Diaries of an Umeshu Addict

A Farewell

2009-08-31T08:31:00.000-07:00

Dear Nagoya,

It has been a week since returning back home to England, and my final box of stuff has finally arrived, marking the point that my life has moved back to the UK and thus the end of my year abroad experience in Japan. It has been a whole lot more up and down than I could have possibly imagined, and answers to the normal "How was Japan?" have been very difficult to answer satisfactorily. So here is the final blog entry, to try and give a reasonable account of myself for the past year, to answer that question, and also in a way to say thanks for reading or following this in any way, and perhaps it might stand to serve for any other student heading to Nagoya or even anyone looking to emulate some of my travelling around South East Asia.

The principle reason why it is difficult to try and pin a single word on to my year-long experience (aside from the obvious time issue) is the fact that, in my head at least, I ended up living two very different lives while in Japan. In one I was a foreign student attending Nagoya University's foreign student programme (NUPACE). In the other I was still a tourist and free citizen of the East, managing plenty of travelling, socialising and even working under various guises. Japan is a marvellous country, and having had the chance to get around so much of it and experience all sorts of different regions and places (regional differences are much larger in Japan than in England) has been a wonderful once in a lifetime experience. If I return to the country again (and I really hope I will soon) it will unfortunately most likely be with work or some other commitment that will stop me doing as much, so I'm very lucky to have done so much already. Not only around Japan, but my travelling took me out of Japan three times, twice to Korea and once to Singapore, to see more of that side of the world that seems so far away from the UK.

My main problem with my year abroad, and what at times actually made me very depressed, was my life within the university. This is important to understand properly, because I do not want to be misunderstood - in fact this might come up more as a compliment for where I'd come from than where I'd ended up. I suppose the best way of putting it was that when I went to Japan, I found normal. That is, life in Japan was very normal to me. This is not the same as familiarity, because nearly every aspect of life in Japan was new and intriguing, but once figured out it became very very normal, with almost nothing exceptional to make it that extra bit special. I was a country-lad, raised on farms and I attended school with a fantastic group of people with fantastic personalities, and there was always something out of the ordinary to discuss, do or laugh about. In the deepest darkest city of Nagoya however, very little changed throughout the year. Anything unique within the university was only with the other foreign students, who mostly only wanted to go out drinking or karaoke, and who eventually were perfectly happy to spend every evening indoors playing on PSPs. With no university clubs (see previous posts) and nothing to do day-to-day outside drinking, social life was very monotonous. Service from shops was always identical, nothing out of place or eccentric popped up, daily life settled into a pattern, there were no ambitious projects for doing anything wild because everybody was happy just to go drinking and have a year partying. This was amplified since I was not really adjusted to city life, where taking walks was no good way of escaping anything, and especially in Nagoya where every street seems identical to the next continuing for an enormous urban sprawl there wasn't really much point to wandering along them. You couldn't see the stars, the horizon, grassy hills... I didn't feel that a life in Nagoya would really suit me very well from a location point of view. I suppose, at least not as a foreign student.

In terms of university life, this really only leaves study to keep the average student motivated and happy, and I guess that's why I ended up being as upset as I was. It is difficult to express my thoughts on the subject without accidentally offending the people at NUPACE, so I want to reassure them that I think they're all amazing. The effort and spare time that the staff put in to their teaching, to ensuring smooth living for foreign students and to help with any problems or queries you might have is phenomenal, and they all deserve medals for putting up with what us foreign students were able to throw at them. The teaching staff are excellent there, but sadly the lesson content wasn't - the majority of lessons were practically a waste of time. Out of the courses that I took in my first semester, I would only put stock into the History, Reading and Presentation classes, constituting just 4.5 hours out of a weekly 19.5, because they taught me new and interesting things. All the other classes simply went over old grammar and futile tasks that seemed more designed to keep students busy rather than teach anything useful. Homework was textbook pages with blanks, tests were textbook pages with different blanks. Classes were mostly teacher reads textbook, asks student to read textbook, asks student with friend to read textbook, sets group work with textbook, then setting homework (from the textbook), lather rinse and repeat for three hours every morning starting from 8.45am. This ended up being rather soul-destroying, because I questioned why I was there, why was I spending my time so uselessly like this, and why do I seem to be the only one so annoyed by it. To cap it off, every single lesson in my first semester (save one thank goodness) was in the same classroom. I suppose I'd come to Japan thinking that my language would be pressured so much that it would have to improve, and it was - just not in that classroom. In the second semester I planned and chose my studying much better, with all but three of the 1.5hour lessons being actually quite new and interesting (and all taught in Japanese this time around). Funnily enough, although I went from "Intermediate Intensive" (Intensive meaning hours worked and by no means an indicator of difficulty) to "Pre-Advanced Standard", in two of the lessons the content got easier and more similar to my 2nd year in Sheffield, and in another lesson the content was directly copy/pasted from the Intermediate syllabus! I bear no grudges against the teachers, but if asked what was the worst aspect of my year abroad, the lessons would be strong contenders for the title.

And it was from this that I tried my best to create the second life, to escape from NUPACE and see what else I could find in Japan for me. A lot of foreign students talk about an "international bubble", and I was out to burst out of it as soon as possible. This is why I did so much travelling, and refusing to go along with the American/English group whenever they did things. I hadn't come 7000 miles to eat at McDonalds, play on PSPs or simply go out drinking all the time. I wanted new foods, cultures, and sights. Having made a disaster out of my first semester, I tried desperately to model the second one into something I could be proud of: much more study, get a job, take the JLPT etc. (the JLPT result is in the post as we speak...). I even started playing the piano again. In the end I'd achieved this goal of separation very well, and my shining pride from my year abroad is my translation job with Nagoya University's OCW department, because not only was it completely removed from all other foreign students but, thanks to the kind understanding and tolerance on the part of the other staff, I've proved that I can make it in a Japanese office without stepping on too many people's toes, and the frequent necessary keigo and both written and spoken interactions have been a great asset to helping me improve my Japanese. I hope that I can continue to help them with their work in any way possible, and wish them all the best in my absence.

Was my year abroad worthwhile? Incredibly. I've learned how to cook, how to play piano (again), calligraphy, translation, the rules of sumo and bridge, karaoke etiquette, how to fold a futon, house-visiting manners, dormitory politics, rubbish recycling, how to teach a British accent... to name but a few. I've experienced blizzards in Sapporo for the winter Snow Festival and typhoons down in Okinawa in mid-summer, done both Sakura and Koyo seasons in Kyoto, visited Tokyo numerous times and even left the country entirely three times. While my mood was up and down like Alton Tower's best rollercoaster (there is no better place to make you feel stupid than Japan), looking back on my time in Japan has changed me and grown me and given me experience of things that I'd have never have encountered otherwise, and now having those things conquered I'm much more of a person than I was before I left. Although I might suggest that Nagoya would not be the best place to first experience Japan, I wouldn't go back and change it even if I could. My closing thought in Nagoya, as I eyed the TV Tower lit up and resplendent at night before heading home for good, was "Done. Next challenge". And I'm eager to see what might be awaiting me around the next corner.

I will see you all the next time I see you, and soon I hope.
Signing off,

Simon

PS. One point I'd like to address separately is people calling Japan "racist". Well yes, at face value Japan is (at times) xenophobic, racist and extremely obtuse, but apart from the way of "that's just how it is", the best way I've found of explaining this is in the form of a "context-cloud". Imagine a subtext, or unwritten codes or patterns that define how things should be in society, then imagine that most people in Japan can see/understand this, and so follow it, because that is often the best way to get about things when everybody else is doing the same. The abiding rule is therefore to follow or to play by the part that has been expected of you, which as a foreigner means that you are expected to be a tourist, to not speak Japanese and to be different. It's by not knowing what is expected that makes us seem very odd, because we do not tend to follow the established way of things, and this both makes you interesting because you're novel and funny, but also trouble. And as soon as you try and do something to deliberately go against this unwritten context, such as try and live in the country, or make extra requests of banks or post offices, do the problems begin. Sometimes even by speaking in Japanese to ask for help will be met with blank looks because you're not expected, or even meant to speak Japanese, simply because you are foreign. Some of the best conversations I've had with strangers in Japan were pretending that I'd only been in the country for a few weeks, rather than mentioning my foreign student status. People complimented me on my Japanese ability, but this was not because I had any linguistical skill but more that I'd had the same introductory conversation X hundred times, because that was what you were expected to say and so went down very well. This system does have its advantages, such as if you're ever caught doing something you shouldn't it is all too easy to simply claim that you don't know any better, and the police/authority will grunt and bear it because that fits with their knowledge of us. Every time I went to the bank I distinctly felt that the clerks' looks were more of the lines "oh no a foreigner, they always ask impossible questions", and so by giving me the answer "that's impossible" everything has been fulfilled and what am I complaining about. Rather than label Japanese culture as racist therefore, it is more accurate to describe it as context-driven, where people tend to follow society's expectations rather than individual judgements. I made it a personal mission to try and change as many opinions of foreigners as possible, mostly by returning stares of curious children who'd probably never seen such a strange thing as me before. Start young I thought.

PPS. I'm sure I can explain that idea better in person, so maybe ask me the next time you see me ;)

Travelling: Okinawa

2009-08-14T05:14:00.000-07:00

PS. If you're wandering what happened to July, it was full of JLPT (went fairly well, maybe pass, find out in September), essays and tests. Very much a batten-down-the-hatches kind of time, but I did manage to get to see Sumo and Kyogen, which you'll have to ask me about...

Okinawa
So, the final destination for me on my travels around Japan - Okinawa. I'd decided to pay a visit to the island and a friend I have there as my last trip in Japan, making it a kind of summer holiday after university had finished. Okinawa is the hub of Japan's most southern archipalegeo, and as such is fairly similar in terms of politics to the Channel Islands, in that it's mostly seen as somewhere to retire to, and receives little or no attention in the mainstream media.

As a holiday, it wasn't much of a plan to simply go tourist-crazy, more perhaps see a couple of things and just enjoy being out of Nagoya for the first time in a while. There were a few things I wanted to see though - being interested in history I wanted to visit the place where the Japanese military made its ferocious last stand against the overwhelming American offensive, I'd also heard lots of good things about the aquarium up in the north (largest fish tank in the world, best aquarium in the world). Outside of that it was principally the plan just to see how island life differed from that in the big mainland city. In the first day we just wandered around the island, seeing bits and bobs, like the local Chinese Garden.

...and then the day after that Typhoon Morakot blew past.

During a typhoon the island just battens down the hatches and waits it out. In this case the typhoon only glanced the island, and the most we had was a bit of strong wind and frequent heavy rain, but nothing that would really cause any damage. It was worrying watching what happened to Taiwan and China later in the week - chance that Okinawa itself was spared the worst of it.

The day after was planned to go to the beach, but that was full of driftwood and flotsam from the typhoon, so swimming wasn't allowed. My goal of swimming in a sea warmer than England's was thwarted again.

When the typhoon calmed down a bit, we managed to get out to Okinawa's principle castle, and while I was told it wasn't worth much to actually enter, outside there was a free display of some Okinawan costumes and dancing.

After that we coincidentally met up with another Sheffielder who'd come to the island for an end-of-term holiday as well. We ended up walking a fair way to the military tunnels together, and had a good look around those.

Getting around in Okinawa is the tricky bit. With no trains, you're left with buses and taxis. Buses are fairly cheap (maybe £2 for a trip to the far end of the island), and being no less reliable than English ones are your best bet for getting places. Taxis are more expensive, at perhaps over £5 for the same journey. The undisputed best way of getting around is to own or rent a car, both of which seem to work out cheaper than catching buses all day, especially if there's more than one of you. You'll need an international driving license, before you leave for the country even, so I was limited to the buses and the occasional taxi. The day we went to the aquarium we were kindly given a lift by a Korean student who'd bought his car for around £150 from another student when he arrived.

On the last day I finally managed to get to the aquarium, thanks to the friend of a friend Anyong. He not only drove the long distance (only about 50 miles, but with very slow speed limits) to the north of the island but also showed us other places along the way. That day the typhoon had finally passed entirely and the tropical side of the island had finally showed up.

The aquarium, or perhaps I should say Ocean Expo Park, of which the aquarium was just a small part, was massive, including tropical gardens and various separate houses for dolphins, turtles etc. We didn't have much time to look around though, which was a shame, but makes it certainly worth another visit. The best thing about the aquarium was the variety - even though I've been to Nagoya's aquarium, there was so much at Churaumi that I'd never seen before: the enormous lobster/crabs and sea cucumbers that were more like sea watermelons, upclose ultraviolet tanks of jellyfish, snakes that bury themselves in the sand and look like living grass, fish with the same luminesance that's in your watch, and of course, the enormous fish tank.

Would love to come back here sometime soon, and spend more time going around everything. There are coach tours that contain entry to this place alongside other things in the north of the island, but just this by itself is worth a whole day if not more.

Anyong also had a good sense of where the best "free sample" sweet/cake shops were, and took us to a few of those, noticably "Pineapple Land", where if you walk in through the exit avoiding the large piles of guilt you can get through the gift shop to the "all you can eat" pineapple samples. I've no real idea how they make any money in that place, although they were on the local news for having made the first shipment of pineapples to the mainland.

Heading back home we stopped at the American Village to see the more foreign side of the island. This place is apparently popular for its night-life, which isn't easy to find in an island that's half condensed whitewash city and half vegetation. On this occasion however, there was a Linkin Park concert.

