Well, it's been a little while but I finally have the time to get back to this.

Like I mentioned, I'm on a study abroad program learning, ostensibly, college-level Japanese here in Hikone. I'd actually intended to write this a good while ago, but...

Here's how it works. There are four Japanese classes offered that ascend in difficulty (obviously) and are supposed to be equivalent to a year of study at an American university. So for example, if you can take a year of Japanese in the US, come here, take level 2, then go back and expect to get into level 3.

I said "supposed to be" just now because I think their idea of what constitutes a year of study isn't based on what American college students actually learn in a year -- it's based on some lofty ideal from a perfect world where no one skips class and everyone cares about what they're studying. I've heard horror stories of people studying Japanese for two years at America and testing into the first level here, and apparently there have been years when no one tested into the fourth level at all.

So I was pretty nervous about this and essentially spent the entire summer studying for the placement test. My big fat weak point when I got to Japan was definitely kanji; when I was in college, my strategy was basically to cram like crazy before tests, memorize as much of it as I could that night and then promptly forget everything once I was out of the classroom. So as a result, I'd "studied" somewhere around three hundred kanji and retained somewhere under fifty -- and I'm just talking about the ability to read them, I don't even want to think about how few kanji I could write. For those of you without Japanese experience, imagine that you know about umpteen gajillion verbs and nouns in spoken English and about forty in written English. Same thing. So I decided I needed to learn somewhere around a hundred kanji a week, a pace I kept up for the most part throughout the summer program; at the time of the placement test around a week and a half ago, I had around one thousand memorized, which sadly is still not enough to make you literate or even close but you do get the delightful experience of "I can read every single word on this sign except the one that completely determines what the hell it's talking about."

So I figured with my level of Japanese experience I would have a lot of trouble getting into level 3. I've had friends on this program and they said level 4 Japanese is basically impossible to get into, like it's equivalent to grad-level Japanese, so I didn't even think of that as an option.

Anyway, the placement test was really tough and I thought I botched it but you probably know where I'm going with this. I'm one of the 四天王 of the Japanese program here, one of the only four who made it into the fourth level.

This is like a mixed blessing. I have somewhere around seven hours of homework a night, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to see quite as much of Japan as I wanted to and who knows what kind of social life I'm going to develop. But on the other hand, the conversations I get into with Japanese college students basically go like this: "What bands do you like? Oh that's cool, so what movies do you like? What do you think of Japanese food?" Now that's pleasant enough, but it's not what I talk about in English and it's not incredibly fulfilling. Class is essentially three hours of discussion, and it's stuff like "what do you think about Japanese gender inequality," "explain these Japanese grammar constructions in Japanese," etc. This is Japanese I can actually use to communicate the way I like to in English, and I don't think it's something you can practice in quite the same way at, you know, the arcades.

So that's my status now. I figure next time I write I'll talk about the karaoke place back in Iida. I promise this will be more interesting than it sounds.

Well, we got our visas changed today.

We actually tried yesterday too. The easiest way to get out of Iida if you're going west is to take a bus to Nagoya and then board the trains from there, but we got there and the Shinkansen had been delayed by over two hours. I didn't even know the Shinkansen ever got delayed. So we took the bus to the Nagoya station... then got on the next bus out of the Nagoya station back to Iida. Five hours and fifty bucks wasted. That's life.

Today did start to feel like a hassle by the time we were on the bus home, but public transportation here really is something else. I think I can add that to the list of things I'll miss about Japan along with drink vending machines and short-sleeved hoodies (do we not have these in America, or is it a Missouri problem? I'd never seen one before I got here).

Speaking of clothes, this is a surprisingly common question from Japanese people: "do you have Uniqlo in America?" I'm at a loss. I'm pretty sure it's a Japanese company and I've never seen one in the US in my life, but that's not to say there isn't like one token Uniqlo in some megalopolis or another. So I don't know, do we? I'll have to figure this out next time I have a decent chunk of Internet time.

Also speaking of clothes, I'm pretty sure I still can't fit into Japanese clothes despite the fact that I'm getting dangerously close to the "healthy" weight for my height and build and I see hella dudes fatter than me. I guess the problem is that I'm either flirting with 6'1 or flirting with 6'2 (I forget which) and I have like mega-wide shoulders. None of the stuff I brought from America fits all that well anymore (including my glasses... which I doubt has anything to do with my miraculous results on the study abroad diet), so this is actually something of a problem. I guess I'll have to look for big and talls because I'm sure they must have them here... I hate B/T stores in America because all of the ones in my hometown are essentially formal wear and really plain solid-color kind of stuff -- the bare essentials I guess -- and I honestly don't have my hopes up for the ones over here to be any better.

