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.

T minus one week

This is a blog about going to Hakodate, Japan for a language & culture program there. Why then, is it named happy cabbage? Well, that has to do with my little denshi jisho (electronic dictionary), which I will rely upon to help me navigate in Japan. It's a Canon G90, a nifty little thing complete with a touchpad feature that lets me write and translate unknown kanji. I was playing around with it, trying to figure out the multitude of features not explained in the minimal 10 page English manual, when I typed in "happy," knowing that it should give me "ureshii." This it did, and it also provided helpful translations of English expressions involving "happy"-- "happy camper", "happy hour", "happy-go-lucky", "happy cabbage"... Wait, happy cabbage? Yeah, you know, that commonly used expression. Basically, "happy cabbage" exemplifies the amount of sense I expect to make when speaking Japanese--thank goodness my host parents speak a little English!