Although I said Okinawa resembles the Channel Islands, it does bear one striking difference in that it was effectively traded to the Americans at the end of WWII for a reprieve of occupation, and the statistic is something like 70% of Okinawa's land is still taken up by American bases. The bases are infamous for incidents of rape - usually drunk GIs picking on young school girls. Those GIs are not answerable to the Okinawan authorities, leaving the actual citizens of the island without any feeling of actual justice. Mainland Japan isn't interested in interfering, preportedly because they see Okinawans as sub-Japanese, but mainly because Okinawa is supposed to be the prime example of Japan/American cooperation, and so they want to avoid publicising any "trouble" that would result from actually prosecuting such GIs. The bases pay well for the land they occupy however, and the local economy is heavily based on (providing leisure for) the bases, and so their upcoming loss (moving to Guam in the next decade or so) will be both a relief and an economic worry. During my time on the island I saw fairly little of them, apart from small reminders here and there: the enormous base right next to the airport, the propaganda-filled US television channel, frequent jets/helicopters overhead, shops accepting dollars...

However, this shouldn't be enough to dissuade you from visiting the island. Okinawa has its own quirkiness to it, with its unique position being part of Japan, not part of Japan, part of America etc. and it plays the role very well. It is the poorest region of Japan, but that only shows around the edges, and so long as you come prepared for a strong sun, strange transportation (bring an international license!) and come with an explorative mood, Okinawa is actually a pretty decent place.

Travelling: Kobe

2009-06-24T00:52:00.000-07:00

Kobe was always on my list of places to visit in Japan. I'd heard good things about it before coming to Japan, and then more good things from other people while in the country. It seemed to be just a nice place - a large city (not unusual in Japan), fairly vibrant, good to walk around and not too far from Osaka if you want some more travelling. It was almost chance then, that the woman (friend of a friend) who kindly showed my family and I around Kyoto when they came to visit lives in Kobe, and kindy offered to give me a tour of the place for one weekend in June. So I took some time out of studying (or cramming if you prefer) for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test the following weekend and paid the city a visit.

Once off the shinkansen, I met up with Mrs Ketano and her daughter, Ikuko, who would kindly show me around. The first place they took me to was the nearby Ijinkan ("Different-People's Homes"). Kobe was one of the first places in Japan to attempt to integrate with foreigners, and it was only in Kobe that foreigners were allowed to own property and businesses outside of a strictly controlled "foreign zone" found in most other cities. Kobe still holds that reputation for being both well integrated and fairly multicultural as a result, and also home to a large number of foreign tourists and residents. Naturally the first Ijinkan we looked at was the British one, which even had a lawn (grass for the sake of it is rare in Japan), even if the inside had been transformed into some sort of Sherlock Holmes museum.

Next stop was a trek up Kobe's mountain, to see what we could see. It was a good location - it was close enough to the city to not be inaccessible and it was not far enough that it felt removed. The mountain ended up being a place just to go to look over the city and maybe get some peace and quiet for a short while, before heading back down. At the top are various rose gardens and scenic spots, all making for good views of the surrounding city/countryside.

Off the mountain I was taken to Kobe's Disaster Reduction Museum to learn about the large and devastating earthquake that happened there not much more than a decade ago. It then hit home that my guides were alive and living in Kobe at that time, and while a bit of a sensative subject, to hear their own experiences of what happened was actually more valuable than wondering around the museum. Japan is prone to this kind of natural disaster though, and will probably suffer even worse in future, despite the museum's best efforts to convince and educate architects to rethink their designs. When I first came to Japan we were given huge amounts of information on the upcoming Tokai earthquake, a big one that's been overdue for a couple of years, and that some of the recent extreme weather has made people worry might not be too far away.

The museum itself was on the harbour, and we drove a bit further out onto the chains of artificial islands to get a shot of Kobe from the harbour. So I managed to get to see the city from both sides, land and sea.

The next day was a day trip to go and see Himeji Castle, probably Japan's most famous castle due to its "fairy-tale castle" kind of image. This was another big travelling checkmark for me, because I knew that in the very near future (maybe next couple of months) the entire castle will be covered in one giant tent for restoration works, and will be closed to the public for approximately 5 years. I figured I should get to see it before then at least, and very luckily that's what I got.

The castle is very well preserved, I suppose because it takes so long to service. It was designed for big and imposing-ness points, and for sheer defensibility.

I ended up wondering around it imagining myself as some invading army. I'd forgotten all my seige engines else I'd have trebuche'd my way in. And I also forget it's completely made of wood, so I left my vats of boiling oil with the babysitter. The basic formulae is you end up battering your way through a gate, being shot at from all sides from small slits in the walls with arrows and guns (yes, they had gunpowder by that time, however people don't like the idea of samurai with guns), then charging up another uphill narrow corridor only to hit another death-zone gate. If the hills don't get you the projectiles will. And all the time you can see the main castle and you keep believing you're getting closer when in fact even after getting all the way around the outer walls you're still nowhere near, and the way in can even be entirely hidden so you end up where you started. Hats off to the strategic genius.

When you finally got inside, there was still no guarantee of success. Ridiculously steep staircases topped with trapdoors, and more slits in the floor for more shooting people as they climb. And about five floors of that, with supposedly Chief Bloke sitting at the top. Goodness knows what would happen if he decided to order pizza or nip to the nearest supermarket or something, take him hours to get back in.

Coming back out of the castle was the end of the weekend and of my travels around Kobe. It was amazing that I had had the chance to look around both the castle and the city of Kobe, and in the hands of expert guides.

How Not to Mend Your Shoes

2009-06-13T00:35:00.000-07:00

One small ideal that I always try to cling to is that, when things break, it is better to fix the old one than immediately go out and buy a new one. In the same vein however, it does mean that I am terrible at buying new clothes until they literally fall to pieces, which ironically has been the fate of my sandals, leaving strange black powder/lumps of sole in the corridor between my room and the kitchen. Unfortunately, as maybe some of you worked out from my ExtremeShoeEngineering(tm) in Hokkaido, where I resorted to wearing a sock-bag-sock combo to keep dry, there was a small waterproofing problem with my shoes. July/August in Japan is well known as the Rainy Season, and after a number of soaked feet incidents I have been prompted to properly repair my shoes.

(NB. Without really checking, I just assumed that the chance of me finding new shoes in my size, in a style that I liked, and within a reasonable price while in Japan would be small enough to discount. Ah well.)

So, my shoes and I made trips to a small shoe-repair shop near the main station, and were promptly told that they couldn't repair them directly, and whatever they did probably wouldn't solve the waterproofing problem. When I went to a larger "Shoe/Leather Expert" shop, they explained that they couldn't do much for it either because the sole was one whole set piece, and they couldn't slice it up well enough to make a repair. The leather on the sole was pretty thin anyway, and wouldn't really have sliced at all. So, no real chance of professional help with solving the footwear problem.

This was about the extent of the problem. Although in the background you can see the strawberry plants - having wielded no more than four strawberries, I figured there must be something wrong with how I was keeping them (or that the season had changed...), so I adopted the strategy of just leaving them to take over the balcony. It works very well for growing the plant, but still no strawberries...

Anyway, back to shoes.Then I remembered I saw some sort of liquid plastic something in Tokyu Hands the last time I was there, so went off to investigate. I found this.

Not only did it have a fun name, but the rear instructions were fantasically optimistic as to how well it would work.

So, application. Squeeze out of tube, spread on with ice lolly stick. The kit also came with a nail file, but my nails were ok so ended up not needing it.

It went on pretty well, staying liquid long enough for me to contort the shoe a bit and get it well into the hole(s).

Both shoes done, just a matter of waiting. The weather was still hot enough to dry it pretty quickly, and it was well done within about two days, though I decided to do a second layer to cement things a bit more.

They sealed pretty much perfectly, and thanks to the new insoles I had sent from home they were back to fully weather proof again. Hurray!

PS. After about a month and a half of wear, and the tsuyu (rainy season) showing no sign of stopping, they eventually split along the hole again. It was easy enough to use Shoe Goo to fix them again though.

PPS. By the end of the year, they're almost back to their original state of holiness. Ah well. Time for more goo...

My Experience of Contact Bridge

2009-06-08T20:08:00.001-07:00

That might seem an odd title, but there's a story attached to this. The story actually took place yesterday evening, so this might be the most up to date blog entry I've posted yet, a fact which is both a source of pride and embarrassment, but hey-ho.

Mondays are swimming days, that is, the university's elite swimming team finally have an evening off and they open the floodgates of the pool for free to the rest of the unwashed who can't splash out on a public one. I tend to turn up, swim a kilometre or so trying not to notice how many times I'm being lapped by everyone else, then decide that that is fair exercise and cycle home. Yesterday, this bit went fairly normally, save that temperatures in Nagoya are now consistently over 25ºC and so the pool was pretty full of people escaping the heat.

Also, I've been trying to get back into piano, and have managed to stick at it by teaching myself bits and bobs of music on the free-to-use digital piano at the back of the Foreign Students' Centre. One of the tricks is I think to play what you want, not what you have to, and I've been away from learning the instrument long enough to have a good desire to be fluent in a couple of pieces, so things will all go well hopefully and I'll be able to bang something respectable out before I return to the UK. The best time to practice is of course when everybody has already gone home, and so on Mondays I usually make it after swimming.

Wandering in to the centre and seeing the piano already taken, I figured I could just wait 10 minutes or so and then it would become free. I had barely sat down when I women came around the corner and asked if I'd be interested in joining in her card game. I said why not, and went around the corner to discover a mysterious board (North South East West and other arcane looking coloured markings), a plastic cage of playing cards and four stands full of strangely marked cards that would put the average Taro artist to shame. The other players included two Indian-looking guys, and a petite Japanese girl, all of whom had already heard the rules and understood them several years ago so I was fairly behind from the go.

The woman then helpfully proceded to try and explain it all by means of a printed piece of paper with a grid of numbers and suits on it. This would have been ok, except there were also odd tetris-shaped lines running around and over those number/suit combos, dividing them into strange areas I didn't grasp the importance of. One of the "y axis" resembling bits of the table as it were was the "points", which I think I wanted to get as much of as possible, but there was no obvious way to climb up the table through the tetris to get to the "ultimate trump" or "7 no-trump" or "7 spade" or whichever was the goal of the whole thing.

We each got 13 cards, which we were meant to count and then arrange in some certain order, and even my card-holding posture was sternly corrected. From 13 cards, you were then meant to work out how many points you had, from the system Ace is 4, King 3, Queen 2, Jack 1. Once you'd worked that out, the game would begin from the person whose direction on the board or coloured markings had "dealer" next to it on the cage with the cards in. Hm. With no real goal in sight and no real actual playing strategy, we moved on to the "Bitting Stage", which I couldn't tell if it was a misspelling of biting or betting.

This was the start of my doubts as to my proficiency for the game. If you didn't have 13 points, then you would take from your card-holder the triangular green "pass" card and put it in front of you, this was simple, and all three other players did so. However, if you did have 13 points (I had 14) then you counted the number of cards of any one suit that you held, and then if you had 5 or more of some then you could take a "1" card of that suit from your card holder thing instead. I did so, having plenty of spades and I declared "1 spade", whatever that was meant to mean. At least I was somewhere on the mythical tetris-based score card.

My partner then put down a "2 spade", which I was told meant he had anything from 6-9 points. I failed to see the relevance of that, along with the relevance of the NSEW directional thing, the card cage and the still baffling stand full of different tokens. And how on earth he'd got 2 and I'd only had 1 befuddled me, especially seeing as he didn't have 13 to begin with. I was assured this was good (I still didn't really know what I was aiming for) and we did two more goes around where everybody passed. "This is defensive play" I was assured, though defending from what exactly I had no idea.

At that point my partner (I keep saying partner, the guy directly across from me who I didn't know) then lay down all his cards neatly on the table and we had to put all the strange tokens from the first bit back in the holder, as if it had all been for nothing. The game then basically became Hearts, with some arbitrary card being trumps, and I had to play both for myself and also tell the guy across from me exactly what to do. Also, for some unexplained reason you consult the colours on the card cage and decide who gets the honour of putting a card face down on the table and then being told to turn it over (eh?). Every time I tried to play Hearts the woman corrected me, saying that I should already know what cards everybody has because of the first round, which I couldn't remember. How that helps you win at Hearts was even more confusing, and thankfully soon all the cards were used and the wins/losses for the rounds where counted.

At that point, it was revealed that although I'd declared "1 spade" I was actually up somewhere in 4 spade, and in a different tetris area on the scoring card, but because I'd done badly at the Hearts bit I was back down to 2 spades. This failed to strike me as in any way significant because I still didn't know what the hell that meant. Regardless, the card cage was replaced with a different one with different colours and the game began anew. I was then asked how I was faring - I said I didn't understand and I didn't really know what the blazes was going on. She made the point that it was like a novel - you start off reading and don't know how it goes but the pieces fall together later on, and why shouldn't I play it because the Royal Family Windsor do. She thus invited me with a flyer to the rest of her group's recruitment drive about the university campus, and it was only at this point that I discovered that the game I was trying to play was called Contact Bridge, something I'd seen next to the chess puzzles in the Times and paid very little attention to. It wasn't looking likely I would in future much either - one game had been far too confusing for me, and it seemed to have not only kicked down the "Keep It Simple Stupid" rule as far as steamrollering it then pegging it out over a termites' nest.

In the next game, I didn't have 13 points, so I passed, as did my partner. However, on the second round he said "Oblivion" or something I didn't quite catch which suddenly meant his cards were worth something different and the 13+ rule didn't apply. This also meant I had to do something they assumed I'd know, but by this point the piano was gathering cobwebs with lack of use and I made my excuses and left before my head exploded.

Thank you kind woman for trying, it was a valuable experience, and I'm sure my misunderstanding of your world-class explanation at the start let me down. Thank you for bearing with my faulterings and misunderstandings at every turn, but I must turn down your offer, and leave Bridge to the readers of the Times and people who might actually stand a chance of understanding the multi-tiered rule system.

The cost of the incomprehensible cards, cage and taro-esque card rack would probably be prohibitive too.

Plan B Review

2009-05-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

Thought it might be a good idea to let you know how things have changed since the "Half Time" post and see if I can check off a few of the goals I set myself at that time.

