エリオットは日本人じゃない

Bonus Engrish Post!

2009-03-04T11:33:00.000+09:00

In the interest of keeping things entertaining, I'd like to start an irregular tradition for this blog that I hope I can continue for many months to come: the Bonus Engrish Post.

I honestly cannot tell you how many times I come across some hilarious Engrish and I don't have my camera. Actually, that's kind of a lie. The way I travel, even to work, is with the sturdy black Chrome bag you see me wearing in almost every picture I'm in (naturally, I don't have that many pictures of myself because I'm the one holding my camera. If Charlie weren't so lazy, maybe I'd have access to some pictures with me actually in them) but packed in this bag is everything I need to instantly turn into Super Tourist! That is, my planner, my notebooks (yes, more than one. Actually, 5 now) my camera, usually spare batteries and the battery charger, and of course my trusty goshuin-cho, should I randomly find myself at a temple. Usually, I don't use any of this stuff. Even when I see hilarious Engrish, I find it difficult to break the "trying not to be a tourist" facade and dig my camera out. On the weekends, I'm not wearing my suit and tie and I can walk around with the camera in my pocket, ready to go, so with that in mind, here are a few tasty tidbits, with more (hopefully) to come.

Someone has been watching too much Heroes. It might be me.

The sign reads, "Kustsushitaya socks are knitted with a workman's spirit and they represent an air of the time"

This is where I used to park my bicycle, until things got weird. I'm kind of a WoW nerd, so I imagine all sorts of Orcs and elves showing up on bicycles, armed to the teeth.

I mean, sounds great.

I mean, what can you say? Lets get crunky!

You just can't make this stuff up. This is a hostess bar (or maybe more) that Weiche and I passed by when we were walking back to the hostel one night in Hiroshima. The area we passed through was marked on our map as "A bit of a dodgy area"

At least they're honest.

This one is an engrish gold mine. "The crape that soft ice cream entered"? Sounds like the title of a poorly translated porno. I'm also interested in the "choco splay" crape, the "cheese omelet stew" and the ever-intriguing "mental and rice". I wonder what happens when you eat it. Oh, you won't believe when I tell you that I walk by this place once a week and it ALWAYS has a at least a 15 person line.

A Bit of Conceit

2009-03-03T22:12:00.002+09:00

I ride the subway to work. I know I said I ride my bike, but when it got cold this winter, I broke down and bought a pass. So everyday, I walk in and out of the Kyobashi subway station, and right past an ad for AEON Kyobashi. My school.

I kind of have to resist an urge to stand under it and grin. Give a little thumbs-up to the passerby. You know, show them what they're getting. I think it'd be effective advertising, honestly. Additionally, I'm a little flattered that, when you break it down (and even when I'm not underneath) that ad is advertising me.

Stay with me a minute -- the foreign teachers are the lifeblood of the eikaiwa industry in Japan. No Japanese person would willingly pick, all other things equal, an eikaiwa with no foreign teachers over one with some. That's why my job exists, so they can hear our natural pronunciation, learn our slang and hear about our customs and experiences. It's why foreigners can make as much as 5,000 yen an hour tutoring students desperate to improve their english skill, without textbooks, lesson plans, training or anything. No, I don't make that much.

But, in essence, the ad is for me. I like that. And, if things are what they appear to be, I deserve it. Okay, so...that's conceited. I don't know if I've grown into those shoes or what, but certainly, I had an experience that boosted my ego last Friday.

I teach all ages -- my actual students' ages range from 3 to 70 -- but the best classes are my kids classes, because I get to run around, sing songs, and generally be a crazy idiot all to the excited laughter of young children. It's now the spring time, which means the new school year starts soon (yes, April in Japan) and mothers are starting to think of cram school and eikaiwa for their kids -- as a result, we're doing a lot of new interviews now. Our interview is half a level check of the student's English, and half a product demonstration. We have to place a student in a class after only a few choice grammar questions while we dazzle them with our own energy, teaching ability and knowledge, or whatever else will get them to sign up. For kids, this usually means impressing the parents, which is where my story begins (finally, I know).

A little girl named Cocomi, age 4, came in for an interview. Her Dad spoke English almost fluently, and her mother was Taiwanese and did NOT speak Japanese. As a result, our manager had to conduct the explanation in English, which was disconcerting for her. What spooked me was when I brought them into the classroom (empty, with a pink carpet to sit, play and sing on) and invited them to sit down with their daughter and watch the lesson. They didn't do it. They stood awkwardly in the corner and watched for the first half of the lesson, as I sang my heart out, did lots of silly gestures (honestly, try to think of gestures that differentiate "yam", "carrot", "cucumber" and "pumpkin") and got Cocomi to smile and sing along. This was a bit of an achievement, as sometimes the kids are so shy they just stare dumbly at you and let you act like an asshole, but Cocomi had also gone to an International kindergarten, and almost sang louder than me on the ABC song.

Then the parents left. I don't really know why. For the remainder of the lesson, the mom looked through the window into the classroom periodically, but mostly I didn't see them until I left and gave her her lesson report card (an analysis of what she did well and what we can help with). What I didn't know until later was that the mother had found a trainer that was visiting our school from AEON headquarters that day and said to her, "Did you hire him? Because he's good. He's here to teach. Good job for hiring him."

Yeah, I felt pretty good when she told me.

Adventures and Misadventures

2009-02-16T21:18:00.003+09:00

"You know what the funniest thing about Asia is?"
"What?"
"It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different."
"Example?"
"Well, in Tokyo you can drink a beer on the subway. And I don't mean no paper bag beer either. You can drink a can of beer. In Osaka, you can buy a shrimp sandwich at McDonalds. Also, you know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Japan?"
"They don't call it a quarter pounder with cheese?"
"No man, they got the metric system, they don't know what the fuck a quarter pounder is."
"What'd they call it?"
"Oh....actually they call it a quarter pounder with cheese."

They do, really. In fact, recently McDonalds launched a campaign promoting their DOUBLE quarter pounder with cheese. Of course, when you order it, you gotta ask for the dabaru ko-ta- paunda-, but all the advertisements are in English. Interestingly enough, however, the Japan-only Mega Mac is one of the best selling items in Japan, EVER. I'm told that the equally absurd mega muffin is also a sales record breaker.

Despite that little bait and switch, I'd actually like to talk about a few of the differences between Japan and America, especially as they pertain to the holiday season (long since gone, unfortunately). I spent a lot of time talking with my students about the topic, and I've come to the conclusion that, as with most imported things, the Japanese just don't get Christmas. Case in point:

Of course, one could argue that American's don't really understand the true meaning of Christmas, and we need a slew of Xmas specials and holiday blockbusters to remind us, but what I really mean is, the Japanese already HAVE a family based holiday -- it's their New Year. They go home to their families (or, if you're a single Japanese person, probably walk downstairs to your parent's kitchen) and dress up in fancy kimonos to visit a local shrine and be blessed for the year. There's also specific special New Years food, called "o-sechi". In contrast, their Christmas is more like a couples' holiday -- you're supposed to buy something for your sweetie, or just buy something. In fact, Christmas is so not a big deal that many couples celebrate it on whatever day in the three or so leading up to the 25th is most convenient for both of their schedules. I even had to work on Christmas. I worked in a Santa hat, but I still worked. You could say they've got it backwards, but who's to say we don't? Plus, we get Christmas AND New Years off (though I guess I got a week here, so I can't complain).

In any case, I wanted to relate my own experiences with Japanese New Year, to fulfill the "misadventures" promise of this post's title.

Sakiko was going home on the 1st to visit her parents, but she invited me and one of her friends from Kyoto University over to her house to celebrate the year turning over. Honestly, it didn't feel all that different from an American celebration -- we had some booze, and watched a Dick Clark-style musical extravaganza (except it wasn't pre-recorded and interrupted with commercials every 37 seconds -- NHK does a nice ad-free broadcast). Then it started getting weird. We were about to go out to a shrine at midnight when we broke out some instant soba (which, I'm proud to say, is the only time I've eaten instant noodles since arriving here), and then steeled ourselves for the cold and headed into the Kyoto night. While we were walking to the shrine we heard the temple bells ringing in the New Year, as we hadn't started early enough to arrive before 2009 did. We had a plan to visit Yasaka shine, a very famous shrine in the heart of the geisha/entertainment district of Kyoto. Of course, Kyoto is not a small city, and picking one of the most famous shrines did not turn out to be a good idea. There were a lot of people walking down the middle of the (closed) street, but when we reached the final block before the intersection of the shrine, things got hairy.

In case you can't tell from the picture, every inch of available space from where I was standing to the crosswalk in front of the intersection is literally full of human. To make matters worse, I soon realized that the police were only letting about one crosswalk full of people cross at a time. After a few waves, we realized this was only happening every ten minutes. So we stood. We played simple games to pass the time in the freezing weather. I complained. A lot. I contemplated turning back (and I was complaining so much that Saks encouraged me to do so) but it was too late -- there was a solid wall of people behind us. She told me, in the hour and a half it took us to travel those 100 yards, that this was the holiest shrine in the area and we were setting ourselves up for a good year by visiting as soon as possible in the new year.

Imagine my shock when, after we were finally allowed across the street and up the stairs into the shrine, I was confronted with a carnival. I don't have any pictures because the flood of people kind of just carried us along, but I literally, and I'm not kidding even a little bit about this, just laughed as soon as I got inside.

There were booths selling everything from takoyaki to candied apples to short lengths of rope (which I learned later was associated with some burning ritual where you lit one end and carried it (often swinging the glowing ember dangerously) until it burned up the length). Everything was brightly lit for 1:30 in the morning and everyone was doing brisk business. I honestly should have expected this of the Japanese, but it was patently absurd. This was the holiest shrine in Kyoto? Where was Jesus to tell the peddlers to get lost (or am I mixing up my bible stories?) It didn't help once we entered the shrine "yard" proper. At any given moment during it's opening hours a shrine has a small window or bank of windows open displaying a wide selection of charms, to encourage everything from good grades to easy childbirth. However, on this night, the shrine had opened every window it had and stocked it with holy consumables, including a kind of arrow for shooting evil (that came in three different sizes). People buy so much of this holy stuff, that they don't have room in their houses for all of it, and have to throw away the stuff from the old year, but just dumping it in the trash isn't okay (it is a divine charm, after all), so shrines and temples provide a "holy trash box" where you can return the old charms for proper, respectful, disposal.

That really wasn't the end of the absurdity. While we were waiting and freezing, Saks told me I should pull the hood out of the back of my jacket so I could catch the money being thrown. Let me explain: on a normal visit to a shrine, you toss a few coins into a collection box, clap twice, pray for something and go on your way. However, as you will see from the following video, there just isn't enough room or time for everyone to respectfully donate. So this happens.

As you can see, people are just throwing their money like a bunch of strippers are just outside the camera frame. Speaking of strippers, how do Japanese strip bars work? I mean, their smallest bill is the equivalent of about 10 bucks -- everything under that is a coin, and I can't see how stockings or g-strings full of change would be attractive. Or possible. Anyway, got closer to the boxes they were throwing for, and there were no strippers, just a bunch of change. Everywhere. And a few bills for good measure (Sakiko had said that people, having waited that long, wouldn't be satisfied with just throwing a 100 yen -- about a dollar -- so they throw 1000 or more. I thought that was just absurd, and considered not throwing any at all, considering my long wait out in the cold payment enough).

We quickly made our way through, and Saks and her friend bought omikuji (fortunes telling whether you'll have good or bad luck) and headed back home, exhausted. And that was the end of that chapter.

2009-01-14T21:58:00.002+09:00

Americans seem to be obsessed with authenticity. Authentic beanie babies, authentic presidents, authentic rappers. If you aren't true to your word, true to your scene -- if you aren't what you say you are, then trouble follows. I mean, everyone has at least brushed up against some form of this, though I think it's especially prevalent in music communities. Rappers seem to argue about nothing but authenticity. If you don't got street cred, you don't got nothin', etc etc. but it exists in other forms too. People complain that bands "sell out" all the time, don't they?

Japan doesn't seem to have this problem. You can be a goth/punk/whatever by night, and don your dark blue pinstriped suit in the morning and head to your office job. There are no "posers" in Japan, no wiggers, no arguments about who's the real deal or not. For example, one of my students has a particularly nappy head of hair. At first, I thought it was a bad haircut, or neglect, or something, because every time he came in, it was just kind of all over the place -- and not in that particularly Japanese, uber-styled Rod Stewart kind of way, more like he literally just rolled out of bed. And his hair probably goes down to just above his shoulders, so it got pretty wild. Otherwise though, he is very well dressed, in nice suits, pressed shirts and well-matched ties. I learned today, when he came in with one side of his head shaved and the rest of his crazy nappiness still crazy and nappy as ever, that I was wrong. I can only imagine that he must don a faux-motorcycling leather jacket and engineer boots and hit the clubs on weekends because that's honestly the only thing you can do with a head of hair like that.

(That reminds me to eventually write a post about the greasers and their poodle-skirt wearing girlfriends that do the twist all day in front of Kyoto city hall on Sundays, but I haven't managed to capture a picture or video of them yet so I'll let that be for now)

But there he was -- pinstripe suit, smile, and half his head shaved, sitting quietly being the best student in my class. In Japan, punks do not grow out or grow old. There are no punks. There is only fashion, and it doesn't matter what your represent, just whether or not you look good. I'm almost positive this has something to do with a quirk of the collective Japanese cultural consciousness, something called honne and tatemae in Japanese. Without lecturing much, it basically describes the difference between what you think privately, and what you say or do in public. The Japanese have no problem with these things being completely different, but Americans find this disconnect rather disconcerting, I think. I believe Dave Barry said it best when he provided this handy translation guide in his book, Dave Barry Does Japan:

What the Japanese say : : Translation
"Yes" : : "No"
"Maybe" : : "No"
"I think your proposal is interesting" : : "I will feed your proposal to the goat"

A Scary Story

2009-01-07T00:28:00.004+09:00

I think someone broke into my apartment the other day. Well, maybe not so much broke in, as perhaps just walked in -- it's possible that I neglected to lock my door. The incident went something like this:

I was making my special autumn curry (odd: it's winter) and I realized that I didn't have potatoes. I had one of two choices, go to the nearby supermarket and buy some, or just skip them. I opted for the later option, as the curry already featured carrots, mushrooms, onions, beef and my special ingredient -- some sort of mysterious Japanese squash. However, when I finished peeling, chopping, defrosting and all the other various curry preparations, I realized that I didn't have enough actual curry to make the curry. This forced me to go to the supermarket, so I hopped on my bike, pedaled furiously there, grabbed a box of curry, and potatoes for good measure, and pedaled furiously home. The supermarket is literally two blocks away, so this whole trip took maybe 7 minutes, however, I returned to a locked door.

Normally, this would be expected. You leave, you lock your door, and when you come back, it's still locked. Good, right? Except it wasn't the normal, key lock (I was furiously trying to unlock the door, and I don't actually remember if the key lock was locked or not). This was the chain lock. Yes, the kind that you lock when you're not sure who's at your door, but you still want to peek out and see who it is. The kind of lock that can only be engaged from the inside, with the door closed, but still allows the door to open 3 or 4 inches before the lock stops it. You know the type. It's funny that my apartment even has a lock like this, because there's actually a small camera mounted beside the door frame that feeds to a little screen under my air conditioner, so I don't even need that secure 3 inches to peer from.

Anyway, I was puzzled. I was on the outside of my door, and somehow a lock that can only be locked (and unlocked!) from the inside was impeding my entry. Honestly, at this point, I did not suspect any foul play -- I thought that maybe, in my hurry, the door closing had popped the lock (it's kind of spring loaded) into a locked position. I was just stumped on how to get back inside.

I spent a few minutes pondering, weighing my options, wondering who I should call, whether or not I should try and break the lock, etc, when I took a deep breath, took stock of what I had with me and figured out how to get in. I'll tell you it only took me 3 minutes to get inside, once I figured it out, and I'll let you guess how I did it after I clarify the situation and tell you what I had on hand.

Problem --
A door chain (photo of my actual lock) locked from the inside, with me on the outside.

Materials on hand --

A shopping bag with one bag of six small potatoes, and one box of curry cubes
One set of clothing, including shoes, a jacket, pants, belt, etc.
One card key, and one set of bike lock keys
A wallet full of normal wallet things, credit cards, business cards, some bills, coins, etc.
Personal sound system -- i.e. Dr. Dre Beats(tm) headphones and a brand new red iPod nano (my old iPod died, sniff)
Two umbrellas, hanging outside my door (they're mine, everyone in Japan stores their umbrellas this way)
A cell phone

Take a minute, and figure out how you would get inside.

....

....

....

Got it?

....

Okay, here's how I MacGyver'd my way in. I can actually fit my hand in the open door, so I unplugged my headphone cable, threaded it through the end of the loop of the lock, got a little lead on it, and tied it into a tight-ish knot. I then took an umbrella, jammed it into the mail slot so the hook end poked through, and "tossed" the other end of the headphone cable so that it came to rest in the hook. Then I pulled the umbrella out, shut the door, and pulled on the cable. Voila. I'm rather proud of myself. Before you go complaining that my Dr. Dre headphones would never fit through a mail slot, the cable unplugs from the headset itself too, making it just a long, double-headed 3.5mm cable. A shitty one at that, but that's another, Monster Cable bashing post.

Anyway, my suspicious were aroused about a possible intruder quite a while later, while my curry was finally simmering on the stove and I sat at my computer, arms covered in goose bumps from the cold.

Wait....goosebumps? Cold? I went over to my window, and found it wide open, screen and all. Now, this isn't a "I wonder, did I lock the door?" kind of moment. I was home all day, without the heater on, in the dead of winter, and I would have noticed before if the window was open.

Nothing was stolen though. As I mentioned, I was only gone for about 7 minutes, so even my 2 laptops, in plain sight and less than 10 feet from the window, were still here. As far as I can tell, nothing at all was touched, which I'm relieved about. Still kind of scary though. I double check my locks now.

