Wisdom from the bottle

I spent last Friday night at my favorite bar in the 堂山町 (Douyamachou) district, about ten minutes walk away from the JR Osaka station. I've been to Bar Bacchus once a weekend and am on friendly terms with a number of the regulars (does that make me a regular, too?) and especially the bar master, Chano-San. He recently shared with me the adage "苦労無くして、前進なし”, which is fairly literally "no pain no gain". Chano-san repeated it to me, half-scoldingly and half-encouragingly, as I started to waver about why I'm continuously working so hard.

By the wee hours of the morning, when it was just me and bar-masters Chano and Goro, (I guess KenKen was there too, but he was, erm, "taking a nap") we got to talking about personal histories and where I was going with this whole Japanese thing. Chano-san likes to brag to other customers that I'm 賢い because I go to Yale and I'm gonna be all important doing 外交 at the 大使館, and I had to confess, that whole thing about going to work in foreign service and diplomacy is mostly to have a satisfying answer when people get curious about why I'm interested in Japanese.

I started to realize at their questions that I have a hard time justifying when people ask "why are you majoring in Japanese?" I kinda waver around it with a long-winded explanation of my defiant urge to be good at the language, to prove myself capable of thriving in their culture. "Why did you choose Japanese in the first place?" I weasel all over the mulberry bush with a rant of how I don't want to fulfill the world's image of the ignorant, mono-lingual American. "Yeah, but why Japanese?" Reasons citing food and video games don't really cut it anymore. Is it enough to just think it's kinda neat?

I confessed to Chano my belief that even if I worked in Japan for a year or two at some point, I could never really be an ex-pat for a whole slew of reasons about me not belonging or not fitting in, not in Japan. He thought most of my excuses were kind of silly. This infinitely wise, moderately inebriated middle-aged man gave me a heart-to-heart explaining exactly how I was holding myself back with all the assumptions I've made depending on being accepted by others' systems.

But this week, I've been able to begin (gradually, painstakingly) shifting myself out of self-deprecating Yalie study mode, obsessed with all the reasons I'm treated differently and barred from ever fully integrating into Japan. I have little patience to deal with non-native speakers of English, yet somehow I've been fortunate enough to make a number of older friends here willing to sit and talk to me for hours, continually correcting my word choice and grammar and politeness and intonation, and then buy me drinks to boot. Even if I'm not finding that connection as much within the student group, the fact that strangers have been so kind and welcoming to me does a lot to undo the damage Ive dealt to myself by focusing on all the ways I'm not accepted.

I was told by a friend, in English, after a series of email exchanges in Japanese: "I could see your heart because you were the first foreigner to write so many word to me..." (awwwww) "...with so many mistakes." (crap).

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

If only happiness were really that simple. And a little bit stylish.

In other fun news, I have a cellphone! I hesitated for the first couple weeks but ultimately its been instrumental in allowing me to get out of the apartment and make plans with new friends I meet. If you're ever just so despondent you need to hear my voice, I receive calls for free at (International code 81) 080-3825-2476. I also have email on my phone- works a lot like texting if you write to roll.you.up.into.my.life@softbank.ne.jp. It is a fact that all Japanese young people must have obnoxiously long email addresses that can not easily be conveyed through spoken conversation, so I followed suit.

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

I found some broskis- Tim came up with some friends from Yale Summer Session in Tokyo. We fratted hard by going to the aquarium.

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

FISHY. WHY ARE YOU SLEEPING.

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

Most terrifyingly large crabs ever. They make Alaskan King Crabs look pretty docile. They also have like five layers of claws inside their mouths. ナニコレェ〜？！

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

The enormous Ferris Wheel overlooking Osaka Harbor.

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

Little prayer cards at a temple in Umeda.

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

I found Waldo! Who knew he was at the novelty omiyage store the whole time?!

From Summer 2010 OSAKA

Please note that when the class went on a study tour to the corporate office of Leo Palace, they had an enormous projection of Lady Gaga playing continuously in the lobby. This is the one aspect of the tour that could possibly make me want to work a corporate job in Japan.

Stranger in a strange land

CET has weekly "orientation" sessions designed to address notions of dealing with a foreign culture. None of these have been earth shatteringly new--things like...
~Culture is an iceberg (only a small number of things are superficially visible, and there's a lot more to it beneath the surface),
~High-Context / Low-Context cultures (The US tends to be direct, Japan indirect and non-confrontational),
~and today, Cross Cultural Methods of problem solving.

These are the kind of things that most of us tend to dismiss as totally obvious. Yeah, yeah, I know cultures think about things differently. Duh. It's easy to categorize these kinds of talks into that wishy washy bin of the humanities, where you're continually surprised people make careers out of publishing on topics that should be so obvious. But I think CET has actually done a pretty good job at helping me get over the cynical assumption that I know all this stuff.