Now that the project is done and my timetable isn't being disrupted with intermittent quarantining, the past two weeks have actually been fairly normal, or as close as things can possibly get to that. The timetabling is much much better this time around - only one late afternoon lesson Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays, and a large wodge on Mondays and Thursdays. The timetable is now entirely taught in Japanese, which while being horrendously difficult I'm sure is healthy somehow, the language equivalent of eating broccoli or something. That said the classes are actually interesting - one about comparing Korean culture to Japan's, one about the place of kanji in Japan and why you only really need to know around 1,500, and one about globalisation and the "McWorld" phenomenon. So basically lots more free time, lots more interesting and useful lessons and much more language. Timetable gets a tick.

Let's see if the rest of the list has come to fruition...

1) Escape university.
Well, um, not really. One or two other students have managed to join the Nagoya Frisbee team I think, but I still don't have much hopes for much proper engagement with the city. I spend as little time as I have to at university now anyway, and that's about it.
2) Get a job.
Big success. I teach English to one student for ¥3000/hour (about £19/hour) twice a week, and could probably find another student if I felt like it. I've also secured a translation postition with the university online course department - they wanted someone to go through their syllabi and course descriptions and things to put them in English. That one goes at 60 words to an hour paid (an hour roughly ¥1000). It's good for me both for my Japanese and by wallet. So yes, earning lots, feeling more like I'm actually working towards something rather than just wasting time around Nagoya.
3) More self-study.
This too a success. I've started studying at least half an hour every day, and also the translation job pushes more Japanese my way. Having a completely Japanese timetable also works wonders too, so happy with this one.
4) Write a Japanese sakubun at least once every two weeks.
Kind of. I've signed up to an online writing course that has one small piece to write every week, but only about 400 characters. If I ever meet my tutor I'll ask her to check through them before I put them online, but there's really not a lot you can say in 400 characters. Will have to expand them or something.
5) Move to the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) Level 1 kanji.
Aha, no. This is oddly conflicting with the next goal, in that I'm not going to change kanji lists while I'm studying for a different test. I'm going to make JLPT2 as good as it can be before July 5th.
6) Take the JLPT Level 2 test this year in July.
All signed up and rearing to go. Studying specifically for this one now in my own time. Haven't received any confirmation for it yet though, hope that's not a bad sign.
7) Try and join a theatre club.
Hmm, not really. Would have liked to, but I think I've just resigned myself to the fact that I might as well just spend all my free time either wasting time on the computer, earning money for translating or studying for the JLPT. Variety was fantastic in Sheffield last year, and I do very much miss it now, but I think that I have two months or so left in this country and the more work I can do now the less I have to do in 4th year.

Overall then things have improved around here. It's still not great or anything half as good as the fun I was having this time last year, but it's better. Having my head down and working towards things is maybe not exciting or riveting but it's better than wandering around with nothing really to latch on to to call your purpose. On top of that more travelling planned - I'd like to finish Japan off with a visit to Kobe and a visit to Okinawa, and then back to the dormitory for some frantic packing and boxing of things before leaving Nagoya for the last time.

I'm both looking and not looking forward to it though. It's something that's difficult to describe - Japan is quite a marvellous place in a number of ways, and it's great to wander around it and just be in its bizarreness and difference of everything. I can easily see how people could make a life out here, however hard that would be to begin with. However, I miss the "extra-ordinarity" of what I had in the UK. I once thought that what I had encountered here in Nagoya was "the Normal". There are people, there are jobs, there are restaurants etc but nothing really special leaps out at you apart from what you yourself find special. Back in England with my friends and family there something extraordinary was always happening, no matter how insignificant, it was extraordinary and outside "the Normal". Perhaps this is therefore a good thing, that I get to both experience the blandness of normality in a country which is by nature intriguing, and that I get to understand what it is that I left behind in the UK and how special it actually is.

PS. Having got bored one day I decided to get a bag of compost and some strawberry plants from the garden-centre and see if I could create anything. The original plan was tomato plants because they're effectively foolproof but they weren't selling any, so I figured strawberries were still red and a fruit and worth having a go at.

They're well developed now, even spilling over into another small container of earth I had lying around and they even managed to produce four strawberries! Although one was bad and I ate the other three to see if they were bad as well. Since the plants seem determined to grow in all directions I'm nudging them towards the balcony wall bit to see if I can get some vine-action in them growing in and out of the holes.

Also, there're loads of little white spidery things all over some of the leaves - they're not making holes or anything and they wash off very easily, but I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be there. Any suggestions on a postcard to the usual address.

April and May

2009-05-30T22:58:00.001-07:00

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!

Travelling: Korea II

2009-05-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

Seoul
This was my second time in Korea, for about the same duration (10 days-ish), a trip mostly just to get to see Lianne again, but this time we also decided we would try travelling around to see more of the country. Lianne didn't have a great deal of time off work so the travel would be slightly rushed, but it ended up being very worthwhile and we got to see a lot of the country that I didn't see much of the first time.

Firstly was off to the captial of South Korea, Seoul. Having talked a lot with the Korean students in Nagoya, asking them for their ideas of what to see/where to go etc, one of the students (who had ambitions to work for the Seoul tourist industry) supplied me with a very comprehensive list of things to see and do in Seoul, including her favourite chicken soup restaurant. Which is where we went first.

It was very tasty - a whole chicken floating in soup stuffed with rice and ginger. Perfect for the slightly chilly and rainy day we were exploring the streets.

Nearby was the National Museum, and a palace. The museum was no-photos, but contained a lot of ancient Korean relics, mostly from its various royal families, along with various traditional possessions and robes still used during various festivals and ceremonies.

The palace was only one part of a large complex, but one which apparently had been destroyed and rebuilt more times than was really fair. It was still able to accept tourists though, so we went in for a look.

The thing that struck me was the colours of it - a lot of work had gone into keeping the colours vibrant in the wood. Just a shame that the weather was a bit grey.

After the castle we wondered up the road to a nearby shopping street, full of clothes and trinkets. Here we discovered the only Starbucks in the world that is forced to write its horrible trademark name in the local alphabet. On the way we also passed by the remains of the Namdaemun, or the usually enormous Great South Gate, which had burnt down about a year and a half ago. Rebuilding work was underway though.

It was on this street that I managed to get myself a hanko (personal stamp) made. My new translation job required one to stamp off the time that I had worked so they could calculate my pay, and most Japanese people use a hanko in place of a signature, so I figured that it would be a good purchase. The trouble would be finding out how to represent my name in Japanese characters - the vast majority are impossible to convert ("Johnson" would have to be "Jon-son", and the characters don't exist in Japanese). I settled eventually for 砦門 (sai-mon), meaning "fort gate". People I've showed it to say that it's a good choice, with a slightly Chinese/old fashioned feel.

Moving from the shopping street, we began exploring the immediate city. In Seoul there's a very well decorated but small river running through some of the busier areas. It makes for good walks and almost separates you from the metropolis that towers above you, and which was a good place to explore. Further up the river there were some fantastic paper lanterns. The bridges were lined with a fair few police though.

It was around this time that we began to actually recognise the fact that there really were a lot of policemen around. I'd heard from the Korean students in Nagoya that all South Korean youths of 18 or over have to partake in some form of military service, and seeing as most don't want to join the army they instead serve in the police or fire service. Still I'd never seen so many concentrated in one place before, and the light and unworried atmosphere in the city didn't seem to warrant their presence. At any rate, there were plenty around, either lining the streets, marching out of subway entrances or forming ranks on bridges. Small worry that some form of martial law was silently being introduced. But no worry, back to touristing. The worst we were getting from the police was the odd blank stare.

From the end of the river (blocked by more rows of police - now noticably sporting riot gear) I spotted a spotlight, and thinking there might be some sort of festival I tried to get to the source to find out what was going on. All the direct streets were blocked by more rows of riot police, so going around the long way we were faced with this.

It's alright when they're just lining up to block passage, but not so much when they start marching in the streets shouting and banging their shields. I wondered if some sort of war had broken out, but at any rate it would probably be better to head back to a hotel than hang around. We later found out that earlier that day there was a parade, and that the police were expecting demonstrations due to the upcoming Labour day, but the show of force was well above what would have been required. I suppose it shocked people enough not to even try.

The next day we left the motel and in the street immediately adjacent to ours was a full blown parade.

Parade over, we set off to try and find one of Seoul's famous temples, close to the business district. There were some musical fountains around which Lianne managed to get a video of.

The temple was famous for having the largest statue of a Boddhisatva called Kannon, and when we found it it was also full of red lanterns.

That evening we thought we'd try for the Seoul tower, to see what we might see. There was terrible queuing though - about 45 mins just to get into the cable car to take us to the base of the thing, and even when we got up to that point, we had to buy a separate ticket just to enter the tower itself. It seemed some clever lock-maker had made up something about couples locking themselves together on the tower dias and made a mint.

When we eventually got into the tower, we then had about an hour and a half wait to even get into the queue for the elevator up. At the top, the windows were pretty thick with dust/grimy-ness and we didn't wait long to find out why - three small Korean girls burst out of the tower and immediately threw themselves at the glass. Wonder if they caught anything.

The view of Seoul was not particularly worth the wait - it was nice, but not two hours worth nice. Especially when there was another three quarters of an hour to get back out of the viewing gallery. Eesh.

By that point it was getting late, and we decided it would be easier travel-wise if we simply caught the night bus to our next destination rather than looked for a hotel for the night.

Busan
Busan is the "other" Korean city - in the same way that most foreigners to Britain have only really heard of London and Manchester. It's less touristy than Seoul, but contains (at least from what I saw) a lot more foreigners.

Arriving at 6am was not so great, but sitting on a beach in early morning having not slept so well was a new experience. It was more a question of finding some way of passing the time before we could even try and get a seat somewhere for breakfast to try and wake up a bit. We eventually managed to find a cafe called "Paris Baguette" (bonus points for originality) to grab some hot chocolate and bread, and as if by some sort of cultural magnet within half an hour there was a french couple chatting merrily behind us. Sort of makes me wonder why my pub or fish and chip shop detector wasn't working.

When we'd managed that, we made off for a large temple on the coast. This too was full of colourful lanterns, and was just a beautiful location to sit in the sun, slightly sleepy, but still taking in a foreign country.

Still sleepy, we decided to find a hotel and hit the sack for a few hours, before heading out that evening for the sea front for dinner and a couple of drinks. The beach itself had a strange laser show and a wonderfully lit bridge, all of which my camera refused to take pictures of. You'll have to put up with one I took the next day.

After those two days, we headed back to Ulsan. Lianne's short holiday was over, and I spend the rest of the time doing odd chores around the apartment and trying to be helpful where I could while she was working.

When I got back to Nagoya I was quarantined... (see next post)

Travelling: Singapore

2009-03-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

Singapore

To kind of round off the large amount of travelling I'd done recently around Japan, when I was offered the chance for a couple of days in Singapore I accepted. I knew nothing of the country, and having never been to that area of the world I thought it would be an excellent experience. I was told accommodation would be ok as I could just sleep on the friend of a friend's sofa, and seeing as it turned out to be only 4 days I didn't need much if any luggage. A day-bus to Tokyo, then wacky confusion on the trains to get to Narita led to the first sprint for the gate in the airport I've ever had. I'd recommend it - much more interesting than the usual slow sitting around waiting rooms.

What I didn't bank on was the exact location of this friend of a friend's sofa. On a windowed corner of the 24th floor in the rich-housing district a small walk away from the town centre. Awesome.

The city itself was very pleasant. Interesting architecture, bustling with people, spotless streets, and plenty of signposts and maps everywhere so you don't get lost. This does have something to do with Singapore being a very strict police state - the taxi driver from the airport warned "All countries have laws, but only in Singapore are they enforced", citing the example of an American boy caned for vandalism, despite huge public condemnation of such punishment in the US. According to our hosts, the government is quick to clamp down on any civil disobedience, and although I couldn't see any policemen apparently the whole place is marked with CCTV in one way or other, linked to an automatic fining system for any infractions. Scary.

Was hugely dismayed at finding the all-evil Starbucks here as prevalent as ever. Is there anywhere that horrible company will leave alone? Any corporation that installs a franchise in the "Forbidden City" in the capital of one of the most ancient civilisations in the world (China) is due all the animosity people are willing to petrol-bomb it with. Grr. I'm starting to rank Starbucks Addiction up there along with cigarettes - feel free to do it by yourself but nowhere near me please.

Temple Fun

Singapore is an interesting place simply from the point of its culture - it's a large city with distinct cultural sections, and as such there is lots of cultural transfer and mixing. You can walk from India Town to Chinatown and then to the Colonial District, and marvel at the choice and variety of surroundings. Having not known a lot about the place before I left I read up on a couple of things on Wikipedia and made it my task to go and find them in the short time we had. One of them was find one of the multi-level statue-filled gateways that seem to be popular here, and there are photos of some below. For one I think it's brilliant how you have to take your shoes off - wondering barefoot around a foreign temple marvelling at the colours and statues but also feeling the hot stone floor as well is quite an experience.

Singapore's main temple is the red and white one pictured above (an excellent picture available here). The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum is quite a sight both from outside and inside, and is more lavishly decorated with icons and small statues than many European churches. The ground floor has the main chambers, where people are free to purchase small models of their required boddhisatva and attach it to the wall, and also a huge hall with an enormous gold statue of the Buddha (with a very Chinese-looking dragon behind it, interestingly). Upstairs was the Gold Tooth relic itself, a lump of gold which adding to is meant to be good luck. In my opinion one of the best things was the inclusiveness - real monks were wondering around and of course meditating nearby to the relic, but there were signs encouraging the passing tourists to sit in designated places and take part with some meditation or reflection of their own.

I would have loved to have joined in but time was pressing and so we headed to the Chinatown food court next door. An enormous covered area with more food shops than you could count, crammed full of people. Goodness knows how each made its money, especially as many seemed to be selling the same thing.