So anyway, enough about my boring life. You know those little studs that people get in their nostrils that look sort of like an unfortunate screwdriver accident? I saw one of those today and it occurred to me it was the first I'd seen since I got to Japan. I wonder if they're less common here or if I'm just lucky.

They played a song from the Chrono Cross soundtrack on some random variety show on TV today. I'd heard this was pretty common but it still caught me off guard. I hated that game.

Okay, enough about my boring life for real. The next update will probably be after school starts on the first.

More about Iida dialect. I've been told いっといな corresponds to, in standard Japanese, いってらっしゃい - what you say in response to someone announcing they're leaving with 行って来ます. That's both totally believable and totally inconsistent with how I've had people use it on me -- maybe that's one of a few different valid uses of いっといな. Or maybe I'm on something. Who knows. I'm no linguist.

Not to turn this blog into Kids Say The Darnedest Things: Study Abroad Edition, but there are these two kids staying with the host family until the end of the week -- my host parents' grandchildren. There's a girl, four years old, and a boy, two years old. I forgot to mention this, but listening to how really young kids who only recently learned how to converse form their sentences is pretty interesting. You'd think it might prove useful for the prospective Japanese speaker... well, maybe it would for one a little brighter than me, I suppose. But anyway, we were around the dinner table watching the Olympics and the dog -- only about five months old now, so he's still small -- was running around, going crazy and annoying everybody. So the girl picked him up in her arms, turned to me and said ｢ポケモンゲットだぜ！」, "Pokemon getto da ze!"

If you don't get it, I'm sorry, I'm not explaining it to you -- I do enough damage to my studly alpha-male image without going out of my way to tarnish it as it is. But I did get a good laugh out of that.

Speaking of the kids, I had to take them to the shrine out by our house this morning. Now it wasn't exactly that I didn't want to do this, I was just kind of nervous bringing someone else's kids to some religious establishment I'm not really too familiar with (not that I could really possibly outdo the people who walked into one of those do-not-enter protection shrines way up in the mountains I suppose) and looking after them. I figured I was going to screw up.

So I didn't screw up, but let me tell you, you seriously have not experienced "awkward" until you're looking after two children who speak a language you're not exactly 100% on and they start fighting and crying and screaming right by a hundred-foot-long set of menacing-looking stone stairs. The best I could really manage was a feeble "hey, stop it, you two!" a few times before I decided to just pry them off of each other.

Well, it worked out somehow. I guess even if I spoke mega-fluent Japanese, there's usually not much reasoning with rampaging toddlers, huh?

Twice now in the past week I've gotten on the train and heard my name from some conversation circle consisting of random people I've never met. That's a little unnerving; I've heard rumors get around like crazy in Japan, but I wasn't expecting strangers to have me (or the other exchange student here, who conveniently has the same name as me) at a disadvantage. I suspect I have our celebrity status at the karaoke place to blame for this.

We move to the next town, Hikone, in I think nine days. I'm going to be living in a dormitory there with tons of other English speakers... the only problem I have with Iida is there aren't many college-age kids around here, so while I have a lot of friends I don't have many in the traditional hang out, do things together sense of the word. It's actually kind of hard to practice conversational Japanese, although I can read and write about umpteen billion kanji now and my listening comprehension is up to "can understand everything but toothless old ladies and the news." Even so, I'm worried I won't be able to find as immersive a Japanese-language environment as in Iida if I'm living with a bunch of other Americans... maybe I should apply for a homestay after all.

Well it's been over two months.

Internet access was pretty hard to come by over the summer, and I filled up my handwritten journal pretty early on, so I made good on my promise to neglect this blog I suppose.

Well let's see. I ended up doing the omozukai (that's head and right hand) for the female lead in
Hidakagawa and sashizukai (that's left hand) for Oshichi, the only character who appears in the scene we do from Date Musume Koi no Higanoko. I didn't feel very confident in the latter role and I feel I brought my team down, but the other sashizukai was really good so we managed to have at least one good performance of the piece. Hidakagawa was fine all around. Our performances actually drew larger crowds than most of the traditional Japanese puppetry troupes with history going back hundreds of years, which I thought was kind of a shame. One of the teachers got video, but I don't know if it'll be made public or not.