Like today, I was selected to do a roleplay in front of the group for different cultural methods of problem solving. The task was to confront a friend, played by one of the Japanese instructors, about how she had told the rest of the groups problems I had confided in her about my roommate. For a variety of reasons, my problem solving skills that I thought so well-attuned didn't accomplish much--what most surprised me most is that during the subsequent discussion, most of the Japanese viewed my tone and demeanor as aggressive and angry, when I thought I was being composed and direct. Huh.

But the flip side of these kinds of chats may sometimes result in a kind of paranoia in trying to be too culturally sensitive. Last summer, after the cultural training of pre-departure meetings at Yale for my first study abroad, I felt like I had to suppress my own individuality and background so as to not cause ripples and offend the Japanese sense of decorum. This time at CET, a few students have felt the talks urge to hyper-vigilance, wondering if even when their Japanese roommate is chill and says everything's fine, they have to continually suspect hidden problems gnawing away at their relationship.

But for all those narcissistic assumptions that I already know everything about cross-cultural understanding, the results are pretty telling that I don't. I'm 90% sure I was chosen to do the role play because I've been grumbling about my own roommate issues to anyone who'll listen.
We spoke for maybe 5 minutes this morning, between him waking up and me going to school--this is probably the most we've interacted at once since last Thursday. I'd love to try again with what I took away from the discussion today, but he's once again at his part-time job until after I go to bed. Even if the talk had tried to give me a concrete answer to how to deal with this, it probably wouldn't count for much because this kind of understanding can only be built through experience. That said, I'm barely even getting a chance for that experience when my roommate is never home.

After the roleplay, Chichiishi Sensei commented that she was interested to hear me speaking quickly and assuredly in English, since I stutter so badly in Japanese. The surrounding instructors tittered politely. I'm making the choice to interpret this comment more as being pleased to find my buoyant personality that shines through in English, and less as a reminder of how piss-poor my speaking ability is. At least it wasn't quite so backhanded as another Sensei`s compliment when I apologized for a difficult to read part of my hand-written speech: "Your handwriting isn't nearly as bad on this manuscript as it usually is in your notebook!" Um... thanks?




Time for something more upbeat... look! It says Friend! You can buy food from the Friend Bakery at the Friend Mart.



A sweet photo from the 8th floor observation deck of Osaka Tower taken on my Birthday.

濡れる

My 21st birthday was fairly laid back, since it holds little meaning in a country where legal drinking age is 20 and even then rarely enforced. Friday night, my last night of 20, I went out to the same bar from last weekend (I guess I'm a regular now, from the number of the regulars I now know). Wasn't going that big for myself but when other patrons heard it was about to be my birthday, they kept on buying me drinks. I tried to refuse but Bar Master Chano-san insisted that you can't really do that, so I just begged him to make them increasingly weak as the night went on. I tried to leave at midnight so I could catch the last train home but the insistence on drinking more detained me; instead another customer who lived in the same direction offered to share a cab when we finally finished around 2 am. The birthday itself was low key, at least partly due to the headache- made some calls home to friends and loved ones, then went sightseeing to Osaka castle. Finished the night when a bunch of the group went to a bar to see Will sing with his guitar at an open mike night.


Osaka Castle

We just entered the rainy season. This means all rain, all the time. The forecast predicts a full week of nonstop rain to follow The Great Wettening of June 13th 2010. I was the only without the foresight to do all my laundry on Saturday so I'm basically sockless for the next week.

So I'm supposedly living in a double apartment, but from how little my Japanese roommate is around, and how we draw out the worst of the quiet introvert in each other, I might as well be by myself. The rain has dampened my ability to go out and explore freely, so the rest of the weekend has been cooped up by myself to do homework. Sure, during the school year I'm a beast at depriving myself of things I want to do in favor of doing the workload that Yale demands, but with summer the drive to be the academically self-deprecating Yalie weakens a lot. Even so, the result of that upbringing kinda leaves me at a loss when left to my own devices. So this summer is perhaps trying to make me learn how to deal with with boredom, with loneliness, with free time, and with myself when I'm alone in a foreign country with limited access to the outside world and limited opportunities to get outside in this country.

I'm actually a little terrified of how much time I have up in the air once the program ends in late July. I have a full two weeks after the end of the academic term before my flight home, and currently no real plans. While this has the possibility to be a chance for freedom and exploration and all those awesome things, the flip side is that I might be very bored and lonely to have no companions for two weeks.