The Night Safari

One of the best parts about going to Singapore was managing to get to the Night Safari, a wildlife reserve, rainforest and safari park which only opens at around 7pm. Singapore's near constant temperature of around 28 degrees means that night is only really indicated by things getting dark than getting cold, so wandering around a dark rainforest in your t-shirt is a great experience. And it is wandering - there is a half-hour tour done on a silent electric car-train thing, or there are numerous paths that lead off into the dark leafyness for you to walk around by yourself. More attraction comes from the fact that you can't see the enclosures; whether they're hidden in the undergrowth or whether it's just too dark but it's a much better way of observing animals by finding them yourself other than being alerted by specific divisions between them.

When you've had enough of looking at fairly happy (if slightly fat) animals, there's a complete tribal village with ongoing performances and enough gift shops to sink a battleship with plastic or stuffed tat. We were lucky in that, by the time we'd made it back there, we were just in time for the last animal show, in which the darkness was taken full advantage of by sending animals actually into the crowd, and having them run past openings. An enormous 15 foot boa constrictor slithering around people's feet causing plenty of screams and the presenters running around trying to catch it again, letting loose small mammals to try and find grapes hidden by the audience, it was a very engaging display with environmental message attached which I'm sure if you attempted in the UK it would be torn to pieces by the ridiculous health and safety people. No doubt some visitor would turn out to be allergic to snakes or oxygen or something.

The Battle Box

One thing that felt obvious while wandering Singapore was its English colonial history. Walking around the city at times felt like stepping back in time to the 1920s, and it was a very odd feeling seeing that particular old-fashioned style of architecture still there, being lived in and very much a part of the city. That mixed with the cultural diversity I mentioned before is a very interesting experience.

Singapore was also the last British bastion before it lost South East Asia to the Japanese in WWII. The bunker now turned museum at Fort Canning Park offers a great history lesson with animated wax models from Madam Tussauds London, charting out the timeline of the British surrender, and what the Japanese did with the bunker when they discovered it. And no, the guns weren't facing the wrong way, as we were often reminded - the guns were to deter any attack from the south by sea, which is exactly what they achieved, and a couple were also apparently turned around to fire upon the approaching land forces. You can catch a bus out to the coast for a bit of wandering-around-a-jungle action and also visiting one of the gun's bunkers for another quick museum experience.

Colonial City
On the evening of the last day we made it around the colonial district, home to Raffles Street, Raffles Hall, Raffles Hotel and everything to do with the chap who first decided Singapore was worth developing for the British. It was impressive, and made me wonder if there were still bearded people cradling shotguns sipping gin and tonics in there somewhere. If anywhere it would still exist here.

Of course around the place were very wealthy seeming hotels, restaurants and impressive government buildings. There was a large park which seemed out of bounds in front of one, which several groups of people had gathered around for some drinking, since apparently it's not possible anywhere else in public. Walking by the riverside was very nice however, and it would have been better to have stuck around for a bit longer but again time was against us. Eventually we arrived at Singapore's famous lion-fountain combo. As you can see in the first photo I posted at the top, it was covered in scaffolding (the vague blue tower in the background). Why? It had been struck by lightning the day or so before. Aww. But it was still interesting to walk around such buildings and take in some of the old colonial powered atmosphere.

I would recommend going to Singapore. It's clean, friendly and because it has a huge amount of different cultures, locales and tastes available you will always find something you like. It's a little more expensive than Japan, and especially getting there will probably eat up all of your budget. It doesn't seem to have a great deal to do aside from the evident tourist attractions, once you've seen it it does lose some value, but for the first time it is definitely worth going and witnessing a very unusual and anomaly in the "one country, one race" scenario.

The last thing I want to mention is this ghastly fruit. This is a durian. It is the smelliest thing I have found in the entire world - you can smell it as soon as you enter the supermarket, and actually like a hound dog follow the scent to where it's being sold. The smell is very pungent indeed, and even having brought one back home it proceeded to out-smell every other scent around. Singapore underground's "forbidden" signs actually went "No Eating, No Flammable Gases, No Durians". I suppose a good practical joke would be to hide one in the roof of your school or something. Upon daring to eat the thing, first you have the lovely job of ripping bits off it, releasing even more delightful smell, then you have to remove the stones. The first bite is horrible, since you're still smelling it as well as tasting it, but after that the smell disappears and it tastes like a mix between cheese and a banana. Not bad at all, but the effort to get to the second chew would have put me off a long time ago.

Travelling: Sapporo, Tokyo and Hiroshima

2009-02-18T22:00:00.000-08:00

EDIT: Photo captions now working, sorry bout that

Sapporo and the Snow Festival

One short plane hop from Nagoya airport found us from a mild grey kind of daytime to a dark, cold and misty train heading to the main city of Hokkaido (the northernmost isle of Japan), Sapporo. Emerging from the enormous train station, it was already snowing with huge piles of snow everywhere. Two things soon became apparent - that they do not believe in salting the roads or pavements, meaning people were falling and slipping all over the place, and also that the small hole in my shoe was fantastically conductive to snow, a problem I should have really anticipated. Ah well.

The reason for heading up to the north in this kind of season was for Sapporo's famous Snow Festival, this year being the 60th. As far as I knew it just involved ice sculptures, and was fairly popular, so I figured it would be a good thing to see in my time in Japan. I wasn't wrong.

Even just looking for the hotel so we could dump the luggage, we passed by the main street and were already awed by the falling snow, icy streets and large numbers of ice sculptures we passed. Once we were rid of the bags, we went out again and scouted around. There was one huge main street, with around 12 sections, starting with 1 underneath the TV tower (very similar to Nagoya's) each with a different theme or dominating sculpture. Between the main street and the hotel there was another festival street which was entirely closed off with long rows of ice sculptures in the road. There was also another site a small train journey away which we didn't manage to go to, but apparently it was more of the same. After a brief scouting around we decided to head back to the hotel and make out early again the next day.

The hotel itself deserves mention. It was a capsule hotel, which means very cheap lodging in relative comfort, only this one was attached to an onsen (hot springs) and spa. So, for the price of around 4000 yen a night you could arrive, change to the loose sack-cloth kind of clothes, then have a sauna, cold bath, jacuzzi, scented bath (lemongrass and pineapple?), steam sauna and the best being the open air outdoor onsen, sitting outside in a steaming bath with snow falling on your head. Very cultural, and a great way of finishing the day.

The next day was again full of snow, sculptures and this time trying to get pictures of it all. In fairness there wasn't much else to do - just taking in the artwork and engineering spectacle of the sculptures. Some of them doubled up as stages with various artists performing at various times during the day, the most impressive being a programmable keyboard in a bubble which was electronically transformed into a whole orchestra.

These pictures aren't really enough to give a full picture of what was available, but they're the best that my camera managed when faced with mostly a wall of different shades of white.

Sapporo is also famous for its ramen, and even has a whole alleyway devoted to restaurants for the things. T'was very tasty, and very befitting.

The other thing to point out is when it gets dark, the whole place is retransformed into an entirely different experience, and it's well worth going around the whole site again just to see it all illuminated, especially since there were better performers on the stages at those times. There was even a television crew at one, and a Japanese guy behind me was watching their broadcast on his mobile phone. It's good to know that sometimes when they save "Live" they actually mean it.

For the third day we decided to head to Otaru, a small town only an hour or so train journey from Sapporo, which we'd heard also celebrated the Snow Festival. When we got there, it was the beginnings of a real blizzard and the snow here was even higher than the snow in Sapporo. This meant that by now the small hole in the shoe had already soaked the shoe entirely, and now was just making it colder. So, I came up with the only obvious solution. If there's no way of waterproofing the shoe, water proof the sock. Although, walking around with obvious plastic bags on your feet is a little bit off, so I ended up with Wet Shoe -> Wet Sock -> Plastic Bag -> Dry Sock -> Happy Foot. Relief at last.

The blizzard was already pretty bad when we left the cafe where I'd borrowed the radiator for some footwear reconstruction. When it got even worse we adopted a stategy of choosing a shop further up the road then hiding in that for a while, then carrying on. There weren't any snow sculptures around in particular, just a ridiculous amount of snow everywhere. It was at this point I realised I'd had my fill of snow for quite a while.

Another honorable mention is the Otaru Steam Clock, a clock that, instead of bells, has steam whistles which play the changing of the hours. I said honorable - on this day it was so full of fallen snow it really tried its best but just ended up as an impressive series of fffing rather than tooting. Bless.

In the same way as Sapporo, though a lot more blizzardy, Otaru was also an entirely different place after nightfall. This time the theme seemed to be candles, and plenty of them. Otaru was also much quiter than Sapporo, and I think I liked it more. It seemed much more hidden, a bit magical almost, with intense weather but still light and warmth coming from the same.

The next day we had some time to spare in Sapporo before heading off for Tokyo, so we went ice skating underneath the TV tower, and had a final look around.

Tokyo

Being my second visit to Tokyo and being much more wise as to what to expect I was fairly certain of what I fancied going to see, namely a couple of places I'd missed the first time. The hotel wouldn't accept us since I'd must have missed the fact it was men only (despite calling them earlier and asking), so we were considering what could be done. Tokyo is a great place for staying the night at - companies have realised that since pretty much all the trains stop at around 1am, there will be a vast number of drunk salarymen who didn't make it or forgot to get back to the station and therefore home. However, starting up hotels would incur all sorts of strange costs and health and safety measures, which most shops in Tokyo just don't have space for. So, the most common places to spend the night are DVD parlours or Internet Cafes, since you get a big ish room with a very comfortable adjustable seat, all you can drink tea and coffee, and you can rent blankets, cushions, and even a towel for the shower in the back. But it's not a hotel. Just so that's clear - the all night price has nothing to do with people sleeping over. Ahem.

So this being the tactic, we'd found a suitable place and were just dumping stuff in the station lockers in Shinjuku when I bump into Lisa. We then spend the evening making valentines chocolates and general catching up before then running for the last train, and Lisa's floor.

The next day was some more general wondering around Tokyo, before having a much bigger meet up with the Sheffield peeps for a very good Izakaya deal and bowling, before another run for the last train, this time without the luggage since it was in the most remote part of the station, me having forgotten that Shinjuku is effectively three or four different stations simply dumped on top of one another.

The next day was very grey, and going to visit very grey parts of the city didn't really help I suppose. This time though I wanted to see the Imperial palace, which was in the distance over some trees next to a park of very dead grass and boring trees, and I wanted to see the Diet, which was surrounded by a multitude of government offices, and was entirely deserted. I didn't know whether that was because they were all busy inside or all on holiday, but I didn't much care either way. I did get another taste of Japanese politics; I guess you can't get that close to the (seemingly empty) government building without someone trying to protest against it. This time was 4-5 black vans bearing flags and incredibly noisy loudspeakers playing some sort of nationalistic music, presumably to get people to vote.

I then went looking for Yasukuni Shrine - the one that's causing all the international headaches because it has war criminals enshrined there. Personally I don't see the problem - any country has so-called "heroes" who committed atrocities in the name of king/emperor/country, and it's up to each country to choose which ones they want to respect and which they would prefer to forget.

From Tokyo, we were taking a nightbus to Hiroshima. I figured this couldn't be so bad - I'd never had any problems sleeping on moving things before, and a dark bus mostly full of the easiest sleepers in the world (Japanese) would be fine. What I wasn't prepared for was the bus stopping every couple of hours, the driver throwing the lights on and announcing to everybody it was time for another toilet break. Grr.

Hiroshima

Arrived very early in the morning, but it soon warmed up and we got our bearings. Hiroshima has its old tram network still up and running rather than an underground, meaning for once you actually get to see the city you're meant to be travelling around. The hostel we were staying at was fantastic - we arrived to drop bags, but they offered us the room immediately, which was ideal, Japanese-styled and had extra futon blankets etc in the cupboard for making it even more comfortable. They even allowed bike rental for even easier cruising around the city, and Hiroshima is much much flatter than Nagoya, making getting round a lot more enjoyable. We decided the first day would just be cruising around and getting bearings, to get a feel for the city. Picture taking for later.

Next day was again spent around the city, visiting my now favourite garden in Japan, taking a quick look at the castle, doing some shopping, and enjoying being there. Hiroshima is a lot more relaxed than any other place I've been so far here, and it was just nice to be in compared to Nagoya. People were living here, you could see signs of life, whether that was people talking in public (even on the trams!), people skateboarding next to the rivers, or just the couple playing frisbee in the peace park. It's also a good size for a city - not huge or crowded with enormous roads like Nagoya, but perfectly doable entirely by bike. We also had luck with the weather, almost always gloriously sunny. Hiroshima is at this point my favourite city in Japan, and actually makes living in Nagoya much more bearable.

Of course, Hiroshima was the site of the first atomic bombing in history, a fact which is now enshrined in the ruins of the Commerce Building (covered in scaffolding while we were there, time doing what the bomb failed to) , the Peace Park and museum. You might be wandering about the cranes - the origami cranes have become a symbol of Hiroshima, ever since one small girl dying of radiation sickness after the bombing decided to fold 1,000 of them in the hope of being granted a wish. One thing I was happy to see was that the people of Hiroshima treat it as any other park, and it is being used perfectly normally, somehow I think keeping to the real intention of preserving it as such in the first place.

Anyway, the next day was a small trip over to the nearby island of Miyajima, home to one of the famous symbols of Japan, the enormous wooden tori (gate) out at sea. The day was glorious, and the island even more so, it was practically a different country again. It was a strange mix of everything - firstly it was Valentine's Day, secondly it was the island's 25th annual festival, gorgeous weather, inquisitive deer hoping to eat your bag, the place had it all. It was even more relaxed than the mainland, if that was even possible.

Unfortunately my camera died at that point, both in terms of memory and battery, else I'd have taken a few more pictures of everything. There are some photos on the internal memory, ~~and as soon as I get a chance to work out how to drag them out of there I'll put them up.~~ Done!

