The Return of 15 Things. (or, Hell-ish)

I'm heading off on the nightbus to Tokyo in a couple hours, but thought I would take some time to update before I dissapear for the better part of three days. The plan was to stay in Yokohama, the third largest city in Japan and about half an hour from Tokyo, but it turned out to be less economical and much more inefficient, so Graeme (also of UBC; he's on the right in the photo, just one above me) and I need to work out our exact itinerary on the bus tonight. We've gone ahead and booked the youth hostel in Tokyo, but we don't know exactly what we're going to want to see when we disembark at 7 am tomorrow morning.

There's a bunch of stuff on our list though. We want to see the commercial nightmare of modern Japanese urban life: Harajuku and Shinjuku are big items for fashion and people-watching, so is Roppongi; Akihabara is the major electronics district. Just south of there is the emperor's palace, to which only the gardens are open; just south of there is Yasukuni shrine, the most controversial war memorial in Asia. We also want to swing by Yokohama at some point: it's China town is famous, but it's also supposed to have a lovely little waterfront. And there's an aquarium that I want to check out too.

'Course, I have other stuff I need to do. I just found out today that my academic advisor for my independent study project (I'm doing Japanese gardens) wants to meet on Friday at 11 am, and he wants to see a one-page report on my progress (thusfar, nil). Conveniently, 11 am falls squarely between my bus's arrival in Osaka (7 am again) and my parents' arrival in Osaka (4:30 pm). Inconveniently, it's going to make Friday what I would call very busy, or if I'm feeling dramatic, hellish.

Just hell-ish, mind you. I'm not that dramatic.

15 More Odd Small Things

1. The hand gesture for a crab is two of our scissor gestures.
2. Armbands are still popular, but with school crests instead of swastikas.
3. CocaCola makes Royal Milk Tea.
4. The gangster rap on the radio is hard core and un-censored.
5. Mizo are uncovered rain gutters that run on the side of every street, and can be deep than I am tall.
6. You can get a plastic bag shaped to put your umbrella in.
7. There are ahstrays in some bathrooms.
8. The city smells different.
9. Restaurants display plastic replica of their dishes in the front windows.
10. Schoolboys wear short shorts, even in winter.
11. Dry ice machines.
12. Old ladies sometimes dye their hair purple, and only purple.
13. I have been asked if I have AIDS.
14. Dumptrucks are the size of minivans. Or smaller.
15. Women walk with their feet turned inward.

Baths and お湯

Last night I finally had a conversation with 健太, (kenta) my homestay brother, that I've been meaning to have for a long time, and we managed to clear up a bit of cross-cultural misunderstanding. When I first arrived, my homestay parents mentioned that I should shower in the morning. I was a bit surprised, because the Japanese tradition is to have a bath (in Japanese it's called お風呂 (ofuro)) before you go to bed, but I didn't want to risk being rude and I definitely wasn't comfortable enough with my Japanese yet. So for the last four months or so I've been showering.

Yesterday I asked Kenta if it would be okay with my homestay parents if I used the bath instead. He said that they had been assuming, and had actually been told this by the people at the exchange office at Kwansei Gakuin, that foreigners wouldn't want to bathe in the evening. I explained in my turn that while I thought showers were just fine, I was here to experience Japan and Japanese culture and as he knows the bath is a big part of this.

It's weird though, there's some basic assumptions we were both making that are a bit odd. I thought that maybe my homestay parents didn't want me to use the bath. In Japan, you wash outside the tub, and then soak in the hot bathwater to warm and relax yourself, water that everybody shares. I was worried that maybe there was some feeling of not wanting to share bathwater with me, so to speak. That was sort of silly, they're very nice people.

Kenta said that even when exchange students want to use the ofuro at first, it usually only takes about three days for them to go back to taking showers. Apparently us foreigners need to have a shower in the morning to wake up. I thought that was weird, but I asked around and a couple of my friends do the shower thing out of choice. I still feel like my family should have given me a choice at the very beginning, but there was a very sizeable language barrier there I guess.

Anyway, let's talk about language again. When Kenta was explaining how to use the ofuro to me (it's trickier than you think) I realized something important. In Japanese, there is a word for water, 水 (mizu), and a different word for hot or boiling water, お湯 (oyu). Oyu is not a form of mizu, it is a totally different substance. Oyu is what you have in your bath, oyu is what you use to make tea, and in Japan both the bath and tea are semi-religious, at least sacrosanct, experiences. In Japanese, you don't say that the bathwater has cooled down, you say that the bathwater has become mizu.

And I think that's fascinating. But I'm late for lunch and must run! Tomorrow: The Return of 15 Things!

I love my new purple shirt but hate my new haircut

I went shopping in Kobe with Jay yesterday (that's, uh, Wednesday). We were both late and ended up running around Sannomiya trying to find each other for about an hour in the morning because the station that I'd directed him to apparently doesn't exist on the Hankyu line (Lonely Planet lies!). We found this tiny diner to get lunch in, and couldn't quite read the kanji on the menu so we ended up pointing as usual and not quite knowing what we were going to get.