The one where Elliot got used to Japan

2008-12-26T16:01:00.002+09:00

I really hope no one gets the title. I really do.

In any case, I have something to say. The Japanese love their food. They really do. They love their sweets, their Italian, their traditional and non-traditional Japanese cuisine. They love to talk about it, make plans about it, and of course, most of all they love to eat it. Sometimes I get stuck standing on the train, unable to turn around or move at all because every available inch is filled with someone's body (no, this doesn't just happen in Tokyo). To entertain themselves, people will usually board with their cellphones out and open (because no one is able to reach into their pockets during the ride) and will text their friends while they ride. On the two occassions I've been unwillingly privvy to someone's text, both people were talking about going out to eat. Not karaoke. Not shopping. Not hiking, biking, dancing, or any other activity. I understand people eat three times a day, but the Japanese do it with gusto.

In much the same way America has Tex-Mex or Fasian food (which is pretty much all popular Chinese food. I don't think they've ever even heard of Orange Chicken in China) Japan has it's own takes on various cultural cuisines. Those who have been there know what I'm talking about. Pizza really just isn't the same. McDonald's hamburgers are smaller, and sport alien additions like teriyaki sauce (actually quite delicious), eggs, or recently, the "gura-koro", short for gratin-croquette, which is basically a wad of mashed potato, fried, with cheese in the middle. Japan also sports it's own unique foods. Sushi is pretty much known around the world now, but some Osaka specialties like Okonomiyaki and Takoyaki aren't as much, and suffer from being so unlike anything Western that they defy being named in English. Okonomiyaki is sometimes called a "Japanese pancake" or a "Japanese pizza" but I honestly think the resemblance exists only in shape -- okonomiyaki, pizza and pancakes are all round, but otherwise are almost completely different. However, Japanese people gobble them up every day, smothered in Japanese mayo (which is also a little different from American mayo). I have rather come to like these dishes as well.

However, eating Japanese sometimes has it's problems. For example, at first, I didn't know how to properly flip an okonomiyaki when you were grilling it. I quickly became adept after having it demonstrated a couple of times, but it took watching first. I accidentally ordered a set with a bowl of beef rice that included, of all things, a raw egg. I was sitting at my little stool, baffled, staring down the surprisingly orange yolk (yes, Japanese eggs are a little different too) in it's own little bowl. I glanced up and down the counter at the other businessmen busy slurping down their meals, and, as luck would have it, spotted another guy being served the same set. Of course, he didn't go for the egg right away, first sprinkling pepper on his beef, and piling some pickeled...something near the side of the rim. I stole furtive glances his way every few seconds, waiting for him to reach for the egg. Finally, he cracked it into his little bowl, as I had done, whipped it with his chopsticks, and dumped it over his rice. I sighed, picked up my chopsticks, and, a few seconds later (to belay suspicion from anyone that I might not know how to use my raw egg, you stupid gaijin) I followed suit. I have to say, I will avoid raw eggs in the future.

The opposite thing has occured as well. I ordered a taco in a new Mexican(? they served burgers too) restaurant, and when it arrived served with a slice of lime, I confidently scooped it up, and squeezed it over my taco. Of course, this was Japan, and the lime was so small and dry that only one (1) drop of juice came out onto my taco, but that did not deter me. I picked it up, eschewing both my provided fork and chopsticks (how are you supposed to eat a taco with chopsticks?), tilted my head to one side, and munched away happily. Oddly enough, the chorizo in the taco was whole, but that did not diminsh my enjoyment one bit.

I suppose I should probably try and connect this back to the title of the post. Essentially, what is happening to me is that I will have little moments where something strange and Japanese will happen and I will remain totally unfazed. However, seconds later, I will become surprised at myself that this odd occurence did not in any way register for me. These moments have become closer and closer together since I arrived. I guess that means I'm getting used to life in Japan, but don't think I fit in just yet. Yesterday (Christmas) I wore a santa hat I had borrowed from the school all the way from my apartment to work. Naturally, this made me even more conspicuous than usual, but I did not expect the sheer volume of rubbing-necking grandmas, blantantly staring school-children, and the ages in between that would quickly glance away as I met their gaze. Even the uniformed school girls, who usually avoid looking at gaijin if at all possible, would giggle and stare, and smile back if I waved.

I guess I'm getting used to Japan, now if only Japan would get used to me.

The Drive of the Japanese

2008-12-22T12:17:00.002+09:00

One thing that constantly amazes me is the deep, mysterious well of self-motivation that exists in (nearly) every Japanese person I have ever met.

This weekend I both visited Suntory Yamazaki distillery, of the award winning Yamazaki whiskey, and attended a choral concert that Sakiko had been invited to by a friend she's had since kindergarten, who also happened to be one of the singers. The distillery was very interesting, and afforded some excellent pictures which I unfortunately can't really download right now, as I didn't bring my camera cord to Kyoto with me, but trust that they will eventually find their way onto my flickr and probably even this blog, though I have been rather lax about updating it as of late. However, as the tour was fairly similar to the distilleries I visited in Scotland, and I'm sure the readership of this blog doesn't include a huge whiskey demographic thirsty (ha, did you see what I did there?) for a detailed explanation of how whiskey is made and the large, traditional devices integral in it's production, I'll leave that part of the day there. Except to say that the free tour included a 10 minute tasting at the end, where we were first offered a whiskey-water or soda, followed by as much whiskey as we could try in 10 minutes, poured however we liked. So I had 3 shots there, to taste the difference between the two 12 year varieties Suntory produces (the Yamazaki and the Hakushu). Then I wanted to taste some older varieties, and ordered a Yamazaki 18 and a Hakushuu 15 (cask strength) in the gift shop. Needless to say, by the time we left, I was on the drunk side of tipsy.

Anyway, we eventually made it to this concert, a little bit out of Osaka towards Kobe. The station actually connected directly to the concert hall by a series of elevated walks, so we didn't even have to get down on the street until my 5 o'clock hangover started acting up and we went to buy some tea at a convenience store across the street. By the time we made it back, the line had grown three-fold, stretching down the walkway towards the station. This, combined with the dark wood lining the inside of the hall, tipped me off to the fact that this may not be an ordinary college student choral concert.

Now, I realize that I have heard some choral performances in my time (some of them my own), and I do not want to cast dispersions on any of them, but this was one of the best I've ever seen. It shocked me to see that the choir was over half men, something that I'd never seen achieved in America, but what shocked me even more was when I noticed the director taking a place in the chorus after waving his hands for the first song, and another member coming out to take his place. This was no University organized event, or class, or activity. These students were directing themselves. Sakiko told me that they pick their own songs, book their own events, organize their own practices, and find their own voice teachers. The university does provide financial support, but the outfit is entirely student run. And they were giving a high-caliber show to a packed house.

Now, I suppose you're thinking, "That's pretty impressive, organizing a group of students and honing them into a fine-tuned instrument. The choir had like, what....10? 12 people?" Try 60. Not only that, but during the third stage of their performance (oh yes, they had 4 stages, with about 3 songs each, plus 2 bonus songs after the performance IN the hall, and 2 more OUTSIDE the hall), since it was the group's 50th anniversary, they had any past alumni that were available to sing come up onto the stage and join them, effectively doubling their number. There were some apologies made that the harmonies might not be as tight due to the difficulty of getting that many working and non-working members together to practice, but in my view, the quality did not degrade. It was an amazing performance.

This is, naturally, not the only time I've seen young Japanese people display a tremendous amount of drive, or else I probably wouldn't be posting about it. Whenever I'm walking around in Kyoto with Saks, and we go back to her apartment kind of late, we go down into this underground shopping complex called Zest to escape the cold (it stretches underneath the street towards her apartment). Every time I've been down there after 9, there are always at least 2 different groups of teenagers practicing dance moves. Not in an uncoordinated manner, like a bunch of idiots messing around -- they are dressed in appropriate dance practice clothing, have a small portable boom box to put out some music and sometimes we even catch them practicing as a group in front of a closed shop window so they can see their own reflections.

I even saw a group of five girls, doing some hip-hop routine in perfect unison outside some building in front of a particularly reflective window as I was riding the train from Osaka to Kyoto last Saturday night. That's correct, I spotted them, in the middle of nowhere, grooving outside in December on a Saturday night at 9 o'clock. That's dedication.

Click!

2008-12-15T16:52:00.002+09:00

If you needed some cheering up this holiday season, and haven't heard of Matt, please click here and watch the video in high quality (there's a little button that says "watch in HD" under the video).

It seems kind of silly, yeah, but it made me really happy.

Oh, and hopefully there will be a real post a little later today about the weekend's debauchery.

Apologies

2008-12-01T14:44:00.001+09:00

I realized that the blogger template I was using was hacking down my horizontal format photos, and honestly, I couldn't have that. So, we're stuck with this somewhat simpler theme for now, until I figure out....html.

Shrine of the Fox Gods

2008-12-01T14:00:00.004+09:00

One rainy weekend in October I managed to convince Sakiko to take me to Fushimi-Inari, a place I believe I already linked on Wikipedia. This place was absolutely incredible. It's a short train ride south of Kyoto, and once you enter, you begin your walk up and around the mountain. There are probably...4 or 5 kilometers of paths on this mountain, and almost without exception every meter features a tori gate. These gates are spaced so closely together that at times, you felt like you were walking through a vermilion hallway. Inari means fox in Japanese (for some reason, a type of fried bean curd product used in ramen and sushi is also called inari, or kitsune, making for a hilarious translation of ''fox sushi''). It did rather feel like a place a fox would live. However, in the interests of returning this site to it's original purpose as a photoblog (and a lack of further interesting things to say about the shrine), I'll simply present you with a few of the best photos. You can find the full set of my pics on my flickr.

The Entrance -- a preview of things to come

Two Paths diverge in a wood

Shrine of the Fox Gods

The Hallway -- now do you see what I mean?

Earth -- This gate was standing off on it's own, away from the path

Heaven -- This is my favorite picture from Fushimi Inari. As we reached the top of a mountain, we started walking through a cloud. The effect, and the feeling, were both otherworldly.

Cute -- I actually like this handheld shot more than the one we got some guy to take.

That's all for now.

A Short Note Regarding Bicycles

2008-11-25T21:54:00.002+09:00

Japanese people love their bikes. I might even go so far as to say that ASIANS love their bikes. It was certainly the preferred means of transportation in Vietnam when I was there 4 years ago, and there certainly aren't any lack of people riding around in Japan. Moms sometimes have 2 kids seats, one in front of them and one behind, to carry their children. High school kids bike around all the time, and sometimes haul their friend/girlfriend on the back. Old grandmas equip their bikes with an umbrella holder, for rain or sun, and a pair of gauntlet gloves attached to the handlebars to shield their sensitive skin from harmful raindrops and UV rays. Basically, what I'm saying is, as much as Japanese ride the subway or drive in cars, they ride bikes.

Of course, I own a bike. There's no chance of getting a car, and since I happen to have purchased one of the "mama bikes", as they're called, it has a nice useful basket on the front, good for hauling groceries home from the supermarket. Don't get me wrong about this mama bike -- probably 30% of bikes I've seen are almost exactly like mine, except for the color, and another 45 percent are the same basketed style. The other 25 percent are these interesting folding bikes that I passed on because their wheels are only about a couple feet across (meaning you'd have to pedal more to achieve the same forward motion, I think. Easier to store though). I've also taken to riding my bike to work. It only takes about 20 minutes, which is only a little bit longer than it takes to ride the subway (sometimes shorter if I *just* miss the train) and I get some exercise.

The only problem is, there is no ROOM in Japan. Meaning, any open space is fair game for a pile of bikes to appear. Case in point:

This is the Keihan mall, right in front of Kyobashi station, very near my work. There is a large plaza, and every day it fills with bikes. Literally fills. On Saturdays, occasionally you'll have a bike maze appear, leaving you to guess which path you should take to arrive at your destination. The irony of it is, as you may have guessed from the sign in the picture, it is ILLEGAL to park your bike in this location. The city of Osaka does not like the mess that occurs when people haphazardly park their bikes every which way, and will occasionally send a giant truck around to load up all the bikes and take them away to a pound, where the owners have to pay a fine of 2500 yen to get it back. However, this threat doesn't deter people (as you can see) and so the days that the big truck is somewhere else, bicycle porters (I'm serious) are dispatched to organize the bikes into neat rows. These are men, employed by the city, to organize illegally parked bicycles.

I had been mostly parking my bike in a tiny closet at the bottom of our building, which has a small space between some loud chunk of climate control equipment, and the wall barely big enough for me to wedge my bike into. Unfortunately, the other tenants of the building had been taking to some passive-aggressive measures to convey their displeasure with my choice of parking. Almost every day recently, there was an umbrella stand placed neatly in the space where I would put my bike. Normally, I would just move the stand, but one day there was a guy painting the railings in the stairway too, so I turned around, and parked my bike at Keihan mall. Of course, that day happened to be the one that the truck showed up.

It took me until today to get around to walking to the pound to retrieve my bike, but when I did, I was surprised. The pound was tucked away under and expressway, and must have gone back for a half mile or so. Captured bikes were organized by date and location of the sting, and after I paid my fine and filled out my form, the guy cheerfully led my to "Kyobashi, 11/19" and helped me locate my bike, after which he wiped it down with a soft cloth, checked the tires and bell, and told me to have a safe ride on my way home. What service.

Meet the New Boss

2008-11-19T00:22:00.003+09:00

I've already mentioned that I was not allowed to move into my apartment immediately (thank god I'm here now though), and this is really what this post centers around. After Kobe, we had another day of training, followed by my real start of "work", which wasn't really the start. Mostly, I watched. That Tuesday, in fact, watching is all I did. I did teach a couple of lessons over the following couple of days, but for the most part I was listening and trying to absorb a lot of information, very quickly. Unfortunately for me, the teacher I replaced, Michael, a semi-hilarious black man from Brooklyn, had been around for a while. Which means, he had been trained in a different way, he had been retrained in a different way, and through it all, he'd developed his own way. Which means, he trained ME in a different way. There was also quite a bit he just....left out. Which led to me looking rather embarrassingly uninformed when I reported back for more kids training (do you see how I ended up with only 1 day weekends?) two weeks later.

Anyway, a short interlude about my school: Kyobashi is at a big station, on the Keihan line leading out to Kyoto. In all honesty, the area itself can be kind of sketchy at night -- there are a lot of hostess clubs, the kind where you pay a lot of money to sit and drink with a girl who pretends she likes you. I usually just throw on my headphones and bike through the crowds, which hasn't gotten me in trouble, yet.

Like pretty much every Japanese business, our actual space is cramped. So cramped, in fact, that I think we had to rent an extra floor -- meaning, 2 of our classrooms, our lobby, and our office and counseling space is on one floor, then the other 5 classrooms (only four of which we use, plus one storage room) are 4 floors up. This makes for further embarrassing moments when you're waiting upstairs wondering where the rest of your class is, and your manager comes dashing up the stairs, out of breath, telling you (very politely) that you should get your ass downstairs and teach your goddamn class, because they've been sitting there waiting for five minutes. Every day since, my head teacher, Mirei, has given me a sheet with my class, students names and a helpful note she's handwritten about which room each class should be taught in. In my defense, I made the mistake once, and there was a student from the class waiting with me.

Speaking of Mirei, here's a photo of her standing behind the desk of our lobby. I had an interesting one of her peering up from the desk like a gopher searching for its own shadow, but I opted for the more dignified of the two.

And here is a hilariously Japanese photo of the assistant manager, doing something so blatantly, conspicuously, self-consciously Japanese that, even though she's Japanese, I was actually shocked. Shocked.

Anyway, during this "crossover week" I was eventually forced to teach some classes. Then we partied. It was an AEON welcome party at a little restaurant nearby, well attended with students and staff alike. I'm not going to lie, it was all you could drink, and I might have gotten a little tipsy, but all in all, we played a version of the game "two truths and a lie" where I ended up stumping EVERYONE by saying that my mother's hair is jet black. Shocking? Perhaps.

After that, I was allowed to wander freely, though still chained to the boring hotel south of Namba. I was honestly getting a little frustrated at that point, because I really couldn't unpack or anything -- I couldn't even psychologically settle into Japan, which was rather annoying seeing as how they were expecting me to operate at full capacity. I explored the electric jungles of Namba and Shinsaibashi, and discovered that there is a shopping arcade that stretches....many many blocks. I think the full distance between 2 subway stations, about 25 blocks? And not shrimpy little Portland blocks. Osaka sized blocks. Here's a photo of the beginning. There is a photo because I became so amazed that it kept on going that a small obsession with finding at least one end grew in that little evil place in my heart.

After I found it, I turned and started walking to the other end, counting the blocks on one hand until I realized I obviously wasn't going to have enough fingers, and switched to counting on one hand in binary. Because I'm a huge nerd. I stopped when I reached the Dotonbori, because I'd, on previous occasions, walked to that point from the other direction. I wish I can a picture of the neon on the Dotonbori, but I haven't ever had my camera there at night.

Anyway, I was mostly scoping the area for cell phone stores, as I planned to buy one the next day, with trusty Saks to explain the ridiculousness that is Japanese cell phone contracts to me. It's boring, so I don't explain it (not that I really understand it either), but trust me, it's ri-goddamn-diculous.

That might be enough for today. I realize that I also don't have any pictures of my apartment, and no plans to take any anytime soon due to it's generally disorganized state. So, more stories for another time.

Revelations

2008-11-18T22:12:00.001+09:00

Enoki mushrooms smell disturbingly like pineapples.

If you are what you eat, aren't cannibals the most human?

You Might Like This

2008-11-14T09:35:00.002+09:00

Though my first month's weekends were, to a man, all chopped down to one unsuspecting day, I feel like I honestly have been making the very best of my time in Japan. Very rarely (besides the innumerable evenings after I get off at 9 that I spend watching bad movies or good television, or the equally innumerable lazy mornings before work) do I let free time go un-seized.