Anyway, from the lovely old-towny feel town at the base of the hills, we figured we should get to the top of the local mountain, Mt Misen, accessible by cable car. At the top we found excellent views that I'd expect in a travel brochure somewhere, more deer and unexpectedly a whole pile of monkeys. They were quite happy to gawp at the tourists just as much as vice-versa, inbetween either grooming or hitching rides on the deer. Further up the mountain there was the Shrine of the Eternal Flame, in which was a smoldering log or two, apparently home to a flame that has been burning for over a thousand years and that had lit the fire of Hiroshima's peace garden and all the subsequent fires. I figured they should throw some more wood on pretty soonish. At the very top was a viewing platform which gave more pretty breathtaking views.

On the way down the mountain (having missed the last cablecar, it's possible to walk down in around an hour) if we ever stopped, deer would come out of the trees and sniff you for food, before walking off in a sulk. Aww.

Back at the small town, the sea was out, and I was able to recussitate the camera for one last picture of the tori before walking through it myself. People had tried their best to leave coins embedded into the sealife living on the legs, and either taller or good climbers had scaled it and left small rocks on the horizontal struts.

Back at Hiroshima for one last night in the hostel, then a final day enjoying more sun (and a very strange modern art gallery) and a good final wander around the city before another nightbus back to Nagoya.

Ahh, that felt good. Holidays are certainly the way to go.

Half Time

2009-02-05T00:03:00.000-08:00

So, pretty much half the year down, at least, academically speaking. From this point on it's all holiday for about two months, then back to the whole studenting business, though this time completely changed, as each semester has different courses and different mixes of people. Unfortunately that does involve losing people, and we've already lost a few good ones, but hopefully they'll be well replaced.

I guess maybe this is time for some sort of reflection and comment on the whole year abroad experience so far. Trouble is, it hasn't all been gladness and light, which is quite extraordinarily in contrast to some Japanophiles I've met that tried making Japan out to be some sort of terrestrial paradise. I've had a pretty good time so far - see all the past blogging for details of most of it - but there's annoyingly been times I've also been pretty unhappy here, for a number of reasons which I think are important to mention if not only to give dispute to the strange army of blind (anime)Japan-lovers.

Nagoya is a fairly rigid place, in a variety of ways. I once had the thought that it lacks inspiration - the buildings and the streets all look the same, much to my annoyance when I take the subway to a new stop only to pop my head up and find it looks identical to all the others. Every street has at least a four-lane road in the middle, giving the whole place a very wide and spaced feeling, like you're not really a part of any of it. There are a couple of interesting narrower places, but they're at least a half hour subway ride away, while the local neighborhood is a little monotonous with a lot of rich private residences and the usual enormous roads everywhere. The more I travel elsewhere the more I realise just how strangely barren Nagoya seems in terms of visible life, expression and involvement. In other cities people even talk to each other on the trains. Although Tokyo is a strangely terrible place, it's still alive in one form or other. I'd hazard that Nagoya is actually pretty dead.

Regardless of the current locale, Japan is actually a pretty amazing place to be in, and I haven't a single regret about being in the country. It's still just as wacky, interesting and beautiful a place as you can imagine. So, there must be something up with what I've been doing in it - which is correct. The year abroad in Japan is meant to be the real boost for the language, the pressure, inspiration and kick to get you from the classroom second year to the advanced level you apparently need to pass the fourth year. So needless to say, I was looking for some sort of challenge and looking forward to really getting stuck into things.

Unfortunately I underestimated the Japanese teaching system. Having read (coincidently) a lot about it even in my first few weeks at Sheffield, I knew that university level is typically a lot more relaxed. Everything educational up to that point is intense pressure to try and get students through the difficult university entrance exams to a prestigious university, to the extent that Japanese people are much more impressed by where you are studying rather than what. Also, being foreign also places you well within the "foreign student" bubble which unfortunately effectively isolates you from any real sort of academic challenge, since of course we're all here to have a good time, not really caring about the work. The plus side to this is plenty of time to do what you want, but this doesn't always work, since as I mention below, so long as you look as if you're working then you're considered working, no matter of the utility of what you're actually doing.

The other main downfall is textbooks - while the course in Sheffield is wonderfully flexible and can turn on a sixpence, having been hand-forged by the teachers themselves, Japanese courses tend to rely on a single textbook, and the lessons closely involve moving at whatever pace through it. This has been carried out to extremes - one whole chapter was dedicated to a relatively simple grammar point, which was covered ad nauseam for several lessons while other more challenging parts of the language were either ignored or skimmed over. For example, the textbook gave good examples of discussions or presentations about certain topics, which if we recreated would have been not half-bad practice of the language, but which were instead on the whole ignored in favour of some trifling structural point found midway through.

I understand that this is largely a problem of balancing - some classmates were of higher levels, and some were of lower, and some teaching points would be useful to different parts of the class. I would say it shows well the excellent standard of teaching we have in Sheffield that the vast majority of the "Upper Intensive Intermediate Course" had already been covered. But the fact there were several fluent students in the same class (Chinese and Korean, so a small head start perhaps) makes me wonder how they coped without going completely bonkers. The main disadvantage is not that the utility of the content varied wildly, more that the time spent on it (3 hours every morning, followed by copy-from-the-textbook homework, organising simple group presentations etc) meant that by the time you were finished with the necessary bits you had no real enthusiasm to try and work with something useful by yourself, eventually killing off most self-study I had told myself I would do, including the other half of this blog (in Japanese).

The other thing to try and drag the mood down is the complete change of lifestyle. In Sheffield I was an active member of multiple clubs and societies, always with something to do and with work and socialising on top came to a fairly decent way of going about things. In Japan, being refused entry into the two clubs I had been interested in joining kind of killed off hope for that aspect fairly quickly, giving a distinct lack of things to try and take my mind off the large amount of time I was spending on dubious language instruction and associated homework. Socialising of course carried on, though there's a limit to how happy you can be simply going out and drinking as opposed to the backstage, student journalism and Japan Soc treasuring I was busying myself with before.

Phew.

So, time for plan B. I'm off on a ten day holiday at the end of the week taking me all around Japan in quite a streched manner (Sapporo in the far north, then Tokyo centrally, then Hiroshima in the west) which will give another great break and fresh views into the country I'm staying in rather than the city/district/university bubble. When I get back, I have a couple of other excursions to plan, and a lot of free time entirely up to me to fill. So, some resolutions for next semester, and perhaps the holiday too:

1) Escape university. If the university can't offer me what I would like, then it's time to cut down to the bare necessities with that part of life and use the liberated time trying to make it by myself. That said, I'm still enthusiastic and optimistic about the different lessons and courses open to me next semester, so I will wait and see to what extent this becomes necessary.
2) Get a job. The exchange rate is terrible with the UK pound, around 130 when normally it's 200, meaning using money from UK bank accounts is almost a non-option. However, getting a medium to low paid job here means high earnings when I get back to the UK, and is also good experience and a way to accomplish number 1.
3) More self-study. Translation has always been a good hobby of mine, and I'm already racing through my second film. This is good language practice, and also a fair extra-curricular thing to be getting on with.
4) Write a Japanese sakubun at least once every two weeks. This is a biggie - with no writing or kanji learning encouraged at Nagoya, my whole writing skill has effectively gone down the drain. This is part of the self-learning effort I'm going to try and put in, the other being
5) Move to the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) Level 1 kanji. Level two isn't perfect for me just yet, but it's good enough that I need the next level to remind me I still know nothing about the things.
6) Take the JLPT Level 2 test this year in July. 2009 is the first year that they've started the level 1 and 2 tests twice a year rather than the previous once in December, and I think I can definitely get to that standard by that time. Maybe that will give me a year to improve by one level and take the next in July 2010, but that might be a bit too ambitious.
7) Try and join a theatre club. I've been pointed towards one, and will contact them and see where that goes. Having discovered that I can get to the main station by bike in under an hour (far far away on the other side of the city) transportation is no longer a real problem. Will be interesting how this one goes. Failing this I'll try again at the university clubs, since it's a new academic year for them and they might be more recipient to new people, though being foreign still counts horribly against you.

That's the plan. Now to see if I can keep to it.
Though for now, I'm off on holiday. At last.

A Korean Christmas

2009-01-05T20:59:00.000-08:00

The Christmas holiday (or rather New Year's holiday due to general unobservance of Christmas as a day off and some schools still have classes) is usually fairly short, generally two weeks at the most, and is the first real opportunity for year abroad students to go travelling in a bigger way than the previous three-day weekends allowed. Some people went to one of the major cities for the large celebrations there; some people even went home to the UK, perhaps unable to bear the absence of gravy, proper bacon or cheese. I went to Korea.

In the UK at least, Christmas is very much a family time, where everybody gathers for lots of eating and reunion-ness, whereas New Year's is usually the time for friends, where you go out with a group of peers and go out drinking in a bar somewhere. In Japan the trend is ever so slightly reversed - New Year's, being the bigger of the two celebrations, is the family time, where everybody gathers at the family home then perhaps visits a temple for the New Year's celebrations there. Christmas is very much a couples' day - the more romantic parts of the Western tradition taken and turned into a sort of festive Valentines. Along these lines, I figured to turn up at my girlfriend's doorstep unannounced capable of cooking a British Christmas Dinner (or nearest equivalent, I can't really cook) could be a half-decent present. Lianne was only a short hop across the Sea of Japan teaching English in Korea, so the plan was set.

I armed myself with a few bits and bobs that would come in handy. First was Hangul, the Korean alphabet. I reasoned that it doesn't matter if I can't speak any of the language, just so long as I could read, write and recognise place names and addresses. Google Earth doesn't work in that region of Korea for whatever reason, and the only alternative was an all-Korean map website, so this was pretty much necessary anyway. Hangul isn't that complicated, and this didn't take much time. Alongside this was taking the necessary spy satellites and making some sort of map of the city so I knew where I'd have to go, and learning one or two things about how to gesture to whichever poor taxi driver picked me up.

Next was how to cook the dinner. Subtly spying over Lianne's shoulder on the webcam to find out what equipment was available - two gas hobs, but notably without any oven. Thankfully Grandma provided a very good steamable Christmas pudding recipe, which I made a kind of strange amalgamation of with the two other recipes/bits of guidance I'd found online, cooked, then tested on people living in the dormitory. Nobody died, and setting it on fire was great fun in any case, so I assumed it would be fit for the task, then cooked another. The rest was simply vegetables - mashed potato instead of roast, boiled/fried vegetables are doable, and homemade chipolatas aren't so complicated either. Gravy and stuffing was kindly sent over for me from home, along with brilliant decorations and a CD of carols. All set.

Getting there wasn't much of a problem - I knew Nagoya Airport, and when I had arrived at Pusan's and dodged past the swarm of taxi drivers asking me where I was going I found the bus stop right outside, and was instantly glad I'd learnt Hangul, so I could quickly see the bus to Lianne's town was not too far away. Not that I really had to worry much - I got into a conversation on the bus with a half-Korean half-Japanese girl coming home for the holiday, which was joined by a Korean student coming home from Tokyo, giving me enough information about things I was curious about. On the other end, I caught a taxi with the girl, who kindly made sure we found the right address before letting me out onto the street again.

The rest, as they say, is history.

About the whole experiencing the different country of Korea bit - this was perhaps entirely opposite to the experience than those people who have been to Seoul only, since Seoul is entirely touristy and shiney, whereas the city I went to was a practically foreignerless industrial mess of broken roads, grey faceless buildings and tired, empty identical restaurants. Pollution everywhere, undrinkable tap water, and everybody's usual stares taking on a much more miserable, detestful look, as if asking why is a free-to-travel foreigner even here in the first place. Due to the exchange rates, everything was very cheap, and you sometimes got the feeling that that would be a suitable answer to the stares, if you didn't really care about where in the world you were. It seems to draw in the smoker crowds - not much tax to speak of, very cheap living costs and no laws against smoking in public places meant that almost every other foreigner I met was smoking like a cigarette factory on fire. Hm.

It wasn't all bad. The city had "The World's Largest Park", which was oddly just a fence and gate on the edge of the city leading out to the countryside. Shopping and taxis were incredibly cheap, so getting around was never a problem. We found bottles of Port being sold for the equivalent of 50p which tasted like undiluted Vimto. I managed to eat dog, which tasted like thin beef by itself, and with the soup tasted like everything else I ate at Korean restaurants - of vegetables and kimchi. I lost my hat (again). New Year's was marvellous with the enormous fireworks very close to the appartment window. And it was just the break I needed from Nagoya, and a great time spent with my girlfriend.

Tut tut

2008-12-11T07:11:00.001-08:00

UPDATED 7/1/09
This entry has been commandeered to help me get this thing back on track. The oldness can remain down there as some sort of memento as I get round to things.
Overdue:
- Room and Nagoya update to 2008
- Christmas and New Years adventures in Korea

These will be written! Eventually...

EDIT: All now done. Phew.

PS. I don't know how many of you have worked this out yet, but if you hold your mouse cursor over the images on my blog for a short while, either a description or some short, potentially entertaining humour ensues. Have a go...

Oh dear, it's all going the shape of the pear. No entry in almost a whole month, small and limited contact with the outside world, and general disappearance into another continent.

This is just a very quick note to say that I'm still alive, well and generally bumbling around Japan. And no, I haven't forgotten the blog and yes, I have been writing bits of it. Kind of. It's more like I go and do something worth writing about, and I never seem to finish writing about it and posting it up here. This behaviour will hopefully change next week as work curtails, people go home for the holidays and I find myself with more time to kill.

Travelling: Ise

2008-12-07T21:05:00.000-08:00

A much shorter travelling this time, as it was a purely day trip affair. Also much fewer pictures this time, as I'd forgotten my camera, and Lena only uses good old fashioned film. Apologies about that, time to dust off that old imagination thing again.

This time around I went to Ise, a small city in the prefecture slightly southwest of Nagoya, famous for its mightily impressive wooden structures, preserved old-town, forests and the Ise Naiku, or the Inner Temple, dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu, thus making it one of the holiest spots for the Shinto religion.

