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!

Osaka and Kyoto photos now available

EDIT: 2/6/07 2:50 p.m. JST

You can now view my photos of the Osaka and Kyoto trips on my Yahoo Flickr page by clicking the link at the bottom of this post. A new photo section for “Engrish” is in the works, as well as some random shots of interesting stuff. Keep checking periodically to see what’s new.

Shigakusha’s Photos

The End of Orientation Week

And so it ends, the last remaining days of freedom before classes begin in earnest. Japanese classes begin tomorrow morning, and I am beyond excited. Finally, maybe, I will be able to read all of those perplexing signs and instructions that have baffled me for the last week… And with God’s blessing, I will be able to hold some decent conversations with a Japanese person without resorting to English. Hah! Well, we’ll see.

Funny, the Japanese use different sizes of paper than we do in America. 8.5 x 11 does not exist. It’s all labeled by a letter-number combination, such as A4, B5, etc. Rather confusing. When I went to the ConveniShop today to buy some notebooks, I discovered that I had no idea which size of paper my professors would want me to turn in! There were at least six different sizes! I chose a ring binder and the size of paper that seemed to fit it best (which was close to the size of regular notebook paper), and I plan to ask my sensei tomorrow what they prefer. How odd. Not really significant for culture shock, but certainly surprising.

Speaking of culture shock, I haven’t been getting it too bad, I don’t think, but some of my friends have been having problems; par example Joanna, Sach’s colleague from Le Republique d’Afrique du Sud (Little French for you there. I saw it on Sach’s passport and thought it had a nice ring to it.). You may remember her as the lamentress of Japan’s paucity of anti-perspirant (“dodgy” was her word). I failed to tell you the last part of that conversation. After her comment, someone suggested that she simply wash under her arms with soap a couple of times a day, to which she retorted that she’d gladly have taken his advice if she’d brought soap and hadn’t been forced to buy some that day. Astonished, the person asked why she hadn’t thought to bring soap. Her answer: “Well, I thought they’d have some here already, like any other civilized place!” Apparently, people take cleanliness even more seriously in South Africa than we do in the States.

We finally got some “crockery,” as Sach calls it, in the dorm kitchen. Boy, did we ever. Rice cookers, toasters, scales, bowls, pots, pans, all manner of utensils. It’s great. I went and bought bread, eggs, butter, forgot the jelly and peanut butter, milk, canned fruit, two fresh apples, a carrot-ish (freebird!) vegetable, some frozen entrees, forgot the cheese, forgot the rice (see? I am no good at all without a list!), cereal, a couple of kinds of ramen that looked halfway edible, a liter or so of ginger ale, a thing of Minute Maid apple juice that tastes completely different here than in the States because it’s mixed green and red apples, Dutch melon custard bread (the amazing tasty-goodness of this stuff is indescribable) as a sweetstuff for breakfast, regular Doritos (here called “Mexican Taco” flavor), and… other stuff I can’t remember right now. Tomorrow’s breakfast will be eggs and yummy toast with juice. If only I had remembered the cheese… Oh well. The QQ is only 10 minutes by bike. Then again, the danger of being hit by a car or other bicycle or hitting some other obstacle (and there are many) makes that short distance deceptively risky. Happily, I’m quickly getting the hang of things. It really is true, you know. You never forget how to ride a bike. You just forget how to do all those cool things with it you used to do as a kid.

Good news! I have found a photo hosting service run by Yahoo called Flickr that appears to be an excellent means of sharing my photos with everyone! I am working busily to get Kyoto and Osaka photos online for you even now. I will let you know as soon as they are available.

So you may remember the roommate “situation” I mentioned a few posts ago. Well, everything has resolved, and I am now settled in 4224 with a my new roommate, Pat. Pat’s an African-American football player and jazz musician from Little Rock, AR who attends Westinster College in Fulton, MO. He is a Christian and has a girlfriend from Cameroon, Africa, who is also a Christian. He’s not as talkative as Michal and is usually gone to hang out with friends, but he’s very laid back and generally genial. However, he is… how shall I put it…? He has a creative sense of organization. He prefers things to be out in plain sight so that he can easily find them when he wants them. At least, that’s what I optimistically hope is his explanation for the way his side of the room looks, particularly his closet. (See, Deborah? Optimism!) “So,” I told God, “I see you have bestowed both a blessing and a challenge. First of all, thank you. Second of all… *sigh* … What do you want to teach me?”

