Friday, August 29, 2008

一中

[8/27]

Today I went to 一中(which my IME annoyingly refuses to acknowledge as a possibility when I type “icchuu”...). They said they were having a meeting at 9:00 and asked if I’d go. Asked if I’d make a short speech. Well what was I gonna say, no? The meeting got pushed to 9:30. There are four English teachers, two women and two guys (one of whom is the one who came to karaoke with us and sang hide songs, and the other of whom seems really friendly and speaks excellent English). I asked one of them about using the computer at school. Apparently the situation is that I can use my own computer all I want, but there’s no way to connect it to the internet. If I want the internet I have to use a communal computer, which of course I can’t stay on for very long. Oh well...

At the meeting I was introduced and made a very short speech in Japanese. (I think it went something like “Hello, my name is Rebecca. I am from New Jersey, in America. In college I studied math and linguistics, and also Japanese. But that was a few years ago so I’ve forgotten a lot, so please be patient with me when talking Japanese. I want to study Japanese more from now on. I am really looking forward to teaching here. Douzo yoroshiku onegaishimasu.” A moving speech, ne?) Then they told me I could go downstairs and skip the rest of the meeting. So I went downstairs. But I had nothing to do. Being an idiot, I had left my math book at home. So I pulled out my computer hoping to work on a story, but couldn’t get into anything. I ended up writing a “self-introduction,” not for use in the classroom or anything, but a real, thorough self-introduction, in other words, random anecdotes from my life and things that have been important to me. Just because I thought it’d be interesting.

The highlight of the day occurred during this time: students were walking back and forth in the hall, occasionally noticing me and smiling or giggling or just staring. But once, two girls stopped at the door, giggling and whispering to each other and looking at my nervously. I gestured them to come in, and they both giggled more and said “shitsureishimasu!” and burst into the room and over to my desk, and stood there awkwardly. So I said hajimemashite and asked them their names (which of course I promptly forgot) and told them my name was Rebecca. This amount of conversation convinced them I was fluent in Japanese, which seemed to put them at ease a bit. I laughed and said I wasn’t fluent yet but I would keep studying. They asked if I was starting to teach next week when school starts, and I said yes, and they giggled and said “tanoshimi!” (looking forward to it) and “yoroshiku!” and I echoed both of those, and they left.

Hee.

Meanwhile, the teachers got back eventually, and the vice principal told me to get here at 7:50 on Monday and that I would be making a speech in front of the students, in Japanese. It took a lot of asking on my part to get any further details, like, um, what I should say. Longer than my speech today, he said. Okay, so what sort of things should I say? I asked. Oh, name, where you’re from, what you studied in college...”isshoni ganbarimashou!” (let’s work hard together!), that sort of thing. Uhh, isn’t that what I said today? I suppose if I add “isshoni ganbarimashou!” at the end it would technically be longer...Oh well, I’ll ask Jarryd about it. Then he told me I could leave. I’d been expecting to have to stay there doing nothing until 4:30. So that was nice.

With my unexpected free time I decided to go on a bit of a quest. I found Kasumi High School. My verdict is that the school in that anime probably really is based on it. They’re far from identical, of course, but Kasumi High School is clearly the same basic aesthetic of building as the one in the show, and in the same position relative to the beach and the mountains. This is probably wrong, but on one of the mountains right behind the school as you’re looking from the beach there’s a big telephone tower thing in the same position as one that’s pretty prominent in views of the school from the beach in the show. Chances are that’s a coincidence, even if it was based on the Kasumi school...but that was what struck me most. I couldn’t find anything that might be the shrine or the station though, in the neighborhood of the high school anyway. I’ll have to ask people who know the area where I should be looking. Still, it was a fun quest: I got to know the layout of the area by the water a little better, and I discovered some beautiful views. ^_^


After that I came home and crashed, and I’m hoping to go to sleep, like...now. Tomorrow is 二中(which the IME does accept!), so we’ll see how that goes.

Random reflection: a song just came on on shuffle that I remember listening to when I was in the grip of an odd but somewhat intense crush a while ago, and at that time I felt all this meaning in the song relating to that situation...but right now, not only have those emotions faded, but it’s a case where I don’t even understand in retrospect how it was real at the time. So that makes listening to this song rather...odd. Like it had all this emotional significance that I can’t even recapture as a memory; it’s just evaporated.

Meanwhile, I need some lyrics, so for lack of anything better coming to mind, here’s my favorite line from the current shuffle song (not the same one as above). It’s my favorite line in the song because of the unexpectedness of the simile; no matter how many times I’ve listened to the song, I still find myself expecting the word “rain”...

A heart’s no good when it’s been broken;
Words of love aren’t often spoken.
My tears fall like jewels from a crown...

おにぎり

[8/26]
I started to write an email about the past few days – since last Friday when I last talked to people – but I felt bored writing it, which is a very bad sign for how anyone might feel reading it. So I’m going to give a trimmed down version, with only scattered little anecdotes/reflections. Besides, that way next time I’m talking to people on Skype I won’t just say “uh, I could tell you about stuff, but you might as well just read about it on my blog...”

First of all, Kuroda-sensei, one of the English teachers at Icchu, knows hide songs! He came karaoke-ing with us last Friday in Kasumi (yup, there’s a karaoke place within like a seven minute walk of my house!), and I was singing EVER FREE, and he joined in! It made me disproportionately happy. He seems generally rather quiet and awkward but he was pretty damn good at karaoke. 楽しかったわ。

At the barbeque that the Kasumi International Something-or-other Association put on for us on Sunday, we played a haiku game: going around the circle and counting off in threes, the first person wrote the first line, the second the second, and the third the last, without communicating. Here are two haiku I liked:

おにぎりは
みんなは元気
笑い声

(Rice balls,
Everyone is lively,
Laughing voices.)

レベッカさん
海に飛び込む
月見草

(Rebecca-san
Flies out to sea,
Evening primrose.)

If I were to edit them in retrospect, I’d change it to おにぎりや, to avoid the two は’s. And of course the first line of the second one has six syllables, at least I think the double consonant would count...so I guess you could do my name as レベカ if you really cared. And for the record, the line with the rice balls was my contribution. (The other line I wrote was ねずみのように, “like a mouse”, but the haiku it ended up in wasn’t that memorable...I don’t know what the first line, and Alisa was feeling time pressure and couldn’t think of anything for the last line and ended up with 車だよ, “It’s a car!” Heh. What would it mean to be a car like a mouse, I wonder...?)

I am reminded that I’m not very good with little children. At least, I end up feeling stressed around them, afraid of not being entertaining enough. There were a couple of kids at the barbeque, and the younger one, Jun, who was five, would follow me and Alisa around staring at us. So I kept feeling like I should talk to him, but I didn’t know what to say...especially in Japanese. So I would just grin at him and wave, and he’d blush and run away lol. Then near the end, he was following me around staring at me, so I started staring back and narrowing my eyes, which made him laugh, and then he was following me again so I spun around quickly to face him, and that somehow turned into him chasing me around one of the tables, and eventually I let him catch me. Then he began the following thing again so I walked around for a while pretending to look for him while he trailed right behind me giggling, then finally I turned around quickly and said “found you!”, or something that I hoped meant that in Japanese, and he squealed and laughed and ran away. So I felt somewhat proud of myself for managing to bond with him a bit...but I just always have this feeling that I don’t know the right way to respond, that some people just know how to be around kids that age and make them laugh and make them feel comfortable, and I have to work so hard at it. I feel much more comfortable with kids who are a bit older.

Well, fortunately I only go to an elementary school once or twice a month. But there’s no denying, the little kids are truly adorable... ^_^

Yesterday when I was hanging out at Alisa’s place eating okonomiyaki (mmm...) and watching some random movie, we were checking something on IMDb, and so then just for fun I checked the pages for Rescue Rangers and Gummi Bears and discovered that not only are my comments still first if you sort them by “Best”, but in fact at the moment they are both on the front pages. Yay. I commented happily on this fact, and Alisa started laughing and said “you are just too cute...” And it was actually really nice because I think she meant it; in other words, I think she thinks it’s sort of quirky and endearing that I’m so proud that my IMDb comments about some old Disney kids shows were found helpful by 100% of people who bothered to weigh in...rather than just thinking it’s weird or kind of pathetic. With Alisa and Jarryd I’ve been doing this sort of experiment of not hiding things about myself – so they’ve seen me belt out Japanese rock songs at karaoke, and seen me sigh over the picture of Seto I found on the cover of a Duel Monsters magazine at some second-hand store, and heard stories about how I used to* find the g.c.d. of random large numbers for fun in middle school – and, unless they’re just pretending very well because we’re pretty much the only English-speaking people around here and they can’t politely exclude me from things, they seem to like me anyway. In fact, they seem to like me for that stuff. And that’s a nice feeling.

Congratulations Rebecca, you might be thinking – you’ve discovered something no one ever thought of before, that the best way to make friends is to actually be yourself and let people get to know you. You should write a book. Well, I know it’s clichéd; and I wouldn’t claim to have discovered anything, because it’s not anything I didn’t already believe was true. And, I still can’t do it with most people. But I’m working on it, and with those two so far it just comes naturally. And I feel really lucky for that, and grateful to them.

*Footnote: Perhaps that “used to” is a little premature, considering that earlier today when I was working on math I noticed a problem that was not assigned that involved calculating some g.c.d.’s using the Euclidean Algorithm (which is indeed what I used in middle school as well – because I was just that awesome), and I was sorely tempted. I would not be shocked if those g.c.d.’s end up getting calculated tomorrow evening...

So it is currently 9:23pm on Tuesday, a time at which I was expecting to be driving back from Toyooka. On Saturday, at the Toyooka International Association welcome party thing, they told me to come to the Tuesday night classes, and I said “can I start this week?” and they said “sure.” At least so I thought they said – admittedly, it was in Japanese. In any case, I went, and I went to the third floor, as instructed, and found it completely dark and rather creepy. Heh. The second floor, however, was bright and had several people on it, whom I asked about the class, and they very kindly checked for me and determined that it wasn’t happening this week. -_-;; Next week, they said.

So, there I was in Toyooka, having driven forty minutes, at about 7:10, with nothing to do. Turns out that Toyooka, at least the section of it I was in – which seems to be one of the main shopping districts, right near the station – is about 70% shut down at 7:10 on a Tuesday. Only a few of the stores were open and there were only a handful of people walking around. I headed for the big mall right next to the station, because I hadn’t explored it yet. The first floor was relatively lively, and I ended up buying both a little change purse, which I needed, and some frozen yogurt. When I went up to the second floor, however, I found it almost empty. So I just walked back to my car and came home.


I’ve been having a hard time falling asleep, and a hard time waking up. I am quite aware that my sleep habits are terrible and unhealthy – I do all sorts of things before bed that I’m not supposed to do, like eat and type things on the computer. And I let myself snooze alarms for like, an hour. (Although Japanese alarms, it seems, treacherously turn off after you’ve snoozed them for about twenty minutes...) So I’m not complaining, since it’s clear that I could do things to help myself. Alisa also said I might not be getting enough physical exercise, which I’m sure is true. So it’s my own fault; so let’s say, I’m frustrated with myself. Even when I’m feeling really knocked out, I’ll lie in bed for an hour or two, sometimes more, unable to drift from daydreams into actual sleep. I should find more novels to read, maybe that would help...And then, in the morning, even when I’m pretty much awake enough to get up, and know I should get up and start getting things done, I can’t fight the desire to curl back up slip back into sleep. It’s not because I’m depressed or because I don’t want to be doing the things I’ll do once I get up...but especially because I’ve been having a frustrating time falling asleep, there’s something I just don’t want to let go of; when I know that if I lay back down and closed my eyes I could easily fall back into whatever dreams I was having, and I know that if I wake up any further I’ll be up for good and will have to struggle again before getting to sleep the next night...I just don’t want to let go of being asleep. Like I have to get in as much sleep as I can while I’m in that state.

But I don’t mean to be making it sound like I have some sort of terrible insomnia – it’s really about the same as usual. It always takes me a while to fall asleep. I guess it’s been frustrating because I know I need to be getting on an earlier schedule, and it seems like even when I get up at eight or nine for several days in a row, I can’t fall asleep before like two in the morning.

Well, tomorrow and Thursday I have to get up by like, oh, six, six-thirty. So perhaps that will kick my sleep schedule back a bit...

