Holy Hanami

Throughout my life I’ve pondered over the question of whether God exists. If God existed, would there be wars? Would there be terrorism? Would there be nuclear warfare? Obesity? Cigarettes? Why would God have created these things in the first place if they are so harmful? I’ve struggled over this question for quite some time now.

And then I did Hanami.

Let’s backtrack a second. What is Hanami? Hanami is literally the direction combination of two Japanese characters “hana”, meaning flower, and “mi” ,meaning to see,. Thus, "to see flowers". Hanami refers to the cherry blossom viewing season in Japan – a time when people from all over Japan flock to parks, rivers, lakes, and shrines to look at the cherry blossoms. And it has evolved into much more than that over the past few decades. Now, it has become a huge social phenomenon. It is now customary to gather friends, family, heck, even strangers can come along, to eat and drink under the cherry blossoms until midnight. Many Japanese companies hold Hanami parties as well, albeit, with a little cruelty involved. In order to reserve the best spot for Hanami, Japanese companies often send their newest employees at 7 (yes, seven) in the morning (yes, morning) to sit around and reserve the spot until 6 (yes, 6) PM or so when the rest of their colleagues come. A Japanese form of hazing, perhaps?

So you must be saying to yourself, “Wow – Dan’s lifelong struggle with the existence of God was decided by a silly flower! What a doofus! What a silly willy! What a dope! What a (insert anachronistic vocabulary word here)!” But only if you yourself do Hanami will you understand. I will try to convey to you the emotions, the feelings, the sights of Hanami in these next few paragraphs, but like a great meal, you’ll only know if you try it.

I first went on Monday to Yasukuni Shrine, one of the top spots for Hanami in Tokyo. The problem is with Hanami is it's quite hard to time it all. The Japanese Meteorological Society issues a “Cherry Blossom Front”, which is basically a map of Japan showing where the flowers will bloom at when. Tokyo was slated to bloom a bit early this year, around March 21^st. The problem is that the peak is not March 21^st, but about a week later. So when I went this Monday (the 26^th), many of the trees at the shrine had not bloomed yet. There were a few that were in full bloom (of course, surrounded by mobs of people) and they were quite beautiful, but the sheer imagery of what the place would look like at peak time made me return today to see what had transpired over the past three days.

And, oh, did things transpire. If there was such a word in the English language that rolled the meanings of beautiful, explosion, sheer brilliance, spectacular, mind-boggling, breathtaking, jaw-dropping, earth-shattering, extraordinary into one word, that’s the word I would choose to describe Hanami at full bloom. Whoa, Dan! Use your adjectives wisely! You can’t possibly be serious! Nothing can be NINE adjectives worth of beautiful. WRONG. Again, see for yourself. I challenge you.

When I got out of the train station today by the shrine, I almost dropped my camera. Flowers were blooming everywhere. And by everywhere I mean hundreds of thousands of flowers everywhere. The walkways up and down the shrines were lined with small pink blossoms. It was like the trees were covered in dripping pink paint. I didn’t even mind the crowds – this was worth it all. What made Yasukuni Shrine special was the juxtaposition (S.A.T. WORD ALERT!!) of the flowers next to the temple buildings. Then again, these flowers could make a gas station toilet look like royalty. One particular favorite sight of mine was a huge branch of blossoms draped in front of the green and gold facade of one of the shrine’s buildings. You really just don’t see that stuff everyday.

And the flowers made the atmosphere that much better. People were not their usual selves. Not to stereotype, but Japanese people rush everywhere – they are an inherently stressed nation and there are times where I just feel like becoming a doctor and prescribing the whole nation a bottle of chill pills, taken twice a day on an empty stomach before meals. But Hanami is different. People laze around in the very sense of the word. Families sit for hours, napping, playing with their children, eating, drinking – Hanami transforms the nation, so to speak. And it was evident everywhere.

After the shrine I went over to the nearby gardens, where I had also heard was a popular viewing spot. I’m really running out of adjectives here, so lets just say that the garden had Yasukuni beat by miles. This was because the garden was surrounded by an enormous lake that was flanked by sheer walls of pink cherry blossom flowers. See the pictures for yourself. There were people boating in the water too, getting up close and personal with the flowers. Of course, the crowds were relentless. The Japanese word ippai would best describe the crowds (ippai is roughly translated to “packed” or “full of” in English). But I didn’t really mind.

The best part about Hanami is that you can’t get too much of it and you can’t get sick of it, much like you can with other good things in life (chocolate, reality television, democracy, Blues Clues, pickles, fondue, did I mention chocolate?, vintage baseball cards – I’m pretty much naming things I like at this point in order to make a point). The reason for this is that Hanami lasts for one week. And that's it. You’ll wake up a week after Hanami begins and its all gone – like a giant hand came through with a sponge a washed the trees clean. And in its wake, the trees sprout their normal green leaves and go on with their lives. The remnants of the flowers line the streets, like little pieces of pink tape, but that’s all.

