Beyond Squidville

The day after the program ended, my parents arrived from the US so we could do some sightseeing as a family. Before heading off though, we had one final celebratory dinner with my host family and my sister's host family.









After leaving Hakodate, our first stop was Sapporo. While there we visited Odori park, a long strip of greenery running throught the center of the city and featuring this awesome slide/sculpture which I want to transplant to my hometown.

Next stop was the old capital of Kyoto with its scores of shrines and temples. We stopped as some of the more famous ones, including the lovely Golden Pavilion.

My final days in Japan were spent exploring Tokyo, with its strange mix of modern and ancient. A trip through the culinary district revealed a shop selling nothing but the plastic food reproductions that are used in restaurant windows, answering for me the niggling question of where all that plastic food was coming from.



From a maze of shrine gates created to bring good luck to business to a floor-to-ceiling Hello Kitty, Tokyo has it all.

More Adventures in Japan

Apologies for yet another extended hiatus from blogging. HIF has come to a close and I am left wondering where the time went. The last week has been a flurry of final presentations and preparations for the final exam yesterday and today's final ceremony, including song rehearsals, because every class must of course say goodbye in song.

My class performed "島歌” (Island Song), a classic Okinawan melody. The signs we are holding read "Ra ra ra ra ra...", which is actually part of the lyrics.

To rewind, a lot has happened between when this picture was taken and when I last wrote, but here are selected highlights:
My host brother is adorable and sure knows how to rock my shades, even if he isn't spot on about how many fingers to hold up for "piisu."

As an optional culture class, I learned about making washi, traditional Japanese sweets, which, so far as I can tell, almost universally involve sweet bean paste. Here we see Hwee holding a tray of steamed bean buns, and a photo of a flowery creation made by our choujouzu sensei out of, you guessed it, bean paste.

In a direct contrast to the refined delicacy of the sweet-making, our next cooking class involved making mochi, sweet glutinous rice paste, by pounding it vigorously with a mallet as demonstrated here by Lee-san. The guy turning the mochi was lucky that none of us accidentally hit him, though someone *cough Sarai * got really close...

Other highlights included a trip with friends to Sapporo over a long weekend. We visited the factory-turned-museum where they used to manufacture Sapporo beer. There were plenty of vintage beer ads including this one. Most of them seem to feature the usual people with beer combo, but the people, oddly enough, are not actually interacting with the beer. Not sure why... Also, I am going to regret returning to a country where I am not of legal drinking age...

Jokes aside, I will be happy to return to the US. While this program has been fantastic, I am about ready for a break, not just from school, but from the sustained mental effort that I have to put forth simply to understand and be understood. I never expected it to be quite as taxing, but it can be, especially when the novelty wears off... Fortunately my host family has been wonderfully kind and patient through all my fumblings, and I am going to miss them a great deal. At least we have promised to write, they in Engrish and I in waseigo...

Lost In Translation

So today was a Japanese festival called tanabata. As it is celebrated here in Hokkaido, the festival involves children dressing up in costumes and then going door to door requesting candy. (Sound familiar?) Here in Hakodate these requests are made in the form of a cute little song, but in neighboring Sapporo I'm told that the lyrics are different, with children threatening to hurt you if you don't give them candy. All in all, upon hearing this explanation, I basically thought, "So this is Japanese Halloween," but a little googling has revealed that this is far from the truth. The holiday was imported from China and celebrates the meeting of two stars (Vega and Altair in Western astronomy), said to be two lovers doomed to be separated except for this one time a year. The way it is celebrated nowadays in Hokkaido is quite different from the rest of Japan and different even from the way it was celebrated in Hokkaido a generation ago. Apparently, it used to be that children requested not candy but candles for the family altar, but these days that is unusual.

As one would expect, the combination of small Japanese children and costumes produced much cuteness, though I was rather disappointed to see that most little boys don't bother with proper costumes--my host brother just went in his decidedly boring gym suit. The little girls wearing yukatas were the main source of cuteness for the evening, that and toddler Tomoya's difficulties in trying to walk and consume candy simultaneously--the concentration required to unwrap the sweets slowed him near to a standstill, sometimes right in the middle of the street, much to his mother's dismay.



