japanese and taping them to the other dorms, and stocking up on coffee beans and milk. In the morning, I talked with Loren about some logistics for her upcoming trip to visit me in Japan in a week and a half. I’m so excited! It’ll be great to see her again, and it’ll be great to show her all these cool Japanese places and things I’ve learned. Plus, it’ll be a good excuse for me to do some more adventurous sightseeing than I’ve been doing in my daily life.

After we talked I also spent a while compiling a little crash course in Japanese for her. I think for learning Japanese, getting the pronunciation right from the beginning is key. That’s definitely been my thought about my Japanese students learning English: a lot of them know decently how to speak Japanese in theory, but their terrible pronuncation makes them not be understood and lose confidence in their ability. Also, of course, they don’t get enough practice listening or speaking. Next semester I’m planning to focus more on pronunciation and the aural aspects of English and music, and use that as the unifying theme of the rest of the course and focusing more on having them write small but correct dialogues and emphasize more practicing them in pairs rather than having them do written assignments.

After only having left over rice and miso soup for breakfast, rice WITH miso plus some toast (I decided not to add miso this time), I was ready for some delicious meat from Bimota for dinner. Hayao has lately also gotten into Bimota and he came to ask me if I wanted to go just as I was about to go ask him. He is really really skinny and doesn’t have much money, mostly subsisting on convenience store food he gets for free from his work, which is really nutritionally poor, so I’m glad he’s digging Bimota too.

I am so white

Here’s a photo from the Richards House get-together last week.

That reminds me that I promised to organize a coffee and sweet things party for Thursday night. Crap, better do that tomorrow.

Today I woke up at 11:30 after going to bed at around 2:30, continuing my general cycle for the last week or two of sleeping too much one day, then not being able to sleep because I’m too well rested and have too much coffee, then sleeping too much because I’m sleep-deprived, and so on.

I woke up and went to Bimota with Andre (my second meal there in a row). It was delicious, of course, and fun talking with him. It’s refreshing to talk with someone other than Sawa about intellectual things in English. I explained my plan to revolutionalize music study by creating a unified theory of music and a worldwide classificatory tree of musical styles and cultures. (That reminds me: I recently had an idea of how to go about doing my plan of creating a program that automatically translates a sound file into a musical notation system: you can make a simple, sheet-music-like graph by graphing frequency of the fundamental tone(s) on the y axis (on a logarhythmic scale so that note intervals are linear) and time on the y axis. This would give a pattern effectively the same as sheet music, but with a lot more subtlety in terms of subtle pitch and rhythm factors. Then, if you really waned to get complicated, you could add a z-axis that has amplitude to show dynamics, at which point you could really get complicated by showing not only the fundamental frequencies but all the overtones and all their varying intensities. It would look pretty chaotic at first, but you could probably learn really interesting things about the nature of the different sounds, and if you got good at reading them it could become just like a super-detailed piece of sheet music.

Anyway, Andre told me about this amazing blog: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like/ In most repsects it absolutely has my number, and it’s embarrassing to see my true nature so bluntly revealed for me. I think the great thing about it is that it puts the cross-hairs over a huge group of white people who are trying to escape the hillbilly/shopping mall/fast food kind of low-class/lower-middle class whiteness by embracing post-colonialism, diversity, other cultures, local food and authenticity, but are in fact all creating a new demagrophic of upper-middle class whiteness. I read the one about Japan (#58) and just couldn’t stop laughing because it was as if it was specifically about me, complete with my teaching English, liking Miyazaki Hayao but avoiding association with otaku anime, saying how I’m spoiled by authentic Japanese food and will complain annoyingly once I leave.

From their article #11 (Asian Girls) I was directed to this site, which is apparently the “definitive article on interracial dating” http://www.isteve.com/IsLoveColorblind.htm
I have long been fascinated with this question, for obvious reasons. He claims that white women are attracted to black men and white men to Asian women because they have the most “masculine” and “feminine” body features respectively, as represented by height, female hair length (this seemed a little dubious), and muscle-body fat ratios. Although there are a lot of cultural factors to consider, I think he’s on point in that cultural factors generally are created from these kinds of biological facts.

