Japanese calligraphy

Slowly catching up on things I wanted to share...

Here's a draft of my project for the traditional calligraphy class I've been taking, once a week on Tuesday afternoons after the usual schoolday.  Its challenging because I have the handwriting of a gorilla, but I'm gradually figuring out how to use the traditional brushes with the dexterity of a gorilla who has advanced to second grade.

The final project is writing out a traditional poem within 20 characters.  The poem I chose was honestly pretty random - they're nonsensical to me in the classic Chinese anyway, and I forget the deadline until right before class, so I chose one of the first things to pop up on a quick google search.

Each page is read from the right, top down, and then the pages are arranged similarly.  It will eventually all be one vertical piece of paper.  Orange marks are corrections on the forms, although big orange swirlies are a sign that that character is passable.

The original 7th century Chinese written out in a more clear order...
千山鳥飛絶
萬径人蹤滅
孤舟蓑笠翁
独釣寒江雪

In contemporary Japanese...
見渡す限りの山々には、鳥の飛ぶ姿も見えず、
雪の積もったどの小道にも、人の足跡は見られない。
蓑笠をつけた老人が、小舟を川に浮かべて、
雪の降る寒江で、独り釣り糸を垂れている。

I'll make a better translation of this at some point, but the idea is...
Looking out on an endless expanse of mountains, so vast that the forms of birds and traveler's footprints on the snowy road disappear, an old man with his catch of lionfish pushes his tiny boat into a river as his lonely fishing line dangles on the snowy path.

Its too bad that this particular stage of the draft I'm sharing is the only time I've ever received a correction on the character 翁, meaning venerable old man.  Despite my lack of talent at most other characters--do you have any idea how hard it is to write the two strokes of 人 properly?!--somehow 翁 is my specialty.  As such, I proposed I new poem for my project that would better utilize my talents.

翁翁翁翁翁
翁翁翁翁翁
翁翁翁翁翁
翁翁翁翁翁

Somehow the instructor was unimpressed with my composition.

Saint Young Men

This is in no way representative of Japanese pop culture, but its among one of the lolsiest examples I've encountered recently.

There's a manga 「聖おにいさん」officially translated as "Saint Young Men", but I prefer my own translation "Holy Bros".  The story answers the question "What Would Jesus (and Buddha) Do?" -- They would get an apartment in Tokyo and bro out.

I don't believe it's sold in the states, and I imagine it would only be met with protests and lawsuits.  "Jesus can't enjoy cosplaying as a samurai!"  "The interpretation of Jesus as an impulse buyer of knicknacks while Buddha stingily manages their household expenses is a subjugation of the Christian faith!" "How DARE you write a scene where Jesus goes to the convenience store and is mistaken for Johnny Depp!" Considering the state of religious extremists convinced they are the victims in America, I can't imagine it would go over well.

That said, I enjoy it thoroughly.  To better describe the sacrilege humor, allow me to translate one particular scene from the first book.

「Jesus and Buddha are attending a street festival and are looking at stalls selling snack foods」
Jesus: Wow, there's really a ton of stalls here!
(Looking at a cotton candy machine)
Jesus: Ooh, what's this? It's like a cloud! Hey Mister, is this, food?
Shop owner: Its sweet!
Jesus: One please!
(Meanwhile, Buddha finds snowcones)
Buddha: Wow, and this one is like snow!  So this is what festival food is like.
Shop owner: Try it!
Buddha: I'll take it!
(Close up on Buddha eating happily)
Buddha: It's just like a dream.  This is great, huh Jesus?  You're always staring at the clouds beneath your feet in heaven and saying how fluffy and delicious they look.
(Panel expands to reveal Jesus face deep into his cotton candy.  Sound effect: STICKY)
Buddha: Huh?  What's... is it... sticky?
Jesus, aside: It's not fluffy like a cloud at all...
(Painstakingly pulling it off his face and out of his hair)
Jesus: It's so long since I've felt this betrayed.
Jesus: This is like, Judas level.  The most disappointed I've been since Judas.
Jesus, aside: And it shrank... just like how puppies shrink when they get wet...
Buddha: Cheer up!  Even that time with Judas you came back after three days!