One such example was the very first such "excursion weekend". I've mentioned it a couple of times already. Kobe. It was a blast.

First, the Kansai (Western Plain) region includes the central city of Osaka, Kobe 40 minutes to the west on the bay, Kyoto to the north-east about an hour, Nara (which is full of deer and temples) to the east an hour or so, and Wakayama to the south approximately an hour and a half. Considering the incredible selection of private train lines (Hankyu, Hanshin, Keihan) the JR lines and the subways, its pretty damn easy to get anywhere very quickly.

To get to Kobe, we took the Hanshin out of Umeda station, and met Charlie and Sakiko's friend Asako in Sannomiya, one of the biggest stations in Kobe. Apparently, Asako and her boyfriend had already picked out a place for us to eat, so we began wandering in that direction. I managed a discreet couple of tourist shots along the way that I'll save for an upcoming Engrish Special, but here's a very nice one of the gang in front of our choice of eatery. We were forced to wait outside for 10 minutes because we got there before 11, when they opened.

From right to left, Asako, her boyfriend Masa, Sakiko then Charlie. Of course, I'm behind the camera and for this picture, so is Jessica apparently. She was actually there, I promise. Anyway, as soon as we were allowed inside, the reasoning behind their curious choice of name ("The Bank") was immediately made obvious. The restaurant had been built inside of an old bank. I wish I had thought to snap a picture of the vault door, still hanging out in the corner between a couple of tables, but I was pretty much starving at this point, so I focused on the excellent pasta that was brought to me.

We walked back towards Sannomiya, mostly to refill empty wallets by means of the international ATMs lurking in every 7-11 here, and then wandered our way into the basement of a nearby department store. Might have been a Daimaru, might have been a Hankyu, I'm not sure. Jessica was looking for a particular kind of furikake (seaweed seasoning you shake onto rice) to send to her aunt/grandmother/mother, and apparently this department store was the last place it had been seen. However, we mostly just wandered around drooling at the sweets and sours arranged carefully behind glass and in front of smiling employees. Jessica was unable to find what she wanted, so we moved on.

Chinatown was the next stop, but due to the flow of people we were pretty much forced to keep moving until we broke, gasping, out of the river of humanity into a side alley where they were serving bubble tea. This picture might give you an idea.

After bubble tea, we held our collective breaths and jumped back in, quickly arriving at the "center" of Kobe's Chinatown, a large plaza ringed with restaurants.

There we ate some dumplings at a famous dumpling place. Seeing a pattern here? I'm getting hungry just blogging about it... While waiting, we took pictures with their mascot outside. I rather like the sequence in the next couple of photos. See if you can spot the difference.

Yes, that is Sakiko and Masa gaijin shashing me.

We resisted the siren song of goma-dango, which are some (apparently) delicious sesame rice ball things, and started towards Harborland, the famous face of Kobe.

When people think of Kobe, that's the scene that pops into their heads. Either that, or big juicy steaks. In any case, that big red tower and significantly harder to see white building behind it are like the Space Needle for Seattle, Big Ben for London, or Le Tour Eiffel for Paris. However, I like this shot of it much more.

We eventually found our way to a giant mall-like place, featuring a Totoro-shop, a cinemas, a gelateria and a couple of arcades, where I learned that playing the arcade game that the Rock Band drums are based on (Drummania) is WAY fucking harder than the rock band drums. I also got frustrated with the Silent Hill arcade game because the gun does not shoot where you aim it, and the first four inches of the screen all the way around will cause your gun to reload -- meaning, if an enemy is attacking you from that point, you will never be able to kill it.

Anyway, we had gelato, and wondered what we should do next, before wandering into Harborland proper. It's basically a giant amusement park. Unfortunately, I have no hilarious pictures of Charlie riding the mechanized circus animals that crowded the square (300 yen and they roll around at a pace slower than a walk!) or beautiful shots from the top of the towering Ferris Wheel (700 yen and you ascend at a pace slower than a walk!) but I do have a couple of good pictures, which I will share with you now.

Harborland is, true to its name, directly on the shore, and in some of my photos of the park, you can see the giant loading cranes of the docks looming in the background. I mention this because there are probably 10 small tour companies all offering a ride around the bay to see the sights. We walked past all of these, but Charlie express disappointment that a particular vessel wasn't at the dock when we passed by. He described it as a "pink pirate ship", so later, when we were sitting under the ferris wheel, and I saw a boat of that description motoring past, I leapt up and dashed to the water, nearly knocking over two small children and an old lady so I could snap a picture.

We eventually got hungry and left, getting lost heading back to the Sannomiya area. Several false starts and one train ride later (I was the one that eventually had to read the map) we made it back and selected a restaurant. It was an izakaya of sorts (a kind of Japanese "bar" where they serve small plates of food and feature a large drink selection in a more restaurant-y atmosphere) but it was a very nicely decorated one, featuring a beautiful fountain and cherry tree right in front of you as you got off the elevator. I took a rather nice photo of the settling dusk before we went inside.

Once there, we ate, we drank, we laughed, we cried. I tried fried chicken gristle, and cried some more. It was getting pretty late by the time we finished, so some people had to catch the harborliner (apparently part of Kobe is situated on an island) home, while the rest of us retired for a little karaoke. A once through of Bohemian Rhapsody and Under the Sea helped wrap things up nicely.

Oh the life...

2008-11-10T10:19:00.002+09:00

I thought that I would spend a little time to enlighten you as to what the life of an AEON teacher is like (for AEON is the name of the eikaiwa I work for, if I didn't mention this before). But first, I'll take you through the end of training.

The remainder of training was actually pretty interesting. Mostly we were exposed to little other responsibilities of the teachers, like interviews or counseling, and practiced our lessons live with real students. At night we'd get a group of students who wanted a free lesson to come down to headquarters, and we'd run a lesson for them, of course getting feedback from the other trainees and the trainers themselves, who were watching. This was naturally my first exposure to AEON students, and....there are some pretty crazy ones. The one that sticks out in my mind is Yoko. On the first night, our good friend Luke (while waiting for the trainer to be ready to take notes) decided to pass the time by asking if his students had any questions. Yoko responded with "what do you think of Japanese women?".

I'll pause for a moment while you either chuckle in disbelief or come to realize how hilarious that is for a 45-ish looking Japanese woman to ask to a 22 year old American teacher.

Everyone in the room laughed, including the other three women Luke was teaching, and Yoko looked around with a face that said, "What? Did I say something wrong?" Needless to say, when she came the next night for the demo lesson, she showed up with an album full of pictures of a recent party she'd had with Masami, a student from my school, Kyobashi, whom she had made friends with, and a couple of AEON teachers (including Michael, Masami's teacher. I didn't realize it at the time, but he was going to be the one showing me the ropes during crossover. Meaning, I was replacing him) and a french guy they had met on the train. I didn't get the full story, because they seemed hesitant to tell it, but apparently this french fellow was a "very bad man," and apparently "has a girlfriend" which honestly, says a lot, and not necessarily about the frenchman.

The end of training brought the Pinning Ceremony, a little celebration for all of our hard work during which we met our managers for the first time and got our snazzy AEON company lapel pins. And our nametags, but those aren't quite as cool. Apparently, the men and women of Japan wear their pins with pride at the company they work for, kind of like students like to wear their uniforms, even on their days off, because it shows everyone what a good school they got into (for serious). I, however, had mixed feelings about it, considering my history of refusing to brand myself with corporate clothing. However, as this bit was free (as in, it didn't cost me any money), I decided it was okay. However, I don't even usually end up wearing the jacket that provides the necessary lapel, so the point became quickly moot.

At this point in the timeline, all of my training friends were whisked away to their various schools in various parts of Kansai, but more importantly, I had a day off.

That Sunday I organized a little outing to Kobe, to visit the famous Charles T. McClean. It was a great trip, and I wish that I'd had the cell phone number or the name of the hotel that Vince (who's school is in Kobe) was staying at, but alas, we were forced to have a great time without him. That, however, is another story. Maybe two. With pictures.

After Kobe, we had kids training, and here I want to take a moment to reveal a little bit of Jessica's character. You will, I hope, remember that BOTH foreign teachers at my school were leaving the same month, meaning that two people from the same training (they occur monthly, I'm told, and I believe that Jessica's husband is about to start his riiiiiiight.....now) went to the same school. This isn't, apparently, irregular, but it did mean that we did not have a veteran teacher available to ask questions to. The amusing thing is that our manager is also new, only having arrived in August, and our assistant manager arrived the week after we did. There are four other teachers on staff (all part time except for one). Meaning, out of 8 employees and 5 full time employees, 4 have less than 3 months experience. We're a bunch of n00bs!

However, at kids training, I experienced two telling moments that, I thought, were illustrative of who Jessica really is. Don't get me wrong, she is generally a very nice person, full of smiles and genuine energy, but during kids training, we were practicing drilling using vocabulary cards, and the trainer, Bill, asked us to put action cards we were holding on three other cards: "happy", "mad" or "sad". Jessica held the "dropped her laptop" card. I'll pause for a minute while I let you guess which emotion she associated dropping her laptop with.

"Happy".

Her reasoning, she explained, was that if you drop your laptop, you get another one. A new one. She went on to say that she'd rather own a brand new car than a day old one, wouldn't you? At this point, I believe Tim exclaimed, "but that doesn't mean you'd be happy about totaling your day old car!" A sentiment I tend to agree with.

The books for the pre-school classes featured an insane kind of "magic", where if you pressed the pen of a special gadget called Mimic Me to the page, the gadget's speaker would spit out the vocabulary word in natural English. Whatever picture, speech bubble or letter was on the page, the pen would say what it was out loud. We learned later that the pen read microprinting on the paper, that changed with the picture it was on, but that still didn't stop Jessica, during her break, from flipping through the pages with lightning speed, seeing how fast she could tap the pen on all the pictures. This lead to a horrible kind of racket as Mimic Me tried to keep up: "Boy! Hors-Ballo-Red! Brow-Yello-Blu-Black! T! T! T!" and so on and so forth.

She also loves cake. When we were out in Osaka last weekend, searching for something to eat, she was fairly insistent on the idea of eating dinner at an all-you-can-eat dessert buffet. It sounds tasty, but I think I'd rather eat real food first.

That's all I have for today. Tune back in later for an account of the Kobe trip and a little more "Life of an AEON Teacher".

Foibles

2008-10-30T23:43:00.002+09:00

And now a break in my regular programming! I usually watch a couple episodes of Heroes (season one. I'm up to episode 13) after work, but I'm sicker than a dog (I don't believe I've ever had a cough as bad in my life as I do right now. I'm sipping homemade consomme soup -- made with real consomme cubes! -- with beef, daikon, napa cabbage and carrots right now). As a result, I will be braving the Japanese health system, without my happy Japanese health insurance card, tomorrow morning in the time slot that I would like to believe is reserved for blogging. That's a dirty lie though. Usually I'm asleep.

First, I would like to apologize to and commend Tina for triumphing over the inexplicably Japanese comment buttons. I think I actually created this blog while I was in Japan last year, and I don't believe I could similarly defeat the localized region settings while I was trying to set it up. As a result, all Japanese. Good luck.

And now, by popular request......training!

Upon arrival at the Weekly Green, our intrepid hotel, we were instructed by Todd to get some rest, try and beat the jet lag, because we would be faced with a half day of training on the morrow and a hard week of instruction starting on Monday -- when the real jet lagginess started to hit. Of course, who listens to good advice? We traipsed back to the station, rode the train to Namba (our train from the airport had come through Namba, so it was really the only place we know how to get to) and found an Okonomiyaki restaurant suitable for toasting our arrival. How can you go wrong with draft beer and Japanese pancakes? I believe we ordered some yakisoba and takoyaki to round out the meal.

The next morning was.....early. Jet lag hits hard traveling west, and Tim and I were wide awake at 5:30. This started a week-long tradition of going on long, pointless walks around the neatly boring Daikokucho area. One such walk did lead us to figure out that the Namba shopping district, where we feasted on Okonomiyaki, was only about a 10 minute walk north of the 'Green. Honestly though, these walk accomplished little else besides wasting time until suit up/head out.

This may shock some of you, but we are required to wear "professional attire" every day. That means jacket and tie. I didn't get the memo, but apparently because Japanese office workers tend to favor dark blue and black suits (though conspicuously flamboyant ties) we should be disinclined to let such drab clothing dominate our closets. Unfortunately, I only have one pair of pants couldn't be considered "dark". Luckily, if I were to buy a suit, tailored clothing should, in theory, be able to fit me. Unlike everything else in this tiny country.

What can I say about actual training? We showed up at 11 sharp every day, we were normally let go a little after 8, and in the interim we were drilled hard on the AEON lesson plan. AEON has a very specific "skeleton" that they hang the individual information of each lesson on, and no teacher is allowed to check out of the Weekly Green until they're overheard mumbling it in their sleep. There is an old Japanese saying that roughly translates to, "the nail that stands out gets hammered down." I guess I kinda stand out.

I'm just kidding actually. They were (and still are) a little worried about my casual nature, but at the same time they realize it makes me extremely approachable as a teacher. Everything is a balancing act.

We did have some good times after we were released though. One evening we stopped in Namba, had some conveyor belt sushi, slammed some beer and sang karaoke for an hour. Like always, Bohemian Rhapsody and Under the Sea brought the house down. Luke was a little cautious at first, being a complete newbie to both the Japanese language and the fine art of Japanese karaoke, but after a couple of Johnny Cash songs, he opened up to the idea and shouted himself hoarse right up until "Any way the wind blows...."

One night however, stands out as such a disaster that I honestly couldn't help laughing the whole way through. Though we had parted paths over the first Sunday before training had started in earnest, Vince had taken the time to meet up with a Japanese friend of his in Osaka, and had somehow secured a recommendation for a cheap sashimi restaurant where the draft was only 300 yen (with the dollar doing so shitty against the yen, it's hard to know how much that is in REAL money) and you could order a plate of whale sashimi for a similar price. It sounded great, so the four guys (Jessica was cooking in her room, or something. More on Jessica later, I promise) trooped out to find the place.

The first thing to understand about Japan is that there are literally hundreds of different transportation companies. The subway system for each city is it's own company, Japan Rail (JR) operates several smaller, regional companies and not only runs long distance trains across Japan and the high speed Shinkansen (bullet train), but also tends a system of surface trains of subway-like complexity. Long time readers may remember my confusion in Tokyo until I realized I had been looking at two different maps -- one for the JR lines and one for the subway. Something similar happened that night.

The bar was located near a station on the JR loop line that circles Osaka. However, we were sort of located inside the loop, on a subway line. So we took a train to Namba, switched to the JR, rode a train to a loop line station, and boarded an express before realizing that the express would actually skip the station we wanted to get off at. So we had to get off early, wait for another local, and take it the last stop to our destination.
Total trains: 4
Total time: ~50 minutes

Getting off the train at the right stop, finally, we noticed it was raining. Luckily, Vince knew exactly where this place was, and we dashed down a deserted (it was really pouring) street to a little underground....shopping area(?)....built into the hillside/under the tracks. It was about 9:30 at this point, and here we were, 4 soaking wet gaijin, sauntering into a local sashimi joint and grabbing a table. Accordingly, it was little surprise to me when Luke leaned in and said, "The guy behind the bar has just been laughing and looking at us since we came in." I'm used to drawing stares in Japan, and it didn't really worry me. We ordered some beer, and asked them to get some sashimi (they were out of the whale) and tempura going for us. The beers arrive quickly, in the mini mugs that are pretty common across Japan. Oddly enough, the one that ended up getting passed to Luke had some sort of weird, blue plastic thing floating in it, partially obscured by the head on the beer. To this day, I have no idea what it was. We called the waiter over, and he apologized profusely and brought us another beer, "serbisu" (service, meaning free). Luke, at this point, was convinced that the guys running this place were playing pranks on the gaijin, and refused to eat any of the delicious maguro (tuna), ika (squid), or hamachi (?) sashimi that showed up in tandem with some excellent tempura. That made the next part all the more tragic and hilarious.

Considering that we didn't know whether Luke was just being a little paranoid about the looks and laughing, and we didn't know if the blue thing had showed up in the beer by accident, when the girl at the table next to us accidentally knocked one of her beer mugs off the table, shattering in and getting glass everywhere, we couldn't help but think there was some sort of huge Japanese conspiracy out to ruin our night. A piece of glass flew by Tim's ear, a full table length away from the girls, and a chunk went flying by Luke's foot and actually cut him. Flip flops were a bad choice, apparently.

At this point, it was all so horrible, and the night so spectacularly ruined that I couldn't stop laughing. It was like some sort of joke -- it didn't seem like all of this stupid shit could actually happen all together like it did. So I just kept eating. Some huge, delicious chunk of BBQ tuna was brought to our table, bone in. We poked bits of cooked fish off of it with our chopsticks and shoveled it in. It was so tasty looking that even after all of that, Luke had a little bit.

The girls felt so bad about cutting Luke that they arranged with the waiter to have the REST of our beer paid for. So we got out of there for much less than we were expecting, but it was still raining. That's when we realized that we could take the train one stop to Osaka station, then catch the subway straight south to Daikokucho and our waiting beds.
Total Trains: 2
Total Time: 15 minutes

Good job.

2008-10-30T11:47:00.002+09:00

I promised (both you, gentle reader, and myself) that I would try to refrain from those epic posts that take me a month and a half to write AND read. I don't tend to produce many of those. So, with that in mind, here is another quick bit, with more detail, and from the beginning.