Looking back at what I’ve written, I’m a bit disappointed because I don’t feel I effectively conveyed what Hanami actually is. But I guess I have to suffice with trusting you, the reader, to see it for yourself. If any of you are planning to go to Japan, have ever thought of going to Japan, or can merely spell Japan correctly, go during Hanami season. Every year, Hanami is around the same time, give or take a week. Check in with meteorological forecasts (japan-guide.com has a good one in English, albeit less detailed than the Japanese one) that show the cherry blossom front starting in late-January.

If you can, definitely check out my pictures on Facebook. There are bunch up there that I didn't have room to put up here. If you can't, certainly look at the enlarged versions of these photographs. Trust me, I'm not trying to flaunt my photography skills here, I just want you see the best pictures possible of the flowers.

Jaa mata ne!

Otaku UNITE!

I know you all have some burning questions to ask me (if it’s burning that bad, you should probably go to a doctor to check it out – HAHA!) and yes, the time will come to ask them. But I know all of you are dying to know (if it’s dying that bad…ah, never mind) where in the world can you find a place where nerdy men who live in their mother’s basement, have two or three clean shirts, and wear shorts three sizes too small can mingle with the most attractive of all Japanese women without having to pay them/go to a maid bar, I’ll tell you! That would be at the 2007 Tokyo Anime Convention at Tokyo Big Sight in Odaiba, Japan.

After an afternoon at the Anime Fair, even I was considering living the life of an otaku (what the Japanese call someone who watches anime and reads manga 23 hours a day (1 hour to sleep, eat, and buy more anime)). But do not fear, I was not converted to the dark side, but instead, merely lived the life of an otaku for just an afternoon.

The fair itself was pretty much unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The closest thing I can compare it with is the Auto Show in NYC at the Javits Center, but that really doesn’t do the TAF (Tokyo Anime Fair…duh) much justice. The entirety of three enormous exhibition halls was filled with hundreds and hundreds of vendors, movie studios, animation school, floating anime character balloons, food stands, and about 400 million people. The first thing I noticed when stepping into the main hall was SENSORY OVERLOAD. My brain shut off after about 13 minutes and I had to transfer to generator power, which meant that I sort of aimlessly wobbled around with my eyes glazed over like a sugary donut.

Every single anime title imaginable (I can only imagine like, 4) was represented in some way or form. For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, there’s an anime for everything. Some specific examples that I was introduced to yesterday include: baseball anime, robot anime, hentai (look it up for yourself, pervert), an anime where this girl changed into this crab thing and pinched people, cutesy girlie anime, mecha-anime (robots/droids fighting each other), samurai anime – pretty much everything you could dream of. And I’m not joking about that. You’re probably saying to yourself, “Yeah, well…there’s probably not an anime with talking parsnips in it, is there Dan” to which I would say “WRONG!” if I could read your mind and telepathically rub your naiveté in your face.

And of course, another one of the highlights were the cosplaying (people dressed as anime characters) anime girls. The people that organized the TAF are smart. Would you want to take a flier from a short, nerdy Japanese guy who certainly hasn’t showered in a fortnight and has the social skills of underarm hair? No. (Now, to be fair, I know people that are otaku and most of them are actually quite normal and nice. It just makes for a funnier story to exaggerate the small percentage of them that are actually crazy anime addicts.) So, every which way you are bombarded by young (20-30 years old, I’d reckon) women giving you fliers, pamphlets, tissues (they sell ads on tissue packets here), video cassettes (so 1993!), etc. And of course, even after I had collected about 423,000 sheets of useless gloss, I at couldn’t refuse the countless sheets of paper that were being thrust toward me. I ended up with so many freakin’ sheets of paper, I surely could experiment on enough of them to find some way to create trees from paper and solve this whole rainforest debacle myself.

The anime girls also love to take pictures (or at least, they look like they are enjoying it). Taking a picture with different anime girls is like reaching into a box that's filled with both good and bad stuff, eels, candy, oranges, apples with razors in them and the like, and not knowing what you’re going to pull out until after you’ve done so. This is because each anime girl has a certain pose and facial expression that they are known for. It could be a sad face. Or a pouty face (only at the TAF did I discover the difference). Most of the time you’ll get a huge smile with the “peace fingers” everyone in Japan does when they are being photographed (see pictures for examples).

The actual exhibits were pretty neat and had a bunch of merchandise scattered about for aspiring otaku to peruse and purchase. Many exhibits were also accompanied by sometimes frightening kigurumi, best translated at mascots, but they weren’t quite mascots in the sense that most of them didn’t make me want to hug them because they were so adorable. Some were just plain terrifying. There was this one that was basically a little girl that was morbidly overweight (poor thing) that sort of bounced around everywhere instead of walking. It was like both of her legs were pogo sticks and the concept of walking like a normal human being hadn’t crossed her mind in ages. The fact that there was a mascot of that sort was not the scariest part; it was that there was actually a real, living person inside of there who, if revealed, would have their life ruined and be exiled to the smallest of islands in the Pacific to live a life of mascot-haunted terror. Of course, there were normal mascots: Pikachu, Ninja Turtles, some robots, but most of them were far from cuddly and made me seriously reconsider my vision of Japan as a cute paradise.

There was also a girl dressed up as a rabbit with carrots as her breasts – just thought, you should know.

