Apologies

 My actual blog post is going to be delayed, I’m afraid. EDIT: However, I have already posted photos of the Nara trip sans comments to Flickr and one video file of the deer to YouTube, and I will soon add the rest of the movies of the deer and our trip with Pastor Takeshi. I have finally figured out how to correctly convert the video files (I think), so I’ll try to update the Shinsaibashi clips, as well. Moreover, I have finished commenting on the pictures of the Kyoto trip to Kiyomizu Temple, and I have added some pictures of campus and examples of men’s fashion from a local clothing store. I’m getting sick again, so I ask for your patience. Thank you.

First week, etc.

Well, ladies and gents, I’m very sorry to have kept you all waiting for over a week for a new post, but I’ve finally got the time and energy. In all fairness, though, I’ve been searching for media hosting sites and uploading videos and photos for you throughout last week, so I don’t feel too bad for not posting until now. Anyway, this past week has been absolutely crazy. I can’t tell you every detail, but I’ll try to hit the high points. Now that I have homework every night, I won’t be able to make posts as long as I used to. Thankfully, now that the first week of classes has finished, there won’t be too much that’s terribly new or interesting to relate. I’ve pretty much gotten all of the major issues covered, I think.

So, classes:

Spoken Japanese 3 (Takayashiki), MTWRF, 50 min.
Reading/Writing Japanese 3 (Kawahara), MWR, 50 min.
Japan-China: Problems in Historical and Cultural Interactions (Scott), MR, 80 min.
Japanese Art in the Kansai Area (Swanson), WF, 80 min.

Total: 14 credit hours

I have spoken Japanese every day in the mornings, at 10 a.m. every day except Thursday, when it’s 9 a.m. Reading and writing is just three days a week at 11 a.m. (10 a.m. on Thursday). Other classes are in the afternoon, 4:00-5:20 p.m. So, I have something each day, but Tuesdays are my easy days because I only have spoken class in the morning. I like the schedule, really. I don’t have to wake up until 8 a.m. (7 on Thursdays), and I have plenty of free time in the middle of the day to do whatever I need to do, especially homework or running downtown for something or getting groceries or watching a movie in the library or whatever.

Spoken Japanese is definitely my favorite class. Takayashiki-sensei is awesome! He’s hilarious! And he’s really a good teacher. For example, today he brought in a purse-ish thing with lots of objects in it to help us practice transitive/intransitive verbs, which worked very well, especially for a visual learner like me. He is very active and mobile, demonstrating verbs and adverbs and such physically, and usually in a humorous way. He gives us lots of handouts with exercises in class, all of which I save because they’ll be great ways to practice for the tests. Anyway, it’s lots of fun, and I feel like I am learning a lot.

Reading/writing isn’t so much fun, but I am definitely learning a lot there. Kawahara-sensei is very… staid. She is a fairly good teacher, but not very charismatic. The thing I like most about her is her handouts. The first day of class, she gave us lists of all the kanji in the book with the compounds we have to memorize for the vocabulary tests AND lists of all the grammar points in the book, including particle functions. Wow. Talk about a major resource! I have wished forever for something like this! I’m very impressed with the Japanese instruction here, overall. They really know what they’re doing. Oh, they’ve definitely got us working hard–at least an hour every night and frequent quizzes, plus language lab assignments where you actually record your voice into the computer and send it to your professor for evaluation. It’s worth it, though.

Japan-China relations is a blast! Prof. Scott is wonderful, very animated in his voice and manner, and a proficient phrase-turner. We’re getting into the nitty-gritty of Japanese vs. Chinese worldviews and how it has shaped their history for the last two or three hundred years, and I’m fascinated already. Thing is, he’s referencing books I’ve already read in my ASU classes, such as Sources of Japanese Tradition (I forget the author) and Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence, the leading American scholar of Chinese history. I feel very “in the know” in his class because he’s referencing material I’ve previously studied and developing on it while taking the discussion in a new direction.

