It's a good thing we aren't getting actual grades in my tea ceremony class, because I wouldn't be getting a very good one. Today we had class in the tearoom, and I had to be the group leader, because my other classmates ratted me out to the sensei that I hadn't done it yet (thanks, guys). That meant I had to be the first to do everything during the ceremony, and had to do everything right. But we hadn't had an actual tea class in the tearoom (just lectures) for three weeks, so I'd forgotten how to do everything. And worse, today - the only time I've had to be the leader during the entire class - was the day a bunch of photographers had to come and take pictures of the cute gaijin tea ceremony class for the newspaper. Pictures that were mostly of me, screwing up.

And, on top of that, today was the day when the sensei, who usually isn't too strict about the details (I guess because he thinks foreigners can't do anything anyway - he's super nihonjinron), suddenly got all hard-ass. He must have wanted to impress the photographers. So not only did he correct me non-stop on details that, admittedly, probably needed correcting - "Look at the bowl before setting it down, not after! Say 'o-saki itadakimashita,' not 'o-saki itashimashita'!" - but also on things I really think he would have let slide any other day. "Look into the tea bowl for half a second longer! Turn it more slowly before you drink!" And my least favorite: acting more feminine. "Woman style," the sensei told me sternly in his barely comprehensible English, as I took an allegedly-too-big bite of the dessert. "Radyrike."

And that, really, is exactly the place where Japan and I run into problems. I have to cut my dessert into little bites and take "ladylike" nibbles, but my classmate Ken is supposed to eat like a "manly samurai" and is acting "kimochi warui" (gross) if he looks too docile when serving tea. Men can speak as assertively as they want, but I'm supposed to say "atashi" (the feminine "I" pronoun) instead of "boku" (masculine) and make the ends of my sentences sound soft and uncertain. And on the children's TV show I was watching last night, the big sister says to the little brother, "It's only natural that Papa should be stronger than Mama!"

In America, I hardly ever have an acute sense of gender, or of gender difference mattering. But in Japan, that feeling of difference is there all the time, and I have a lot of trouble dealing with it. After all, on the one hand, It Is Important To Respect Cultural Differences. But, on the other hand, Come On Already. And it's navigating the thin line between those two views that I find so frustrating. If there were no other reason, that alone would be reason enough for me to not spend my life in Japan.

I already talked to Betsy on the phone about this earlier today, but man, I am seriously having a hard time finding classes to take next semester. The available courses and a few descriptions have been posted online, but even though I keep browsing through them, I can't seem to come up with a schedule.

The frustrating thing is that I have a lot of freedom to take basically whatever I want, since I only need either one or two (depending on what Iowa accepts from Nanzan) Japan-related courses to finish my Japanese major, and since I'm pretty sure I'm ditching International Studies that means I've got a lot of leeway for choosing other stuff, underwater basket-weaving or whatever. What I really WANT to do is start taking a few education-related classes and see what I think of them, but there's next to nothing even remotely teacher-ish you can take without having actually been accepted into the Teacher Education Program, so I can't really do anything there.

So I'm left with just taking whatever classes sound good, but there aren't really enough of those to make a whole schedule: a class called Food In America which might be interesting and involves eating (although it actually looks pretty hard); there's also the probably-slacker-standby "Sex & Popular Culture in the Postwar U.S.", which promises comic books, pulp novels, and drive-in movies (nice), but will also almost definitely involve intolerable post-modern tracts about Marx's views on the commodification of sexuality as considered in terms of Freud's writings on eroticism and the co-optation of the Sexual Other. I just made that up (that's all I learned from World Film class, how to write that crap), but it's probably real. Oh, also, now that I'm looking, the Food in America and Sex & Pop Culture classes appear to be at the same time, so I'd have to choose.

I don't know whether I'm going to take Japanese language next semester. It looks like the highest level offered is fourth-year, and while I'm not saying I'm Miss Fluency or anything (not by a long shot), it's possible I might actually test out of that. So then I'd be kind of out of stuff to take, I guess, at least this semester (which seems stupid, since it's not like I'm actually good, and I feel like you shouldn't be out of stuff to take until you're way better than I am). I was actually kicking around the idea of taking a German class, just as something to do (probably not French, because I don't really miss French, but I do miss German sometimes). But the class called First-Year Review is every single day, and I don't know if I miss it THAT much. I mean, come on.