So was it an experience worth having, absolutely yes. Would I go again? Absolutely maybe. There were actually some cool looking anime that I would like to check out in the near future. A career as an otaku – meh, not for me. After the fair (and Bernadette getting interviewed by Swedish Television outside the main entrance hall) we went to dinner at an American (YES!) buffet on Odaiba. I was completely not surprised that we were the only Americans in the American buffest, but whenever you combine the words “eat” and “all you can”, all shame goes out the window.

Today we went to another baseball game at the Tokyo Dome between the Yomiuri Giants (Japan’s equivalent of the Yankees) and the Hiroshima Carp (yes, the fish). As I go to more and more Japanese baseball games, it becomes clearer and clearer how cool the fans are at these events. So passionate! So supportive! Not one bad word toward opposing team members or fans. Hopefully next weekend we will go to Chiba to see ex-Mets manager Bobby Valentine’s team, the Marines.

Three weeks from now, if all goes well, I’ll be in Thailand! Segoi!! (AWESOME!)

Jaa mata ne!

And you call yourself a TOURIST!

So Japan is great for many reasons, but I added another one to the list yesterday when we had off for the “Spring Equinox”. Let me briefly explain the deal with holidays in Japan. There is pretty much some holiday/festival every week, but obviously all of them aren’t national because then nothing would ever get done. However, each month there are at least 2 national holidays that everyone gets off for. In fact, they love their holidays so much that a number of years ago there were no holidays in June so the Prime Minister at the time literally,just made one up out of thin air and called it some weird name like “The Beauty of the Sea Day” commemorating the contribution of the ocean to the lives of the Japanese. Now it’s a national holiday and everyone has off for it. Can’t beat that.

To celebrate the “holiday” we decided to head for Asakusa, the historical district of Tokyo, that has been recommended by several people for being “must-see”, “fabulous”, and “eh, kinda cool”. We decided to maximize the number of modes of transportation that we took during the day, so we started off by taking the subway to Shimbashi, taking the monorail one stop (literally a 45-second ride) to Shiodome, and then caught a boat to Asakusa down the Sumida River. But before that, we went to the Hamarikyu Garden where the pier was to look around. Out of nowhere in the middle of the garden was this enormous field FULL of these yellow flowers (the brochure called them “Rape Blossoms”; is that even a real flower? Any horticulturists out there? I’m thinking it was a classic case of Engrish – with hilariously bad consequences, as usual). It was gorgeous (look for yourself!)

After we satisfied our sensitive sides in the flower garden, we boarded the boat (called the Cute Dog Express, though there were no dogs involved much to my dismay. I pictured a small puppy with a captain’s hat on its hind legs driving the boat; boy was I disappointed). The boat was very cool, especially because we passed under 12 different bridges, all which looked completely different from one another. One non-highlight of the boat was the swarm (yes, swarm) of seagulls surrounding the boat after this little Japanese kid started throwing popcorn at them. Japanese people have such bad touristy judgment – even in their own country! These are the same people that tried petting squirrels at the Grand Canyon (squirrels are HUGE here, because there are none – there is a magazine, and I’m not making this up, called “Riisu no Sekai” which translates to “Squirrel World” in English).

After dodging bird missiles for a little while, the boat finally landed at the pier at Asakusa. And then came the people. See, I question my intelligence very much sometimes, mainly because of times like that when I don’t make the connection between national holiday, people having no work, and Asakusa being a touristy place. Why didn’t they teach associations like that at school?!

There were so many people lining the narrows streets of Asakusa that if you looked from on top of a roof down onto the main road, it would like a chaotic solid stream of black heads (with the occasional teenager with some weird colored hair) moving in an infinite number of directions. Asakusa is really neat though, and I definitely plan to go back there when it’s not so crowded that I could have literally crowd surfed anywhere I wanted to go.

What is also funny is that I have been wondering up until this point where the tourist traps are in Japan – I mean sure, there are stupid stuffed animals and highly-priced elevator rides that whisk you to the top of some building at 400 miles per hour, but I mean Japanese people do it too! It's not just foreigners! It’s not like Times Square where you know everyone is a tourist no matter who they are. Well, my question was answered in Asakusa. Nevertheless, they had some great souvenirs there, including sweet katana swords, kimonos, beads, jewelry, and porcelain – pretty much everything. They also had some horrible souvenirs, such as dog outfits (don’t get me STARTED on the Japanese dressing up their dogs), this stuffed penguin sitting on a toilet that would say things like (no joke) “That felt great!” and “It stinks in here!” in English when you pushed its flipper, and this cigarette butt disposal thing that had the words “Smoking! May peace prevail on Earth” written on it. Can’t make that stuff up.

To add to the weird touristy-ness, my friend Eric had to get Takoyaki, which is basically a bunch of baby octopi fried in some sort of ball and covered in mystery sauce. Enticing huh? I would’ve lost it when I saw the little tentacle poking out of this fried mass of stuff, but Eric seemed to enjoy it to some extent. There was also this freaky amusement park from like 1850 that was right next to one the oldest (and most famous) temples in Tokyo (talk about irony!). There was this freaky clown guy at the entrance yelling at us in Japanese to come into the park, which of course, made us even more frightened for our lives and sent us scurrying in the opposite direction (which of course, landed us smack dab in the middle of the red light district where we saw this guy with a huge bottle of liquor repeatedly push over his bicycle and clap at us).