Lamely uncostumed neighborhood boys examining their hauls. Please note the relative size of kids and candy bags. (Strictly speaking, it wasn't just candy-- squid flavored crackers, pocky, and other Japanese goodies were included.)


One mom was enlisted to help carry the excess...

Yukata clad girls and the ubiquitous "peesu."

Lost looking girl being completely, as Elliot would say, adorbs. Modern sneakers beneath her yukata.

Same little girl with her brother. Please note his power ranger themed yukata.

In addition to the beggar's night aspect, tanabata is celebrated by writing wishes on colored strips of paper and then hanging them on trees along with other decorations.

All in all it was quite a bit of fun and a welcome break from preparing for my midterm and the upcoming speech contest. That said, it made me more aware of my tendency to try to translate all things Japanese into something recognizably American. Upon hearing about the costumed candy-demanding children, I just tried to equate it with the familiar Halloween. As I progress in my Japanese language studies, I am increasingly learning words and expressions that just have no real equivalent in English, and the same can surely be said of cultural traditions.
That said, there are plenty of things that are direct imports. I watched a program recently which I am absolutely certain was the Japanese version of Mythbusters. In the episode I watched they were trying to recreate a movie stunt which was basically the vehicular equivalent of ski-jumping, but the effort failed miserably when the scale model took a total nose-dive. However, that program came directly after a game show that was definitely of the only-in-Japan variety, for much of the game show centered around the contestants' abilities to read and write obscure characters and to appropriately categorize English words. Much to my surprise and my host family's amusement, I found I had never heard some of the English before. Now, thanks to Japanese TV, I know what eldelweiss and Judas' ear are...

Further Updates: Tea, Kimonos, and Engrish

As part of HIF, there are number of after-school classes covering various traditional Japanese arts. Recent classes have included the art of sado (tea ceremony) and the etiquette of kimono wearing. For the tea ceremony, we all trooped to a local high school to observe the tea ceremony club there in action. Like all Japanese arts, tea is full of highly specific rituals detailing how exactly one must pour the tea, the number and direction of rotations of the tea cup to be made before drinking, etc. During the ceremony we foreigners were permitted to sit normally rather than adopting seiza, the highly painful traditional kneeling pose, and were generally given a great deal of latitude, but it nevertheless struck me as highly regimented. What also surprised me was the amount of difficulty the Japanese high school students had with seiza, even after years of practice. One girl had to be lifted up by her friends because her legs became so stiff...
The tea ceremony club, with teachers seated at left.

For the kimono wearing ceremony, teachers came to our school bringing cotton yukatas for us to all practice wearing. Even for just a simple yukata, the process of tying the obi is quite intricate, and I doubt I would be able to do it on my own.














Helen, wearing her yukata, then all the participants in our kimono etiquette class.

Amusing Engrish watch: The other day I shopping at Dai-Ei, this sort of continuous indoor mall, where I saw these shirts for sale

Mayonezu, Mayonnaise, Omeretsu, Omelet, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

So basically I have been horribly negligent about keeping this blog updated... First, the big news is that two weeks ago I moved in with my host family, the Murakamis. Dad works for Toshiba while Mom stays at home taking care of things and minding toddler Tomoya and 8-year-old Naoya. My new parents are lovely and almost overaccommodating--I've been given my own bedroom while everyone else shares. The kids are full of energy, leading Dad to sometimes dub them as めんどくさい (troublesome). Naoya is surprisingly independent; he typically spends most afternoons in a nearby park with his friends, and he comes and goes more or less as he pleases. Tomoya chatters more or less continuously, but I catch less than 10% of what he says--the combination of poor enunciation, highly casual speech, and high speed does nothing for my Japanese comprehension. I felt a little better when I found out his parents don't always know what he is saying. And just knowing what he is saying doesn't guarantee comprehension... He often yells "mayonezu!" (mayonnaise) for no apparent reason. Me with Dad and Tomoya.