Further on the Naiku: Amaterasu also happens to be the mother of the the Imperial line, and as such the Naiku houses one of the Imperial Regalia handed to the emperors by the gods - a Sacred Mirror (Yata Mirror), in which you are meant to be able to see the image of Amaterasu. It's not, and probably will never, be on display though - only emperors and certain priests are allowed to see it. The closest we even got was the outer wall of the area that contained the building, replete with another wall. It didn't seem the most secure of places to keep such an important object to the Imperial institution, but then again we could only just see the actual building itself, which for all we know could have been made of reinforced titanium.

Anyways, Ise is very reachable from Nagoya by a shortish hour-and-a-bit train journey, and then a quick bus journey from immediately outside the station. This lands you in front of the forest in which the Naiku resides, alongside the enormous wooden tori (those immediately recognisable gate like features you find all over East Asia) and the huge, ancient-seeming wooden bridge. Having said that, ever-faithful Wikipedia assures me that the entire complex is rebuilt every 20 years, Shrine, bridge, tori and all. Ah well. Still feels good to be walking over an almost purely wooden bridge in such beautiful woody surroundings.

Once over the bridge, it was a nice walk through the forest, taking in the fantastic amount of greenery (such a long time in a major city has that kind of starving effect), the peacefulness of it (no huge pushing crowds like at Tokyo/Kyoto this time) and just the general relaxed ambiance. The shrine itself was well enclosed, and visitors weren't even allowed photos, but it's certainly worth a visit if just for the area itself.

Having done the Naiku, we walked through the old-town area, full of curio shops with very low roof beams. Feeling happy at the traditional-seeming district, I managed to get a small bit of tourist shopping done, including some region-famous (meibutsu in Japanese) plum wine to send back to Blighty.

From the small town, the famous Wedded Rocks were only a short bus journey away, and while being accosted by a strange, very enthusiastic old man (he told us where the bus stop was, then even sprinted after us later to make sure we got the right one - said he was a bus driver on a day off) we made it to the stretch of coast where they could be found (right next to some enormous aquarium/prison for seals, in case anyone else gets a bit lost).

Now, just a short aside. I was fully expecting the sight from all the many pictures of Japanese touristyness - of two enormous rocks far out at sea, with a colossal rope stretched between them, a marvel of Ancient Japan and a stunning work of art. Got it? Ok. We rounded the corner of the cliff to this magnificent sight.

My word, look! There they are! But wait, is that sand?

Yep, they were a pesky few metres away from the beach, let alone a small number of metres tall. They'd even included a miniature tori to really throw people off the true scale. Here are a few more pictures just to show you what we're talking about.

Feeling cheated, we then walked further along the coast, before realising that actually it was quite dark now and we probably should head for a train station of some sort. The best strategy we reached was to simply head inland through whatever housing estates till we found a station or some tracks, which surprisingly worked, leading us exactly to a deserted station with a train back to Nagoya due within a quarter hour. Perfect.

Just a last note - Nagoya station does some great light displays over the Christmas period, and I really should have got a video, but this dodgy picture will have to do. All the lights were on/off, but there were such an incredible amount that the whole display was fully animated.

Travelling: Kyoto

2008-11-22T22:42:00.000-08:00

Another long weekend, another excursion somewhere into deepest darkest Japan. This time, Japan's cultural treasure and number one tourist destination - Kyoto. Very well preserved from the Edo period, as before this most of the city was destroyed in the civil wars, and having survived being target number one of the atomic bomb (removed from the target list by one of America's higher ups - apparently he honeymooned there), Kyoto is an interesting mix of old, traditional architecture and huge, sprawling modernity that comes with Japanese cities.

NB. You have to forgive some of the photos with this post. There are two things my camera doesn't like, and it had to put up with extremes of both: dark and bright sun. If you feed it any slight dimness whatsoever, it claims it wants a flash and when you don't give it one it sulks and blurs whatever photo you take. In bright sunlight it decides to either bleach everything or to miss out a colour or two. So, some of these pictures are edited to try and get the best out of what I took. Funnily enough, some of the best photos (in my opinion) on here were taken perfectly naturally, which goes to show it's not a bad camera after all.

Koyo
This trip to Kyoto was going to be with Lena, another exchange student, from Germany, and we would be meeting up with her old Japanese friend, Gen. Reachable from Nagoya by normal trains within two hours, en route it slowly started to become obvious that everyone around us was also going to Kyoto. At this I cottoned on that Japan's "koyo" season was really in full swing. "Koyo" is the very popular appreciation of leaves changing colour in Autumn, and of course there's no better place to fully observe and appreciate orangey leaves than in Kyoto, where you can see them alongside a lot of well known beautiful temples. This was most evident when we arrived at Kyoto station to find people everywhere and enormous queues for every bus, taking new-come tourists to various parts of sightseeing.

An interesting observation was that the overwhelming majority of the tourists were Japanese, aka domestic. I can't really imagine a similar situation of national vigour to appear in Britain, unless you think about actual events such as the Fringe in Edinburgh or New Years celebrations. Perhaps X-Factor, however depressing that may sound.

Kyoto Garden
Anyway, first stop was a garden nearby to the station, called Shosei Garden. Was a good example of a relatively uncluttered, fairly traditional Japanese garden, and you could almost feel why while walking around - the high walls block off most of the noise and also restrict everything to the garden, which in itself has its own small representations of landscapes, life and the world in general, meaning the whole garden experience oddly does become a small world of its own if you spent enough time in there.

Kyoto Streets
From the garden, it was then off on a trek to find Nijo Castle. This wasn't after a burning desire to see the castle, though I was very curious to experience the Nightengale Floors (floors that creak slightly musically as you walk across them, designed to wake the local lord up before you murdered him). It was much more of a curiosity to find Reizeiin, the locale and scene of the Kyoto ghost story I'd translated for the Classical Japanese module the previous year. After a long, long walk around countless small crowded streets, even asking a nervous-looking postman where I was (the fact that he didn't know either was a both reassuring and not) I eventually found the castle, and started eastwards from there. I couldn't find the exact street, but soon realised why - the clever folks who owned the hotel built over that particular block in Kyoto had built it over the road too, effectively replacing the whole Reizeiin story with the ANA International Hotel. Ah well. I didn't have the classical road map in the first place, so I can't really be sure anyway.

Kyoto Castles
Nijo Castle itself seemed very empty - once you'd taken your shoes off and wondered around the interior, squeaking as you went, you then simply had the gardens to look around. I suppose it's important to note that when we say "castle", this one was mostly as a palace, having both never been attacked and being used mostly as a private retreat for the Shoguns, so it's not as if there's much to the castle in the first place, save the floors. The gardens were very nice however, and did a good job of illustrating the fascination of Koyo, providing some good examples.

Kyoto Koyo
After Nijo it was back to the station to meet up with Lena and her good friend Gen, and then take a crowded train to Tofukuji, one of the most popular spots for Koyo in the whole of Kyoto. And it showed - I had seen similar masses of people when I'd gone to Tokyo, but this that same number all crammed into a much smaller space. Of course, there was only one spot that you *had* to take the picture from, so it was each for his own as you pushed around to try and get to the edge to get a view. I learnt that being big and foreign does indeed have its advantages. It wasn't even a very good picture.

Kyoto Buddhism
From there we went to the (cameras forbidden) Sanjusangendo, the longest wooden building in the world at 118m, containing no less than a thousand near-identical statues of the bodhisattva Kannon. The unbroken length of the building and sheer number of statues was fairly mesmerising to say the least. The hall's name, Sanjusangen (lit. 33 intervals), refers to the lengths between the supporting pillars, which add up to the same number. Apparently the building also hosts an annual archery contest, where contestants have to fire arrows down the length of the building (outside, of course).

Kyoto by Night
That evening, we attempted the famous Kiyomizu-dera, the temple on stilts in the hills above Kyoto. Two problems with this - first, it was dark, and so my camera threw a fit and refused to take anything seriously (boom boom), and second, everyone else in Kyoto had the same idea. The pictures here are stolen shamelessly from Gen's camera therefore, and you should be able to get some idea of just how crowded the street was. Even when we'd made it to the top however, it was hard to distinguish where exactly you were or on what bit of stilt you were standing on because of the sheer number of people around. I did manage to get to drink some of the water though (Kiyomizu means "clear water"), which falls from three streams in front of you, and you have to reach out for it with little cups on sticks. According to Gen, the streams apparently represent health, love and money, though he'd forgotten the order. I drank from stream number one in any case, so we'll see how that goes.

Kyoto Living
We spent the night at Gen's appartment, not too far away by taxi, and far enough away from the temples to avoid the crazy numbers of people swarming all over Kyoto. I've valued this overnight experience ever since, however odd that may sound. Having never seen a "Japanese room" as it were, it was very enlightening to see how the style completely differed from the idea of a room we have in the West. Although I know it can't be the absolute rule for rooms throughout Japan, and it would be foolish to assume so, I marvelled at the design. Three rooms - small bathroom/toilet/shower combo, small kitchen, and a larger square plain room. On one side were some shin-level shelves, with books, a TV, and any personal effects. Aside from these there was no other furniture, save for a Kotatsu (square, foot-high table with a duvet attached with a heater underneath). Everything else belonged in the large cupboard in the wall. When it came to sleep, the kotatsu was dismantled and put in the kitchen/genkan area, and futon and duvets were brought out of the cupboard to make beds. In the morning the process was simply reversed.
Like I said, I don't know why, but I still strangely like this way of organising things. Of course, it's no good for anything but living by yourself with the occasional friendly visit by a small number of friends, and the space might get a bit restrictive, but equally I was impressed, and it will always stick in my mind somewhere.

Kyoto Outskirts
Next day, it was off to Uji, a short and extremely crowded train journey away (Tofukuji was on the same route). You know the infamous videos of people being physically pushed and squashed on to trains in Tokyo? That kind of crowded. I tried to the be humanitarian and make as large an area as I could for the children squirming somewhere around my knees. Once everyone got off at Tofukuji everything was much better, and we could even sit down. Uji is famous because of the building called Byodoin, or the Phoenix Temple, which is the temple that appears on the back of the 10 yen coin. It was very pretty, with extensive pieces of art, especially from India, and it was very clear how much Indian culture and influence had succeeded in travelling the Silk Road however many thousands of years ago. Uji also is famous for its tea, and I made sure to buy some before I left.

Kyoto by Evening
Once back in Kyoto, and having had lunch on the sunny river bank, we made for Kinkakuji, or the Golden Pavilion Temple. Again, swamped with tourists, it was a simple enough visit of walking with the crowds along the path, but my camera behaved itself in the sunset and actually took some pictures I'm rather proud of, one especially that I've had as my computer's background ever since. On the way out of the complex, there was a small temple, and we decided to throw some money in and ask that whichever stream of water we'd chosen to drink at Kiyomizu would be the "right" one. After sneaking past an enormous bus queue we managed to catch a bus back to the station for some quick coffee and then the train home back to Nagoya.

Tools of the Trade

2008-11-17T03:57:00.000-08:00

Eesh, it's been almost three weeks since I last wrote. I couldn't say where the time has gone - the weeks go by quickly, since it's very easy to simply concentrate on a day-by-day rather than some sort of larger scale. Work and lessons are going well, though we have enough tests that they are no longer something special and it is easy to miss revising. In terms of extra-curricularness I haven't managed to acquire anything yet. I suppose I can use some sort of language acquisition still-early-days as an excuse, but it's stark contrast with my life in Sheffield where I was almost never in my room during daylight hours.

So what has been happening? I managed to make it to Tokyo for one of the long weekends (Japan has plenty of bank-holiday-like Mondays off), which I will try to mention more about in a different post. I've been slightly ill for a time, but nothing serious enough to put me out of lessons. I had a birthday - thank you very much everyone for all your messages/presents/confetti bombs hidden in inconspicous cards! - I managed to have a small celebration, as it fell on a Sunday most people were either away or buried in work, but I still had a good time. I've finally managed to acquire bananas, but at the expense that my room is now regularly invaded by small (fruit?) flies which incredibly annoying. Ah well.

Anyway, for this blog I figured I could do some small descriptions of one or two things I find useful for life in Japan, at least, life so far.

The Bike
Three main reasons for getting a bike in Japan: in Japan bikes ride on the pavement, so it's a lot safer; there aren't any rules about safety equipment, so it's much easier just to hop on and off wherever you feel like (bikes are extremely popular in Japan so businesses/places in general are a lot more cyclist-friendly); and finally most of Japan's cities are built on largely flat ground, meaning it's easy to get around.

My bike cost ¥10,500 (roughly £50) second hand and in very good condition. It is about as cheap as you're going to get, as second hand bikes are very scarce. This is mostly because of the Japanese respect for others' property - when people abandon bikes, no-one is prepared to remove them unless they're distinctly getting in the way. There are actually bikes on campus half-assimilated by bushes, happily rusting away, which could otherwise be taken away for a bit of oil and a resale.

This bike is single speed, with a handy basket for shopping and whatnot. There is no real lock as you might expect - seeing a bike chained to something here is a rarity - instead it has a small bolt you can lock through the rear spokes. It makes things a lot easier getting around Nagoya, since although the university is only a 10 minute walk away, it speeds up getting to the shops, which are more at the 20 minute mark. It also encourages exploring a bit, as it's all too easy to simply rely on the subway map for all of your geographical interest.

The only downside to getting a bike is the registration process - once bought, you must register it in your name and put goodness knows how many stickers on it (my bike already has enough to shame the average rally car), and after that you might have to register it at whatever institution you want to park it outside (eg universities/dormitories, supermarkets and other public places are exempt fortunately). The registration process also restricts your bike to the city you register it in, but to be honest with this kind of single-gear bike you're really not going to stray far in any case.

The Phone
Ah, the magic of Japanese technology. The phone is a Toshiba 912T model, with plenty of the bells and whistles you might expect (although I've yet to use most of them).