The weirdness continued when we to Akihabara (the nerd district, as I call it) after we left Asakusa. Eric wanted to find a Nintendo DS so we figured that we’d all tag along. We got there and there was this huge crowd watching these men dressed up as women anime characters (see picture) doing the most ridiculous dance I’ve ever seen (it was sort of like a cross between the worst German polka you’ve ever seen, a hoe-down, square dancing, and the Moonwalk – a lethally dangerous combination if you ask me). Of course, we took numerous pictures, much to the delight of the freaky women-men.

So the Spring Equinox was spent quite well, in my opinion, and now we’re in the home stretch of school, with a little over two weeks of classes (eep!) to go. Expect some more weird stories in my next entry, since we are going to the Tokyo AnimeCon (the largest in the world) on Saturday. It’s going to be intense. Sunday we are planning to go to another baseball game at the Tokyo Dome.

Jaa mata ne!

Picture Guide: #1 - The flowers in the Hamarikyu Garden, #2 - The Gang on the Cute Dog Express, #3 - The masses at Asakusa, #4 - I just love this picture -- taken at Sensoji, #5 - The women-men at Akihabara

Buy Me Some Fried Octopus and Dried Abelone Tentacles

Another exciting, fun-filled weekend in the life of Dan. I’ve certainly started packing the activities into my weekends as it begins to hit me that my weekends are indeed numbered and I need to do as much as humanly possible before I leave this fabulous island.

Saturday:

My friend Dave and I had been planning for quite a while to go see a Japanese baseball game when the season began, so we finally did so yesterday and brought along a bunch of our friends with us. Though it was only an “open-season” (read: preseason) game, we decided to give it a go and see what it was like. We went to nearby Yokohama to see the Yokohama Baystars battle the Hanshin Tigers (from Osaka). We were a tad worried about getting tickets the day of the game, but realized when we got there that it would be no problem and actually ended up sitting in about the 10^th row on the third base side of the stadium.

The actual game that the two teams played on the field was pretty much like the game played in the States. However, that’s where all the similarities end. The biggest difference, by far is the nature of the crowd. The entire game they were rowdy, loud, energetic – pretty much the opposite of what you would expect from a Japanese crowd. Now maybe it was because there was a whole slew of Hanshin fans there, famous for being particularly rabid and devoted to their Tigers, but it was far more noise than you’d ever hear at an American game. The stands were neatly divided into two halves; one side was Hanshin, one side was Yokohama and the Hanshin side (again, from Osaka, over 300 miles away) had at least twice as many fans as Yokohama – and this was an exhibition game. We sat on the Hanshin side and thus, in a matter of minutes, all decided that we were all huge Hanshin Tigers fans and would root for them for the remainder of the game, and perhaps the rest of our lives. A few of us bought some really slick-looking Tigers jerseys to complete the deal – though Dave remained a staunch Bay Stars fan, a fact that was not received well in a crowd full of Tigers fans. It was sort of like being a Red Sox fan in the middle of Yankee Stadium.

And let me tell you, these Tiger fans were crazy. In the left field stands, they had an enormous cheering section, complete with four of five men whose job it was to stand on huge ladders and conduct all of the cheers, like in marching band. They also had this guys waving enormous (and I’m talking like as long as a full-sized automobile enormous) flags with the Tigers logo and various Japanese phrases such as “Fight!”, “Win!” and the like printed all over them. That wasn’t all. There was pretty much an entire horn section too; trumpets, horns, trombones – you name it. And as a trumpet player myself, I can say – boy did they blast those things. Then there were three or four bass drums that never stopped sounding the entire game. And it’s not like the cheers were half-assed, like they are sometimes at MLB games. Everybody knew the words and sang along and banged together these huge plastic sticks shaped like bats that made a surprisingly loud noise for their size. And the cheers were awesome too. Before the game, the fans sang a sort of “alma mater” song (that had to be at least 5 minutes long) with verse upon verse of praise for their precious Tigers. The cheers during the game consisted of customized cheers for each player on the team. One cheer (which sounds significantly less cool without trumpets, bass drums, thunder sticks, and a few thousand Japanese voices behind it) went something like this: “I-ke! I-ke! *insert last name of player here*” (Go, go *player’s name*!). Also, when the power hitters came up, they all (and by all I mean 6000 fans) did this synchronized motion thing where the people on the 3^rd base side would motion from right to left toward the outfield fence with their thunder sticks and the fans in the outfield would motion toward them, coaxing their player to hit a home run, hoping that this synchronized motion would change the atmospheric isobars – which I think it did – to allow for that extra gust of wind to carry the ball over the fence. The fact that 6000 people could cheer in such harmony with each other, and with such enthusiasm, astounded me. And even though I didn’t know any of the cheers, it was extremely hard not to join in by the end.