Which means I should be getting to bed now, but I know I won’t fall asleep for a while. Besides, all I’ve eaten today is three pancakes, two rice balls, and that frozen yogurt. So I’m going to make myself a snack – probably consisting of yet more simple carbs – and watch an episode or two of anime, and then try to sleep.

Oh yeah – I’ve watched four episode of that anime that Wikipedia claims has places based on Kasumi in it. I cannot verify that yet: the station, the school, and the shrine (the places Wikipedia mentions) are not based on the main, active train station, or either of the middle schools, or the one shrine-like place I’ve been to. Jarryd says there is a small, out-of-use station somewhere (or maybe more than one lol); and I haven’t really been to the high school yet, only driven past it; and there are many shrines. However, the town in the show is certainly exactly the same genre of town, sort of uncannily so. There are signs about trash disposal in the background, and all the same sorts of markings on the streets, and the same stone walls at the edge of the sand on the beach, and the same little bridges over rivers that run between rice fields. So it’s pretty cool to watch. ^_^

Okay time for food. Hmm, food, lyrics...okay, this popped into my head, and I mentioned this song earlier in the post, so it works:

夢に夢見た季節忘れちゃって、
あの子に聞いてみる。
すると微笑むあなたは言いました、
「夢って食べれるの?」

Friday, August 22, 2008

よろしく

Oh yeah, how could I have forgotten? Also yesterday I had a nice little exchange with a few junior high school boys who were riding their bikes on my street when I was walking to the 公民館. One of them called out "Hello!", and I said "Hello, konnichiwa!" and they laughed and said "konnichiwa," and the first one turned to another one and said "atarashii sensei" (new teacher), then to me, "Ne?" And I said "Hai, hai, sou desu," and smiled, and then the same one (I guess he was the outgoing one lol) said "Nihongo, jouzu!" (You're good at Japanese.) And I laughed and said "Iie, mada mada desu ne," like you're supposed to when someone praises you (No, no, I've got a long way to go...), and they laughed and all said "Yoroshiku!" and "Jaa ne!" and rode off down the street. It was really nice, I thought.

Jarryd later told me that at 一中 they have a stated goal to be the best in the nation at 挨拶, greetings (aisatsu). In other words, all the sort of ritualized things you say to people when you meet them or see them or arrive or leave or whatever. Well, I guess it's good to have lofty goals....

Meanwhile I've found myself having trouble explaining よろしく, yoroshiku, to people who've never taken Japanese...I'll end up saying "well, it's just what you say to people, it doesn't really mean anything." Which is sort of true. It's part of the phrase どうぞよろしくお願いします, which means something like "please treat me kindly," but we don't say that in English. So yeah. It's a useful phrase to know if you're ever in Japan. ^_^

またね。

Thursday, August 21, 2008

百京円

This is the first post in a while that I'm writing in the little blogspot window thing instead of on Microsoft Word. I'm in Alisa's living room right now, staying here tonight instead of driving back to Kasumi and then back to Muraoka early in the morning for all my internet appointments. "But Alisa doesn't have internet yet, does she?" you might be asking yourselves. She doesn't. But we have made the discovery that somehow Jarryd's computer broadcasts some sort of wireless signal -- I don't entirely understand it, but that's okay! I'm willing to use internet I don't understand. And I am so much more comfortable hanging out here than in the empty apartment of a guy I've barely met. Heh. So tomorrow I should be able to use internet from here or Jarryd's place. よかった!

Firstly, I remembered what it was I'd also meant to say last time: namely, I had an insight into one little reason some of my interactions have been confusing. I should have thought of this before because it was something I already knew: in Japanese, the way you answer negative yes/no questions is different from English. In other words, if someone says, say, "Did you not eat lunch yet?" and you say "No," you've just negated their negative, so you're saying you did eat lunch. I've had a bunch of exchanges along the lines of,
日本人:これ、いらない? (Do you not need this?)
Me: ううん。(No.) *shakes head*
日本人:いる? (You do need it?)
Me: いいえ。(No.)
日本人: *confused*
And just yesterday it occurred to me that that's why they've been confused! I should have been answering "yes, I do not need it."

And now, I should be going to sleep, since it's 2:07am, but...I'd rather write about my day! Heh. So today I hung out for a while at the 公民館 (kouminkan -- remember those kanji 'cause from now on I won't transliterate), doing math, which was fun; and every little while one of the people would come over and look over my shoulder and say "へえっ、すごい難しい。" ("Heh, that's really hard!") There aren't any math people there so all of them are very impressed when they glance at whatever page I have open of the textbook. Unfortunately no one has asked me what sort of math it was, so I haven't gotten to use 楕円曲線 in conversation. I feel, though, like they wouldn't know that term...and if they knew what an ellipse is, which is likely, I'd probably have a hard time explaining that elliptic curves are not actually ellipses, but are just called elliptic curves for some rather involved reason...so perhaps it's just as well that no one's asked. ^_^

白井さん (Shirai-san) did ask me to say something that I thought was better about Americans than Japanese people. I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just said it was a hard question and I'd keep thinking. (When I conveyed the question to Adam who was on gchat at the time, he suggested "they're modest." But I didn't know how to say that in Japanese...and we both agreed the irony would be lost on them anyway and they'd just be sort of confused. Heh. Ironically, the Japanese word for "modest" came up in conversation later; apparently it's 謙遜、けんそん. So now I know. Meanwhile it reminded me of the story my mom used to tell, where there's a Rabbi or something, some learned teacher-like person, and he's sitting with his eyes closed, and a few of his students come in, and think that he's asleep. So they start whispering to each other about how wonderful he is, how he's a wise and patient teacher and a kind person and his philosophical insights are so profound, and so on...and finally, the teacher, who is in fact awake, is getting a bit frustrated listening to them listing all his virtues, because he feels they're not including everything they ought to be; and finally he can't stand it anymore and he opens his eyes and looks at them, offended, and says "And of my modesty, you say nothing?")

Then I drove down to 村岡 (Muraoka -- learn the place name kanji 'cause it's more fun than writing them in romaji) and Jarryd and Alisa and I went to 豊岡 (Toyooka -- yup, same "oka") to a meeting with three Japanese women that Jarryd does volunteer stuff with. Right now they're working on a play, The Three Little Pigs, which is to be performed on October 11th for a bunch of kids. One of the women lives in 香住 (definitely learn that one -- it's Kasumi), and her son goes to 二中 (Nichu, the smaller school; that's the kanji for two, and middle, short for 第二中学校, number two middle school). She gave me her phone number and told me to call her if I ever need help with anything. We worked on reading over the script; the three women are going to be the pigs, Jarryd is the wolf, and apparently Alisa and I have volunteered to be mother pigs, with the job of sort of hyping up the audience in the beginning. (There was temporary worry about there being two mother pigs...but then Alisa pointed out that nowhere in our script was it written that the three pigs were siblings, so they could just be friends, with separate mothers. So that was okay then. A lesbian pig couple is apparently a little too much to ask the Japanese kids to accept...) We spent a lot of time repeating "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!" Which is quite hard to say if you don't really speak English. And hard to explain exactly what it means even if you do...And we also talked a bit about how to do the set, and apparently I am going to paint the basic background, just some simple mountains and a sky or something. Yay, painting. And it was just really fun and the people were lovely and it's nice to be getting involved in something. :-)

Afterward we had a bit of time to kill, so Jarryd and Alisa and I and the two younger women from the meeting (Ayumi and Tae, the two who don't live in 香住) went to an arcade/bowling place for like twenty minutes, and we did the little photo booth thing -- it's like one of those little photo booths that we have in the US, only it makes those look utterly pathetic. These ones are really fancy and have all sorts of backgrounds and special effects and you can draw and write stuff on the pictures. And the photos you get are stickers, I think. They came out really nice, actually.

Then 'twas time for dinner. For dinner we were joined by Tania, a math teacher from 香住高校 (high school) whose last name might or might not have been Ishigawa (let's assume it was for now), and an English teacher from 一中 (Icchu; can anyone guess what 一 means?) named Kuroda-san. So he's one of the teachers I'll be working with. But he's apparently only been teaching for three months. The conversation went back and forth between English and Japanese, which was nice because it was good practice but I was able to find a way to say pretty much anything I wanted to say. Oh, and we went to the restaurant the party last weekend was at, so I could eat Mexican food! うれしかったよ。 I had a share of some nachos, and a burrito. I learned that root beer is not common in either Japan or Australia; Alisa ordered root beer and everyone wanted to try some, and the Japanese people all said it tasted like medicine and they made very weird faces when they tried it. I got Dr. Pepper and that was also unfamiliar to them but they seemed to like it better. びっくりした; maybe it's just because I've been drinking root beer since I was little, but I'd have thought Dr. Pepper would be a harder taste to get used to. I tend to think of root beer as sort of neutral tasting. But I guess maybe it was the first soda I ever drank much of...

So I was chatting a bit with Ishigawa-san about his teaching, and he was saying (as I've heard several times about 香住高校) that there's a really wide range there, from students who are studying for the college entrance exams to students who don't care about school at all, and are doing the marine studies curriculum, i.e. fishing, which is not aimed at going to college. So he was giving me an example of the kind of problem he'd do with those students: Bill Gates, he said, has about 10,000,000,000,000 yen. Suppose that every single day, he spent 1,000,000 yen. Then how many years would it take him to run out of money? (I guess we're assuming he's not making any new money during this time...) And he told me to guess, without calculating. The woman sitting next to me (who was actually some random other woman who joined us later; another friend of Jarryd's, I guess, but I never quite caught who she was) guessed 50 years. Now, obviously, it's ten million days, and ten million divided by 365, even accounting for leap years, is not 50. But I know it's more fun when people make ridiculously low guesses like that...so I guessed 5000 years. He said it's about 27,000. Okay, I said, now suppose you have a chess board, and on the first square you put one grain of rice (I needed Jarryd's help to say "grain of rice" in Japanese...), and on the second you put two, and on the third you put four, and then eight, and so on for the whole board. How many grains do you need in total? And he kept wanting to calculate, but I told him to guess, because that's what he'd told me with his problem when I started counting up zeroes. So finally he guessed 100,000,000. Now, I did this problem in middle school -- and me being all anti-calculator, I had in fact written out all of the powers of two up to 2^64. But that was middle school. And I couldn't remember for sure exactly what the order of magnitude was, but I knew it started with Q. So I told him it was at least 1,000,000,000,000,000. Then, since he now had permission to calculate, he took the paper I was using and wrote down "log_10(2) = .301, 301x64 = 19200 + 64 = 19264", so apparently it should have been close to 10^19, so more like ten quintillion. I liked the fact that he knew log2 up to three decimal places off the top of his head. I told that to Alisa and Jarryd on the ride back and they said I am attracted to odd things...

(Being now at my computer, and having since middle school abandoned my principles, I can say that the correct answer is in fact 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice.)

I asked the same question to the two women from the meeting, except I changed it to be giving money each day for two months, one yen the first day, two the second, four the third, and so on, and asked how much money you'd have after two months. They were very reluctant to guess. Finally they guessed 3200 yen. They were very surprised when I wrote out one quintillion. They didn't even know the Japanese words for so many zeros. (One quintillion, apparently, is 百京、ひゃくけい, a hundred kei.) But, impressively, Ayumi noticed while she was working on the problem, starting to add up the first few days I guess, that when you added up everything up to a certain day, the total was one less than what you got the next day. A key observation.

So that was fun. ^_^


We were at the restaurant until about 12:30, and then came back here, and now it's -- eep! -- 3:21, and I've got a Skype date with my parents in five and a half hours...so I guess I should get some sleep.

Powers of two make me think of this song:

Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds;
You and your arithmetic,
You'll probably go far.

Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds;
Seems to me you'd stop and see
How beautiful they are...

Another Harry's Bar

[8/20]

Fortunately, the orientation in Kobe today was not very exciting. So I will not write much about it. (Fortunately because I’ve been posting too much anyway...heh.) The drive actually only took about three hours from my house, which isn’t bad. And Mizuta-san drives slow. And it was weird, even after only three weeks or whatever, to be in a city again. It’s just so different. But that’s not a very deep observation, is it?

The best part of the trip was the sunset on the way back; there were scattered dark clouds with the sun peeking out from behind them and making huge rays of light and halos around the clouds, all over layers of shadowy mountains. I kept trying to take pictures with my phone but it was hard from the car.