I arrived in Japan on the 3rd of October. I think. It might have been the 2nd in some other parts of the world at that point too. After a ridiculously long wait in a stifling room packed to the gills with people waiting to get cleared through immigration, I was immediately flagged down by a goofy looking guy who introduced himself as Todd. He turned out to be one of our trainers, and though a rather focused fellow (he would abide no goofing around while we were supposed to be absorbing or presenting information in the following week) I eventually discovered he has a rather....unique sense of humor. All in all, though my initial impressions were wary, he turned out to be a pretty good guy. I was half surprised he had managed to pick me out of the constant stream of people leaving the customs area though -- it's not like I was the only gaijin there. But then he demonstrated that his folder had the picture of every single new AEON teacher that was arrive that month, that day. And he told me the rest (except for one guy we were still waiting for) were waiting like 100 feet away. So I went and introduced myself.

First impressions are interesting things, because they're very difficult to remember after you spend a lot of time in very close proximity with someone. Hence, I'll skip what I don't remember, and give you my own thoughts on each of my "training buddies."

I first met Vince, a native Canadian who has apparently spent a lot of time in his ethnic homeland of Hong Kong. He'd been to Japan before a number of times, and had actually been here while waiting for our jobs to start, but had returned to China to apply for the necessary visa. Thus, his Japanese is at least as good as mine, and I let him do most of the talking when we were running around after training that first week, drinking beer and eating whatever Japanese food we could get our hands on. I think we went out for Okonomiyaki that first night, after Luke finally showed up (there had been a problem with his bags being sent to Thailand, or something) and we got to our hotel in Namba.

Tim and Jessica were also waiting with Vince in the little lounge area at Kansai International. Tim is a soft spoken Texan with a hilarious George Bush impression. He was my roommate at the Weekly Green (our apartment-style hotel for the training week, and my home for the week after that while I couldn't move into my apartment). He's a pretty funny guy -- always looking out for Japanese people "givin' the stinkeye" (which happened occasionally as we wandered around -- a big group of gaijin is going to draw stares in Japan, curious or otherwise), and for other gaijin wandering about, which he always tried to give The Nod. The Nod is a general acknowledgement that You Are Both Gaijin In This Indifferent Asian Wonderland, and it seemed to upset Tim whenever The Nod wasn't returned. Occasionally people would turn away and pretend we didn't exist when Tim gave The Nod, which would cause him to exclaim: "Did you see that guy? I tried to give him the nod, and he just turned around and was like 'ain't no gaijin in my Japan, oh no. I'm gonna pretend you don't exist'. What a jerk!".

Jessica is an interesting case, mostly because she works at the same school as me. AEON schools generally have 2 foreign teachers, and both of the previous ones at Kyobashi (my school) decided to leave at about the same time, so both of us started at about the same time. So I think I'll leave my impressions of her until later, because she's had a significantly larger role in these Japanese proceedings.

Luke was the last to arrive, as I mentioned before. I think I only need to show this picture as means of explanation.

Okay, that's kind of a joke. He had this face he would use to demonstrate the looks my hair would sometimes get, when he and Tim caught people giving the stinkeye. He would use it other occasions too. It never failed to make me lose my composure a little, it's so hilarious. Anyway, he's a good guy too, even though he had pretty bad luck during training, actually fainting during a demo lesson at one point (the room was ridiculously hot and he was pretty dehydrated) and eating something bad a little bit before Kid's Training Day 2 this past Monday, which caused him to be sick and required a trip to the hospital. He was a major player in the strangest story of training, which I'll relate sometime soon.

For now though, I work.

Great Scott! The Blogosphere is ESPLODING!

2008-10-28T11:13:00.003+09:00

...and so begins my triumphant return the the classy world of blogging. Like so many others, I'm off on some crazy adventure in some bizarre country. In fact, because I'm in the SAME country I was in last year, I've conveniently just restarted my pretty blog from last time. Please peruse the previous posts should you run out of bloggyness to devour.

In any case, I'm actually recovering from a cold, so though my original plan was to awake at about 8 this morning and really put something down (including actually figuring out a way to make flickr like my photos), it is now 11:17, and I will soon have to suit up (literally) and ride my bike into town to teach young and old that "English" is not pronounced with an 'r'.

For those of you caught unawares, I have moved to Japan. I arrived on October 3rd and underwent a rigorous week of training in the subtle art of drilling English grammar points into Japanese skulls using ONLY English and a wild variety of complicated, energetic gestures akin to a schizophrenic mime playing charades. With himself. Stories of my training group and their foibles are to follow.

After training, I spent a brief Sunday in Kobe with none other than the slanty-eyed Charles McClean (with pictures!) and was immediately shoved back INTO training to learn how to teach Japanese children. Oh yes, the "school" I work at is what is called an 英会話 (eikaiwa), which basically translates into "English conversation". Japanese people, in general, get about 6 years of formal English education, but because this is focused entirely on passing the English reading/writing sections of their college entrance exams (and are taught in a terribly passive style by their Japanese teachers, who probably don't speak English themselves -- if you want a lecture about the Japanese educational system, all you have to do is ask). As a result, if you ask a perfectly normal Japanese person, "How are you?" they will generally break out into a sweat and run for cover. Thus, eikaiwa were born: a way for Japanese people who actually want to use English to learn how to speak it.

To continue my outline (all of this will be filled in later, I promise) I worked a week with the previous teacher, a black man from Brooklyn by the name of Michael. Then he left. And I had to teach on my own. It was terrifying.

The following weekend I got to move into my apartment, finally, and I got a cell phone with Sakiko's help. Then I worked some more (do you see why I'm only going to expand the interesting bits?).

Finally, I spent an interesting Sunday this past weekend exploring the mountain that is Fushimi-Inari shrine. You'll want to see the pictures, I promise.

All that said, the best ways of getting in contact with me are: commenting on this blog (ha!), using my NEW email elliot.aughenbaugh@gmail.com (the old random986 one still forwards to gmail if you're lazy, but please update your address books) and through my fancy-schmancy Japanese cell phone. The number is: (+81) 08057058333. Interestingly enough, you can email me DIRECTLY TO MY PHONE at elliot.986@ezweb.ne.jp
Try it! It's fun!
My address is extremely difficult to remember, as Japanese address have to include the City, prefecture, town, street, block, spot on the block, building and (if applicable, as it is in my case), apartment number. So please wait for next time.

It's a Power Hour!

2007-07-06T20:59:00.000+09:00

Um. Not the drinking game. In all truth, I haven't really been sleeping very well recently. Perfect example--none of you bothered to check the timestamps on those last couple of posts, but they were both released about 6AM. Tokyo time. Otherwise known as "Elliot should be asleep" time. The best part? I'd been up since midnight. And I did not go to sleep except to nap briefly after lunch. Now, I'm flying high on caffeine, hoping I can make it to some reasonable hour before finally crashing. We'll see how that goes.

In any case, I'll update you a little more on some backlog of the fun-fun activities here!

Back around Golden Week, when those delightful Kyoto and Tokyo trips took place, I was telling a lot of people about my awesome plans. Well, this is the story of the last of those early May trips--the infamous On-Sen.

On-sen, for those of you that don't know, is the Japanese word for hot spring. They...come in many shapes and sizes--in anime, they're often outdoors, and the male/female separation is achieved by an incredibly flimsy and/or riddled-with-holes bamboo fence. The one we went to has been rated #1 in Japan for the past 25 years running, and was more like a Ryokan with an ofuro (which I'll get to explaining in a minute). Um. Meaning, it was a high rise hotel, with rooms in the traditional tatami-style, and it had a public bath (which was inside). Public bathes in Japan are actually pretty cool--the water is always extremely hot, and very clean, because everyone washes off before getting in. The creepy part is being the gaijin, and having a bunch of random, old Japanese guys come up and start asking you questions about where you're from and why you're here...I guess a red-head in the bath is a curiosity.

Anyway, let me throw up a picture of the cast of characters in this drama.

From left to right, Will, Heygyong, Ungi, Makiko and The Sensei. Will is a Tufts student, like myself, and had this to say during this trip:

Will: (while eating a cherry from the complimentary plate of fruit left in our room) Man. We could eat a whole basket of these and be constipated for the rest of the trip.
Me: (giving him a weird look)
Will: What, cherries don't make you have raging diarrhoea?
Me: ....no.

Heygyong is Will's girlfriend, and decidedly Korean. So is Ungi. I mean, she's Korean. Will is only dating Heygyong.

Makiko is a "friend of Tufts", meaning, she's an adult that hangs around Kanazawa and does cool stuff with us Tufts kids occasionally. She was our intrepid leader for the trip, though it was actually arranged by the enigmatic Matsuda-san, who I've mentioned previously as being our kind of "mother" in Kanazawa.

The Sensei is...a sensei. He's also a friend of Tufts, though I see him just about everywhere. A week previous to this trip I helped him out with his English club at the all-girls school he works at by providing an example of a native speaker's pronunciation. Yes, yes...when I hear the phrase "all-girls" I immediately think of sexy parties too, but this was purely business. I even got paid! Oh. The reason I call him The Sensei is because I can't remember his name, and everyone else calls him The Sensei, so I don't really have any opportunity to learn it again.

Okay! So anyway, this trip was supposed to be an all-Tufts adventure, bankrolled by our tuitions (that Matsuda-san handles for us, and uses part of to arrange cool cultural outings, like this one), but, as you obviously already know, Will and I were the only Tufts kids that ended up going. Why, then, were we joined by two Koreans and a college professor from a girls school? The reason being simply this--you can't cancel reservations the day-of in Japan.

Matsuda-san has a lot of sway in Ishikawa (the prefecture we're in, for those who can't read a map) and she knows almost everyone. It would have been incredibly rude, and damaging to her sterling reputation, to cancel half our reservation on the day of because all the other fucking Tufts kids woke up "sick" and didn't want to go. So we had to fill the spots--luckily, there are very few people who would pass up a chance to chill at an on-sen, so after Makiko and I spent 40 minutes banging on doors and waking up Niki, Ashley and Todd, all of whom begged off with bare apologies, we headed to okonomiyaki for lunch and frantically called friends at the kaikan to fill vacant reservations. So that's how we ended up with this motley crew.

We had a van, and drove north up into the Noto peninsula towards the hotspring, stopping at a five-story pagoda along the way, you know, to soak up the local culture. It was rather impressive, but I've since seen many like it, so I'll throw up a picture and continue.

We briefly stopped at another shrine that isn't really worth talking about.

What is worth talking about is the on-sen experience. Shortly after arriving, we were wowed with precision bowing manuevers from the hotel staff, in addition to being gang-bowed by a group of trainees (or so it appeared, since they were to a woman young). This staff member was playing the...koto? Shamisen? Some traditional Japanese instrument while we waited in the lobby for our...hostess? More on her later, to show us to our rooms.

We were introduced to our rooms, which were a peculiar blend of western and Japanese styles--regular hotel beds in one room, a nice, western living room in the middle, and a large tatami room where no shoes (or the plastic, tiny sandals that were provided for us) were allowed. There, we received our welcoming tea from our hostess. This is where I was informed that you never tip anywhere in Japan, except at a ryokan (a Japanese style hotel, which is what was built on this on-sen. I pretty much use them interchangeably here). I'm guessing the reason was that this lady arranged everything for us--our kaiseki dinner, the show, karaoke, and even our massages (we'll get to all of that later).

That's a nice picture of us having tea, isn't it? After that, we were sized for our yukata, which are light Japanese robes, and sent off to the bathes.

It was about 5 PM at this point, and we had dinner coming up, so we were only allowed to soak for about 40 minutes--which was pretty nice, shaking the creepy old Japanese guys and finding an outdoor bath that I had mostly to myself. Makiko must have heard us talking over the bamboo fence that apparently separated the two bathes (at least the outdoor ones--the indoor bits were in different parts of the building) and shouted for us to head out when it was time. I want to emphasize how spectacular these hotels are--we were actually in a sister hotel for this first bath, but this is a picture of it's lobby:

Incredible. And, for a little comparison, the bar of our hotel:

It was actually fairly interesting being at the other hotel, because I noticed that everyone's yukatas were different. Men and women have different ones at every hotel it seems, and the design of both differs across hotels--so if they find you wandering along the beach, they immediately can tell what sex you are and what hotel you're from! (men are generally dressed in a blue patter, and women in red. Additionally, the curtains or signs for bathrooms are often designated by these two colors, just so you know)

We were rushed back in time for dinner, which was spectacular, and I'm sad to say I don't really have any pictures of it. We came into a small tatami room with individual seats for all of us, complete with a little table with most of the food already on it. The dishes were beautiful, as you might expect of a traditional Japanese meal (which is what kaiseki really is), but was also very strange. We ate firefly squid as an appetizer, and dozens of other small dishes that I don't really remember, but included このこ--konoko, or dried sea cucumber ovary. This, oddly enough, tasted pretty damn good with sake. The sashimi course was fantastic--easily the one of the top three sashimi meals I've had, and the other two include the other two kaiseki meals I've had here. Utterly fantastic. The rest of the meal arrived in small pieces--a little do-it-yourself grill/clay dish that we used a mini-alcohol gel light to cook, and a mini hotpot. It was all very delicious, and despite being almost bite sized portions of each dish, we were pretty full by the time it was over.

After dinner, we waited a little bit for the "show" to start. I honestly had no idea what it was supposed to be about, but....it was hilarious. Unintentionally so. The show careened from dance number to dance number, seemingly without any connection between them (most of the songs were in Japanese) though it was dominated by a long, complicated story about a samurai with a massive axe and a sakura (cherry blossom) princess. This didn't stop it from starting with a little big-band number, or including a bit where everyone came out in leopard print costumes. Yes, before you ask, there was a sparkly, Vegas-style can-can line somewhere near the end, and the lead came out to sing the final song in a spangled tail coat.

Did I mention the cast was entirely women?

It was hilarious. I wish I had a video, but, alas, I don't. I was just sitting there in shock the whole time.

We retired to some karaoke after that, which was relatively uneventful, for karaoke, and then to the bathes one more time before our massages, which were pretty good. After that (about 1:30AM) I went downstairs for ANOTHER bath (I'm not kidding) which was fantastic, because I was the only one there. The water is REALLY hot, and REALLY relaxing, and after the massage, it was simply wonderful.

Sleep had us rested for a viking (which is honestly what the Japanese call "all you can eat") breakfast, which was quite tasty, and then another bath (I swear to god, in 16 hours I had four bathes--cleaner than Jesus!) and we headed home, stopping only to gawk at another feature of the Noto penninsula, which is honestly very hard to describe, and I didn't get a good picture of. It's essentially a very craggy shore, which was very beautiful to hike around and see. You can take a look at the flickr set if you're interested.

That's all for now! I may try for a "small anecdotes" style post later on. Maybe it'll be less effort to write.

Bonus Engirsh Post!

2007-07-06T05:41:00.001+09:00

It was true! Their clothes were really fobby! For those of you that don't get the joke...Wikipedia to the rescue!

Just what you need in the morning: a put me down. Deepresso! For the maniac in you.

Just....ew...

So...that was just a fun collection of a few good shots of Engrish I've captures recently. You may return to what you were doing.

2007-06-05T21:55:00.000+09:00

Okay, I apologize for the silent month. I know you`re all on the edge of your seats about what happened the second couple of days in Tokyo, and I don`t mean to disappoint. However, you`ll have to excuse any typos I make here--my trusty lappy finally decided to not stay unfrozen past the login screen, so not only was I pretty much out of commission, internet-wise, for the beginning of June, I had to put up with a Japanese keyboard to type much of the beginning of this post. Honestly, you`d think that they designed it for an octopus with a stiletto strapped to each tentacle, the keys are so close together. I swear to god, the space bar is as long as my thumbnail. Now, I know I have a pretty freakin` big thumbnail, but that`s honestly a little ridiculous. Anyway, I'm running Linux now, which is kind of a pain in the ass, but perhaps a different story.

The rest of Tokyo!

We left off after another night of debauchery in Roppongi, collapsing at home and waking fresh for a new day. Our rather decent Lonely Planet guide had good things to say about the Ueno district, and a rather large, post-war black market area that thrived nearby, so we decided to check it out.

Now, here is where I begin to notice a trend among the pictures I take in Japan--almost every single one (okay, not every one, but certainly a lot) seems to say the exact same thing: SWEET JESUS LOOK AT HOW MANY PEOPLE THERE ARE!

That said, take a look.

See!? We wandered around in this complicated masterpiece of lean-to stalls and some interesting street vendors. I mean, we saw all kinds of stuff. This was Tokyo, after all. I believe I purchased a new pocketwatch for around 1200 yen--pretty inexpensive, I think, though it doesn`t have the heft of my old one (which I will try and fix when I return to the states I think...I believe it just went through the wash too many times) and, nearby, saw this:

Dr. Bronner`s in Tokyo. I said they had everything, didn`t I? And, just to hammer the point home, one more picture.

It speaks for itself. Anyway, it was pretty expensive for a back-alley market, so we headed over to Ueno park, as the guidebook suggested that were we to visit one museum in Tokyo, there was one there that we should visit. I was excited for a muesum, honestly (Raul didn`t seem to be) but the massive line at the gate deterred us from even considering going in. On the way, of course, we encountered a book fair. Raul read to the Japanese children.

Okay, not really. He did, however, eat a blue banana shortly after we bagged the museum.

Come to think of it, we had ice cream before we bagged the museum. Yay for food! Anyway, that brought us back to Ueno station, and, having decided it had no further wonders for us to discover, we headed back to Roppongi, determined to find something worthwhile in the ex-pat wasteland. Fortunately, a massive, architechturally complex complex called Roppongi Hills had recently been constructed--it was kind of like a mall/living community/movie theater/attraction...thing. On the way, we spotted this Roppongi policeman:

Yes, he will kick your ass. Only a badass Japanese policeman would chill on a street corner in Roppongi with nothing but a four foot oak stick. Oh, and that truncheon on his hip. Whatever. Anyway, Roppongi hills was populated with crazy gaijin making fools of themselves as the only street performers I`ve ever seen in Japan. Ever. This guy kept acting like he was hearing things through that massive...tranciever...toilet plunger-lookin` thing he`s holding up against the wall in the picture. He had a crazy looking cart thing too (no, not the yellow trash can in the picture. But seriously, he honestly looked like a hobo) but I didn`t manage to capture him with it before he ran up to the wall like his long lost siamese twin was trapped on the other side.