In the end, the Tigers won 7 – 4 which of course, spurred another round of raucous cheering, a repetition of the alma mater, and rejoicing among other things. Though the fans were certainly the best part of the game (I’d love to go see a regular season game when the stadium is actually full!), there were a few other cool things that I noticed as well:

-First, when any team brought in a relief pitcher from the bullpen, they drove (yes, drove) the pitcher out from the outfield in this extremely slick sports car to the mound. What service!

-The Japanese mascots are both the stupidest and cutest things that you have ever seen at the same time. The Baystar’s mascot is this thing with a big star as its head.

-Ties are feasible in Japanese baseball after 10 innings

-There is no booing or hostile cheering against the other team of any kind. Quite the opposite in the states, huh?

Anyways, it was a really fun time and I hope to go to a few more games before I leave if possible. After the game we came back and went to a Mexican restaurant with a few other people and then proceeded to Cold Stone Creamery (yes, they do have it here). So worth the 500 Yen I paid for it! And, of course, I gave them a tip which made them have to sing these silly English songs (in English, which was the best part).

Sunday:

Today was less crazy than yesterday, but extremely fun nonetheless. We went to the Ghibli Museum (Hayao Mayazaki’s film studio) with my Japanese Culture class and saw a fabulous collection of relics from all of his movies (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, etc.) The museum was also really hands on and had a bunch of fascinating exhibits all talking about basically how freakin’ hard it is to make a full length animated feature.

After the museum, we went for Hawaiian burgers at Kua’Lana (the mahi mahi, avocado sandwich is so good!) and sort of sat around the restaurant and talked about various things for a few hours. It was nice to sort of relax and chat it up with everyone for a while, instead of rushing out to do one thing or the other after dinner.

On tap for this week is a field trip to a Japanese school with some of the TIS students tomorrow afternoon. On Wednesday, we have off (for the Spring Equinox – they have holidays for EVERYTHING here!), so I think I’m either going to go to Kamakura or Asakusa. Also, this week officially begins Hanami (flower viewing) when all the cherry blossoms begin to bloom and Tokyo becomes about 10 times prettier in a matter of days.

Everybody’s also starting to realize how little time is left and how fast it’s all going by, so everyone is being really personable and just sort of enjoying what we have left. I don’t think any of us will realize it until we leave this place, but despite the drama, the people we get annoyed by on a daily basis, even the people we dislike, we’ve all been drawn closer to one another just by going through this experience together. It’s nice to be united by a common thread, and know that that thread will hopefully remain in tact when we all return to our respective universities. It’s quite a unique experience in that we basically all have accelerated friendships, starting (and perhaps ending) in a matter for 4 months. It’s a unique experience, but certainly one that’s not worth forgetting.

Sorry about the introspective stuff. I will warn you that there will probably be more in the coming weeks as time slips away here in the Land of Rising Sun.

Jaa mata ne!

Picture Guide: #1: Me and Eric sporting our Tigers jerseys, #2: The Hanshin Crowd, #3: A Tigers pitcher in action, #4: The gang in front of a robot at the Ghibli museum

Of Speaking Partners and Harmony

The most exciting news of the past few days is that after finals end me and two of my friends, Kate and Ashley (kind of like the Olsen twins) are going to Phuket, Thailand for 6 days. We had been tentatively planning the trip for a while now and finally booked the tickets last night. The flight was a bit expensive – and involves a red-eye return flight to Tokyo – but a combination of cheap lodging ($49 dollars a night for a three star hotel on the beach) and the opportunity to lie on the beach for six days was just too good to pass up. Google Image Search “Phuket” and see for yourself. Be jealous. It’s okay.

Besides that, all else has been fairly uneventful around here. I’m having a super good experience with my three speaking partners, though it’s more like 7 or 8 since they always bring a few friends along. I’m definitely getting to use my Japanese a whole lot more, something that I really wanted to strive for during this second half of my trip here. Also, it’s nice to help them out with their English and actually pretty fascinating to see how they are learning the language. The one main thing that I’ve found with all of the students is that their level of speaking and level of writing are completely unrelated (a correlation coefficient of 0, for you math nerdz out there). One girl, Motoko, usually does most of the speaking while her two friends Akiko and Yukiko (try to tell those names apart) sort of sit around and occasionally ask questions in broken English. Though Motoko isn’t fluent, she’s pretty decent and probably is where I am at with Japanese right now. The other two girls are considerably less fluent and it’s a bit more difficult to understand them.

On Tuesday, they asked me to correct their essays that were going to hand in on the Salem Witch Trials (which one girl tried to describe to me and I think she started describing the story of Thanksgiving before I stopped her and told her that Thanksgiving and the Salem Witch Trials are quite unrelated, perhaps save for the fact that both events involved meat roasting on a open fire – sorry, it was too easy). The weird thing was, Motoko’s essay was by far, for lack of a better word, the “worst” of the three essays. I was a little worried about Akiko and Yukiko’s papers, since they were not too proficient at speaking but was extremely surprised, especially by Akiko’s essay, at how well they wrote. If you looked at the essay by itself and didn’t know the author, you’d easily say that Akiko was the most proficient at English, whereas it is just the opposite case. Very odd indeed. Nonetheless, they are so extremely nice and are helping me a great deal with my Japanese – just by letting me talk – so its been very beneficial. Plus, these girls are in the APP Program, sort of an English TOEFL Exam prep program, and the level of English they are expected to be able to read and write is much, much higher than my current level of Japanese is. I give them a whole lot of credit.