The prospect of independent travel is exciting, but my preliminary research and stab at itinerary making have been discouraging. I didn't manage to get a Japan Rail Pass (unlimited use of the bullet train for a week!) before leaving the states and assumed it'd be fine to have my family buy one there and mail it over, but looks like it might be harder than that. I was considering couch surfing as a way to create a snaking route of stopping points, but there's really not many hosts outside of Tokyo. It doesn't particularly look like my travel dates and plans line up with anyone else on the program. WWOOF usually expects more than a week or two, but I've got a membership pending with their Japan branch. So we'll see.

For now, it's back to the mountain of homework.

Photo dump of silly things!

Tomorrow is the first major test of the program, which is surprising that I'm already through a quarter of it. Damn, that's been fast so far.



Japan is weird about Obama. I can't tell you how many little kids have exlaimed "YES WE CAN" upon seeing me walk down the street. I guess that's the trademark of America now? But I was watching the show ナニコレ珍百景 (I like to translate it as "WhattheF***WeirdShit") where they were investigating "Obama Udon". It takes its name from the first letter of three of its main ingredients to spell out O Ba Ma. So this one Japanese comedian whose entire stick is looking kinda like Obama (except Asian) went to investigate by yelling "CHANGE" and "YES WE CAN" at the noodle shop owner a lot.




A fun group shot from going out to Yakitori last week.




I don't know why all Japanese burger chains are so strange. This is "Big Man Big Juicy Burger". I couldn't help giggling while I ate it.



This is clearly the most adorable Pocky box ever. The back has little cardboard flaps that swing out so you can hang the panda box on sills and things. And then eat Pocky. Everybody wins!



Japan has a weird relationship with drag and other things relating to queer identity. I don't think I've gone a day without seeing a drag queen on TV since getting here- whether its a campy commercial or a straight comedian in drag or Akihiro Miwa's Oprah-esque show where he teaches people how to deal with their emotions, drag is common, not really frowned upon, and seems to be widely disassociated from "gay".

So the reason this costume struck me apart from just looking silly: though the text insists the sparkle gown is unisex, its clearly marketed towards men. But I can't think of a US male with any degree of involvement in drag who would buy an item marketed at playing drag--they'd go for the real women's clothes. Though drag is a counter-culture costume of sorts, they wouldn't buy things marketed by mainstream society as a costume. And any non-drag male who wanted to play drag for just a party gag would go to the women's costume section of a party shop. So what does it mean that a unisex female costume is marketed towards the average male consumer? I can't say. But I'm intrigued.



And finally, un-related to cultural musings, its HILARIOUS to put fake boobies on your baby. Thanks Japan!

Belligerence = デッカイ

Made it through the first full week. Class is tough just for the speed and volume of material it covers but so far nothing in that aspect is too overwhelming. I spent most of the first week being frustrated with my speaking ability knowing it hasn't been measuring up to what I'm capable of, but the weekend came with a couple of nice breaks for that.

Incidentally, Japan sells whiskey bottles out of vending machines. Not that I like whiskey, but just knowing such a machine exists makes everything better.

For Fami's birthday, a bunch of us went out to a nearby Yakitori (grilled chicken n' stuff on a stick!) restaurant and stuffed ourselves silly. I made a point of sitting away from the English speakers (I'm probably coming off as "that guy" to the other American students on the program for avoiding them, but this is what I need to do for my own language practice--Sorry that I'm a huge tool) to hang out with the Japanese roommates. And we bonded in the way that young adult males inevitably will- we made a bunch of crude sex jokes.



Perhaps I'm a terrible person, but I will never get tired of my Japanese friends learning how to properly pronounce "election".

Another thing I've found is that I sometimes need to create excuses for conversations. My roommate and I still don't speak that much (he's busy with his part time job, entering the hell of a Japanese 3rd year college student's career search, and fairly quiet) so I'm creating small excuses everywhere when I go out, like stopping at the civic information center to ask about where to find the bookstore when I have no intention of going to the bookstore.

Another thing about using excuses to meet people- one of our homework assignments was to go out and interview people on campus about their hometowns. Which of course, was fairly awkward to approach strangers and ask them personal questions. But Will had brought peanut butter and apples to the campus cafeteria to share with our Japanese friends (peanut butter exists but is surprisingly rare in Japan) and eventually used the leftovers to go around offering "traditional American snacks" to random people in the cafeteria. He used this as a seque into meeting people and when we realized one group of girls would still be there during our class time when we were doing the interview, we asked them if we could come back to interview their group. So basically, we've used homework as an excuse to meet girls. Everyone's jealous that I interviewed the totally hot girl.