There was other weirdness--the crazy, hannibal-esque movie poster, and the robot mouth. Both fairly bizarre representations of the craziness offered by Roppongi. In a tamer, less titty-focused kind of way.

We helped ourselves to the classy kaitenzushi (which is the Japanese name for the conveyor belt-type sushi restaurants) place in the maze-like complex, then made our way across town to taste the electronic fruits that the world's richest orchard had to offer. Of course, I speak of Akihabara.

At first blush, Akihabara looks much like the other main centers of Tokyo--specifically Shibuya and Shinjuku--decked out in neon and tall-ish buildings (there aren't a lot of really tall buildings in Tokyo because of the earthquakes). However, instead of containing bars, restaurants or girly clubs, Akihabara's towers housed a menagerie of goods that only an otaku would love. There were quite a few multi-level arcades, which of course had the obligatory taiko drumming games, Guitar Freaks, a Time Crisis here and there, and, of course, the rows upon rows of generic fighter consoles. Interestingly enough (though I didn't deem it important enough to snap a picture of) all fighter games are installed on identical machines--they just have different games on them. Popular titles included Guilty Gear, Tekken 4 (or was it 5? Who cares) and many other 2D "classics". I even think I saw a streetfighter one. However, the thing that blew my mind about these arcades was this game:

Did anyone ever see an episode of Yu-gi-oh? That show where they take the "I choose you!" element a little too far, and actually fight with digital representations of cards that the characters carry around with them? Well--here's the inspiration. I believe this game was called Aquarian Age Alternative, and it was a computer game played with 5 collectible cards--each representing a different, usually very cute, young girl that would do battle with another person's (or the computers) group of five cute girls. The crazy part is, the cards are actually placed on the gird, and you command them by moving their position around. I honestly don't know any more than that, but I watched a couple of games, and that seemed to be the basic idea. I thought that was pretty insane. Like Magic cards that you fed into a machine to see a virtual representation of the battle.

Anyway, arcades weren't the only thing Akihabara had to offer. My personal favorite of the district was the nerd-shops--basically 6 or 7 floors of otaku heaven. The first floor would generally be new releases of manga and anime, and any new related toys they had, and then they would proceed up from there--anime, manga, action figures, cosplay (usually the top floor), video games. It was wild. The action figures were so cool, I would have bought one if they didn't run 3,000+ yen.

Then came the final type of Akihabara--the sex shops:

I didn't really want to get my blog flagged (nor did I actually take pictures INSIDE the shop we went into) so you'll have to be content with that for an idea of the kind of outfits they had in addition to racks upon racks of DVDs, toys, etc etc. Raul ended up getting a Doraemon vibrator as a gag-omiyage for Charlie (of the Kyoto trip), and I think there's actually a video of him opening it somewhere. I might have to track that down.

We left Akihabara after being scared shitless by the whitewashed concrete walls and sketchy line of clientèle we found outside the maid cafe we had decided to patronize (as part of the Akihabara experience, yes?). Needless to say, we got the hell out of there and made a beeline for Shibuya and passed through love hotel hill on our way to a hotel with an amazing skybar.

It honestly wasn't as sketchy as it sounds. Love hotel hill, I mean--not the skybar, which wouldn't let us in because I was in shorts and sandals. However, all was not lost, as I managed to snap this photograph crossing over the highway to get there:

Which I thought was pretty cool. Yes, there is one where I cranked the shutter speed way down, balanced it on the railing and made the tail/headlights blur into a big line, but it really made the skyline wash out, which is the part of the picture that I actually like. So you get this one, instead. The other benefit of being turned away by the skybar is that we made our way back into Shibuya and found this amazing little bar on the 7th floor of a random building there, which was tended by this man:

Though it's a little blurry, I'm sure you can tell he's a character, just from the hair and the glass of absinthe under the sugar cube he had just lit on fire for Raul. He had apparently been serving drinks since World War 2, and made amazing martinis. He laughed and joked with us in English and Japanese the whole night. It was a blast. We actually tried to make it back to the hostel without a taxi that night, but ended up getting stuck at Ikebukuro, and having to taxi the rest of the way (after midnight McFlurrys!).

Hm. That just reminded me of something amusing. "fukuro" in Japanese means "bag", like a plastic supermarket bag, or whatever. Like Spanish, sometimes they change the sound with a diacritical mark to make it "flow" better from previous sounds, so "fukuro" sometimes becomes "bukuro" when combined with other sounds, like, for example, "te", meaning hand. So "tebukuro", literally translated as "hand bag" is actually "glove". One of my classmates referred to socks today as "ashi-bukuro", or "feet bags" (instead of the actual word, "kutsu-shita", meaning "under shoes") which I find to be utterly hilarious in English. Hee hee...feet bags...

Anyway, on with the story. The next morning, we headed to Ginza, one of the major districts we hadn't hit yet--and we only had one full day left. We started off with some amazing yakitori from a little stand hidden under the railroad tracks.

And went on to see mini-godzilla (also the only photo from Tokyo that I appear in!),

freaky eye-people,

the Ginza Apple store (I'm such a fanboy),

cool toys (art?) in some of Ginza's famous department stores,

and our first Mochi Cream store (there's also one near the station in Kanazawa, which I now patronize frequently).

A "mochi cream", the little round things you see in the picture, are essentially rice gluten (a kind of chewy, deliciousness) wrapped around different flavors of...creamy...goodness. The centers vary from variety to variety, but they're all good.

Anyway, afterwards we made our way to the imperial palace, which was nearby, and tried to find a way to get it. No dice though, so all you get is this rather nice photo I took of the exterior.

There's also another rather nice one with a swan in it, but I'll let you look for yourself on that one. It was getting late-ish by this point, and we had already decided that we were going to attempt an all-night clubbing rampage, so we headed back for a quick nap and change, and made it back to Shibuya by around dinner-time. We ate ramen and dumplings at a random restaurant in the area, and that was the last normal thing that happened.

Drinks at clubs are expensive. Everyone knows this. That is why "pre-gaming" is even a concept at all--drink a couple of beers before you go out to get a little buzz going at a fraction of the cost. So, Raul and I decided to pregame a little. We went to a conbini right near the Shabu-Shabu place we'd eaten at a few nights before, and cracked open a cold one. On the street. I don't know if you remember, but we'd asked directions to the shabu-shabu place at a police station. Yeah, we were about spitting distance from that.

Thank god for no open container laws. Or maybe it was just gaijin-smash.

The strangest part about that was distinctly smelling pot for the first (and I'm willing to guess last) time in Japan. Twenty feet from a police station. In the middle of Shibuya. Wow.

We finished our beers (I think Raul actually drank Smirnoff Ice) and wandered back into Love Hotel Hill looking for a club recommended by our guide. It turns out we'd walked past it the night before, and had made a mental note because it looked pretty good. So we got there around 10:30, with the club's three floors nearly empty. There was one guy that was standing all alone out on the dance floor, jiggling along with the trance beats like he was having a seizure. Due to the fact that he kept it up all night, I would have sworn he was on a coke binge or something. I didn't ask. We met some cool gaijin there, and got a little tipsy before heading out onto the (by that time, fairly crowded) dance floor ourselves.

This was going to be a common theme in Tokyo, and Japan--the gaijin were way friendlier than any of the Japanese. But oh well. They bailed around midnight, and so did we soon after, cabbing out to the docks to another club called Ageha--which was less like a club, and more like a complex. You know how in every spy movie ever made, there's a scene were they're at some European club and there's this massive pan shot of the main dance floor, with like three levels, and it's all packed, with 2 DJs at a massive table at the front? Yeah, this was like that. Except that was one of 5 dance floors--the others being out in a huge tent on the premises, kind of off the lobby-reception area, out next to a pool with a view of Tokyo bay, etc. It was insane. I spent most of my time at the pool because it was outside, and by that time my throat was raw from so much smoky club air, but I moved around a lot to avoid the advances of creepy middle-aged gaijin women from around the world. This delightful circus included a group of five-foot-nothing Brazilians and a British woman who looked like plastic surgery gone wrong, and claimed to have DJed at that exact pool/dance floor. She felt this entitled her to describe to me EXACTLY what the current DJ was doing wrong, which was "being too progressive" and "waiting too long for the payoff", which I can understand. You know how some trance doesn't "turn over" enough, just builds and builds to false climax after false climax? Well...she illustrated her point by pretending to have a climax of her own, which left nail marks in my arm. That was fucking creepy. I excused myself quickly afterwards.

By this point Raul was about ready to go, and it was getting early. We let ourselves out, gathered our stuff from our lockers, and walked the ten minutes to the nearest train station, where we waited another 15 for the first train. This is where I took some good pictures of Raul looking emo. Of course, in that pre-dawn, anyone would have looked emo.

The other pictures really do a better job of capturing the delicious atmosphere of the morning, though.

Once we got home, we slept a little, then made our way to Harajuku (Sunday being the day that the girls are supposed to come out) in a vain attempt to capture some fun cosplay pics. Unfortunately for me, rain smears makeup, so most of them stayed home. I left disappointed. From there, we headed to the station and back home. That wraps up the trip (finally--it happened like, 2 months ago).

So...cracked that open. Look forward to more backlog soon!

Tokyo....スタート！

2007-05-31T14:46:00.000+09:00

So, here begins the long overdue account of the Golden Week (no comment on the actual quality of the trip--that's actually what the holiday is called here in Japan) I spent in Tokyo. I mean, Golden Week was the first week of May, so this is almost a month late. Oh well. As a result, I think, I'm going to try to keep the account short--to the interesting anecdotes and the stuff needed to give them context. Of course there are photos (and they're in perfect, temporal order this time!).

So, Raul and I had been talking about upgrading to the shinkansen (which is like the TGV of France--basically the superfast bullet train) but, as it turns out, when we were rushing from our local train transfer at Eichigo-Yazawa, we had actually had purchased tickets for the shinkansen without knowing it. That's probably why they were so expensive.

Anyway, we got to Tokyo around 7, were briefly baffled by the insane Tokyo commuter rail/subway system--seriously, take a look at those maps and tell me you wouldn't be confused. Oh, and we didn't know that there were two distinct systems--it took us a couple of days to figure that out.

Anyway, the directions to the hostel were pretty good, so we made our way there, and checked in. It was pretty far out there--on the Keihin Tohoku line, about a 5 minute walk from the Nishi-Kawaguchi station. Now, I've never stayed in a hostel before (and haven't since, so I don't really have anything to compare to) but this wasn't that bad. I mean, it was crowded as hell, the "divisions" between the "private rooms" were put up with spare 2x4s, old curtains and carpet tacks, but it was still a clean futon. So yay for that.

We turned pretty much right around and took the train back into town to Shinjuku. Raul had wanted to go to Roppongi, but, like I mentioned before, we didn't realize that there were two different commuter systems--and Roppongi isn't accessible by the one we had been using up to this point (the JR commuter rail, for those of you keeping track on the map). So we got off at Shinjuku, and wandered around a bit, eventually grabbing a bite of curry and stopping into a "shot bar" to enjoy our first taste of Tokyo night life. I had a taste of a bottle of McCallan 12 they had, then decided to try a decent Japanese whiskey--which was nearly on par with the scotch, honestly. However, the Japanese have a unique way of serving scotch, which I found amusing enough to photograph:

Yes, that is a solid, spherical ball of ice, chilling my whisky. Now I know why the bartender looked at me funny when I insisted that my drink be served with just one rock.

The drinks were a little expensive, so we bailed, and of course we had to play a game at an arcade we passed:

And then we decided it was time to get a taxi to Roppongi. Now, here's my advice for anyone planning on visiting Tokyo--either go with a lot of people (and cram more than is legal into the back of a taxi--the driver probably won't say anything. See gaijin smash) or plan to come home before the trains stop running--otherwise, you're going to be paying out the nose for cab fare. Everything in Tokyo is like, a million miles apart. I swear to god, cabbing home from Roppongi that night (after passing a pet shop still open at 1AM and visiting several sausage-fest clubs) felt like cabbing to the goddamn moon.

"Are we there yet?"
"We've barely exited the earth's atmosphere."
"But the meter's already up to 6,000 yen!"

Anyway, we made it home, slept, and awoke refreshed, ready to take on the day. As it turns out, I got to pick where we went, so Harajuku it was. As it turns out though, Harajuku forms the norther point of a triangle with Omote-Sando (the center of high fashion for Tokyo attracted Raul's interest) and Shibuya, the hip district where all the teens hang out. We walked the loop, starting in Harajuku, and I'll cover them all the best I can.

So I'm sure you've all heard of Harajuku, in one way or another (thanks to Gwen Stefani--thanks for treating an interesting youth subculture like your personal pet, bitch!) but for those that haven't, it's kind of a Mecca for the Tokyo teens that like to dress up--real crazy like. The main shopping street was pretty crowded,

But we pushed our way through. We actually stopped into a lot of the places, just looking at stuff. I have pretty specific tastes in clothing, I've discovered, so I have to look at a lot of stuff before I see even a few things I like. However, the jacket/hoodie I'm wearing in this picture caught my attention from the moment I saw it.

Someone commented that it was "really Japanese", whatever that means. Please ignore the goofy half grin.

Anyway, Raul eventually bought a couple of shirts at a shop called....wait for it....

They sell clothes, oddly enough. Really, really Japanese clothes, in kind of the "gothy, hot-topic dark with chains and buckles" kind of....vein? (sorry!). But it honestly works on the Japanese. And Raul doesn't look half bad in his shirts either. Anyway, along the way, we saw quite a few shops hawking wares such as these:

As well as seeing several people in that can only be described as having a particularly Harajuku quality.

I even managed to take a picture or two. Anyway, we eventually tired of the crowded alley, and headed out towards Omote-sando, stomachs a-growlin'. I really wanted to eat one of these,

Um. The Panda cake. Not the Japanese girl. I eventually settled for some lunch at a place a few storefronts down. We traveled the crowded walkways, seeing various amusing sights along the way. The last is a shot from the interior of the Comme de Garcon headquarters in Omote-sando, which was so incredibly spare as to warrant a photograph. Otherwise, Omote-sando was actually rather boring, me not being a fashion whelp.

Next stop was Shibuya, with the famous Hachiko Dog statue:

Apparently, he waited every day for his owner at Shibuya station. Even 10 years after his owner's death. And, just before I went to Tokyo, apparently the statue was stolen and returned as part of an April fools prank. Which I guess means it was probably stolen about a month earlier, around April fools. Anyway, directly behind Hachiko is Shibuya crossing, which is utterly insane. To help you understand, I will provide you with a time lapse series of a typical traffic cycle here.

Cars

Yellow light! The first few make a run for it...

The Levee Breaks

Torrent!

And, just for good measure, here's a shot I took facing away from the station later that night, after we'd gone home for a bit of a rest and come back:

Just. Utterly. Insane. We had our hearts set on Sukiyaki for dinner, and inquired at a local police station as to the nearest such restaurant--it turned out to be around the corner. However, sukiyaki is popular, so we used the time between inquiring about a table and actually being seated to explore the Tokyu Hands department store and the Harley Davidson store nearby, which is where the intervening pictures come from if you're following along in the set.

Sukiyaki, if you haven't had it before, is basically a sweetish soy sauce-based broth that you throw thin slices of beef or pork into, along with veggies, dip in raw egg and then devour like you've never eaten anything before in your whole life. This is the aftermath of our meal (which included nomihodai--all you can drink):

And from that, you can kind of see how the setup goes. After this, I believe we taxied to Roppongi to give it another shot, but were again rebuffed. We were even accosted by a Russian pimp and his three stripper/prostitutes when we accidentally got off on the wrong floor of one building and stuck our heads into an empty strip club. I honestly thought we were going to die.

Another strange thing about Roppongi are the "promoters"--pretty much every shop in Japan has them, but the more legitimate enterprises use Japanese who stand outside and shout "Irashaimase!" In Roppongi, however, it's pretty much just black ex-pats. One guy came up to us and was like "Hey man, you came here to see titties right? I know this place--lots of fresh bouncing titties. You wanna eat sushi offa titties?" I mean...honestly. Raul did eventually find a hookah bar, it being his dream to find one in Japan, so there are a couple pictures of that in the stream. This time, however, we did try to leave in time to make it home on the trains, and I think we made it. I'm not sure though--one night we had to take a cab back the rest of the way from Ikebukuro. That might have been the next night in Shibuya.

Okay, I'm going to leave off there for now, and post the rest of the trip another time.

I think there's mold growing in my lungs...

2007-05-08T10:48:00.000+09:00

Here we go--Kyoto Trip, part 2.

However, before we begin, I'll throw up a little fanservice. You may or may not have seen this picture already, seeing as how it IS in the flickr set that I repeatedly linked last post, but I'll put it up for you just the same:

There's something extremely epic-sounding about the name...a particular flavor that lends it an air of legend. Moss...the interruptor. And before you ask, I'm too lazy to look up the actual kanji on the sign and get my own translation. I have the feeling it would be equally hilarious.

Okay, continuing on. After Sam and Daves, which had a costume night going on (no one except the bartenders, of course, in wearing anything unusual) and some pretty awesome flair bartending, examples of which are well described in this photo,

we gave ourselves a little time to sleep in, and made a noon-ish train out to Arashiyama, a district on the outskirts of Kyoto. The people we were supposed to meet were, as always in Japan, a little late. We went to collect one, Yuka, at a nearby station, then met Sakiko on the bridge, where I captured a picture of a little Ein waddling past.

