everyone's a critic and most people are DJs

Fine lines and gender crimes

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:03:03 GMT

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.

Trouble in Slackerland

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:17:31 GMT

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.

EVERYTHING is cute in Japan

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:02:01 GMT

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?

The Great Japanese Shopping Challenge

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:42:22 GMT

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.

Now that I’m living in the dorms, I have to cook for myself, and let me tell you: cooking may not be my strong suit, but cooking in Japan is the easiest thing in the world compared to the process of actually obtaining the ingredients. Shopping in a Japanese grocery store is a bizarre experience because it’s almost familiar—there are regular shelves, carts (albeit in miniature), freezer sections, meat counters—but at the same time, it’s utterly alien. You wander from shelf to shelf, preceded by your tiny cart, and wonder: why must there be entire aisles dedicated to seaweed, but no cheese visible anywhere in the store? What is the difference between these twenty different kinds of soy sauce? How can I recognize anything when all the containers are in different shapes from what I’m used to, and I don’t know the brand names or the words on the labels? Does this jar contain blackberry jam or fish egg paste?

When I was cooking for myself in Chicago last summer, I never wanted to cook anything that ever, at any time, breathed. This wasn’t out of compassion for animals, but simply out of fear of accidentally giving myself food poisoning, combined with intense confusion over what all the different joints and types of meat are. Even fish was too overwhelming for me. But now I regret that, because shopping for fish in America is easy: you buy it, take it home, and cook it. Not like here, where there’s fish you’re supposed to cook and fish you’re supposed to not cook, and I have no clue which is which. Does it make a difference? If I fry fish that’s meant to be served raw, what’s the worst that can happen—will I just be put on the hit list of the Japanese cuisine police (Iron Chef Special Ops)? Or will I actually die somehow? I think the octopus tentacles are for sashimi, but I’m keeping my distance from those regardless.

Meanwhile, as I roll my little plastic cart between aisles offering soy-sauce-mayo-flavored potato chips on one side and cookies called “Strawberry Omelet” on the other, I am serenaded by the grocery store’s selection of popular songs performed in Japan’s beloved Synthesized Accordion style. I think the stores here are trying to save money (either that, or they just like it) by playing songs in the MIDI format that was popular around, I don’t know, 1995 or something, and always sounds only slightly higher-quality than Super Mario Brothers. Apparently I’m the only one who finds this bizarre, as none of my friends seem to pay any attention. I’ll sidle up to an American student and ask, “Hey, is this actually a soulful MIDI version of ‘I Want It That Way’? It is, right?” And my friend will listen for a second and say, “Huh, you’re right. I didn’t even notice” before going back to her shopping, as I demand helplessly, “How could you possibly not notice?” How can you avoid noticing that Japan’s chosen soundtrack for grocery shopping is lite-radio hits meeting the sound of the early days of the Internet?

Around late November, the selections in most stores changed to Christmas songs, mostly “Last Christmas” for some reason, but also featuring “We Three Kings,” “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,” and various unbearable songs that sound even worse in MIDI format. One day I was walking from the bookstore section of a large store into the grocery section, and while the bookstore hadn’t changed their music to Christmas carols yet, the grocery store had; as a result, the soundtrack transitioned smoothly from digitized “Uptown Girl” into accordion-style “The Little Drummer Boy” without me even noticing.

When stores do play actual songs with real instrumentals and vocals and everything, they pick really strange ones sometimes. When I bought my cell phone, the store was playing generic instrumental elevator music; I had tuned it out entirely until, with no warning, the music switched into Belle & Sebastian’s “Act of the Apostle.” I had a sudden sensation of being in a coffee shop; then, after three minutes of religious musing were over, the wordless elevator music took over again and continued unabated for the rest of my visit. Another day, I was browsing the nonsensical English T-shirts at a supermarket clothing store when the loudspeakers transitioned unexpectedly from cheery J-pop into the opening drone of the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?”. Which I love, but isn’t there a time and a place? I kept expecting them to fade it out or play a truncated version or something, but no, they played the entire six minutes and forty-seven seconds, up to and including the part that runs:

There’s a club if you’d like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry and you want to die.

Right on, Japan. Speaking for myself, nothing inspires me to shop more than a good Morrissey sulk.

Tights

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 06:38:09 GMT

A robot story, by Ellen Heddendorf, age 8

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:52:07 GMT

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.