Here’s the random musings I wanted to write about tonight: yesterday, hanging out with Jarryd and Tania (not the one whose house I stayed at but the other one, whose name I am arbitrarily spelling with an i to distinguish her), both of whom have been here for years and years, they were talking about how often they went home (not very – Jarryd hasn’t been home yet in his five years here!), and they were sort of shrugging and saying “well, what is there to go home for?” And it just made me think how different this all would feel if I didn’t feel so tied to my life back at home. If I were, in some way, looking to really center my life here. I mean, I want to love it here, I want to bond with this place, I want to meet people I care about, I want to feel like I belong here...but I guess, right now, I can’t picture wanting to root myself here. I feel like I have too many roots already back at home. I guess it hadn’t explicitly occurred to me that some percentage of the people who come to Japan in this program don’t particularly feel like they have strong ties at home. I’m lucky enough to have a family that I’m really close to, as well as a handful of friends who are really important to me. It just must feel really different to come here thinking that you want to really set up your life here. (I’m not trying to make it sound like my situation is somehow better – I think it’s pretty cool to come to a foreign country and stay here for four or five or ten years and really live here. Just that for me, right now, I find that thought kind of scary. Because I’d be leaving so much.)

And everyone says “you have to stay at least two years; you don’t really get into the swing of things until your second year.” That sort of scares me too. I wasn’t planning to stay for more than a year. I have things to return to that I don’t want to give up. But being surrounded by all these people whose whole lives seem to center in Tajima, I feel almost...guilty, or something, saying I was only planning to stay for a year. And I already know it will be hard for me to leave if all the people I know are staying. But right now, I can’t imagine not wanting to go back home after a year.

After all, if my friends are still here, then I’ll always have a place to crash if I want to come back and visit. ^_^


In other news, we were talking about the local dialect, or Kansai-ben I guess, the other day, and Jarryd was saying one of the main things that’s different is that they use ~hen instead of ~nai for a negative ending a lot of the time. So today I was watching out for that in Mizuta-san’s speech, and he does it all the time! It made him significantly easier to understand, knowing that that meant ~nai. Heh.

And now, while I feel there was something else I meant to write about, I can’t remember it, and I got up at 7:30 this morning, so I think I’ll try to sleep now. My plans to do math yesterday kept being thwarted (by, for example, people ordering me to play video games instead – I mean, there’s only so much you can insist on reading a math textbook instead of playing video games before people think you’re really weird...), so tomorrow I’ve got a lot to do before Jarryd and Alisa get here at five. がんばります!

Oh oh, in (or near) Kobe I saw a bar called Harry’s Bar! It was exciting. So here are some lyrics from Another Harry’s Bar:

God’s tears on the sidewalk; it’s the mother of all rain.
But in the thick blue haze of Harry’s you will feel no pain.
And you will feel no soft hand slipping on your knee;
You don’t have to pay for memories, they will all come free.

It’s another Harry’s Bar,
Or that’s the tale they tell.
But Harry’s long gone now,
And the customers as well.
Yeah me and the dog and the ghost of Harry will make this world turn right,
It’ll all turn right...

透けて見えるぜ

[8/19]

I was told today, by Alisa, that I don’t look liberal. She said she kept being surprised when I said liberal things. What would make me look more liberal, I asked. More piercings in my ears? Tie-dyed t shirts? Birkenstocks? I mean, I suppose I wouldn’t have claimed that I looked especially left-wing. But I’ve never been in an environment, I guess, in which it wasn’t basically assumed that I was liberal. So I guess I’ve never really thought about what sort of political aura I give off. Does the fact that I dress sort of boringly and conservatively and am not, I dunno, a wild party girl, make me seem more conservative? Lol.

Eric – not that I really expect that you’re reading this – but are you voting in Ohio or Virginia? Alisa’s voting in Virginia and she’s currently undecided. If she votes for McCain, vote in Virginia and cancel her vote! Heh. You’re probably voting in Ohio though. Oh well. I asked why she was undecided and she said a bunch of stuff about Obama not having much experience and being sort of tied to a lot of different people with unclear motives, or something. I dunno, I mean I am terrible at political debates because when it comes down to it, I’m not very well informed. (Especially now when I’ve barely read any American news in three weeks...) But it just feels to me like, okay, maybe you don’t think Obama is perfect in every way, but how can that lead you to go all the way to voting for McCain? Maybe I just don’t have very pure ideals or something, but hell, I just want a democrat to win. I don’t care if he’s inexperienced or young or superficial or whatever. He’s got to be better than McCain. I mean if someone said to me “I’m voting for McCain because I believe the war in Iraq was a good thing and because I believe national health care is a terrible thing and because I believe gay sex should be outlawed,” then fine, at least that seems, I dunno, straightforward. But to vote for McCain because you’re worried Obama might be a bit inexperienced? That just doesn’t make sense to me. Their policies are going to be so different.

However, Alisa also said that if Obama wins, her dad (who works for the Pentagon) could lose his job. Now, if I knew the details of whatever policy of Obama’s would lead to that, I would probably be in favor of it. But of course, on a personal level, I don’t want Alisa’s father to lose his job. I certainly can’t say to her “oh, well, that sucks but I’d probably agree with the policy decision.” And I guess I can understand why that would push her toward voting for McCain...although I think it could be debated whether it really made sense to help impose McCain on the rest of us just to help her father keep his job. Like, it might make more sense for her to kind of, abstain from this election because she had that personal stake? But that’s a horrible thing to say; like I’m trying to disenfranchise her just because she might not vote for who I want to win. If McCain’s policies were going to lead to her father losing his job, I would probably say “yeah that bastard, you’d better vote for Obama!” So I take it back. But it just seems odd to me to be undecided between McCain and Obama.

Meanwhile Jarryd and a Japanese girl who was hanging out with us were sitting over on the couch shaking their heads and saying “man, American politics are weird...” Heh.

And, to complete the scene, the TV was showing synchronized swimming. Duets. One of the oddest things I’ve watched. Some of it is close to beautiful...and I would never deny that it takes a ton of skill and athletic ability. But yeesh...the whole thing just has this forced, artificial air about it. The people wear these hideously fake smiles, and the way they move so precisely in unison, like as they walk out to the edge of the pool, is sort of...creepy. They also wear a ton of eye makeup, which I find odd. But I tend to find eye makeup odd in most contexts. Japan was third after the preliminary round. Yay Japan! (“Well,” Jarryd said, “Japanese people are good at doing things in unison...”)

It made me think of some of the thoughts that float through my head when I watch the taiko and dance performances at Swarthmore in the spring...about unison and symmetry. Because I’ve often thought that one of the many things I find so powerful about that performance is the tension between synchronization and, umm, whatever the opposite of that is. That part of what makes the dances so beautiful is how the motions are almost perfectly in synch, but not quite. It wouldn’t be quite as effective if all the dancers looked just the same and actually moved at exactly the same time in exactly the same way. But obviously that’s basically what they’re going for, and so something about reaching for that perfect symmetry and synchronization and inevitably falling short is powerful, and beautiful. I might even be able to relate it to what I think I said somewhere else on this blog about the tension between the sort of ideal created in the mind of the listener/watcher, and what you’re actually given. It might be a similar idea, in some ways. Or just something about how the little differences and asymmetries make the whole pattern more compelling.

But I didn’t have that reaction to the synchronized swimming. Maybe it was, in fact, too synchronized. In any case, it just kept feeling unnatural. But it’s technically impressive, I’ll give them that.


Okay enough of that. Today I went down to Muraoka again and hung out with people. I guess the highlight was going to a waterfall...but I left my phone in Jarryd’s apartment by mistake, so I couldn’t take pictures. :-/ Next time. There was a little sign that said if you look carefully you can find rocks that look like the Virgin Mary, the Buddha, and a monkey. (Like, separate rocks, not all three at once. That would be more impressive, ne?) But you have to climb up to the upper platform, and we didn’t. Again, next time. As for the rest of the week, tomorrow is “orientation” in Kobe...which means driving for three and a half hours, sitting around for three hours listening to people talk about, I guess, being a junior high school JET in Hyogo (since it is an orientation for junior high school JETs in Hyogo...), and then driving back for another three and a half hours. Now, for those of you who are good at math: does that seem like a reasonable ratio of driving to, umm, content? We won’t even get to explore around Kobe. Well...at least we’ll know how to drive there, lol. Mizuta-san’s taking us. So really, seven hours in the car with Alisa and Mizuta-san should be a relatively fun way to spend seven hours...but still. And then on Thursday I’m going to hang around here for most of the day, chat with people at the kouminkan, work on math, and then in the evening I’m going with Jarryd to some sort of volunteer group thing he does with some Japanese people where they do plays and other projects with kids. And then to dinner at that restaurant the party was at this weekend – so I can have nachos! Yay. They were actually quite delicious nachos. Friday I’ll be online for the morning and early afternoon and then I don’t know what I’ll do in the evening. (So this will probably get posted on Friday, and I’ll probably have more interesting things to say by then, like about orientation and the meeting on Thursday...but oh well.) Saturday there’s a welcome party at the Toyooka International Association, along with some sort of placement test for the classes they offer. Unless they strongly discourage me, I’m leaning toward trying to study for nikyuu, to take this winter. You need to know about 1000 kanji, and I wouldn’t mind knowing about 1000 kanji by December in any case. But I’ll look over the materials on Saturday, and see if that seems impossible. Sunday there’s some sort of party or barbeque or something (I wonder if they know I’m vegetarian...doubtful...) that some sort of International Association in Kasumi is putting on...but I’m rather unclear on the details of that. A guy I was talking to today at the kouminkan told me someone was going to come pick me up. Oookay...was anyone planning to fill me in on any of this? He only told me that much after I’d awkwardly grilled him for several minutes about the logistics of this thing. I asked if other ALTs would be there and he said “oh, I don’t know, that would be nice...” Well, they’re not just going to magically show up. Heh, well we’ll see. Then Monday and Tuesday are free as far as I know, and Wednesday and Thursday I’m going to my schools! And then as of the following week, school starts! Eeeep.

I have to get up at like 8:00 tomorrow morning to drive to Kobe, so now I think I shall have a snack, watch an episode or two of anime, and try to sleep. ^_^

I don’t entirely know what the following lyrics mean...in fact, if anyone has any insights into translating them, especially the last (Japanese) line, that would be greatly appreciated. (Enough so that I put that sentence in bold!) But I like the song in any case. I think, in general, the song is something about cutting through societal restrictions to your real self, or something. (It’s the same song that has the line I really like: “微笑んで見ててあげるから、好きにしないよ。” They’re watching you and smiling so you can’t do what you want. Or literally, they’re giving you the act of watching you and smiling.)

Scan your brain, scan your bone,
透けて見えるぜ、何もかもが
Scan your brain, scan your bone,
甘く見てればいいのさ、今のうちさ
Scan your brain, scan your bone,
まるでハリボテ、ハリコのトラ
Scan your brain, scan your bone,
知らぬが仏せいぜい吠えりゃいいさ
Scan you all...

Monday, August 18, 2008

きれいな所

[8/16]

It’s 4:39, and I have to catch a 5:46 train to Toyooka. So I give myself, oh, twenty-five minutes to write. Okay, then I’ll put on Picture Perfect World, and when it ends, my time’s up.

Right now it’s raining, pretty hard, but fortunately I was left two umbrellas, which should be more than enough to get me to train station without too much water damage. And meanwhile the rain is beautiful, especially the sound it makes on all the roofs. (I always want the plural of that word to be rooves...but it isn’t, is it? Pity.)

I don’t know what the hell my predecessor was talking about when he said there wasn’t really anywhere nice around here to walk or just sit. Sheesh. Today Yumi took me around to a bunch of places, starting with Okami Kouen (that’s 岡見公園...a park from which you see hills, I guess?), which was absolutely lovely.

(Speaking of lovely, I just had to take a break from writing to go open the window upstairs and watch the rain for a bit, because it started absolutely pouring...すごいきれいよ。)

Anyway, 岡見公園 is a little spot on the top of a cliff near the water, with a couple of benches, and an odd stone structure that must have some sort of traditional religious significance or something...when I asked what it was, Yumi said she’d never really thought about it. It just was. Which is sort of cool. I took a picture on my phone (my camera, I discovered, is pretty much out of batteries...oh well). I wonder if there’s a way to upload pictures from my phone to the computer...できるかな...I know the phone came with a USB chord. Maybe that will enable the transfer of photos. I’ll try that out sometime soon. And grass! Grass grown in odd little squares, at least partly. There were people having a picnic down on some rocks by the water – how they got there is beyond me, though. I guess you could scramble down the side of those cliffs if you really wanted to; there was sort of a path. But not in the shoes I was wearing...I already injured my ankle by tripping in the parking lot of Toyooka station. I think that suggests that picking my way down rocky slopes might be a somewhat bad plan.....