This is what my roommate gave me for my birthday last month.



It is a plastic piggy bank shaped like a smiling pink pile of poop.

This is what's inside the bank (whose name, Unchikun, means "Little Mr. Poop").



Pieces of chocolate shaped similarly.

Japan, what's wrong with you?

All right, it’s a new year, and I’m resolving to make a renewed effort to chronicle the various weirdnesses of Japan while I spend another four and a half months here. Today: grocery stores.
( Read more... )

I had to write a story for my Japanese Writing class. It was hard, man! Here's a summary of my story:

An inventor has finally completed a time machine, which he plans to use to go back in time and stop his ex-girlfriend from breaking up with him, because he still loves her. He takes with him Daria, his beautiful robot assistant, who secretly loves him. But he presses the wrong button and accidentally goes into the future, where it turns out that robots are everywhere, because they've been given emotion and reason (like the inventor gave Daria), and that enabled them to take over the world. He demands to know why Daria, who is so intelligent she can see the future, didn't tell him this would happen, and she says it's because she didn't want to see him sad, because she's in love with him. But he doesn't believe her and says she just wanted to take over the world with the other robots, so he leaves her in the robot future and disappears in the time machine. Daria cries, but then she meets a nice guy robot and they live happily ever after.

I'm pretty proud of it. Here's Google Translate's mangled version if you want to check that out.
( 'Dr. Dahlia was seen at large' )

I have no idea what happened with the sentence that goes, "Besides, my ass is a genius?". I totally didn't write that; he's supposed to just be saying, "Besides, I'm a genius, right?". Anyway, this was a fun experience in a way, but it was also really frustrating. I'm not a bad writer of prose in my native language, and that makes it annoying when I can't express things very gracefully in Japanese. Being non-fluent makes me sound like a second-grader.

However, I will say that I think "The happy life from the date of the robot" sounds EXACTLY like something I'd see on a T-shirt or tote bag here.

Twenty-seven days until I go home for Christmas! I've decided to take a break and head home to Ames, and I'm already really glad I'm doing it. I need some time away from Japan and Japanese to help me figure out whether I still even like it. Taking a couple weeks off will be good, I think.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I used to think I wanted to be a Japanese-English translator, and now I don't really think so anymore. But that means I don't know what I want to do at all. Like, AT ALL at all. Like, to the point where it's scary. So last night I made a list of potential future careers. It didn't go that great. It looks like this:

( Starting with childhood dream occupations )

Dude! PRINCETON. PLAINSBORO.

I never do these silly "writer's block" prompts that LJ offers, but that one just made me smile. And I'd like Wilson to be my doctor, please, even if it means I have cancer and would probably die. I guess I just said that if Wilson were real, I would rather die than not be with him? Probably true, though. Also, House said it too.

I haven't watched that show in five weeks; I'm trying to kick the habit until the writers start doing a better job. But I know I'll start watching it again when I go home for Christmas. My mom and I have to watch it together.

Anyway, the other purpose of this public post is to mention a few miscellaneous interesting things about Japan that I've been meaning to bring up. So here they are.

-Yesterday I was so desperate to avoid my host family that I told them I was coming home late and would be eating dinner at McDonald's, even though there was absolutely no reason why I needed to be late except that I didn't want to go home to their house. Anyway, during my dinner I observed some interesting differences between American McDonald's and Japan McDonald's (which is called Makku for short if you're from Tokyo or eastern Japan, Makudo if you're from Osaka or further west). For example:

1) They aren't all like this, but the Makku I went to yesterday was set up like a coffee shop. The ground floor was for placing your order, but once you received your tray of food, you were supposed to take it up to the second floor, where there were lots of small tables and low, comfortable chairs all casually arranged like you were at Starbucks or something. There were some students up there who had already eaten and were now sitting next to their empty trays, studying their textbooks.
2) They don't have ketchup dispensers at Japanese McDonald's. I know ketchup exists in Japan (my host dad always puts it on my scrambled eggs, which I am not the biggest fan of), but I guess they just don't use it for French fries? So weird, just eating naked French fries.
3) They put so much mayonnaise on their sandwiches that I could just die. Gross.
4) The sandwich that they call "Juicy Chicken" is, in fact, spicy chicken. This is a good example of the traitorous quality of Japan English. A lot of the time English is used in Japan for stylistic purposes only, and it doesn't mean anything; it's just a design on a T-shirt or whatever. But other times, it seems to be perfectly functional English indicating something comprehensible. But it's not always what it claims to be, like in this case, where they wanted the word "spicy" and used "juicy" instead, just to trick me. I didn't want spicy chicken!
5) You cannot, in fact, substitute your value meal's soft drink for a milkshake in Japan. The poor high school kid who was taking my order had to go ask the manager whether this was allowed, and then came back and told me that unfortunately, and he was sorry, but it seemed that that might not be entirely possible, sorry…and so on. I tried to put him at ease with my Japanese skills by saying something like, "I see. So it's a little different from American McDonald's, isn't it? Ha ha," or whatever, and he just gave me this really baffled and resentful look, like, would you please just give me your order so I can wait on somebody who speaks my language and knows how a McDonald's works, what is wrong with you. Poor kid. Poor everybody in Japan who has to put up with me.

-I got my hair cut last Friday at a hair salon that cost ten dollars, took ten minutes and – this is true – was called "Cutacombs." Like catacombs. Japan has borrowed so many English words that they can now make their own terrible, pointless English puns. Anyway, this place was next to a huge grocery store, like a Great Clips or something but even more generic, and when I went in I had to stick my thousand-yen bill into a machine and push the button that said "1 person = 1000 yen." Then it printed me a little ticket and I handed it to the hair guy and said, "Haircut, please." But the guy was standing right there, so why did I have to use the machine? Why does Japan love machines so much? Anyway, I showed the guy a photo I had of Chris and me and said, "Hair this length, please," and he said, "Is that your boyfriend?" For the next ten minutes as he cut my hair we chatted mostly in Japanese (with him occasionally throwing in English words just for fun), and he continually asked me who my boyfriend was, whether I liked Japanese boys, and what my "type" was ("Wild? Wild boy?"). He just got a kick out of hearing my stumbling responses. We found each other pretty amusing. It was a nice experience. He cut my hair way shorter than in the photo, but that's forgivable since my hair is really hard to cut even for non-Japanese people, and I like how it turned out anyway. Besides, ten dollars!

-Later that same Friday I went with a few friends to a rock show at a club called Electric Ladyland, which I guess they must pronounce something like "Erekutorikku Radyrando" here. Oh, Japan and your English borrowings. Anyway, what was remarkable about the show was that all the rock band frontmen (there were five bands) kept speaking in really, really formal and humble Japanese. I was way culture-shocked. They were all like, "Thank you very much for hearing us. Thank you, truly. We are humbly doing a tour [okay, you don't really say that in Japanese, but that was the sense behind it] and would be honored if you would come to see us again. Please keep this song in your heart" and stuff. I was like, what? It was really weird. Also, nobody in the crowd talked between songs. That part was even weirder. I wanted to talk to my friend Meredith, and we were literally whispering. Like in church or something! Man, that was something else.

Off to Japanese Culture class, which sounds so much more interesting than it is. More at some later date.

This is going to make me sound like a huge nerd, but I think that right now, my favorite thing about living in Japan might be my Japanese Writing class. I don't enjoy the class periods themselves, and I don't enjoy the million kanji that I have to memorize for Wednesday's midterm exam which I'm going to fail. But I do enjoy our weekly composition assignments, so much so that I think I'm really going to miss them next semester.

Basically, I love writing these compositions because I get to write like a third-grader, and then feel proud of it. If you doubt the claims I have made that Japanese is really hard, consider this: students of European languages who have studied for about as long as I've studied Japanese are supposed to be writing research papers and in-depth essays on literature by now. I, on the other hand, spent last Tuesday night writing a book report which was actually a movie report, and I wrote it on Disney's Mulan. It contained such insightful analysis as: "Because Mulan is brave and cool, I think she is more interesting than princesses." And: "My favorite part is the song 'Be a Man,' because it is easy to remember and everyone thinks it is fun to sing." A+ for me!