And then of course in the next scene they re-encounter their Yakuza friend, who in a hilarious case of mistaken identities thinks Jesus is a high level gangster.  Classic mix-up!

Side panels often contain little fun facts about the characters, such as
"Buddha prefers soy sauce on his sunny-side up eggs.  Sometimes he even wants to add a little red pepper."
"Jesus prefers worcestershire sauce.  But since coming to Japan he's started liking it with soy sauce, too."

A lot of it is kinda inane except for the fact that its Jesus and Buddha broing out.  But, its validating that I can read it now and appreciate the slightly twisted sense of humor - previously started it at the end of Senior year, at which I could comprehend it, but not enough that the sarcastic humor was actually enjoyable.  So go me!  And now I'm looking forward to getting the next three books in the series.

Personality changes

Some personality changes have been creeping up on me since moving to Japan.  A couple I noticed within the first few months.  I used to not care about small dogs, but now I'm secretly obsessed with long-haired dachsunds. (they don't walk, they just flow!)  I used to have an active dislike for babies but now I want all the half-asian babies to be mine.  I have growing preference for girls who are tiny and overly cute (as in the pop sensation AKB48, which makes me feel ooky inside because they're mostly of legal age but their appeal is looking and acting like high school girls.)  Please reference also one of my roommates, Teru-chan, who is older than me but tiny and adorable.  I often remind her to study hard for her high-school entrance exams.

All of these changes are innocuous enough, and not that surprising given the abundance of small and cute in Japan.  (Although my fascination with AKB48--unabashedly one of the most over-produced, fake, devoid of talent pop creations out there--is disturbing in its own right.)

A couple bigger things, though...  I had said for years I would never never never want to live in Tokyo.  Ever.  Too big, too impersonal, too much rush hour.  But now I'm having to take back a couple of those "never"s.

I started thinking about it first for the work commute - I'm probably looking at a 40 minute door-to-door commute (at best) once I start in September.  Its honestly not that bad considering I currently do close to an hour each way to school, but its not something I would want to keep up forever.  (This coming from the Spokane boy who used to think driving fifteen minutes to the valley was unfathomably far.  Distance perception has honestly been one of the biggest changes.)

But beyond that, I'm suddenly discovering there's a lot of stuff to do in Tokyo.  In the past couple of weeks I've suddenly been going out much more than I did during first semester (when I didn't have enough money to buy blankets for my new apartment, haha).  Part of it is that I have money not only to buy blankets but also enough to go out.  Part of it has a lot to do with me now knowing more people outside of the foreign student bubble, and in turn part of that is a recent break-through in my own language ability.  It's only recently that I've felt I've reached a casual fluency (very different than the academic and specialized fluency we study in school) that actually allows me to express some degree of my authentic personality.  Eli is no longer so quite so polite and taciturn, and as a result Eli has a lot more fun.

Something I really struggled with was the language limitation - my arguments in class were previously limited by my clumsy ability to string words together, resulting in a lot of half-developed reasoning and generalizations.  I had been aware of that for a while, but I was becoming more and more aware of how that same limitation also stunted my reasoning, not to mention my social and emotional expression.  (This is probably why I got so addicted to facebook recently, as my one chance to unleash a perfectly crafted status update that casually wields humor and insight.)  But now, I'm getting closer and closer to a point where I actually sound like me in Japanese.

And somehow that sense of self affects my sense of place: My idea of Tokyo is now very different from my previous image, an impersonal dichotomy of depressed Japanese salarymen commuting to work and ignorant, spoiled foreigners clubbing in Roppongi.  As I'm getting past more of my personal barriers, it looks like a lot more places and opportunities are opening up.
 

Anyway.  More important than anything else I have otherwise discussed here: I ate a pudding the size of my head.  Please play this song for inspiration while gazing upon my photos and thinking glorious thoughts of pudding.

PURI PURI!  PURI PURI!

Preparing to extract the pudding into a pie dish.

Pudding brings joy to everyone!