And it looks out over the water, to the west, so Yumi said it’s the best spot to watch sunsets. I think I could walk there if I were willing to walk for twenty minutes or half an hour or something. I’ll have to test it out. In any case I want to go there a lot, to just sit or read or draw or whatever. At least before it gets too cold...


Well, we did a bunch of other things, but the record has already finished – what with watching the rain and getting a call just now from the guy who’s picking me up at Toyooka station when I get there, I didn’t get to write much. Oh well; more later! (Or tomorrow, if I end up crashing at someone’s house in Toyooka...)

またね!

....................

Okay it’s tomorrow, aka Sunday. I just got back. Nice that coming back to Kasumi feels like coming home. I am absolutely starving, having eaten nothing since a light supper yesterday of half a quesadilla, a few nachos, and salad, but while the water boils I can start writing. The party last night was...interesting, but I think it will be more interesting in email form, just to be safe. Heh.

Meanwhile back to yesterday afternoon. After the park, Yumi took me to a temple in Kasumi, whose name I forget. It’s got thirteen rooms with painted walls, mostly painted by some relatively famous artist from Kyoto. You walk in through huge gates, past a couple trees that we were told were 1000 and 500 years old, and then there’s a statue of someone – a man – at which you light a little green stick and put it in a big pot filled with sand. And throw a coin into a wooden box. I find I love rituals like that. I even love tiny rituals like taking your shoes off before you enter places. One of the rooms upstairs in my house, the tatami one, feels for some reason to me like a slightly sacred room – maybe because of all the tatami, and a little raised wooden platform in one corner that looks like it should be some sort of shrine, and the fact that you have to go up a small step to enter the room – so I bow before I enter it. There’s something really comforting about all of that...I don’t know how to explain it. Anyway, then we went in to the genkan and took off our shoes, and then entered the sort of entrance room, where you kneel on the floor and writing your name and address in a book. The woman at the counter was very impressed I could write my address in kanji and my name in katakana, and speak a few easy sentences of Japanese. Then a youngish guy took us on a tour, on which we were joined by a Japanese family. They gave me a little information pamphlet in English, but it had much less information that was being explained in Japanese by the tour guide. Yumi translated some of what he said, and some I think I managed to follow. For example, in one room, where the walls are painted with koi and turtles swimming around a little river or pond, the guide had us first stand on one side of the room, and then on the other, to look at a couple of the animals: one fish, for example, if you looked at it from the right side of the room it looked like it was swimming away toward the left, and if you looked at it from the left side of the room, it looked like it was curving toward the right, swimming toward the other fish. And a similar thing with one of the turtles. In another room, which depicted puppies playing under a tree, two of the puppies seemed like they were staring straight at you wherever you stood. One room had a big ceramic jar with slots in the top for you to put in coins, and when you dropped a coin in it made a beautiful, echoing musical sound. Anyway, I think what was mainly innovative about these paintings was the way they worked with the space of the rooms and didn’t expect the viewer to be staring directly at them from the front all the time. Which is pretty cool. I didn’t take pictures, because no one else was; I didn’t see any signs saying not to, but I didn’t want to be the obnoxious America tourist taking pictures of the sacred temple paintings. So if you want to see them, you’ll have to visit me. ;-P

When we were done with the eleven downstairs rooms, they offered us a tour of the two upstairs rooms, which apparently they don’t always include on the tour...I’m not certain, but I think the woman said they only show them specially, so like, they were taking me there because I was a foreigner, or something. In the first room upstairs we started chatting with the woman who had taken over the from the guy for the upstairs part; she said she had a daughter my age who was really good at English and had gone to New Zealand for a month or so once, and then they’d hosted an exchange student from New Zealand. But that student didn’t like Japan very much and got really homesick and would cry every night and refuse to eat Japanese food. Which led to a conversation about whether I like Japanese food, which of course led to vegetarianism and another episode of going through lists of food and determining whether I can eat them. Apparently her daughter is now in Tokyo doing some sort of musical.

The last room depicted a group of monkeys, or rather apes, hanging out around some rocks, and I think it was my favorite room. The apes were so playful. That room, the woman pointed out, had a low ceiling so that you couldn’t draw your sword in it. That’s comforting. The woman told me that if I ever had any problems, I should come down to the temple and talk to her and she’d help me. Isn’t that sweet?

I really wanted to buy something at the little gift shop (aka, stuff displayed around the counter)...but until I get paid (Wednesday!) I’m trying not to spend money that I don’t in some sense have to. But I am certain I’ll be back there, and then I’ll buy something. On the way out we walked around the area outside the temple a bit, where there were some other very beautiful buildings and little shrines and gardens. Then we went to a sweets shop right next door, where they have a bunch of sweets out on a table that you can sample for free. I felt bad sampling and not buying anything...but I really didn’t need any sweets, even though some of them are quite good. But Yumi bought something, at least.

Next she drove me over to the famous railroad bridge. Which, uh...isn’t really that exciting. It’s a big red bridge. I suppose it’s an impressive construction. I’d be slightly more impressed if a train hadn’t fallen off of it about twenty years ago, killing both passengers and people on the ground. Now, apparently, they don’t drive the trains over it when it’s too windy. Somehow I would have wanted a more extreme reaction to that event...can’t wind start to blow while a train is on the bridge? Well, I’ll probably take the train to Hamasaka at some point while I’m here, so let’s hope there aren’t any sudden gusts...

There were many Japanese people standing around pointing their cell phones up at the bridge. I guess it’s a tourist attraction?

After that she gave me two choices: keep driving further toward Hamasaka for more sightseeing, or go back to Kasumi and eat cake. I chose the cake (it sounded like that was her first choice too...). So we went to a cute little café/bakery in Kasumi, near the water. By the water there’s another park with even more grass, and a sidewalk near the water to walk on, which I’m sure I could walk to. But it was raining by then, so we didn’t go there. The café had big stuffed animals of Elmo and Snoopy and some other random animals I didn’t recognize. I got some sort of ice cream thing with fudge sauce, bananas, and strawberries. It wasn’t bad. We chatted about music and she told me some of her favorite Japanese groups. After that it was getting close to when I needed to catch the train, so she brought me back here, and I wrote the first part of this post and then headed out to the train station.


Which brings me to the party, so check your email. ^_^

まっさらな空 どこまでも連れて
限りなく舞い上がるよ

Thursday, August 14, 2008

[8/14]

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with my cell phone. When I first got it, in the car with Mizuta-san and Nishimoto-kun, I was trying to save Mizuta-san’s number, and in trying to enter the name I got very confused, and couldn’t figure out how to delete characters; I kept saying “ack!” and giggling, until finally Nishimoto-kun offered to do it for me. At that point I had entered pタ as the name. The next time I saw Nishimoto-kun he sort of smirked and said “Keitai wa dou? Naremashita ka?” (How’s the cell phone? Have you gotten used to it?) Heh. I have gotten much more used to it. I know how to take pictures, send and receive email, set all the sound and display options, and even delete characters. Sending email costs money but receiving it doesn’t, so I set my gmail up to forward to my phone, until I have internet in my house at least. So forget whatever I’ve said about sending email to my phone; it doesn’t matter where you send it. I even got fancy and set it so that when I receive a call there’s a little animated panda that waves its arms around, and for email there’s a penguin. And I even gave a few people special email ring tones just because I could. The one annoying thing is that there’s no quick way to get it to be silent for emails but not for calls. I don’t like to be unreachable at night, so I don’t want to put it on silent, but I don’t want to get woken up just because Coldwater Creek sends a coupon to my gmail account. But people have had to do worse things than click through a few menus to change the email receive volume a couple times a day.

And now I have my camera, so I can take a picture of the cell phone without having to set up some elaborate system of mirrors. Which is really a pity, because I quite enjoy elaborate systems of mirrors. But it would seem a little dumb at this point to bring down the mirror from upstairs, set it up in front of the bathroom mirror, and take a picture with the cell phone of the reflection of its reflection...ne? Zannen na; tanoshimi ni shiteta. ^_^

When we were in the 100-yen store the other day, standing near some shelves of small mirrors, I commented that I love mirrors. And then remembered that when I say that it doesn’t necessarily convey the intended meaning, so...”Uh, I mean, not looking at myself in them...just like, conceptually. Philosophically. Artistically.” Then I said something about indirect paths of light, how I like being made to think about all the zig-zags a given speck of light had to take in order to end up in my eye, and the sort of tension between what is “real” and what is just reflected...at this point I think Jarryd was just sort of giving me a weird look. Heh.

I don’t think this post will have any bold in it at all...but that’s okay. It’s been a lazy day; I meant to get up at eight but actually got up at....uh....one. Oops. Well, I figure I needed to catch up on sleep. Did laundry, walked to the store, made myself scrambled eggs and toast (a comfortingly American breakfast...), did laundry, then lay on the couch watching anime for a while, while outside it was raining lightly. Tonight Jarryd’s taking me out to dinner with some friend of his who lives in Kasumi; he’s trying to help me start networking a bit lol. I, being an idiot, had accidentally thought that was happening yesterday. That’s what comes from skimming emails that are in Japanese. (Actually I think my problem was that his email was right next to a previous one whose subject line was “today,” so subconsciously I think I applied that subject line to the new email by mistake. And then glossed over the fact that the first word of the new email was “tomorrow”...) Anyway, he told me to invite people from the kouminkan, but there aren’t very many people there ‘cause it’s Obon, and I felt really awkward about it anyway. He also told me to ask them for a list of people in Kasumi who are interested in English, and I did that, but they told me they couldn’t show it to me. Fair enough, I guess. So I think it’ll just be one other person. Oh well.

This isn’t a very exciting story, but yesterday I made myself spaghetti, intending to put butter on it, and then at the last minute as an impulse I put soy sauce and sesame soy sauce and chili powder on it instead. It was....interesting. Good, actually. One of these days when I’m bored I’ll finally look through the books about being vegetarian in Japan and see if they have any recipes I feel like trying.

In the meantime, I’m quite happy to now have milk and eggs in the house. Maybe I’ll make pancakes for a late-night snack later...

Speaking of food, if the scale in my bathroom is to be believed, I’ve lost like 4kg since I got here. That’s kind of too fast, ne? And I thought I’d been eating quite a lot. I guess some of that could just be normal monthly fluctuation...but not all 8.8 pounds of it. So I guess that’s encouraging? But I’d ideally go at about half that rate lol. Oh well, it’s not like I’ve been going hungry. But if that pace kept up (which it won’t), then in another three weeks I’d weigh less than I have since like sixth grade. Heh.

Once it gets a little cooler I think I’ll walk to Icchu instead of driving; it’s only like a fifteen or twenty minute walk. Of course I could also bike, but that would require, umm, knowing how to bike. And I’m still at the stage of wobbling along the wide, straight, car-less path from here to the grocery store; I don’t think I could navigate my way along the roads to school.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for me will be having no way to reach people instantly. I’m not worried about “falling out of touch,” not with the people I really care about; we’ll always find a way to keep in touch. But I’ve always been able to contact people right at the moment I needed to; and if not at the precise moment, then very soon thereafter. I could always call Andrew’s cell phone and at least hear his voice on the voicemail, and know that if I left a message saying “call me as soon as you can,” he would. I could always call home, and call my parents’ cell phones, if I just had a sudden need to talk to someone, or be reassured or comforted. And of course at college, I had friends living right across the hall, right upstairs, who I knew I could find if I needed them. Yesterday in the car driving home from Muraoka, the area to the right of my right eye started tingling a bit. I ran my fingers along it, and decided it felt numb. Well why would part of my head feel numb? An impending stroke, obviously. I tested out my ability to talk, to move my arms and legs. But when I closed my right eye, I was convinced something felt tight and weird. And then I started noticing little pains, in my right leg, my right arm. And wasn’t I a little lightheaded? I started to feel panicked.

Of course, this has happened to me enough over the years that the logical voice that tells me that I’m being ridiculous has some authority. But not as much authority as my mom, who’s been to medical school. And, perhaps more importantly, is my mom. And it just struck me, as I drove along trying to pay attention to following the curves and wondering if I should be looking for a place to pull over until I came to my senses (or, you know, had a stroke and died...), that it was four in the morning on the east coast, and in any case I have no way of calling home, no way of reaching my parents when they’re not at a computer, when we’re not both at a computer.