Briefly, let me tell you the most fascinating thing I got from his lectures last week. He was contrasting the worldviews of the two countries, specifically their national and ethnic identity concepts. He speaks Chinese pretty fluently and got one of his degrees in Taiwan, so he knows what he’s talking about. In China, he says, you can’t keep your English name. They won’t let you. As soon as you have made friends for a decent length of time, they’ll give you a Chinese name, possibly based on the meaning of your English name (if you want). In Japan, you can’t take a Japanese name. You could try, but people would think you were incredibly strange, and they would avoid calling you by it. A non-Japanese can’t have a kanji name. In Japan, all foreigners have their names butchered by the Japanese tongue, but they aren’t allowed to change.

In China, Prof. Scott says, if you get a Chinese name, if you can read Chinese, if you know the classics (e.g. Confucius, Mencius, etc.), if you dress in Chinese clothing (silk), eat Chinese food, and you have Chinese friends, you can be Chinese. They’ll take you. If Prof. Scott were to go to mainland China and converse with a Han Chinese person in Mandarin, after a few minutes, the person would come to accept the fact that a blue-eyed foreigner could, in fact, speak Chinese and speak it well. As a matter of fact, the Chinese have many ethnic minorities in their country (the six stars on their flag stand for the Han majority and the five biggest minority groups), some of which also have blue eyes. They have a large Muslim population in the West. They are accustomed to naming people Chinese who don’t look or speak like the Han, and their national identity is not based on birth or ethnicity. So, you can be Chinese if you are willing to become like the Chinese; they will take you.

However, if you go to Japan, learn to speak, read, and write perfect Japanese, put on Japanese clothing, eat Japanese food, memorize the Japanese classics, convert to nishiren Buddhism, and make Japanese friends, the Japanese will ridicule and ostracize you. No matter how hard you try, you cannot become Japanese. It’s an exclusive club. You have to be born in Japan from Japanese parents. Foreigners who become too much like the Japanese make other Japanese people uncomfortable. They like their foreigners to stay foreigners, and even in their speech, they like foreigners to have an accent, however slight. In fact, Japanese people marvel at foreigners who can speak Japanese well, if they have just met them. Their automatic response is something like, “Whoa! That’s impossible! Nobody can learn to speak Japanese that well except us! The monkey can do math!” At church this Sunday (see story below), the congregants did the same with me. Pastor Takeshi asked us to introduce ourselves, and after every sentence, I received the characteristic gasps, gawks, and “Heeeeee…” of Japanese who can’t believe that an American youth can introduce himself without making a grammatical error or mispronouncing a word. Basically, the Japanese identity is based primarily on ethnicity, not culture. Even if you are willing to become like the Japanese, you cannot be Japanese. They will not take you. You are and always will be gaijin, a foreigner.

Back to classes. Art class looks interesting, and Prof. Swanson appears to be a very sweet silver-haired lady with a passion for Japanese art. I decided to take this class over the psychology class because the professor in that one was very boring, and I thought the material, though interesting, wouldn’t be very enjoyable. I came here to study, but I also came to have fun. Art class looks fun and educational at the same time. I mean, come on, FIELD TRIPS! I’ll be interested to see how this class turns out in the coming weeks.

Besides classes, I’ve had some miscellaneous adventures. One afternoon, I met a friend of Trevor’s named Gil in the CIE lounge who asked me almost immediately if I would go with him to Hirakata-shi to do some perikura. For those of you uninitiated into the wonders of perikura, think about those odd photo booths you see sometimes in the mall or at amusement parks. You know, the ones teenage girls go into and take crazy pictures with friends and whatnot, get the photo strips, and cut them up and stick them on things or whatever. Now imagine that concept multiplied exponentially and girly-fied to the uber extreme. Now imagine that there are at least ten of these machine on the top floor of every arcade and department store in Japan. Now you have some idea of what perikura is. I will try to scan the photos Gil and I took that day and upload them to Flickr, but the scanners on campus are “dodgy,” to borrow Joanna’s word. We’ll see. Anyway, long story short, we rode all the way to the station, into the Vivre department store, took some quick pictures (one of which features Gil with his shirt off and the words “Hey big spender” scrawled in digital glitter across his chest), and rode back. I thought that was an excellent random adventure.