Text messaging in Japan is slightly different to how things are in the UK, and much more efficient and common-sensical. Like UK phones, they have normal text messaging (SMS) and can call other phones. However, what the UK calls "MMS" or Multimedia Messaging Service (ie sending pictures, music, videos etc) and is charged for at a set rate per message (50p minimum on O2!), the Japanese have simply used normal email protocol, and charge for the number of packets (size of the email in data), for some tiny fraction of a yen per packet. As a result, most Japanese phones can also send and receive email like a normal computer without having to sign up to some ridiculous overpriced "Internet Access" plan as you have to in the UK. Since they work using data packets, they can usually also browse the internet, and retrieve all sorts of news and information from all over the place.

My phone's functions thus stand at something like: voice call, video call, text messaging, email, 3G internet browser, SaifuKeitai (Wallet-phone, I can pay for things by waving my phone at the till - haven't used it yet as I have to link my bill to a credit card), 3.2megapixel camera, OneSeg (free to watch TV on my phone), mini-SD card slot, and a spinnable screen for easier watching of TV and picture taking. Oh, it's also got a GPS feature, but that's an extra 300 yen odd a month, and I haven't yet got lost enough to need it.

Sounds expensive? Well, I bought my phone from Softbank, one of the main companies in Japan (the others being Docomo and Au). All emails, messages and phone calls within Softbank phones anywhere in Japan are free from 1am-9pm, and most of the the foreign student community here use Softbank also. I also bought my phone before October, meaning I got a special student discount - so long as I paid a (discounted) price for the phone, which was 19,500 yen (just under £100), I could pay a meagre 350 yen (about £1.75) a month for use. This roughly works out at around £10 a month for effectively unlimited use of my phone, since the things you have to pay for are extremely cheap in comparison to the UK. If I manage to sell my phone before I leave the country I will have paid peanuts for a great phone service.

The Dictionary
There are a lot of reasons not to get an electronic dictionary in Japanese and an equal number in favour. One on hand you might end up too reliant on its speed of use and easy to check kanji functions, while on the other hand there really is no way to guess words in Japanese if you don't know them without a wordy work-around explanation. In any case, my Denshi-jishou (electronic dictionary) has been consistently invaluable throughout my learning of Japanese, and I will always be thankful to Amako-san for her huge generosity in kindly bringing it back from Japan for me all those years ago. Having started Japanese from scratch, I'm still learning how to use it, since they are designed for Japanese people learning English and so have no real "English Menu" option for the reverse situation. The irony of using it to look up its own terms isn't lost on me of course ;)

Prices for Denshi-jishou can range from anything from £50 to maybe £300, depending on what features you require (more modern dictionaries have more than one language, character recognition, touch screens and even TV tuners), so if you want one choose carefully. I find that a simple word or kanji look-up is enough for me - the extras (list of Japanese proverbs and automatic formal letter writing!) are more than enough. I think I've changed the battery in it once in about three years, so they're fairly long lasting, also this one has survived the same time living up to its portable nature in some pocket somewhere. If you have the money I'd certainly recommend one but by no means think you are losing out without one.

More in a bit...

Travelling: Tokyo, Shinkansen, Capsule Hotel

2008-11-05T07:26:00.000-08:00

Japan has a lot of national holidays - weeks where the Monday becomes a holiday, effectively giving you a three day weekend - ideal occasions for travelling. As such, I told myself I would go somewhere and travel around Japan on each one of these long weekends, so long as I didn't have so much work I couldn't forestall it till later. This holiday was actually meant to be "Culture Day", so I suppose going to the nation's capital was a suitable way of spending the time.

Shinkansen
First though, to get there. There were three main options:

- Nightbuses run from Nagoya every evening to Tokyo, dropping you off tired and grouchy (so I've heard) at a bus depot in the early hours of the morning. This is the cheapest option, and would have given me the most time in Tokyo, but I wasn't in a hurry and didn't fancy the overnight bit.
- JR (Japanese Rail) operate easy enough trains to Tokyo, which are reasonably priced, and would get you there in maybe a few hours. But of course...
- I chose the Shinkansen, or Bullet Train. The tickets were expensive, 24,000 yen for a return (just over £120), but it's the fastest way of getting to and from any point in Japan, and I wanted to experience the fastest train on earth for myself at least once. When buying the tickets I discovered that foreign students, not being the "real" flavour of students, can't get student discounts. Hm. There was also the strange feeling looking at the train schedules that, actually, this time, there would be no scope for lateness - the trains would turn up at exactly the times shown, which, the following morning, unsuprisingly, it did.

On the train itself it doesn't actually feel that fast - it's very smooth, very comfortable and that's about it - you arrive at your destination a very short while (an hour and a half) later, no questions or complications. Of course, on the route I was taking was the famous view of Japan: the shinkansen in front of Mount Fuji surrounded by fields. However, being on the train I only managed to get the Mount Fuji bit, which was always nice to see I guess. From arriving in Tokyo station I had to find my way to Shinjuku to meet up with Woody who'd show me around for the day, and that was made more interesting by how train maps' lines aren't labelled. Stations fine, line names not. You have an interesting experience matching the shades of colour to the signposts in the ceiling to find your way, though I cheated and asked at the station office.

Shinjuku
Full of tall buildings, loud signposts, and big neon everything - a very Tokyo place to come to first in all accounts. Met up with Woody, and we had some Okonomiyaki (cabbage and whatever, cooked on a hot top) for lunch, although I failed marvellously at cooking the runnier version, Monjayaki, which instead decided to see how much of the table it could spread to while I wasn't paying attention.

Wondering around the area between all the enormous skyscrapers, we came across the Government Towers, two towers with free viewing decks on the 42nd floors. From up there you get a very good idea of just how big the whole place is.

For the evening's entertainment, we met up in Shinjuku for a trip to an Izakaya and Bar. Awesome to see everyone again - it's hard to realise we're all still on the same course somewhere. Apart from much drinking and swapping of adventures, it was back to the station before the last train.

Akihabara
The next day I ended up looking around here, dumping bags into a railway locker for the day. It's a great place... if you're looking to buy something. Otherwise, it's good for a couple of hours browsing. However, any more than that and you're likely to start going a bit mad - the whole !!we L0Ve An!mE1!! movement is very much in your face, and you end up thinking about bombing the place. But not before buying some sort of technological gizmo or other in one of the countless twenty-storey warehouses of the things.

From here I walked to Ueno, upon which was born the theory of "train station accumulation", detailed in the "Tokyo vs Nagoya" bit below. The reason being was that there's actually very little between the stations, or at least seemingly. There was a fun market like place where I sussed out some "magical" street magicians selling hopping cardboard men, and then I found myself at..

Ueno
..home of the unescapable park. Goodness knows how I did that - I got in easy enough, but to get out I had to walk down the side of a road and into a train station. True gaijin style.

Anyway, Ueno Park was great. Full of small temples, statues of this and the other, street performers, people and boys and girls on their 3/5/7 kimono visits. There was an old man playing a sombre melody with a reed sitting by one of the temples - I wanted to record him, but he managed to escape before I could try. It was also here that I had a very Japanese moment. I passed a Mum&Dad-esque couple taking turns at taking pictures of their little girl wearing a beautiful kimono. Were I in England, I wouldn't have hestiated in offering to take pictures of them all together, but some odd sense of intrusion kept me from bringing myself to ask. I didn't know these people, I told myself, and I wasn't entirely comfortable with the feeling that they were no concern of mine, but that's how Japan works. Their moment was working, and while it could be improved, it could also be dashed to pieces by a clumsy gaijin offering to take pictures for them. Doing nothing was the best way of leaving things "unrippled" as it were.

Sensoji
A short train ride away, in a place called Asakusa, you can find a temple called Sensoji. A large complex, very popular with tourists and Japanese people alike, with it's very distinctive huge red latern, is also the oldest temple in Tokyo. Not much to say here really, though the enormous shopping district in the street running up to the temple was very interesting, especially considering that people have been doing exactly what I did at Sensoji for centuries, perhaps even stopping at the same shops.

When I left, I came across a shop with a large scale version of the old English game Bagatelle (you fire marbles up and past pins to land in holes worth points) and had a chat with the owner, who was friendly enough for me to have a go. She says it is the origin of the Japanese phenomenon Pachinko, although there is only hers and another shop in Osaka left. Needless to say, I didn't win anything.

Shibuya
Following dusk, the Sheffielders met up at Shibuya again, where I've never seen so many people crossing the same road at the same time before; almost mesmerising. This was followed by a curry house where you could buy "extra hot" and "extra spice" separately. Following this, a trip to Karaoke, with a mix of feeling sorry for the bartenders for keeping them busy and feeling sorry for the company for having to put up with our singing. Karaoke with (nearly) all English peeps though was most enlightening - all the good songs came out of course, and everyone could join in.

The Capsule Hotel
Here's a bit without pictures - it didn't seem very polite to go around taking them.
I decided the best bet for staying overnight in Tokyo would be to find either a DVD-Cabin (rent a seat overnight with a film or two) or to find one of the magical and mystical "Capsule Hotels", where you're given a comfortable coffin for the night. I chose the latter, a) because I wanted a proper bed and b) because then you can tell everyone about it later.

So, I found myself a 4000-yen Capsule Hotel and checked in by removing my shoes, locking them in a small compartment and handing the key into Reception. They ask me to fill out a small form, whereupon I'm given another key and directed upstairs, where my small cupboard is waiting for me with a dressing gown (woefully short but never mind), towels, toothpaste and toothbrush and a shaving kit. You get changed into your dressing gown (ok, so it wasn't THAT short) and then go off in search of your cabin. According to my brochure, my cabin was 1mx1mx2m, though for some reason I was still a couple of inches off fitting into it. Ah well. If you don't feel like sleeping, you can wonder downstairs to use the internet, have a shower, use the beer vending machines or even stay in your capsule and watch TV. In all honestly I thought it was a brilliant experience, and had I not had a rubbish night due to a small head cold it would have been ideal. Turfed out at 10am, then wondered to the nearest bit of civilisation, Akihabara.
The website to see where I stayed is http://www.capsuleinn.com/index.html

Akihabara (again)
Waited for the others to turn up for an hour or so - like I said before, probably a bad decision, since now I feel like avoiding it for the foreseeable future lest I start thinking dark thoughts again. Anyway, we found a okonomiyaki restaurant, had something to eat, then went to a "Maid Cafe". I found the appeal of this hard to grasp - it's a cafe, where all the staff are dressed as maids, and who serve you your order with a small side-order of supposedly cute haplessness. I didn't really have time to order anything, since I had to get back to Tokyo Station and catch the Shinkansen back to Nagoya, but I wasn't sold on the cafe. I guess I'd have to give it another fairer chance before I condemn it to the murky depths of Akihabara, as hereby it shall be known (like 'being sent to Coventry' I suppose, only much worse).

Shinkansen Home
Slept. How Japanese. It was all dark anyway and since the train didn't really move a lot save forwards it was very easy. Oddly I woke up at the right time - still don't know how I managed that.

So...
Tokyo vs Nagoya
While in Tokyo, I was always drawn by the bright colours, narrow, often pedestrianised streets, and the large amount of people everywhere. Nagoya is meant to be the most "developed" city in Japan, but its much more obtuse: the streets all seem to be four lane roads with wide pavements next to tall faceless company department stores, making the city seem much much bigger than Tokyo, regardless of actual land-mass occupied. To that end as well, it is much easier to think of Tokyo as a collection of train stations, each with a mini-city spread out around it. Nagoya is just one, enormous, spread out mass of concrete, without even half the interesting places to go and keep your attention away from the spready-outness.

That said, I still wouldn't want to live there. The costs are ridiculous - student rent is five times Nagoya's, along with higher food prices and the general cost of things. Also, I heard that in the 5 odd weeks of Woody's commuting to and from University by train, it had been stopped because of train-jumping suicides no less than 4 times already. A lovely way to start (or even at least for one person, end) the day, I just wouldn't want the same degree of desensitisation. Tokyo has its plus sides of course. If there's nothing going on in your particular neck of the woods it's very easy just to hop on a train and find something else. There are a lot more foreigners around, if you see that as good or bad. There is a place for everything and anything you might want to do, and so long as you can put up with a city sprawling on all sides and half your life spent on trains then Tokyo will give you no problems.

Will I go back? Of course, perhaps in the Spring. And hopefully I'll meet up with all the peeps again for some more Karaoke and general Pub-going.

Top Signs You're Living In Japan

2008-10-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the break in communications - things have been busy here as lessons have now all started and work is starting to trickle in. To mark the "You've Survived A Month!" anniversary I thought I could do some sort of summary of life in Japan, mentioning the main points of difference that have struck me the hardest after staying a month here.

Sun up
The sun rises incredibly early here. On the first few mornings when I had to be up for 8am, opening my eyes to blazing sunshine streaming through the curtains had me leaping out of bed for fear of having slept in till midday, only to find my alarm hadn't yet gone off. Evening comes soon too - the sun starts setting around 5pm-ish.

Cables anyone?
I don't know if it's because they'd be easier to repair after an earthquake or maybe it's because digging up the road might be too expensive, but there are staggering amounts of cables run throughout the streets around here. This is only in the outskirts though - going to the city centre there are almost none at all.

Please take care!
There's a lot of things in Japan that simply talk at you - the most strange are ambulances, large trucks and escalators, which as far as I can make out simply repeat things along the lines of "This is an escalator. Please take care when stepping on". When vehicles start to talk at you it's hard to stop thinking of political rallies. This is especially "fun" because living very close to a hospital hearing ambulances loudly annouce their arrival in the early hours grates a bit.

Birds in Traffic Lights
Traffic lights will either beep at you when they go green, or they also sometimes chirp at you. When the little chirping speaker is high up on a pole somewhere, it's hard to distinguish it from passing birds and you suddenly feel very sorry for any blind people trying to cross the road.

Milk
There is a huge variety of milk in the supermarkets. So, being the adventurous sort I've been working my way through them all - so far I've had milkish milk, thinner milkish milk, and milk that tastes like it's had cereal floating in it for a while (slightly sugary).