I finally met Tomoko yesterday, and boy… wow. She is a ham and a half, quite a character. Some Japanese girls feign shyness when they’re in unfamiliar situations and just titter demurely. Not Tomoko! No, she’s large, in charge, and goofy as an oral surgery patient with the N2O valve on full blast. Now, when I say “large,” I mean that her personality is effusive. Physically, she stands barely 5′4″ and nearly scared me to death when I made her laugh very hard because I thought she’d snap her tiny back from bending backward and forward so much, her hand covering her mouth as though she was holding her head screwed on. Ohhhh, and her mouth. Please understand, I don’t mean to insult. I just found it… blackly humorous. The Japanese, from all observations, care less about teeth and have poorer genetic dispostions for oral aesthesia than the English.

All of that aside, we had a wonderful time. She brought her friend Fumiko and Fumiko’s conversation partner Alan, and we went out to eat at a wonderful donburi restaurant at Hirakata-shi (the train station), then window shopped at the nearby depaato (department store) and finally stopped at Mr. Donut for a small dose of sugar before bidding each other “Ja mata!” at the bus stop. In the beginning, I felt very unsure of my Japanese, but after only a few hours, I caught on rather quickly to the girls’ speech patterns and phrases. I even wrote a list of new words on a napkin to memorize at home. Overall, I’d say it was an excellent afternoon. Next time, she told me, we’ll go to Nara to see the daibutsu, the famous gigantic statue of the Buddha. And, of course, we’ll go to the royal gardens and see the deer. Nara deer are famous for their beauty, grace, and pernicious habit of chasing people whose hands, bags, or clothes they suspect of concealing food. Chouin shite kudasai, ne? (Have to be very careful, you know?)

In case you’re wondering, donburi is a style of Japanese food that is very simple but very delicious. It consists of a bowl of white rice topped with any number of ingredients and sauces. Some of the most popular varieties have tempura shrimp and/or vegetables, beef and onions, pork in sauce, chicken with mayonnaise, and a unique kind called oyakodon. Oyakodon’s three kanji represent parent (oya), child (ko), and bowl of rice (don). The “parent” is chicken, and the “child” is egg, both of which are mixed together in a skillet, swished around in a pungent brown sauce, and spread over the top of the rice. It’s a favorite of mine, second only to shrimp tempura (ebitempuradon).

Well, I figure that’s about all for tonight! I want to go visit my friends in Sem 2 before the visiting hours are over (10 p.m.), so I’d better get moving. Pictures are coming! Bye for now!

Osaka trip

Okay, so here’s the deal. Facebook is the best way I know to share pictures with comments that has no limit on upload sizes or amounts or daily posting. Sadly, even though anybody can get an account for free, only college and high school students have really picked up on it. Since I know that the adults reading this will probably not want to create an account (and I don’t really blame them), I am still searching for a better way to host my photos. The problem is, no hosting site has a great uploading interface (almost none have GUIs or Java), and almost all have limits. That, and I want to post comments with the photos instead of having to post them here. It’s just a huge hassle to post 60+ photo links from Facebook on this blog with commentary. I’ll do it, if that’s what it takes, but I’d rather not. While you’re waiting, here are some videos I took today from my trip to Osaka’s Den-Den Town, Shinsaibashi Shopping Center, and Amerika-mura district. I hope you enjoy.

Amerika-Mura street corner

Shinsaibashi shopping center

More Shinsaibashi

… more to come in the morning.

EDIT: The sound on the videos is out of sync. According to the online help guide, it’s because I uploaded in the Quicktime .mov format instead of MPEG or .avi or .wma formats, which are more conducive to YouTube’s compression software. It suggested that I convert the files before uploading. Well yippee skippy. Sorry, folks, looks like I’m going to have to hunt down even more software to make this blog easily accessible. Sheesh, somebody should already have come up with stuff like that. Until such time, please excuse the poor video qualities and compensate using your noodle. Thanks for your patience.

Day 4 & 5

I’m still having a hard time getting used to people staring at me all the time. Anytime I walk into a room full of Japanese people, I am immediately the center of attention. If I were walking through the cafeteria at App looking for a table (which is much less crowded there, by the way), very few people would bother to look up from their conversations to follow me with their eyes down the row. Here, everybody stares at me–at all of the foreigners–as we go past. I just *know* that they’re talking about me/us… Oh well. Gaijin are apparently still a novelty here. I take it for granted that I live in such a melting pot culture and country. When I get back, I think I will appreciate people from different backgrounds much more than I did before.