Doctor's time machine
Ellen HEDENDOFU

Dr. for a long time to study, finally made things. ... That was a time machine.
"Oh, that is!" Dr. laughed. "People said to be impossible, but finally made. Now, in my time machine, any human being can go anywhere. To say what a good car.'ll Have no problem."
So saying, and Dahlia is a beautiful robot lab assistant said. "Oh, the time machine, made?" There is no enthusiasm in the voice said.
"Oh, Dahlia! Yeah, yeah. I was just a perfect time machine. What do you think?"
"It's good." Dahlia said in a voice like that before.
"Huh? Why does the voice? Eagerness to work my whole life, I made the machine. I do not like?"
"I'm not ..."
"I?" Said Dr..
"... In the car, what are you going to?"
Dr. laughed. "Dahlia, stupid! I say? Remember now?"
"I ran out of batteries?"
Dr. Dahlia叩ITA light of the silvery hair. "Then, once I teach. I worked every day in the life wisdom of the world's most important reason."
"That?"
"Things like love." Doctor said. "I still love her for the past, this created a time machine. Back to last year, will say goodbye to her before I fight back."
"If you love ..." said Dahlia. "If you love, I'll understand and love."
The doctor laughed. "But Dahlia's a robot!"
"Yes, but ... I'm a robot," said Dahlia slowly. "I see it, the robot, but ..."
He did not listen to me. "Now you do not have the time, the dahlia. Forthwith to return to last year. Now, the time machine入RO faster."
"Yes ...." Dr. Dahlia is a time machine back.
"OK." Motherboard, he saw very complicated. "Did any switch."
Dahlia "put" pressing the button. "You do not know how to make the car?"
"Of course, I know!" Said Dr. angry voice said. "I have a good car. YASUIDA really understand. Besides, my ass is a genius? To use any machine I know now." Another time he saw the motherboard. The screen switches to a big red button and there were hundreds of pieces. "Hey, can be. ... When you press this button."
"Oh, oh, danger!" Dahlia cried. "It is ..."
It was too late. Time Machine suddenly lost in the orange light.
After a minute, and Dr. Dahlia was a time machine. "Good!" Said Dr.. "Reaching the last year. Now, to find her house." I said, he closed his eyes, a big, open. "Wait a minute ... direct. ... This is where?"
All had the silver. Saturday and silver, silver buildings, a silver car. ... People who ...
"This is not a person!" Cried the doctor. "People do this ... this ..."
"This is the future." Dahlia said.
"Future?"
"Yes. Doctorate from the past no pushing the button, push in the future."
"So, this man ..."
"Robot. I'd like." Dahlia replied.
"... All the robots in the future?"
"Well. Actually, in the future, a robot rebellion, the world will dominate." Dahlia explained to me. "I like to make a doctorate at us, and my feeling is the reason? That's a little dangerous. Rational people can quickly robots. Then, easy to control the world."
Dr. Dahlia was seen at large. "This dahlia that is, Do you know what?"
"Thanks to you like Doctor, I'm so smart robots. Can be seen in the future. Doctoral-made me do it."
"Well, you always know why I did not say?"
Dahlia reddened face of the metal. "Actually ..." Dahlia said in a low voice. "... In fact, like Dr.見TAKUNAKATTA sad."
"What? What I'm saying?"
"Doctor-like ..." Dahlia said. "Actually, I just love the doctor does!"
"Liar!" Said Dr.. "The robot can not love everyone. Is the real reason, the robot and dahlia to dominate the world. Traitor!"
"I'm not! It is ..."
But he did not ask Dahlia. I was in a time machine. "Good-bye!" Says the press. The time machine is gone.
"Oh, Yeah, like Doctor." Dahlia metal cried out in tears. "I was in love."
Then, I heard the voice of Dahlia. "Do not cry?" Said the voice.
It said the robot was a handsome man. "Well, she Robo. Your name?"
"Dahlia."
"It's a beautiful name. I IX937-B." Robot said. "Go to coffee with a robot?"
"Oh ... okay."
IX937-B with the Dahlia's hand, began to walk. The happy life from the date of the robot.

End

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.

Career fair

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:48:38 GMT

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:

• Catburglar
This is probably not a good idea.

• Librarian
Boooo-ring.

• Supersleuth
This is not a real job.

• Regular Detective
I’m pretty sure you can’t actually just start being a detective out of nowhere, my childhood heroes like Nate the Great, Cam Jansen, and Encyclopedia Brown notwithstanding. I think you have to start by being a police officer, and then you get promoted to police detective eventually.

• Police Officer
Whenever I read the comic Gotham Central—which, when I’m not in Japan, is actually VERY often—I start wanting to be a cop. However, I think my lack of physical fitness/ability, not to mention my dearth of street smarts and general common sense, probably disqualify me. What if I got assigned to vice? What do I know about drugs? Besides, I’d probably be the rookie cop in every movie who always throws up when they arrive at a murder scene. That’d be me, all pale and quavering, “Sarge! There’s b-blood everywhere!” And the sergeant, outwardly gruff but secretly kind-hearted, would be like, “Get a hold of yourself, Heddendorf,” and would maybe send me home out of pity. Then he would shake his head as I staggered away, and growl, “That poor kid. She’s just not cut out for the force.” Then the other cops would nod sadly, and then they would stay up all night investigating the case. I’m terrible at staying up all night.

