Southern Barbarian

Invisible Bicycle Riders

2009-06-26T22:53:00.001+09:00

As promised, here's the second catch-up post since my emergence from blog-hibernation. The first thing to relate is my adventures during Golden Week, but before that there is a certain piece of information without which it would probably not make very much sense. Allow me to skip ahead in time a little bit to explain.

Starting this May, I've now started doing lessons at the elementary school in Tomari in addition to my regular duties at the junior high school. I was looking forward to it for a long time; the junior high kids are great, but elementary kids are young enough to enjoy learning English without thinking about it as work. It's often easier for me to just channel the younger kids' energy than to try and create energy among the junior high school students.

I can't take pictures at school for obvious reasons, so here's a shot of the mountain range near Iwanai instead.

The first lesson I did at the elementary school, in mid-May, included a section where I got to introduce myself, my country, and my hometown. Unfortunately Elvis Presley means nothing to kids these days (outside of providing the soundtrack to Lilo and Stitch), so I have to just say that Memphis is famous for music and barbecue. After my introduction, I like to leave a space for the kids to ask whatever questions they want.

There are always a few cute questions (Q: Can you speak Canadian? A: No, I can't, but I know a guy who's fluent in both English and French dialects.) There are always a few about my appearance (height 184cm, weight 70kg, shoe size 28. No, not all foreigners have such big noses.) And there is always the question, "Do you have a girlfriend?" Despite the personal nature of the question, I have gotten in the habit of just saying "No" right off the bat, as it is the only sure way to head off further interrogation. But this time around, I got to roll out today's Best Japanese Word Ever instead.

Sunset. Seriously we have some good ones here.

Best Japanese Word Ever
さあ。 Saa.

Saa. In English, 'well now,' 'it's a mystery,' or 'who knows' would be the closest available translations I can think of. In response to a simple yes/no question as above, it provides a conveniently vague non-answer, but one which the listener is expected to accept as final. Saa is best delivered with a shrug and a knowing smile, to take the edge off.

While saa may have worked on my easily distracted elementary students, I know I cannot hope for as much from you all. Her name is Arijan, and she is a fellow English teacher here in Hokkaido. She is from Washington State near Seattle, majored in Japanese, and consequently can speak rather better than me. Our first date back in March was to go play Dance Dance Revolution at an arcade, thus making all those hours I spent back home looking stupid on a dance mat worth something after all.

Hokkaido gets cherry blossoms later than anywhere else in Japan, and they're usually particularly winter-hardy strains different from the delicate things cultivated down in Honshu, but cherry blossoms are cherry blossoms, I say.

Which brings us back to May and Golden Week. Arijan and I ended up putting together plans to visit south-central Hokkaido together, stopping at friends' houses along the way. This is another cool thing about being in the JET Program: almost everywhere you would think to go, there's another JET teacher there already who may let you stay for free if you ask nicely. Our travels were all over the place, but would probably make more sense if categorized by area.

So, first is 室蘭 Muroran, the largest city in the area. It's famous for its grilled pork, its many refineries, and its JET teacher Jameela (also the music director of the musical.) We had the grilled pork-- delicious as advertised-- climbed some hills to get a nice view of the city and its gleaming refineries, and enjoyed a local beach despite the trash. We even went to watch the sunrise at 地球岬 Chikyū Misaki Cape Earth, but as luck would have it, it was a cold and cloudy morning, so we ended up just huddling on the lookout point watching the dark sky turn gradually lighter shades of gray.

A view of Muroran, looking back from Cape Earth. The famous view is supposed to be in the other direction, of the sun rising out over the sea, but that didn't really work out for us.

The second general area is 登別 Noboribetsu, just northwest of Muroran. The main natural attraction in Noboribetsu is 地獄谷 Jigoku-dani Hell Valley, where stinky sulfurous steam from the bowels of the earth burbles up through a jumble of discolored rocks. It's a beautiful image I know, but it has the advantage of creating some of the best natural 温泉 onsen hot spring baths in all of Japan. We went to a particular hotel onsen which had as its selling point 11 different baths of varying composition and temperature, both indoor and outdoor, with waterfalls, wading walkways, etc., etc. As might be expected, neither one of us actually finished within our goal time of 60 minutes in the baths.

Attribution: I stole this picture from a blog about Hell Valley. The sulfurous hot springs are in the foreground, and the hotel onsen is the white building on the right.

Besides Hell Valley, the main non-natural attraction in Noboribetsu is 登別伊達時代村 Noboribetsu Date Jidai Mura, which is usually translated in English as "The Theme Park That Has Ninjas In It." The minute I first mentioned this to Arijan, it was already decided that we had to go. So we did, and there were definitely a few fake ninjas hanging around-- real ones are of course invisible, but we had a feeling they might have been around too. There was a trick maze, a few stage shows, and a few walk-through attractions that probably haven't been refurbished since the park opened decades ago. But the real treat was to watch about a dozen kids who volunteered to train as ninjas, as they worked their way through a set of "tests" with predictably cute aplomb.

One young ninja-in-training readies himself for the historic test of unerring aim, passed down through the ages: throwing a plastic shuriken at a brightly colored balloon.

The third general area is 洞爺湖 Tōya-ko Lake Toya. Lake Toya is the home of local JET Megan, is famous for hosting the relatively uneventful 2008 G8 Summit, and has a set of active volcanoes that erupt and destroy parts of the surrounding villages every decade or so. And you thought New Orleans was built in a dangerous location. We walked around the lake, ate at a kitschy cafe that called itself Canadian, and watched the fireworks at night. Nearby there was a ropeway that takes people halfway up one of the older volcanoes, so we enjoyed clambering around in a light fog, composed of both cloud vapor from above and steam emerging from the rocks below.

It turns out this otherwise pointless and bone-dry channel is meant to direct lava flows around the town and into the lake in the event of an eruption from the volcanoes in the background. I will repeat, this is a channel for lava. Suddenly living next to a nuclear power plant seems quite boring.

Since Golden Week, the other major development has been my long quest to obtain a Japanese driver's license so that I wouldn't suddenly become an illegal driver come August. I have an International Driver's Permit, but that's only valid for one year and can't be renewed. So, I had to get my American license translated, take driving classes, pass a written test and eye exam, and take a so-called "practical" driving test in order to get a real Japanese license. (For anyone who might be looking for information on the subject, this guide to Driving in Japan and Passing the Driver's Test has been indispensable.)

I can't bring myself to write "practical" without the quotes, for reasons that I hope will be very clear with a taste of how the test runs. For instance, when beginning to drive for the test, one must hold down the brake, turn on the car, switch the gear to 'drive,' look back over the left shoulder, look up at the rearview mirror, look right at the wing mirror, look back over the right shoulder, turn on the right-turn signal, look right at the wing mirror again, look back over the right shoulder again, and only then begin to slowly roll forward out onto the driving course. In that order. And despite the fact that it is 100% guaranteed that there are no other vehicles on the entire testing course.

Fortunately, I practiced the arcane rituals of the "practical" test in advance, and wrote down such helpful notes as "watch out for invisible bicycle riders here" or "pump the brakes exactly 3 times to slow down here," so the only complaint my tester had was that I didn't turn on the turn signals quite as early as he might have liked, but he supposed it would be all right if he passed me anyway. So now I have this:

Maybe it's not a good idea to post pictures of one's driver's license online, but the vast majority of people reading this wouldn't know what's what anyway, and I think I've eliminated the worst of the personal info. I bite my thumb at you, identity theft!

And finally, in other news (and a partial excuse for why I was not able to post this update sooner), my father visited Hokkaido for a week about two weeks ago. The story of his adventures I will leave to him, but if you'd like to see some pictures, I am happy to oblige with the ones I pinched from his camera.

One thing I will say: the Sapporo Yosakoi Soran festival was absolutely amazing. Every year, teams of ordinary people from across Hokkaido come to dance in parades and on stages, in a style that dates back more than a hundred years, but which has somehow managed to be flexible with the times as well. For a taste, here's a TV broadcast of the final performance from the winners of this year's Yosakoi Soran (make sure to watch in full HD if you can.) And we got to sit not more than a few meters away from where these very folks paraded down the street.

Koala's Appendix

2009-05-22T22:31:00.005+09:00

Ah, so it's been three months since my last post. Also about as long since I vacuumed the house, or cleaned the bathroom, or a number of other things around here. In other words, things have been busy. Which is not so much of an excuse, but at least gives me plenty of things to write about, now that I have come around to blowing the dust off the old blog and limbering up my typing fingers.

My main occupation for the last few months (outside of my official, real occupation) has been working on the musical, "Alice in Japan." I've mentioned it in previous posts, but never in particular detail. The title, plot, and most of the lines were liberally borrowed from a previous string of performances in Niigata Prefecture, with the full permission and encouragement of the director of said performances.

The basic idea is generally the same as the original by Lewis Carroll-- aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson for the pedantic. Little girl gets bored, follows a rabbit into a drug-addled world of madmen and talking animals, has various episodic adventures, eventually confronts the Queen of the land to great commotion and disaster, and finally awakens back where she started. In our version, however, some characters speak English and others speak Japanese; some new characters come from Japanese legends; and costumes and set pieces conform more to Japanese theater than Victorian England.

As previously mentioned, I had three roles: Momotarō's Monkey, the Caterpillar, and the March Hare. Monkey was by far the easiest, though his lines were in Japanese; all I had to do was lope around the place, hop in time to some songs, and pretend to eat fleas off of other people. In other words, like a perfectly ordinary English conversation lesson with the elementary school kids... but I digress. Caterpillar ended up being me tiptoeing across the stage encased in my blue sleeping bag, which was generally the most Caterpillarish thing I could come up with for a costume. He was great fun to voice, and the song our music director Jameela picked for him to sing was the perfect blend of bizarre and creepy to make Alice want to leave and find somebody else to talk to instead. Here is the first stanza:

Hi Miss Alice

あなた硝子の目でどんな夢を見られるの？
魅入られるの？
まだあたし心が裂けて、流れ出る
繕った隙間に刺さる記憶たち

Hi Miss Alice.
With your glass eyes, what dreams do you see?
Do they draw you in?
As for me, my heart is still torn, and flowing out of it,
my little memories are stuck in patched-up crevices.

And last but not least, there was the March Hare. The way he was written in the script, he almost could have been the Mad Hatter's imaginary friend, as he almost never spoke except after the Mad Hatter, and no one really interacted with him... except the Queen interrogated him individually at the end, so that's that theory shot. (Unless he was a shared hallucination?) I had fun making his costume as ridiculous as possible, though upon reflection the knee-high bright yellow socks were a mistake. Not because of how they looked, but because of their propensity to slip on smooth surfaces such as stages and auditorium floors. Running into things is fully in character for the March Hare, but I'll danged if he wouldn't wear shoes or something after the first couple of stubbed toes.

Believe it or not, this is the entire cast of the musical. The little girl in green at the bottom was even an extra who we recruited for just one show. From left to right, in the main row we have Momotarō, the Queen of Hearts, me (as the March Hare), the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, and Alice. Up on stage are Two-of-Hearts and Tweedle Dee, and on the floor are Three-of-Hearts and Marimokkori. (Search for information on Marimokkori at your own risk; I will not link directly. You were forewarned.)

Besides the musical, there have been a number of other developments as well. The ski practices eventually built up to the Great All-School Ski Field Trip Extravaganza to Hokkaido's #1 ski resort, Niseko Annupuri, in March... which was then canceled halfway through due to high winds and snow. But not before I was stuck in a gondola with the school principal and a random guy from Hong Kong for 1 hour straight. Once we finally got to the top, it was time for skiing sideways down a fairly steep slope, without being able to see anything besides the principal just ahead of me. But all that just made the plate of hot curry rice I had back at the ski station all the more delicious.

The gym was specially decorated for the 3rd graders' graduation-- I helped hang the birds!

The school year in Japan starts in April and goes through the end of March, so there was a good bit of activity as graduations, teacher transfers, and new inductions all piled up together. For the 3rd graders' farewell party, I sang every song we used in class together, but so as not to take up too much time, did all of them at double speed. If you think it's hard remembering the order of all Twelve Days of Christmas, try doing it twice as fast.

Our principal and vice-principal both left, and soon I was helping their replacements move in as my new neighbors. The math teacher also switched, and it was certainly fun cleaning out an unused house for him to live in with the other teachers-- call them wood lice, pill bugs, roly-poly bugs, slaters, ワラジムシ warajimushi, or what have you, we got rid of hundreds of them from an old place just south of here.

The roads are clear, but the mountains still have some snow. Good times.

All of that brings things up-to-date as of the beginning of May and the Golden Week holidays. There were some other things that happened in there too: the melting of the snow, an epic 75-minute haircut at the local barbershop, my discovery of a delicious fruit called dekopon, a visit to Iwanai from the Sapporo Symphony Orchestra, a visit to Tomari from my predecessor's predecessor, the destruction and free repair of my phone line, the distribution of my ¥12,000 ($120) federal stimulus check, and the Japanese DVD release of Wall-E. But they're all pretty self-explanatory, and if not, your imagination is sure to make them much more interesting than I could describe myself.

Pictures from the Golden Week holidays and further updates all the way to the present are on their way, but perhaps I should get to vacuuming first, or cleaning the bathroom. But before that, one more thing...

Best TV Commercial Ever

Having lived here for several months now, and watching at least a couple hours of television a week, one would think that I would be fully inured to the craziness that is Japanese TV. I really thought so myself too, at least until I saw this commercial. It's part of a series called 豆しば Mameshiba, in which people go about their daily lives, grab something to eat, only to find tiny talking bean-dogs nestled in their food. The bean-dogs then tell them rather gross natural facts, causing them to lose their appetite and not eat anything after all. Facts like "flamingos produce red-colored milk," "squids have three hearts," or "a one-second kiss can transfer 200,000,000 germs." Perfectly normal, right? Except this one was in English. Behold the jellybean-dog:

The effect is best appreciated on repeat viewings, so please rinse and repeat as necessary. Also visit Youtube for further examples.

I definitely didn't know that koalas' appendixes were 2 meters long. And I defy anyone to interpret what the commercial is supposed to be selling. Hint: it's not jellybeans.

Winter Wonderlands

2009-02-13T17:58:00.010+09:00

Greetings, people of Earth! I come bearing photographs!

In the intervening time between my last post and the present, I will admit that at least a few interesting things have happened. First among them was my trip home, a multi-legged odyssey which took me through six different airports (Sapporo-Chitose, Tokyo-Narita, Detroit, Memphis, Minneapolis, and Osaka-Kansai for those counting.) Also for the record, including car travel times and excluding layovers, it takes more or less 18 hours of continuous travel from my doorstep in Tomari to my doorstep in Memphis. Though it seemed like an eternity at the time, looking back I have to wonder how long it would have taken decades ago-- trans-Pacific ocean liners, anyone?

I think I can safely say that I enjoyed this thing in Narita Airport (above) as much as it is theoretically possible to enjoy a signboard listing airplane departures. The best part is when one flight disappears from the top of the list, and each one below it systematically bumps up one spot at a time. Exciting I know, but given my history of staring avidly at dishwashers and TV test patterns as a child, perhaps this is a step up?

Also in Narita Airport was this endless line of moving walkways. I have no idea why everyone is going one way (on the right) but no one is going the other.

In my relatively brief absence, the weather in Hokkaido decided that it was going to drop as much snow as possible, and it showed no signs of letting up when I got back. One of my English conversation students told me that they had to close down Sapporo-Chitose Airport the day after I left due to heavy snow and wind. My least favorite part of giant snowfalls is definitely digging out my car afterward. I think the example above is probably the most egregious so far: it required more than twenty minutes work with a snow scoop to clear around the car, snow shovel to get the bulk brushed off, brush to clear away the rest, and ice chipper to clear the windshield. On the plus side, it forces me to get a bit of exercise now and then.

Also, with the full arrival of winter, it has become painfully obvious that my house is not designed for use in Hokkaido. Maybe on Kyushu or Shikoku or some southern island of the archipelago, but not here. I have to keep various air vents and windows sealed off with plastic sheets and masking tape, or else the wind will literally blow straight through my house. If there is any snow at all around the outer front door, it will get caught in the sliding groove, and the door will not close all the way (although I have left it cracked open a few times when in a hurry, and it has been perfectly safe: welcome to life in rural Japan.) And the roof is angled just perfectly so that giant piles of snow and icicles cantilever themselves out over the edges waiting to fall on someone if they happen to stand underneath.

Readers may remember that I tried out for the Hokkaido JET Musical a few months back, and I can happily relate that I made it in. I am playing the discombobulated March Hare, the letter-spelling hookah-smoking Caterpillar, and one new character, a monkey belonging to traditional Japanese folk hero 桃太郎 Momotarō, usually translated as Peach Boy. Three characters means a lot of lines and a lot of work procuring my own costumes, but I'm still looking forward to the performances in April.

Me and Tomarin, the cutest nuclear cooling tower mascot in all of Japan. Note my snow boots, which I wear almost everywhere-- thanks to my predecessor Jeff for leaving them behind!

Anyway, a few weekends ago I hosted a musical rehearsal right here in Tomari, mainly for the selfish reason that I didn't want to drive five hours through the snow and ice to get to somebody else's town or village. With help from Megumi, one of my English conversation students who will also be the musical's narrator, we reserved stages and rehearsal space for everybody, and a house for folks to sleep in next-door Iwanai town. It's probably the largest number of foreigners this village has seen since my predecessor Daniel organized a Hokkaido JET Association meeting here a number of years back, an accomplishment of which I am still in awe. I don't know where they would put that many people in such a small village.

The next big event, which incidentally takes up nearly all of my remaining photos, is the world-famous 札幌雪祭り Sapporo Yuki Matsuri, or Sapporo Snow Festival. Trivia fact: the Japanese self-defense forces (can't call them an army under Article 9 of the post-WWII constitution) help to build the giant snow sculptures, partly as a PR exercise, and partly because they don't really have much else to do.

I am genuinely torn about the 2016 Olympics. I've posted before about Tokyo's bid, and of course Chicago would be great as well. I would be happy with Rio de Janeiro too; it's about time the Olympics visited South America. Still waiting on Africa, though at least South Africa gets the World Cup in 2010. I guess we'll just have to wait until October and see who gets picked. At any rate, the giant shouting guy above is Kōsuke Kitajima, who is pretty much Japan's version of Michael Phelps, if Michael Phelps swam breaststroke, which is pretty much the only event that he does not.

Stitch is a lot more popular in Japan than in America. I have found one of the best motivators I have to get students involved in a lesson is a stack of Stitch stickers I picked up in Sapporo a while back. It doesn't matter whether you're a pink-obsessed elementary 4th grade girl or a too-cool junior high 3rd grade guy about to graduate into high school: you will sit up and pay attention when the crazy gaijin tells you that you might get some Stitch stickers. If you think about it for a minute, Stitch is almost a Japanese anime character as-is: giant head, big eyes and mouth, cute, extraterrestrial, and even has strangely colored hair.

(Bonus for 10 points: say "stack of Stitch stickers" five times fast.)

Aww cute! It's an eagle family! And an owl family! And... a splashing fish. For lunch I suppose.

Say what you will about Barack Obama's presidency, but you cannot deny that the man has already made significant contributions to English language learning in Japan. This Reuters video gives a taste of the phenomenon. Over the past few months, I have heard practically everyone-- from card magicians in karaoke bars to small children climbing around the playground in front of my house-- spouting English words at me like "Change! Obama! Change!" or the now-ubiquitous "Yes we can!" That said, I don't claim that labeling this serious-looking snow owl with a random American political slogan is really supposed to make sense, but perhaps it puts the photo in a bit more context.

It may not be a snow sculpture, but gosh darn if it's not made of snow and sitting right there on Odori Park with all the rest of the Snow Festival stuff. Watching person after person jump, fall, and tumble down the hill was a great confidence-builder for the ski classes I would be attending later in the month (details below.)

Dear Disney Company: Is it not enough that you must saturate the American market with repetitive, derivative product events such as High School Musical 3 and Tinker Bell The Movie? Must you also foist them upon unsuspecting foreign countries as well, and conscript hordes of small children to dance to your pop tunes on a giant stage made of snow? Where does this madness end?

Sincerely, David.

P.S.-- While I'm at it, why do you delay all of your Pixar offerings in Japan until months after their release in every single other major world market? Ratatouille was a month and a half off, Wall-E was 6 months late, and Up will have to wait 7 months until December of this year. What gives?

Beyond gallivanting off to Sapporo, I have had a few adventures closer to home as well. The first and second graders at the junior high school have a series of ski classes every winter, during which they go to nearby ニセコ岩内国際スキー場 Niseko Iwanai International Ski Resort and hone the skiing skills they've built up since elementary school. At one point, I had expressed interest in possibly joining in and learning how to ski, and before I knew it, my fellow teachers were packing me into a bus with a borrowed set of skis and poles and the entire second grade class.

In the hour and a half we spent on the mountainside, I would like to think that my skiing ability improved significantly from its solid starting point of absolute zero. I have mastered walking sideways with skis on, I can go relatively straight on a gradual incline, and I am a full expert in falling down without injuring myself or those around me. The secret art of "stopping" is still just beyond my grasp, so falling sideways is still my preferred method to avoid hitting people, going off cliffs, etc. "Stopping" will have to wait until the second ski class I guess.

The photograph above is from the top of the ski slope, with the town of Iwanai in the foreground and the village of Tomari on the farther coast. I have defaced a copy below to give you a basic idea of where my house falls in the picture, though my range of error is fairly large. Basically, I live a little to the left of the nuclear power plant in the middle of the farther coast. As always, click on a picture to see it in a higher resolution.

This concludes your irregularly scheduled update from the now literally frozen northern mountains of Japan. I look forward to further communiques as the winter continues to produce weird and interesting events.

Beware the Extin Panther

2008-12-10T00:14:00.001+09:00

I really do like the sunsets here. They've been getting awfully early lately, such that by the time I get out of school it's already pitch-black outside, but occasionally I can get out early and capture shots like this. The lights are not faraway city lights, nor stars on the horizon, but rather ships fishing for squid: since squid are attracted to light, fishermen string up rows upon rows of blinding halogen lamps on their boats to lure them in.

Happy December to all! To celebrate the fact I have now survived in Japan longer than my previous four-month stint here in 2007, and to catch up on all the random things going on, I would like to introduce a new segment. Without further ado, here are some...

Important Things I Have Learned Recently

Do not believe a Canadian who tells you they are not good at ice skating. This is a lie. It is a nice, polite lie, of the same variety as "Yes, of course I like your new haircut," or "I am resigning in order to spend more time with my family," but it is a lie nonetheless. When most Canadians think of ice skating skill, they automatically compare themselves to other Canadians, who are often born straight onto the ice, learn to skate before they can walk, etc. When most Americans think of ice skating skill, they wistfully imagine being able to slide slowly in a forward direction without falling on their faces. The TomaRink ice rink here is an excellent arena for experiencing this particular lesson.
It is physically possible to prevent one's superior from paying the restaurant bill in Japan. In Japanese classes at Georgetown, it was quite effectively drilled into my head that one's seniors always pay for the restaurant bill when going out in mixed company. Paying for your own meal, I understood, was like trying to give your waiter a tip: a nice sentiment, but just not done here, and more likely than not to cause confusion. The few times I tried, the resistance was so adamant that nowadays I just put out one or two token offers and call it a night. However, recently in Sapporo I witnessed a miracle: the combined wheedling of four foreigners combined convinced one local Board of Education official to let us pay for our own meals. Perhaps from now on I will offer to pay three times, though without the backup of other foreigners I am not sure how successful I will be.

I found windmills! Real ones that spin, unlike the token windmills we've got on top of the hill next to the nuclear power plant here in Tomari. I swear they've got to be just for show. Anyway, these were awesome, so I stopped my car in a random parking lot, wandered around, took some pictures, and generally fulfilled every stereotype of the strange, suspicious gaijin. Mission accomplished.