We then hiked our way up SARUYAMA. Those of you that understand Japanese will see where this is going. Those of you that don't, check out this picture:

Yes, that is Raul Gaijin Shashing a monkey. Those of you that are still in the dark about what the hell Saruyama is, it can be translated as monkey mountain. This wasn't just a regular zoo--oh no. Despite what most of the pictures show (which were taking inside an enclosure designed to keep the monkeys out), the monkeys were just running around loose on the top of this mountain. You walked right by them on the trail coming up, which is how I was able to capture this tender moment.

It was actually a lot of fun. The enclosure was built so you could feed the monkeys without them mobbing the little Japanese children and tearing them apart in what would be an excellent beginning to a horror film. We, of course, had to buy a little bag of bananas and feed the monkeys too. Being the little kids we are. During this process (mostly after we'd run out of little slices of banana) we discovered that if you took the discarded slices of peel, and draped them over the outstretched arms of the monkeys like a little fruity bracelet, they would screech and fling the peel back at you. This provided another few minutes of amusement, in what I'm sure was one helluva gaijin smash.

We even got one of the keepers to take a picture of us. That's Kyoto in the background, and Yuka, other Japanese girl we were hanging out with. And no, I'm not sitting in the lower left, but sticking my head out over Yuka's.

We left the mountain by a different path, going through a playground (resulting in that picture of me revealing my inner child) and eventually finding ourselves back in front of the station, where we enjoyed a rather delicious lunch of Japanese noodles. Seriously, Japanese noodles rock--soba, udon, ramen--doesn't matter, they're all awesome.

A quick walk through a nearby bamboo forest yielded this rather amusing photo:

Where I have no idea what we're doing. I do rather like the blur of Raul's jazz hands, though. A train ride back into town (after dropping Yuka off at the station) left us with no real priorities, and an evening in town to spend (as well as me forgetting part of the narrative, because I know we left Arashiyama before dark, and my next memory is at around 9:30). We discussed where to go for a while, and eventually settled on bowling, where we discovered that there was also pool, and we decided that we'd much rather do that. Unfortunately, I wasn't shooting at this point, for whatever reason, and so Raul has all the good pictures of us playing. Of course, he did lose the first game for his team (of him and Charlie) by draining the 8 ball halfway through--which was a good thing, because I'm terrible, and Sakiko is worse. Charlie, however, is a fucking shark. Luckily, for the next game of cutthroat (which lasted the better part of an hour) he was off running an errand. We eventually retired to the Billy Bar, which sported a logo that closely resembled McGyver with a shotgun, and sipped drinks and played "never have I ever" for the rest of the evening.

We were a little worried about Sakiko getting home okay on her bike, seeing as how the two cans of chuhai had given her a signficant asian glow, but the email message we got on the way back to Charlie's place mollified us.

That pretty much wraps up the trip--the next day, we slept in and made it to the station in time for a delicious, slow lunch of tonkatsu (which is like a fried pork cutlet) and to make our train. However, this reminded me a little bit about my phone--

Cell phones in Japan are awesome. Just the regular, 1-yen-with-a-plan models all come with the ability to transfer numbers via infared (which is way more convenient than typing them into the phone yourself) and all of them come with your own email address, (mine is aughenbaugh@ezweb.ne.jp, if you want to email me and have me get it anywhere) as well as the obvious necessity of text recognition, completion and predicition, in Japanese. Rock on.

So, I'll continue, hopefully tomorrow, with Tokyo, provided I can ever get the photos off my iPod, and that my computer doesn't die.

Gaijin SMASH!

2007-05-07T16:12:00.000+09:00

So, there have been many weeks that have passed uncovered. For that, I apologize, but will offer this explanation: classes are boring. I got sick for a while too, but basically, with the last week being a notable exception, I haven't really been doing anything interesting besides going to class and learning new grammer patterns. Or, rather, relearning the ones that leaked out my ears in the past four months or so.

Anyways, there were some highlights that I'd like to touch on that actually occured in Kanazawa--first was a welcome party that happened absolutely ages ago. It like stumbling into a UN afterparty--drunk international kids all over. However, I was surprised at the quality of parties our little kaikan can throw, which leads me to my next event.

A little lower key, there was a cooking party, where people brought delicious good they cooked up on their little hotplates. And it was all amazing. I, as you can see in the bottom left corner of that picture, contriubted my famous cesar salad, which turned out beautifully (if I can be so crass to say that myself). Other delicious selections included some thai coconut milk noodles, german meatballs, some sort of casserole style cannoli, stuffed with meat instead of sweet, delicious Boston creme. However, these totally stole the show. Our resident Spanish girl made sangria, and we all sipped and ate happliy.

Skipping over the intervening week, the following weekend we (at this point meaning Raul and I) went to Kyoto to visit Charlie--who is the most Asian white guy I know, from Tufts, for those who don't know him. Thanks to him, we had a great time. I'll give a little overview of the things we saw, but most to give some context to the pictures.

We arrived at the massive Kyoto station, having bailed after the last class (that I'm enrolled in, at least :) we had on Friday and futzing around with money and train tickets for longer than absolutely necessary. Apparently it's incased in this massive mall, or something. We got lost in some shopping area called the cube, and were amused when we stumbled into...well....just read the sign in the photo.

Classic.

Anyway, we waited at the Mr. Donuts in the mall for Charlie to arrive, and lead the way out into the Kyoto wilderness. The plan for the evening didn't even allow us time to make the trip out to Charlie's host parent's house, so we stashed our bags in lockers at a nearby train station, and met up with several of Charlie's friends in Teramachi, a massive covered arcade that stretched for what seemed like miles.

Pictured above is your handsome narrator, Rich and Nicole, along with some people in the background who's names, lamentably, I do not remember. It's not my fault though--they showed up later, right in the middle of Karaoke! It's surprisingly difficult to make a lasting impression on someone between belting out "scaramouch" and "fandango". Unless that lasting impression is that you would rather clean a eastern european porn studio after shaving your whole body with the edge of a spoon armed with nothing but a toothbrush and lemon juice than hear certain people sing karaoke. But before we started singing, we had to eat something first.

No, we didn't eat that. But we did eat this:

...which is nearly as ridiculous. And doesn't Charlie look great in that photo? Anyway, after devouring that (and my first omuraisu--rice omlet, which was also delicious) we actually went and did karaoke, which was fun as balls. I don't really have any more to narrate about that, but I did snap a photo of the bathrooms in the karaoke place, because they were ridiculous.

I mean, who designs a bathroom as one long hallway, with the toilet at the end? And also, what's that thing between the urinal and the toilet? I mean I was there and I don't fucking know.

We left karaoke and said our goodbyes (including setting up something with Rich to meet the next day) in time to catch the last trains home, and tiptoed into the house. It was very cute, and very Japanese. Which meant essentially I walked like a hunchback for the next three days, because I was taller than all the door frames.

We awoke early enough the next morning, were fed by Charlie's gracious host mother, who inquired politely about we were were from, what we were studying, etc. and was only occasionally rebuffed by our complete lack of mastery over the language. We left for Kyodai, which is a contraction of Kyoto University, but in Japanese of course, arriving to fiddle with Charlie's bike. I don't really remember what we were doing, but the bike disappeared again soon after, so it couldn't have been very important. Telling you about it does, however, allow me to show this picture.

I believe that's only a small portion of the bikes in just one section of one of Kyodai's many parking lots. Anyway, while waiting for Rich to arrive on the scene, Charlie gave us a short tour of the campus, which was very nice. We even stopped for a bit of coffee before meeting Rich and another of Charlie's friends, Sakiko--who would prove to play a large role in our enjoyment of Kyoto, by being constantly cute and Japanese, and making me feel less silly (in a silly way, I know) for coming to Japan and hanging out with just gaijin (and guys at that). Anyway, here's a good shot of part of the gang outside the dining hall, where we procceeded to eat lunch.

Apparently, enormous sundaes are a thing in Japan.

Rich bid us goodbye, and Colleen, Charlie's girlfriend who is also studying in Kyoto, joined us. This is near Ginkakujin, a temple we visited shortly afterwards. Colleen would be the one not previously pictured. They look cute and completely unawares, don't they?

We actually took a great number of decent photos under that flowering tree (of whatever sort) but I'll spare you, and skip right to a great shot Charlie took at the entrance of the temple.

And one I rather like of my own:

It was a great temple, very senic and very green. You can see more pictures at the flickr set, but there's one more great little engrish photo I'd like to share:

I think it rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

I collected a goshuin (remember the fancy writing I posted about a while back?) and we left for Kyomizudera, a different and equally spectacular temple built onto a hillside. You can't tell from this fantastic picture of Raul's (in which it looks as though I'm seated on some ancient throne--or so I like to think) but the temple itself stretchs FAR past what you can see.

The light was excellent that day.

Good times were had by all exploring the temple complex. There was little shrine dedicated to lovers located within, and a fun little challenge for those who wanted to get their mojo back. There were two rocks, decked in the rope and paper lighting of shinto, and if you could walk between them with your eyes closed, you would have good luck in love. Of course, you're supposed to get someone to help you :)

We left, and bought some souvenirs at the omnipresent little shops that always seem to lead up to major temples, which is where this little gem was snapped:

Cute, huh? That about did it for our sightseeing for the day. Charlie, Raul and I took the train back, where our talk of the day blossomed into a beautiful, new kind of art.

Talking with Rich and Sakiko had clued us into a concept here that Raul and I hadn't been previously aware of--it's called "gaijin smash". For those of you that aren't familiar, gaijin means foreigner, and smash refers to smashing down cultural boundaries. As a whole, the term means a gaijin's ability to commit a faux pas, and get away with it, simply because the Japanese are too polite to point it out. So you can imagine the amount of joking that went on about gaijin smashing throughout the day, even if we weren't being particularly disruptive. However, the stroke of brilliance is the extension concept, which we put to practice that very night: gaijin shash. "Shash" comes from the Japanese word for photo, which is "shashin", and thus a new kind of photography was born: run up to an unsuspecting Japanese, and do your best "I'm a gaijin idiot" pose, and capture the hilarious result. Here's the inagural shot, taken later that night at the riverfront.

Fantastic. There are a number of others, but I don't feel the need to post the rest of them. You'll find them on flickr, tagged appropriately. This was taken after a bit of sushi (which is where the disturbing hello kitty kitsune in the flickr set comes from) and before a night of clubbing. Colleen didn't go in with us, but she did help us find a fun place called Sam and Daves. I think the following picture pretty well sums up the evening.

Hm. I think I'm going to wrap this up for now, and post the rest of it at a later date. Until then, neh?

Nowhere Man

2007-04-17T01:14:00.000+09:00

A few years ago, I drank at a bar. I drank a warmish, thick draft of a locally produced beer, Tiger beer, while a short Vietnamese came by in her little Carlsberg dress and asked us if we'd like refills. In the spirit of things, our leader ordered a round of the watery Carlsberg draft, but I continued sipping my Tiger and listening. Our waitress would come by and ask us if we needed anything in Vietnamese. The dutch members of our party carried on in their native language at the end of the raised table. On the stool next to me, I held down a conversation in mixed Spanish and English with a (I believe) Chinese grad student. If you listened beyond the din of the bar, the shouted Vietnamese at the pool table, the blare of the television, you could hear the muttered exhaust of the motorbikes--no cars--that careened by at this time of night.

What have you ever heard of Vietnam? Any more than the media tells you? Any more than you learned in the 3 days spent on the war in your junior year US history class? What did I learn from sitting there, in that international crowd? I don't know. Something. Very little. But it was real, and unfiltered.

Tonight, I was in a similar situation. I'm in a foreign country, in an international crowd. I'm a little at ease, everyone being in my age group, being only second youngest to the giggly Japanese RA who is only 19. The scene is a little different--the concrete walls of an international dorm, but people are still making jokes in other languages. A helpful Spanish girl leans across the table and explains to me--first in English, until I let slip that I had studied Spanish in high school, and she changes to her native language--the dirty jokes that the two guys sitting to my right are making in Japanese. The drinks are a little different from Vietnam. On my arrival, a tiny sake cup was filled with a white substance from a plastic bottle with text I can't read, which is at once suprising--because I don't recognize it at all--and not, because here, you have to get used to not understanding everything. They thankfully don't try and get me to drink it without an explanation of what it is--an Afgani national drink, that's made from fermented horse's milk.

I fucking kid you not.

I picked up the cup and took it like every shot of tequila I ever took partying at the New Century in Hanoi.

What have I learned? Naturally, that when you drink liquids made from fermented horses milk, your mouth will immediately be filled with the taste of French cheese that's gone south, but besides that? Again...I don't know. Something.

When we're at home, domestically, we hear very little of the outside world. Almost every paper in America prints the same 5 or 6 international stories a day, which are recieved from the AP or Reuters or wherever, and hand-picked out of thousands of words of articles for your consumption by...someone. Every fact that you ever hear about another country has gone through some filtering process, and that fact is a seed around which you grow a perception of another country.

Does communism work? It does. I've been there. I've seen it myself. Vietnam is not a first world country by any means, but the majority of the population is not dying in the streets. They could benefit from some motorcycle helmet laws, for sure, but helmets are available, if the choice to use them isn't usually made.

So what.

Imagine you read a book a day, every day, for a thousand years. That's 36,500 books, more or less. Maybe you break for Christmas every four years to counteract the leap thing, I don't know. The library of Congress has, what....20 million volumes? And it probably doesn't have every book...nor does it have the internet included in that number.

So based on all these facts, what we come up with is colossal ignorance.

So I guess I have to think of a way to fix the problem. I am a guy after all :)

Basically, what you need is a new kind of renaissance man, not a jack-of-all-trades sort, but system which can educate towards a global viewpoint--men without countries. Of course, it's impossible to assimilate all available information. But to be given a framework for as many places, as many cultures, as is possible would be a good thing. Or would it? Perhaps the better option is to create merely bi or tri-cultural identities. Learning the languages is a good start, but the distillation of as much culture, a word rich with connotation and meaning, as is possible.

This kind of liason would need to be trusted as much as possible to provide correct opinions and actions to the people that would specialize in other things (of course, not mere tolerance but actual international culture exposure would be a cornerstone of a new education system, hopefully for everyone). And there would need to be as many of them as possible.

Media would have to be balanced. I don't know how to reconcile news media as a form of entertainment, and the seeming irrelevancy news takes on, the further away from the audience it gets. But somehow, we cannot focus on just the local issues. A balanced diet of information needs to be achieved.

---

Okay, enough of that. I'll move on to a different topic: addiction. I have a problem. And that problem is...

Gadgets.

Counterclockwise from the left, moleskine, phone, iPod, DS, DS game case (sweet jesus), another moleskine, 160GB USB-powered external HD and finally, trusty Bond, without which this post would not be possible. There's a Japanese mechanical pencil in there too.

And for the record, yes, a notebook does count as a gadget, it just happens to be a low tech one.

The point I'm trying to make here is, I'm addicited to an aesthetic. Notice how every single thing in the picture is low profile, slim and silver or black? I mean, they could make a tampon case that was matte black and made out of german steel, and I would seriously consider buying it, simply because its aesthetic would be so chic. I'd think "Who do I know would need one of these? Well...certainly not one of me or one of my guy friends...on second though, getting someone a tampon case would be really fucking weird. Who the hell designed this thing anyway? Did they do anything else?" And on that thought, I'd wander off.

The phone is new. I liked it so much it got a few pictures of its own, but they're all unpostable. I took one of me with a terrible flash, and I came out looking like a crack addict. I changed my mind--I'll post it simply for humor purposes.

See what these things do to me!? SEE!?!?!

I'll see if I can get the images from the party Friday night from Raul. I honestly did not bring my camera with me. It probably would be broken right now if I had.

Hisashiburi da ne!

2007-04-13T17:34:00.000+09:00

It has been a long time, hasn't it? Lucky for you, you haven't missed much. So I'll meander through the last week or so, pointing out some good bits.

Probably one of the oldest things that hasn't made it up here has been a set of photos I took last Saturday, when the cherry blossoms in the famous (previously mentioned) Kenrokuen garden were in full bloom. Luckily for you, I didn't simply shoot scenery--twenty or thirty pictures of simple, blossoming trees would be beautiful, yes, but I can guess that your American attention spans (ha!) would tire of it quickly. So instead I took pictures of the human element--it was a mob scene at the garden, and taking surreptitious shots of the Japanese was fairly easy. I'll post a couple that I really liked up here, but you can see the whole set here.

I really like how those ones turned out. Ya'll think it's weird to go to a park and take a bunch of random shots of other people huh? Well I'm sure Ansel Adam's didn't get permission from the mountains to take his famous photographs of them! So beat it!

Anyway, the day before Raul and I ventured into the mysterious Eastern Pleasure Quarter and Higashiyama, in our attempts to see as many interesting things as possible before we were forced to begin actually taking classes. Unfortunately, most of the geisha only come out at night, but we managed to snap some very interesting daytime shots of the beautifully wooden-sided tea houses, and the shrines and temples up on the hill in Higashiyama. It was a great walk, to say the least. We tried to venture into the area directly adjacent to the pleasure quarter, where the little swastikas of Buddhist temples decorated the map like metal studs on a epileptic punk's leather jacket, but the temples really didn't stick out from the rest of the crowded rows of houses, nor were they open. Apparently, so many temples opened in this area that many of them were later abandoned because they didn't receive enough donations to keep running, and almost all of them only open on important festivals.

So, again, I'll link you to the set, and throw up my favorite.