Miscellaneous thoughts on Japan:

The one question every single Japanese person asks foreigners is "what do you think of Japanese food?" This works quite well for me since I can use it to segue into "You know, I've lost twenty kilograms since getting to Japan" which I can usually use to start much more engaging conversation, but it's still something of an eyeroller (along with "you're so good with chopsticks!").

A very close second is "Why are you studying Japanese? You can do so much more with Chinese these days." I don't know how long it's been like this but Chinese is definitely the language to learn over here, there are programs on morning TV for people trying to learn Chinese and most electronic dictionaries have big fat Chinese dictionaries with pronunciation guides. At least this one is much easier to answer and sort of naturally leads into further conversation.

To anyone studying Japanese, karaoke is actually very good reading and accent practice. Any kanji without furigana is something extremely common that you'll need to know, and since you're on a time limit your reading speed will skyrocket. Also, one of the easiest ways to impress a Japanese person that doesn't involve chopsticks is to sing some big hit from days gone by; my recommendations are Yume no Naka e by Inoue Yosui, Linda Linda by The Blue Hearts and Natsumatsuri by Jitterin' Jinn, and anything by Kaguyahime. Or, for that matter, any enka song at all.

The local dialect for Iida is pretty funny, although it's hard to understand. Pretty much every sentence ends in "de na" and a few of the set phrases are much different. Most notably, anyone who's had a semester of Japanese knows that after every meal you say ごちそうさまでした, "gochisousama deshita," which is something along the lines of "thank you for the meal" to whoever prepared it for you. They also know that before every meal you say いただきます, "itadakimasu," and humble or honorific language is really where word-for-word translation fails spectacularly but this is the humble word you use for when you're going to receive something.

So in Iida, before meals it's いただきます like in the rest of the country, but afterwards -- and no one will look at you funny if you say the standard ごちそうさまでした -- you might also hear いただきました、 "itadakimashita," which is the past tense of that same word you use at the beginning of a meal. So in order, "I'm about to humbly receive (this food)" and "I have just humbly received (this food)."

Well I lost anyone who doesn't speak Japanese but anyone who does can share in my bafflement. One of these days I want to try "itadakimashita" out outside of Iida; I've heard you either get confused stares or muffled giggles.

Other Iida dialect, sorry no romaji for the Japanese-impaired: だいじょうぶだよ becomes あんじゃない, どうぞ becomes いっといな but only some times -- I think in cases when the listener is being told to go somewhere, but I could be off. I get the latter a lot from the people who run the local karaoke place. My comprehension of Iida dialect is pretty shady, and I find people who speak it really heavily almost completely impossible to understand.

People drive like maniacs here, which goes quite nicely with the incredibly narrow winding mountain roads. Thank god for good public transportation.

A fun exercise you can do if you're foreign and in Japan: when you're walking past a group of people, slow down immediately after you pass out of their eyesight. Sometimes you get to hear what they say about you when they estimate you're out of earshot. Other times this isn't necessary because they assume you can't speak Japanese anyway. Most of the time this just has the effect of making you appear intoxicated or preoccupied as your speed fluctuates wildly as you walk down the sidewalk.

Anyway, the best I've heard doing this has been "wow, his hair is cool!" I jumped a couple of meters and clicked my heels mid-air.

I have a few anecdotes I can share, most of which involve karaoke or puppets, but I'll actually start with something that happened today. I'm staying with some friends and they had their yearly neighborhood softball game this morning. They've got a five-year-old girl in the family and we got out of the car ahead of everyone else so the father could find a better parking spot. So on the way down there the girl ran into one of her classmates from I suppose kindergarten and I immediately decided I would pretend I didn't speak Japanese (this is pretty fun to do with little kids because they don't take the opportunity to poke fun at you like the slightly older ones tend to and their reactions when you start speaking their language at them all of a sudden are usually quite funny). So she introduced herself to me in English, incidentally in a disturbingly accurate accent at that -- leaps and bounds above the katakananglish most of the kids twice her age speak -- we picked our spot on the bleachers, and she started asking the girl about me.

"Where's your friend from?"

"America."

"Africa?"

"Not Africa, America!"

"Oh. How do they greet each other in America?"

So this kind of dissolved into mumbles for a while and then the girl turned to me and waited for me to make eye contact. I was expecting more English or Japanese, but I'll tell you what I certainly wasn't expecting:

"Namaste!"

I replied in the only way that seemed appropriate, which was to steeple my hands and bow.

Day 3

Well I'll be honest, we didn't do much of anything today. Two things:

Automatic doors and elevators are out for your blood in this land. Not only do they not stop for you if you're walking through them, they hit with the strength of a pair of rhinos, one on each side. Salarymen haul ass through train stations like the March Hare here so I guess they try to discourage that behavior however they can, but man when you're not expecting it they'll knock the wind out of you.