A sufficiently high-scoring game of Whack-A-Mole can entitle the player to free entry into a Japanese onsen. I am not making this up. With the ongoing collapse of the US dollar, I might propose that Whack-A-Mole game tickets replace dollars as the dominant world reserve currency. Some of us would be very well equipped to compete in such a market. I also bet that some Japanese onsens (bath houses) underestimate the willingness of cheap foreigners to play silly arcade games just to save ¥500 ($5) off the standard entry fee. For any curious Hokkaido denizens, the onsen in question is ハート＆ハート in Nanporo.
Japan has poor taste in English-language Christmas songs. Evidence: the #1 most popular English Christmas song here is "Last Christmas" by Wham!. This is a sad, whiny, repetitive 1980's song, about a boy who can't get over a girl he met once last year and who doesn't even remember him. The lyrics lurch between overripe schmaltz and vague sentence fragments ("But a face on a lover with a fire in his heart; a man undercover but you tore him apart.") The wildly popular Japanese pop band EXILE released a new cover version this year, ensuring the song's continued undead survival for the foreseeable future. I would be less bitter about this song if I didn't have to sing it for every single 1st and 2nd-grade class for the month of December. Thank goodness the 3rd graders voted for the rock version of "The 12 Days of Christmas" by Relient K.

Before I figured out how to set the heater timer to warm up the house before I got home, I had to deal with temperatures like this. Inside. Now, 0 Celsius means 32 Fahrenheit, so it's not as bad as it might seem at first glance. But freezing is still freezing.

The traditional dances of Australian Aborigines involve a lot of foot stamping and imitation of native animals and birds. This and even more random facts can be found in your very own copies of the junior high school Sunshine English textbooks. For instance, did you know that Japanese people invented a new form of tennis using a soft, squishy ball and different rackets? Or that if you ride a wild horse for more than eight seconds, it is more likely to become calm? Or that Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity has operated an orphanage in Tokyo since 1963? Or that an Argentine musician happened to hear the Okinawan song "Shimauta" in a Japanese restaurant and subsequently turned it into a fairly trippy international hit in 2001?
Anti-lock brakes (ABS), when actually in use, feel like a small animal furiously attempting to burrow through the sole of one's shoe. I could have just as easily made this into another one of the "Things Japan Does Not Believe In: Clearing Ice Off of Roads," but this way is funnier I think. Knowing that the snowplows here tend to leave a couple centimeters of ice even on major roads, I tried a quick-stop test on a back road in Iwanai to see what really sliding felt like. The ABS rattled into force, and I thought for a moment I had run over something, but quickly realized the only thing vibrating was my foot on the brake pedal. It's nice to know it works at least.

It has snowed and melted a few times now, but it's always pretty while it lasts. Here's the nursery school opposite my house, with maybe an inch or two of snow all round.

Best Conversation Ever
Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) Edition

So the JLPT was two days ago, and the listening section contained the very best conversation question that I have ever had the privilege to answer: a perfect microcosm of character development, buildup of conflict, and an unexpected resolution, all conveyed through a low-quality 60-second audio recording. Four stars. A translated version is below:

A man and a woman are having a conversation. Why did the man not come to the party yesterday?

Woman: Why didn't you come to the party yesterday?
Man: Well, I... had some stuff to do.
Woman: "Stuff to do?" What is that supposed to mean?
Man: Actually... I was visiting a friend in the hospital.
Woman: That's not true and you know it. My friend saw you out on the street that night.
Man: I was... buying some fruit... to give to my friend in the hospital.
Woman: My friend said she saw you at the mall, going around with another cute girl! She said you were shopping together at the accessories store!
Man: It's all a lie! I was with my sister! We were shopping for a ring, so I could give it to you as a present. And... here it is!
Woman: ... Really? ... Ha ha... Thank you?

Why did the man not come to the party yesterday?
1: Visiting a friend in the hospital.
2: Buying fruit.
3: Buying accessories.
4: Buying a present.

And as an encore, one vocabulary question was all about the word こしょう koshō, the only reading which I knew at the time was "pepper." This resulted in some very odd sample sentences, over which I puzzled for some time:

1: My car is peppering lately.
2: That store peppers at 8 o'clock.
3: Mr. Tanaka has a cough, so he will pepper to work today.
4: I peppered with the TV left on last night.

It turns out that koshō also means "break down" or "be out of order," so choice 1 was the only correct usage. I chose 3, but I doubt it will be a fatal error, since the rest of the test was generally not so hard. Results come back in February, so we'll see then!

This box contains not the remains of an extinct panther, but rather the apparatus for a fire extinguisher. The only way I can imagine it would end up labeled as "Extin Panther" is a case of poor handwriting combined with overzealous spell-checking. Found in the main Sapporo Station bus terminal, of all places.

Running Wild

2008-11-07T10:09:00.000+09:00

It is now no longer exaggeration to say that it is freezing here in Tomari. I learned a new word on Tuesday: 初雪 hatsuyuki, literally "first snow." The sky was dark and gray, the snow was generally light, and the ground was warm enough that nothing stuck, which is to say that I didn't manage to take any pictures of the occasion. However, most accounts indicate some pretty sizable snowfall will be falling as the month progresses, so I should have no problem getting some good shots to share soon enough.

In other news, this past weekend was the HAJET Fall Meeting in 函館 Hakodate, which I attended especially to audition for the JET musical, "Alice in Japan." It remains to be seen exactly which drug-addled creature or personage I will be depicting, but my rendition of Georgetown's admittedly oddball fight song went over pretty well at auditions, so we'll see.

Best Movie Ever
"Hom Rong" ("The Overture") directed by Ittisoontorn Vichailak

I was flipping through the TV channels a couple weeks back when I came across an interesting-looking movie from Thailand, called The Overture in English. The dialog was entirely in Thai, with subtitles entirely in Japanese, so it was very fun (read: mentally draining) trying to follow along. I stuck to it though, partly because of the interesting characters, costumes, and such. However, they were merely sideshows compared to the awesome climactic scene of this movie, and the reason why I recommend it so highly. It can be summed up in only three words:

EPIC XYLOPHONE BATTLE.

Yes, my friends, The Overture is a xylophone movie like Remember the Titans is a football movie: historically rooted, defiant against restrictions of freedom, playing out the moral battles of the time through a narrower, local lens, and finishing with a ringing affirmation of national spirit. Personal rivalries rise and fall over the course of years, marked by complex, frenetic, and virtuosic xylophone melodies that have to be seen and heard to be believed. Seriously, when a review refers to one character as "the Darth Vader of xylophone musicians," you know it has to be pretty amazing.

I wish that I could do justice to the final scene of the movie, which features a literal xylophone duel between our hero and the aforementioned "Darth Vader," judged by the ruling elites of Thailand-- in fact, I have already gone through two drafts of this paragraph just trying to describe it. In the end, though, I will have to leave it to you to buy, borrow, or imagine it yourself, which will certainly be more vivid than my prose can capture in any case.

Best Conversation Ever

Explanatory note: At my school, like most in Japan, everyone has to take off their shoes at the entrance and either put on a clean pair they brought themselves or take a set of slippers set aside for visitors. This conversation took place in the staff room where all the teachers have their desks together; I am sure not every sentence and detail is 100% correct, but all the funny parts are true. I did not personally take a speaking role here, but was pleasantly surprised to understand almost all of what was being said.

"Did we ever figure out what was up with the shoes?"
"What shoes?"
"He doesn't know about the shoes?"
"The shoes left in the entranceway?"
"Somebody left some shoes behind?"
"Yeah. There's a pair of pink Asics that's been sitting there for a while. They're facing in like somebody just slipped them off but never put them back on to leave."
"Pink. So, probably a girl's shoes?"
"Yes, but you can't rule out that it could be a boy."
A thoughtful pause.
"How long have they been there?"
"Oh, maybe two days now I think."
"Which is to say, somebody came in two days ago but hasn't left yet."
"So somebody's been living alone at the school for the past two nights?"
"Maybe they've crawled away somewhere and died."
"Ha, yeah, that's probably it."
"The school's not even a year old and it's already haunted by ghosts."
"Does anybody want to search all the rooms for the dead body?"
Silence.
"Or maybe we could just announce it to the students and see if anybody knows anything about it."
"Okay, let's do that."

Epilogue: As far as I know, they never did figure out whose shoes they were, though they are no longer sitting in the entranceway.

Best Picture Ever

I am terrible with identifying wildlife and plants, especially those found in an unusual region of a foreign country, but I'll be darned if this stuff doesn't look a lot like wheat. More likely it's some variety of local wild grass. Looking at this panorama, I very much expected a certain Maria von Trapp to come spinning onto the scene, and indeed one of the folks I was with did attempt to reenact the musical number in question-- however, it turns out these plants are quite tall and the undergrowth is almost impossible to walk through. So, no living hills or laughing brooks for us.

Technological Wonders

2008-10-25T11:44:00.000+09:00

Best Japanese Word Ever
プルサーマル purusaamaru

Living less than 2 km (about 1 mile) away from an active nuclear power plant, I generally feel the need to remain up-to-date about its construction activities, operational status, current probability of catastrophic meltdown, and such. Helpfully, 北電 Hokuden (Northern Electric) mails out a bulletin every month, with the latest on the construction of the new Reactor 3, upcoming community events, and the impending collapse of global oil production (I suppose they had some space to fill and felt like justifying the need for nuclear power.) However, one page full of technical jargon and diagrams mystified me to no end, especially one word in its title: "Purusaamaru."

(The cutest little nuclear cooling tower, nicknamed "Tomarin," informs his readers about purusaamaru.)

A quick digression: Many languages are very defensive about borrowing words from English. French purists, for example, argue for government bans of English words when French equivalents already exist. Japan is about as far from this attitude as possible. For example, here is a quick list of English words, just beginning with the letter A, that I have personally seen used in everyday Japanese: accent, access, account, action, adapter, address, adult, adventure, advice, aerosol, airport, alarm, album, alcohol, allergy, aluminum, amenity, amusement, animation, announcer, antenna, apartment, application, aquarium, art, Asia, assistant, assortment, athlete, attack, attraction. I could go on.

The point here is, when I see a strange word written in the カタカナ katakana phonetic alphabet, it's usually pretty safe to assume it's borrowed from English, and so I approached purusaamaru with that attitude in mind. Unfortunately, due to differences in pronunciation, English words sometimes end up a little odd after Japanization-- 'aquarium,' say, becomes akuariumu, and 'action' becomes akushon. Purusaamaru was clearly a particularly egregious victim of this process, but I could not for the life of me figure out what it was.

I will break the suspense right here and let you know that purusaamaru actually means 'plutonium-thermal:' a thermal reactor that uses waste plutonium generated in uranium reactors. (However, I will challenge anyone, except maybe a nuclear engineer, to know the translation without looking it up.) 'Plutonium-thermal' is just about the worst word you could try to render in Japanese: it has consonant clusters, L's, R's, even a TH, none of which Japanese handles well. 'Plutonium' is too long and gets shortened to plu, which has to be written as puru. The TH of 'thermal' becomes an s, the strange 'er' sound becomes a long aa, etc., and you end up with saamaru.

(A photo of Tomari Nuclear Power Plant, as shown at the Tomari Nuclear PR Center. Reactor 3 is not yet under construction in this picture.)

Getting back to the original article, it turns out that the new Reactor 3 will apparently be purusaamaru-capable, and the gist of the content was a reassurance that the plutonium recycling process does not pose any undue risk of escaped radiation or radioactive waste leakage. This is, of course, a relief: everyone is familiar with their Godzilla origin stories, I hope?

Things The US Does Not Believe In
QR Codes

Human beings have spent literally thousands of years developing systems for recording and communicating information in visual form. From cuneiform and hieroglyphics to Chinese characters and the Roman alphabet, we have come up with a huge variety of ways to make such deep, pithy statements as "Keep Off the Grass."

Computers, though, don't like what we've come up with so far. There are all these loopy parts, different fonts and sizes and shapes. Computers need something clear, something regular, something orderly. Americans are already familiar with those oddly shaped numbers on the bottom of a check, as well as the bar codes on books and groceries and whatnot. Japan, though, has yet another format that eclipses anything mainstream in the US: the QR Code.

(This QR code reads http://southernbarbarian.blogspot.com/. If you lean back and squint hard enough, I swear you can see the face of an angry, mustachioed barbarian right in the middle.)

These pixelated squares are literally everywhere in this country. The bananas I buy at the grocery store (when I can get them-- Japan is in a bit of a banana craze lately) have stickers that link to the Dole website. My satellite television receiver displayed a link for two weeks asking me to fill out an online survey before I finally gave in to get rid of it. And an Amazon Japan book delivery service left an encoded note at my house asking me to reschedule for another time when I would be at home-- and I set up a return for 7:00pm that same evening! (Yes, I did enjoy my copy of Anathem, by the way, even if it did get rather deep into an unwieldy mash-up of Plato's theory of Forms and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics by the end. Yes I am that much of a nerd thank you.)

As you can tell from the above examples, QR codes are most commonly used to signify Internet addresses. On a kind of metaphysical level, it's like clicking a link from the real world straight into cyberspace-- insert witty Tron reference (or your choice of silly outdated computer movie) here. You use the camera on your cell phone to read the code, then it automatically accesses the Web and you do what you need to do from there. It's simple and useful enough that I'm surprised US cell carriers still haven't caught on at all.

Best Picture Ever
(Mt. Yotei towers in the background, while a few fellow ALTs and I strike gravely thoughtful poses in the middle of a sunflower field. I don't remember whose idea that was, but I think it was supposed to be funny? I suppose all those sunflower seeds they sell at the checkout counter have to be harvested from somewhere.)

Volume One, Issue One

2008-10-19T21:25:00.009+09:00

My apologies for not making as frequent blog posts-- I have heard you all through various channels. In my defense, the "problem" is threefold: First, this time around, I actually have a 40-hour-a-week job to keep up. Though 20 hours a week of classes seemed like a pretty big amount last year, I now have a much fuller appreciation for the freedom of the college lifestyle. Second, Tomari is not Tokyo. Though it's certainly a great living here, there's something about having 12 million people squashed in uncomfortably close proximity to one another that tends to produce interesting events in a way that living alone in a village of 2,000 does not. Last, I am "strongly discouraged" by no less than the JET Prefectural Advisor from keeping a blog about my workplace, co-workers, or students, so school stories are out-of-bounds unless I heavily anonymize them.

That said, when I actually converse with people about life here, it always turns out that there's something or other to talk about, so I think I just need something to jump-start the process. To that end, I would like to try a more structured format, at least for a little while. I've come up with a series of sections below that I hope can kick off some interesting digressions. I am sure I will invent more new headings, and some of these ones will likely rotate out of circulation over time. For now, read and enjoy, and your feedback is welcome as always.

(Approximate location of conversation detailed below. The neon yellow banners blowing in the wind read "Safe Driving" from top to bottom.)

Best Conversation Ever
Note: Conversations are subject to mistranslation, misremembrance, and occasional embellishment for dramatic effect.

A little girl, maybe 8 years old, upon meeting me on the sidewalk: "David, that's a cool name." She giggles and points at my face. "Hey, why do foreigners have long noses?"

Me: "I don't know, um, why do Japanese people have short noses?"

She had no response to that.

Things Japan Does Not Believe In:
Central Heating/Cooling

I have yet to find a single residence in Japan that comes equipped with its own built-in heating or cooling system. Places like office buildings or schools may have them (my junior high school even features a heated floor in the main hall), but homes usually rely on miniature AC/heating units. As I understand it, the traditional Japanese approach to home climate control was basically to accommodate the seasons, keeping the house open during the summer and piling on extra layers of clothing in the winter. Maybe it is in that spirit that today's home designers never leave room for central heating or cooling, instead forcing the residents to add appliances to make up for it.

(My heater, in the living room. As for the teapot, it is as much a mystery to me as to anyone else. It was there when I got here, and I dare not move it for fear of upsetting some unknown balance that holds the universe together. You never know.)

My particular setup here in Hokkaido features no air conditioner, but a single propane-burning space heater installed in the living room. Never having used a heater like this before, much less one whose operating instructions were entirely in a foreign language, I had been put off turning it on for as long as possible. However, once temperatures inside dipped below 15 degrees Celsius (about 60 Fahrenheit) earlier this month, it was clear I had no choice. I found the biggest button on the panel and pressed it, hoping I had not just condemned my house and myself to ignominious destruction by gas-powered fireball.

(The heater, once ignited, gives an interesting glow of blue flame and red-hot metal.)

As I am still here writing this, you can be assured that I survived more or less intact, and I can in turn assure you the same about my house. Though it takes several minutes to start up, the heat it provides was more than sufficient to warm up the living room with the sliding doors to every other part of the house kept closed. While this is not particularly helpful for, say, getting into bed without fear of frostbite (an electric blanket may prove necessary here), it gives me reasonable confidence in surviving the sub-freezing winter winds.

(To any northerners out there snickering at my lack of experience with living in the cold, get used to it, because there's sure to be more where this comes from.)

Things the US Does Not Believe In:
Rigorous Separation of Trash

This one was weird for me to get used to, coming back to the US after living in Tokyo last year. After you've spent four months sorting even your trash at マクドナルド Makudonarudo into burnable, non-burnable, plastic, and liquid components (some places also have separate recycling slots for the paper cups), just shoveling everything together into one bin seems vaguely immoral.

(The Tomari Trash Chart, posted on the wall of my living room for quick and easy reference. I especially enjoy that they have a telephone number at the bottom right to call in case you have any questions.)

To get an idea of how Japan deals with trash disposal, you could take my current setup here in Tomari. I can put out burnable garbage in yellow bags on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; non-burnable garbage in blue bags on Wednesday; and recyclables in clear plastic bags on Saturday. Categories of recyclables include aluminum, steel, PET plastic, other plastic, glass, newspaper, cardboard, and cloth-- but mysteriously not regular paper, which has to go in with burnable garbage for some reason. Oversize garbage, such as furniture, and dangerous garbage, such as spray cans and cassette tapes, have their own irregularly scheduled special collection days.

One could suppose that this highly organized system of disposal and recycling signifies a greater ecological awareness and sense of personal responsibility among Japanese citizens, and to some extent I think that's true. On the other hand, though, Japan just doesn't have any room for garbage dumps. It's a relatively mountainous island nation, so anyplace flat already has people living on it. The water is out of bounds, and nobody wants to have a mountainside dump-- besides being an eyesore, I shudder to think of the consequences of a "trash avalanche." So, Japan recycles what it can, burns what it can't, and buries the remainders.

Best Japanese Word Ever
ちょびっと chobitto

Though I went for a good while without really catching it, now it seems like everybody in the staff room is using this word all the time. Jim Breen's infallibly awesome online dictionary declares chobitto to mean "a little," but Japanese already has other words to serve that purpose, including the ubiquitous ちょっと chotto and the more formal 少々 shōshō, so why another?

According to my co-workers, chobitto is much more informal, fairly colloquial, and more popular around this area of Hokkaido than elsewhere. For a more evocative English counterpart, I would use something like "a smidgen" or "a wee bit." I couldn't plot a definitive etymology, but it seems like a general mash-up of chotto ("a little" as above), English 'bit,' and ちび chibi ("small and cute.") Chobitto. Even saying it in my head, I have to squinch up my eyes a little and grin.

Best Picture Ever
(A nighttime shot from Moiwa Observatory, above Sapporo. It was fairly cloudy, so my photos of Sapporo didn't come out so well, but I really liked the atmospherics of this picture, with people just milling around on the roof.)

In closing, I will make every effort to have only a chobitto break until my next posting-- until then!

A Place To Stay

2008-09-21T20:36:00.000+09:00

For today's post, we bring you a second installment of vital statistics about 泊村 Tomari-mura Tomari Village, in no particular order:

The kanji that gives the village its name (泊) literally means "stay overnight," as in "stay at a hotel" or "stay over at a friend's house." I originally thought this was a sign of the village's enduring obscurity-- even its name implies only a place to stop on the way to somewhere else. However, it turns out that in the olden days when the names were being handed out, Tomari was quite the fishing town, and the name comes instead from the aboriginal Ainu. The original was "Hemoitomari," or "Trout Bay," according to the village website-- at least I hope that's what it says, because it's only in Japanese.

(As with literally everywhere in Japan, Tomari has its own special manhole covers. In Tomari's case, they depict the local rock outcropping "Kabuto Rock," a few seagulls, and some boats out on the sea.)

There is almost always wind in Tomari. Explanations for this fact range from the proximity of the East Sea/Sea of Japan, to the mountains just to the east influencing the airflow, to the prevailing weather patterns swinging at us off the Russian coast. Whatever the case, it has come in handy for cooling off my house (which is not equipped with an air conditioner): just open one window to the west and one to the east.

P.S.-- To anyone confused by "the East Sea/Sea of Japan:" it is actually a matter of considerable dispute. I don't feel like taking sides, so feel free to take your pick of names. (Thank you Georgetown SFS for making me take "Map of the Modern World.")

(I get the left half of this building as my house, plus the red car. A pretty usual sunset is in the background.)

My house is located in the 滝ノ澗 Takinoma, or "Valley of the Waterfall," subdistrict of the village. I am assuming this is another transliteration from Ainu, because there is no evidence of a valley, much less a waterfall, anywhere near here. The rent is cheap, the water is cheap, and electricity and Internet services are both paid for by the electric company Hokuden (more on them later.) All in all, not a bad deal for being able to open my windows and have a view of the sea every morning.

(The junior high school at which I teach. The grounds are still undergoing massive construction-- just the other day I think they were breaking up asphalt while we were trying to play the telephone game in English class.)

The educational system in the village of Tomari consists of one elementary school and one junior high school. There used to be four elementary schools: two got demolished entirely, one was turned into a skating rink/athletic complex (more below), and one was knocked down and rebuilt into the currently-used elementary school. Tomari JHS (junior high school), roughly equivalent to US grades 7-9, was the most recently reconstructed. It now sports a computer lab, broadcast room, library, Home Ec. room, science lab, art room, carpentry room, full-size gymnasium, two sets of locker rooms, three practice rooms, three student club rooms, two sets of student bathrooms, one set of teacher bathrooms, and a pantry stocked with emergency supplies to supply everyone in the area in case of nuclear emergency. This is all for exactly 60 students.

(A nice view down the road from Tomari JHS, with Kabuto Rock on the left and 公民館 Kōminkan/public building where I do my English conversation classes on the right.)

The speed limit for the one major road that goes through Tomari (Route 229) is 50 kph (30 mph). Originally I had no problem with this, especially given that I was still getting used to driving in a strange car on the left-hand side of the road. However, over time, it has become more and more obvious that a 30 mph speed limit for a major (if one-lane) thoroughfare is pretty ludicrous. Most people seem to just ignore the speed limit altogether, but you'd better believe when a police car comes around, nobody's going to try and pass it. In any case, once the snow and ice of winter come, I have the feeling 50 kph may be faster than I'm willing to drive anyway.

There are, I think, five or so stoplights in Tomari. Most are just for show, and I have never seen them come up anything except green, but I have stopped at a couple of them before.

(The 役場 yakuba, or village hall. Literally translated, it means "useful place," which is generally the last thing I think of when contemplating government bureaucracy, but I have no complaints with this "useful place" so far.)

Life in Tomari is touched in various ways by its hosting of a nuclear power plant-- some obvious, and some less so. There are shacks in a few locations that give readouts on the ambient radiation level in nanograys per hour (these hover around 30-40 nGy/h, which I understand to be a normal background level.) The village hall has both radio and television broadcasting facilities, which would be silly for just 2,000 people except that it might come in handy in case of emergency. Every household in the area also gets a booklet on what to do in case of a nuclear accident, helpfully illustrated by an cartoon character called Tomarin, who is the shape of a nuclear cooling tower. (My copy is hanging in my living room along with the 地震に自信を Jishin ni Jishin wo "Confidence Against Earthquakes" booklet-- it's a pun in Japanese, since 'earthquake' and 'confidence' are homonyms.)