Went to Den-Den Town again this weekend and bought a Nintendo DS. No, it’s not just for games, seriously! I bought it primarily for the dictionary software that Sydney told me about. You can actually write the kanji or word you’re looking for on the touch screen, and the program recognizes which one you’re looking for and flips to the entry or entries. I have already found it to be incredibly useful. Unfortunately, there is a severe shortage of DSs in Japan at the moment, such that Sydney and I were unable to find any Japanese versions in all of Den-Den Town. That’s bad. They are incredibly, amazingly popular in Japan, and Nintendo actually issued a formal apology last Christmas when their production failed to meet the holiday demand. Eventually, we found American versions in a used-media store for a jacked-up price of 19,000 yen, aprox. $158 but with tax maybe $165. We decided it was worth it anyway and seized our opportunity. Of course, I couldn’t just buy the dictionary cartridge. I picked up a used copy of Final Fantasy III, as well. $25, about $20 cheaper than a new one. I think I got a good deal overall. I’m having fun translating it as I go along. It’s edutainment!

One final note before I head to bed. I have found a church and Bible study in the area. It’s a small community of believers shepherded by Pastor Takeshi Watahara, a small but lively man in his 50s with lots of silver caps in his teeth (his smile literally gleams). His style is something like YWAM (Youth With A Mission), if you know what that means. Maybe I could better say that he’s along the lines of a Pentecostal or Assembly of God preacher, though he says things that sound suspiciously Calvinist. I wonder… Oh well. Worship on Sunday was one of the most uplifting and awing experiences of my entire life. Being able to worship with my spiritual siblings from a country on the opposite side of the globe made me feel very acutely the union of the body of Christ throughout the world. The service was bilingual, such that everything Pastor Takeshi or the music minister said was repeated alternately in English and Japanese, sentence by sentence or phrase by phrase. Surprisingly, the sermon was still quite easy to follow for me, but I also was able to follow some of the Japanese. That might have helped. Music was bilingual, too. The song sheets in the bulletin had English lyrics on one side and Japanese lyrics on the other so that the worshippers could sing in whichever language they felt most comfortable. I have to say, if anyone had walked in from outside, they would probably have thought we had all lost our minds–and we wouldn’t have cared one bit. It was lovely. A beautiful cacophony of praise. I wonder if heaven will be anything like that.

Bible study time has yet to be determined, but Pastor Takeshi has planned to take Trevor, Sach, and me to Kyoto this weekend to visit a Shinto shrine and an onsen. He’s very serious about Japan’s religious culture (or cultural religion?) and its spiritual dangers, and he has a heart for the lost who are, as he says, “in bondage to idol worship.” I hadn’t really thought of it as idol worship, but I suppose it is. Anyway, the onsen trip should be verrrrry interesting. Onsen are hot springs, favorite relaxation spots of the Japanese, and they are quite common because of Japan’s tectonic situation. Thing is, when Japanese go bathing in an onsen, they bathe in the buck. That’s right. Everybody’s naked. It’s not shameful or awkward for them, apparently. They think nothing of it. For now, I’ll just say that I’m looking forward to getting out of my comfort zone.

Well, I’m afraid that’s all, folks! I should’ve been in bed already. Never say that I don’t care about my readers. Coming up, a post on food! The most intriguing aspect of Japanese culture I’ve discovered since I’ve been here is cuisine-related. The kinds of food they eat, how they prepare it, what they call it, how they eat it, table manners, tea and cookies, full-blown tea ceremonies, you name it. The Japanese have an interesting way of doing all things edible. Don’t keep your cursor on the refresh button, though; give me a few days to find some time. Don’t worry, I won’t leave you hanging. Ja mata!