After lunch I only had about 4 hours till I had to go meet some people from the chorus I quit back in December for some food and drinks before some of them graduate. In that time I practiced noh for 30 minutes (it feels good to do a little every day: in addition to being something I’m trying to study, it’s similar to the kind of speak-singing exercises I used to do for my voice training anyway), went to the Amherst Guest House to check some wedding details, and practiced my shamisen at the Kamogawa (it was another beautiful day).

If anyone is looking for a way to pick up Japanese girls, playing the shamisen on the banks of the Kamogawa river is the way to go. I only practiced for about 30 minutes, but in that time 6 girls came up (in three separate groups) and took photos of me, or talked to me, or got me to take a photo with them. Also, two old ladies came up to me and had a loud conversation about the shamisen while standing right next to me while I was playing. I was focusing on playing so I wasn’t sure what specifically they were saying. These two photos were taken by this one random girl and she offered to send them to me. I somehow ended up getting her phone number without even trying to or wanting to, that’s how well the playing-shamisen-by-the-Kamogawa-river technique works!

The get-together with the chorus people was fun.

I was glad there wasn’t any awkwardness about the fact that I quit.

Sweet Sabbath

9/3: So, again I didn’t update yesterday because it was my Sabbath. And what a glorious Sabbath it was. It was pretty much exactly the kind I wanted to have (except that Sawa wasn’t there): the weather was suddenly beautiful and spring-like after being really cold for a long time, I woke up late, went to Nashinoki Shrine to give thanks and take water, made French toast for everyone for the first time in a long time

Drank a bunch of coffee, went to Kitano Tenmanguu and the Imperial Palace next door to see the plum blossoms,

ate mamemochi and korokke and drank a beer while playing my shamisen and sitting by myself and watching the sun set from this spot on the bank of the Kamogawa river.

And to top it all off, I went to Bimota with Mashu!

It was especially great to do French toast and go to see the plum blossoms after not doing a lot of group stuff with the ryosei lately, especially Ikuruto (Junpei). Since he and Nikyuu got girlfriends and are about to graduate, I think they’re less interested in spending their last remaining weeks as college students than enjoying their time with their old friends and new girlfriends before the endless working life of the Japanese businessman begins. But it was great to hang out with him today, and have Mashu back after she’d moved out to start her new job last month.

I was thinking what a perfect location I have at the Friend Peace House. It’s a 10-15 minute bike ride from the centre of Kyoto, a 5-10 minute walk from the two main subway lines. Even closer, the Imperial Palace is like a 1 minute walk to the west, one of the nicest spots on the Kamogawa river is a 5 minute walk to the east, and Nashinoki shrine with its 3rd best water in Kyoto is a 1-minute walk to the south (kind of upside-down feng shui…?) Then of course, a 2-minute walk to the north are Bimota and Eze Bleu, with a 24-hour convenience store, Katsu Katsu Ton Ton and Demachi Imported Goods, where I buy coffee beans 100g at a time for 300¥ a pop, which gives me not only the coffee beans but a free cup of coffee and all the free mints and biscuits and truffles I can snack on while I drink the coffee without feeling like too horrible and bloated a person. I can’t believe what a sweet deal I have. Oh yeah, and Futaba, who’s mamemochi is the most famous in Kyoto, is a 5-minute walk to the North/East, as is the Demachi arcade, with its amazing local stores like the tofu place with its cheap, delicious korokke and tofu.

10/3:
Now that I got my translation and Zumbyes arrangement taken care of and relaxed on my Sabbath, I started with my schedule today. It actually worked great: I got a lot done and I didn’t feel stressed about it all, nor did I feel guilty about doing unproductive things when I did them during my break times.

The only kind of bad thing the night before was that with all my sleep and coffee I again was up late, till 5am, but I was reading Oliver Sacks’ “Musicophilia” and it was fun and interesting, so it wasn’t too bad. It was tough getting up at 8:30am, but I did, went to the shrine for my prayer + water, successfully made my rice and miso soup (the miso soup was especially great).