Obligatory photos of puddingy goodness

Comparisons and perspective

It hit me recently that when I told my family I was moving to Japan, they didn't argue with that decision.  They didn't even grill me on the details of why.  It was just kinda accepted.  So I haven't really been forced to articulate why I needed to come here, why I needed to work for a Japanese company.  Other than I needed to.  There's a reason there, but its worrisome I can't articulate it better.

That worry and doubt of course leads to asking if this is the right path for me, when there were any number of options that didn't involve leaving the states.  (Most of them revolved around gainful employment, which I wasn't otherwise finding, but that's a different story.)  But thinking about this in November, when I went back to campus for The Game and had a chance to see a glimpse of what my college friends were up to, something else hit me:

"Oh crap.  Everyone's so much happier than me".

Maybe "happier" wasn't the right word for it.  "Doing better"?

I was jealous of how much of the college network everyone else seemed to retain even after moving away. A staggering proportion of my JE friends ended up in the DC area, and get to see each other all the time.  A further staggering amount of couples stayed together, something I had considered so impossible after my own experiences with distance.  I thought it so impossible that I didn't even dare to ask before Graduation what they were planning on doing afterwards, assuming it would be a touchy subject.  Most everyone had jobs in something they really wanted to do (at this point I was still jobhunting and feeling pretty anxious about it).

Nobody else had an hour commute to and from work, nobody else had lost 10 pounds because of a spartan budget, nobody else struggled with something so basic as buying groceries because they couldn't read the label.

Of course, some of this is just the inevitably human tendency of thinking the grass is always greener.  And realistically, I'm sure everyone else has their share of difficult things they're dealing with that I didn't get during our too short (always too short) reunions.  In the day and a half of alumni coming back to campus, I only got serious, lengthy conversations with a small handful of people as I tried to see everyone at overlapping events.

Corinna (one of my JE friends, who of course knows lots of other friends from college working near her in NY, and has a comfy living situation, and is still together with her college sweetheart, yadayada) came for a visit two weeks ago on her way to visit her family in China, and spent the weekend at my place.  It was great to see her for many reasons, including making the world feel a little more connected, that a Yale friend might casually drop in to Shinkawasaki station for a visit.  She also provided me with perhaps a much-needed dose of perspective.

To a lot of my friends, I'm the one with the enviable position, the incredible freedom to jetset around the world.  Somebody is paying me, not because I produce a profit for them, but so that I can invest in myself.  I'm in such a fantastical wonderland every day that seeing Mt. Fuji or eating fried squid is mundane.  

Corinna is very wise.  Also she brought these AWESOME maple cream cookies.  God bless Canada.


Again, because I am delinquent on pictures, instead please look at the internet-famous Shironeko blog, a series of videos devoted to stacking things on top of cats.

Third Semester

We're now two weeks into the third semester of classes, and its been a haul.

Here's a breakdown of my week:

Politics & Economics - M&Th, 10:00 -12:00
This is fun because I know diddly squat about economics and now I'm learning about them in my non-native language.  But we're using articles taken from a college level textbook, which is in itself pretty exciting.  The reading for this class tends to be the toughest assignments I have, if for no other reason I can't keep track of all the different departments in the many layers of bureaucracy.

Modern Japanese History - MTuThF, 1:30 -3:00
The first day we talked about Meiji, and I was all "Yaaaaay this was my senior essay topic I can say lots and people will think I'm smart yaaaaay" and then by day 2 we had moved past Meiji.  And then I was sad.  The class covers from 1900 to the present, but the bulk of the material is Postwar stuff.

Integrated Japanese - TuW, 10:00-12:00
Nothing too exciting, just a straight-up grammar class.  Homework is usually just writing example sentences for a grammar pattern, so its comparatively pretty manageable.