I have two other partners, Naoko and another guy named Takahiro, who are both extremely nice, but are a bit less proficient than the three girls. Both of them try to cop out of using English sometimes by starting to speak Japanese (sometimes I do the same thing in reverse), so I try to force them not to revert back to Japanese when they are stuck. It’s also interesting to see how both the male and female Japanese students interact with me. No matter what, and this is just part of the Japanese culture, none of them will say “Thank You” when I mention that they are all very good at English. Never. Even if they were fluent, I’d expect that they would still go “Iie, iie” – “No, no” or “Sore demo nai kedo…” – “That’s not so…” and bow their heads like they usually do. Japanese culture sees responding to a compliment with “Thank You” as extremely self-centered and breaking the “collectivist” harmony of the group. It’s a bit frustrating sometimes too when you keep insisting that they are good at English and they never believe you. The funny thing is that I’m starting to do the same thing, partly because of habit and partly because I don’t want to seem egotistical at all.

Another unrelated – but at the same time related – part of Japanese culture involves their staunch commitment to non-intervention. Whether it’s a woman not speaking up when she’s being pushed around a train or a man who is clearly annoyed by a teenager’s music blasting through their headphones so that everyone can hear, no one says anything. Case in point, today. I was getting some bread after dinner at Shinagawa and noticed a man with a very oddly shaped coat walking around the bakery. I soon realized that under his coat was no less than 10 sandwiches that had stolen from the fridge in the bakery and was shoving more under his coat as I watched him. At least two or three other Japanese women in the store – not the store clerks, however -- saw him and sort of just looked away and pretended not to see. I was going to say something but then I think he noticed my suspicion and darted out of the store, scot free, with 10 sandwiches he had stolen. I walked up to one of the women and said, in Japanese, “What was that guy doing?” and she replied “It looked like he was stealing sandwiches.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked, and her reply said it all. She turned to me, with a small frown pasted across her face and whispered,

“Because that would be un-Japanese of me.”

So you see, it’s a whole different world over here in Japan. I’m not really sure how I got off on this tangent (sorry, but its good that I did since I didn’t really much else to write about), but I hope it gives you a better look into some of the intricacies of this culture. If that sandwich stealer had been in the U.S. you know something would have been said. But here, that would be the exception to the rule.

Anyways, this weekend I’m (hopefully) going to a baseball game on Saturday (yay!) and then going to the Studio Ghibli Museum on Sunday. Time is flying by here and I hope you are enjoying the ride and will stay with me ‘till the end.

Jaa mata ne.

Nagoya and Friends

So this weekend was my “spring break” from TUJ, which was more or less just a four-day weekend that they called spring break to make everyone (sort of) happy. As I mentioned before, I planned a trip to Nagoya, originally by myself (because everyone was going to Kyoto but I’m going in a month with my dad), but ended up being accompanied by my good friend Bernadette. All in all, I’m definitely glad that I didn’t go alone.

The first, and one of the most exciting parts, of the trip was the Shinkansen ride to and from Nagoya. The Shinkansen literally translates to “new trunk line” in English but I translate it as “Wow that’s a fast train, why can’t America have this sort of thing??” The train tops out at nearly 200 mph, so fast that you can really barely see anything that’s going on outside the window. To top it all off, it’s a super smooth ride too. So smooth that during the first few years of its existence, people were getting motion sickness because it was such a clean ride. To combat this, Japan Railways actually installed bumps on the tracks to make it seem more “rickety”. It’s really quite a fun ride, especially in the daytime when you can look at the window. On the way home, we had a great view on Mt. Fuji to the left of the train, which is still breathtaking at 200 mph.

Nagoya is not often cited as the “place to be” as far as cities in Japan go, probably because it is a lot like Tokyo. However, there were some really neat parts in the city itself that we got to see, though I’m glad we only had one day in the city proper. The night we got there we checked into our hotel, which happened to be extremely extremely nice with these fabulous beds that were so comfortable we wanted to steal them, and decided to go to the top of the Marriott Hotel which was about 52 stories high. We got to the top and ended up going to the bar/club up there and got a really nice seat by the window with a great view of the city. Though the singer in the bar was pretty terrible (and sounded oddly like a man) we had delicious wine and got to taste the “high life” (i.e. we were the only ones in jeans, under 40, etc.).

The first day we decided to head over to Inuyama, which was about a 30 minute train ride away. The city itself was not too exciting, but had a really amazing castle that was still pretty well preserved (and totally NOT touristy like Nagoya Castle), with these extremely steep ladders you could climb to get to the roof. Along the way I befriended this two really nice Japan obaasan (grandmothers) who were visiting the castle as well. In fact, I met a lot of obaasan all around and it became sort of a running theme throughout the weekend. The castle also had a shrine nearby completely dedicated to dogs, since Inuyama translates to “dog mountain” in English.