Then Jiiko came over for coffee before we both had to head out at 10:30.

My Noh lesson was good, although I really need to start doing more practice. I can easily get away without doing any and in fact if I do practice hard sometimes I don’t get a chance to try it and see what my teacher thinks, but I should do it because I want to learn more. She may be not the greatest teacher, but it is really nice of her to do it and just have me help check her simple English translations in return. Also, she keeps making me more and more elaborate lunches for free. I vauely recall hearing that sometimes Japanese people, rather than gradually being ruder and ruder till you get the hint and leave them alone, actually get nicer and nicer until you get the hint. I can’t tell if maybe that’s happening. But if it is, I’ll just play my gaijin card and not feel bad because I didn’t recognize it.

After I got back I worked for 2 hours on wedding stuff, then took an hour break to drink coffee, read the New York Times and briefly play the piano downstairs (reminding me that it’s not in good shape to play pieces you want to actually sound pretty).

After that, I praticed the koto and shamisen for 30 minutes each, started going through my huge pile of email I’ve been putting off replying to for a while and spent two hours on that, with a break to go to Bimota with Hayao.

Then, in the evening, Andre Deckrow came around and we spent most of the rest of the evening hanging out talking about politics – global and Japanese, and all the various economic and environmental and cultural factors underlying the chosen topics. Andre, like me, likes to think about these, as does Junpei, so we talked for like 2 or 3 hours. I would never have thought a month or two after I arrived that I could possibly have a conversation about those kinds of things for as long as we did in Japanese. Granted, I spaced out a few times and sometimes missed some phrases, but I generally followed and contributed to the whole thing.

So yeah, it felt good to follow my schedule, so I’ll try to do the same tomorrow.

Finished arranging

I’m constantly amused by all the hilarious English in Japan, but this is pretty ridiculous by anyone’s standards:

Oh, and here’s a photo of me, Rambo, and his friend Okumura playing tennis yesterday:

Unfortunately, it’s almost 3am, because I’ve been up finishing my arrangement for the Zumbyes. I spent pretty much the whole day on it, with a break for 2 or 3 hours to go have yakitori for dinner with Rambo, Rambo’s friend Kume, and Mariko, then meet with Mashu, grab some snacks and Haagen-Dazs and beer from a combini and enjoy them back at the Friend Peace House.

The yakitori was great. It was at this cool little local place that fit about 8 people on Marutamachi Road a little more or less than a block East of Kawabata Road (this is for myself so I can find it again, in case people reading this from New Zealand or the States wonder why I’m telling them about random street information).

That’s it for today. I’m very glad I finally did this arrangement for the Zumbyes, and I think it’s gonna sound quite pretty. I wish I could actually be there when they perform it, but they should record it later in the year for the new CD, and perhaps I can get them to sing it when I’m back at Amherst in May. Now that I’m done with that and that translation editing, I can restart my program and get moving on wedding stuff and whatnot. But first, I will have a day of rest tomorrow and make French toast and go see plum blossoms with Mashu and Rambo and hopefully go to Bimota with Mashu if it’s not closed on Sundays…

Praying to protons

This morning I started what I think will be a new start-of-the-day ritual: walking the three minutes down to Nashinoki Shrine, praying at the shrine and filling up a 2-litre bottle with it’s delicious spring water. I felt like it would be a good thing for me to do, especially since I’m taking their water for free, and I like nature a lot and was reading this article on Thoughts of Amherst about neo-paganism and it all kind of combined to make me think it would be a good idea. Also, I think it will make me appreciate the bounty of nature, and I can think of it scientifically (water would have to be the most important element to pray too). I also sort of mentally gave thanks to all the protons and electrons and neutrons that were responsible for all the elements, making it a sort of sciencey religion, or religioney science. I think that getting some fresh water every morning and praying at the shrine will make me feel like I’m starting off the day healthily and at one with nature. Then when I pick up some food and go back to my dorm I can start the day of with a cup of coffee made with that tasty water instead of the tap water.