Two weeks ago I wrote a composition called "My Favorite Thing," which could be about a book, movie, sport, hobby, travel destination, or anything else. It would be nice to say I didn't write this essay about "House," but that would be a lie, because I TOTALLY did. Here's how BabelFish awkwardly translates the first paragraph:

As for the television program which I like you call “the house”. It is program concerning the American doctor. Although it is drama, the funny place there is a large quantity and, it is very pleasant. The house is name of the main characters. But as for the house the first-rate doctor disliking the person, it is just a little the unkind person. To that, there being a wound of the foot, because always it is painful, you take the medicine too much. Because the house always being disagreeableness, means ill-tempered thing, it is strange. So, to tell the truth the house is the unhappy person enormously.

Gets the basic point across, right? Nice work, BabelFish, and nice work writing, me.

Seriously, this isn't even an easy class or one where I'm slacking off by writing at this level. This is a genuine measure of how hard I've worked at Japanese, that I am now able to write compositions in which I opine that "House and Wilson's friendship is very important to the show, but their personalities are opposite… Sometimes it's hard to answer whether House really likes Wilson [I'd say "cares about" instead of "likes" if I knew how, although since the Japanese word for "like" also means "love" it's not inappropriate]." Or to put it in the far more preferable words of Google Translate:

House and Wilson's friendship is very important to the show, but it is against nature. Wilson always want to help people. Good friends. But the house is usually a bad friend. Wilson is really a question of whether love is sometimes difficult to answer.

That's…actually rather profound, Google Translate. I'm going to think about that for a while.

Can I just take one second to briefly reflect on how great punctuation is? With a single comma, I can completely reverse the meaning of my post's subject line. If I said "Damn Japanese technology!", that would mean I was mad at the technology and found it frustrating or useless. OR, as I have chosen to do instead, I can use the same words to convey admiration and happiness, thanks to the insertion of one comma. Awesome!

Okay. Anyway, all I actually have to say is that I'm really impressed by the usefulness of my Japanese cell phone's email function. I sent my phone email address to Jim, and at my request he obligingly live-blogged (only via email so it's not really blogging, I know, I know) a recap/commentary of the presidential debate onto my cell phone while I was in my Wednesday morning classes, so I could read about it during my morning break and at lunch. Isn't that so useful?

Man! My Japanese cell phone is great!

When I came to Japan I thought briefly of starting a "travel blog," but then I realized that those are for people who actually travel, like people who study in Europe and spend their weekends hopping from country to country. The only traveling I've been doing is on the train between Seto and Nagoya, so I've decided not to start any special blog, as I don't think entries about commuting and homework would be of much interest. But when I write entries on LiveJournal about Japan, I'm going to start making them public (instead of friends-only) posts, so that anyone can read them. Just thought I'd mention that.

So I've survived almost a month in Japan so far, and I thought I should write a brief entry about what my life here has been like, for anyone who's interested. I live in a city called Seto, which is spread out over so many mountains and hilly areas that I'm really not sure how big it is, but Wikipedia says its population is about 2.5 times that of Ames. The host family I'm living with live way out on the edge of town, so I haven't seen much of Seto proper, but I actually like where I'm living now – the green rice fields and forested mountains are really pretty, and it's easy to go for a short, aimless walk and end up in what looks like real My Neighbor Totoro territory, all secluded shrines and bamboo groves and everything very Japan-picturesque.

To get to Nanzan University in Nagoya, I have to take a commuter train into Nagoya and then the Nagoya subway to campus. It takes about an hour total, but I don't really mind too much. It has its benefits, actually: today I spent the train ride doing the grammar worksheet I forgot to do last night. By the time I arrived at Nanzan, it was finished.

The classes I'm enrolled in here are Intensive Japanese 400 (this is the one that meets every day, for either two and a half or three hours, except Wednesday when it's only an hour and a half), Japanese Writing 3 (essay writing and hard-core kanji review), Intermediate Translation, and a sociolinguistics course called Japanese Culture (originally I was going to wuss out and take Flower Arrangement, but it was boring so I dropped it and picked up Culture instead). It's a lot of work – some nights, a lot of work – but I can tell I'm already learning and measurably improving.

( Much, MUCH more under the cut. )

Transcribed from my diary entry of 9/16/08:

( An average day (plus corn banditry) )

More to come, when I have time to write a real entry.

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