Which leads me to another topic: Japanese food habits. Apparently in Japan mayonnaise is seen as an all-purpose condiment to be used not only on sandwiches, but on pizza as well. When mixed with soy sauce, it becomes a veggie dip. Tomoya likes to eat it alone, but I think that this is atypical... He also likes to eat dried squid snacks and Calpis candy. Calpis is a brand of yogurt based food products, the main one being a carbonated yogurt drink. Also available are yogurt candy and yogurt popsicles--I guess yogurt is a dessert here. The Japanese seem to take Western foods and reinvent them, just as they like to take English words and reinvent those. This is how "manshon" (mansion) comes to mean apartment and "waishatsu" (white shirt) comes to refer to any collared shirt. Go figure.

Land of Cuteness and Squid

A belated thank you to the folks at the Light Fellowship for the funding that makes this travel, and thus this blog, possible!

Just spent a busy weekend exploring Hakodate, the city where I'll be spending the next two months. Saturday was devoted to exploring 五稜郭公園（Goryokyaku Park) and its environs, which we reached by tram. The park actually is actually the site of a nineteenth century fort, the first Western fort to be built in Japan and the base for rebels loyal to the Tokugawa shogunate at the beginning of the Meiji era. What makes it so distinctive is its shape--the fort is a five-pointed star, surrounded by a moat.

We rented little rowboats to circle the fort and played on the playground at its center, much to the confusion of the few Japanese children there. We also were able to watch what appeared to be a rehearsal for a massive historically themed spectacle set to occur later in the summer to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the opening of port Hakodate. We had dinner at a sobaya before beginning another evening of karaoke that was cut short by the fact that the city tram line stops service by 10 pm.

Sunday afternoon I visited Yachigashira Onsen, a very large public bathhouse fed by mineral springs. The water there is so laden with iron that it is a rather disconcerting rusty brown color, but the heat was lovely, particularly when juxtaposed with the rather chilly outdoor air. The outdoor tub was even shaped like a star in honor of Goryokyaku.

In the evening I went with friends for a curry dinner and then a beer at the local brewery. I'm no beer fan, so what interested me most was in fact the brewery slogan, shown at right. Roughly translated, it means "the beer that CEOs often drink." The live music was something of a surprise as well--though American music is ubiquitous in Japan (even the seafood shop plays "Hollaback Girl"), I didn't expect to hear an instrumental version of Disney's "A Whole New World" in a brew pub...

Cuteness is no longer a surprise though--it is truly EVERYWHERE, as these few pictures show.

Apparently these taxis' horns actually sound like mooing!


Move over Chiquita banana.
Because it is not enough for manhole covers to be functional...

Arrival!

I flew out of Newark the day before yesterday on a flight that coincidentally included Rene, my next door neighbor. We got into Japan yesterday afternoon and soon made it through customs and initial quarantine (see left), leaving me plenty of time to explore in Tokyo with fellow program participants. We wandered around Shibuya and Harajyuku and even stopped for karaoke. The amount of English that is everywhere is ridiculous, especially once you include everything in katakana, but not all of it makes much sense--why would you want a shirt that says "drug abuse"?

I keep being surprised by the small ways in which Japan differs from the US--I knew to expect crowding, greater politeness (Everone bows so much, even to buses!), etc., but the minor differences are what catch my attention. The toilet in my hotel room has a bizarre array of options, and those in the lobby play music! The Gideon bible shares a drawer with a book on the teachings of Buddha, and my airplane was painted with teddy bears.

I'm currently on break during my placement exam, which is making me painfully aware of how little Japanese I know and how little I've slept in the last three days. At least I'll have the weekend to recover -- nothing is scheduled, and I don't even get to meet my host family yet due to the swine flu scare. I am being "quarantined"to protect them, but this just means that I live in a hotel and am free to come and go as I please so long as I don't meet my them. It's a measure to keep host families from pulling out of the program--if the density of face masks is any judge, people here are really scared.