After I got back from that and getting some food from Eze Bleu I invited Mariko from next door over and I had coffee with her, Ranbo and Hayao. We talked for a while and my new globe turns out to be a pretty good conversation lubricant – we’d start talking about something or some place and then find it on the globe and that would lead to something else, or we’d talk about places we want to go or whatever.

I spent about 4 hours on my Zumbyes arrangement, and actually mostly finished the basic note stuff. I’ll probably spend quite a while tomorrow working out the final copy and adding dynamics and getting it all notated, but I think it should sound pretty cool. In between the arranging I retrieved the miso and rice and left-over ingredients from Sawa’s fridge and brought them to the Friend Peace House. I’ve been feeling like I’ve been spending too much money on bakery food and lunch, so I want to start making a day’s worth of rice and miso soup every morning, then just have toast and buy enough okazu (side dishes to go with rice and miso soup) to have a delicious and healthy day, but without spending quite so much on everything. I still want to go to Bimota pretty much every day I don’t have other dinner plans, though. I think that way I can reduce my food bill from around ¥1700 on a day I don’t have any free meals down to probably around ¥1100  or ¥1200 (just an estimate).

Today, rather than get MOS burger or something like that for lunch I got some bread from Eze Bleu and experimented with eating it with butter and miso. It was actually really good. It sort of has a vegemite-y taste, but if I remember vegemite right this is much better.
Also in between the arranging, I went with Ranbo and his friend Okumura to this public tennis court on the Kamogawa river (next to Kitayama road) and we played for an hour or so. It was a lot of fun and it felt great to be exercising for the first time in a while, in the fresh air and right next to the river, no less. I want to go a lot more, especially now that the weather looks like it’s about to start getting nice and head towards spring.

Mashu was visiting the dorm tonight. She moved out last month to her new apartment in Shiga to start her new job, but is here for the weekend. Apparently, her new job really sucks. In general, I just can’t believe how much time Japanese people have to spend at their companies. It’s like once they start working, that is their life. Nikyuu already couldn’t get out of his job to come to our wedding (which is on a Saturday). Even Hayao and Jiiko say they can’t know whether they can make it because they’re hunting for jobs right now and apparently the companies can tell them come anywhere at almost any time for an interview and they just have to do it. I really don’t think I could deal with having a company own my life like that.

Bad news x 2

For some reason I again had trouble sleeping till around 3am, so I woke up at 11 and had to go pretty much straight to my English Club lunch. This week again it was only me, Takada-san and Fukushima-san, confirming that pretty much all the people who’d been in and out last semester seemed to have stopped coming. It makes me a little sad – am I really that boring that I drove them all away? But it’s still fun talking with Takada-san and Fukushima-san. Today, Takada-san asked me to write a 1,000 word article about my China trip for his next addition of the “English Club News” and also invited me to some dinner in a few weeks with some former club members. Little does he know I already posted 5,605 words and thirty-something pictures about it, so that shouldn’t be a problem!

Afterwards I biked all around town doing some errands like buying a new shamisen string and book. I learned half of the lesson I learned in China that I should value my ability to call the store and ask them how to get there, which I did while I was looking for the tiny out-of-the-way music shop. I failed, however, to remember the more important lesson, which is that I should call before going to make sure there’s a need for me to go. So it turned out that one store I went to was closed on Thursdays (why Thursdays?!) and at first it looked like the music store I biked for about 40 minutes to get to didn’t have the music I wanted (she found it after all). I need to remember this for the future, though.

While I was downtown I experienced a horror almost too much to bear…: Haagen-Dazs appears to have stopped selling coffee ice cream! Before I could at least get it at the Haagen-Dazs store, but now they’ve taken away my favourite food since I was 6! The ice cream was still delicious, but it wasn’t a brief glimpse of heaven like it usually is.