Registration was yesterday, and even though my lottery number was 215 out of 408, I still got all three courses I wanted. Apart from the Japanese speaking and reading/writing courses, I’ll be taking one on China-Japan relations in history, one called Cultural Prisms: Cross-Cultural Interaction in Psychology, and one called Japanese Art in the Kansai Area. All of them sound fantastic, but I think I’ll be dropping one of them after a while. All of the second-semester students and even the head of the exchange professors advised us to take only four courses. They told us that if we wanted to see any of Japan outside of the library and our dorm rooms, we should take only 14 credits, not 17. The Japanese classes here are reportedly very tough and very time-intensive, to which I replied, so much the better! Let me learn! Hah! I scoff in the face of two hours of homework per night in Japanese alone and throw down the gauntlet before the threat of daily quizzes. That’s what I came here to do, after all! Well, it’s *one* of the things I came here to do. At any rate, this sounds like an interesting semester already, academically.

Still working on those pictures… For some reason, they keep coming out unusually small. I think I know the solution, but I’m still testing it. iPhoto is so stupid! They keep three copies of every picture! Imagine how much hard drive space they’re wasting! I think I’m going to take a little time one night to go through and delete all of the extraneous files. I bet I’d free up a couple of gigs.

So get this: Our school is so prepared for earthquakes, it’s unbelievable. Our dorms and buildings are constructed with the latest in quake-resistant techniques (I’d bet the administration building actually bends to keep out of the frequency of shock waves.), and there are even a few nifty features that the program leaders warned us about today in the general meeting. In the CIE building (Center for International Education, i.e. my *second* second home for the next four months), there are blast doors around the main staircase to shield debris and keep out smoke from fires. Instead of using that staircase, there are special quake-proof stairwells on either side of the building that we are supposed to use. Seriously, there are gigantic metal plates that drop from the ceiling to cordon off this huge glass-enclosed stairwell that runs through the middle of the building. I’m not sure exactly how it works, they just warned us that we won’t be able to use the main stairwell in case of an earthquake. There are other neat security measures, too, but I just thought that one was the coolest. Mom, Dad, family and friends, you have nothing to fear. The odds are pretty good, they told us, that we could have a earthquake during this semester, but it would be a small one, below 3.0 on the Richter scale. Most of them are that weak, and the region gets on average one earthquake per year strong enough to be felt without a seismograph. We would probably notice a little vibrating, but nothing more. Nevertheless, we were drilled heavily on preparedness and evacuation procedures, and I expect we’ll get it again at the main dorm meeting on Sunday. They take this stuff seriously over here.

Well, I really have to get moving on with my day, but I want to mention one other thing that’s going on. We have a roommate “situation” here in 4221. Michal is moving out on Sunday to go live with his host family, so it’s just going to be me and this other guy, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Turns out the other dude, Louis Lapaz, is an extending student and wants to switch roommates so that he can live with a friend from last semester. So that you can get an idea, Louis is from London, and his last name is not representative of any ethnicity. He’s straight Caucasian. Kind of emo black hair, thick accent, likes to play the guitar, blunt and straightforward. Anyway, I told him I wouldn’t have a problem switching. After all, every room looks exactly the same. Sure, this room is directly across from the shower and toilets, which makes it very convenient, but three doors down is no big deal. Thing is, I have no idea who the other guy is who’d be living with me. Far as I know, I’ve never met him. And who’s going to do the moving? Am I going over there, or is he coming over here? I think we’re going to “scissors-paper-stone” for it, as Louis said. (Cultural aside: the Japanese have elevated rock-paper-scissors into an art form. They call it “jan-ken-pon,” and there are actually unofficial competitions for it. They’ve added some crazy rules to it, too, that I cannot begin to comprehend. Like if you tie the first time, you do it again, except you say, “Ai-ko-deshou.” Then, there’s some thing about pointing different directions… I don’t know. It’s confusing for a gaijin. You’ll see young Japanese do it in large groups all the time when they can’t agree on something simple and want to make a quick decision, like which of two restaurants to eat at for dinner. Before I leave Japan, one more of my goals is to learn what the heck they’re doing.)

Well, I think that’s gonna be all for a little while. I’m leaving soon to take a tour of Kyoto today with a big bunch of other students. We’re going to learn how the transit system works and see some interesting sights. I think we’re allowed to break off from the main group if we wish, but I’m not sure just how comfortable I am with that at the moment. Although… OH! Story! Another time, though. Sorry, sorry. I promise I’ll post it later. Just one of those things where I recklessly decided to go off on my own adventure and managed to pull through by the skin of my teeth and all of my linguistic mettle. Happy ending. Til later! Sayounara!