April and May

Hello blog followers. You may have been it's been a bit of a while since I haven't been posting anything, and nothing at all in April or May. That's because things here have been busy. That's my excuse anyway. You'd have thought 5 days in quarantine would have made me write something at least...

April - Project project project
Having come back from Singapore, I had two weeks working on my Year Abroad Research Project (tm), which was fairly pointless because I needed term to start on the 13th April before I could really do any of the research side of things. The family came over on the 4th for 16 days, and I spent the time I had before term travelling around Japan with them, seeing some new places and revisiting others. Since I'm feeling lazy, I was going to invite one of them to write something about the occasion, especially since I wasn't with them for half of their time, but I might end up doing it myself after all ;)

April was incredibly busy trying to get enough research done to warrant a pass. Students on the year abroad aren't required to actually pass anything at their host university, and so long as they turn up to lessons then everything is fine - the only caveat is that we have to write a 6000-word research project on a subject of our choosing. Not really wanting to write anything serious, and not being too keen on handing out opinion polls about women's working rights or economic conditions or something else doable but dull, I chose (back in Sheffield this time last year) to base my research project on the topic of Japanese Humour.

Ah, blissful ignorance. What have I learnt from doing this research? Humour is the absolutely worst thing you could ever write about academically. Reading the available literature, which already is incredibly difficult to find (especially about such a specific topic as Japanese humour) is simply boredom grating at your eyeballs, jokes have no meaning when written down, and I even found a chapter where the hilarious Yes Minister was pared down to an incredibly dreary explicative text. Taking such material and then trying to write something meaningful from it was not easy at all, especially when the vast majority of it was completely irrelevant. On top of that, the majority of Japanese humour comes from the discourse of a comedy duo, the clever tsukkomi berating the hapless boke for his errant thoughts. You can't even record that sort of thing in words. The Japanese idea of a funny television show is to gather a random handful of celebrities, maybe bring in an expert of something for educational purposes, and then get them all to do something bizarre or impossible like eating scorpions or playing Human Tetris. This is equally difficult to really write about or describe, so I eventually had to write about the place of humour within society rather than about the humour itself. Ah well.

May - Quarantined
The big plan was to finish it off before going to Korea for Golden Week (a group of holidays in the first week of May) but I didn't quite manage that. This was ok though, because something fairly big happened while I was busy scribbling away. Swine Flu came to the Far East.

It was only a tiny amount of cases, but Nagoya University insisted that, since I wasn't going to cancel the £200 odd flight to Korea with only three days' notice, I would have to be quarantined on my return to the country for 10 days. I wasn't exactly explained the rules, just that I would have to stay in my room as much as possible, avoid places people gather etc. The idea of it was completely without meaning - if I wanted to cook I'd have to visit a shop to get ingredients, and then use the communal kitchen down the corridor. I'd have to get back home from the airport using the underground. If I was infected they'd find out very quickly when I took the whole dormitory out. But of course, the death rate for swine flu outside Mexico is less than 0.1%, so of course the Japanese government has gone absolutely nuts in suggesting such quarantines.

When I got back I found that the number of cases in Japan was roughly 200 more than Korea's anyway. It had managed to infect a school or two in the Osaka area.

So, I spent (a fortunately shortened) 5 days in my room with just the research project and the bi-daily temperature measuring to do. This was where I discovered the disadvantage to my do-everything laptop - I ended up doing everything on it. If I wanted to work, laptop. If I wanted to play games, laptop. If I wanted a film or music, laptop. I even use a couple of Japanese study programs on the thing. If I wanted any variety from sitting at my desk I could read a book for a bit or read through a textbook but aside from that there was remarkably little to stop me going incredibly stir-fever. Never mind swine flu, cabin fever would end up killing me.

On the last day (Thursday) I emailed in my health/temperature sheet and looked forward to freedom. Turning up at university, I was quickly surrounded by teachers on all sides wondering why I had come in. Apparently they as in the department had no problems with me being there, but they hadn't cleared it with Nagoya University's Beurocracy Central. I was allowed to go to the one lesson that day, and then asked to carry on taking my temperature over the weekend too.

I'm sorry to say that Boots' Feverscan(tm) was either inaccurate or Nagoya Uni had its paranoia hat on again, but having emailed in the weekend's results I got a phone call early on Monday saying that a temperature of mostly 37 with occasional 38s classifies as a fever, and would I be so kind as to go to hospital to be checked. Hm.

Hospital was a way away, and a fairly small drab kind of building in which I waited for a fair bit, was talked to, waited for another bit, had some long stick thing wodged up my nose, waited some more and then eventually charged about £25 for the bit of paper on which the doctor had scribbled "no problems".

With my health now financially secured on paper I could get back into the swing of things at uni, and with no more project to worry about I could actually try and get back into some sort of normal schedule. Hooray!