When I returned, I spent about five hours doing editing this translation for my friend Alec. I think I learned some of what Sawa has to go through in her work: it’s incredibly frustrating editing/translating when the original work is very poorly written. You try to make it presentable, but there’s only so much you can do, and in fact the better you try to make the writing by removing all the BS and strings of prepositional phrases, the worse it looks because you’re exposing the fact the sentence is in fact not saying anything much at all. I feel like I could have saved everyone involved much time by just crossing out the whole thing and telling the Hyogo Prefectural government who will be receiving the report not to bother reading it and to commission another study with the time they save or something, but that’s not really what Alec wants me to do. (It’s not his fault, it’s the original Japanese that’s the problem)

In the middle of all that Alec came over, because Ranbo had offered to make us motsunabe for dinner. It turned out that in true student style the motsunabe was going to consist of a little pig colon and a LOOOT of cabbage, but after throwing in some radish, taro and spring onion from the fridge (better not to wonder about how long it’d been there) and throwing in some udon at the end it was actually pretty good).

While we were eating the nabe and watching TV I had another unhappy surpise: this black guy who’s name appears to be “Jello” (it’s written in Japanese as “jero”) completely stole my game and then some. I thought that if I do get to appear on “nodo jiman taikai” (an American Idol-like programme that’s been running in Japan for a long time) and sing this enka song in Japanese it’d be really impressive as a gaijin, but Jello has apparently become very famous recently by singing enka. Not only does he sing enka, but he sings it in full hip-hop regalia and adds his own hip-hop dance moves. (http://youtube.com/watch?v=YEmeVeQe56U) And, to make things worse, I think he got his start by appearing on Nodo Jiman Taikai! How am I supposed to compete with that? (Come to think of it, this is probably how Hilary Clinton’s been feeling lately…)

Oh yeah, I realized that I actually can’t really start the schedule I laid out yesterday until I finished editing the translation (done) and arranging the Zumbyes arrangement (I really should finish by Saturday and will probably need to spend most of tomorrow and Saturday on it to do so). Then Sunday is my Sabbath, so I might not be able to start for real until Monday…

Tentative schedule

Last night I had the same problem I had a month or two of too much luxury: I tried to sleep at 2am but couldn’t go to sleep till around 4:30am because I slept too late and was generally too well rested and had drunk too much coffee. However, I decided that rather than let myself sleep even later and make the problem worse, I’d wake up at 9am, make myself sleepy and get to bed at a decent hour tonight and get on a healthy schedule.

I had also hoped to see Nikyuu off on his two-year trip to Europe, but for some reason he left earlier than I had thought, so it didn’t work out. When I got up, though, Hayao and two former Amherst House ryosei who moved out when they were kicked out of the Amherst House last year came around to record short video stuff about the three graduating ryosei to compile into a video to show at the sotsuryou party (dorm leaving party). I also recorded one of me making coffee and reflecting on my good memories of them. It’ll be pretty sad when they leave and there’s only me, Hayao and Rambo left in the Friend House and Jiiko next door in Richards House. Hopefully if we can make headway with the administration we’ll try to get them to let us admit new members soon, but time is running out and I have the feeling they won’t let us do that.

Today was pretty much like the last couple in that I had no actual obligations. I did my hour of Japanese in the morning and about 45 minutes of practicing koto and noh (I couldn’t practice shamisen because I haven’t fixed the string yet).

I was going to go into town to buy that string and do a bunch of other errands, but suddenly it started snowing pretty heavily out of nowhere and I decided to just stay inside and do other things. I finished sending off the last of the wedding invitations, talked to my parents and figured out almost all the accommodation for when my family is around for the wedding and the week after, and arranged another chunk of that song for the Zumbyes, and had another heavenly dinner at Bimota. I love that place.

I do think, though, that when my friend Loren comes it’ll probably be a good chance for me to do some cooking again. She loves cooking and it’d be good for me to have someone to cook for and with. I’m also considering making a big batch of miso soup and rice every morning to get me through the day with a minimum of buying too much other stuff, maybe eating dinner out once a day (Bimota Bimota Bimota) but not buying breakfast at Eze Bleu almost every morning and getting lunch out at MOS burger or Tenka Ippin ramen like I often do (especially since Eze Bleu hiked up their prices significantly a few weeks back because of the rising cost of flour, probably due to the global economic woes and possibly Australia’s environmental problems…)
Anyway, I proscratinated significantly less and got more done today than I have been (I’ve been reading the New York Times online pretty compulsively, along with looking stuff up on Wikipedia and looking up random things on my cool new globe), and I feel like I’ve had a good enough period of lounging around after my China trip to give myself a more disciplined schedule.

