[8/4]

First, a paragraph for complaining, to get that out of my system: If you’re reading this, it’s probably almost Halloween, because it seems like I’m not going to get internet until then. Okay, maybe mid-September. What the hell. Why does it take so long? First of all, no one around here will let you do a damn thing unless you have a hanko and an alien registration card. I’m just waiting for them to inform me that I need the alien registration card to be eligible for a hanko, while of course you need to sign for the alien registration card with a hanko...but so far it hasn’t gotten that bad. In any case, the alien registration card won’t be ready until at least the 11th, which is in a week, and who knows about the hanko. They’ll give you a temporary card, which the woman at the town office told us is just the same as an alien registration card but without a picture. She assured us that that plus a passport would be good enough for anything you need an ARC for (yeah I was getting sick of typing that out...heh). Some of the information packets I got at Tokyo orientation assured us of the same thing. Turns out, it’s a foul lie. You need the real ARC before you can do anything – cell phone, car, internet. And then, once I have that, and the hanko, then getting internet will take a month. Are you kidding me? My predecessor freakin’ had internet in this very house as of a week ago! It’s not like they’ve got to completely rewire the place! Oy vey. I know I should have enough inner resources to survive for a month without internet...but trying to survive during the day each day in a language I don’t really know, interacting with people who don’t know me, is tiring. I don’t mind doing it, but I want to come home and replenish my emotional energy by interacting with people who know me and care about me. I want to feel grounded in the world. I end up creating imagined interaction for myself by writing letters or emails that I’ll send later. But that’s a bit hollow, really. I want someone to say “goodnight, love you” to me before I go to sleep. Right now I feel completely dependent on people who can’t quite understand me, which is a very helpless feeling. I want reassurance. Maybe that’s not very mature of me, but I want someone to tell me I’m doing okay. I was prepared to wait a week or two, but when Miura-san (I finally figured out her name!) told me yesterday that it would take a month, it deflated me. And they have internet right there! I spend the day surrounded by computers I’m not allowed to use for “non-work-related” things. Meanwhile Murashima-san spent ten minutes today looking up Fruits Basket and Cowboy Bebop on Google after asking me what anime I had watched. How is that work-related? And they’re all like “oh, won’t your parents be worried, not hearing from you? Taihen desu ne...” Yeah, it is taihen, and you won’t let me take two minutes to send them email on your computers! So yesterday was my first bad day. Not terrible, just bad. And not all bad; there were good moments too. Like going shopping – I always feel better when I actually get out of my house and walk around. Then I can smile at people and greet them. I passed a group of teenaged girls on bicycles, who all giggled shyly and called out “konnichiwa!” and a few even said “hello!” Here’s a sweeping generalization that probably has no merit whatsoever: it seems to me so far that the teenagers around here lack that characteristic slightly hostile, slightly accusatory gaze that some American teenagers are prone to direct at strangers. At least I know that when I’m, say, at a mall or movie theater or somewhere with gaggles of teenagers, I tend to feel self-conscious, like if they’re noticing me at all it’s with slight scorn or skepticism. Now, I still like kids that age; I think they’re usually quite interesting people. But in groups they can become a bit unfriendly. Such has been my experience. So far every teenager I’ve passed here has smiled or grinned at me. It’s a nice feeling.