After the castle and shrine, we hopped on a bus to the main attraction of the day, Meiji Mura. This place had been recommended to us by our Japanese culture teacher, and for extremely good reason. The best way to describe is as a giant (and I mean like 50 acres giant) historical theme park that had hundreds and hundreds of perfectly preserved Meiji and Edo period buildings all around. The buildings were literally brought in by train from all around Japan and looked pretty spectacular considering how old they were. There were post offices, banks, hotels, apartments, famous people’s homes, churches; pretty much every type of building. There was even a Noh theater, which we got a private tour of (in sort of a hybrid of Japanese and English) by one of the guides. A highlight of the tour is when we went into the basement where the workers slaved away in suppressive heat turning the giant rotating wheel that made up part of the stage. The guide described the place as “Naraku” which literally means “hell”. Before we headed to “Naraku”, the guide, in her most cheerful voice, announced to us, in English, “Let’s go to hell!” And to hell we went.

Another highlight was in one of the Western churches. There was a group of Japanese girls that were taking pictures and one of them was crouching in front of the altar, pretending to pray while her friend took a picture. So, of course, I ran over and kneeled down beside her and started to “pray” as well, much to the amusement of everyone around us. If anything, besides the spirituality (ha!) of the whole experience, Bernie took a priceless picture and me with the girl next to me. There was also a really neat hotel whose lobby was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Meiji Mura was a really awesome, totally unique place and it was certainly worth the trip out there. I would probably say it was my favorite part of the trip.

The next day we decided to just stay in Nagoya and see the sights within the city. In the morning we went to the Tokugawa Museum, a giant building that had tons and tons of stuff from Japanese history: a monumental collection of old porcelain dolls, 400 year old waka poetry, kimonos, samurai helmets, swords, beautiful painted screen doors – it had everything, and all of it was truly fascinating to look at (which is certainly what everyone else had in mind since it was absolutely packed). Near the museum there was an enormous garden as well, which we toured for a bit after the museum.

After lunch we went to Nagoya Castle. We were expecting touristy, but this was a bit much. The castle itself is gorgeous, towering above the castle walls with 7 floors that are segmented on top of one another. Though the outside was awesome, the inside was pretty much a tourist trap and a half. We made the most of it. Nagoya Castle is super famous for these two golden dolphins on the roof. So, of course, there was a huge plastic dolphin inside the castle that you could pose with. And oh, did we pose. One of the better shots was of me “modeling” on the dolphin, sprawled out on my side with my head resting on my hand. Isn’t defiling historical artifacts fun?!

At night we met our friend Kyle from TUJ, who was visiting his girlfriend, for dinner and went to an izakaya (Japanese bar) afterwards where his girlfriend was working. After that it was time to go home for the last night before heading home on Saturday. It was a great trip (with many, many more details and events that I purposely omitted) and of course, I took a ton of pictures which I’ve posted on Facebook.

Today I went with Bernie back to Odaiba (she had never been there) and did all the usual fun stuff there. Tomorrow its back to school for the home stretch…ack. Hard to believe how little time is left here and how much more I want to do. We’re still trying to plan a trip to Thailand (though it’s still up in the air) and will hopefully have a plan hammered out by the end of the week. If not Thailand, another option would be Guam (which is a bit closer and cheaper) but if that falls through, I’m going to probably go to Osaka on my own.

Keep in touch, ya’ll! Before you know it, I’ll be back home sharing all my crazy stories and pictures with you guys (though perhaps I stay here forever, because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how fast its going by and how much I truly love Japan. I can’t quite put my finger on the reasons I love it so much, but there’s just something about it that makes you adore it. The TUJ program director was spot on when he said at orientation that Japan is like a bad drug habit – if you go once, you’re going to come back whether you like it or not).

Minna san, ki o tsukete ne! (Take care everyone!)

Picture Guide: #1 Bernie and Me in the Marriott Hotel in Nagoya, #2 Inuyama Castle, #3 An old post office in Meiji Mura, #4 Tokukawa Garden, #5 Nagoya Castle

A Controversial Saturday, A Temple-Filled Sunday

T’is March in the Land of the Rising Sun. While March brings warmer weather, the start of cherry blossom season, and spring with it, it also means that I won’t ever want to go to class ever again once the weather starts to get nice. Today was case in point. If I had class today, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to go. It was sunny and 65 degrees the entire day. Couldn’t have asked for better than that! In fact, the whole winter here seemed almost non-existent. Sure, we had a few cold days here and there, but I don’t think it ever went below 25 at any one point. Now that I say that, of course, there’s going to be a cold snap for the entirety of March. I shouldn’t test fate.

Yesterday I went on the second of three field trips for my Japanese Culture class. For this one, we headed to Yasukuni Shrine the famous (and infamous) shrine where many Japanese war veterans are honored. The Shrine itself is a really cool building – painted a dark red with a bunch of neat designs and Buddhist figures all around. The controversial part lies in what exactly the shrine is commemorating. For those of you that don’t know, Yasukuni has been in the news a lot lately, mainly because the last Prime Minister, Koizumi, made it very public that he supported what Yasukuni stood for. The problem is that a few of the shrines are dedicated to known war criminals during World War II; people that took part in Chinese discrimination, slavery, etc. However, the shrine honors them as though they did a good dead for the country.