Well come on, I’m not nine years old anymore. I shouldn’t need to call my mom just to be told that a bit of tingling on my forehead doesn’t mean I’m about to die, right? And I didn’t end up having to pull over; I forced myself to concentrate on singing to the Malice Mizer CD I was listening to, and on driving, and by the time I got home the panic had passed. So maybe I can do it. Is that part of being an actual grown-up, being able to pull yourself through those moments when you just need to talk to someone, even if you know exactly what they’ll say, just to be comforted? To know how to comfort yourself instead?

Eh, I don’t really think so. I don’t like that vision of “grown-up,” where it’s all about being self-sufficient and independent. I think there’s something to be said for developing the ability to control illogical panic and to find ways to get yourself through times when you desperately want human contact and there’s no way to get it right then. But not so much because it’s more “grown-up” as just because it will help you be happier and more able to deal with life. I think those feelings of needing comfort are legitimate, though. And I think it’s going to be hard sometimes when all I can do is send out emails and wait.

Okay Jarryd’s here, gotta go!!

..............

Back. Tanoshikatta yo! We went to a fancy-ish little restaurant that said “Pizza and Pasta” on a sign outside, and sure enough that had pizza and pasta...all of which had some sort of meat or fish. Well, not technically all: I ended up ordering ziti with “gorgonzola cheese sauce”. It was sort of like alfredo sauce, but not quite. Not bad, actually, although I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat it. We also had spiced french fries, which were quite good (hey now, I thought I was supposed to be avoiding french fries...oops). And I had two small slices of a pizza that Jarryd ordered specially to have a few slices without fish. So it was just asparagus. Also not too bad. And I’m terrible at ordering alcohol, because I don’t know the names of any drinks I like – even in English! – so Yumi said she’d just order me what she was getting. So I had two drinks, the first of which I liked and the second of which I didn’t like so much. But I don’t know what they were.

Right, Yumi: Jarryd’s friend, who lives somewhere around here. She was really sweet! She speaks really good English. On Saturday she’s going to take me to a park near her house that has a little shrine and which she says is the best place to watch sunsets. (Hmm, Wikipedia said the places in AIR that are based on real places in Kasumi include the school, the station, and the shrine, didn’t it? Sono shrine kana...?) We spent a lot of the dinner talking about anime – Jarryd wants to have an Evangelion (sp?) party at my house because I’ve never seen it, lol. He said we should start a Kasumi anime club. That’s fine with me, even though honestly I haven’t seen that much different anime. And I don’t know if the people in Kasumi want to watch Yugioh.....heh. We also spent a while trying to figure out how to write various English names in kanji. My name is hard because there aren’t any common kanji pronounced “re”. All Yumi could think of was the first kanji of “remon”, aka lemon. But I’d say the sense in which that kanji is read “re” is a little...I dunno, contrived. It seems like a case where the kanji and reading are pretty separate. That kanji is 檸. Eighteen strokes. Other than that, all they could think of were kanji whose readings are actually “rei” or “retsu”, which would lead to odd pronunciations of my name. Then for “bekka” there are lots of possibilities. The most obvious for the first kanji would be 別, betsu, which means like, separate. Then there are like sixty or seventy kanji pronounced “ka”. I figured since I’m living in Kasumi I might as well go with 香. Put that all together and...I don’t know what the hell it means.


And Jarryd showed me another trick my cell phone can do: magically beaming information to other phones. It’s pretty sweet. You just tell it to send the information, like my email address and phone number or whatever, and put the phone near the phone you want to send it to, and it transfers. Ahh technology...

Meanwhile it’s 10:19; I woke up really late today, so unfortunately I probably can’t get to sleep for a little while. But tomorrow I need to get up at like 7:45 or something to get down to Muraoka by 9:00, which is when I told my parents I’d be online. (Hear that parents: if I’m so tired that I drive right off the side of the road into a rice paddy, it’ll be all your fault! But if you’re reading this, I must not have died, unless of course you’re reading it on my computer after claiming all my things...well in any case, I’ll be careful. ^_^) I guess I should spend the next couple hours doing math...yeah, we’ll see about that.

But in any case, I don’t really have anything else to say for now, so I’ll think of some lyrics and end this post. How about some Jethro Tull?

Deep red are the sunsets in mystical places;
Black are the nights on summer day sands.
We’ll find the speck of truth in each riddle,
Hold the first grain of love in our hands...

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

I commented to Alisa tonight that I’m introverted and shy. She wrinkled her forehead and tilted her head at me. “Really? Are you sure?”

Well, maybe if I’d been watching me at karaoke yesterday I wouldn’t believe it either...

That’s the same reaction I got from Celeste and Elena last summer when I mentioned how shy I am. “You? Are you kidding?” Am I picturing an outdated version of myself, sitting in the girls’ bathroom during free periods freshman year of high school because I became paralyzed when confronted with the idea of finding somewhere to sit in the library near other students? Remembering how proud of myself I felt one day sophomore year when I exchanged a full two or three sentences with Jason Karl (a guy!)? Thinking of that girl who avoided study breaks freshman year of college because she didn’t know how to join in all the teasing and banter?

Apparently, I don’t come across as shy now. So why do I feel shy? I think the way Mark phrased it once is key: that introverted and extroverted are separated by what recharges and refreshes you. That extroverts feel the most relaxed immersing themselves in people and activity. Socializing exhausts me, even when it’s fun.

Also, I stress. I worry constantly about whether I can pull it off, seeming interesting and funny and worth getting to know. Maybe I have a vision of a truly social, outgoing person who doesn’t feel all this insecurity, who can mingle and chat and banter effortlessly. Maybe such people exist...but I wouldn’t really know. If I come across as open and outgoing...then how do I know that the people I envy don’t go home at night and replay conversations in their head and feel exhausted and intimidated, too?

So perhaps it’s time I updated my self-image, and gave myself credit for coming a rather long way from hiding in the bathroom to avoid social interaction. All the way to singing Japanese rock songs and discussing my views of erotic Japanese manga with people I’ve just met.

When did this happen?


Actually, karaoke didn’t exhaust me; it gave me a buzz that lasted for a couple hours, so that even at 2:30 in the morning when I should have been sleepy, I was lying in bed singing out loud to myself. That was, I believe, because of the music more than anything – I forget how much joy I get from singing, and in particular from singing with other people. Singing “Barbie World” (or whatever that song is called) with other ALTs at karaoke is a far cry from strolling through the Battlefield singing The Water is Wide in harmony with Lindsey and Deirdre...but it taps into a similar sort of pleasure for me. I guess even singing in the car is missing something, that communal sense.

That said, I did buy blank CDs yesterday and printed out a CD of hide songs to use as driving music until I get around to printing more different CDs. It makes winding around the endless curves between here and Muraoka much less tedious. ^_^

Now whenever I listen to a song I wonder if they have it on karaoke and feel like I should learn all the lyrics just in case. Right now I’m listening to an anime theme song...aru kana...maybe next time I’m stealing wireless internet, I’ll look up various lyrics.

This weekend there’s a big gathering being arranged in Toyooka of JETs and random other foreigners and Japanese people who like hanging out with foreigners. I think I’m planning to go, although right now I’m feeling intimidated by the idea of getting myself there, and the idea of spending the night with what Jarryd said would probably be “twenty or thirty people” that I don’t know. (This was, incidentally, the topic of the conversation in which I mentioned being introverted.) The plan is apparently dinner and karaoke. Karaoke with five people was one thing...but yeesh. Neither Jarryd nor Alisa will be there. Chotto, kowai...

(Oh yeah; I’ve been typing in romaji, mainly because of finding out that Japanese characters don’t copy and paste from Word into blogspot properly, and partly as a concession to those of you who don’t know Japanese. But if you don’t know Japanese, does being able to pronounce something help? You can copy and paste Japanese characters into JDIC just as well, in fact better, if you care enough to try to figure out the meaning...So fair warning, when I start being able to type directly to my blog, no more of this lame romaji! Everyone should learn kana in any case; it’s good for your soul.)

Despite waking up at 8:39 this morning (to my doorbell...turned out I’d slept through my alarm and had failed to show up across the street at 8:20 as I’d promised to. Whoops!), I don’t feel sleepy. I should probably try to head to bed, through. Tentative plan for tomorrow is to get up relatively early, do some laundry, then stop and do a little bit of shopping on my way to Muraoka to use wireless internet. I’m hoping some people will be online then (late evening EDT/early evening PDT...otherwise known as sometime before you’re reading this, since I won’t post this until I’m there obviously, heh) and maybe I’ll get to Skype and actually hear the voice of someone I really know for the first time in a few weeks. I’ll also try to be productive and work on Japanese and math. In the evening if it’s not too hot I’ll take a walk around Kasumi and get to know it a bit better. The next day, or sometime soon, maybe I’ll drive around to some of the more scenic spots and take pictures – with my phone, which isn’t a great camera, but is best we can do.

Have I mentioned how much I miss you all? (Well, if you’re reading this, chances are we’re pretty close and that I miss you...unless you’re some sort of creepy stalker. In which case, sorry, but I don’t miss you. You can skip the rest of this paragraph.) So far I’ve been on a little bit of a high from all the new-ness and feeling my way around my life here, and it’s been great and I’ve been feeling mainly excited and happy...but at some moments it sinks in a little bit that I’m not going to actually see any of the people I love for another year or more. Well, possibly briefly in the winter for some people. But it’s just so different from seeing people every day at dinner, or around the math lounge, or being home a few times a month and for vacations. When I have to “catch up” with people, rather than just existing in each other’s everyday lives.

And on the topic of catching up, the next two weeks are going to be in fact the easiest time to really hang out with people for a while; once school starts at the beginning of September, my schedule will become less flexible. Until then, my supervisor has instructed me to spend my time getting to know the area and having fun. (“And I’m really getting paid for August?” I asked. “Of course!” “But I’m not doing any work...” “Well, you’re working on getting used to being in Japan.” Hey, I’ll take 300,000 yen for that any day... ^_^) And until Jeff gets back from Canada, I have internet that I can be at with about 40 minutes notice. So anyone who has a bit of free time at a reasonable Japanese hour (EDT + 13) and wants to Skype or something should email me on my phone (if you don’t know that address, check my facebook) and name your time, and chances are relatively good I’ll make it. The internet is near Jarryd and Alisa, so if I’m being social I’ll probably be down there anyway.


I watched an episode of anime earlier, for the first time since actually being in Japan. This isn’t a very deep thought...but watching it, even after being here for like two weeks, felt different. I think it’s set in a not-too-big town near water, somewhat like Kasumi (although not actually Kasumi, as far as I know...), and just little things about how the streets look, and the odd giant concrete jacks (well they look just like jacks!) next to the water...I kept noticing little things that feel familiar and real now that I wouldn’t have paid particular attention to before. Details that create the atmosphere of this sort of town that I guess I would have just taken on faith, or subconsciously classified as just part of the art style, suddenly make it feel grounded in something I’ve actually experience a little bit of.

A few days ago I finally, finally, read You Remind Me Of You, Miss Corrigan’s first book. What was most odd about it, for me, was how the majority of the places mentioned – various houses, dorms, apartments, hospitals – were like any place in a book; I constructed a vague mental image based on the description given, but mainly coming from some sort of subconscious visual imagination. And then suddenly, she’d mention Elm Farm, or the spot by the canal where people go to smoke, or the freshman locker area...and my vague mental imagery would be interrupted with actual knowledge of those places. I almost wanted to experience the book without that knowledge, to see Elm Farm as it would have felt to me just based on the words on the page. Still, there’s a certain thrill in being able to latch on to something so specific and real.

I’m reminded of a conversation with Lucy about anime: she said she by and large didn’t like watching animated movies because somehow it felt caught in the middle between a book and a movie; like she wasn’t being shown something that actually looks like real people, real places, real things, but she also wasn’t given the freedom to visualize things in her own mind. So she felt stuck with, for her, unsatisfying depictions of a world that her mind didn’t know quite what to do with, that she couldn’t quite take at face value because it doesn’t look like anything quite real. I hope I’m paraphrasing her fairly.