That paragraph was getting too long so here’s a new one. It might contain a little complaining too. So yesterday I spent the day at the office across the street, as suggested by Mizuta-san (my supervisor), albeit rather indirectly and vaguely. No one had told me a specific time I ought to be there by, so I showed up around ten thirty I think. Of course I didn’t have much to do. Mizuta-san had said I should study Japanese. Well, the JET Program had given us a book called “Japanese for JETs.” Turns out I know everything in that book already. And it’s all written in romaji, which is terrible. I felt like my Japanese was getting worse just looking at it. So I spent a while reading another book they gave us, about the school environment and tips on team teaching and lesson planning. But that intimidated me and after a while I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ll wait until I have a more concrete picture of the schools and teachers I’ll be working with before thinking about lesson planning. (So scary!) I worked on îíâÕñÈëD vocab for a little while, but I finished the vocab I was supposed to do, finished writing down the words I didn’t know that is, and I had no way to start looking them up without a computer. I felt like I was supposed to be officially “at work,” so I shouldn’t be doing random things like elliptic curves. Or writing letters. So finally I decided to write a letter in Japanese, which would look enough like studying. That occupied me pretty well for the afternoon, since it was slow going, but after I ran out of things I could express in my limited Japanese (and with no English to Japanese dictionary), I was reduced to scraping the bottom of the barrel by copying down random example sentences from the Japanese to English dictionary, like, for “inlet”, “A dead body was found in the inlet.” And here’s one I found today, for some word that means “one after another”: “The [elementary school] students killed themselves one after another.” What the hell? Finally Miura-san told me it was time to go home. Phew. Then I could write in English! I watched another random movie that my predecessor left here: Autumn in New York, with Richard Gere. It wasn’t great. Not hideous, but it was one of those love stories where I just couldn’t see what the two people saw in each other. They’d have fights where the girl would say “why am I wasting my time with someone like you?” and I’m like “yeah, seriously!” But then she’d cry and cry and they’d end up back together. Sheesh. She could have done better, for sure. Then I started reading The Fourth Treasure for comfort. It really is beautiful. However, reading about Hanako’s MS I happened to feel a tingling in my leg, and now I can’t shake the idea that I might, for all I know, have MS. After all, I do get random tingles and pain in my legs sometimes. And without being able to get reassurance from anyone, it’s dangerous for me to keep reading.

Okay, it’s official, the last corner of the scarves I hung up around the living room yesterday has just fallen. So scotch tape is not the answer. Sad.

I also felt awkward around the office because there would be fast conversation in Japanese, and laughter, and then suddenly people would look at me like I was supposed to respond. Because I can speak some Japanese they think I can understand them. It makes me feel incredibly awkward. There’s one guy, Shirai-san, who’s sort of the office clown, and he’s always making jokes I’m apparently supposed to join in on but don’t follow. There’s another guy, Nishimoto-san, who’s really cute and helps explain Shirai-san’s jokes to me. Oh, I’ve also discovered that no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember anyone’s name when they say it to me. Unless I see it in writing, it’s just gone. So I spent a while today studying a white board in the office that seemed to contain a list of last names, and scanning a list in a book I bought at orientation called “Kanji Survival Guide” of common Japanese last names, and trying to match things with names I’d heard. That’s how I figured out all the names I now know.