(とまリンク TomaRink, the creatively named ice center/athletic complex that was once an elementary school. Many people have emphasized to me that the rink is large enough and properly equipped to host an international hockey game, but they are just as quick to note that no international hockey games have actually ever been held here.)

Probably the biggest way that Tomari has been shaped by its hosting of a nuclear power plant is that its revenue streams are very comfortably arranged. Up to this point you may have wondered how this 2,000-person village could afford to be rebuilding all its schools, maintaining its public hot springs, fishing museums, ice rinks, etc. The answer is simple: it is all covered by the rent from the nuclear power plant. This, incidentally, is how I got here too: somebody had a surplus in the late 1990s, thought it might be nice to have a real live foreigner help teach English at the junior high school, and voila! You have a new JET ALT post serving exactly 60 students, plus a few more through English conversation classes.

(Even the sign on the trash bin outside my house features the slogan 村を美しく、あなたの生活を支える原子力 "Keep our Village Clean: Supporting your Lifestyle with Atomic Power.")

The sunsets here are pretty awesome. I think it was my vice-principal who told me that they are nicer here than anywhere else he had ever visited, even Hawaii. So: sorry Hawaiians, but your sunsets have been defeated (I will have to think of another reason to visit instead.)

As always, you can click on any of these pictures to get higher-resolution versions of them.

Finally, in striving to be always at the forefront of modern technological progress, I have found that I can use the Google to create a virtual map of Tomari. By directing your browser to the following URL, you too can participate in this symbolic recreation of geographical reality. I recommend the satellite imagery over the road map version-- we only have one major road-- though the terrain view is pretty cool too.

http://tinyurl.com/tomarimap

Wonders never cease.

TCP/IP Interlude

2008-08-22T11:28:00.003+09:00

There should be a word for when someone else expresses your own feelings with more eloquence and coherence than you can muster yourself. Vicari sensus, anyone?

Credit goes to the ever-popular, peerless xkcd.

After probing for any sign that my neighbors might have a wireless network, testing every potential Ethernet cable in the mess of wires behind my TV, and trying more potential network configurations with them than I care to list, this was pretty much how I felt at home here. Of course, there was no cable van to wait for, but instead a team of two gentlemen who came to set up a little, slow computer on a shelf in my living room. After a little reverse engineering-- which was not so easy since the new computer operates entirely in Japanese-- I set my own laptop to mimic the necessary settings and use the newly installed Internet connection. Tada!

This must be the real reason why I took all those computer science courses at Georgetown.

Of course there is much more I want to share; I have some gorgeous pictures from around the Tomari area, and many many thoughts about my first days here. All this and more will be in my next post, which I am preparing concurrently. Until then!

Return of the Internet

2008-08-12T15:28:00.001+09:00

...or, this post could also be titled "In Which it is Confirmed that David is Still Alive." It seems like several months since I was ever in the US, and yet I know that it was only a little more than a week ago that I made my flight from Nashville. Every day has been a 100% busy whirlwind of activity, except of course for the times when it was a 100% lack of activity sitting and staring at a wall instead.

(My life, in four bags. Of course there's a couple things I left at home to be shipped later, but still...)

First came the flight. Based on my extensive experience in making transoceanic voyages (read: exactly 2 trips), I have determined that only two main factors decide whether the experience will be any good. The first is one's seat neighbor. This time, like my last flight to Japan, I sat next to a Korean gentleman making a connection to South Korea through Narita Airport. Unlike last time, he did not speak English, Japanese, or Chinese (the three official languages of the flight) and so he had great difficulty ordering from the menu, choosing drinks, interpreting announcements, etc. He was very nice though, offering me his headphones when I was clearly agitated with the failure of mine to produce any sound in the left ear. (Fortunately I had my own pair.)

The second deciding factor is the in-flight entertainment. I think the airlines must deliberately choose mostly bad movies in order to encourage people to go to sleep rather than stay up and watch. I certainly did skip "Made of Honor" and "Flawless," the first of which I had been warned against seeing, and the second of which I did not previously know existed. I did stay awake to see "Kung Fu Panda" again though-- despite its publicity as yet another CG kids' movie under the non-Pixar formula of celebrity voices and bad jokes, it is actually a decent movie with some very nice art direction. My favorite, though, was Stomp Out Loud, which they showed in its entirety. Those guys are awesome. Youtube has a few clips, unless they've been taken down since I wrote this.

So, with a nice but unintelligible seatmate, and a decent slate of in-flight shows, it was a pretty good flight overall. Upon arrival at Narita, I experienced the new security procedures from late 2007-- I'm not quite sure why some people consider the fingerprinting/photograph so onerous, especially considering that the US is moving toward getting all 10 fingerprints from all visitors by the end of this year. Heaven forbid that foreign countries apply the same standards to Americans as we do to their nationals.

(A view of the Rainbow Bridge between Odaiba and Tokyo proper.)

After passing through security and the baggage claim-- where I found free luggage carts which I very much wish I had seen last time-- we were greeted by dozens of yellow-shirted JET volunteers, who were posted about every 10 meters like a breadcrumb trail leading through the airport to our "Friendly Airport Limousine" buses. From there, we took the same route back to Tokyo that I had taken on the way out, including a pass by the very same strange mural building I mentioned in my last post. The rush hour gridlock was definitely not there last time, but it gave me a chance to catch some nice photos like the one above. By the time we got to the hotel, it was time for dinner, so another Hokkaido-bound Nashville JET and I made our way to a 回転寿司 (kaiten-zushi) conveyor belt sushi restaurant, which was delicious. (The sign out front said they served whale, but I didn't see any come around and didn't feel like asking.)

Overall, the Tokyo Orientation did not feel like I was in Japan. It felt very much like I had flown nowhere in particular and landed in some bizarre in-between land: a Westerner-filled hotel with Japanese staff and a portal out the front door that led to the Tokyo neighborhood of 新宿 (Shinjuku), which itself has always reminded me of a Japanese version of New York. Inside, most of the food was Western standard (no corn-spaghetti soup to be seen), everybody spoke English, etc. Add to all this the disorientation inherent in a 12-hour long, 14-time zone transoceanic flight, and you have the perfect environment for communicating vast amounts of vital information to hundreds of people at once. (I have nothing against the JET Programme's efforts though; there really is no other way to do it.)

Most of the presentations could be split into two categories: organized, detailed speeches by Japanese and JET officials, and informal, interactive sessions by current and former JET participants. Both were useful, but the former tended to encourage nodding off in one's seat, which happened to quite a few people and very nearly me. One notable exception to this strict dichotomy was a show by Japanese official Mitsuharu Ota (pictured above.) It almost seemed as if he was attempting to use as many high school English vocabulary words and English idioms as possible within a 1-hour time span. He spent half of his allotted time detailing the previous 24 hours of his life, from arriving in Tokyo to coming to our hotel via the subterranean labyrinth of Shinjuku, before he realized he had a PowerPoint slide show to do as well. He skipped through most of it, pausing strategically on photos of friendly dolphins, an animation of passive-aggressive penguins, and excerpts from A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh books and Mary Poppins songs. The theme, apparently, was that we as JETs should be teaching a "zest for life"-- at least, I hope that was the main point, because that is the only substantive part I can remember.

Before I had established anything resembling a decent sleep schedule, it was time to fly off to Hokkaido. I wish I could tell you that this was my plane, but we were one gate and one hour off. This was the 12:00pm flight to 千歳 (Chitose) airport in Hokkaido; we took the 11:00am one. Apparently, since Hokkaido is a popular destination to cool off during the summer, ANA is running a special promotion "Vacation with Pikachu and Friends" during August. Another thing I had never seen on a plane before was a live video feed of the ground under the plane:

As you may imagine, this video was especially fun during landing. Most of the JETs were seated together on this plane (unlike the flights from Nashville and Detroit) so we were all either teaching or practicing our Japanese greetings and introductions: after baggage claim, we were to meet our supervisors in person for the very first time. Nobody wants to flub their first impression by saying よろしくお願いします (yoroshiku onegaishimasu) "good to meet you" before 始めまして (hajimemashite) "how do you do." Luckily, the self-introduction routine is very set in terms of phrasing and order, so even the Japanese newbies got it more or less straight before they marched us in, one by one, to the room where all our new employers sat waiting for us.

Well. That's Nashville to Detroit to Narita to Tokyo to Hokkaido. At least we're on the right island now. Rather than try and fit any more in here (it's already taken me two days' worth of internet access at the junior high school to write and upload this much), I think I'll leave my first impressions of Tomari for another post. More to come soon!

From Epilogues to Prologue

2008-08-01T21:33:00.003+09:00

So it comes to my attention that I have essentially been a liar for the past year or so, given that I never got around to posting the pictures and information I promised in my last entry of August 2007. So, in order to get things off on the right foot, here are a few old shots and explanatory notes below.

Yes, this is me looking absolutely ridiculous in wizard school robes at Kinokuniya at about 7:55am July 21. The girl next to me will remain anonymous, due to the fact that she is holding a movie promotional poster of Lucius Malfoy, brazenly ripped from the wall of a subway station. (I still can't believe you got away with that, Allison.) The Deathly Hallows anticipation had all of us a little crazy I guess.

This is the exterior garden area of the kimono museum I visited with Emiko. The whole outdoor area was rather oddly furnished if you ask me-- doors leading nowhere like above, seats the shape of saddles but with random spikes-- but I suppose the people running the museum are the aesthetics experts, not me.

I think this photo perfectly captures the personalities of each of the primates in it. From left to right: "I'm just waiting until I get offstage." "Sometimes I wonder how I got into this job, but hey, it's fun." "I YELL TO MAKE LOUD NOISES." "I'm confused."

This picture is from a local festival held in my neighborhood (Koganei!) shortly before I left. There were huge crowds of people gathered on and around the streets and train station to watch their friends and family dance and play music. I thought of it as a nice kind of going-away present from the place I called home for four months.

If I remember aright, I took this picture from the hotel where my mother, my aunt, and I stayed at the end of my time in Tokyo. The Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka featured a breakfast buffet on one of the upper floors, which offered a great view of how incredibly smoggy Tokyo air can get in the summertime. I seriously wondered about the veracity of all those photos showing Tokyo Tower or something with Fuji-san silhouetted in the background, but apparently the winter air is not so bad as it is in summer. More to the point: the buildings in the center of this photo comprise Sophia University.

I brought my mom and aunt to Koganei, so they could see where I'd been spending most of my time the past four months, and realized I didn't have that many pictures of the area-- I guess at the beginning I didn't know what to take pictures of, and at the end I thought I had already taken pictures of everything. If that makes sense. The staircase to the left leads up to the dormitory, and directly ahead (and with a slight jaunt to the left) is the alleyway to the train station.

Yeah, I have no idea what this is either. It was on display at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno though, so it's obviously important to someone.

The TCVB (Tokyo Convention and Visitor's Bureau) tells me that the Rainbow Bridge is named for its colorful lights, but it's looking rather monochromatic in this photo. Much more interesting was the veritable armada of sightseeing boats out in Tokyo Bay, as seen from our restaurant perch on the island of Odaiba (which I described previously.) And since some people I have talked to are apparently still confused, teleportation is NOT REAL. Go directly to grade-school science. Do not collect $200.

The bus ride from the hotel to the airport was very nice, kind of a "highlights of Tokyo" tour going around a bunch of the big landmarks. If I remember correctly, this shot of Tokyo Tower is out the back of the bus; oftentimes we would pass by things too quickly to even see on the right and left.

This was the last picture I took in Japan. It was pretty sad for me at the time, but this gigantic mural was just so striking that I had to take a picture of it as we passed. I could probably figure out where it was, and its name, etc. (yes, I can read the word "hotel" on the roof) but I think it's kind of a poetic last photo, a good encapsulation of my Japan experience. Weird stuff happened, and I often didn't understand everything that was going on, but it was pretty much all cool: my four months in a nutshell. I had no idea when or whether I would find my way back, but I was satisfied with the experiences that I was privileged to have in this strange and beautiful country, Japan.

BUT WAIT!

As most of you reading this already know, I have signed up for the JET Programme to teach English in Japan, and I am soon to be placed in 北海道・泊村 Tomari-mura, Hokkaido so that I can make a fool of myself in front of the junior high school students there. Some quickie fun facts about Tomari:

Its (self-appointed) nickname is "The Hometown of Energy"-- appropriate, given that Hokkaido's only nuclear power plant is located on the coast less than five minutes from the village center. Did I mention Tomari is primarily a fishing village? Watch out for the mutant three-headed carp, everyone. (Just kidding.)
The population of the village, according to the Tomari bulletin of July 2008, is precisely 2,031 (living in 999 households; 939 men, 1,092 women; etc.) I hope to find my own +1 duly noted when the next bulletin is published.
My rent, if converted using current exchange rates, comes to $93 dollars a month. Given that I spent $900/month for a space the size of a closet in DC, I think I am willing to endure a few rattling windows and stinkbugs (which my predecessor warned about) in exchange. The wonders of government-subsidized housing in the middle of nowhere.

I think that gives a brief taste of what is staring me in the face for at least the next 12 months. It goes without saying that I am pretty nervous right now, especially about constructing and executing effective English lessons, cooking food that will be both inexpensive and palatable, deciding how and to whom to give my omiyage gifts, dealing with the potential risk of my toilet water freezing solid in the wintertime (of which I was not even aware until my pre-departure orientation here in Nashville), but hey! This is why we blog, right? To complain about our lives, so that everyone else can commiserate?

Of course, I hope this new iteration of Southern Barbarian (SB 2.0?) will be more than that. I cannot promise as frequent updates as I made before, but I will post when I can, and when I have something interesting to share, rest assured it will be here. My flight to Tokyo leaves tomorrow morning, following which are a couple days of JET orientation there, and finally our dispersal to our Contracting Organizations (COs) on August 6. I hope to write a bit along the way, so be watching for posts here: the return of the Barbarian is at hand.

Epilogues

2007-08-08T14:50:00.000+09:00

Hello all! It's been a while, hasn't it? I apologize for not updating in the past couple of weeks, but as many of you have guessed, the end of my time in Japan was easily the most hectic since I first arrived. Between final exams, computer science conferences, squeezing in some final tourist opportunities, and of course showing my mom and aunt around the city, the blog was definitely not the first thing on my mind. I couldn't leave everyone hanging though, so now that I'm home again in Memphis, here is a quick run-down of what I've missed.

The weekend following the ignominious Fuji trip (specifically Saturday July 21st) was designated "Harry Potter Day" ever since I figured out how to work the calendar function on my Japanese cell phone. Since I was scheduled to give a 3-4 minute speech in Japanese class the Friday previous, I figured I might as well throw myself into it outright, and ended up giving a speech on the Japanese-language version of 世界一有名な魔法使い "the world's most famous wizard" (with deep apologies to Gandalf and Merlyn.) I am deeply indebted to this Harry Potter in translation website for ideas.

On the day itself, Ryan, Colin, and I went to Kinokuniya at 8:00am to stand in line, and we met up with Allison (from Georgetown) as well. I was the only one there in wizard garb-- even armed with a chopstick wand-- so naturally the TV cameras were pointed in my direction more than most. As Cameron can confirm, I was briefly on at least one channel, or at least my costume was. Returning to the dormitory with noses in books, we had all finished by the early afternoon. After a wide-ranging discussion over dinner (while others avoided our table for fear of spooky spoilers), we buckled down to prepare for final exams and papers scheduled for the next week.

As a complication to my study plans, though, I had previously arranged to meet with Emiko, a friend of a family friend, on the 22nd to go to the base of Mt. Fuji. This, thankfully, was absolutely nothing like climbing the mountain itself. We went to the Itchiku Kubota kimono museum, a trained monkey show (!), a make-it-yourself noodle shop, and finally a kennel where Emiko was keeping a dog she didn't have room for in crowded Tokyo. All very fun, but I was also anxious to get back and study, because I knew there were even more distractions on the way...

As I had been preparing for all semester, the 2007 IEEE CEC & EEE Conference (it stands for Computer Stuff and Things) was scheduled to take place July 23-26. I knew in advance that that time span directly overlapped with my final exams, but I had hoped that I would be able to participate between things. BRRRP- sorry, wrong answer. With three Intensive Japanese finals and a Religion, Conflict and Violence one thrown in for variety, I had basically no chance to take part in the conference proceedings, or even in the Web Services Competition for which I had created a website and handled most all correspondence. Instead, I just played tour guide, and showed Fitz and John (other participants from Georgetown) around the conference area, around Shinjuku, and sent them off to Roppongi. At least I got some free food at the official dinner banquets.

More details on exams, fireworks, touristing, and walking club coming soon-- pictures too, once I fish my camera cable out of my luggage somewhere. For now, I need to go to sleep.

Mount Doom

2007-07-20T20:05:00.001+09:00

There is a saying that people say about 富士山 (Fuji-san) Mount Fuji: "A wise man climbs Mt. Fuji once; only a fool climbs it twice." I would have to disagree with this statement-- I believe it should read: "Only a fool climbs Mt. Fuji." Period. This is the story of six fools who decided to try. Look, read, and enjoy!

"Mount Fuji: We Climb It So That You Don't Have To."

We left for Fuji on Wednesday evening. Ryoma from the dormitory kindly set up a car rental for us to drive to there, rather than spending even more money on train or bus tickets. Of course it was a Japanese-size car, meaning that I had no leg room and could not sit up straight without bending my neck sideways. I am no advocate of American behemoth SUV's, but just a couple more inches all around would have been nice. In this photo, from left to right: Ryan, Colin, Ryoma, and Joe. Charles is stuck in the back seat with me.

Yes, I am wearing two layers of white cleaning gloves, thanks for asking. The department store only carries winter gloves in-season, so we had to go with what they had. Also, I am very much obliged to Joe for allowing me to wear his Fairfield University hat.

Engrish again-- but Ryoma is Japanese and he was making fun of it too, so that makes it all okay. Charles is on the left.

Between this picture and the next is a period of suffering lasting several hours, for which I have no photographs-- this is because we were climbing Fuji in the dead of night, with the goal of reaching the summit to see the sunrise. By only the light of our narrow flashlight beams, we toiled for hours up winding gravel paths and steep rock climbs. I naively thought I would get along without a flashlight because everyone else had one, but I ended up having to buy a little cheap one halfway up for ¥1600 ($13). One of my backpack's zippers fell apart, and we had to tie elastic bands around the whole thing to hold it together. Ryoma had bought canisters of oxygen to fight off altitude sickness but everybody felt it anyway. Exhaustion led to frustration, and then to bickering. Finally a dim light began to appear in the east.

Joe, Ryan, and Colin sat here on uncomfortable, pointy rocks next to a torii gate very near the summit, just as the sun started to rise. That is, the sun came above the horizon but remained completely covered by clouds the entire time we were there. I tried to use flash for this picture, but the ever-present drizzle-fog made it white and fuzzy. I suppose you could say we were walking through the clouds, but at the time it felt and looked like the grayest kind of misty precipitation-- the kind that makes you want to go back inside right away and get in bed. Except we were ten to twelve hours away from our beds.

When the sky took short breaks from being completely overcast, I did get some pretty pictures. For this one, we appear to be between two layers of clouds.

A look back at the summit, and the torii gate where we had rested. The top of the mountain only got direct sunlight once we had left. D'oh!

A cloud creeps its way up the mountainside, threatening to engulf a trail station (on the right). You never realize how fast clouds move until you're standing right next to them.

The sky! The sky! The great blue sky and the peach-colored clouds! This view was unfortunately short-lived, as the clouds closed back up again rather quickly, and the mountain resumed its usual greyness.

Our best guess on this group of white-clad climbers was that they were Shinto religious pilgrims on their way to the shrine at the summit. The path down is different from the path up, so we never passed by them directly.

Beside the paths, there were areas still covered with snow, or at least mud-ice. I am not certain how this is the case; it is above freezing even at the summit, and it was fog-drizzling the whole time, which you might think would wash the snow away. But Mount Fuji never had to make sense.

On the way up, there were a dozen or so stations where you could rest and buy overpriced supplies or food. On the way down, there were only two. This one was the most colorful, with Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags out front (wrong mountain?). We talked to a store employee here for a little while; he was so pleased we knew Japanese he came out of the station to chat with us.

Joe ominously points the way down the mountain. The path down was in some ways worse than the path up. By this point the fog-mist had become so thick that I could not use my glasses any more-- so, not only were my legs too tired to walk properly, I couldn't even see very much of where we were going.

The zig-zag gravel path down lasted a few dozen turns; then we had to climb back up again to get to the station where we had started. Whoever first set out these paths should be brought out for public questioning, and the whole thing should be revised. After we finally got back to the car, we went to an onsen where we boiled ourselves for a little while, got lunch at a strange Chinese place, then drove back to the dormitory. I slept from 4pm Wednesday straight through to 7am Thursday, with only a short break for dinner around 8pm. My legs are still sore.

So in summary: Hooray for my first real depressing blog post!

To balance the mood, here is a note on a completely different topic. In less than 12 hours, I will be at Kinokuniya bookstore purchasing my pre-ordered copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! All of you in the US have my pity; I will get the book at British midnight, while you will all have to wait until midnight at your local times. I have managed to remain pretty much unspoiled, despite the leak of the entire book to BitTorrent and the New York Times' unfortunate decision to print an early review. I will not be writing anything else about the book in this blog, so don't worry about me ruining it for you. In the words of J.K. Rowling: "In a very short time you will know EVERYTHING!"

Earthquake Redux

2007-07-16T13:40:00.000+09:00

Just a quick note on this one-- for anyone who has seen the reports of this morning's earthquake, we did feel it here in Tokyo but there was no damage this far away from the epicenter at 新潟 (Niigata). I was actually in class at the time, working through another Japanese grammar point when the chairs started to go wobbly. Then the walls were shaking too and a girl in the back of the class just blurted out "地震!" (jishin)-- "Earthquake!" The professor didn't know what was going on at first, but he felt it too soon after that. After a minute or so of shaking, we got a short Japanese lecture about what to do if an large earthquake occurs (cover your head with your textbook, apparently) and went back to our lesson.

In other natural disaster-related news, the much-hyped super-typhoon Man-Yi managed to cancel everything this weekend without actually delivering anything more than rain showers and mild wind. 台風４号 (taifuu yon-gō) Typhoon #4, as we call it in Japanese, headed out to sea before it got to Tokyo, sparing us the lashing it gave to pretty much everywhere else south of here. I know it ruined many people's plans for this weekend-- not only Fuji mountain climbing but also fireworks displays and musicals (Wicked included) were all called off due to the typhoon threat. Maybe next time?

All the Very Latest

2007-07-14T19:45:00.000+09:00

Keeping up-to-date is always the most difficult thing with this blog it seems... so to recap the past week's events we bring you a series of relatively unrelated anecdotes!

I think I mentioned the holiday of 七夕 (Tanabata) a couple posts ago-- on the day itself, a group of us from the dorm (Charles, Colin, Joe, Ryan, and me) decided to go to Koganei Park and see if they had any festival stuff going on like they did for hanami at the beginning of the semester. Unfortunately they did not, but I got to see what the park looked like when it did not have hundreds of trees covered in pretty pink blooms. Basic difference: green instead of pink.

One interesting thing we did see though was a group of people flying the most giant kite (or is it a string of kites) that I've ever seen. There was only just enough wind to keep it up for a couple of minutes, then they had to bring it down again. I checked up close and it was a series of multicolored, star-shaped panels all strung together with wire. Probably the stars had to do with Tanabata, but who knows? Maybe they just wanted to fly a super-long star kite on a non-windy day for no particular reason.