I think that if I set myself three 2-hr-ish chunks of time where I will solidly get things done that I want to do (Japanese, music practice, wedding planning, other emails and errands) and reward myself with breaks to drink coffee and read/screw around without feeling guilty I’ll be more efficient and feel less guilty about my ridiculously luxurious life. That kind of thing worked very well for me during my senior year when I had to make myself make progress and get other long-term things done like planning the Japan trip…

OK, I’ve made myself a little daily schedule and will post it here and I’ll see how I do following it:

9am: wake up
9-10: shower, breakfast, (fill water from Nashinoki shrine?), coffee
10-11: Japanese
11-12:30: music (30-min each noh, koto, shamisen)
12:30-1:30 lunch/coffee
1:30-3: work on wedding stuff
3-4: work on other errands/emails/etc
4-5:coffee break
5-7: Zumbyes arranging
7 on: one last coffee, dinner, whatever I want for the rest of the evening, except for:
10-11/11:30: chat with Sawa, write my blog and update my budget

My food/coffee breaks include doing whatever else I feel like, and I will save my procrastinating stuff for those times and once I’m done with my day’s “work”.

Ideally, I won’t use an alarm clock, I’ll just try to get my body into the habit of going to bed around 1am and wake up around 9am, and I’ll just move the schedule forward or back if I wake up earlier or later.

Maybe I’ll try this for a week and see how I do. I’m going to try to finish the Zumbyes arrangement by Sunday at the latest, so I’ll need to revise it after that anyway, but that’ll be a good chance to check to see how it’s going so far. Tomorrow will be a little different because my friend Alec asked me to edit something he’s translating (he’s paying me) and I felt like I should do it, so that’ll take up 4 or 5 hours, probably.

Back to the daily routine

Today I restarted my old routine of studying Japanese for an hour and practicing music for an hour every day, for the first time in about a month. It felt very good, although I couldn’t practice shamisen because a string broke as I was tuning it. But I did practice my koto for the first time on my own.

Before I wasn’t terribly excited about playing the koto, just thought I may as well because my teacher happens to be great at it, but now that I’ve started it’s actually quite a groovy little instrument. It has a lot of the ability to play chord/arpeggio things of the piano, but the more interesting timbral sounds of plucking and picking strings. Best of all, it’s kind of as if you could reach into the piano and modulate the strings to give them vibrato and bend their pitches slightly, which adds a lot of beauty and subtlety to it. Also, it’s quite easy to learn, so I think I’ll be able to come along quite a ways just in my remaining months (wow, I can’t believe I’ve already been here for 6 months!)

In the evening I had my lesson, where we did the koto since I couldn’t practice shamisen and I had more to learn on the koto.

I woke up pretty late today (around noon) and so ended up only having lunch and dinner. I went to meet Kishida-san at the Residential Life office to discuss some more details about my English class I’ll be teaching down the road. Afterwards, I had a cheap curry rice lunch at the Kanbaikan restaurant for 500 yen. For dinner, I had my beloved Bimota, and although it was 150 more, the difference in quality and overall satisfaction was like night and day. I still maintain that, although you can certainly get by with dinners that are less than Bimota, I don’t know if there are any other places that have such good quality and balanced, nutritious meals as Bimota for anything like Bimota’s price. Bimota Bimota Bimota. I love Bimota.