Sometimes I’m in a mood where I don’t feel like watching a live action movie because it’s too real; too cluttered somehow. When I want something that takes me a little bit outside the normal physical world. And I don’t feel like reading a book, having to do all that mental work myself. If I’m mentally tired in a certain way, I balk at that task. In those moods all I want to watch is anime. I want a world where every image is there because someone decided it should be; where artistic intention went into each leaf that quivers on a tree, each book scattered on a desk, each sound of cars passing in the background. Where the world is a purposefully aesthetically satisfying version of itself. It’s not exactly an escape from reality: ideally, the characters, emotions, philosophies, jokes, would all be as real as anything. But it’s a reality given to me through a certain artistic lens. I like that the world, in a lot of anime, is pointedly beautiful. Not that the non-animated world isn’t. But sometimes I just want to sink into a movie where each image is a work of art, where I get pleasure from the actual viewing of the frames, as much as from the plot.

I guess it just doesn’t bother me that everyone’s eyes are too big and their hair behaves oddly. I don’t need them to look more “realistic” in order to seem like real people. But maybe that just has to do with getting used to the style.

Of course, some contemporary American animation I find so unpleasant that I have a hard time watching it, even if people tell me the show/movie is really good. I can just barely deal with the Simpsons – maybe because a lot of the episodes I’ve watched are just so funny that they don’t give you time to object to the animation style – but I have a hard time with, say, Family Guy. And with some of these computer animated, pseudo-3D movies. So I’m not unsympathetic to Lucy; I can understand the feeling of being shown a world that I’m not satisfied with, that distracts me from the story because I don’t want to picture people that way. But good, well-drawn anime doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels more like it captures something real about the world and just shifts the style a bit to highlight it, bring out the art in it.


Was that too much bold?

I’m not a real connoisseur of anything, am I? I have the things I care about, things that have fallen (or been shoved) across my path, but outside of that I always have to admit I don’t really know anything. People ask me what anime I like and can list a few but always with the caveat that I haven’t actually watched that much. And each comes with a disclaimer: well I watched Yugioh because my little brother was into it; I’ve only seen any Cowboy Bepop because my friend Lisa forced me to watch it; and so on. I add the disclaimers not because I don’t legitimately like the ones I like, but because I don’t want to give the impression that it is my considered opinion, having considered all anime out there, or even a good chunk, that these are my favorite. The ones I like are ones I’ve happened upon and then clicked with. Same with the music I listen to. Miura-san said the other day “so, you don’t really like anime that much, do you?” And I tried to explain that a good percentage of the anime I’ve ever watched I’ve enjoyed or even loved, but that I don’t put a lot of effort into looking for new shows to watch on my own. I had a similar conversation about music yesterday with Jarryd and Alisa, when they were somewhat confused by my somewhat random and limited knowledge of popular music. Why is it that when I find something I love, it isn’t my first (or second or third) impulse to go out and search for other similar things? In fact, I rebel actively against that, as though it would be disloyal.

I suppose with so much out there that I would indeed love, the idea of trying actively to find things intimidates me. It’s easier if I just let things come to me naturally; then I feel a personal connection to them, like I was meant to find them. I was writing about something similar to this a little while ago wasn’t I? Was that on here in or in an email?

In any case, it’s getting late. I’m not in the mood to sleep, but sleep I must. Or at least sleep I ought. Maybe I’ll watch another episode of anime in bed; perhaps trying to follow Japanese dialogue will convince my brain it ought to shut down for the night.

Perhaps I should have saved MISERY for later...I fear my dedication to explaining song lyrics might be wavering. So perhaps instead I’ll limit my lessons to the lyrics I quote at the end of posts.

Oh yeah, in the car on the way home yesterday, talking about hide, Alisa said she could never listen to someone whose songs were so depressing and negative. Well, I suppose I’d only explained the plot of HONEY BLADE, and she’d seen the video to PINK SPIDER. Not two of his most uplifting moments. And yet my immediate reaction was “what are you talking about? hide is all about being positive and celebrating life...” I tried to explain MISERY to them, what a positive song it is: “It’s about accepting all the sadness and pain and making it part of you...” That didn’t end up sounding very positive. (“Emo,” Alisa said.) But it is positive. And so many of his songs are about breaking out of the limits that you impose on yourself or society imposes on you (Genkai Haretsu, SCANNER, ROCKET DIVE, DICE, BEAUTY&STUPID...), and about learning to enjoy even the meaningless, confusing, messy, frustrating parts of life (hi-ho, OBLAAT...). And even the sadder, more serious, more depressing songs have a subtlety to them; they’re not just twisted, depressed rants at life. So let’s have a bit of OBLAAT, although I’m sure I’ve quoted it before, to highlight hide’s more......well, I was going to say “positive side”, but maybe that word doesn’t capture this song. A song about manipulating how you see the world to purposefully put a positive spin on things. “Mite minu furu yori wa mashi sa: Me o hiraite, nani mo miru na.” Better than not looking, open your eyes and see nothing. Is that uplifting or depressing? Neither?

Hadashi de arukeba ishi mo sasaru sa.

Vobaculary:
hadashi = barefoot
aruku = to walk
ishi = stone(s)
sasaru = be pierced

Syntax: The “de” is marking, like, means/mode, and the verb is in the conditional: if you walk barefoot. Then what? You’re pierced by stones. (The “sa”, incidentally, is a sentence ending particle that I covet; hide uses it quite often for emphasis, and it’s one of my favorites, but it’s not used much, and apparently not used at all in my part of Japan...)

Ame no hi, kasa sasanakya zubu nure ni naru darou.

Vocabulary:
ame = rain
hi = day
kasa = umbrella (a fun word when speaking Espango)
sasu = to open (an umbrella, specifically)
zubu nure = sopping wet
naru = become

Syntax: Ame no hi, a day of rain. We’re missing an object particle after “kasa”. The verb is in a negative form (sasanai), which in turn is in a conditional (sasanakereba; i-adjectives can be made conditional by replacing –i with –kereba). Which in turn is contracted to “sasanakya”. So, if you don’t use an umbrella. Then what? Well, logically enough, you will become sopping wet. (“ni” marks the goal of becoming, and “darou” gives that should/will sense). Do note the three “sa” syllables in a row; quite fun to sing.

Sono teido sa, warau dake sa.

Vocabulary:
sono = that
teido = degree
warau = to laugh
dake = only

Syntax: This isn’t exactly any sort of intricately well-formed sentence. As best as I understand it, it just says “that degree, just laugh.” Meaning like, that’s the extent of it, and all you can/should do is laugh. Again, note the aesthetic zing of the “sa”s...In fact, in this whole chorus, that syllable occurs eight times. No one can convince me that hide didn’t put a lot of poetic thought into his lyrics...

Never mind my friends, hadashi de arukeba ishi mo sasaru sa.
So make it rough, make me high.
Never mind my friends, ame no hi kasa sasanakya zubu nure ni naru darou.
Sono teido sa, warau dake sa.
Take it easy dear my friends...

Karaoke!

[8/12]

Yesterday I did karaoke for the first time ever. Now, if you’re reading this blog you probably know me (if you don’t...what are you doing here? Isn’t it kind of boring?); if you know me, you might not be able to picture me, sitting in a little room with a bunch of people I’ve pretty much just met, singing HONEY BLADE at the top of my lungs into a microphone. (If you don’t know the song HONEY BLADE, which, let’s face it, you most likely don’t, suffice it to say that it’s a kind of intense Japanese rock song about a guy who’s dreaming about having sex with his old girlfriend and then wakes up to remember that she left him and then shoots himself in the head. I’d say YouTube it but it’s not on YouTube for some reason.) Can you picture it?

Well I did. I sang OBLAAT, hi-ho, MISERY, HONEY BLADE, HURRY GO ROUND, PINKU SUPAIDAA, Madrigal, premier amour...that might be it for Japanese songs. Also several Beatles songs, Bye Bye Bye, Mamma Mia, and several songs I didn’t pick but ended up singing parts of. It was...well, I don’t think I can say it was the most fun I’ve ever had, because it would have some tough competition, but maybe....tied for third, or something. And I was just really proud of myself because I didn’t shut down and sit quietly in the corner and decline to sing because I was embarrassed about the music I like or thought other people would think it was weird. They did think it was weird, but it turns out...that’s okay. I thought some of the music they picked was weird too lol. Mainly people were just like “wow, how do you know all this odd Japanese music?” Jarryd liked some of hide’s songs and said he’d have to check him out. Also, apparently he’s a fan of Gackt’s more recent stuff, but has never listened to his Malice Mizer records. So after I sang a Malice Mizer song he sang a more recent Gackt song. And everyone kept being appalled by how little normal popular music I know; Alisa kept saying “here, you’ll recognize this song for sure,” and then I wouldn’t. So she and Jarryd are plotting on how to get me to listen to some new music. But I told them I’m completely open to it; I just need someone to give it to me. What I’m bad at is going out on my own and searching out new music.

Not shockingly, there was not a single Jethro Tull song in the karaoke book. Can you imagine trying to sing Jethro Tull as karaoke? Muzukashii deshou ne...Still, you’d think there’d be a few songs that would work okay. At least as well as HONEY BLADE lol.

They said the PV (music video) for PINKU SUPAIDAA was the creepiest thing they’d ever seen. (“No wonder people take this as evidence he was suicidal...”) Maybe I’ve just never paid good enough attention to it...but I don’t find the video that shocking. I mean, I do realize that a woman jumps off a building and dies at the end. But it’s artistic, deshou? I don’t really find it disturbing...(This video, by the way, is on YouTube for sure; search for “hide pink spider PV” or something, and if that doesn’t work try pinku supaidaa instead – technically the title is written in katakana.)

Now I want to go to karaoke all the time! Except, I feel like I’ve almost run out of songs I can sing...heh.


Okay, I think that’s the end of the interesting (?) part. At least, the main content of what I wanted to say. On the way back from karaoke, in the car with Jarryd and Alisa, I was pretty much high on tiredness and on the energy of singing so much, and I seem to remember babbling and babbling nonstop the whole ride back. Heh. I wonder what I said...

And right now I am sitting in the kouminkan. Earlier I was working on math, but I don’t feel like doing that anymore. I don’t have internet (although, I was told today that I might get it as early as the beginning of September! Woot!). So I’m writing this post. I could be in my house doing laundry and watching Olympics...but I’d rather be surrounded by people, even people who aren’t paying much attention to me. Jarryd and Alisa told me if they were doing anything interesting today they’d let me know, but so far they haven’t. Tomorrow Alisa’s going away for the rest of the week and the weekend. Sabishii deshou ne...But hopefully Jarryd and I can do some stuff, and I can be productive and keep organizing my house and doing math and things like that. Next Wednesday there’s a short orientation in Kobe, and a week later I will go to my schools and hopefully get more information about exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. But other than that...I’ve nothing scheduled to do.
So to entertain myself, I shall go through another song. :-)

A STORY

Kowareta tokei ga hanashikakeru yo.

Vocabulary:
kowareru = to break
tokei = watch/clock
hanashikakeru = to talk to/to accost (formed from hanasu, to talk, and kakeru)

Syntax: This is a pretty basic sentence. We see the use of the past tense verb functioning as a small relative clause to indicate a state: “broken”. We have a subject marker, ga, and a verb in the present tense. What’s missing is an object of the verb, and in fact, I personally don’t know what it naturally implied. You? Me? Us? In any case, a broken clock is accosting someone. Let’s go with “us”...

A broken clock accosts us.

Subete no mono mo hito mo me o tojite...

Vocabulary:
subete = everything/all
mono = things (physical)
hito = person/people
me = eye(s)
tojiru = to close

Syntax: The particle “mo” means, in this case, “also”, and is really just emphasizing the inclusiveness here: all the things and all the people both. (Note: the “no” is connecting the noun “subete” to the other nouns so that it can be a modifier.) So everything and everyone...Then we have “me” marked as a direct object, and a verb in the -te form, in this case acting as a sort of connective form leading to the next clause. So let’s say...

Everything and everyone, closing their eyes...

Zenbu yume da to mezameta toki omoitai to...

Vocabulary:
zenbu = everything/all
yume = dream
mezameru = to wake up
toki = time (“when”)
omou = to think/believe (something)

Syntax: I’m tempted to just skip this line, because I do not understand it. I understand each little chunk, but not how they fit together. (If anyone thinks they know, please, oshiete kudasai!) So “zenbu yume da,” remembering that “da” is the copula verb, means “everything is a dream.” “To”, you’ll recall, marks a clause as something that is said, thought, believed, etc. So in a sense it puts quotes around “zenbu yume da.” Then “mezameta toki” means “when [someone?] has woken up.” “Omoitai” is the form of the verb omou that means “want to believe” (adding –tai to the pre-masu form). And then we have another “to”. So how does it all fit together?
I don’t know. Maybe the subject is still everything and everyone, closing their eyes...”it’s all a dream,” when they wake up, they want to believe...and then there’s that random “to” on the end...what does it imply? It’s confusing to me. Well, let’s just say it’s something about a dream.