We also found that there was a pretty cool playground there too. We didn't actually get to play on it, since there were real kids there and we didn't want to scare anybody away (the curse of being a gaijin...) There was also a slope with special astroturf that you could sled down. We contemplated buying a plastic sled and joining in, but ended up just on the top of the hill watching Joe do fire-spinning practice without the "on fire" part.

On Wednesday, Cameron, Jennie, Joe, Martin, Mike, Ryan, Seamus, Stephanie and I went to the 日本科学未来館 (Nihon Kagaku Mirai-kan) National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation-- I much prefer its shorter Japanese nickname of 未来館 (Mirai-kan) Future Museum. Just as we arrived, there was a demonstrataion of ASIMO, Honda's diminutive but humanoid robot. He waved, he walked, he ran, he spouted short recorded phrases at the audience in Japanese. Very cute.

Also at the Future Museum there was the best model for the Internet I have ever seen. Forget tubes, the Internet is really a giant contraption of metal ramps, lifts, and spirals, communicating using different-colored marbles. This model actually works; we sent short messages like "HI" or "!" or "ネ" across the room with such unnecessary trouble that I think Rube Goldberg would be proud.

Oh yeah, and there was a floating superconductor magnet thingy with cool smoky liquid nitrogen.

This is the giant LCD screen version of Earth. We watched a demonstration of a number of the globe's features-- you can see Earth with clouds, Earth current state, Earth surface temperature (present and projected), even the Moon and Mars. Ryan and Martin got to control it a little bit, rotating it around to see Japan and the US. The one funny thing about the globe was that whenever you switched between the various views, you ended up with the Blue Sphere of Death.

That same evening, Seamus put us together a trip to 歌舞伎座 (Kabuki-za), a famous kabuki theater here in Tokyo. We went to go see 十二夜 (Juniya), a kabukified adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. I have heard a number of horror stories about boring, tedious Japanese theater, but they must have all been thinking of 能 (Noh) because kabuki is awesome. We didn't get to see the first act, but we did manage to buy tickets for the second and third sections of the performance. After grabbing earphones with English explanations of what was going on, we took our cheap student-price seats in the nosebleed section.

For anyone not familiar with kabuki, it works like Shakespeare's plays used to: all the female roles are played by men. This, according to our headsets, is because the female style built up by 女形 (onnagata) men playing women cannot be emulated by real women-- they are too natural. Since this was a comedy, all the actors totally overplayed their parts, especially the "females" and the yellow-clad comic relief man. After a while I turned my earphones almost to off so that I could listen better to the Japanese-- and was pleasantly surprised to find I could understand a good bit of it. Good fun all around.

Yesterday evening we were treated to an entirely different, yet Shakespeare-based theater performance. As I imagine this picture might suggest, it draws very very loosely from The Tempest-- as far as I could really tell, only the new title "Storm" and the names of the characters had any connection to the original. That said, it was mind-blowingly awesome. Seamus was a natural as the insane asylum head, Dane from choir was his frustrated assistant, and Richard and Dan from our dormitory danced with pink feather boas and executed top-secret missions respectively. In true Shakespearean form, everybody died at the end, but fortunately they came alive again so we could talk with them after the performance. Congratulations, and three cheers for all!

As for today, a huge group of us-- Allison, Amy, Brittany, Cameron, Charles, Colin, Emery, Jennie, Joe, Kelly, Mariko, Michi, Mike, Ryan, Ryoma, Stephanie, and I-- went to go see ハリー・ポッターと不死鳥の騎士団, I mean "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." My review: Doesn't really follow the book much at all. Transitions between scenes are nonexistent. But real wizard dueling is awesome-- Dumbledore vs. Voldemort for the win! That whole battle was totally written for the big screen anyway.

After the show, we headed over to Isetan department store, where they had a special exhibition of Harry Potter movie props and products. Two pictures above is Harry's original acceptance letter and glasses, and this one is the Triwizard Cup from the fourth movie. They also had all the characters' wands, the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone, copies of the Daily Prophet, wizard costumes, broomsticks... not to mention a wide variety of Potterania for sale. Among other things, I bought a Bulgaria Quidditch banner-scarf, so Colin from the dorm had to buy an Ireland one to support his home country against me.

And in closing, here Joe responds to the news that super-typhoon Man-Yi, "the biggest typhoon to hit Japan in July in 10 years," is coming for Tokyo. It seems to be working its way up the Japanese archipelago, going through Okinawa, Kyushu, and Shikoku to the main island of Honshu where Tokyo is located by tomorrow afternoon. Some guys from the dormitory were planning on climbing Mount Fuji this weekend, but the mountain is literally closed due to the typhoon. I was kind of half-hoping for this to happen, in just the same way I am still hoping for my morning train to be late so that I can get an official excuse paper from the train company-- I want to be able to say say it happened to me in Japan. I'll be sure to write about it if the dorm is still standing after it hits.

Just kidding, of course. I think.

Metal Giants, Forest Islands

2007-07-06T21:53:00.001+09:00

Ahh, there are so many things going on! I just saw the Japanese version of Wicked the other night and it was amazing. I haven't seen the American production, but I have the soundtrack, and I pretty much memorized it in advance, so I was able to follow along with most everything that was going on. There were a number of places where the Japanese worked so well that I couldn't imagine how you would get the same nuance in English, so I guess I have to see it now and find out how they did it in the original. There are a number of very low-quality recordings of the Japanese songs online, but keep in mind they don't accurately reflect the superior singing quality of the actresses and actors involved.

(長谷寺, Hase-dera or Hase Temple)

Today's post, however, is not about green witches or flying monkeys: it is about my trip to 鎌倉 (Kamakura) a couple weeks ago. Kamakura is about an hour south of Tokyo, next to the ocean. With a variety of attractions hundreds of years old, I really got the feeling of old, authentic Japan there, almost as much as I did in Kyoto. I guess it was far enough away from the city that it escaped the massive indiscriminate firebombing campaign the U.S. launched against Tokyo in WWII (just like Kyoto narrowly avoided being the first target for the nuclear bomb!) You can tell what part of Japanese history we're studying in class right now, I'm sure...

(地蔵, Jizo statues at Hase Temple)

History aside, Kamakura was beautiful. I went along with several Georgetown friends (Ryan, Emery, Seamus, Alice) and our patron Ms. Miyake, who organizes such events for us from time to time. We all met up at 品川 (Shinagawa) Station, and took the long train ride down to Kamakura Station together. Kamakura has a very cute local railway called 江ノ電 (Enoden) which has been around for a hundred years or so. I wish they would update it and add some more trains though, because every time we got on it, it was even more crowded than your usual morning Chuo Line train. First stop: Hase Temple.

(The view from Hase-- that is the Pacific Ocean.)

Inside Hase Temple is a giant statue of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, with something like a dozen heads. The thing is gold-plated, at least five times as tall as a normal person, and looks very impressive, but unfortunately they told us we couldn't take any pictures inside. As I am learning though, the grounds of a temple are just as interesting as the building itself-- in this case, there were winding paths up and down the side of a mountain, with statues and geraniums all over the place:

The geraniums at Hase (which I, being something very much less than a botanist, originally mistook for chrysanthemums) seemed to be the main attraction for most people-- to the point that there were timed tickets to take a certain path that was literally surrounded by blooming geraniums on all sides. Cooling ourselves off with the complementary fans we got at the entrance, we slowly made our way among the flowers, then back to the Enoden. Next stop: 大仏 (Daibutsu).

This dude (the big metal one in the background, not the dopey gaijin in front) knows what's up. He's been around a while. 'You close me up inside a temple? That's okay, I'll just sit here and meditate a couple centuries. Giant tsunami blows up the temple and most of the village? I'm still sitting here, nothing wrong. Heck, even if the Great Kanto Earthquake happens tomorrow, I'm cool. They just built me a sliding base-- earth moves, I won't. Ain't nothing that can knock me down. I'm the Great Buddha, yo!'

Even if it is an overblown tourist attraction where everybody just goes to have their picture taken in front of the statue, I still think the Daibutsu itself is pretty cool, as I hope the previous paragraph shows. They let you go inside the hollow metal statue for 20 yen (though none of my pictures from that turned out very well.) Also, strange Japan story #274: Completely unknown man approaches our party, asks if we can take a picture. With him. Not Ms. Miyake, just the foreign kids. We reluctantly oblige, and have a group picture with him in front of the Daibutsu. He thanks us and leaves, no name, no contact information, no nothing. Why? "Hey look guys, I went to Kamakura and I met these awesome foreigners! I have a picture to prove it"...?

(Giant sandals for the Daibutsu, in case he decides to stretch his legs some millenia hence.)

Last for the Daibutsu, here is a reproduction of a sign we noticed just outside the monastery compound where the statue sits:

NOTICE
KOTOKU-IN MONASTERY
KAMAKURA

STRANGER WHOSOEVER THOU ART and whatsoever be thy creed, when thou enterest this sanctuary, remember thou treadest upon ground hallowed by the worship of ages.
This is the Temple of Buddha and the gate of the Eternal, and should therefore be entered with reverence.

By Order of the Prior

Close by to the Daibutsu, there was a passage to the ocean. There is a length of beach along the coastline, but none of us had brought swim gear so unfortunately we couldn't take full advantage of it. There were whole squads of windsurfers out there though, and a number of surfboarders as well. Oh well. I already swam in the Pacific (admittedly a very different part of it) during my trip to El Salvador anyway.

Following our glimpse of the beach, there was nothing else particularly planned, but it was lunchtime so we figured we might as well all go together. After not being able to get in a number of places due to the crowds, we found a Korean restaurant that could seat us all at one table. I got ビビンバ冷麺 (bibinba reimen), which turned out to be noodles in a special spicy sauce that caused them to clump together stronger than crazy glue. At one point, when I was offering to share some and Seamus tried to take part of it, we repeatedly failed to pick up anything less than the entire lump of noodles at once. Noticing our plight, the waiter helpfully brought us a pair of scissors. That was the first and hopefully last time I have ever had to use scissors as a table utensil.

(江ノ島, Enoshima: Paradise for the Evil Overlord. Single footbridge access makes keeping your enemies out easy-- unless you plan to lure them to their doom.)

After lunch, we separated and went in several directions. Emery, Seamus and I decided we wanted to go to Enoshima, an island just off the coast, since it seemed to have several interesting things ranging from temples to caves to an observatory/lighthouse tower. Little did we know, it would turn out to be the perfect location for an evil mastermind's headquarters (if anyone is considering that particular career path, follow the captions for more information.)

(Narrow, winding forest paths, good for ambushing pesky adventurers, terminate at ancient shrines guarded by fierce dragons.)

Sort of following the one map we saw at the entrance to the island, we made our way through the crowds, up and down many stairs, and through a forest trail, finally ending up at a Shinto shrine apparently dedicated to dragons. In addition to the stone dragon pictured above and a few random relics, there was a "dragon bell" which lovers are supposed to ring to bring them good luck-- didn't look like anything special to us though. After a few more flights of stairs, we reached the end of the island and were at the caves.

(The natural cave network is perfect for hiding people or things, and the rock beach serves as a treacherous but scenic battle arena.)

The caves turned out to be a bit ridiculous. I went inside expecting a series of natural caverns, maybe some stalactites/stalagmites and such. But, instead of that, we got glow-in-the-dark rocks, backlit Buddha statues, and even a very fake-looking neon dragon with thunder sound effects. We had candles to navigate with, but it was difficult to get through anyway, because the cave roof came down to half my height for some portions of the route. I'd still say it's worth the price of admission, but maybe they should note it's more along the lines of Chuck E. Cheese than Carlsbad Caverns.

(Ready-built tower: perfect for grandiose living space, evil genius experimentation, grand climactic duels, or all of the above.)

Our next stop was the Lighthouse/Observatory at the top of the island. Whether this thing actually serves or ever did serve as a lighthouse is an entirely open question-- I forget now which side I was even advocating but Emery and I debated it off and on the whole day. On our way there was a street performer, so we stopped to watch his show a bit. I was expecting him to be a magician, but there was no such thing going on there-- still, some deft juggling and other tricks done to the latest J-Pop background music.

(Excellent view from the tower allows you to see your opponents from far off. Nearby city and beach provide ample opportunities for intimidation, theft, and hostage-taking.)

From the top of the tower, you could see pretty much everything on the island and a good deal on the shore. This particular view looks toward Kamakura-- you can see the footbridge and the beach there, but not much else in any detail. At the very top of the tower, out in the open air, there were a few hawks hovering about-- I think if you look at the previous picture you can see a hawk to the upper left of the tower. The observatory was our last big attraction of the day, after which we made our way back off the island, took Enoden and then the train back to Tokyo... but before I finish, I could never forget the Mystery Soda Incident!

(Rigged drink machines will trick and confuse your adversaries, worsening morale and denying refreshment.)

Okay, so I admit this particular Evil Mastermind caption is a bit of a stretch, but I couldn't not post this picture. In this machine, the two top right buttons correspond to something called "Mystery Soda." Emery was explaining that this was something delicious he had heard about before, so Seamus bought one-- but it turned out to be Skal, aka carbonated water mixed with milk. Like a true gambler, Emery decided he would try too, to see if he could get the drink he thought it was originally, only to receive another Skal. So the two of them stood there quite pathetically, having been duped into buying a drink they didn't want, but feeling obligated to drink it anyway. They did. It wasn't so bad.

(A dark, looming tower wrapped in spiral display screens and topped with metal wolf heads sets a menacing tone for your base of operations. All-powerful, world-ending technology/artifact not included. Ask about our 'Those Meddling Kids' insurance program today!)

Snapshots, Misc.

2007-07-02T21:35:00.000+09:00

In advance of my long-delayed post on my trip to Kamakura and Enoshima (coming soon!), I realized I had a load of pictures and random things I had been to or done that didn't quite justify a full blog post, but were definitely share-worthy. Since I am lazy, and since writing short captions for funny pictures is easier than fully chronicling a day-long trip, I ended up finishing this first. So, as we say in Japanese, どうぞ! (Doozo!) Here you go!

Don't Worry Be Happy? Yes, you did make my day, dear random store with the number seven on the front. From a street corner somewhere in north central Tokyo.

You know how they say the United States is always behind other countries when it comes to math and science education? Well, sometimes things like this make me wonder... taken on a subway line somewhere; I think the Chuo Line is too smart for this kind of nonsense.

I do not at all envy the guy who had to wave this flag around. Every year Sophia University and Nanzan University get together and have all their sports teams play against each other. Last year they held it at Nanzan, this year it was at Sophia. This was the opening ceremonies, and the flag is Sophia's emblem. Sadly, I did not get to go to any of the actual games, but we did beat them in a majority of categories, so we won!

So some friends and I went to a restaurant called Ninja. I got a crash course on the ninja arts (large thanks to Joe) and this is the result. Keep in mind that this picture was taken with the flash on. And yes, the scroll lying on the table is our menu.

An artifact from a forgotten age, this cube still seemed to radiate some unknown power... we spoke no louder than whispers, transfixed by the undulating design and indecipherable writing... actually I don't feel like pulling another Tokyo Teleport-style hoax here, so I will say straight up this is a magic cube from the floating city of Laputa, found on the roof of the Studio Ghibli Museum.

A few weeks back, our wonderful dormitory manager decided we should all go out and have some fun together, so he set up a trip to a nearby all-you-can-eat buffet, and invited all the students staying in the dorm to come for free. You get raw meat and cook it at your table, but that means you get it exactly the way you like it, so I have no problem with that!

Everybody talks about Yasukuni Shrine, or at least they used to when Prime Minister Koizumi made his annual trips there. The one good thing about Shinzo Abe is that he hasn't done that yet, so it hasn't been in the news lately. The basic story is that Yasukuni 1. enshrines the souls of convicted war criminals and 2. maintains a revisionist history museum painting Japan's WWII behavior as completely blameless (Pearl Harbor was forced by the Americans, the Nanking Massacre never happened, the Japanese Empire was an absolutely necessary development, etc.) Well. Americans have been known to do weird things too.

Some things about this picture I can explain. For instance, the black-and-white penguin is encouraging people to switch to the new Mobile Suica service, where you can use your cell phone as a train pass and credit card, and the text says "1 out of every 10 people gets ¥1000! You COULD WIN!!" But why the penguin is holding a duck head? Completely beyond me.

This requires some Japanese knowledge to appreciate the humor... the main political party in Japan (in fact the only one in power since WWII) is called 自民党 (jimintō). Somebody thought it would be fun to sell candy based on the name, so they now sell ジ・ミント (ji minto), which is how you would say "the mint" in phonetic Japanese. Get it? So maybe it's not such a good joke, but I thought it was funny at least.

Tanabata is this Saturday. That I knew already. I did not, however, know that the city of Koganei would randomly decorate its streets with crazy multicolored jellyfish thingies. Though as they say, "any day you can wake up to crazy multicolored jellyfish floating outside your window is a good day." I'm not sure if they do say that, but they should.

It's what we've all been waiting on for months-- the new elevated platform at Musashi Koganei Station is now open and functional! This picture is from the day before they opened it-- you can see the construction crews sweeping the tracks and the technician installing the vending machines. Very clean and nice and new. They're hardly finished-- they have only elevated the line going one direction (out from Tokyo) so they have to start all over again working on the other side-- but I'm glad they at least finished part of it while we're here.

Until next time!

Lumos Maxima!

2007-06-29T21:07:00.000+09:00

June 22, 2007: Some friends and I were riding on the Hibiya line back home. We had just gone to a 銭湯 (sentō) public bath-- very relaxing-- and following that a delicious dinner of Okinawan cuisine. As I usually do, I was looking around at the various advertisements on the train. It's always fun to decipher something witty or interesting, and Japanese train ads usually don't disappoint. Right in front of me hung a rather bland-looking blue poster, with an announcement that was anything but bland:

Magic Message. 6/28, 7:30pm, Roppongi Hills.
On June 28, 7:30pm, help out with Harry's magic.
Recite "Expecto Patronum!" in the direction of Roppongi Hills. When you do, something will!

In Japanese it is okay to leave your sentences unfinished sometimes ("something will!"), so frustratingly I had no idea what on earth this event was. Most of us there agreed we had to go and find out, and I resolved to look it up on the Internet somehow. Eventually I found the Japanese-language Harry Potter fansite pottermania.jp. There, among other articles I sifted through with the help of some automatic translating tools, was a schedule showing June 28 as the day of the Japanese premiere of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Upon checking with some other English-language websites, it turned out that this was not only the Japanese premiere, but the first premiere ever. The London showing calls itself the World Premiere, but that's July 3, and the last time I checked July came after June.

At any rate, this was pretty exciting, so it wasn't difficult at all to get together a group of people together to come see what "something" was. This Thursday, after my History of Japan class, six of us gathered on campus before heading out: Cameron, Jennie, Joe, Kelly, Seamus, and me. I had checked around for directions to Roppongi Hills, and along the way had come across some new information about the event. First, the red carpet walkers would start around 6:15pm. Second, the spell involved had been changed from "Expecto Patronum!" to "Lumos Maxima!" Third, pottermania.jp coyly recommended people who couldn't come to the premiere to at least look towards Roppongi Hills, as the "something" would probably be visible from a good distance.

We arrived at Roppongi Hills around 5:30pm, well in advance of the first celebrity attendees. The entire area was chock-full of Harry Potter publicity-- posters on walls and pillars, ads coming over television screens, even some images set up behind running waterfalls (see the very last picture below.) Since the red carpet was scheduled to be at Roppongi Hills Arena, we followed the maps right up to where the arena was supposedly located, only to find that we were five stories too high. My fault as navigator, but it did make for a nice overhead shot:

After running into several different guards blocking several different staircases down, we gave up and smashed into an elevator. Finally, the ability to throw the concept of 'personal space' completely to the wind (born of the daily crush of the morning rush hour) found its use. Once we were at ground level, we wandered around the outside of the arena. There were a lot of people already inside, and the only people going in when we walked by were the reporters and photographers. So, we decided we would find a place somewhere around where you could see the red carpet. This was the best view we got:

Yeah, it's not that great, because the press was kind of in the way. But we could see the red carpet, and we could see the stage, so I was relatively happy. The only thing was that the security people kept having to ask us to stay out of the walkway, so every few minutes or so we would have to squish in to the metal barriers, and then inevitably spread back out again a little later. I left to go take pictures from another spot, during which a Harry Potter bus randomly passed by:

It's so well done, you almost can't tell it's a bus, but I promise it's not a wall. Since this area didn't have a view of the stage, I moved back again, only to find the crowd there had grown even larger since I had left. Fortunately my backpack was saving my space. At this point, at least according to my own imagined version of the event, the security guards broke down. We were standing all over their precious walkway, and there was no way any of us was going to move and give up our view. So they got tickets for inside the arena from somewhere and started handing them out to the people standing in our area. There was a near-riot during which I definitely did not take advantage of my height and reach over three other people to grab a ticket. Okay maybe I did, but the point is I got one:

If you haven't picked it up by now, ハリー・ポッター does indeed say 'Harry Potter,' and the smaller text 不死鳥の騎士団 literally means 'Mounted Samurai Group of the Non-Dying Bird' or, if you like, 'Order of the Phoenix.' Since there were enough tickets for most everybody in the area, everybody in our group managed to grab tickets and join the small horde of people rushing toward the arena entrance area. There, unfortunately we had to turn in our tickets, but in exchange we got hanging badges assigning us to Section E. This, I firmly believe, stands for Exceeds Expectations. Although Section E was in the middle of the arena, isolating us from the red carpet around the outer edge, we got a good view of a giant TV screen as well as the stage:

This is another example of a situation in which it is very nice to be tall, especially in Japan. Jennie and Kelly both ended up standing on top of their backpacks to see over the crowd a bit. At this point there wasn't much of anything to see; people still hadn't started arriving yet and the giant screen was turned off. We did get to hear certain excerpts from the new soundtrack, many of which I recognized from hearing on the official soundtrack website, though of course in greater length and better quality. Suddenly some very loud, ominous music started playing, and smoke and red lights filled the stage. It sounded so evil I thought maybe Ralph Fiennes would be swooping in to Avada Kedavra us all, but no such luck. As the music reached a crescendo, the lights began to fade, then just as it stopped a single spotlight shone on... the announcer lady.

Since my camera doesn't do very well in low-light situations, I ended up taking pictures of the TV screen for some of these next shots. You can see the boom microphones of the media section poking up at the bottom of the picture, though why they would be pointing boom microphones ten or twenty feet in the air is beyond me. The announcer lady greeted us all, gave a little speech about how this was not only the best Harry Potter movie ever, but the best movie ever made period, then proceeded to interview the arrivals on the red carpet. There were so many interesting ones-- the solitary American star of Cold Case, the lady with a purple-and-gold hat half the size of a normal one, the kid celebrity who liked "action movies, the kind with fighting," all the Japanese celebrities struggling to describe exactly why they liked the Harry Potter series-- but then somebody showed up and stole the entire show.

It was Daniel Radcliffe, aka the actor who plays Harry Potter, aka the reason why hundreds of Japanese teenage girls started screaming simultaneously in the middle of an interview with the tiny hat lady. The lady to the left seemed like his agent or something, she stayed with him the entire time; the lady to the right served as a translator so that Radcliffe could answer the many questions of the Japanese TV crews. First he went to the media section, then he slowly made his way around the red carpet, signing autographs and talking to whatever fans could speak a little English. From our section, the television was pretty much our only view of the action, but I did manage one shot of half of Radcliffe's face in the middle of the crowd:

After a good while, all the little interviews were over and everybody had made their way around the carpet, so it was time for something different. Announcer Lady came back up to the stage and talked a little more about the film, then pointed everyone over to the big screen for some clips from the movie. These were fun, about a minute apiece, spoken in English but subtitled in Japanese. The first was fun broom flying, the second was Voldemort's plans, the third was Umbridge's class, and the fourth was Umbridge's general reign of terror. Just in case you weren't situated where you could see the screen (and happened not to understand the English being spoken), Announcer Lady kindly summarized each clip after it played.