I asked the guy who runs Bimota (it’s just him, and only 7 people can fit in there at a time) to cater the lunch we’re having for family the day after the wedding, but unfortunately he can’t do it. Oh well, I’ll be able to find someone else. I really wanted him to do it, though.. ☹

In between, I did a little more work on arranging this song for the Zumbyes on the piano downstairs. It’s been so long since I did any composing or arranging, it feels kind of nice to be at it again. It’s taking a little longer than I had hoped, though… I hope I can finish it within another couple of days. Throughout, I made myself and the ryosei three or four cups of coffee each. Cups of coffee are a major way I divide up my time and reward myself for getting a chunk of stuff done on days when I don’t have any firm activities scheduled. In the evening I talked with Sawa on Skype (Skype is so awesome!) and cleaned up my room. I got everything sorted out and cleared out all the trash, but I’ll have to finish arranging everything tomorrow.

As you can see, everything’s kind of calm and settling back into a mellow schedule after all the hectic excitedness of the traveling period. I do have a lot of stuff to do, though, especially planning the wedding stuff and finishing this Zumbyes arrangement and try to work out some resolution for this Amherst Fellow/dorm future situation (I’m waiting to hear back from the people I emailed the other day) and a whole bunch of little errands and correspondence I’ve been meaning to do for a while, so I’m hoping to gradually get through it all over the next few days. We’ll see how well I’ll be able to do that.

Oh, Junpei left the other day to go on a bike trip to Shikoku for a few days, and Rambo left today to go home for two days, and Nikyuu’s leaving tomorrow for a two week graduation trip to Europe, so it’ll be just Hayao and me in the dorm for a few days. Hayao’s really busy with his shuushoku katsudou (job application) stuff, and of course Sawa is back in Yokohama, so it’ll be a little lonely, but hopefully that’ll make it easier for me to focus on plowing through all this stuff.

Dinners

Sorry I didn’t write yesterday, I was out late-ish with the ryosei and was too sleepy.

The night before yesterday I ended up going to a sento with the ryosei after I wrote my blog and got back late and for some reason didn’t get to sleep until around 3am. Oh yeah, that’s right, I think I was talking to Greg about this Zumbyes arrangement I’m finally going to do of Teru no uta. It should be pretty… Since I didn’t get much sleep the night before I ended up sleeping till around 1pm, decided to kind of just lounge around in the afternoon and enjoy the sweetness of a lazy Sunday.

At 7 o’clock I went off with the ryosei to eat yakiniku with a bunch of people from one of the other dorms. Eating heaps and heaps of grilled meat and drinking lots of beer and meeting new people was all pretty awesome. Afterwards, some people wanted to go to karaoke, which I was so down for, but then somehow this one guy ended up being egged on to profess his love to this girl over the phone and then everyone decided to go to this girls’ dorm and visit her and I guess meet lots of girls and have a good time.

As always happens with these things, the idea is much rosier than the actual experience. When we finally got there, it turned out the girl wasn’t there after all and there weren’t lots of girls around wanting to have crazy parties, there was just one acquaintance of one guy who had a cold and everyone kind of awkwardly piled into her room and I felt really bad about imposing on her and everyone looked a little sheepish. Then the first guy called the girl again and said something like he was sorry he didn’t’ really mean it or something. I really didn’t quite understand, but when I asked the ryosei they said they didn’t understand either. It was all very strange and anticlimactic, but it recalled many other similar adventures back at Amherst and it felt comforting to be able to still have those kind of experiences.

When we took a long break at the Friend Peace House on our way over we hung out in Jiiko’s room and all piled on the bed and looked at old photos of their life at Amherst House in 2004 with Andy Xue.

Seeing all 10 or 15 students there and Ueda-san making them food and all the fun they seemed to be having made me really wish I could be living there now. As fun as it is here now with 4 other students, I can only imagine how much more fun it would be with 3 times as many people in that awesome building. Sigh…

When I got back I chatted with my my Kane-Levit relatives back in the States about various plans for wedding stuff, in Japan and the States and went to sleep.

Today I woke up at 8:30, had some Eze Bleu for breakfast and practiced utai for the first time in many weeks at the last minute before my 11am lesson.