Aaaand...I should go now, so...to be continued! :-)

Boku ga boku de wa o tsuzukeru tame...

[8/10 again]

That line means, roughtly, “in order to remain myself.” It makes me think of the line from Genkai Haretsu, “Boku no ue de kimi wa kimi ja naku naru,” meaning “on top of me you become not yourself.” I guess hide’s playing with the tension between the power of the self and the power of transcending the self. Or...not. Anyway, you know when suddenly a song you’ve known for a while and not paid much attention to just sort of pops out at you? That happened to me today with Tell Me. I’d always sort of brushed it aside as an aesthetically pleasing but not very compelling song. But listening to it earlier today, it suddenly struck me as really poignant. When I get internet I’ll look up the lyrics that I don’t know.

Oh hide, why will I never get to see you perform? Why did you deny me that? Why will you never write any more songs? What pushed you to it?

Meanwhile, once I get internet I should see who is performing around Japan while I’m here. Having gotten the small sample of Japanese music that I listen to from Lisa, I feel it stereotypes me as a certain genre of person which I’m not. But then, combined with everything else, what does it add up to? The little slices of Japanese popular culture that have crossed my path don’t seem to go together very natural: Yugioh, Fruits Basket, CLANNAD, hide, Malice Mizer, Yoshimoto Banana...I seem to belong to at least four demographics. Everyone’s heard of Yugioh around here, and Banana, but Miura-san hadn’t heard of Malice Mizer; I told her they were sort of Visual Kei and she started giggling, then later when we were flipping through some girly magazine, she found a picture of a guy in creepy white makeup with an odd wig and leather jacket holding a guitar and screaming, and pointed to it and said “Visual Kei desu ne?” and giggled more. I couldn’t entirely deny it. I don’t even know if Malice Mizer is (was) Visual Kei. They did wear odd costumes, there’s no denying that.

Tomorrow I’m going to ask people around the office if they’ve heard of AIR. If they haven’t, I know they’ll get a huge kick out of its being set in Kasumi. ^_^

A Gackt (post MM) song just came up on shuffle. The only one I have, I guess. I would be quite interested to see Gackt in person. He is simultaneously one of the most utterly beautiful people I’ve ever seen, and one of the most insane. But he can sing, that’s for damn sure. I’d be intimidated to go by myself though, and I haven’t gotten a vibe of alternative Japanese rock from anyone I’ve met yet. Ha ha ha, maybe Miura-san will go with me......

Or maybe not.

So when people ask me why I decided to do the JET Program, I say something like “well, I’d been studying Japanese since senior year of high school, both the language and some of the culture, so I really wanted to be here for a while and experience it for real; plus, I wrote my linguistics thesis on second language acquisition and I’m really interested in the process of learning and teaching languages, in fact when I get back to America I’m planning to get a Masters in it and probably teach ESL for a while. How about you?” I think I need to come up with a less intense answer. More often than not the response is something like “Oh...well, I just didn’t really know what to do after college, and going to Japan sounded kinda cool.” Which is a 100% legitimate reason, and I feel like my answer makes me sound too...I dunno, serious. So next time maybe I’ll go for “’Cause Seto Kaiba is so hottttt!!”

......What? He is.

For, you know, a drawing.

If I were you, o hypothetical reader of this blog, I would probably be sort of annoyed at having to wade through so much rather meaningless babble to get to actual anecdotes or substantial musings. Maybe I should put important-ish paragraphs in bold or something. Actually, that’s not a bad idea. From now on, this will be a skimming-friendly blog, with anything I deem actually worthy of your time in bold. Starting with this paragraph, so that you know about it...lol.

Ever free, kono yoru o tsukinukete...Mezamereba, toberu no ka, free ni...?

Did I mention that you should all learn Japanese? To entertain myself, I shall give Japanese lessons in the form of analyzing song lyrics. Some preliminaries:

i) Japanese word order is, generally, SOV.

ii) Japanese verbs end in –ru, -u, -ku, -gu, -su, -tsu, -bu, -mu, and –nu. In general, verb conjugate by changing the last syllable to something else in the same column – something beginning with the same consonant that is – and adding an ending. For example, to negate a verb, change to the –a row and add –nai. So –ku becomes –kanai. The “pre-masu” form of the verb just means change to the –i row. So called because that’s what you do when you want to attach “masu” (polite form) on the end. But that form is also used before various other verb suffices. For (some) verbs ending in –ru, everything I just said is wrong: you don’t change the –ru, but just delete it and add the ending. Such verbs are called “ru verbs” or “group I verbs.” They’re not as much fun as group II verbs. Feel free to look down on them.

iii) Japanese adjectives end in –i. They are predicates. Meaning, they contain within themselves what we English speakers need the word “is” for. Because they’re just that cool. So “ookii” doesn’t mean “big”; it means “is big.” That said, if pressed, these adjectives will allow themselves to be stuck right in front of nouns just like in English, to form a larger noun phrase. In this case, they surrender their predicate powers, and you need some other predicate in the sentence. When functioning as the predicate, adjectives conjugate by changing the –i on the end to something else: -katta for past, -kunai for negation. I’d tell you what past negation is, but it turns out that that “nai” on the end – it’s an i-adjective! And you should know how to make it past. Sometimes people will try to tell you there are “na-adjectives” in Japanese. You should slap those people. But gently, since in fact there are na-adjectives in Japanese. They’re just so different from i-adjectives that it bothers me when people lump them together. In fact, they are most similar to nouns. The only difference is that when they want to stick on the front of a noun to modify it, a magical “na” appears between them and the noun. If it were a normal noun, that “na” would be a “no”. Compare: “kirei-na heya” = “clean room”; “suugaku no heya” = “math room”. Other than that, na-adjectives behave like nouns. So don’t worry about them; they’re boring. Stack them with the group I verbs.

iv) There is a copula verb in Japanese, meaning something that simply equates things. It appears alternately as “da” and “desu”. It either means that two things are the same or that one thing has a certain property. It should not be confused with verbs of existence, also often translated as “is”. There are two of those: iru (animate things), and aru (inanimate things). If you use aru when you should use iru, Japanese people laugh at you.

v) Japanese has particles, many of which can be thought of as case-markers. They come after what they mark. They are scary. But actually, they’re one of the most fun things about Japanese. Here are your basic ones:
wa: marks topic (something already in the discourse about which you are giving information)
ga: marks grammatical subject. Be careful: sometimes something’s a subject in Japanese that’s an object in the English translation. For example, things you understand are grammatical subjects.
o: marks grammatical object. Also, path through or along which movement occurs.
ni: destination, location (of existence), exact time, indirect object, and about twenty other things
de: instrument, location (of action)
made: limit
kara: starting point

That’s enough for now. Let’s plunge in to a song, shall we?

Kimi no itami ureshisou ni hane o hirogete maiorite kuru.

Vocabulary:
kimi = you
itami = pain (nominalized form of the adjective itai)
ureshii = happy
hane = wings
hirogeru = to spread (gr. I)
mai-oriru = swoop down
kuru = come

Syntax: This sentence lacks a topic/subject marker, but in fact the topic is “kimi no itami.” “no” is a possessive, working sort of like ‘s in English, so that NP means “your pain.” Okay, now what’s the main verb? It’s at the end, as it usually is: maiorite kuru. This introduces the –te form, one of the most important forms. You can think of it as a sort of connective form, and occasionally like a gerund. In this case, we have the verb kuru stuck on to the –te form of another verb. This adds a hard-to-translate connotation of movement toward something: the speaker, the present time. Sometimes it works in English to say “came to...” In this case, “comes swooping down” seems to do it. The tense of the verb is carried on the kuru: present. Okay, so your pain comes swooping down. What of all those middle words?
They are in fact two modifying clauses. You may notice the particle ni. Here it is acting to create an adverb: ureshisou-ly, pretty much. Okay, so what’s ureshisou? It comes from the adjective ureshii. Japanese people don’t like to assert, well, pretty much anything. So there are a zillion ways to say that something seems a certain way, but of course you can’t assert that is really is. Replacing the –i with –sou is one such way. It can be used when the evidence on which you’re basing your claim is evidence of your own senses, as opposed to something someone else told you. So what we have here is something that sort of means “happily”...but it’s only apparently happily, really.

Next we have another verb in –te form. “hane o hirogeru” means “to spread [one’s] wings”, and it’s in a connective form, so we might say it as “spreading its wings.”
All together: “Your pain happily spreads its wings and comes swooping down.”

Hiru no hikari kimi no kizu o daite yasashiku hirogete yuku.

Vocabulary:
hiru = noon/daytime
hikari = light
kizu = wound(s)
daku = hug (note: also used to mean “have sex”...but not in this context. Listen to “Kiss Kiss Kiss” on Double Fantasy.)
yasashii = gentle
yuku = to go (alternate pronunciation of iku)

Syntax: First, what’s the topic/subject? It’s the first noun phrase: hiru no hikari, the light of day = daylight. Again, we lack a particle. Tsk tsk hide. Well, particles are often dropped in informal speech. What’s the main verb? It’s “hirogete yuku,” another –te form construction. Now instead of attaching “come”, we’ve attached “go”. Sure enough, it’s a similar meaning, but with movement directed outward. In this case, not physical movement; it implies an action continued into the future. We might say “goes on opening/spreading.” Or we might not have a good way to phrase it in English. But now, hirogeru is a transitive verb; fortunately, there’s an object, complete with object particle o. “Kimi no kizu”, your wounds. So the daylight is opening your wounds.

And the modifiers? We again have an adjective-turned-adverb, and a –te form, but in the other order: “daite” is the –te form of daku, and “yasashiku” is the adjective “yasashii” with the –i replaced by –ku, which is how adverbs are formed from i-adjectives. In this case, I believe that “daite” originated as the predicate of its own clause, but then got switched to –te form to connect it to another clause with the same topic. So instead of using an –ing form, I’d connect the two clauses with “and”:

The daylight hugs your wounds and gently rubs them open.

(More accurately, then, “kimi no kizu” originated as the object of “daku”, and then is carried over into the next clause as well.)

Hoshi no nageki kikeba, hon no chiisa-na koto darou.

Vocabulary:
hoshi = star(s)
nageki = moan
kiku = listen/hear (also ask, but not here)
hon no chiisa-na = really small
koto = thing (abstract)
darou = might/should be

Syntax: Where is the subject? Hidden. Implied. It’s probably “you.” What sort of verbs do we have? We have kiku, and it’s in some weird form. In fact it’s in a conditional form, made by jumping to the –e line (ku --> ke) and adding –ba. So “if you listen.” To what? Well, there’s a noun phrase sitting in front of the verb looking like an object: the moans of the stars. So if you listen to the moans of the stars...

Then what? Hon no chiisa-na koto – a small thing. Darou, the form of the copula verb that expresses a good probability. So I would say, “it’s just a small thing.” What is? Unclear.

I lumped “hon no chiisa-na” together as one vocab item; chiisa-na is a na-adjective version of chiisai, meaning small. I don’t know how to describe the meaning of “hon no” on its own; I think it just sort of emphasizes, but I’m not sure.

If you listen to the moans of the stars, it’s just a small thing.

Yoru no yami ni ochite yukeba wasurete shimau koto na no kamo.

Vocabulary:
yoru = night
yami = darkness
ochiru = fall
wasureru = forget
shimau = [see below]

Syntax: Did you spot the conditional? Here we have yukeba, formed from yuku, which is again attached to the –te form of a verb. Here the English translation is easier, since we do say “go falling”...although in fact I might stick with “fall”. Where are you falling? Well we have a noun phrase marked with “ni”, which you may recall can mark for destination. So you’re falling into the darkness of night. (Contrast to the line that started “hiru no hikari”...ahh hide you are a wonderful lyricist...) So if you fall into the dark of night...

You may see another verb, not at the end of the sentence, but in the present affirmative form: shimau. You may notice I refused to tell you what it means. It’s generally used as a suffix stuck on a –te form, and it adds either a meaning of completion (similar to “up” in a lot of English phrase: eat up, finish up), or a meaning of regret, that whatever happened was too bad. Often found on the back of the verb wasureru, to forget – I guess forgetting is often regrettable. So if you fall into the dark of night, you (unfortunately) forget...forget what?
Now we introduce relative clauses. Relative clauses in Japanese are easy. You have a clause. You want it to modify a noun. What do you wish you could do with it? Just stick it in front of the noun and be done with it? Well you can! It’s that easy. Is this clause stuck in front of a noun? Indeed it is: koto is a perfectly fine (if rather vague) noun. Put it together and we have “something you forget as you fall into the dark of night.”