After all the interviews and movie clips, it had become quite dark outside-- since Japan doesn't use Daylight Savings Time, the sun rises and sets earlier than I'm used to in the States at least. Announcer Lady let us know that it was now time for the main event, a talk with Daniel Radcliffe and David Heyman, the movie's producer. Epic music began to play, the smoke machines worked double time, and the lights swung around wildly pretending to be a laser light show. A cloud of smoke obscured all of center stage, but just as the music reached its climax, the smoke blew away, tiki torches burst into flame, and Radcliffe and Heyman emerged, simply grinning at the crazy spectacle and crazy fans.

First Heyman, then Radcliffe read off a couple short phrases of Japanese from notecards. These were hilarious. Both of them had the very clearly discernible accent known as 'an English-speaking person reading romanized Japanese.' At least they picked simple enough sentences that they were easily understandable-- 日本の皆さん今日は "Hello to everyone in Japan!" 僕はダニエル・ラドクリフです "I am Daniel Radcliffe." 日本のファンは最高 "Japanese fans are the best!" After they were finished mangling the admittedly complex language I am learning here, Announcer Lady turned to asking actual questions about the movie, which meant the rest of the conversation was held through Translator Lady.

Heyman and Radcliffe made some generic comments about how the whole series and the books are all great, but that this movie was even better than anything that had come before... how the actors are all growing up... how the films are becoming darker in tone... the usual questions and the usual answers. Translator Lady made regular notes on her pad, then once Heyman or Radcliffe had finished speaking, went through them to make sure she reproduced what they had said-- as far as I could understand, it was pretty exact. Radcliffe appeared maybe a little nervous, but I imagine I would be too if I had legions of fangirls screaming after me wherever I went. Though if I did, I'm not sure if I would be complaining either...

Finally, at 7:30pm the last interview was over and it was time for the "something." Announcer Lady explained to the crowd that we would count down (in English) "3, 2, 1" then everyone would say "Lumos Maxima!" Radcliffe apparently thought that was the actual cue, so he yelled the spell quite loudly, but nobody else did. Realizing his mistake, he said "Oh, that one was just a practice," and Translator Lady related that to the crowd-- there was some giggling. After a few more practices and some pretend false starts from Radcliffe, it was time to do it for real. Together we chanted "3, 2, 1, Lumos Maxima!" and behind us something burst into light.

We couldn't tell what it was at the time (this picture is from afterwards), but we had just conjured up a great pillar of light next to the Roppongi Hills tower. I'm not sure whether it was the smoke machines operating for a few hours straight or else the general quality of Tokyo air, but you could see the high-power beams pretty clearly all the way up to the cloud level above. Having so magically created this shining apparition, we turned back to the stage only to find that Radcliffe and Heyman had disappeared again behind an impenetrable wall of smoke, sparks, and crazy lighting. Further helping the two make their escape, giant silver streamers shot from the top of the stage out over the audience. I kept three strands as souvenirs-- those and my "E" badge are the only physical proof I have of attending the premiere.

How I managed to get them in the frame I will never know-- I am always terrible at action shots-- but you can see the streamers just being shot at the top of this picture. With this as the finale, the premiere party was officially over. Those of us that were standing on top of backpacks got down again, we waited for the guards to let us out of our section, and after five minutes or so we had gotten free and were on our way to dinner. We didn't get to see the movie, but honestly I wasn't expecting to; all reports indicated that it was only celebrities, media, and a few lucky contest winners that got to go in to the theater. We were lucky enough just to get inside the arena I think, and it really was a lot of fun.

Until next time, be like me and Neville: Constant Vigilance! (Yes, I am holding an oversize cooking chopstick in my hand as a wand. And that is Norbert on my shirt. If you think that's overkill, then you may want to avoid this blog around July 21...)

A Day in the Life

2007-06-19T22:37:00.000+09:00

I was thinking, one thing I haven't posted about yet among all these theme parks and vacations and gimmicks is what a normal day is like here. There are so many random details, small things that happen but aren't enough to write or even talk about usually... but put together they make up my daily life. I'm not sure if it amounts to anything colossally interesting, but here for your edification is a chronicle of my day yesterday, Monday, June 18, 2007.

6:50am: The phone alarm goes off. I have a regular alarm clock which I got as a gift along with my cell phone contract, but the cell phone is easier to set so I've always used it. I wake up enough to make it stop, then stay in bed anyway.

7:05am: I decide it's time to get up. I open my curtains to let in the sun, which rose about 2 hours earlier. For no readily explained reason, Japan does not use Daylight Savings Time. With my towel, clothes, and toiletry bag in tow, I go down 3 flights of stairs to wait in line for one of the 2 showers.

7:40am: After showering, changing clothes, checking email, etc., I go down to breakfast. Today I have the "Western food" option, which I get about 90% of the time (as the Japanese option usually involves fish, which I prefer not to eat that early in the day.) It is an assortment of vegetables in a tomato sauce, and also a small bowl of macaroni-type noodles and alfredo-type sauce.

Side note: I apologize that my culinary vocabulary in English is about as poor as my Japanese. I only know the names for about half the dishes served at the dormitory, and I can't describe them properly in any language really. My most sophisticated cooking word is probably ratatouille, and that's only because Pixar is so good they can get away with such a weird name for a film. Too bad it doesn't come out here until a month after the U.S.

8:00am: Having flipped my nametag and switched from slippers to shoes, I head out of the dormitory. Along the way to the subway platform I am cawed at by 3 giant crows. Solitary giant crows are pretty normal here, but three at once were enough to make me move to the other side of the street from their balcony perch. Evil-looking birds.

8:09am: I board the Chuo Line Rapid service in the direction of Tokyo, second car. The first car is women-only, so the second becomes men-only by default. Signs all over Musashi Koganei station remind me that over the weekend of June 30/July 1, service will be curtailed in order to get the outbound elevated track running. I am pretty excited about this, and I look forward to riding the new elevated track soon.

8:50am: My Chuo Line train arrives at Yotsuya station. During the ride, I have studied the vocabulary and grammar points for the chapter test I will have in Japanese class at 9:15. The local homeless man (who, my Japanese friends tell me, is called 四ツ谷さん/ Yotsuya-san/ Mr. Yotsuya) appears to still be asleep-- usually at this hour he is sitting with his rosary beads at the curb.

9:00am: I arrive at my Japanese classroom, which is in Building 11's 6th floor. Thankfully at the beginning of the month they turned on the air conditioners; it used to be my default 'job' to open the windows to get some fresh air. Now my 'job' is just to turn on the lights. Why nobody else does these things I don't know. There are still announcements over the intercom stating that students with measles are not allowed on campus. You'd think by this point they would have gotten the idea, but maybe it makes the administration feel better, like they're actually doing something.

9:15am: Our professor, 小林先生 (Prof. Kobayashi), arrives and we begin our test. I am glad we have at least one male Japanese teacher. Japanese language teachers in general seem to be overwhelmingly female, and that only gives you one side of Japanese gender-specific language. Why Japanese has different speaking patterns for males and females is another topic, but I'd personally prefer to speak like a man and not a woman if that's possible. Though for you guys out there who'd like it the other way around, you're okay by me too.

10:45am: First-period Japanese ends. I feel pretty good about how I did on the chapter test. We get a break between our two morning periods of Japanese, which are taught by separate professors and operate practically independently of one another. I usually go up to the 7th floor during break: since there is no one there but the cleaning lady (we always exchange "good mornings"), I can stretch my legs a bit, enjoy the quiet, and be refreshed for the second class.

11:00am: 大森先生 (Prof. Omori) begins our second class, which focuses more on listening/speaking and casual speech patterns. Even though we had a chapter test in the first class, we have a vocabulary test at the beginning of this one. After that, we listen to a conversation example of how to complain in Japanese. Japanese complaints are entertaining, to me at least. For example, one common formulation is to conjugate a verb with ～てもよさそうなものだけどね (-te mo yosasō na mono dakedo ne), which translates roughly as "it would just seem to be a nice thing [to do], right?"-- this means "I really wish you had done this instead of what you did."

12:30pm: Second period lets out, and I head down 6 flights of stairs to Building 11's basement cafeteria. For the first time in a couple weeks, I get the ¥450 ($3.70) A Lunch, which is usually some crazy mutation of Western-style cafeteria food. But today it is a chicken pita, which I figure can't be too far wrong. After I find a seat with Cameron, Camille, Colin, Joe, and Ryan, I am rewarded for my curiosity by biting into pita bread that is approximately the consistency of stone. We discuss, among other things, that Little Kuriboh is due to post his parody Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged Movie sometime during the day. Yes, we are a little nerdy, but it's a pretty funny series even if you don't like anime.

1:30pm: The party splits up, and I head for the university library to read the Washington Post. Specifically, the comics section. It's just a little piece of American culture that's become something of a ritual for me. I can read the news just fine online, but reading Zippy the Pinhead's discombobulated, postmodern adventures (for example) on an actual piece of paper seems like the only way to do it right.

1:50pm: I head over to one of Building 2's many computer labs to do a number of things: check the news, print out the notes guide for my later history class, and scan the receipts from my visit to the doctor a couple weeks back. I'm hoping I can get my study abroad insurance to pay for my medical bills, but they're not so expensive, so if they don't then it's not the end of the world. Speaking of which, I am now 100% well; in fact, I started feeling much better when my medications ran out. Just goes to show something, I'm sure.

2:45pm: It's early, but I go down to the Building 10 basement classroom for my Japanese History class. It's over-enrolled, and there are never enough chairs and desks for everyone in the class-- thus, it's best to get there ahead of time and grab a seat than have to drag a chair from a neighboring room as I had to do once. I read over the notes guide and reading briefly, then have a short rest.

3:15pm: Prof. Fuess (pronounced Foose, like 'loose') enters the classroom, wearing a collared shirt for once. In the words of a classmate who may wish to remain anonymous, "he usually looks like he just got out of bed and came to class in whatever he found lying on the floor." The lecture is about Japan's foreign relations in the lead-up to World War II, but he somehow manages to make it seem boring. How I managed to get a 100% on the midterm is completely beyond me, as I generally don't do the readings in any detail. It seems Fuess prefers my BS to actual substance, which there is plenty of from other students much more involved than me. In sum: I don't like the class very much, and I think it's not fairly graded besides.

4:45pm: History lets out, and since it's the last class of the day for most people, a group of us form to walk to the train station. Jennie, Cameron, and Seamus peel off at Shinjuku station, leaving me and Joe on the train. I watch as Joe plays Meteos, a strange little game for the Nintendo DS. I was kind of surprised he was playing that, since everyone seems to be working on Phoenix Wright lately-- but maybe Joe beat it, just like he did the crazy male-cheerleaders Ouendan game. Did you, Joe?

5:45pm: We arrive back at the dormitory, and since I'm feeling tired, I decide to have a short nap. I set my phone to wake me up at 7:00 for dinner.

6:50pm: Colin and Ryan attack my door to get me to wake up-- they want to have dinner quickly so that we can all watch the Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged Movie together as we discussed at lunch. Along the way down to the dormitory cafeteria, we pick up Joe and Charles. Dinner is a bowl of rice with various vegetables and some fish on top (once again my food descriptions fail). As always with this type of thing, I load a bunch of ginger on top because ginger tastes like sharp pink freshness mixed with awesome. It kind of drowns everything else out, but that's not so bad sometimes.

7:20pm: It is decided that if we are going to watch a movie-- even a parody of one-- we must have popcorn, so we head down to the Seiyu department store to pick up some movie munchies. Most all department stores here have supermarkets in the basement (or else on the top floor), so you can literally get everything you need to live just by going to one building. The others get their popcorn; I'm not so much of a fan so I just get an ice cream cone for ¥89 ($0.75). Being thus prepared, we go to Ryan's room to view the movie, and after a few system crashes we switch to Firefox and watch the movie literally just as it is being uploaded to YouTube. Funny stuff as always.

9:00pm: Around this time I emerge from Ryan's room and realize I still haven't put my laundry in as I planned, so I grab a load of dark clothes from my room and load them into one of the 5 washers on the 3rd floor. I must mention that these washing machines operate using methods so far advanced from anything I'm familiar with that they are literally indistinguishable from magic. The clothes churn themselves inside the washer, mixing and moving around without any readily explained motive force. Craziness. But they get clean, and that's what matters!

9:15pm: I return to my room, and alternate between surfing the Internet and doing my homework, with admittedly much more of the former than the latter. Among other things, I discover the Japanese Ratatouille trailer, catch up on the latest Homestar Runner short cartoons, re-watch parts of the Abridged Movie, and belatedly come across the London 2012 Olympic logo controversy. (In my opinion they could have done a lot better.) Also I do my Japanese homework and read a little about Aum Shinrikyo for my Religion, Conflict, and Violence class. Along the way I get my clothes out of the washer and hang them up in my room to dry, since there's a 30% chance of rain overnight (though that did not come to pass.)

11:45pm: Colin returns to let me know there are more Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged episodes up (#21 and #22) so we have to gather again to watch them. This being rather later at night, it is naturally even funnier than before (and less annoying since we know to use Firefox from the start.) As we're wrapping up, Ryōma joins us, though he can't talk much since he's losing his voice. Such random ailments are cropping up here. Even when I was getting ready for bed and going to brush my teeth in the bathroom, I ran into Mike, whose allergies have more or less incapacitated him for the past several days now. Even my American-bought drugs aren't enough to help, though I gave him some to try.

Eventually around 12:30pm I made it into bed and fell asleep shortly thereafter. A full day, I think, but of course only one of many.

Compass of Your Heart

2007-06-15T21:58:00.000+09:00

Everybody knows about Tokyo Disneyland, right? Well, it seems the Imagineers at Disney got fed up doing Disney Lands and Worlds and Parks and Kingdoms and whatever EPCOT stands for, and decided to give a nod to the other 70% of the world's surface area: thus Tokyo's Disney Sea was born. This is not a water park, it is a real Disney theme park that happens to have some water stuff in it-- not to mention EPIC FUN.

This Wednesday was my friend Cameron's birthday, so to celebrate that and the end of midterms, a group of seven of us bought tickets at the combini and planned a trip to Disney Sea. All together, it was Cameron, Kelly, Camille, Seamus, Joe, Ryan, and me. Immediately after lunch, we put our bags and backpacks in locker storage at Yotsuya station, then took the hour-long train ride to 舞浜 (Maihama). This should really be called "Tokyo Disney Station," because that's all that's really there in the area, but unfortunately I don't run JR East. If I did: big changes, folks. Anyway, Disney has their own little train line for transportation inside the resort area, complete with Mickey-shaped windows and ads for "Funderful" travel packs. Too bad that awful puns don't translate very well.

After traveling round the Disney train loop, we finally got to the Disney Sea stop. I took the picture above from the station; the Earth fountain is kind of the symbol for Disney Sea, and I think the dilapidated buildings in the background are supposed to be Mediterranean-style houses. We made our way to the ticket counter, where we traded our paper tickets for the real deal and had our bags politely searched. As we stood below the giant Earth and the orchestra came blaring over the loudspeakers, it really hit home: we are in a Disney theme park. Excitement rises, we enter the gate, and there is Mickey, waving from a boat in the lake.

Mickey, why don't you wear any of these crazy costumes in the United States? All we usually ever get to see is your normal clothes or maybe a wizard outfit. In Japan, you've got whatever this medieval royal gear is called, an Arab outfit we saw later on in the park, a wild primeval feathers-cape-conch shell thing going on for BraviSEAmo-- but more on that later. Mickey greeted everyone in Japanese, the crowds parted, and we set off to get some rides done.

The first order of business was Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I think this ride either exists or once existed in the United States as well, but only in Japan can you get in with a 30-second wait and then have your whole ride narrated in Japanese (except the exhortations to remain seated until the ride has come to a complete stop, which are in Chinese and Korean as well.) We never figured out that you can control your own spotlight while exploring the mysteries of the deep, but it was fun just to watch anyway. Mystic crystal underwater aliens for the win!

(The Carousel in Arabian Coast. From left: Seamus, Cameron, me, and Camille.)

After 20,000 Leagues, which was inside Mysterious Island, we headed to the section called Arabian Coast. If you thought Aladdin was a poor representation of Arab culture ("where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face") that has absolutely nothing on this place. Nothing is particularly offensive, but the obvious lack of authenticity is equivalent to putting together the most stereotypical and old-fashioned parts of U.S. history (Model T's, antique shops, rotary phones, straw hats, jig dances) and calling it America. Oh wait, they did that too.

(Me, Joe, and Ryan, sporting our new hats.)

While in Arabian Coast, we made a quick stop at a gift shop to pick up some Disney gear. One of the first things I noticed upon entering the park was the hats and ears. These are not like the obvious American ones, where you have giant Mickey or Minnie ears clearly attached to a headband-- Japanese cosplay is much to sophisticated for that. Instead, you get mouse ears or Stitch ears that appear to be actually sticking out of your head, or else miniature hats properly proportioned only for a hamster. Of course I went for one of the latter, and proudly wore it for most of my time at the park.

(Mickey pretends to be Arabic/Persian. It is only a matter of time before he is assassinated for insulting someone's home country.)

After the carousel, we went to a 3-D magic show, where the attendants were all very concerned whether we could understand Japanese or not-- frankly, the Genie turning into Geppetto and making his former master dance like a marionette doesn't need much translation. Following that, we went to a ride called Sindbad's Storybook Adventure. If you took the story of Sindbad the Sailor, animatronics of Pirates of the Caribbean, and aesthetic of It's a Small World After All and put them all together, this is approximately the result you would get. The song is still stuck in my head. The refrain lyrics are below-- I bet you can read at least part of them!

人生は冒険だ。
地図はないけれど、
宝物を探そう、
信じてcompass of your heart!

After Arabian Coast, we went to Lost River Delta, which is supposed to be a reconstruction of an ancient temple complex in Honduras. Let me tell you-- I've been to Honduras, and I've been to a Mayan temple there, and I can say for sure their ruins don't look anything like roller coasters. But this one did, and we rode it, and it was good anyway. The mist effect even cleaned my glasses off for me. It was at the ride exit that we had our first EPIC experience:

Imagineer conversation: "Okay, so we need something cool at the exit of the ride." "How about a waterfall?" "That's good, that's good, what else?" "Maybe it comes down out of a giant statue ruin? With dragon mouths on the sides?" "I'm seeing it, but it's missing something..." "I've got it! Set the water on fire!" "That's perfect!" So here you have a random ruin, with random waterfall, on fire for no readily explained reason. That, my friends, is EPIC. Seamus called it first so he got to do the EPIC pose. I did touch up the picture just a little bit but I think that gives you the flavor of the moment.

Also in Lost River Delta, we went with Indiana Jones to the Temple of the Crystal Skull. Dear Indiana Jones, I thought you only spoke English, or maybe ancient Greek? Where did these magical Japanese-speaking abilities come from? This was one of those rides where they take your picture halfway through, in this case just as you are about to be crushed by a boulder a la Temple of Doom. The first time we all looked sufficiently scared, but each time afterward we pulled some trick or other, like crossing our arms or looking in random directions. My favorite wasn't ours though-- it was a man and little girl sitting in the front of the car; the girl looks a little nonplussed, but her father is screaming and frantically pointing out in front of her, clearly yelling "LOOK! IT'S A BOULDER!"

After Lost River Delta, we headed for Port Discovery, which symbolizes The Future, and Science, and that sort of thing. By all appearances, the coming energy crisis will be solved by strapping boat oars to steel rings and spinning them around in the air (as in the above picture.) Also, the weather will be controlled by giant airships that shoot storm-disrupting missiles into typhoons, but which lack the necessary safety systems to prevent the missiles from circling back and hitting the ships. The future is a weird place... but not as weird as the American Waterfront...

The surreal feeling started right when we crossed the border into "America" and had our pictures taken. "Look! It's some Americans, in America land!" Then as we were passing Aunt Peg's Village Store, a 'Modern Autobus' pulled up, having every appearance of something that operated maybe in the 1920s. Colonial-era architecture was the norm, though it was mixed with some dark, Gothic overtones for the Tower of Terror. As far as the Tower is concerned, ancient evil dolls are a lot scarier if they taunt you only in a language you don't understand. While the Disney characters had a square-dance performance by the waterfront, we had another EPIC moment, courtesy of Joe and his Sorcerer Mickey hat:

Again, I've touched up the picture just a little bit, but I think it gives you an idea of the feeling. I am the Sorcerer; I control all reality! Waves crash beneath my feet! Broomsticks will tremble and despair! And apologies to Ted of Heroes for stealing his hand radiation power thing, though as both Peter and Sylar took it already I suppose it's all right... yeah I like that television show sort of a lot.

Finally, we gathered with everyone else around the lake for BraviSEAmo, which is yet another untranslatable pun as well as the main evening special effects show at Disney Sea. It's a love story between a water spirit and a fire spirit, so under any normal circumstances you know that wouldn't end well-- somebody would boil away or be extinguished-- but of course this is Disney so there's a happy ending featuring fireworks. We didn't get the fireworks unfortunately because of wind, but this video has them, as well as Mickey's crazy golden peacock outfit and greeting:

ようこそ皆さん！よこそう、このすばらしい魔法の世界へ！
(Yōkoso mina-san! Yōkoso, kono subarashii mahō no sekai he!)
"Welcome everyone! Welcome to this wonderful, magical world!"

A great ending to a great day. We went back on some rides again (Sindbad, the Mayan roller coaster, Indiana Jones) in order to avoid the massive crowds leaving at that point, but left soon after. In conclusion, I definitely recommend this park to anyone staying in Tokyo for any length of time. Go there especially during the week because the wait times are under a minute for practically everything, and you get to experience Disney from a Japanese perspective. If your time there is anything less than EPIC, it's probably your own fault.

Want to See Bronchitis

2007-06-10T13:55:00.000+09:00

On the great list of "the worst things in life you hope you will avoid, but which are likely to happen anyway," getting sick in a foreign country has got to rank pretty high. Perhaps you go to Mexico and forget to ask them not to use the ice cubes, or maybe you hop over to Africa and get bitten by the wrong mosquito-- wherever you go, if you travel for any appreciable length of time, it is virtually certain you will become ill at some point or another. Statistically speaking.

The point of all this is that recently I have been subjected to a crazy mystery Japan illness. A number of my friends from Georgetown refer to this disease as the Cough of Death, after a certain Japanese anime cliche, though of course in contrast to that formula none of us have died (yet). The distinguishing symptom of this disease is a hearty cough which resists all means of eradication for two to three weeks, then disappears essentially of its own accord. So when I first caught the disease and learned its name, I took hope that others had the same thing before me, and it went away by itself. Besides which, I had midterms going on, so I didn't really have time to concentrate on figuring out whatever this was and getting specific medicines for it or anything.

Little did I know that the Cough of Death had other plans for me. Over last weekend I started getting chills in the evenings, which I recognized as odd since it's been consistently warm here lately, and only realized what was going on when I went down to dinner at the cafeteria and people were saying I looked pale. It's been so long since I've had a proper fever (grade school I think, with the flu?) that I forgot what the chills meant. Besides which, I don't have a thermometer of my own to prove anything with, and though I'm sure they have one somewhere in the department store nearby, I didn't know how to ask for one. Now I know it's a 体温計 (taionkei), but that's just one of the many vocabulary words I would learn through the week...