Today was “hina matsuri”, some kind of festival which isn’t too big and somehow seems to involve dressing up dolls and eating food. When I looked it up on Wikipedia, I found out that the biggest related event apparently is this thing where they float little dolls down the river starting from Shimogamo Shrine, which is like a 5-minute bike ride from my dorm. Unfortunately, they did this right when my noh lesson was, so although I went there after my lesson was over, I was too late for that. I did see a couple of dolls that couldn’t’ overcome the intertia needed to start their downstream travel, though:

After that, I did a few chores – returning my library book, confirming some accommodation reservations at the Amherst Guest House and sending in my postcard to apply for the Nodo Jiman Taikai – a kind of lower key version of American Idol in Japan. Unfortunately, I delayed for too long and they were supposed to actually receive it by today, and the Japanese tend to be pretty rigid about rules and stuff so I think I might not be able to get in. That’s OK, though, because I wanted to sing a duet with Sawa and she was too busy to do it at the end of March, so maybe there’ll be another opportunity later on when she’s less busy.

In the evening the Richard’s Hosue people had a little dinner party, which was cool just to see everyone and chat together. We were supposed to go to karaoke afterwards but only a few of us had the money and desire to go, so we ended up not going. We did decide to have a coffee, tea and cake party next week and to definitely do karaoke after that, though.

After that, I got back and was going to get some more stuff done, but there was this interesting programme on TV about the world of Japanese ホスト (host’s). I’m seriously considering trying to become a host as a temporary part-time job once all the wedding hecticness settles down, partly just so I can say that I did it and have some interesting stories and partly because, as some speaker was saying, it’s good experience to have a part-time job in Japan, to learn the language and the culture, and the world of host’s would be a very interesting culture to see.

Basically, it’s a place where girls come to drink with guys who are good-looking and nice to them and flatter them – kind of modern-day reverse geisha. I don’t think I’m that good-looking or anything, but being a foreigner in Japan is often a plus and I think the novelty of a white guy who can speak Japanese might appeal to people. It might be a little weird, but I think it’d just be a really interesting thing to try out for a little while and actually see what it’s like, then move on.

Amherst dinner

This morning Sawa headed back to Yokohama. After enjoying our last morning together for about two weeks snuggling and eating Eze Bleu and drinking coffee, I saw her off at the train station and then relaxed back at the dorm over several bowls of coffee, brought my new globe into the common room and finished going through the Smithsonian Global Sound’s brief overview of world music (US and Carribbean music). I was struck by one thing I hadn’t fully realized before: pretty much all music that’s popular in the mainstream today is a direct descendant of the blues, through either jazz, rock or R&B.

In the evening, I went off to the Amherst Alumni get-together Reiko had organized. I biked down the Kamogawa river to get there and saw noticeably more people out there than a month or two ago. You can feel that winter’s just about over and soon itll quickly get nice and awesome. Spring is supposed to be the best season in Japan… apparently all the cherry trees along the Kamogawa river are in full bloom and it’ll be great. I really want to grab my musical instruments and set up on the Kamogawa and have a great time playing and enjoying the weather, maybe meeting some people…

It was great to get together with everyone again. Here’s a photo at the end of the dinner. Morita-sensei looks like quite a baller with his fat stack of cash

Cooking again!

Actually, after I wrote my blog last night Sawa and I were hanging out in the common room and we had a great casual chat with the ryosei, which was especially nice after the dinner being so strangely awkward. Guess it must have just been a random weird vibe at dinner.

Sawa finally finished the biggest chunk of her work yesterday, so this morning we were able to sleep late and have a nice relaxing morning eating delicious Eze Bleu pastries and drinking coffee and looking at my China photos. In the afternoon she had to do some work and get packed to go back to Yokohama tomorrow morning, so while she did that I wrote an email to Jared Diamond asking about potentially doing research with him and took care of various other emails and whatnot.

Since Sawa was busy working and I hadn’t cooked in a long time, I took this last chance to cook for her and made this meal.

It felt good to cook again for the first time in a long time, and to go shopping in the local market. Also to have a nice hot bath and drink tea and watch a movie (Persepolis – very weird and dark…) It did remind me, though, how long it takes to do all the shopping and cooking and cleaning. Not including the gas and cookin facilities or the value of my time, just the ingredients for the meal still cost about ¥550/600 per person, compared to Bimota’s 650!