Good Ideas
Japan seems to be full of these, at least, at face value. For example, the trains stop exactly at marked places, meaning you know where you'll be getting on. Shops have models of the food you'll be ordering so you know what you'll be getting. There are umbrella stands everywhere where you can leave your soaked umbrella outside without someone stealing it. I even found an open book exchange in the subway - simply put down and pick up books as you read through them on your way somewhere. Convenience stores have warm food, microwaves and boiling water available for you to feed yourself well on the go. At supermarkets you pay for your shopping, then take it yourself to a bagging area and bag it up yourself. All-you-can-eat/drink restaurants :) Mobile phones.

Bad Ideas
ATMs have opening hours. The subway stops at midnight, leaving you stranded for the night unless you want to pay an expensive taxi home. Bread and cereal come in small packets, meaning you go through them faster than Pringles. Cheese and sausages are pretty much unobtainable, as are(/were, ish) bananas since some magazine proposed an "Exclusive Banana Diet" which quiet caught the public imagintion at the time and promoted hysterical bulk buying of the things.

Enormous Insects
Enough said really. The worst thing is the noise - because they're all so staggeringly huge the buzz is about two octaves lower, giving them a much more ominous feeling. I was almost hit by a butterfly about the size of a bat the other day - big, black and flapping in your face certainly makes you jump.

Bins
There are a lot of these (when you find them - public bins are much more a rariety in Japan). This is because of Japan's harsh recycling program, through which you must divide your rubbish first into Plastic, Paper, PET, Aluminium, Glass, TetraPak and Paper Cartons, then sort the remainder into Burnable and Non-burnable. Each has its own way of being prepared, for example with PET you must remove the label and cap (which go to plastic) then wash it out and crush it. It's actually very interesting to see just how much of what I throw out is plastic.

Gaijin
Being foreign in Japan is certainly an experience. A quote I heard in my second week pretty much summarises it: "But I don't want to be a minority!" It's not so much the fact that you're different, more that Japanese people (in general) think that they 'should' treat you differently, leading to some odd situations. You don't know what to do/how to behave because it's all new, and they don't know what to do differently because you're foreign and treating you normally is discounted for some reason. This isn't helped when you don't understand what they're saying (shop attendants in Japan speak in honorific language, or Keigo, which is the equivalent of a very wordy roundabout Jeeves style of English). It's taken me up to this point to work out when the till people are asking if I want a bag or not. This will almost certainly improve, but it's certainly a defining characteristic of life here initially.

More later...

Nagoya Festival

2008-10-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

This last weekend happened to not only be a long one (Monday was a national holiday) but also hosted Nagoya's Annual City Festival, an opportunity to put up dozens of food stalls, erect the occasional stage and to put on quite a show through a city-wide parade. Being an annual event (although not very famous as I was told by my Japanese friends) and never having been to a Japanese festival before I was keen to attend and see what sort of things might be on offer.

Arriving at the opening, I was surprised that even though Nagoya was a big and bustling city there weren't crowds and crowds of people. The festival was a two-day 8-hours/day affair, so perhaps more people attended the second day, but I had imagined it would be a lot busier. Nevertheless, it was certainly more bustly and a noticable increase in police and "traffic-light keepers" when I arrived at the city centre and found the festival spread out around the base of the TV Tower.

Browsing around the stalls, and being close enough to lunchtime, I picked up some takoyaki (balls of cooked batter with octopus and other fillings) and perched myself in the greener bit of the Sakae to eat. Compared to the takoyaki I'd eaten in the UK, these were certainly more undercooked and gooey, but I'm not dead yet so it must have been ok.

There were two main stages - one that hosted various entertainers and band acts, and the other that was similar but had a slightly more traditional bend, hosting also traditional costumes and martial art demonstrations. These were all fun to watch, though the large majority of the language-based entertainment passed me by.

Next of course was the parade, the highlight of the festival. For this the streets were closed off, and the rush of small children and grandmas was a mini stampede to try and get a good position in the crowd. Being tall is a definite plus in these situations, however a definite disadvantage is that most of my pictures feature someone's hair.

With all of these pictures and descriptions, if I have missed something or have made a mistake and you know better, please let me know ;) The commentary was from a far away loudspeaker and was vaguely incomprehensible.

First up was Mr Toyota himself, presumably the sponsor, with either daughters, escorts or competition winners in the boot.

Plenty of marching bands and dancers in between various bits, playing various bits and bobs of music to try and keep the crowd happy. Interestingly a few were approached by a Festival Organiser-looking person and told presumably to take a hike, cutting short whatever symphony they had going and shooing them away for the next lot.

It wouldn't be a festival without floats, and there were plenty to choose from here, many holding celebrities such as the Koala here (mascot of the local baseball team) or some giant duck of sorts (???).

Towards the end there were plenty of medieval reenactment teams, some going as far as setting fire to the street and charging at each other with sharp things. Nothing like traditional slaughter in the name of a Festival.

At the end, before heading home, there was enough time to watch the Tossing of the Heavy Thing, this year's entry being big, shoulder-mounted and golden, and this year's team is Team Blue.

More soon!

PS. If anyone anywhere could tell me the significance or indeed history of these two, it would be much appreciated. The first is a bird-like creature who proceeded to touch all the kids in the audience with its feather fan thing, while the other seems like a sacred dog (of Nagoya?). Any and all suggestions welcome.

PPS. There was another result of the festival ^_^ One has already popped its clogs, but the others are living happily on in a murky plastic 100 yen breadbin.

The Room

2008-10-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

Just some more pictures to show you what the room is like. It's worked out pretty well so far, there's enough space for everything, even though I do tend to get home and throw things wherever there's space then go out again. The rice cooker is a hand-me-down from an old student, which came to me in a slight state of neglect. I decided to clean it, which filled it with enough water and elbow grease to break it somehow. Stripping it, laying it out to dry on the balcony and then reassembling it seemed to have done the trick and now I can have rice in 30 minutes.

The balcony is only small but a good area for things (like washing in this case). I'm hoping to get some plants and things for it or maybe the room but that depends on the winter.

The bed I can actually fit into, and there's cupboards underneath it as well. The red pillow and the bowl are also hand-me-downs, while little thing next to my bag is the magical all-powerful mobile phone, which I'll probably write about later.

Looking towards the door, you can see the cupboards and some shoes, nothing particularly special. Hope to get some sort of posters or something just to spice the walls up a bit eventually.

The last picture is of the little bathroom-ette. The bath is surprisingly deep, it sinks into the floor quite a bit so feels pretty good. The little white box on the wall is a thermometer of sorts which allows precise control of the hot water - 36 for a shower and 40 for a bath suits me fine.

More later...

First Thoughts

2008-10-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

Having never been to Japan before, it was hard to work out what to expect. There were many stories and sharing of experiences, but because no two experiences are alike I was very keen to keep an open mind and go out and make my own adventure through living in an entirely different country and attending one of its universities. As such I found myself at Nagoya, one of Japan's major cities and a hub of transportation and industry. Most people I asked before coming told me that it was very nice but nothing exciting, so I was curious as to how far this opinion could stretch after I'd actually lived there. It's been a week - a hectic, manic week of rushing around with forms, fees and general franticness - but I've survived a week. Only 46 more to go then.

So, for a while I'll be posting some descriptions/observations/general things worth noting:

The Room
My room is on the 6th floor of one of Nagoya University's residences, the Ohmeikan (名古屋大学国際嚶鳴館 for all you kanji lovers). It's an ensuite with a bath/shower combo whatsit, with a balcony with laundry line, a large desk, a bed I can fit in, and a spacious wardrobe. The bed deserves special mention as it came fit with a Japanese-style pillow, which is essentially a small bean-bag. At first I scoffed at it, but it's actually really comfortable.
The room shares a smallish kitchen (couple of hobs, fridge/freezer, sinks, microwave, no oven) with around 16 people on the same floor, which is okay, except mostly things don't get cleaned. Every Wednesday at 10pm we have the Block Meeting, where so far (with my limited language) the other students babble for a bit then we clean up a bit of kitchen, so it's slowly getting back to some reasonable state. There are two other foreign students on the floor, so there's always someone to shrug at when things fly a bit too far over my head.
In total there are around 20 foreign students living here, so it's always easy to get together a group of people to head out and explore the city.

The University

Nagoya University is divided over three campuses, the main one being a short 10-minute walk from the Ohmeikan. I've yet to explore the majority, but so far within the campus I've discovered a Post Office, a subway station, various cafeterias, the occasional shop, and a Student Co-op. The building I'll be spending most of my time in will be the Education Centre for International Students (留学生センター) which has classrooms, a free computer room and a lobby for sitting around and chatting to anyone who happens to drop by. There's also a gym and a library, but library orientation isn't for a while yet.
In terms of study program, I'm taking part in the NUPACE (Nagoya University Program for ACadamic Exchange), with around 50 other students. According to Dr. Wikipedia, it's a fairly prestigious university, so it looks like I'm going to be worked hard. Good job lessons haven't really started yet - when they do I have to be up every morning to attend language classes from 8:45am to 12.

The Food
Ohmeikan is self-catered, but still it is fairly cheap to eat out if you're not so sure what the weird tentacle things in the supermarket are. There are literally loads of restaurants in Nagoya, and they are mostly all a very good deal, with a main meal costing around 800 Yen, or £4. For that you'd likely get a bowl of rice, some miso soup, as much green tea and water as you can manage, and whatever you ordered. Some dishes ("don" or　丼) are already served with rice. Nagoya is famous for its thick, dark miso, and it's therefore served with pretty much everything, so it's lucky its quite tasty. There're many variations with the miso, and as such there's always plenty of choice of Japanese food, espcially at lunchtime at one of the many cafeterias on campus. There are plenty of foreign style restaurants as well if that's not really your thing though, although these might be more expensive.
In terms of cooking for myself, the supermarkets of course stock different foods, so not everything is available/as cheap. Hopefully I'll be able to pick up one or two useful recipes as I go through the year, if not there isn't a huge difference in overall cost between eating out all the time and actually buying ingredients. There is news in the pipeline of some of the foreign students cooking together at some point, so I'll try and bring something tally-ho spit-spot British to the table. Any suggestions welcome...

More in a bit!

"Mr Karachi...?"

2008-09-25T23:27:00.000-07:00

I have now arrived in Japan! Unfortunately there is no internet in my dormitory at all, and there won't be for another couple of weeks, so I'm going to try to keep in touch with everybody through the occasional email and maybe facebook during the small bits of free time we get to disappear off to the free computer room in the International Student Office. Even though we have the weekend free, we can't get in because we don't have any student cards yet. Ah well.

For now, this is just a quick hello to let you know that, even if I haven't sent you a message so far (and thank you for sending them all!) I will try and get back to you as soon as I can. Jet-lag is a curious thing, and I'm currently up at some late hour typing this to try and train myself the hard way.

The flight. It ended up lasting around 19 hours, leaving the UK around 2:30pm, arriving at Dubai for 00:20am (UK time 10:30pm), then heading off to Nagoya a couple of hours later on a different plane arriving at around 5pm (UK time 11am). Interestingly, Nagoya Centrair Airport is one of Japan's engineering marvels, having been built entirely at sea, so please read more about it if you have time. Upon arrival I had to submit my fingerprints and have my photo taken, and be sniffer-dogged to death by the cutest drug-addicted canine in the world. After that I had my suitcase taken apart by the security staff, either because I didn't answer fast enough or because they hadn't done it to someone in a while and were getting bored. Once they were convinced I wasn't carrying anything deadly or illegal like raw meat, they let me through where I met up with the NUPACE (Nagoya University Program for ACademic Exchange) and was led by subway and train to the International Ohmeikan, my dormitory for the next 47 weeks.

PS. "Mr Karachi" was the name of some poor gentlemen whom it seemed had escaped from the Dubai airport staff, who themselves were running around shouting his name all over the place trying to recapture him. Bless.

Leaving Party

2008-09-21T22:51:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick thank you to everybody who came to my leaving do (and those who were coming but couldn't make it) - I had a wonderful time and couldn't have asked for a better send off, thank you all so much for both your presence and your generous presents; I was very grateful for both. I hope that you'll all have an awesome time while I'm away, and be sure to keep some time in late August free for catching up.

Happy 21st Birthday to those who's birthday I will unfortunately miss, and best of luck for the coming academic year to everyone else!

Intro

2008-09-19T14:39:00.001-07:00

“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.”

After two years of hard-learning, sink-or-swim exams (half of our original number have either dropped out or changed courses) and nervous expectation, I am finally going to make it to Japan, the country I have studied and heard so much about but never actually personally experienced. I'm setting of next Tuesday (23rd), and the suitcase is still empty, but this will be soon rectified.

This blog exercise is an off-shoot of its Japanese counterpart (found on the right), ever since I realised that most of my readership would probably not be able to read it. It is interesting equally because I have never kept any blog, diary/journal whatsit before, certainly not one that could be read by whoever feels passingly like reading it.

So, whether you are from the UK, Europe or elsewhere, whether you've known me from university, high school or clubs, or whether you're a relative of mine wondering where I've disappeared to, you can find out with me whether this will turn out to be a successful venture into personal reflections and experiences, and I hope that this blog will keep you informed, reassured and, hopefully, entertained with whatever antics may find me in Japan.

Some fun facts about me:

Name: Simon, Sim, Si, aka Sarcastic Git.
Status: 3rd Year Undergraduate at the University of Sheffield.
Favourite colour: Blue.
Quest: To seek the grai.. I mean, to get the most concentrated language practice as possible out of the year abroad.
Cats: Two.
Answer?: Forty-two.
Destination: Nagoya University.
Drink of Choice: Umeshu!
Favourite word: Syzygy.
Others: Just ask!

English Version Up?

2008-09-13T09:11:00.000-07:00

Will hopefully be able to flick between these two during the year, so that all my friends and relatives will be able to read something about what I'm getting up to while I'm away.

It's also a small test of my brand new laptop from which I'll be typing all these things.

Huzzah!