(Whoops, I thought I had published this on July 1st, but somehow only saved it as a draft)
Haha, I’m finally up-to-date with my blog, so much so that I’m updating it twice on the same day, once in the morning and once at night!
Today my shamisen lesson was good. I’ve just started working on the two pieces I’m going to play at this big recital next month – one on the koto and one singing while playing the shamisen. Since I’m running low on funds I might have to call it quits for my lessons after that, but we’ll see how it goes and how my job situation is.
Afterwards I did some errands that made me feel very productive: I paid my health insurance and got my brand-new spouse visa! Oh, and it turned out that my mum couldn’t make it to Kyoto in time to move into her new place because of some delays on her work, so I had to clean up my room so she could crash there tonight. This was good, as I had been meaning to do that anyway and it was a good incentive.
So, after that it was time for me and Sawa to meet Mum at Kyoto station. We had a tasty dinner at this Japanese-style spaghetti restaurant in Kyoto station for the first time in ages, then I got mum settled into my room and she crashed. The ryosei and some other students from Richards House were having a barbecuey thing on the veranda, so I hung out with them for a little while and then went back to Sawa’s place.
Over some tea and gomatamago souvenirs that Mum got us, we talked about our plans for the future for the first time in a little while. I realized there’s one major issue with my becoming a professor, which is that it might make it very hard for me to get a job in Japan if me and Sawa want to be there for a while. One idea that seems like it could be the best to keep that option open and not compromise too much on my career goals is to do a Masters on something related to Japanese music in Japan at a Japanese university. This would be pretty challenging to do in Japanese, but I think manageable, and could be the only way I’d really force myself to bring my Japanese to the level I’d need it to be to do work as a professor in Japan.
There are so many options and possibilities for what to do in the next few months and years it’s quite daunting to figure them out, but his certainly could be a possibility. Whatever happens later, I realized that although my Japanese has improved a lot, Ive started getting complacent and not pushing myself to improve as much as I should be, so I think I want to focus a lot on that for the rest of the Fellowship and up at least until I take the 1st level Japanese Proficiency Test in December. Me and Sawa might try implementing a Japanese-speaking system again like we and tried and failed back at the very beginning of the Fellowship when my Japanese wasn’t nearly as good.
OK, that’s it for today, hopefully I’ll be back on a decent blogging schedule now, although I’ve certainly made that claim falsely many times in the past…