I fell into a pattern that when I was feeling feverish, I would tell anyone who was concerned-- and myself as well-- that I would see the doctor the next day. Then in the morning I would wake up feeling perfectly fine. This is my least favorite aspect of my Cough of Death strain: if it is going to completely disable me, it could at least do it consistently and long enough that I am forced to do something real about it. Instead, I had my fever spells in the evenings, then recovered completely every morning. Somewhere along the line I picked up a 咳止め (sekidome) cough suppressant from the department store, and started taking the Tylenol I brought with me, but both only reduced the symptoms somewhat. In fact I'm not sure the cough suppressant had any effect at all.

It did have its use though, since when I ran out of it, something clicked in my head that this had gone on long enough to be a real concern. Thursday afternoon, I turned myself in to the Student Health Center at Sophia, with the same overdue conscience of a criminal who has been avoiding the law. They asked a question-- literally "What did you do, sir?"-- that I eventually realized was an invitation to describe my illness, though my cough politely chose that moment to introduce itself, incapacitating me from speech. After a time I was able to convey that I wanted to meet with an English-speaking doctor if that was possible, and they produced a map to a clinic down the road that would open just as my history class was about to start. An excellent, legitimate excuse to miss class.

I checked briefly at the 佐々木クリニック (Sasaki Clinic) website to make sure of my directions; perhaps the animation on the site should have tipped me off that the English quality of the place was not necessarily of the highest order (I will make no direct comment, just see for yourself.) Once I had got there, I had to explain once again "what I had done," fill out a set of forms, and take my own temperature under my armpit. Although I understood most of the questions just fine, my favorite section was a list of 'previous illnesses' written in ridiculously obscure kanji. I recognized only one: 麻疹 (measles).

After waiting about a half-hour while other patients saw the doctor and an odd mix of English, Japanese, and Spanish music played over the waiting room loudspeaker, they called my name and I went back. During the entire time I was there, the doctor spoke a total of zero words of English. He said a good few in Latin, such as sputum, expectorant, mucus, bronchitis, etc., but that was all. I explained my symptoms in broken Japanese, he listened to me breathe deeply, then frowned and looked intently at his pen for what I swear were at least thirty seconds. Then he grunted and said 「何だろうかな。ブロンカイティスみたいな」, which as my friend Cameron pointed out later, can be translated as "What is this? Seems like bronchitis," or equally validly "What is this? I want to see bronchitis."

The doctor was clearly not convinced of his own diagnosis, so he asked me to run through my symptoms again. After I had done so, he recited them, writing down something on a piece of paper for each symptom. Once he had finished I realized these were medications: he had prescribed me five separate medicines, one for fever, one for nasal congestion, one for cough, one for sputum, one for general cold-like symptoms (or something like that.) I paid my $30 doctor's fee at the counter as I left, and filled my $30 prescription in the downstairs 薬屋 (kusuriya) drugstore. Along the line various alterations had occurred to my name via the telephone game, so that when I finally got my medications my name had transformed from デイビッド (David) to デイピット (Dapit).

My $30 got me a five-day supply of some pretty hard-core looking drugs, though カタカナ (angular katakana style writing, used for drug names among other things) pretty much just makes anything look hard-core by itself. The standout among the five is definitely my supply of powdered crack cocaine, packaged nicely in clear packets the size of individual ketchup servings. Here is a picture so you know that I am 100% not lying about this at all:

The other drugs are all more boring, the usual tablet things. Still, it makes for an interesting lunchtime conversation starter: "Whoops, looks like it's time to take all five of my medications now, including this cocaine here." "Oh my gosh, what do you have?" "Well, it's called the Cough of Death..." To their credit, my five little friends seem to be doing their job fairly well; I have not had a fever episode since I've started taking them, and the congestion is gone. But whichever one is supposed to be the cough suppressant is not pulling its weight; on a few occasions my diaphragm still seems determined to expel my entire respiratory system from my body. Calm down, diaphragm! This is a cooperative effort here, not an episode of Survivor: Human Internal Organs.

In conclusion, there is nothing to worry about. I thought about mentioning the Cough of Death earlier, as I've had it for three weeks now, but having people freaked out about my well-being here is the last thing I wanted, so I waited until now as I am clearly on the path to recovery. Moral of the story: if you get sick, go to the doctor. If you're in Japan, you might get some illegal drugs for your trouble.

I Feel the Earth Move

2007-06-02T15:57:00.000+09:00

...under my feet, I feel the sky tumblin' down, a-tumblin' down...

Yesterday morning I felt the second 地震 (jishin) earthquake of my life. The first was in Comalapa Airport, in the capital of El Salvador. I was on my way back from visiting my friend Diego over Spring Break, and I was in the line to check my luggage when there was a sudden jerk and a dull, distant noise which I would write as thoom. I didn't realize El Salvador got earthquakes, so my only workable assumption was that an airplane had accidentally run into the terminal or something. Struggling to ask people what was going on in Spanish, I eventually got the phrase terremoto pequeño (small earthquake). I was pretty freaked out about it, not so much due to the event itself, but the fact that nobody else seemed to even notice it at first.

So I was relatively prepared yesterday, while I was sitting in my room looking at emails before I went down for breakfast, for what a small earthquake feels like. But it was still very surreal. Everything went a little wobbly for about 15 seconds, but I wasn't sure if it was just me until I looked over at my shelves, where a number of dangling things were swinging by themselves. I went down to breakfast, but nobody else had felt anything. Strange. After I got back from choir practice in the evening, I looked to see if the Internet had recorded the event somewhere, and lo and behold the USGS had. 7:29:01am local time-- just before breakfast. I had vindication!

Then this afternoon, just an hour ago now, there was another tremor, this time closer to Tokyo and thus a little stronger. A few other people in the dorm felt it, so I didn't have to sound crazy this time around. With some help, I even found the quake on Japan's Meteorological Agency website, as well as yesterday's.

In conclusion, to the Powers that Be, I've experienced my Tokyo earthquake quota now, okay? Measles already did its bit to weird out my study abroad experience; the Great Kanto Earthquake can wait another couple of decades. Thanks.

The Thousand-Year-Old City

2007-05-30T21:27:00.000+09:00

It was a shared bond, a common call. When an ancient disease unexpectedly wiped a full week of classes from Sophia University's calendar, the same idea occurred to dozens of foreign students simultaneously: we have to go to Kyoto. Many of us had tried during Golden Week, but as the entire country was on holiday at the same time, tickets were scarce to nonexistent. Now, with our own private break, the compulsion became irresistible. We came like pilgrims to a holy place, by bullet train and bus, ready to stay in hostels or sleep on park benches-- whatever it took to experience the city of Kyoto.

(Our overnight bus, the 青春中央ドリーム (Seishun Chuo Dream), with curtains drawn to shade us from the light of passing cars and whatnot.)

But what was this place, Kyoto? What is there? Why do we and millions of other tourists make our way to the city every year? I was thinking about this, and wondering what kind of overarching theme I could draw for my miscellaneous experiences in Kyoto, and I came up with this: the city is over 1200 years old. Now, in global terms, this is not a particularly long lifespan-- the Middle East sports several cities of 5000 years or more-- but it is the place in Japan where history runs deepest. Every other block has some historical significance or other, and famous shrines and temples abound. (Random thought: if the rate at which places become "historical" tourist attractions is relatively constant, would there come a point at which the city was rendered uninhabitable due to its overwhelming historicity? Or is there a leveling-off, so nothing becomes "historical" anymore?)

(Kyoto Station, eerily empty as we arrived in the early morning.)

Whatever the case, four friends and I all decided we needed to go to Kyoto, and the organization of things just fell together as we went. It turned out that we would take the overnight bus-- less than half the price of a round-trip bullet train ride-- and stay at the previously mentioned Orange Inn hostel. Turns out the bus isn't the best place for sleeping, but we drowsed through our eight-hour ride and arrived at Kyoto Station with some semblance of wakeful awareness.

(On the bus, which is the only way to get anywhere in Kyoto, almost. From left to right: Martin, Joe, Cameron, and Ryan.)

Oh convenience stores of Japan, how could we live without you? We wandered through and around Kyoto Station, hungry for breakfast, but we had somehow arrived too early for most shops to be open. Finally we found a コンビニ (konbini) convenience store that sold breakfast foods, so we grabbed some and ate them there in the station, as (I think Ryan described us) "a bunch of gaijin hobos." Much later, just before we took the bus back to Tokyo, we returned to this same shop and realized they also sold basically all of the good souvenirs we had bought in various places around the city. So we could have just sat there in Kyoto Station and not gone anywhere, bought our souvenirs and nicked some photos off other people who had been around the city. In fact, maybe we did. You'll never know.

(Ginkakuji Temple, as seen across the sand garden.)

Once we had got our bearings and our bus passes, we went to the hostel to drop off our bags. I was all prepared to go through the check-in in Japanese, but the hostel owner insisted on speaking in English, and he was quite fluent. From there, we headed to 銀閣寺 (Ginkakuji), aka the Silver Pavilion. "Truth in Advertising" disclaimer: There is definitely a pavilion there, but it is equally definitely not silver. The guy tried to make the temple covered in silver, but as you can see above, he ran out of money and ended up with simple wood and thatch. This is not particularly impressive to look at, but it is amazing to realize that it has never burned down, considering Kyoto's all-consuming firestorms every few decades.

(Please click the picture and read what it says in the English caption. Just do it.)

As we later learned is the standard for major shrines/temples in Kyoto, the grounds area is just as significant as the main attraction itself. In this case, apparently, even the moss was Very Important. It was very pretty though to walk around the temple grounds, and somewhere along the path we ran into Anna, a fellow student in my Japanese class. Yeah, it was weird. But since she had been before, she had some good advice on what to do and such.

(The Philosopher's Path, and adjoining canal.)

We had lunch nearby to Ginkakuji, bought some souvenirs, then headed down the 哲学の道 (Tetsugaku no Michi) Philosopher's Path, which connects a whole string of temples and shrines on the east side of Kyoto. Though I failed to have any life-altering revelations along the way, we did enjoy watching the koi in the canal and reading shop signs and posters beside the road. My favorite was this one:

"Beware the Demon of the Hand! Children, remember to look up so you will know he is there!! If you do not look up, he will find you and eat your head!!" I don't know what it really says, and I don't particularly want to. Any guesses regarding what the green creature on the left might be?

(An aqueduct, appearing randomly in the temple grounds.)

At the end of the Philosopher's Path, we came to another set of shrines-- these were not so famous, so there were no tickets and no lines. We watched some kids play tag, wandered about a bit, and in the back of the complex we came across a brick aqueduct. To properly understand this, imagine you're looking at an ancient cathedral, with flying buttresses and gargoyles and all, but when you come around a corner you see a satellite dish hanging off one of the spires. That is the level of non sequitur/anachronism that we're dealing with here. Bricks are not native building materials, and aqueducts belong to the Romans. My only explanation would be that it was constructed after contact with Europeans, but why and how I am not at all sure. Maybe if I could read the information plaque in Japanese that would help...

(A generic temple in Gion.)

From there we walked to 祇園 (Gion), otherwise known as the geisha district. We did see geisha there, but out of some sense of respect or something I didn't do the touristy thing and take pictures of them as they went down the street. There really weren't that many-- perhaps it was because we were there relatively early in the evening-- but it was a fun feeling just to walk down the car-less streets and feel like the place hadn't really changed for a hundred years or more. We found another set of temples, but even on the first day they were becoming less interesting, so we just snapped pictures from a distance. The adjoining playground was much more attractive:

(Yours truly, attempting to avoid hitting my feet on the ground.)

We had dinner at a pseudo-Italian restaurant called Mirano (they probably meant Milano, but L and R are the same in Japanese), then headed to Gion Corner for a variety show featuring seven different traditional performances in a single hour. It was very touristy, but fun. The hands-down favorite was the comic play, which was easily understandable despite being written in super-formal Old Japanese. It went like this: The master of the house has two servants, who he orders to stay at home and protect his stores of sake while he goes on an errand. To make sure they don't drink any behind his back, he ties one's hands to a pole, and ties the other's behind his back. But between the two of them, they ingeniously figure out how to serve themselves enough sake to get completely drunk, dance, and sing, just in time for the master to get home and give them a royal telling-off. Physical comedy translates well I guess.

(Kinkakuji, with the usual crowds in the foreground.)

Evening came, and morning followed: the second day. This time we started out with 金閣寺 (Kinkakuji) the Golden Pavilion, which lived up to its name in brilliant fashion-- the top two floors of three are covered in gold leaf. The guy for this one definitely had the money to do it right. To be fair, the building you see here is actually a reconstruction from 1955, built after a monk burned the original place down. But it is an exacting reproduction of the original, and I'd say it still serves its original purpose as a statement of ostentatious wealth and power. I mean, how many buildings do you see even nowadays that are covered in real gold?

(Weeding the lily pads? at Ryoanji)

From Kinkakuji, we decided to go to nearby 竜安寺 (Ryoanji) aka Peaceful Dragon Temple, to see the famous Zen rock gardens that had been recommended there. Sadly, it was a bit of a letdown. Perhaps if it was empty and quiet, and it was just you staring at the sand and rocks, you might get some philosophical meaning out of it, but with people snapping pictures and blocking views from every angle, it wasn't very contemplative to me at least. The grounds were beautiful though, and it was interesting to see a crew out on the lake, appearing to be weeding out the dead lily pads.

(Where the Wild Things Are, in Japanese.)

We hopped on the bus again, and went to a place which existed only on one map, and nowhere in any guidebook we had on hand: the Kyoto International Manga Museum. The only possible reason I can find for its seeming obscurity is that it opened in November 2006. Otherwise, the place is amazing and I recommend anyone in any way remotely interested in Japanese manga to go there. We spent hours just looking through the open library sections (not even the exhibits), especially the children's section since that was about our level of Japanese. I found a translated copy of Where the Wild Things Are, and despite the prohibition on taking pictures inside the museum, decided to sneak a quick one anyway. When translated directly, the cover reads:

the place where the monsters are

by maurice sendak, trans. teruo jingu

(It's written in a childlike style with no Chinese characters, so I think the lowercase is the closest analogue for that in English.)

(A poster for the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, just outside the okonomiyaki shop. Loosely translated, the text reads "Energizing our Communities. Energizing our Development," which is innocuous enough. But it's still kind of scary WWII looking.)

After becoming completely engrossed in reading comics for about three hours (I tried to do V for Vendetta, then Superman in Japanese, but ended up with English versions of Yu-Gi-Oh and Batman instead), we eventually realized that food was somewhat of a necessity, and went down the street until we came to an お好み焼き (okonomiyaki) shop. There were no other customers, which seemed strange, but the cook and waitress seemed happy to have us, and doubly happy that we could actually speak some Japanese. We grilled our dinners, had a nice chat with the waitress, then headed back to the hostel by bus.

(A guard-wolf of Fushimi Inari Shrine)

For the third day, my one particular goal was to go to 伏見稲荷大社 (Fushimi Inari Taisha) and see the 10,000 torii gates there. This was the one time we didn't take the bus to get somewhere-- since the bus lines didn't run there, but there was a train stop literally in front of the shrine, we ended up taking a train ride from Kyoto Station down to Fushimi Inari. It was beautiful, even though we only followed maybe a quarter of the path before we turned back. As you can see above, the 狼 (ookami) wolves were just as emblematic of the place as the torii gates; they seemed to stand guard at every corner. (Not sure what that one is holding in its mouth though-- a key perhaps?) I liked the place so much, I ended up buying a small torii gate and Japanese version of 20Q as souvenirs.

(The inside gate at Nijo Castle.)

After Fushimi Inari, we headed up to 二条城 (Nijo-jo) Nijo Castle to check out the shogun's old stronghold. This was definitely my favorite inside-building tour. Best example: Since there was a constant risk of assassination, the floors of the shogun's living quarters were constructed to squeak loudly if anyone stepped on them. However, since he was the shogun after all, and didn't want to listen to any old annoying squeaks whenever he walked across the room, they made the floorboards to chirp like songbirds. So imagine hundreds of people shuffling through the building in their socks (leave your shoes at the door as usual here), with the sound of flocks of birds filling the air, all due to some centuries-old floorboard innovation.

(An overhead view of the Nijo Castle grounds.)

After touring the entirety of Nijo Castle grounds, on top of all the other walking and not-sleeping we had done over the past two days, we had pretty much exhausted ourselves, but for some reason we went on to the Imperial Palace anyway. The doors there were closed and locked, as we had missed the official tour time by a few hours, but we took some nice pictures in the adjacent park at least. Following that, we had nothing else particular that we could do, or wanted to at least. I think we just sat on the benches in the park for at least 20 minutes, only getting up when Cameron had to go and meet a friend for dinner. If she hadn't done that, we might have fallen asleep right there and missed the bus.

(Me, in front of the Imperial Palace gate.)

So Cameron did her dinner thing, and the four guys ended up in the underground part of Kyoto Station, having dinner at a sandwich shop. We had planned to go up Kyoto Tower and see the skyline at night, but since it was expensive and full of loud grade-school kids, we just hung around in the bookstore, reading humorous English-language books on life in Japan-- I even found one by Dave Barry. Cameron returned with her friend, we all had a snack at the combination Mister Donut-Cafe du Monde (don't know how that combination came together), and we finally boarded the bus for Tokyo. Eight hours and a train ride later, I was back in my room, asleep.

Good night!

The Word with No Rhyme

2007-05-24T21:03:00.001+09:00

Wow. Coming back to real school work from an unexpected break was about as difficult as I thought. I wish Sophia hadn't started the whole measles craze, and could have waited to take its turn in closing until June sometime (Waseda is the latest to close and largest so far), but no such luck. That said, I still wanted to present you all with something interesting, even if I'm not quite lucid enough to pull off a coherent subject-oriented post. So what you get today is: Things in Japan that are Orange!

Seriously folks, it is my favorite color, and it just keeps appearing here, everywhere I go. Not just things that have the color, but even things that are named "Orange" this or that. This is especially strange because there is no native Japanese word for orange-- they just use オレンジ (orenji), transliterated from English. Side note: whenever you can use the word "transliterate" in a sentence, you know it's a good one.

The first example you could probably tell from before, in my post about the subways, but here it is again: the 中央線快速 (Chuo-sen kaisoku) Chuo Line Rapid trains are all painted bright orange. The fancy new ones that have televisions screens inside only have an orange stripe though. I suppose the color is to differentiate them from the Local trains, which are yellow. The Yamanote Line is green. Not sure about any others...

In 浅草 (Asakusa), nearby to all the temples and adjoining souvenir stalls, there is an area dedicated to medium-nice restaurants and shops. Why they chose to call it Orange Street, and put the name in English letters, is beyond me. The only thing orange about it is the name. I dropped by because I thought it would be funny to see a street named after my favorite color. Little did I know how much more there was to come...

Tokyo Tower, probably most famous in the West for being the generic big landmark that gets destroyed first by whatever monster is attacking Tokyo. I was kind of disappointed that it is essentially a rip-off of the Eiffel Tower, painted orange, but it has its uses. The French would never let their version be disfigured by protruding cell phone, radio, and television antennas, for example. And of course orange looks so much cooler than gray/brown when illuminated at night.

The official color for the 東京読売ジャイアンツ (Tokyo Yomiuri Giants) is orange. During the baseball game I went to with my student monitor, the Giants only scored once, but when they did, half the stands exploded with song as Giants fans belted out some kind of triumph anthem while waving orange towels in the air. The opposing 東京ヤクルトスワローズ (Tokyo Yakult Swallows) had many more opportunities to wave their toy umbrellas (?) in the air, but they were all blue-- boring!

This one is from Kyoto-- the biggest 鳥居 (torii) gate that I have seen so far. Most torii seem to be painted orange, as well as many shrines and other structures near them. Maybe orange is the official color of the 神道 (Shinto) religion? If that were the case, I'm sure some Buddhist monks would want their color back. And what would other religions be? Islam gets green of course, and blue for Judaism, but Christianity? Looking at this page on the color of Hinduism, it seems orange is pretty popular; even the Sikhs want in on it too.

The hostel we stayed at in Kyoto was called the Orange Inn. This is not a case of my own personal selection filtering out other options, mind you; Cameron was the one who made the decision to book there, and then it was only because the options I had suggested were all full for the days we wanted. The place was very nice and new, and there were little plastic oranges decorating the walls of every room. How cute!

This being Japan, of course there are koi fish. Though most of them are dull gray like three in this picture, or else splotchy with different colors, one we saw in a canal in Kyoto was a brilliant orange. Under normal circumstances I probably would not have taken a picture of a group of fish, but at that point we had just come out of 金閣寺 (Kinkakuji Temple) and I was in full tourist camera mode, taking pictures of anything that looked remotely interesting. I took so many I don't even remember what some of the photos are supposed to be of anymore. Oh well.

Of the 'orange' shots so far, this is my favorite. It was also my favorite shrine in Kyoto, so that doesn't hurt. It is called 伏見稲荷大社 (Fushimi Inari Shrine), and it is the one with over 10,000 orange torii gates all lined up in rows, making a path through the woods. It seems that the individual torii are donated by different individuals or groups, as each one has a name, address, and date written on them as you can see. I kind of liked that each one had a slightly different size, shape, and hue-- the irregularity made it feel more real, not like a pre-planned theme park attraction.

I hope you enjoyed this random selection of photographs and thoughts. Once I have the time and energy to properly organize my writing, I will be posting a comprehensive post on my Kyoto trip-- it definitely deserves one. Until then, adieu!

Update: The day after posting this, I went to lunch at the cafeteria and ordered the "A" Lunch, which was a cheeseburger for that day. The "A" lunch set always comes with a randomly selected mini can drink, which can be anything from a sports drink to coffee (I've had both before). But what do you think the lady put on my tray? A Fanta Orange. Um. What sort of divine message might this be...?

Tokyo Teleport Town

2007-05-19T21:38:00.000+09:00

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, and also because I am lazy and don't want to write lots of words, I now present my trip to お台場 Odaiba in picture form!

(Taken from the Yurikamome monorail line headed in to Odaiba. Ryan and I had to meet the walking club at Odaiba, so we got to cheat and took public transit rather than walk over the Rainbow Bridge. To the left is the giant Ferris wheel, to the right the Teleport Building and Sphere.)

(Odaiba's beachfront, with Rainbow Bridge in the background. The part of the beach where we ate lunch with the walking club was farther along; sadly, there was no volleyball going on there.)

(The Main Transmitter. I was kind of surprised the bridge area where we first walked would be open to the public, but the transmitter antenna does make a graceful photograph from there.)

(Teleport Station itself. The way I understand it, the reason the city's only teleporter was built out on Odaiba island, in the middle of Tokyo Bay, was that if it went Akira or something then most of the city could be saved. Of course now we know it's perfectly safe, but back in the early research days they didn't! In any case, the crowded public transit system here needs every means of transportation at its disposal, so it makes sense for them to fund things like this.)

(A Mobius loop. I thought it was funny how much the public art in the area reflected the theme of teleportation. Consider this playground-style reflection on space-time wormholes: You can get in one hole, go around in one full circle to 'where you started,' and you will come out somewhere different-- the interior of the loops! So something that would normally be two separate circles become merged into one, allowing transit between two formerly inaccessible areas.)

(Statue outside the Teleport Building. Another piece of teleportation art I enjoyed. I mean, you have a human figure on one side, an empty form on the other side, connected with lines flowing through the air-- about as direct a visual metaphor for the 'entanglement, transmission, reconstruction' model of teleportation as any I can think of.)

(The Teleport Sphere, where all the magic happens. Apparently it had to be specially insulated from ground tremors and such, so they ended up with this odd construction style of crossed trusses and things. Pesky earthquakes.)

(The Living Matrix. We all went inside the Teleport Building, though only one of us got to go in the Sphere, and this covered one whole side of the lobby. I doubt it was an actual working part of the teleport machinery, but it was beautiful to look at-- multicolored lights playing across a field of grass, suspended sideways on the wall. Very Close Encounters. Squint closely at the bottom of the picture and you can see the red "Pirates of the Caribbean" posters.)