Business Japanese - F 10:00-12:00
The first hour involves roleplays of set phrase and interactions with keigo (the elevated, I-am-sorry-for-committing-an-inconvenience-upon-you-by-my-very-existence style of speaking), and the second hour is a series of practical workshops on resumes, interviews, stuff like that.  Since I'm the one person in the class already with a job lined up, I was volunteered to go first for the panel interview next week.  It will be a six on one interview with the other students poring over my resume and preparing questions as representatives of the company.  The Sensei will play the role of (what I think translates to) "Chief Tormentor" and be mean to me.  To see how fast I cave under pressure.  Waaaaah T_T

Outside of the regular classes, there's also...
Calligraphy painting - Tu 3:15-5:00
My handwriting is lousy to begin with, but that's all the more reason to try to learn the stylized painting techniques for kanji characters.  I still don't excel, but I'm approaching what I might dare to call adequacy.  The teacher compliments us (in all sincerity) "oh look how good you're getting at writing your own name!".  Makes me feel a little bit like a kindergardener.  The sensei also tells me that my characters have their own "distinct interestingness", (独特な面白さ）which I think is a polite way of saying I'm doing it wrong.

By the way, the characters I chose to spell my name are
井惇 (Eaton: "well" and "considerate")
伊雷 (Eli: "having style" and "thunder")

Business - Th 3:15-5:00
This is different than my Business Japanese class, and also different from the Business & Society class additionally offered by the center.  (You'd think they'd be more creative with names).  Its the only lecture class I've had here, and also the least interesting.  We receive upwards of 30 pages of charts and graphs each time, and the teacher points out a couple fun facts, without a very clear path of where he's going.  Someone best described it as the kind of one-sided conversation you have when you sit down next to the drunk old guy at the bar.

Apart from just the class hours, school day itself is pretty long--I'm almost always in the building by 9 AM preparing for morning, working through lunch to prepare for afternoon class, and staying until the building closes around 5 doing homework, so I keep myself pretty busy.



In lieu of having pretty pictures, I shall instead introduce something else japanese-y.  The cellphone carrier Softbank has a commercial campaign centering around the antics of the Shirato family, mainly starring the iconic white dog Otoosan (Dad).  I'm not sure how these commercials sell phones, but they're entertaining.  Softbank also manages to sell a lot of Otoosan merchandise in the process.

Oh hey look I have a blog (明けましておめでとう）

I have been hardcore neglecting this blog.  More backlogs of stories to come, but a couple things for now:

I have employable job skills! (lolwut) 

I went back to the states in November for the Boston Career Forum, the world's largest English/Japanese career forum.  So I flew to 11 hours to Boston to interview with companies that also flew to Boston, even though their Tokyo offices are generally about 30-40 minutes from my apartment.  Yeah.  I had a hard time explaining that one.

BUT- a couple weeks after I got back, I got a full employment offer from Rakuten.  Just accepted it right before the new year, so for the first time in 15 months I am not thinking about a job search, at all.  Funny thing though: I still know very little about the concrete job details.

Fastest explanation of Rakuten is that its the Amazon of Japan, but it also has a lot of subsidiaries including travel, electronic money, investments, even wedding planning.  When I start in October I'll have a month or two of training/evaluation and then they'll put me where the they think I'd be the best fit. Seems like this should work out well for somebody with an interest in everything but necessarily "tangible" job skills (oh hey, me!).  But my various investigations into company atmosphere and happiness of current employees give me good vibes.  (doesn't hurt that the pay is probably the most I could get as a new grad without going into finance and banking)

Did a lot of studying over the break, and most notably, I finished the exams on all 1945 of the Jōyō kanji (daily use characters), the characters required in primary/secondary education and generally used as a guideline of basic reading proficiency for newspapers and such.

Of course, the list was updated two years ago to now include 2136 characters.  (jerk move, Ministry of Education).  But when I originally set the goal to master all the Jōyō kanji, there were only 1945 at the time.  So it still counts.

Third semester starts on Monday, reputed to be the hardest term academically.  I'll be adding an Econ class, a business Japanese class, and a contemporary history class.  The work so far seems challenging and interesting, and by this point we're using pretty much exclusively textbooks intended for native speakers.

To make this post more interesting, a mildly offensive (but still hilarious) example of how Japanese pop groups don't quite get how its insensitive to parody other cultures. T-ara, which is actually a korean pop group that also produces Japanese versions of their hits, dress up like Tiger Lily, and wave their palms over their mouths going "wowowowowowowo" as they dance around the teepees:

Some things are best left unexplained