Which I guess brings me to today, which has been noticeably better than yesterday. It didn’t start out great: I went to the post office to discover that they didn’t sell envelopes. Odd, for a post office, I thought. But maybe they don’t usually; the Swarthmore College post office did, though. They told me to go to a bookstore (I think), but I peered in the door of the nearby bookstore and saw nothing that might be mistaken for an envelope. So I went to the office and found Miura-san, Murashima-san, and some guy whose name I still don’t know. I explained that I didn’t have envelopes and Miura-san immediately produced two envelopes. Well, that cheered me up. But I had another hurdle: I didn’t know the zip code of Lumberton, NJ, and couldn’t pass off looking it up as work-related, even if the letter I was sending there was partially in Japanese. Fortunately the nameless guy kindly found a site where I could look it up, and I did. So that was two hurdles cleared, and after that mailing the letters was easy (and cheap! About two dollars total to send two letters to America. Well, I guess I shouldn’t expect them to arrive by Halloween either...). So that was a nice start to the day, overall. After that I spent from about ten until about five-thirty in the office, and accomplished absolutely nothing. I wrote down a bit more vocab. I skimmed through the Kanji Survival Guide and wrote down a few school-related kanji. I browsed the dictionary randomly. I worked a bit on math illicitly. (3.6 is really bothering me, because I don’t feel like it should be hard at all: every example I work out is intuitive, but for some reason my mind is getting tangled when I try to think in the abstract. :-/ Did you guys do that one?) I doodled. However, unlike yesterday, I really enjoyed chatting and interacting with the other people. Mostly it was just Miura-san (who’s really really sweet) and Murashima-san, an upper-middle-aged man who speaks noticeable English and kept saying “Rebecca! I have question. Is okay?” and then asking me random things like how much it snows in New Jersey and what anime I like and what my major was and what kind of alcohol I like. When a couple other guys were there and I had just mentioned I was from New Jersey, Murashima-san started printing out pictures from Google Maps and showing them to me, asking me to point out where I live. Finally I went over to his computer and zoomed in on our neighborhood. Everyone was disproportionately excited to see a map of where my house is, and especially when he switched to satellite mode and I pointed out the roof of my house. It also seems to be a favorite pastime to quiz me about what I can and cannot eat; the two of them spent over half an hour mentioning different Japanese vegetables and trying to figure out how to say them in English, an activity which for some reason amused them greatly. They also went through and listed all the poisonous insects that live around here (but concluded that the most dangerous local creature was probably Shirai-san...). At one point some other guy came in and introduced himself and laughed a lot – I said I was from New Jersey and he said I should called it “Atarashii Jersey,” and everyone laughed like crazy. Then he left, and a few minutes later he called Miura-san and started asking her rapid-fire questions about me, which apparently he’d been too shy to ask me when he was there. She answered the phone and immediately burst out laughing – it was quite amusing. Apparently he’s going to come back Thursday afternoon and try again to talk with me. Murashima-san said of all the ALTs he’s ever known in Kasumi, about a dozen of them, I was the best at Japanese of anyone when they’d just arrived. Miura-san took me to the convenience store to buy lunch and I got a little pre-packaged lunch with udon and inari, and we ate together back by the office. She told me that Shirai-san and Murashima-san are both single, although she doesn’t know why. When I got back to my house I found a little plant with a note under it on the doorstep. The note was from Jarryd, an ALT who’s been here like four years, and said he’d stopped by but hadn’t found me, and he’d try again tomorrow around lunchtime. A couple hours later my doorbell rang and it was an older woman who was friends with my predecessor, and she invited me (in very broken English which she insisted on speaking even though I probably could have understood her better in non-broken Japanese...) to come visit her whenever I was lonely. The note from Jarryd also said they (whoever “they” are) were planning a welcome party Wednesday night. Well I just hope someone comes and picks me up for that lol, ‘cause it’s not like I have any way to get anywhere...

The point of all this rambling is that today I felt more and more like I have people here I can talk to and laugh with. Even if there’s still a language barrier and they still don’t really know me. Tomorrow I’m going with Mizuta-san to visit my two base schools and talk to the principal and vice-principal of each, and I bet that will make me feel better too, once the whole school thing becomes more concrete. Also I’m eager to discuss school lunch...so far all anyone’s said to me is “oooh...what are you going to do about school lunch? That’s going to be a problem, ne...” I don’t mind packing myself some cold udon or something. But as a school culture thing, participating in the school lunch is supposedly important. Well, édï˚ǻǢÇ≈ǵÇÂÇÀÅB

Oh, and I was thinking about Christmas, and right now I feel like I really want to come home for Christmas. The 25th is a Thursday it seems, and the 23rd is a school holiday anyway (Malik’s birthday. Oh no wait...the Emperor’s birthday. One or the other). So I figured I’d ask for the 22nd and 24th as paid vacation days. That way I could pretty much leave here Friday evening or Saturday morning, spend a couple days in Seattle, and get home by say Tuesday. School starts up again on the 7th, so it wouldn’t be a very long stay at home, but I’ve never missed a Christmas and I feel like I’ll need it. (Especially if I haven’t gotten internet by then...) So I’m going to ask Mizuta-san about that tomorrow hopefully, just to check that it should be okay. I get ten days of paid leave that expire if I don’t use them by the end of January, so if I haven’t used many of them yet, maybe I’ll go back a bit farther and ask for the end of the previous week off too. We’ll see.

Okay, it’s 10:09 and I have to be up bright and early tomorrow, so I should start preparing myself for bed. My upstairs air conditioner won’t be fixed for another week at least. But that’s not terrible; it’s not so bad with a fan. Let’s see, song lyrics, song lyrics...oh, let’s take a nostalgia trip, shall we?

Every day she takes her morning bath, she wets her hair,
wraps a towel around her as she’s heading for the bedroom chair;
it’s just another day.
At the office where the papers grow she takes a break,
drinks another coffee and she finds it hard to stay awake;
it’s just another day...