Saturday night, after my candid exploration of the garden, seemed like it had nothing in store for me. I brought my laptop down to the common room, apparently the only place where bittorrents are available for download (the router settings on the stupid modems we have in our rooms are inaccessible, and I can't find the passwords for them on the interenet ANYWHERE), and set about downloading some entertainment, while I sat through a showing of Ghostrider. I don't know how many of you caught this movie in theaters in the states....but it is so bad. Like, I sympathized with poor Johnny Blaze by the end of the movie--not with his characters emotional or moral plights, because those were so unbelievable that the sudden introduction of baby koalas to the film wouldn't have surprised me, but with the feeling of having fire pour out of your eye sockets. I wondered, post-credits, whether I would be able to watch Hollywood cinema again. Just as I was about to queue up another download for a second ocular assault, I was saved:

Raul had the sense to wonder aloud why there wasn't anything to do on a Saturday night, Mike Huston, a helpful and friendly guy from Virginia (who's conversational Japanese is very good) mentioned that the core of the English-speaking international crew had headed out for karaoke earlier in the evening.

Now, I won't mention that one of them had said that they would come and find Raul and me before any karaoke outings were organized, so we would have the chance to participate, but we had Mike call them up (STILL not having cell phones) and ask if we could join them. Of course they said yes, and we grabbed Nikki and traipsed down. What a fucking blast. I mean, if I attempt to sing to the original key of More than a Feeling again, I need you all to gun me down to save the lives of the immediate 5 miles or so, but other than that song, it was freakin' amazing. It was something like, 3,000 yen per person for this HUGE room (it would probably seat up to 20) with a small stage and two screens with lyrics, one at either end, till four AM, with free drinks the whole time there. We started out with some solid Asahis, and by the time we had an 8 part chorus going for Bohemian Rhapsody, we switched to rounds of the weaker, but considerably more delicious, Kahlua floats. I wish I had some pictures for you, but sadly, I've been neglecting my duties at the camera.

As far as I can remember, we staggered back around 3AM, stopping at Jusco and the Circle K for snacks. I enjoyed myself a delcious onigiri and a sandwich that later proved to be a bad idea. I'm almost positive it wasn't the booze, but bad mayo in the sandwich, that made me sick four hours later. Whatever. In any case, I didn't have the wherewithal to make it out of bed in time for the International Club hanami (cherry blossom viewing, that usually involves the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol) and told Raul to head out alone. Apparently he didn't end up going either, though, missing the meet-up time because he was busy taking pictures in the Kenrokuen.

Somewhere in here we watched another terrrible movie (now, mind you, I had since cleansed myself with viewings of Happy Feet, The Prestige and the deliciously terrible Crank) called Slither. If any of you ever have the opportunity to watch this movie, I suggest you pass. It's just...soo.....filthy disgusting. That's all I have to say about that.

Also somewhere in here was a feat of cooking that I, myself, am rather proud of. Ever since coming to Japan, my eating habits have changed necessarily as a result of the food that's available--naturally, it's a little easier to find instant miso and tea than many other breakfast items. I've actually kind of made it a morning routine--I get up, boil some water for miso and tea, take my hot breakfast over to my computer, wrap myself in a blanet and warm up while checking out what's new on Gizmodo and IMing whoever happens to be on. I've also been eating a lot of microwaveable dinners of a different sort--usually rice with a sauce of some kind. They're fairly good, but small, and generally not very filling. And I know how to cook. However, the task of using my tiny hotplate to cook a meal was daunting. Nevertheless, I took the time to meet the challenge, going for the gold: Chicken Teriyaki.

I bought myself some chicken at Jasco one afternoon, bringing home shoyu (soy sauce, sorry), mirin and sake as well. I mixed them in the proportions I've practiced many times, not even refering to an internet recipe to assure myself. I browned the chicken in a little oil in the pot I had, and I got ready to pour the sauce over it when I got my first full whiff of the stuff. It smelled like a distillery. I took another whiff, just to be sure, and got out the bottle of sake I'd purchased, unscrewing the cap and taking a little sip. Instantly, the memories of that first awful shot of rice vodka/paint thinner I took in Vietnam came flodding back. Worried, I scanned the bottle, eventually arriving at the tiny print on the bottom of the label that read, once I took the time to translate it, "30% alcohol by volume". Mother fucker. I added more soy sauce, mirin and sugar, and prayed that I could reduce the extra alcohol out of it with a slow burn. It was here, after I poured the boozy sauce over the chicken, that I realized that the heat control on the hotplate did not actually control how hot it got, merely the time between intervals of heat application. Thus, the reduction took forever--boil, sit, boil, sit--you get the idea. And teriyaki sauce burns very easily.

How did it turn out? It was perhaps the best chicken teriyaki I've ever made. It was delicious, especially accompanied by a little bowl of miso. The only thing that would've made it better would've been a little rice to sop up the extra sauce, but I'm not complaining. I still feel triumphant.

However, there's only so much at a time that I can carry up the hill from Jusco at once, so often I find myself hungry and pretty much without anything to eat--down to my last single slice of stale bread, a banana, a half a jar of peanut butter, some honey left over from my failed attempt to make my own iced green tea...hey, that gives me an idea...

And thus, the banana-honey-peanut butter taco was born. It's a fusion food--ethnic Mexican cuisine inspiried by late night dorm room desperation.

Okay, moving on from culinary topics now. We had a couple days free between the weekend and classes, except on the Tuesday they decided to torture us with an entire day of boring orientations. Seriously--I had most of the stuff they took from 10:30 to 4 to cover explained to me in 30 minutes in Japanese the night I got here, on some freakin' wacky jet lag. If I've survived for a week and a half not knowing this kind of info, I probably don't need to hear it now.

That said, I started classes on Wednesday, with a kanji class that promises to be almost entirely review. I mean, more than half of the first set I've done before. Wowz. On a related topic, the placement test I took at some point put me into the C1 class (A being beginner, F being the highest, and C the only level with a 1 and 2), but naturally I need to keep up with everyone who was in my class before they left to spend the year here--and they're all in C2. I really don't want to go back to the hundred level classes I'm going to have to take (or else I don't graduate) senior year having spent my study abroad wanking off linguistically. So, in my attempts to get bumped up, I have been asked to attend both classes for this week and the beginning of the next. I cannot explain how difficult it is to sit through 3 hours of Japanese, at two different levels, starting at 8:45 in the morning. Needless to say, coming back from that today I immediately fell asleep for a three hour nap. It's thanks to that, and the massive caffeine intake I had directly afterwards that brings you this post.

Hm. That seems to be a fairly decent catch-up...I'll, uh...keep you posted. Please don't hurt me.

Sightseeing Tour is GO!

2007-04-05T19:47:00.001+09:00

Rather than keeping the tradition of minute-to-minute continuity that has been plaguing this blog for some time, I think I'll take the time here to finally and completely depart from that dreaded "laundry list" style.

I mean, I know that the European Style instant curry I had last night for dinner was absolutely delicious, and the metal spoon that I made a special trip to Jusco for came in handy for that exact situation, but that doesn't mean you fucking care.

That said, I'm going to take it down another notch for this specific post. After we boozed it up that one night, and awoke to a straightforward meeting with Bittoman sensei, we came to the true meat of my stay--so far, this has been the highlight of Kanazawa.

The two "friends of Tufts" that I mentioned previously (we feasted with them at the New Grand Hotel, with Matsuda san) actually have names. I just didn't remember them when I wrote the last post. Honestly, after we spent a whole day sightseeing with them, I still didn't remember their names--I had to email Matsuda san for their names and emails. And, in the interests of uncomfortably full disclosure, I have to admit I went and looked at that email just now. They are called Murai san, and Miura san. See? You shouldn't have made fun of me for not remembering their names.

And they are wonderful.

That picture, however, is not. I have a better one, which I will reveal when the time is right. Anyway, we began the afternoon with a delicious lunch of okonomiyaki, which is a popular Japanese pancake food that has never even heard of flour. It's comprised mostly of cabbage and egg, I think, with various delicious mix-ins. It's kind of like the fried version of Coldstone, except the waiters don't sing when you tip them. In fact, you're not supposed to tip them at all. That's Japan. Okonomiyaki, though, translates (very) roughly to "anyway you like", so even after you've chosen what you want fried into your cabbage and have flattened your pancake onto the grill, skillfully flipped it once to praise and adulation, skillfully exploded Miura sans all over the table to scolding and shame for generations to come, you can spread powdered nori (seaweed), mayonaise, BBQ sauce, or whatever the hell else you want all over it. I continually added more and more fiery hot sauce through the course of devouring my pancake. Each time I squirted another teaspoon onto a bite, Miura and Murai san's eyes got bigger and bigger, until, by the time I was finished, they were about the size of dimes.

Okay, that was the last bad Japanese joke. I'm sorry. I really am.

No I'm not.

After lunch we taxied to the Kenrokuen. This is one of the most famous gardens in all of Japan, and words like "utterly amazing" and "incredible" really do fail to capture it. We first visited the famous castle gate of Kanazawa castle, which was, I believe, built in the 16th century. It's still all original, though the castle behind it has been rebuilt recently after a fire burned it to the ground.

We then set out to explore the entire beautiful garden. I'd point out a few of the particularly famous places here, but I don't want to bore you with endless explanatory exposition. Instead, if you're interested, just check out the Kenrokuen Flickr Set. You won't be disappointed, I promise. Their beauty isn't diminished from a lack of context, though you may wish you were there.

I will include this one photo, however, because it is apparently the most famous spot in the garden, and the only one I have of all four of us.

I'm a giant in Japan!

We stopped at the tea house in the center of the garden, shed our shoes sat to a beautiful, tiny cake and a cup of bitter macha, the powdered green tea of traditional Japanese tea ceremony.

It was very deep, if you let it be. For those who understand the concepts of wabi, sabi and mono no aware, it's almost a spiritual experience. We sat out on the porch and watched the blossoms fall into the pond while I think I surprised them by just mentioning these things. I'll save you from a public display of how raw the experience was, but if you are curious, ask me. There are no pictures besides the tiny cake--I felt trying to capture the experience with pictures would have detracted from my appreciation of it.

I think a good story that illustrates the Japanese aesthetics at work here would be a story about Sen Rikkyu, the man who codified Japanese tea ceremony and is regarded as the true master of tea. All tea rooms have an alcove, where a decoration is displayed. Usually, it is a scroll, or a flower, or maybe a piece of pottery made by a local artisan. Sen Rikkyu, before receiving a lord to a ceremony, was confronted by a beautiful bush of marigold flowers in his garden on the path to the tea house. He picked a single, perfect bloom and told an assistant to cut the rest and throw them away. When the lord passed through the sparse garden and eventually stooped to enter the tiny tea room, he was moved to tears by the single bloom presented so sparely in the alcove. That is Japanese aesthetics at their best.

Anyway, we left the garden shortly afterwards, and walked to the international salon of Kanazawa, another resource apparently always open to us. The director, who's name I also have forgotten, welcomed us, and showed us some of the more interesting parts of the house the salon is located in. We had a bit of tea, and then rushed off to catch the final "performance" at the ninja-dera, or ninja temple.

To be honest, when I was hearing our guides talk about this final stop on our little tour, I had no idea what to think. Would there be leaping ninjas? Would I be walking through a dark hallway, and suddenly feel a knife at my throat, throw my hands in the air and say "Soo! Ikuno?" ("Ah! You crazy ninja, you totally got me that time. But you just wait! Next time through, I'll be more alert!")? When we finally arrived and had left our shoes behind to wait in front of a beautiful gold and red altar surrounded by what looked like elaborate musical insturments (photos were forbidden inside. Damedayo!) I wondered if we were going to be treated to a serene musical prayer by an army of monks (there were A LOT of instruments). What the ninja-dera finall revealed itself to be was something that had utterly NOTHING to do with ninjas, but was very interesting nonetheless.

I just lost the entire male 12-35 demographic, didn't I? Well, whatever. As we began the tour, we learned the name ninja-dera refered to the trickyness of the construction, with tons of secret passageways, extra rooms and floors (the shogunate forbid buildings to be higher than 3 stories--this only looked like two from the outside, but had something like 7 different levels and 34 staircases) and such ingenious construction points like the use of curved trees as beams to bear the load of heavy snowfall, and shoji (oil paper) backs to stairs, so sentries could see and even spear enemies going up certain flights of stairs. It was a very interesting tour, like I said.

As we were leaving, I remembered something Raul had mentioned about pilgrims buying small notebooks that they carried to the shrines, and after paying a small fee, a calligrapher would sign the shrine's name, including the hanko (seal) as well. Well, after explaining the concept to Murai and Miura san in a complicated mixture of Japanese and English, they finally remembered what we were talking about, again amazed at how well informed we were about Japanese traditions. However, we didn't have any notebooks, so after confirming a price of 300 yen (again, about 3 bucks) with the guides at the temple, we left and headed in the direction of home.

However, not two doors down, there was a small temple shop that sells small souvenirs and the like. I popped my head in, and merely said "goshuin-cho?", refering to the small notebook that the signatures are kept in. The shopkeeper motioned us over (including a burst of incomprehnsible Japanese) and showed us a perfect little Japanese style (accordion pages) notebook. We quickly paid, and ran back to the temple to try and catch them before they close.

Undeterred by a sign indicating as such, we went in and rang the doorbells and gradually increased the volume of our plaintive calls of "sumimasen!" until Raul and I got uncomfortable, and encouraged our guides to give it up and leave with us. But they wouldn't! And eventually, a guy came to the door, almost looking a little sleepy (though it was approximately 5 in the evening) and enthusiastically agreed to do a goshuin for us, accepting our money and disappearing with our notebooks for 15 minutes or so, while we waiting in the freezing courtyard. The result, I think, was worth the effort.

Anyway, that little adventure marked the end of our sightseeing trip. Fanastic. I don't think I've properly captured how incredibly culturally immersive the whole experience was. But I think that's okay.

The following day we were up early to take care of some bureaucracy with the Japanese government, getting our own personal hankos and bussing downtown to take on the bastards of city hall! Err...well...to submit our alien registration certificates. Apparently it'll be a month before our alien cards are ready, but whatever. Who needs those anyway?

Instead of heading back up to campus, we took the bus ride as a free trip and made the decision to try and find an electronics store that I had been given vague directions to, in addition to finally checking out the real Daiwa. What a trip.

The first few floors were nothing but women's high fashion--brands I've never even heard of were visible from the escalator. And this place was enormous. We checked out the mens fashion floor, which was incredibly shi shi and spendy, only to continue on to the "naisu ribingu" floor. Just say it, and imagine for a second you're Japanese. Still nothing? "Nice Living". Which in Japan means SAMURAI SHRINES!

I honestly have no idea what these are for, but if you can read the little price tags, they get pretty expensive--up to about 190,000 yen. But, for pure wierdness, they couldn't hold a candle to the section on the next floor...

Yeah. I don't think anything needs to be said.

My favorite part of the whole store was the basement, which, if you remember, was promised to have delicious obentos and other fine foods. It did not disappoint. We were treated to counter after counter of amazing Japanese foods--desserts, candies, onigiri, sushi, noodles, rice, fish in all shapes and sizes and flavors...it was utterly amazing. You might be able to get a sense of how far this place went on from the picture below, but keep in mind I was standing near the middle, length-wise, and shooting towards one end.

I'll include this picture merely because the candy counter the clerk is standing behind was completely circular, and rotated. And because it looks as though she's returning change to a wookie.

There are again, more shots, which I won't bore you with. We left Daiwa a little poorer, but with delicious onigiri in hand and some tasty strawberry-centered mochi in stomach, and with the intent to find this mythical electronics store.

Our reasons for seeking it out so fervently were two-fold--Raul had thoughtlessly brought along a Mac mini as his primary computer and had obviously been unable to pack a monitor in his luggage. Thus, he had to find one to purchase here. As for me, my laptop had recently begun making whining noises, and would occasionally lock up, internals groaning like a grandpa trying to get up from his barkalounger. This obviously scared me shitless, not only the thought of losing my past work and writing (which I will never show anyone. Ha!) but also my extensive music collection and pictures--none of which are backed up. So I needed to find me an external hard drive right quick.

Now, I had been told that this store was very near Kanazawa station, just to the left, in fact. I should known not to have set out with vague instructions teetering on the brink of my oblivious memory. Getting to the station wasn't hard at all--all the buses and roads pretty much lead there. And once we got there, we momentarily forgot our search. The largest tori gate in all of Japan graces the entrance to the station on the side we approached. It's literally monolithic.

We were also distracted by the stations clock. Rather than give you a rather unimpressive picture of its workings, video will make it's triumphant debut!

Woo! This literally facinated us for a few minutes, until we tore ourselves away and stopped into a local hotel to inquire as to the location of the electronics store. Luckily, we didn't receive blank stares, but instead we got an explanation that we were to take a ten minute taxi ride directly away from downtown. She assured us that it was in fact, the biggest one around and that there wasn't a comparable store to visit anywhere nearby. With a heavy heart, we began to walk. It wasn't that hard to find, just a long walk down a fairly uninteresting main street. I would say it took hours, but it was really more like 30 minutes. But it was nowhere near the station. Grr.

Once we found it, it was pretty much smooth sailing--I picked up my hard drive (a 120GB USB driven portable for a mere 15,000 yen--it's a slim little puppy) and Raul got his monitor, after a small debacle involving DVI cables, and whether or not they were actually in the box. I also picked up a fancy little dictionary for my DS--comparable in entries to one of those portable electronic jobbies that sell for 300-400 bucks, but this one was 40, and allows for an incredibly accurate handwriting input. Don't know a character? Just draw it in, and it'll translate for you! Fucking fantastic.

That will be all for now.

I'm rich, beotch!

2007-04-03T21:59:00.000+09:00

Oh, the wonderful, wonderful bureaucracy of Japan.

Truth be told, the time between my last post and now was filled mostly with administrative duties--but that doesn't mean it wasn't fun and interesting!

Oh wait.

Yes it does.

In any case, before I delve into the world of forms and scholarships, meetings and courses, I think I'll pick up where I left off--directly after returning from Jusco (as I realize now it is called). As soon as I got back, I immediately turned around and went back out again with my partner in crime, Raul.

He's the other "semester" student from Tufts here, having arrived only a few days before I did. There are others here, that will probably warrant mentioning and photos at a later point (the infamous Ashley, the notorious Todd, the invisible Will and the irrepressable Nikki) but for now, we'll stick with Raul, because he and I are essentially stuck figuring everything out together. Yay us.