• DJ
My mother says I’m not allowed to be a DJ when I grow up.

• Music Journalist
This is a silly job. I think I could do it, but no part of the world or anyone in it would be made better or happier by my efforts. It would be the most empty, ego-stroking job in the world. “Oh look, I listen to painfully cool music that only hipsters are allowed to know about! Then I write posturing, self-indulgent articles about how cool it is, and, by extension, how cool I am. Then Pitchfork sends me my check and I wish I were dead.”

• Some Other Kind of Journalist
I’d probably like this since I enjoy writing so much, but I don’t think I’d make much of an investigative journalist. And while it could be fun to write reviews of books or movies, that might end up being only a slightly less ridiculous iteration of the job above. Are there other kinds of journalists besides those two? Upon reflection, I don’t really know anything about this.

• Travel Writer
This might be nice. But then again, it might not. Also, approximately 800,000 bajillion other people also think it might be nice, which could make things more difficult.

• ESL Teacher
I’ve been kicking this idea around recently, because I like the English language and I’ve had fun on a few occasions teaching words and expressions to my Japanese friends. But I’m pretty sure you can’t just be an ESL teacher; you have to get a teaching license in some other field, and then you can add an ESL licensure onto that. Which leads me to consider…

• Teacher of Any Kind
…But, since I’ve hated school since I was around ten and still haven’t really stopped, wouldn’t I be a huge hypocrite if I started teaching it? Not to mention I might just keep hating it; there’s no serious reason to believe that I wouldn’t. And on top of that I’d have to think of something I’m good enough at doing to teach it, and my options are somewhat limited there.

• English Teacher
That’d go well.

Me: Students! Today we’re going to study internal rhyme…using late ‘70s pop songs!
Principal: Ellen, the curriculum says you’re supposed to be teaching Charles Dickens.
Me: Charles Dickens sucks, though.
Principal: Okay, you’re fired.
Me: Aww.

• Just Never, Ever Graduating, So I Never Have To Deal With All This
Looking more tempting by the day.

"Writer's Block" + Japan facts

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:05:22 GMT

Hospital dramas are a time-honored staple of television, from General Hospital to County General to Seattle Grace. Which TV hospital would you most want to check in to? And who would be your doctor?

View 500 Answers

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 basically of interest only to my mother if even her, but whatev

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:49:50 GMT

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.

Damn, Japanese technology!

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:41:58 GMT

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!

Missive from Pokemon Land

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:49:47 GMT

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.

Nanzan has a really small campus, to the point where the odds are pretty good that if you walk in a straight line (which is basically how campus is arranged – a long line with a few shorter lines branching off of it), you'll just bump into whoever you're looking for, rather than having to make actual plans to meet. But for the times when actual plans are necessary, I bought a cell phone. It was the cheapest model available and yet, because this is Japan, it contains email, a television, and what is very possibly a better digital camera than the actual camera I brought from back home. Everybody in Japan has charms dangling from their cell phone straps, so I bought a small Totoro to hang from mine.

Japan is split in half between being incredibly advanced and surprisingly low-tech. Cell phones and TVs (which can be found on car dashboards) are really something to see, but computers and Internet connectivity are surprisingly terrible. Other modern conveniences are lacking for reasons like conserving space or saving energy. Almost nobody has a dryer, so sunny days are laundry days in Japan, and when I have to do laundry I need to be sure to hurry home from school early so that there's enough daylight left to dry my clothes by the time I get them on the line. There are hardly any electric hand dryers in bathrooms, either – everybody carries handkerchiefs with them to dry their hands after using a public restroom. Speaking of which, I was surprised by how prevalent floor-level squatting toilets are here. I thought there'd be Western toilets everywhere, and in fact when I first arrived I fervently vowed that although I'm all for adapting to new cultures most of the time, it would be November at the earliest, or else a REALLY big emergency, before I used one of the non-Western toilets. But that fell by the wayside pretty quickly, so now while I definitely still have a preference for what I'm used to, the alternative doesn't gross me out.

Sorry if that was a bit more than you wanted to hear on that subject; it was one of the differences here that gave me culture shock at first, so I thought it'd be worth mentioning. Another thing I've had to get used to is sorting my trash, which my friends who've studied in European countries will think nothing of, but I will say this and no more: it's harder when you can't read the characters on the garbage bins. Not to mention the pieces of trash that don't seem to fall into either the "burnable" or "non-burnable" categories: what about gum, for instance? I'm not a habitual gum chewer, but I chew it enough that I've had this dilemma a few times. Once or twice, I ended up just swallowing it; on an occasion when I was feeling less saintly, I dropped it in an ashtray, but don't tell the Japanese police.