Jay: Man, I hope whatever I order is warm.
Server Girl: [Cold udon. Dozo.]
Jay: Damn.
Me: OH! I knew that Kanji looked familiar.

Anyway so I bought two shirts and we had waffles for dinner. Purple shirts are awesome!

I also cut my hair this week. I think it looks silly, as I may have mentioned.

Language Miscellania

Some stuff I've been thinking about the Japanese language recently.

a. In Japanese, there's no way to say "I want to be brave". Explanation: the English verb "to be" gets broken up into three seperate Japanese verbs, 1) ある (aru) which means "to exist" and can only be applied to inanimate objects; 2) いる (iru) which is the same as ある but applies to animate objects; 3) です (desu) which means "to have the quality of", as in "Firetrucks are red" and conjugates really funny. です is probably the closest Japanese comes to an irregular verb. And while you can conjugate ある and いる into the verb form that means "to want" (they become ありたい (aritai) and いたい (iritai), but don't really mean anything at all useful if you think about it) you can't do that with です. I guess I can't really explain that one in a blog, but it just doesn't conjugate that way as far as I can tell. The closest I can get is 勇気の男の人になりたい (yuuki no otoko no hito ni naritai) which literally means "I want to become a brave man".

b. If you're in Japan and find yourself in a situation where in English you would want to say "thankyou" (that's ありがとう (arigato) in Japanese), a lot of the time you're supposed to say "excuse me" (すみません (sumimasen) in Japanese) instead. Example: Erika and I went for Indian food back when we were dating, and every time the waiter brought something to our table she would say すみません. Example: today I was trying to go into the bathroom when another guy was trying to get out, and when he deferred to me I was supposed to say すみません (I didn't, whoops). There's a lot of stuff like that. I guess sociologists would say it has to do with a greater focus on "intrusion" in the East, as opposed to "gratitude" in the West, but I don't really know what that means. It's just one of those language things, as far as I can tell.

Alright, I've yammered on enough. I'm going to go shopping in Kobe tomorrow I think - I came to a decision in the gym today that having only two long-sleeved shirts without collars is ridiculous. I'm basically cold all the time, and the weather is actually quite mild.

I'll try to post something again tomorrow :) おやすみ

Christmas Pictures!

Here are those pictures from Christmas I promised a while back. I didn't have any pictures from Christmas in Toronto on my own camera, I was probably too jetlagged to remember something like that, so my snot-nosed, no-good younger sister kindly sent me some from hers. One of the downsides to being the one taking all the pictures is that you unfortunately don't end up in any of them.

My family is super nice :)

Clockwise from top right: Aunt Christine, doubletasking with her dog and opening presents; dad; mom with her oddly-shaped present that I thought was going to be a wizard's staff; grandma.

Me modelling my new sweater in the most horrendously homosexual way I could think of.

Cloie Petunia, my aunt's dog and the most important member of the family, ostensibly attacking my pants.

Matt and Birthdays

I got like a million birthday greetings over Facebook. That's a nice feeling. But I got it now. You can stop guys. My inbox can only take so much!

My family's taking me out for Sunday birthday dinner when お父さん gets back from working in Tokyo. I've been sick again for the last couple days, and tearing through a bunch of comics I stole form Jordan, but hopefully back on my feet tomorrow. Some birthday gift, the common cold.

阪神・大震災

Today marks the twelth anniversary of the 1995 Kobe earthquake that killed 6 434 people. You can watch videos of it on YouTube. It lasted just 20 seconds. It struck when people were still sleeping. An entire building was uprooted and fell into the streets. I was nine years old at the time. Thirty six hours later, I was ten.

I remember that it happened; I have a very specific memory of a particular picture of rippled train tracks that I have come to realize in no way actually captured the, the scale of the event. Kobe burned. It fell down.

If you go to Kobe, I'm only about 20 minutes away from downtown, you can find a park by the water where they've preserved a section of street just as it was after the disaster. The sidewalk is underwater. The lamposts are crooked. You should go see it.

My family, my Japanese family, was fine; they were in Nagoya at the time. I haven't asked if they lost anybody. I don't really know what else to say.

Japan is still awesome.

Back in Japan. It's still awesome.

My flight back was totally uneventful - I spent most of the time blissfully asleep, read some pretty decent Greg Bear, and watched The Illusionist, which is not that decent at all. I did have to kill 5 hours in Detroit, but I managed to find a restaurant that does a delicious veggie omelette and an excellent, unsweetened iced tea. I didn't even lose my passport.

I don't have any class until Thursday, and as of Friday the term is done. Which sounds relaxing, but in reality I'm up to my neck, maybe my forehead, in essays, and on top of that have a 10 lb. brick of a Japanese grammar final on Thursday. The essays aren't long - they average around 4 pages, double-spaced, and most of my sources are class readings - but I was not very enthusiastic about work over the Christmas break (hell, who is?) and now I'm paying the price for it. Boo that.

Anyway, back to the grind. I guess I should post some pictures from Christmas back in T.O. or something like that. Gimme a couple days.