Saturday night I went to a bar, my first foray into 大阪 (Osaka) proper (we actually live a couple train stops away in 吹田市 (Suita)). Aside from being totally awesome that it was the first time I've gone to a bar by myself (I'm getting the jump on my 21st birthday next week by taking advantage of Japan's drinking age of 20) I stayed for 4 hours just talking and listening to other conversations. Most bars in Japan are tiny, and this one had maybe 8 or 9 seats. While I was there, the number of patrons never exceeded three. So I got to chatting it up with the Bar Master. At first it was the typical "Oh! So you're a foreign exchange student! You're studying Japanese!" type interactions, and since the first Sex and the City movie was playing on tv they all gossiped about which characters they liked. (The second one just came out here, so it's kind of a popular topic). But for a while when it was just me and the bar master we got to talking about my own research on America-Japan relations post World War II.

The bar was pretty sweet and I'm definitely gonna keep doing that on the weekends, even if it means I subsist on ramen and rice balls for most of the week to offset the cost.

On Wednesday the whole program took a trip to Arayashi Yama and 天龍寺 (Tenryuuji) temple in Kyoto. My family has a tradition of posing with statues because we're cool like that.

Kyoto also included モンキーパーク(monkey park) where we got to walk through trails surrounded by Japanese macaques. I tried to explain my own experience with the monkey lab at Yale and how monkeys are evil and will still all your things given half a chance.

OM NOM NOM

Getting settled

This is my apartment- the kitchen/bathroom/front door are there on the right, and the floor space expands in an approximately 2 Elliots x 1.25 Elliots square space to the foreground.

See that tiny little loft up there on the right? That's where I live. About 2 Elliots deep, .67 Elliots wide, and .5 Elliots tall. (Since the Japanese would actually measure this space in tatami mats, I see no reason why my own arbitrary distance doesn't hold equal merit).

My roommate is 中山絢太 (Kenta Nakayama). He seems like a pretty cool guy, although we haven't yet spent a lot of time together. He's really busy with a part-time job and some other things that I'm not really sure about. I'm not entirely convinced that working in a noodle shop requires you to leave for your job at midnight and come back the next morning at 9:30, so I'm going to assume that he has ties to the Yakuza.

Incidentally, Kenta is wearing my fratty glasses in this photo--Thanks Margeaux! Apparently all the Japanese OGU partners thought they were the coolest thing in the world, and there's an extensive series of photos of everyone trying them in turn and looking badass.

First thing I did upon getting home today: make rice, and make tea. I think I'm officially an Asian housewife. But I'm getting better at feeding myself myself in Japan- at first it was a challenge to cook for myself when I was shopping for unfamiliar ingredients with directions I could only read 60% percent. The first dinner didn't happen because I tried to take a brief nap at 4 in the afternoon only to wake up at 4 am the next morning (oops), and then the next one was basically rice and noodles because I didn't have anything fresh or interesting to add to the carb fest. Realizing how quickly I would get tired of that, I made something much nicer tonight...

Isn't that the cutest little Donburi bowl you've ever seen? I pre-gamed dinner with some takoyaki (fried squid balls), then made a bowl of rice with fish and seaweed sprinkles, some beef and onions in a savory sauce, fresh tomatoes, mugi tea, and followed it up later with Dango, a sweet rice flour dumpling. Please note that the cup says in Japanese "Let's go out to find happiness!" It's matching partner says "I want to fly to wherever you are". The spoon has a smiley face. Totally bringing these home.

This is from the open air mall space where we had a banquet for all the students and Japanese partners- the whole area was covered in posters of this cat character doing different things, sometimes recreating classic movies? My favorite is the Star Wars pose. I have no idea what significance the series of cats hold.

I tested into the top level- exactly what I wanted, although I was terrified it wouldn't happen and I'd be stuck in a level that didn't challenge me like last summer in HIF. It's actually the largest of the classes, meaning there are 5 of us (but I guess that's what happens in a program of 14). We practiced speed reading today- something I hadn't really expected I would have been able to do in Japanese.

So far class is pretty manageable. I've been surprised that I feel like my weakness right is speaking. Like, at all. Out of nowhere I've become able to understand most of what's happening on the TV, comprehend all of the lengthy directions and discussions from 三森先生 (Mimori Sensei), and read an enormous volume of complex kanji while figuring out compound words I've never seen from familiar kanji. And despite all that, I'm stumbling over trying to express anything longer than a direct sentence. Balls.

Unrelated to anything else: it's weird how many American stars I've seen on Japanese TV. Ke$ha was at the red carpet entrance to some sort of Japanese music awards night, and she described her costume in the characteristic Ke$ha drawl ("It's like a... sexy bird.") while the subtitles translated ("セックシ・バード。”). Then I saw the cast of Sex and the City 2 interviewed by a Japanese station, and the main lady (Carrie?) talked at length about how you should sleep enough if you want to be pretty. And then the interviewer girl said how little she slept, and it was awkward for everyone.