The more controversial part of Yasukuni isn’t even the shrine itself but the Yushukan Museum nearby. After we headed through a few exhibits of the museum, the problem was clear. All the descriptions of Japanese military history are widely skewed in favor of the Japanese. Especially for World War II. For instance, one of the plaques mentions how the war would have ended much sooner “if not for the United State’s persistent pressure” and that “though Japan was defeated, they inspired nations around the world to promote freedom,” etc. Also, the world “battle” was never used in connection with a Japanese attack on another country. For example, the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war was called “The Manchurian Incident”. Such euphemisms ran abound through all parts of the museum. My professor was clearly against the propaganda and mentioned that a lot of Japanese people did not agree with what was written in the museum. Nevertheless, the museum was fascinating and it was really interesting to see how the Japanese saw World War II. The only part that gave me the creeps was the exhibit on Pearl Harbor. It’s very weird to see what the Japanese thought of Pearl Harbor, mainly because the American sentiment about the attack is pretty uniform all around. It was sort of equivalent to going to a museum in Iraq or Afghanistan or someplace like that and seeing a display about how 9/11 was a triumph for the country, etc. Intense stuff.

On a more fun note, today I took a trip up to Yanaka in northern Tokyo for the afternoon. The only reason I found out about Yanaka was because I typed in “Tokyo Walking Tours” into Google and found a great site with 4 walking tours you can do around Japan. Yanaka is definitely the quietest, most residential area of Tokyo that I’ve been in so far. You can hardly believe that the packed streets of Shibuya are just a few miles away. Anyway, I took my walking guide and headed up for the afternoon.

I saw way too much stuff to describe it all here, so I’ll go through a few highlights. The first stop was Tennoji Temple, which was founded more than 500 years ago. The temple itself was pretty basic, though a few of the surrounded buildings were done in very traditional Japanese architecture that was neat. Also, in a theme that ran through all the temples I saw today, the landscaping was gorgeous, especially with some of the trees blooming flowers already. The main attraction of Tennoji was a giant seated bronze Buddha statue which dates from 1690. It was quite the impressive Buddha, I must say!

After Tennoji I walked through Yanaka Cemetery and visited a few other temples in the area. Next on the tour was the Asakura Choso Museum, the studio/house of a famous western-style Japanese sculptor named Asakura Fumio. Though unfamiliar with his work, I decided to check it out anyway because I hadn’t been in a Japanese style house yet and I figured it was worth the trip. After several footwear changes (of course, into slippers that would never fit me in a million years), I entered the house, which was really cool to see. All the rooms were Japanese style and had a bunch of his sculptures (which were quite good) all over the place. The best part about the house was the enormous Japanese courtyard smack dab in the middle complete with koi fish, a waterfall, and giant rocks (which supposedly symbolize the Five Confucian Virtues). I really want a pond in my house. The rooftop was also really cool because you were able to see the whole Yanaka area from above, which was nice because there were no skyscrapers in sight, just the roofs of hundreds Japanese-style houses. This is also where I somehow got in a picture with this Japanese woman who was, no joke, half my height. Unfortunately stupid me didn’t have them take a picture with my camera, but trust me, it was hilarious.

Then, I followed the tour down to a little pedestrian shopping street that was very old-fashioned and packed with tons of people enjoying the weather just like I was. Though tempting, I didn’t buy anything (though I think I’ll do some souvenir shopping there) except for sembei, those rice cakes I am obsessed with. The tour mentioned a place famous for them, so of course I indulged and bought a bunch that was covered in glazed sugar. Mmmm.

The walking tour wound down with a few more shrines, including one I happened upon just because I went the wrong way which ending up having this ENORMOUS golden sculpture of some Buddhist deity. Sometimes it’s good to get lost! My personal favorite part of the tour was the last place I went: Nezu Shrine. The best part wasn’t the shrine itself, but surrounding temple grounds. The setting couldn’t have been more perfect. There were cedar trees all around and the shrine was completely surrounded by azalea bushes (which must be unbelievable when they bloom in April – I’ve made it a point to go back there). There were also a bunch of ponds with waterfalls with fish and birds all around. Couldn’t have asked for a better atmosphere. The shrine itself was also very pretty (though now, most of the shrines I see seem to blend into one another). I sat on a bench near one of the ponds and just kind of hung out for a good half an hour or so. A great end to an eventful day!

Anyways, this week is a shortened week due to our “spring break” on Thursday and Friday. Wednesday night I head off to Nagoya and it looks like my friend Bernadette is going to join me. Should be fun! I might do another entry before then, but most likely will wait until I get back on Saturday. Hope all is well with everyone

Jaa mata ne!

P.S. Picture guide: Picture #1 - Buddha Statue at Tennoji, #2 - Garden inside the museum, #3 - Landscape around Nezu Shrine, #4 - Bridge/One of the Nezu Shrine buildings