Just like I've read about in books, it really is a little strange living in a country where nearly everybody looks (and even acts) completely different from you. I've never been such a visible minority for such a long period of time before. I do get stared at by a lot of children, even in urban, theoretically cosmopolitan Nagoya (in real life, although Nagoya is one of the biggest cities in Japan, it's a lot more run-down and tired-looking than people here want you to think). Even adults look startled to see me at times. On the subway or the train, even putting ethnicity aside, I can't help but feel like I stick out when everybody else is wearing either a suit or a school uniform.

Of course, Japan isn't really a "homogeneous nation" – that's just a myth that has been propagated for decades. But I'll say this: it's a lot more same-looking than anywhere I've been in America. I don't think there's much of a question that Japan likes thinking of itself as being all the same. Good social relations do seem to be really crucial here, even though a reluctance to buy into these "Americans think as individuals, Japanese think as groups" stereotypes makes me hesitant to say it. I've been interested to notice that advertisements, posters, and even warnings or announcements are often phrased as "Let's…!" invitations instead of commands or requests – "Let's clean up our train station." "Let's try to be careful of the doors." "Let's make our country great with Tokyo Academy." It's like there's a reluctance to sound too bossy. A poster I often see when walking through one of the train station corridors is full of advice, written in both English and Japanese, that sounds curiously reasonable and empathetic – almost passive-aggressively so at times:

"I offered my seat to someone on the subway. It didn't cost anything, but it delighted someone."
"My foot stepped on my cigarette, but the trash still remains."
"Smoke issues from my cigarette after I put it on the ground. If it were my house, I wouldn't be so unconcerned."

I suppose I'll wrap this up for now. I hope it'll prove interesting to anyone who wonders what life in Japan is like. If you have any questions or anything, please ask them – it'll give me something to talk about next time that's not, "Man, I sure am tired from those four hours of kanji homework last night."

Placeholder post: a day in the life

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:26:29 GMT

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

Okaasan [my host mother] teaches piano lessons, and on the evenings when she's teaching students in the living room, I'm exiled to my room for the hours while the lessons are going on.　Tonight is one of those nights, so I’m in my room trying to stay awake enough to do my kanji homework while through the door I can hear these piano exercises that make me even sleepier.

Sometimes we just eat dinner really late when Okaasan teaches lessons, but tonight she actually ordered 4 boxed dinners to be delivered here, and as Okaasan's waits for a break between lessons and the other two wait for Otousan [my host father] and Shiori-chan [my host sister] to get home from work and school, I ate mine in my room. It was pretty good, too, although I wish it'd had some sort of vegetable in it. Sometimes I wonder if I'll end up with scurvy from the lack of fruits and vegetables here. I eat apples and salads like crazy at home and back in Iowa City, so I'm in withdrawal a little bit. Actually, my host family often serves a little salad or at least a few cherry tomatoes at breakfast, so it's not like I'm really so deprived. But this morning my breakfast was an aluminum-foil-wrapped piece of toast with ham and melty cheese on it, handed to me by Otousan as I prepared to dash out the door to catch the train, and my lunch was a 220-yen bowl of plain udon from the cheap cafeteria. So although the carnivore side of me appreciated that my boxed dinner contained a sausage, two pieces of fried chicken, AND a hamburger patty, the veggie-starved side wished that the scoop of potato salad had been a REAL salad, or at least had been resting on more than one sad, mostly decorative piece of iceberg lettuce. You get the impression from books & things that Japan is this ultra-healthy, vegetarian land where the only source of protein is soybeans and maybe fish, and everybody chows down on green stuff constantly. And then you actually get here and realize that every meal you eat basically consists of rice (or else noodles), salt, and fried things. Supplemented by tea, admittedly, or else sugary drinks from vending machines. And when you eat meat it's always super fatty here. I am going to go home weighing 200 pounds if I don't pay attention.

Anyway, today wasn't bad, but I got bored in Japanese class (the only class I had today, for 2 1/2 hours). I kept being compelled to check the time, as if there were anything else I had to do here in Japan other than learning Japanese. I mean, what else did I come here for?

All right, Okaasan just came to the door & told me that her lessons are done & she's going out (I think she said she's going out "to study"? What is she talking about, or alternatively, why is my listening comprehension so bad?), but that there's pizza in the living room if I want some. Seriously, pizza? To top off my dinner of three different kinds of meat served with sides of rice and potato salad? How much do these people eat? But I did take a peek inside the pizza box and it looked like it had corn on top of it, so I might have a piece just for that. Or just sneak some of the corn right off the top of the pizza and try to make it look like I didn't. Like a vegetable bandit. I'm a desperate woman.
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More to come, when I have time to write a real entry.

Sun, 08 Aug 2004 20:14:57 GMT

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