What of all those random syllables at the end that didn’t even make the vocab list? I won’t try to explain “na no”...suffice it to say that it adds a bit of emphasis. “kamo” is in some sense short of “kamo shirenai”, which means “might” (I’m unclear on the etymology/syntax of that phrase, but it definitely means “might”). So,

It might just be something you forget as you fall into the dark of night.

Yureru omoi, tsuka-no-ma no yume, chiisa-na higeki.

Vocabulary:
yureru = shake, waver
omoi = thought, emotion
tsuka-no-ma = transient (but it’s not acting syntactically as an adjective! you say. I guess it’s sort of a no-adjective...or something.)
yume = dream
higeki = tragedy

Syntax: What syntax? This is just a string of noun phrases. Note the small
relative clause in the first one: a feeling that wavers. A transient dream. A
small tragedy. Adding a bit of alliteration we get...

A wavering feeling, a transient dream, a tiny tragedy.

Furu hoshi no kazu kazoetara, naku no ni aki darou.

Vocabulary:
furu = fall (as in rain, snow, etc.)
kazu = number
kazoeru = to count
naku = to cry
aki = tired of

Syntax: At least this is more like a sentence. Again we have a conditional, but this time it’s a –tara conditional, formed by taking the past tense of the verb and adding –ra. Again, the topic “you” is implied. And we’re missing the object marker o, but nevertheless “the number of the stars that fall” is the object of “if you count.” So if you count the falling stars...

Now we get to see a fun function of “no”, which is nominalizing things. So naku = to cry, naku no = the act of crying. The all-purpose “ni” as, in some sense, the destination of the being-tired-of. Again the “darou” adds a sense of “probably” or
“should be”. But don’t take that too seriously: you’re not supposed to assert anything for sure, remember.

If you count the falling stars, you’ll tire of crying.

Warau tsuki no aosa kizu o nadete tojite yuku.

Vocabulary:
warau = to laugh
tsuki = moon
aosa = paleness (nominalized form of aoi, which depending on what kanji it’s written with can, can mean blue or pale. –sa and –mi are both ways of changing i-adjectives to nouns, and it’s a bit random which adjectives use which.)
naderu = to rub
tojiru = to close

Syntax: You wouldn’t know it, because of the lack of particles, but we have an actual subject in this sentence: “warau tsuki no aosa” = the paleness of the moon that laughs. (Another relative clause.) Kizu, you may remember, means wounds. Now a bunch of verbs strung together with –te forms: nadete, and tojite (okay so only two), and again yuku gives a sense of the action moving forward in time. So whereas the daylight was gently opening your wounds,

The paleness of the laughing moon will rub your wounds closed.

(Note: “present” tense in Japanese often actually implies a sort of future tense – a not-yet-completed action. Also, I changed it from the literal “rubs and closes your wounds” to something more idiomatic to English.)

Furi-sosogu kanashimi o sono ude no naka ni dakishimete.

Vocabulary:
furi-sosogu = to downpour (furu combined with sosogu)
kanashimi = sadness (nominalized from kanashii)
sono = that/those (refers to something related to the listener usually, or to something just mentioned)
ude = arm(s)
naka = inside
daki-shimeru = hold (formed from daku, to hug, and shimeru, to fasten)

Syntax: Let’s look at the main verb first: it’s in the –te form. A main verb? you ask. Yes; it’s an imperative form, another use of the –te form. (But if you want to get into it, it’s not really “another” use...the usage is short for “-te kudasai” where “kudasai” is a different imperative form of a formal verb meaning “give (to me)”. In that phrase, the –te form is in fact functioning as a sort of gerund: “give me ~ing.”) So what are we being ordered to hold? That would be the noun phrase marked with o, which includes a little relative clause: the downpouring sadness. And we’ve also got something marked with ni, which remember can mark location: so the place of this holding is inside those (your) arms.

Hold the downpouring sadness in your arms.

Kareru made odoru darou, subete uketomeru yo, kono mama.

Vocabulary:
kareru = to die
odoru = to dance
subete = everything
uketomeru = to catch
kono = this
mama = (indicates a steady state or situation; see below)

Syntax: We’re back to the implied “you” subject. The particle “made” indicates a limit: “until”. So until you die, you (might) dance. But it’s unfair to translate darou as might here; it really just means like, should or will. So you’ll dance until you die...

And in the second part of the sentence, the verb is “catch”, and what you are catching is everything. “Yo” is just for emphasis. “Kono mama” means like, in this state, just as it is. It’s not very clear how to connect these clauses, but I tend to go with...

You’ll dance until you die, catching it all, just as it is.

Sakuretsu suru itami ga kakenukeru dake no kaze naraba...

Vocabulary:
sakuretsu suru = to explode (literally, to do an explosion; “suru” means to do, and there are a lot of “suru” verbs, nouns to which you can attach “suru” to make them into actions)
kakenukeru = pass through/blow through
dake = only
kaze = wind
naraba = (conditional you can attach to nouns)

Syntax: This isn’t a complete sentence, but rather just the antecedent of a conditional. And we’ve even been given a subject marker! Isn’t hide kind? But it’s still a bit of a challenge to sort out what’s the subject of what here. One noun phrase is “the pain that explodes”, and another is “wind that just passes through” (the “no” is needed to attach the relative clause to the noun because the “dake” got in the way). In fact, though it’s a bit hidden, this is really an equating sentence, made into a conditional:

If this exploding pain is just a wind passing through...

Ame nochi hare o matou, hora, kimi no namida o tabechaou.

Vocabulary:
ame nochi hare = a weather term meaning rain and then clear skies (ame = rain, hare = clear, nochi = ??)
matsu = to wait
hora = look! (exclamation)
namida = tears
taberu = to eat

Syntax: We get a new verb form in this sentence, the volitional, formed (for group II verbs of course) by jumping to the –o row and then adding –u. So matsu becomes mato-u. (Remembering that tsu is from the t-column, used instead of tu, which doesn’t exist.) The form expresses...well, volition. Intention. There’s no explicit subject here...but if a speaker is expressing volition, it’s likely his own. So, I’ll wait for the rain-then-clear, and look...

Now we need to dissect the odd “tabechaou” thing at the end of the sentence. Believe it or not, that’s just a contracted form of “tabete-shimaou”. And we already talked about adding shimau to –te forms; in this case, it’s the “completely” version, not the “unfortunately” version. And it’s also in the volitional form. So what’s being completely eaten? Kimi no namida, your tears.

I’ll wait for the rain to clear, and look, I’ll eat up your tears.

Kanashii to iu naraba, sora no aosa sae mo todokanai modokashisa ni kimi wa naku-n darou.

Vocabulary:
iu = to say
sora = sky
aosa = blue-ness (this time – different kanji from before)
sae mo = even
todoku = to touch/reach
modokashii = tantalizing

Syntax: For this we need to know how to say things in Japanese. I mean, how to say how to say things. And for that we need the particle “to”. When you stick the particle “to” after, say, a clause, it becomes something one can say, think, yell, whisper, and so on. So “kanashii to iu” means “to say (you’re) sad”. The subject of sad, of course, needs to be supplied by context. Naraba is a conditional I said could be attached to nouns but it can also be attached to clauses if it feels like it. So the first part is “if you say you’re sad”.

To find out what happens if you say you’re sad, we jump to the end of the sentence: kimi wa (oh now you tell us the topic?) naku-n darou. Naku means to cry, you’ll recall. That “n” is a contraction of “no”, being a nominalizer again. But don’t worry too much about that: nominalizing things and adding copula verbs after them is just something Japanese people do to pass the time. The point is, if you say you’re sad, you will cry. And what of all the middle words?

They are in fact a noun phrase with a big fancy relative clause, and marked with “ni”, I suppose to indicate that it is what will be making you cry. (Really, the particle “ni” can do anything it wants.) The head of the noun phrase is “modokashisa”, nominalized from “modokashii”, tantalizing. So...tantalizingness? I’ve tended to just go with frustration; close enough, right? And what sort of frustration? “Sora no aosa sae mo todokanai” frustration. Well, what does that clause mean? The verb is in a negative form: doesn’t touch. And the first part means “the blue of the sky”. And “sae mo” means “even”. So “doesn’t touch even the blue of the sky.”

Well what doesn’t? The frustration? You? I was bothered by this for a while, and finally settled on...

If you say you’re sad, you’ll cry with the frustration of reaching not even the blue of the sky.

Eh, not great...but I think that’s the idea.

Kimi no chiisa-na karada tsutsunde-ru yume wa itami o nomi-komi, azayaka ni naru.

Vocabulary:
karada = body
tsutsumu = to wrap/envelope
nomi-komu = swallow (made from nomu, to drink, plus komu, which has a lot of random uses...)
azayaka = brilliant/clear
naru = to become

Syntax: We have a topic marker to latch onto, and it follows the noun “yume”, dream. What sort of dream? Well, the first noun phrase is “your small body,” and then the verb “tsutsunde-ru.” This is a contraction of tsutsunde-iru, a progressive form we haven’t seen yet, but works pretty much like English progressive forms: is ~ing. So, our topic is “the dream that is surrounding your small body.”

Well what about it? “Nomi-komi” is in its pre-masu form, which can also be used as a sort of neutral connector of clauses. So it’s swallowing pain, and...the “ni” in the next part marks the destination of the act of becoming, so it means “become brilliant/clear.” But what is doing the becoming? You? The dream? I am unclear. Let’s just say...

The dream that surrounds your small body will swallow the pain and become brilliant.

Te o nobaseba kanjiru, sono itami ryoute de uketomete.

Vocabulary:
te = hand
nobasu = hold out
kanjiru = to feel
ryoute = both hands

Syntax: Back to the –ba conditional, and assuming the subject is “you”: if you hold out your hand, you’ll feel (it). The second part is another imperative, and the particle “de” is making an appearance to mark instrument/means: catch this pain with both hands.

If you hold out your hands, you’ll feel it; catch this pain with both hands.

Itoshisa o, nikushimi o, subete uketomete, sono mama.

Vocabulary:
itoshisa = love (from itoshii)
nikushimi = hate (from nikushii)

Syntax: There are two direct objects listed, and then “subete”, and this time, “uketomete” is in an imperative. Also, compared to the similar line from before, it’s now “sono mama.” I don’t know the exact significance of that.

Love and hate both, catch it all, just as it is.

Subete uketomete, kono sora no shita de, kimi ga warau...

Vocabulary:
shita = under

Syntax: This –te form is a connective rather than an imperative, and this time “de” marks location. So...

Catching it all, under this sky, you laugh...

Kimi no itami ureshisou ni hane o hirogete maiorite kuru.
Hiru no hikari kimi no kizu o daite yasashiku hirogete yuku.

Halleluiah miserable, hoshi no nageki kikeba,
Halleluiah miserable, hon no chiisa-na koto darou.
Say halleluiah.

Yoru no yami ni ochite yukeba wasurete shimau koto na no kamo.
Yureru omoi, tsuka-no-ma no yume, chiisa-na higeki.
Furu hoshi no kazu kazoetara naku no ni aki darou.
Warau tsuki no aosa kizu o nadete tojite yuku.

Stay free my misery, furi-sosogu kanashimi o sono ude no nake ni dakishimete.
Kiss your misery, kareru made odoru darou, subete uketomeru yo, kono mama.
Stay free my misery...

Stay free my misery, sakuretsu suru itami ga kakenukeru dake no kaze naraba,
Stay free my misery, ame nochi hare o matou, hora, kimi no namida o tabechaou.

Kanashii to iu naraba, sora no aosa sae mo
Todokanai modokashisa ni kimi wa naku-n darou.
Kimi no chiisa-na karada tsutsunde-ru yume wa itami o nomi-komi, azayaka ni naru...

Stay free my misery, te o nobaseba kanjiru; sono itami ryoute de uketomete.
Stay free your misery, itoshisa o, nikushimi o, subete uketomete, sono mama.
Stay free my misery...

Stay free my misery, furi-sosogu kanashimi o sono ude no naka ni dakishimete.
Stay free your misery, kareru made odoru darou.
Subete uketomete,
Kono sora no shita de,
Kimi ga warau.

Halleluiah miserable...