(Arrival. As I said, there was only one guy who got to actually use the teleporter, since it's still pretty restricted at this point. They told us to wait at a certain spot on the patio at a certain time, and they would send him to a point 3 meters off the ground. Of course they had the trampoline they use in most cases, but a bunch of guys wanted to try catching him and they kindly let us. Amazingly I got a shot of him just after he appeared-- I'm not even sure if it's the afterglow or if his leg is still materializing.)

And yes, by the fact that this post exists, you can assume I made it back from Kyoto in one piece. It was a lot of fun, and produced upwards of 400 pictures, so I look forward to sharing at least some of it all soon!

Seeking Transcendence

2007-05-15T20:03:00.000+09:00

First, an update on our newfound Measles Break (that's one thing I didn't expect to have on my calendar). Completely reversing my frustration at a lack of information before, Sophia's closing is all over the Japanese news now. It was very strange to be riding the train, watching the regular news clips, and see shots of my university pop up Saturday. We even rated an article in the Asahi Shimbun, sort of Japan's New York Times, which compares this year's measles spread to "levels of the 2001 epidemic." I didn't know they had a measles epidemic in 2001. And I'll be gosh darned if anyone can find any mention of Tokyo measles in Western news media sources. It's a cover-up, I tell you!

Honestly though, it appears that Sophia and the previously mentioned university in Hachioji are the only ones closing due to measles. There are still only 10 reported and confirmed cases of measles at Sophia, none of them critical. It seems that there was a period in Japan, around when people my age were born, that vaccinations switched from the shot-plus-booster formula favored in the States to a one-shot-combo. This new one-shot plan made things simpler but it turned out to be not as effective in building immunity, so they have since switched back-- still leaving people now in their teens and twenties vulnerable to a disease otherwise nonexistent in developed countries. At least I think I understand that from my rudimentary translations of Japanese news articles.

Now, on to my day Saturday!

Our Georgetown graduate and organizer lady Ms. Miyake, previously mentioned in my Ueno post, took it upon herself to organize a trip for all us Georgetown folks to visit her hometown Buddhist temple, 青松寺 (Seishoji). Apparently she knew the abbot from a long time ago, and used that contact to set up a group tour along with an English-speaking monk there. Of course the big draw was that we could do some Zen sitting meditation while we were there-- having been dubbed the Zen Master in my middle school days, I signed up as soon as I got the email.

Unfortunately for us, the tour was set to start at 9:00. This doesn't sound bad in itself, except that working backward, it meant we had to meet at 神谷町 Kamiyacho station at 8:30, get on the train from Koganei at 7:15, have breakfast at 7:00, shower at 6:40, and get up at 6:30. But we soldiered through somehow, gathered as a group of 10 (11 including Ms. Miyake), and headed for the temple.

(A TV crew at Seishouji, out to film a shamisen performance in a side building)

According to Ms. Miyake, Seishouji has become a lot more upscale since her younger years, and I can definitely believe it. The grounds were impeccable, the halls spotless, and there was even an NHK TV crew there filming a shamisen performance. A robed monk came out to meet us in the courtyard and directed us into a side door. There, we put our shoes on the shelves, then followed him down the hall to a couple of changing rooms. It turned out there was nothing special for us to change into, but it was requested that we leave our bags and socks there-- thus, we would enter the temple empty-handed and barefoot. (Sadly, no pictures allowed inside the temple.)

At this point our guide took us to what I might call a side chapel, to teach us the basic postures and gestures for getting around the temple. The usual pose is to have the head slightly bowed, with the left hand in a fist and the right hand over it, placed just above the stomach. The bow of respect or thanks has the hands flat against each other, with fingertips a hands-width away from the nose, elbows and wrists in a straight line parallel to the floor, and requires you to bend at the waist with a straight back as close to 90 degrees as possible. Try that one at home. After we had learned these and other things, our guide took us to the main temple to attempt some real Zen sitting meditation.

Under the watchful eyes of three or four monks, we went through the ritual motions of bowing to the Buddha statue, fluffing the pillow, sitting on it, swinging our legs over the ledge where real monks took breakfast in the mornings, getting into lotus position, swaying to find our center of balance, and finally clearing our minds for meditation. I got my left and right hands mixed up in the cosmic mudra pose and had to be corrected. One of the monks rang a bell three times, signaling: Begin.

For twenty minutes, I thought about nothing at all. Almost.

I did find it very relaxing though, and I felt like I could have gone on much longer when the bell rang again to signal the end of meditation time. My legs might not have appreciated it though; since they had both fallen asleep, it was a little difficult to do the final bows, but I managed like everybody else. I slowly regained the ability to walk as the monks were demonstrating the other bell, taiko drum, and woodblock signals used throughout the day.

After the meditation and temple tour, we went back to our original hallway to have tea and "discuss our meditation experiences." There was a small survey to take, and the monks were deeply impressed when some of us wrote in Japanese, and even more so when we demonstrated we could speak too. This allowed us to talk to all of the monks, not just the English-speaking guide, and we got some really interesting stories out of it. For instance, Charles from the dorm here asked what it was that brought each of them to become a Zen monk. One responded that he used to be super-competitive in karate, fighting all through high school and college, and was pretty good at it. One day, he had beat up an opponent almost to the point of having him knocked out on the ground-- his friends were cheering him on to take him out-- he felt the viciousness and violence that were his life in full force and something snapped. He reached out his hand to help his opponent up, never fought again, and turned to a life of austerity in the monastery.

That will have to do for now, unfortunately. I wanted to write about my trip to Odaiba (aka Tokyo Teleport Town!) as well, but I have to go, and I think I have a good excuse: I am headed to Kyoto! I and four others (Cameron, Joe, Martin, and Ryan) will be taking the overnight bus there, sleeping in a hostel, taking in some Noh plays if we're lucky, and generally having a good and touristy time with our Measles Break. I'll definitely write about Odaiba and the teleporter soon, as well as whatever adventures we have in Kyoto. Till then!

Does Not Compute

2007-05-11T15:43:00.000+09:00

Due to an outbreak of measles, all classes at Sophia University have been canceled for the coming week. Club meetings and activities are also prohibited.

I first heard about this at our dormitory yesterday. There was a note (in English) pinned to the bulletin board in the cafeteria, stating that due to an upswing of measles cases in the Tokyo area, we should be on the lookout for certain symptoms, and should stay home from school if we had a fever of 37.5 Celsius or higher. This I more or less ignored; who gets measles nowadays anyway?

Then this morning in my Japanese class, the teacher read a letter from the university president saying more or less the same thing, but more strongly urging people to see a doctor and stay home from school if they had any suspicion of contracting the disease. What struck me was that she read it in English-- this from a woman who absolutely refuses to speak English to us under any circumstances whatsoever, on the grounds that it helps us learn Japanese. They read it again in my second-period Japanese class, and again in my afternoon religion class.

After the class, a few friends from a different school department within Sophia asked if I had heard that classes were canceled-- apparently their department contacted them individually to let them know. I did not believe them; I thought it was a rumor out of control, and resolved to go to the Overseas Liaison Office to set things straight. And of course, as my luck goes, the lady at the office didn't speak any English. But I think the conversation we did have was pretty conclusive-- here's a rough transcript to judge for yourself:

あの、すみません。 (Um, pardon me.)
はい。 (Yes?)
来週のクラスのことなんですけど。ありますか。ありませんか。 (I had a question about next week's classes. Are they there? Are they not there?)
来週は休みになります。 (Next week is turned into a holiday.)
クラスはぜんぜんありませんか。 (Classes are completely not there?)
はい、そうです。 (Yes, that's right.)
。。。 (silence)

I was so frozen I didn't even thank her properly as I left, and my brain gears are still a little stuck. I was supposed to have choir practice this evening-- is it still on? Should I even go if it is? Didn't I get the measles vaccine? Doesn't everybody in Japan get the measles vaccine too? Is this some kind of new strain or what? Why isn't any of this being carried on any English-language news source that I can properly read?

I will post again soon when I get something of this sorted out. I just figured it was kind of important enough to let you all know about now. I feel fine, so don't worry about me; I'll be washing my hands regularly and all, and I've got the vaccine besides. I just wish I knew what the heck is going on...

Update: A notice from Sophia, confirming that "several Sophia students" have contracted measles, as well as those at other universities. Still nothing online about the cancellations that I can find.

Update 2: The campus has just gone insane. Just as classes let out at 16:45, an army of university officials deployed to the streets handing out flyers (thankfully in both Japanese and English), confirming that classes and club activities are canceled effective immediately through May 19 to prevent further spread of measles. Announcers are coming over the loudspeaker system with the same message. You can imagine the pandemonium on campus-- three complete strangers already asked me if I understood the flyer and volunteered to explain, but I guess they didn't realize it was already in English too. My answer: 分かりますけど、よく分かりません。 I understand, but I don't really understand.

Update 3: Here is the latest notice from Sophia, pretty much a direct copy of the flyer they were handing out this afternoon. Also, as I was reading on a Japanese sports news page of all places, upwards of 10 students are confirmed to have measles. That same news page also mentions that another university in Hachioji, which I pass by every day on the train, has had to close as well. Our dorm manager was very concerned when we got back tonight, making absolutely certain we all felt all right-- we had to explain several times that we had received the vaccine for はしか (hashika) measles before we came to Japan. Finally, I was looking forward to a walking club trip to Odaiba this weekend but figured the ban on clubs might get it canceled. Having called Kohei, one of the group's officers, it appears that the walk will go on, but not as an official club activity, so that neither the group nor Sophia University will bear responsibility for us "if anything happens." What a day.

Feeling Smile and Satisfaction

2007-05-09T13:54:00.000+09:00

Engrish. Everyone knows it. From All Your Base are Belong to Us to T-shirts you can see on any Tokyo subway, examples of Japanese writers trying but failing to create comprehensible English are beyond count. I do feel bad about bringing it up sometimes though. These people are working hard to translate something into a completely alien language, and making fun of their errors seems unfair, especially coming from someone who would be hard pressed to say anything of decent length in Japanese without mistakes.

That said, when I came across a piece of almost-English today that literally made me laugh out loud, I knew I had to find some way to share it tactfully. So, to balance things out, I will first offer a brief story, to showcase my own embarrassing shortcomings in Japanese. I don't know if that rationalization works for anybody else, but I think it does for me at least.

A few nights ago, a little past midnight, I was up working on Japanese homework-- perfectly normal activity, unfortunately-- when there was a knock on my door. Wondering who it might be at that hour, I said "Come in" but didn't move. The knock came again, and I said simply "Yes?" There was a pause. I got up, opened the door, and it was our dorm manager, who wouldn't have understood what I was saying any more than if I had said 「どうぞ」 ("Doozo") in the dorms back at Georgetown.

My brain went immediately into overdrive. Why would our dorm manager be coming to my room at 00:05 at night? Was I in trouble? Was somebody else? I apologized as politely as I could remember how, and asked what was the matter. He smiled and explained that something needed to be changed but wasn't yet. What that something was I did not and could not catch, even after I asked him to repeat himself. At that point, I went into 20-Questions mode. Was it my bedsheets? They had recommended we change our sheets regularly, and he seemed to be staring at my unmade bed. He shook his head no, said the word again slowly, and made a hand motion as if changing a lightbulb. Oh-- was it my ceiling light? No. Was it in my room at all? He shook his head again, gave a bemused smile, and motioned for me to follow him down the hall.

We went down the stairs to the entry floor, my mind a complete blank. He stopped at the door and pointed at the rows of nametags hung on the wall (as described in a previous post). I looked, and mine was on yellow-- I had forgotten to flip it over when I got back, so I was still officially outside of the dorm, and it was just past curfew. Finally understanding what was going on, I switched it over to the white side, bowed, and apologized again. The dorm manager only laughed and advised me to take care next time. (If you want a punchline, it would be that I still don't know the word for "nametag," as I was too confused at the time for it to register properly.)

Now, for the moment you know you've all been waiting for: I went to eat lunch at the Building 2 cafeteria today, and for a change I went to the Western foods side. The Japanese-style side is much larger, the service is quicker, and the food is better, but I thought I might investigate what Sophia's interpretation of Western-style cafeteria food would be. I ordered a Sophia Burger, Fry Potato, and Cinnamon Bread from the ticket machine, took my receipts to the counter, and soon had a smallish hamburger, pack of french fries, and giant cinnamon loaf on my tray. The loaf was huge-- in terms of volume, it was probably bigger than the burger and fries combined, and it cost only ¥100 (80 cents). But it was the french fries that made me laugh out loud. Printed on their pouch was the following:

SOUNDS GOOD
Thank you very much for purch using every day.

Feeling smile and satisfaction,always.
Frankly,producing products say What a so tasty! is our mission.
Innouation "taste well" to make you surprise and present for you.
Special thanks for supporting
our product.We stake a word of tasty from a custmer.
Thank you very much for purchusing every day.This item is one of
our proud stuff we made and put a heart and soul for our store.
by all of us.

I challenge you to read this and not smile. I almost wish I could meet the translator and thank him or her for making my day. In closing, as they say in the Berlitz English-learning ads on the train, "Did you enjoy it? Have a nice day!"

So It Goes, Ueno Edition

2007-05-03T22:34:00.000+09:00

Listen: this blog has become unstuck in time.

After spending a month to get through my first few days, it's time to cut to the present. Taking advantage of the Golden Week holidays, I went to 上野 (Ueno) today. Shortly after I had arrived here, I met with Ms. Miyake, a Georgetown alumna living in Tokyo, and she gave all the newcomers maps of Tokyo, including various neighborhoods. I figured since Ueno got its own map section, there had to be good stuff there, so I set it on my schedule for today. I had no plans on what to do in particular, but set up a rough idea during the train ride and then improvised from there.

(The trees are taking over! The park is on a higher level than the surrounding area, so you have to go up the stairs to get there.)

As I learned from my map-guide on my way there, Ueno is known for its very large park, which includes a zoo, art museum, science museum, a few shrines and temples, lake, fountain, etc. etc. Those of you who know me will probably not be surprised that the 国立科学博物館 (Kokuritsu Kagaku Hakubutsukan) National Science Museum became my top priority. Since I had slept in, then eaten at Mosburger in Koganei for lunch, I didn't get to Ueno until around 14:00. (My cell phone clock, and most of Japan, uses the 24-hour system.) As the museum closed at 17:00, I planned on zooming through most of the park, seeing the exhibits, then making my way more leisurely back.

(The view from the top of those stairs, as a JR Yamanote train passes through.)

Ha ha! Little did I know you cannot "zoom through" Ueno Park. Unless you stare resolutely at your shoes for your entire walk (Phantom Tollbooth, ch. 10), you will be distracted by one of the eight zillion things all around your path. Of statues alone, there were guys on horses, guys with dogs, guys with test tubes, the Thinker, heck, throw in some women with children for some gender balance. Not to mention the food stalls, street performers, garden paths, baseball field (with 10-meter high net), Native American totem pole-- I mean, even the obligatory 交番 (koban) police box was decked out in crazy futuristic style:

... the end result being that I only reached the science museum at 15:00, leaving only two hours to see the whole thing before they started kindly asking everyone to finish their museum experience (Japanese for "getting the heck out right now"). I bought my ticket at a vending machine-- as I buy almost everything else here-- grabbed a map, and went inside.

A lot of it was your standard science museum fare: I think the 'floating ball' demonstration shown above must be some kind of requirement for museum certification, because it seems to pop up everywhere. Other things were more original, like an illuminated floor map of the evolution and classification of all life forms on Earth, or an exhibition of early Japanese astronomy tools and records. Although only a minimum of signs had English translations on them, I was more or less able to follow along, leveraging what Japanese I could understand ("Oh! That says 'animals of the ocean!'") along with what I might expect a museum exhibit to be about.

(A wooden Japanese astro-ma-jigger.)

I made my way through exhibits on dinosaur excavation, Japanese tectonics, ocean floor life, clockmaking, and one generically titled "Progress of Technology," going from the abacus to the vacuum tube. There was a giant map of earthquakes-- either funny or scary depending on how you look at it, since nearly every part of the country had a dot representing a recorded earthquake nearby. (I'd post a picture but it didn't turn out very well.) Eventually there were some announcements over the loudspeakers, of which I could only understand that they were in the super-formal mode, meaning that the museum staff really wanted us to do something. Since it was 17:00, it wasn't too hard to figure out...

(A whale, inexplicably balancing on its nose at the exit of the science museum.)

I headed outside, and by this time I was getting slightly hungry, since the last thing I had eaten was a small Mosburger around noon. Fortunately, the food stalls were still out in force, so I wandered over to one that said チョコバナナ (choco-banana) on it, and guess what I got? If you guessed "a bright blue, chocolate-covered, whole banana with sprinkles on a stick," then you were looking at the picture, you cheat. It was tasty, although I paid ¥300 for it and saw other stalls selling the same thing later for ¥200.

It was around this point, wandering among the clothing stores near the station to see if I could find any T-shirts with hilariously bad English on them (no luck yet), that I got an e-mail on my phone from my dorm-mate Ryan, asking if I wanted to join him and some others for dinner. By the time I had managed to type in "yes i would, where can i meet you?" I was back in the station, and soon after on a train headed back into the city. Turns out he was at Ueno as well, so he got on the train just after I did, and managed to shoot off another message to stop at Shinjuku so he could catch up.

(Wire-frame elephant, near the end of Ueno Park closest to the station.)

Eventually we got things straightened out, and Ryan, Charles, Jen, and I met for dinner at a 焼き鳥 (yakitori) grilled chicken restaurant, which included such delicacies as chicken skin, chicken liver, and chicken cartilage. (I thought chickens had bones?) It really was quite good though, and we enjoyed all being old enough to have some 酒 (sake) with our meal. After translating everything on the menu and the walls, we had enough Japanese practice for the night, and it was time to go home. We took the trains our separate ways. I got back, sat down, and started writing a blog entry.

Up Wisdom Big Study

2007-04-29T23:05:00.000+09:00

Now that we've gone from the dormitory, through Koganei City, onto the subway, it's finally time to introduce the place where I've been taking classes for the past two and a half weeks: 上智大学 (Jouchi Daigaku) Sophia University. A quick note on the name: it is called differently in Japanese (Jouchi) and in English (Sophia). The kanji characters literally mean "Up wisdom"-- with university being "big study"-- which is nice but bears no relation to "Sophia." I guess they just liked the sound of both, and decided to throw translation consistency to the wind.

The first thing you notice coming out of the 四ツ谷 (Yotsuya) subway station is that you don't have a clue where you are-- there's no obvious signage pointing toward the university, only a Becks Coffee Shop (one syllable away from Starbucks) and a series of crosswalks. However, once you know what they are, the gigantic round church and nearby steeple with a cross on top serve as pretty obvious landmarks. St. Ignatius Church deserves its own post, and I have some beautiful pictures to go with it too, so for now you'll just have to be satisfied with this outside shot.

After you cross the street, which can take a while as it is one of the busiest in Tokyo, you come alongside a ridge of grass and trees. This is one of my favorite parts of the campus; as everyone claims, Tokyo is the most crowded city in the world, so there's no open green space like Georgetown's Healy Lawn. Instead, what you get is this sliver of cherry and other trees running down the whole block, across the street from campus. It is phenomenally relaxing just to climb up there after an afternoon of classes and enjoy the trees and the view.

(Taken from the ridge during Freshman Week.)

The so-called Main Gate of the university faces this ridge, and is only accessible via a small side street. The North Gate, which is closer to the station, is currently under construction-- but construction is of course the natural state of any university anywhere.

When I came to campus for the first time, it was during Freshman Week. For a week before the year's classes begin (academic year runs from April to March), every club on campus turns out to lure new members, with very overt methods even by American standards. People force flyers upon you whether you want them or not; some club recruiters forcibly drag you back to the tables to sign up for their e-mail list. Everyone advertises that they will do hanami at such-and-such a time, and in this case "hanami" is code for "free drinks and snacks." I signed up for half a dozen clubs, went to a couple of hanami parties-- all in all a lot of fun.

In the end I decided to stick with the あうこう会 (Arukou-kai) walking club and アマデウス・コールAmadeus Chorus. The walking club organizes weekend trips sightseeing around Tokyo-- perfect, I thought, for seeing the city, getting some exercise, and practicing Japanese all together. So far I've been on one walk and one camping trip, both a lot of fun. The Amadeus Chorus is a bit more labor-intensive, with three-hour-long practice sessions every Monday and Friday (though attendance is only mandatory at one session per week.) Since business there is conducted entirely in Japanese, I understand roughly 14% of what's going on, with 65% going toward mimicking others and 21% making things up as I go along.

(You may recognize this one from last post... here's the biggified version.)

As for actual classes, most of the English-language courses are in buildings 10 and 11, on the farthest end of campus from the station. It used to be that English- language classes were housed on a completely separate campus in 市谷 (Ichigaya), from which I can only assume that they wanted to keep the gaijin germs away from the rest of the college. They still have us kind of secluded at the end of campus, but they're really nice modern buildings compared to some others, so I don't much mind.

I'm taking Intensive Japanese II, "Development of Japanese Civilization II" (basically Modern Japanese History), and "Religion, Conflict, and Violence." Intensive Japanese is insane-- who would want to put themselves through three hours of class, followed by one to two hours of homework, every day? Apparently I do. Japanese History is fine so far, though we haven't gotten to do any of those field trips I read in previous years' syllabi. Religion/Conflict/Violence is an eternal debate without a clear topic, as the professor seems to value class participation more than substantive learning. But overall it comes to only a little more work than I'm used to at Georgetown, and I need the credits, so I'm dealing with it-- at the cost of time to make regular blog posts (sorry folks!)

(Taken from the Building 2 cafeteria, facing the church, cherry tree ridge, and Yotsuya station. I liked the effect with the reflection of the fluorescent lights, though they're kind of distracting.)

The cafeterias at Sophia definitely deserve mention; there's three or four on campus, and each one serves approximately the same varieties of noodle bowls, curry rice, ramen, and set lunches. The amazing thing is how cheap they are-- I regularly get a full lunch for ¥450 ($4) which is just as much food or more than I would eat at Georgetown's cafeteria. I have become addicted to Japanese-style curry rice, so I always have to pay attention and make sure that I don't eat it every day. I need to figure out how to make it at home; I wouldn't want to go into withdrawal when I get back to the States.

That's it for now I think. I don't know what I'll post on next; we'll keep it as a surprise till then. Maybe I'll even skip to the present and talk about this week's Golden Week holidays. Until next time...

Magical Cardinal Ordinals

2007-04-26T21:29:00.000+09:00

As I was at school today taking pictures for my rundown on Sophia University (coming soon!), I had another idea for a photo gimmick post, and I couldn't resist. So, today I present "Learning Your Numbers, Sophia-Style!"

Apparently the old European-style practice of naming your buildings individually never really caught on here; too inefficient I guess. I do wish they'd put giant numbers on all the buildings and make a full set of them. A lot of the older buildings (1, 3, 4) only have identifying signs near the doors, so you can't tell which is which until you're already standing right in front of them. How inconveniently like most American colleges!

(If you're wondering about the lack of a building #5 among the pictures, it is definitely not because I got mixed up, forgot to take one, and didn't realize until I was already back at the dorm. Nothing like that at all. Building 5 has never existed, and anyone reporting so-called "Building 5 sightings" on campus is clearly pulling your leg.)

Pity the Sardines

2007-04-22T20:02:00.000+09:00

Tokyo's subway and train system is, without a doubt, the largest and most complex public transportation system ever to exist on the planet Earth. I don't feel like doing any actual research to prove it, but consider a few solid facts:

Like a kajillion people live in Tokyo.
None of them live in the center of the city.
Everything that anyone wants to get to is in central Tokyo.
No one drives a car.