Our second trip to Jusco yielded more edibles, in the form of instant meals, a clothes drying rack more complicated than most NASA engineering projects, and some much needed soap. Until now, my one (and only) shower in Kanazawa had involved the use of many tiny little slips of "paper soap". If that doesn't conjure an appropriate imagine for you, imagine instead trying to wash yourself with a single Cool Mint Listerine pack of breath strips, if instead of fighting halitosis, these strips fought body-tosis. Yeah.

We also brought back booze, some Bacardi and Smirnoff, in addition to some rather delicious lychee liquer and some rather disappointing apple flavored spirits. But I'll get to that (unfortunately tame) story later.

I fought back jet lag for the remainder of the evening, and eventually succumbed (after my third cup of tea and a cup of instant coffee) around 10:30.

Raul and I had an appointment with Kei Yoshimura, the nameless door-holder of my arrival who I thought was my student tutor (am I even ever going to get one?) but who actually runs the entire international student division. See, this is a problem--it is patently impossible to guess the age of a Japanese person. Like, if I were on a game show where this kind of thing was required, it might go something like this:

Me: "Eeeeetooooo.......ni jyu roku sai?"
Host: "Gomen ne! Obaasan wa hontou ni hyaku go jyu hachi sai! Mo ichi do onegaishimasu!" (I'm sorry! She's actually one hundred and fifty eight! Please step up to the machine that will drop scorpions into your pants!"

Anyway, we filled out some forms. And some more forms. And then she had us sign some forms for good measure. I'm pretty sure I signed away my power of attorney to the mayor of Kanazawa (I'm honestly being serious here, that's not a joke) and they also gave me one of those cute little bank envelopes that the ginkous (uh...banks) here hand out money in. I'm still not sure what this is for, though I've sinced recieved numerous threatening requests for the contents of my camera's memory card. Did they somehow know I was stranded in Honolulu for a day?

In any case, I'M RICH BEOTCH!

For those of you that can't read arabic numerals, those are 10,000 yen bills. A yen is worth around a penny, so you could say that 100 yen is about a dollar. Do the math.

Sorry about that. I'll try and be less of dick in the future.

However, it wasn't all free money. Later, when I returned to the international house, I found a piece of paper in my mailbox. Curiously, it appears some poor jerk is gonna get evicted because his bill got sent to the wrong guy. I mean, I don't know who this Erriot fellow is.

In any case, we left the International Student Center, and went to meet our academic advisor, Prof. Bittoman. I heard he's german, though he kind of looks (and sounds) like a scruffy Japanese, and his first name is Heiko, which sounds seriously Japanese to me. His Japanese is also perfect. In addition to his English. So I'm thoroughly confused. In any case, we didn't have any of the forms or pamphlets he was supposed to explain to us, so he told us to come back the next day, after some terse phone calls to Yoshimura san (who is also apparently new).

So Raul and I decided to spend the rest of our afternoon down in Katamachi, the popular shopping district in Kanazawa. We were hustled onto a bus, which took us directly downtown. Lucky us. Raul had a guidebook from the mid-eighties that we were trying to use to sort through the torrent of visuals we were receiving--Katamachi is a pretty lively place. We went to what we thought was the Daiwa department store, where Raul was trying to find what should have been a classy obento shop in the basement, but actually turned out to be a weird italio-japanese resturant, and a Spencer's-style kitch shop. This is where I snapped shots of Tickle Me Elmo TMX, which even in Japan is so extreme he needs to be locked in a Haliburton-style aircraft-aluminum briefcase.

In case you were wondering, I did not, in fact, "try him." In my experience, sticking anything through a whole into a metal box inhabited by something that constantly wants you to "tickle" it probably isn't a good idea. Also photo-worthy from the shop was the insane collection of pot leaf-shaped air freshners. I can't make up the crazy scents they came up with, so just look at the picture.

We took the escalators all the way to the 7th story (where they stopped) to see the apparently famous view from the top, but were disappointed to find a small seating area with a couple of vending machines underneath a set of small windows that looked out over an uninteresting part of the city. There was, however, this sign.

Apparently Kanazawa has a problem with little cupids peeing all over the place, and required unambiguous signage to indicate where they should relieve themselves. Which is, of course, in the toilet.

In case you hadn't already figured it out, we weren't in the ACTUAL Daiwa department store, just some...building. I still don't really know where we were. We did eventually find the actual Daiwa when we were trying to take the bus back home and required a bit of direction to find the correct stop to wait at in what turned out to be a kind of transit mall. A very nice stranger helped us find the information desk inside--which was right across from the Hermes and Louis Vuitton store-stores-within-a-store. Classy.

Anyway, we hit the streets again, and before finding ourselves delicious strawberries and creme street crepes (take that Paris!) we, and everyone else on the street, were shocked by a parade of living, breathing, walking porcelain dolls. I swear to god, these girls came right out of left field. Even the Japanese on the street were rubbernecking. This was the best shot I got before they scurried, giggling, across the street and disappeared behind a bus and into the crowd.

I might've expected as much in Harajuku, but in downtown Kanazawa? Downright nutty.

We made our way home in the manner I described earlier (after wandering around for quite some time--I took some good photos of the area, check the flickr) in time to make it for a dinner that had been pre-planned for us by Matsuda san at the New Grand hotel in--you guessed it!--Katamachi. We grabbed the waiting taxi and rode back downtown with Ashley and Todd, and enjoyed a lively dinner with Matsuda san, her husband, the director (?) of the International Salon in Kanazawa, and a couple of "friends of Tufts" that have hosted homestays and are generally nice, friendly, and extremely helpful. This is where I am eternally grateful for the program that I'm in. The experience of being in Kanazawa doesn't stop with the academics, or with the people associated with the university--I'm not even sure if Matsuda san is even directly associated with Kanazawa Daigaku. As Tufts students, we have this group of people that are just here for us. These friends of Tufts that we met at that dinner later took us on an incredible sightseeing tour of Kanazawa, out of their own time. It's absolutely amazing the network that we have available to us. It was also at this dinner that we received our April stipend, and were loaned a guidebook to Kanazawa--the same one that Raul already had! Apparently, Matsuda san had known the author well, and had helped out quite a bit with the book. Her name appears first in the acknowledgments. To repeat myself, we're wicked lucky.

The dinner ended with a comical routine involving a selection of take out cakes being offered to us, and then subsequently denied. I think eventually a total of 5 or 6 different cakes were "out", but mine survived after the first round of cuts. I love the Japanese penchant for cute, small things--my cake was a work of art. You know, before I devoured it.

We taxied back to the university to take advantage of our late start the next day by pulling out the alcohol and making some cocktails with the shaker that Raul had thought to bring with him. Eventually, we all got out our DSs and had a little geek-fest, facing off in 2 v 2 Elite Beat Agents and free for all Mario Kart battles. I eventually had enough, and we mellowed out a little for a terrible, terrible movie called Death Valley (first trying a VHS version of Ace Ventura 2, dubbed in Japanese (hilarious!) but with an awful, and sometimes non-existent, picture). I won't go into how bad this movie is, suffice to say that if you shot a 16 year old full of bull testosterone, made him do a 16 foot line of coke, handed him a camera and told him to shoot a Rammestien music video on a bad wild west set with zombies you might be getting an idea of the celluloid butt-floss that we suffered through.

And that's where I think I'm going to leave off for tonight. I'll get the sightseeing tour down tomorrow at some point, after I digest it a little. It's amazing though, and there are tons of pictures.

Home?

2007-04-01T19:24:00.001+09:00

So. I finally made it here.

After my small walk around Osaka, I was picked up by the jumbo taxi for what turned out to be a rather uninteresting ride through Japan. It was five hours long, and, for the most part, the Japanese feel the need to build large walls on either side of their highways. It impedes the view a bit. So I (having been comatose, mostly, for the past two and a half days just...travelling) spent a lot of time just watching traffic.

And you know what? I saw ONE American car. Just one. A Chrysler 300 pulling off just to our left, about 3/4 of the way to Kanazawa. Having noticed this absence far before then, I nearly flipped my shit. Over a Chrysler. It's sad, I know.

Anyway, after driving through a small lightning storm on the coast, we finally made it here, and I was immediately immersed in a flurry of Japanese. Well, Japanese people too, but I was refering to the language. I met Matsuda san, my adult contact here, at the doorway of the international house,

and she paid the driver, as she promised. Then, a girl held the door open for me, introduced herself (a name which I forgot approximately two seconds later) and told the two RAs to bring me to her office on Monday at 10--then she disappeared! The RAs took me on a whirlwind tour of the dorm and my room (shown below).

They took their time explaining all the complicated routines I would have to perform. Like, for example, taking a shower.

Honestly, it's much harder than it looks. The entire bathroom, for one, is the shower stall, so I guess you could sit right on the toilet lid, if you wanted to, but it makes keeping toilet paper in there a rather dodgy proposition. Additionally, I think (I think) that the hot water for the whole room is controlled on a panel right outside the shower. I mean, I don't think I've tried the hot water faucets when I haven't been dicking around with the panel. Shit, I don't know. They explained it, and it's labeled, in Japanese. My favorite little bit is the dial you can see on the toilet--it has two kanji on it, one for big (ookii) and one for small (chisai). I, for some reason, find that hilarious.

The hot plate is kind of complicated too (you can see it lurking under the hood in that wide angle (har!) shot of my room). Apparently they need a kind of magnetic (?) pan to work, and luckily Matsuda san included one in the little care package she gave me when I arrived--which also had sweet, delicious pocky in it, and a number of American foods, like instant coffee, lipton lemon tea (I had it, and it's good, but I've since purchased some jasmine green) and a kit kat bar. The obento she got me for dinner was delicious and beautiful, but I was halfway through devouring it before I thought to take a picture. And, given the state it was in, I immediately thought better of it.

After having EVERYTHING in the dorm explained to me (my blank looks at some of their explanations prompted them to have me perform basic operations like: opening the front door. I think they might wonder if I'm mildly retarded), they let me retreat to my room, where I promptly avoided touching anything. I read the two manuals that had been stuck in my mailbox (which were essentially the same thing they had just explained to me, but with some engrish thrown in) and tried to make my bed. I say tried, because I think I was suffering from a mild blow to the head--but that's not to say that the futon set wasn't confusing. I was provided with one (1) bed pad, which went on the bare mattress, two (2) flat sheets, one (1) fitted sheet, one (1) futon/comforter blanket thingie, two (2) normal blankets, and one (1) pillow and pillowcase, which seemed to be filled with lead shot. After unsuccesfully trying to fit the fitted sheet onto the mattress over the pad, and realizing that it was not, EVER going to fit, and that what it did fit was the futon/comforter thing, which already had a similar one on it, I was stuck with the problem of figuring out what the hell I was supposed to sleep on. For some reason, I came up with the retarded plan of putting the actual blanket down first, putting one of the flat sheets on top of that, which I would sleep under, and then using the futon/comforter thing for warmth on top of it all. Seriously--blow to the head. Or jet lag. I fell asleep at like, 8:30 local time.

And woke up at 6. realizing that I was supposed to put the flat sheet down, sleep on top of that and directly UNDER the futon/comforter sheet, which had a fitted cover so you could pull it off and wash it, and the blankets were just extra icing. Woo! Mystery solved. Anyway, I got up, washed, read some book, and went wandering around.
I walked up to this monolithic structure as seen from my private balcony,

...before realizing that it was the center for math, science and technology, and I would probably never go there again. I made my way there over a sky bridge of some sort, the entrace of which I took a picture of, because it was interesting, but not quite interesting enough to post the picture of.

...

...

Okay fine.

Happy? Anyway, I continued walking around, determined to find the university hall (which was said to house a legendary convinience store) and the language buildings, where I'd be taking Japanese. I eventually did, with some help from a map that I cleverly decoded (go me!)--the path to which brought my across another sky bridge (the whole campus is kind of build on these hills, with big gullys in between). That bridge had a rather unusual resident. I was drawn to the sound because it was so foreign, but familiar. It sounded like a bird, like the cooing of a dove or a pidgeon, but a dove that had been stitched to the starter switch of a rusty chainsaw, or a pidgeon with emphysema. When I got close, I realized that it was just a regular looking pidgeon making the noise--no chainsaw, no nearby pack of Marlboros.

But it looked at me. With that evil red eye.

So I kept walking. I found the buildings I was looking for, grabbed a flyer for the archery club (the only one I could understand what it was advertising--helped along by a little cartoon of snoopy with a bow and arrow) and headed down a massive flight of steps, which brought me back to the international house. It was then I realized I would have to climb them every day to get to class.

Maybe twice.

Rather than returning to the house (at this point, it was probably only about 9:30) I just kept rollin' down the hill, right into town. I had remembered something an alum of the program had said about a store at the bottom of thi hill, named Jasco or something, so I kept walking till I found it. It was right at the bottom of the hill, as promised, maybe a 20 minute walk. It was also HUGE. Imagine like, a massive Target, then take another one the same size, fill it with women's clothing and put it right on top of the other one, and then take everything else inside and change it so that it might appeal to someone who actually has a hint of class (zing!) and you'll start to get the idea. Oh, and since it's in Japan, everything is in Japanese.

I bought some stuff, snapped a picture of these MASSIVE apples they had (yes, the watermelon in the picture is one of those cute little Japanese melons, but these apples were still approaching the size of a baby's head) and headed out.

It was a good little trip--I got a bunch of stuff I desperately needed, like a bath towel. Take a look at the picture of my bathroom again, noting the little towel hanging on the rack. That was included in my kit from Matsuda san, and I don't know if was intended to dry a Japanese face, or a whole Japanese body, because honestly, it seems too big for the former, and maybe just right for the latter. Certainly not large enough for an Elliot sized creature though.

The hike back was muggy as hell. Which is, I guess, what I have to look forward to in the coming months. I'm just glad I brought some shorts.

I guess that'll be all for now. Don't expect such large updates in the future--I don't think I'll have time (or as much intersting "Hey! I just came to a new place!" kind of crap) to put it together. I know, I know. I can hear the sighs of relief from here.

Welcome to Japan!

2007-03-31T10:54:00.000+09:00

It was a long trip.

After a 3AM wakeup call on the 28th, an early morning drive to the airport, and a quick puddlejumper to SeaTac, things ACTUALLY started to go wrong. Apparently the AC on our DC-10 to Honolulu was broken, and though I was enjoying a nice breeze from the open door I was sitting next to, the people in the back were experiencing what it was like to be the fire-grilled chicken sandwich I'd just purchased from the King. So, of course, they pulled everyone off and tried to fix the plane, all the while my layover minutes ticking away. I made sure I was booked on the next flight to Osaka, and explored other options, like flying into Narita and taking the train to Kanazawa. However, seeing as how the train "trips" I researched were weighing in at 10 to 20 thousand yen (knock off two zeros to get the dollar amount--a yen is worth about a penny) I just decided to try my luck.

God I suck at gambling.

So of course the plane eventually took off, but it was actually a different plane, and we made it to Honolulu. Forty-five minutes after my flight to Osaka left. Le sigh.

The good news is, there's no place better in the world to be stranded than in Honolulu. I mean, the Hawaiians are totally chill.

And the better news is, the nice people at NorthWorst airlines put me up in a hotel, free of charge. On Waikiki beach. Fuck yes. This next photo is the view from my balcony. Yes, that is in fact Waikiki beach.
So I wandered around there, did the Waikiki thing, ate a discounted, prime rib buffet meal (thank you NWA) that became totally free when I discovered a moth the size of my palm in the salad. Seriously. It was brown, and huge, and I didn't get a picture of it. Damn it.

In any case, that layover went splendidly, except for the emails I was receiving over the free shaka net (thank you Waikiki business owners) while chillin' on my balcony. Apparently, the taxi (a special, JUMBO taxi. I still have no idea if it's unusually large by Japanese standards, or if it's been named that unofficially by Matsuda san because it operates to pick us Jumbos up), though able to pick me up on the 29th (when my plane was originally supposed to get in) and the 31st (the day AFTER it ACTUALLY got in) found the arrival time of 7PM on the 30th unduly ardous. So I was to shack up at the Ramada Inn (and given explict directions on how to get there, which I had to clarify with an information booth girl on arrival) in Izumisano. Otherwise, the rest my actual plane travel was officially uneventful.

As for my actual arrival and impressions of Japan, I think I will have to turn, as I often to, to scripture. "But you know what the funniest thing about ~~Europe~~ [Japan] is?...It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here, they got there, but there, it's a little different." Examples you say? Well, naturally, they drive on the left side of the road here. I know, freaky, huh? And all the cars are smaller. The style of the Scion XB seems to be very popular--that little, kind of minivan looking type of car. The bread at my continental breakfast was about twice as thick as a slice you might get here. The bathroom had a sqaure, but ONLY a small square, of fog-free-ness.
I mean, if you can make a mirror fog-free, why not do the whole thing? There are other bits, but I don't want to bore you all.

After getting up this morning and breakfasting with a couple of Aussies (that's them in the next photo) I took a short walk around the neighborhood, snapping photos as I went. I found vending machines , which did not have any school girl undergarments in them, but did have beer (which I was, for some reason, unable to purchase. You'd think, with a vending machine, you put in money and press the button for the one you want, but I guess with some it's not that simple. I thought better of buying beer at 10 in the morning on my third push, and got my money back), and a rather amusing engrish sign. There were also some cute alleyways (everything is cute and small in Japan!) which I won't bother throwing up here, because they're just...alleyways. You can always check my flickr though (http://www.flickr.com/photos/random986) if you're interested. The most interesting thing I saw was a neat, temple thing, just along the main-ish road we came down to the hotel. I took a couple of photos from the doorway and across the street but I avoided actually going inside. I don't really know why. Expect more to come, when I actually make it to Kanazawa!