There are no exceptions to these rules. Yes, there are taxis and cars on the roads, but they are there only for show, to demonstrate that Tokyo is a cool city like all the other international cool cities that have cars and stuff like that. I strongly suspect that the government pays certain people to drive around and look busy, because I have yet to meet a single person who does drive a car.

(Me, with a cylinder of mint chocolate chip ice cream from a vending machine in hand and a Chuo Line rapid-service train to Tokyo Station in the background.)

At any rate, anytime anyone wants to go anywhere, they have to take the train. This has led to an explosion of train services, with at least half a dozen companies operating in the Tokyo area, both government-owned and privately run, each with various lines going in various directions. The end result is that any train/subway map of Tokyo ends up looking like a particularly large bowl of pseudo-spaghetti soup, and that there are always multiple ways to get from A to B.

As an aside, I should explain why I have to keep putting train slash subway rather than just 'train' or 'subway.' As a matter of definition, a train is something that runs on rails above ground, and a subway is one that goes underground. There are both sorts here; most trains belong to JR East, while most subways belong to Tokyo Metro. A lot of times you end up transferring from one to the other, and it's important to know which is which, because they have completely different fare systems.

(Caption contest for this inexplicable crying chef ad, seen on train doors on almost every line. Click to see in detail. My entry: "No, Whisk! You can't leave me like this! I love you!")

The way I get around is usually by use of my 通学定期 (tsuugaku teiki) student pass. This is one of those things that my friend Mike would say makes you feel totally badass about being in Japan. You know you're really part of the country when you can just wave your wallet at the turnstile and it will chirp to let you through. Yes, I know that technology is already widely used in Washington and New York, but do they have cards which simultaneously serve as a fare repository and home-to-school free pass? Probably not.

I'll interrupt myself briefly to point out a couple of websites that have been immensely useful to me in navigating Tokyo's train and subway and calculating the price of a student pass. Just for the benefit of any other gaijin trying to figure out which direction is up.

One of my favorite stations is 新宿 (Shinjuku), one small part of which is illustrated above. The place is huge, and by huge I mean that it could probably be measured in square kilometers. Shinjuku is a bit like Atlanta airport I guess-- if you're going much of anywhere, you end up passing through it, and it's got enough different terminals that you almost feel like you need another train line to get from one train platform to another.

For example, I have walked for 15 minutes underground without leaving the station; on another occasion, I climbed 3 sets of escalators each about 2 stories tall, and at the end of it I was still below ground level. Built on top of this gargantuan subterranean labyrinth are some of the tallest skyscrapers in the city. Somehow, I don't feel like having a giant hollow space underground would be very helpful in the event of the Next Great Tokyo Earthquake. But hey, they've been predicting the Big One for years now, and it hasn't happened yet...

I really enjoy the advertisements on the train-- mainly because it's so rewarding to figure out the witty things they have to say after staring at them for several minutes. When I first saw the one above, I immediately knew I would have to do some research. I've always wanted to go see Wicked, and seeing it here in Tokyo would definitely be a bonus. So, I took a picture, went to the Wicked Japan website, and found that tickets would be on the order of ¥6000 ($50)-- less than the cheapest reservable option in New York. Plus, I would get to say that I had seen it in Japan, in Japanese. So, I muddled through the reservation process, and I get to hear all these musical numbers and more on July 4!

Next post, Sophia University!

Don't Mention Plasma

2007-04-20T00:57:00.000+09:00

Here, for your viewing pleasure, I present a brief study in Tokyoite states of matter, in preparation for the upcoming post on the train/subway system here:

Gas

Liquid

Solid

I wish I could also illustrate Bose-Einstein condensate-- which I have also experienced-- but in that type of situation I am generally incapable of movement from the neck down. Who knew Tokyoites were bosons? Ha ha!

This has been your irregularly scheduled dose of purely science-nerd humor.

Little Golden Well

2007-04-18T19:49:00.000+09:00

Sorry for the delay in updating-- the first round of classes hit me like a metric ton of bricks (slightly more than the American ton) and I only have time enough today because I only have one class in the morning. Anyway, to business!

The city name of 小金井 (Koganei) translates into English as "little golden well." If I understand the official Koganei website correctly, it used to be called 黄金井, which means "yellow gold well," due to a gold rush in the area. Then people messed things up and switched the first character out for another one of the same pronunciation. Neither way makes particularly much sense to me, but if you think about some American place-names (Los Angeles "the angels"? Washington "washing town"?) we've got some odd origins too.

(Picture taken of a local playground in the rain during sakura season earlier this month)

For me, this place feels a lot more like the real Japan than central Tokyo does. Maybe that's because the heart of the city strongly reminds me of Manhattan, while I don't have much of an analogy for Koganei. Very few people seem to live in Tokyo itself; everyone just commutes in for work or school or play and then goes home at the end of the day. So Koganei is genuinely 'home,' a place where people can live and breathe a bit before plunging back in to the metropolis nearby.

This is not to say that there is nothing going on in Koganei, quite the opposite. There's more restaurants here than I could go to if I did one a day until I left. There's two department stores (Seiyu and Nagasakiya) with everything you could possibly want from watermelons to bicycles to electric dictionaries. There are bars and pachinko parlors and arcades on seemingly every street and alley. There are two train stops (Higashi-Koganei and Musashi-Koganei), and the entire line is being reconstructed so that it will run above rather than directly across every street in the city. And there's even Colonel Sanders (please follow the link, I can't explain why).

Since I could probably write an entire blog entry about most of those things in the last paragraph, I'll save them for later and just talk about the park today. To the north of Koganei, there is a magnificent park, about 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) from end to end, stuffed to bursting with sakura trees. I went there during the local 桜祭り (sakura matsuri) cherry blossom festival and it was amazing. There were judo demonstrations, fan dancing, mayoral speeches, food stalls, government stalls (I got a hilarious almost-English guide on what to do if an earthquake strikes Tokyo), and a traditional flute-drum-dance performance that gave me one of the best photos I have ever taken:

I wish I knew what this performance was called, so that I could possibly see it again somewhere or recommend you to see it. At any rate, there were four drummers and one flutist, who played a jaunty but not particularly memorable tune, while dancers with different masks came in and out of a tent to perform on the tarp you see in the picture. Multitudes of children gathered around the edges of the tarp, interacting with the dancers in one way or another.

At first, there were two evil-looking dragon-faced creatures, who ran around leering at the kids. Next there was an assortment of human caricatures-- surprised faces, cross-eyed faces, sad faces as above-- who held out their hands for the children to shake. (Apparently it is also part of the performance for the child to hit the dancer on the head while they are distracted with shaking hands. I saw several kids doing it, including the one in the picture above.) Finally, the dragon-creatures returned, only to be chased and subdued by a pair of white wolves wielding paper streamers. It was so much fun to watch, especially the kids' reactions. I still wonder how the dancers could see though, since there were no obvious eye-holes.

I hope all this gives you an idea of a slice of life in Koganei. I'm definitely going to write more about the department stores here, as well as the restaurants, but I think next I'll cover the train/subway-- I guess continuing the arc of my daily journey from the dorm, through the city, onto the subway, to Sophia's campus.

Pseudo-Spaghetti Breakfast

2007-04-11T19:59:00.000+09:00

I hereby unilaterally declare that linear storytelling is both antiquated and boring, and that digression is the key to natural communication. Failing that, I declare that I'm too lazy to chronicle the events of the past week in order, so I will resort to a series of loosely-connected ramblings. Either way, what you get today is... everything you will have wanted to know about 上智大学専用小金井寮 / Koganei Dormitory for Sophia Students but didn't know to ask before I told you.

I love this dormitory. Honestly, when the forms came in the mail for selecting housing in Japan, I had no idea where I wanted to live. My real options were three: home-stay, Azalea House, and Koganei Dormitory. Part of me really wanted to do home-stay to get a really authentic Japanese experience, but I also feared that miscommunication and cultural faux pas might nullify such an advantage. Azalea House is 外人 (gaijin) foreigner-land, so I didn't want to stay there and avoid real Japanese people either, and besides it is the most expensive option on the list. So I settled on Koganei as sort of a compromise pick, not exactly ecstatic about it but hopeful it would work out.

(The view from my window)

Living here for a little over a week now, I can say without a doubt that I ended up making the right choice. Being here both with other gaijin and with Japanese Sophia students has been phenomenally helpful in integrating into Japanese life. I mean, how would I have known where to do alien registration if I didn't have friends here who had done it before? And who would I hang out with if I had stayed with a host family? Anyway, I am getting boring, but for anyone out there contemplating study abroad in Japan, I recommend dormitory life; two thumbs up.

The dormitory is a five-story building in the heart of Koganei, just a couple minutes' walk from Musashi Koganei station. In fact, I just spent the past 15 minutes looking up its geographical coordinates, so I hope you appreciate them: N 35.703531 E 139.506355 precisely. You can punch that in to Google Maps or something and it should work. I think the satellite view gives you an idea of how dense this neighborhood is, but of course I'm getting off track as that's a topic for another day.

(I specially cleaned my room to take this picture. Okay maybe I didn't.)

The rooms are okay by American standards but very spacious by Japanese ones. Mine is about twice the size as some others, who have only enough room between the bed and the desk to fit the desk chair. The rumor going around is that the Japanese students got the small rooms and the foreigners got the big ones, because somebody in management thought the Japanese could deal with it and Westerners wouldn't want to. I don't believe a word of it though; we seem to be pretty evenly distributed.

I wrote a little yesterday about our dorm manager, whose name I still don't know. He seems like a very genuinely nice guy, but one who never thought he would end up running a dormitory housing foreign students. He and his wife live here in the managers' quarters, and some other ladies come regularly to clean and cook. And oh! The cooking!

It deserves an exclamation mark or two. Usually it's really really good, as in tonight's feast of breaded fish with vegetables, rice, and some refrigerated concoction of pork and onions. But some things just make my palate wince (can palates wince? Does anyone know?) Take the oolong tea, which is quite recognizably oolong tea except for the aftertaste, which hits you like a roll of aluminum foil with a dab of nail polish remover. Or perhaps the "Western-style breakfast" a while back, which was a weak soup with spaghetti noodles, onion, and corn. Yes, we eat all of those things in America, but not all at once, and not for breakfast! Of course those are the exceptions to the norm, which is quite good.

One thing people rail on about Japanese dormitories is their strict rules and restrictions. Usually there's a curfew, they make you participate in certain activities or cleanings, etc. Koganei's rules really aren't that bad. I could probably write all the main ones out here:

Be sure to wear slippers when inside the building and shoes when outside. Use the shoe lockers by the entrance to store whichever pair you're not wearing.
Be sure to flip your tag by the door to let the manager know whether you are in the building or not. This lets the manager know whether you're in by curfew or not. If you're planning to stay out all night, put a red counter on top of your tag.
Curfew is 12:00 midnight. This means you should be in by 12 or else stay out all night. (Since Tokyo's public transit shuts down at midnight, you should be back before then anyway.) If your tag is flipped and there's no red counter, the manager will try to contact you to make sure you're all right, and see if you need him to keep the door open for you.
Breakfast is from 7:00-8:30am and dinner is from 6:00-10:00pm. Wash your hands before you eat.
Don't destroy your room or make too much noise.

And that's really it. At least I'm saying that's it, because I need to get to bed to be ready for classes starting tomorrow morning. I think next time I'll write about Koganei City; that should be fun. Until then!

From the Air to the Dorm

2007-04-10T19:57:00.000+09:00

We resume our story as I pass through the portal into Narita Airport proper. That was more than a week ago now, but if I'm going to tell it properly I may take a while to reach 'now'. Bear with me!

Seamus, Patrick, and I emerged into the meeting area, where a few people stood waving signs indicating peoples' names: "Robert," "Seamus," "Joseph," and so on. I didn't see one with my name-- at least at first. Then I realized the one for "Joseph" (my middle name) had my last name on it as well. Apparently Western name order is just as confusing for Japanese as Eastern word order is for Americans. I waved goodbye to the others and strolled over to my temporary escort.

His name was Kosuke-- a junior at Sophia University, studying law. (Japanese introductions are very efficient with this type of biographical information; you just say it all at once.) It also turned out that he was my "student monitor" at Sophia as well. A monitor here basically serves as a mentor and probably should have been called a mentor from the beginning, but I don't run the university. And yeah, the picture is from a later time; I didn't think about taking one at the airport.

Despite my best efforts at rearranging my sleep schedule before I left, the mental weirdness of a 10-hour time difference was beginning to set in, and I was very glad for Kosuke to more or less steer me through the necessary steps: changing money from dollars to yen, finding a luggage delivery service to take my bags to the dormitory, buying train tickets and so on. For anyone going to stay in Tokyo and bringing lots of luggage, I recommend 宅急便 (Takkyuubin) delivery-- they're the ones with the mother cat carrying the baby cat by the scruff of its neck. Just be careful that you have everything you need in your carry-on... like power adapters?

On the two-hour-long subway ride from Narita to Musashi-Koganei, we alternated between conversation and just looking out the windows at the passing scenery. We were fortunate in that the whole thing was above-ground, so there were things to see and comment about. I also realize now that we were very fortunate to have a place to sit down-- the only consistent thing about Tokyo subways and trains is that they're really crowded.

At any rate, we talked in English and Japanese about the beautiful 桜 (sakura) cherry blossoms, passing rice fields, places to shop, upcoming baseball games, the musical Wicked, visiting New York, going to zoos, saying 'giraffe' in multiple languages... yes, it was a long ride. Since Kosuke's English was several times better than my Japanese, most of it was in English, though I made an effort to speak in Japanese when I knew how to say what I meant. Eventually we arrived at Musashi-Koganei, left the station, and cut through a neighborhood that looked nice but that I was not in condition to properly appreciate.

We climbed the steps to the dormitory entrance and met the dorm manager just inside the door. I noticed several pairs of shoes just inside the door, and that the manager was in slippers, so eventually I put two and two together to indicate that I should take my shoes off. I didn't put them in my specially designated shoe locker by the door, but it wasn't like anyone had actually mentioned that. More on dormitory quirks later, I promise.

Kosuke had to leave-- by this point it was very late in the evening and he needed dinner, but couldn't go to the cafeteria as I was about to do. So we split there at the door, and I let my new dorm-mates show me to my room (the manager didn't speak English, and seemed to prefer a smiling silence to my attempts at producing Japanese), number 404.

Jeff and Asuka in particular were very helpful in moving in; both were bilingual and had lived in the dormitory the previous semester. And just as I was putting my bags down in my room, I turned around to find a Japanese-language classmate from Georgetown, Mike. By that point I was virtually immune to strangeness-- it was only slightly surreal to find him there on my floor with no previous knowledge of him coming. I guess he skipped the one meeting we had before we left.

At some point I made it to the cafeteria downstairs and had the standard "noodles and something" for dinner. (Don't get me wrong; I love Japanese food, but I don't know the names for much of it, so it ends up being 'long noodles with crunchy white stuff' or 'fat noodles with vegetables.') I found my pajamas, and after a few fruitless attempts to make things fit that couldn't, put my rented bedding in an arrangement that looked reasonable. Seriously, who makes a futon cover that's too small to cover a futon? I slipped in and fell immediately to sleep.

Day One: fin.

Way in the Middle of the Air

2007-04-06T12:30:00.000+09:00

Yes, I can make gospel song references in my blog titles-- I'm from Memphis, folks! I thought it might be good to go kind of chronologically to catch up with the present, since there is no way I could just pick up with where I am now. You wouldn't have a clue what I'm talking about if I said I was meeting with the あるこう会 (arukoukai) walking club for cherry blossom viewing at 16:00, or if I mentioned how much I love IR ports on Japanese cellphones... but you will! I only hope I can eventually catch up with the present.

The first leg: Memphis to Detroit. Besides getting through the security checkpoint in 20 pieces (shoes, coat, belt, liquids, laptop, backpack, carry-on...) and turning around every 5 seconds to wave and blow kisses to my family, there wasn't much to note. I thought I was being so smart when I reserved a seat at the back of the plane-- I would avoid the engine noise from the wings, plus be able to board first and fit my luggage where I wanted. Turns out the engines were located at the back of the plane, and boarding was everybody at once. Maybe I should check that kind of thing before I reserve seats in the future.

People of Detroit, if you are reading this: you have an awesome airport. Or at least a really good airport terminal for Northwest. See the picture above? Imagine sitting there at Gate A40, listening to Barack Obama's disembodied voice on CNN over the intercom, staring off into the distance, when this red shuttle-tram swoops into view on a rail you didn't even know existed. That crimson streak-- travel of the future!-- completes the place in a way that is difficult to describe.

Also unexpectedly, I met a fellow Hoya at the terminal: Seamus, whom I had seen in various theater events on campus but never quite met. Though we sat nowhere near each other on the flight, it was nice to sit, talk, and share our complete un-readiness for arriving in Tokyo before we left. Nor were we the only 留学生 (ryuugakusei) foreign students on the flight; we joined with Patrick of Vanderbilt in the boarding line, and agreed to try to meet and face customs and baggage claim together when we landed.

On the flight from Detroit to Tokyo Narita Airport, I had a window on my left and a Korean man who didn't speak much English on the right. So much for my plan of practicing Japanese on the plane, but the view was amazing. The flight path they showed on the TV screens seemed to have us flying over land pretty much all the time, up through Canada and Alaska and down through Russia, but whenever I opened the window for this picture, all we had was the Pacific Ocean. A blue, flat, infinite space, with a sparse layer of clouds just to show you how huge it is.

The movies they showed were Night at the Museum, Dreamgirls, and Happy Feet, in that order. What's with the lack of Japanese selections, Northwest? Even though I had promised myself I would spend most of my flight practicing writing 漢字 (kanji) characters, I ended up watching most of all three. Night at the Museum was not as terrible as I had thought, but still painfully bad in some spots. I drowsed through most of Dreamgirls, tuning in for a few great songs, so I didn't catch much of the actual narrative.

Happy Feet is one of my favorite movies, so I had to watch the whole thing. Seriously, that movie is amazing. It masquerades as a song-and-dance penguin cartoon, but at its core it is one of the best science fiction stories I know. If anything can feel more impossibly alien than the gigantic ice-breaker ships toward the middle of the movie, I'm not sure I would want to know about it. It's like that moment in Lilo & Stitch when Nani finds Captain Gantu abducting Lilo... But I'm getting off track here a little bit.

We got to Tokyo fine, with plenty of filling if not-quite-good airplane food on the way. At Customs, Seamus, Patrick, and I found each other, had our passports glanced at, and went down to pick up luggage. My two pieces were miraculously right next to each other and easily accessible. I strapped some things to some other things, and eventually found a configuration that allowed me to walk without major difficulties. We all went through another checkpoint where a few clerks did nothing in particular with our luggage, and then came to the door to the airport.

We paused, looking at it and each other. Together, we stepped forward; it slid aside, opening a passage to the outside world. To our new home. To Tokyo.

To be continued...

We are Here, We are Here

2007-04-04T18:26:00.000+09:00

Yes, I made it to Tokyo alive! Sorry for the delay in posting, but I have a good excuse. Sort of.

As I knew before I left, Japanese power outlets are exactly identical to those you would find in an older American home, namely that they have two prongs, but no grounding plug. My laptop power adapter has three prongs, and my power adapters were in my checked luggage, which was to be delivered by a 宅急便 (takkyuubin) shipping service. So, for my first two days here, I was left trying to somehow fit three prongs into two holes, with entertaining but ultimately fruitless results.

After 48 hours of Internetlessness, my bags showed up yesterday evening, and now I have power adapters, a pencil sharpener, paper clips, Ethernet cables, and pretty much enough supplies to set up a home office on a deserted island. Most everything is still packed in the bags; I figure as long as I don't really need whatever is in them my time is better spent getting to know the area and spending time with people here.

And OH MY GOSH there is so much to write about since I got here that there is no way that I could ever distill it into a single post, so I think I'll have to break it up into several theme-based sections. Maybe one about the flight, one about the train, one about the dorm, one about the food, one about Sophia, one about student clubs, one about the rain, one about alien registration, one about 花見 (hanami) cherry-blossom viewing, one about department stores... I clearly have my work cut out for me.

Just as a taste of things to come, here's one picture for you:

I would do more, but Blogger has mysteriously converted itself to Japanese, most of which I can't read, so I need to figure out how to get it to return to English. One more thing on my massive list of things to do!

Before the Storm

2007-04-01T14:44:00.000+09:00

It's about 3:30pm Tokyo time-- aka 1:30am Memphis time-- and I'm up alone, riding out the final hours before everyone wakes up to take me to the airport. This is the point where I know I'm as prepared as I'm ever going to be, but still feel like I'm plunging into a complete unknown.

It doesn't help much that Georgetown just lost its Final Four game to Ohio. Now we'll never know what Georgetown students would have done to top shutting down M Street and singing the fight song outside the White House (as we did for the last game). Maybe someone would have stolen the Healy clock hands and shipped them to Atlanta for the final game. Oh well.

Plus, even though we've spent practically all of the past week packing or preparing to pack, I've pretty much resigned myself to missing something once I arrive. It really never fails, at least in our family trips, that we think of an item we should have brought but forgot. Something like umbrellas, in a week of rain; or extra batteries for failing walkie-talkies. Somehow though, we usually manage to get along without whatever-it-was.

I know I'll probably end up doing the same in the end. And once I'm actually on my way, I'll feel better about it. In the meantime though, sitting around and waiting is not one of my better skills.

Next post: Japan!

Tokyo time

2007-03-30T19:22:00.000+09:00

So it turns out that the Earth is round, and it isn't the same time of day everywhere at once. Shoddy way to run a planet if you ask me. But apparently this is the way things go, and I'm still awake at 6:00am local time trying to reset my internal clock before I leave for Japan.

We had my pre-birthday pizza party today. It's always hard for me to think of things to ask for, for Christmas or birthdays-- I figure my life works pretty well as things are, and anything that would really make a difference would probably be too expensive to reasonably request. This is why my Christmas list consisted mainly of a single item (a digital camera), and why my birthday list this year featured such exciting entries as rechargeable batteries and a doorstop.

(A note on doorstops: Do they actually exist? I would swear I had seen them in the past-- little rubber wedge things, right? But a comprehensive search for them at several stores near my home turned up absolutely nothing, leaving only two possible explanations. Either someone else got there first and is stockpiling doorstops for some unimaginable global catastrophe, or else my very memory of doorstops has been artificially implanted by forces unknown.)

At any rate, we did the birthday thing, and then went out to see St. Benedict's production of Fame, otherwise known as The Musical Without a Plot. Seriously though, the acting was good, the singing was great, the dancing was vintage Otis Smith, and everybody involved gets my kudos. Especially my sister Claire as Ms. Sherman. Well done SBA.

All right, people here are starting to get up to go to school, and that's my cue to get to bed. Stupid time zones. Good morning night.

My new blog

2007-03-30T05:24:00.000+09:00

Though I suppose the title of this post is misleading; I never had an old blog in the first place. But whatever. This is the spot for the chronicles of my semester in Tokyo. If that's what you're looking for, then this is the place. If not, then you're still welcome to hang around, but don't expect any political diatribes, soap opera angst, or whatever it is the hip blogging people do these days.

About the blog title: When Europeans first came to Japan, they arrived via the south, and had no concept of Japanese-style manners. So the Japanese naturally regarded them as just a new kind of crazy heathen tribe, and named them as such: 南蛮 "Nanban" or "Southern Barbarians." As I hail from the American South (go MEMPHIS! even though they lost in the Elite Eight), I thought it might be a worthy blog title.

(For the record, they don't still call Europeans that in Japan, although if they did I would be 100% okay with that.)

So, um, it turns out that since I'm not actually in Japan yet, there's not much to write about here, so I think I'll wrap it up. Stay tuned for more soon-- same bat-time, same bat-channel.