Walking for hours every day is beginning to take its toll on me. I think going from a sedentary lifestyle to Tokyo was a bad idea. My feet are covered in blisters and my dogs are barking by the end of the day.

Day 2

We went to Akihabara again. And yeah, I went to Club Sega again. What can I say, I'm really competitive. I finally beat someone today, I suspect he wasn't one of the stronger players though. I did pretty well against everybody actually except for the Slayers. I don't think I understand that matchup.

I'm way out of practice, but in this environment if I play consistently (which I probably won't be able to do until autumn, and even that's only if I'm smart with my budgeting) it won't take me long to get back to where I was and probably surpass that by a factor of ten.

We ate at a Pepper Lunch today, which was the same amount of food as Yoshinoya -- and even more or less the same kind, except it comes on a hot plate and you have to cook it yourself -- but costs twice as much. Figure that one out. The beef was a little higher-quality, but I'm not all that finnicky an eater -- I am pretty miserly though.

I couldn't really understand the waitress. In fact, this is becoming a bigger problem than I'd expected; my spoken Japanese was never my strong suit, but I'd never had any trouble following along in class exercises and I wasn't expecting to be completely blindsided like that.

My friend wanted to buy an electronic dictionary, so we did a lot of walking around Akiba looking through electronics stores. It's not too hot out here right now, but they have these drink vending machines all over -- like several a block -- and it's hard to resist the siren song. Almost everything I've had so far has been lemon-flavored, which might sound like kind of an odd choice but when you've been walking around in the summer sun for eight hours it's really good.

We got assaulted by these guys with a camera who were going a mile a minute: "Nihongo wakarimasu ka?" "Intaabyuu OK desu ka?" "Nihon TV desu." I have mixed feelings about what I did next.

I think "man on the street" inverviews are stupid in the first place, and the way foreigners are portrayed on Japanese TV doesn't always sit well with me either. On the other hand, the whole point of this study abroad thing is to try things I wouldn't do at home, so I went along with it... to the best of my abilities, anyway.

I forgot to mention it, but there was a mass murder here at noon on Sunday. I guess on Sundays in Akiba they close off the main roads to traffic and there are approximately eight gajillion pedestrians. Some guy with mental problems got in a truck, plowed it into the crowd, killing four people, and then got out, pulled out a knife and started attacking people. He killed seven and put ten more in the hospital. It's been all over the news, like it'll be on three or four news networks at the same time.

The TV guys wanted to know what we thought about that. My answer was basically "I can't really put it into words in Japanese," because I didn't really feel it was my place to say anything. Of course it's tragic but I felt it would have been disrespectful to go on about it in my second language when it's not like I know shit about Akiba culture. They asked us if we were at all scared to be in Akiba and again I didn't want to answer because how can you say "not really, since this kind of thing hapens in the US pretty often" without sounding flippant?

They also asked us why we went to Akihabara, and I answered, which in retrospect was not terribly bright -- since I went there to buy electronics and go to arcades. I'm sure that's all they'll put on TV, if anything at all.

So that was a dumb decision all things considered. But whatever. We were so confused since they put us on the spot, hopefully they didn't even bother with it.

Day 1

If I had to sum up the flight in one word:

Cramped.

I'm flying back business class even if it costs thousands upon thousands of dollars. On the upside, the in-flight meals were actually pretty kick ass, which could be my low expectations talking as much as the actual quality. They had a bunch of different movies on in English and Japanese, so I watched the Japanese dub of some boring movie set in old-timey Europe where a Natalie Portman in a green dress was rejecting the advances of some nobleman. They were using the word "heika," which I've been told (by a teacher, not some random dude) is generally reserved for the emperor of Japan, so I'm guessing the king of England. I actually liked the dub all right, which means either Japanese dubs are better than English dubs or I'm a weeaboo.

Oh yeah, but back to why I hated the flight. I just straight-up don't fit in those seats, and the carry-on bag I brought was way too big, so I had to cross my legs at the ankles. This put a bunch of pressure on the bottom ankle, so I had to switch legs every ten minutes or so. For thirteen hours.

I did manage to fall asleep four times, for about an hour each time.

Anyway, so then we got to Narita, through immigration, then went by airport shuttle to the Tokyo City Air Terminal (where we got "Haro-!" from a bunch of girls in school uniforms -- which I'm guessing will be the first of many times). On the way, there were a bunch of signs lining the road that said "shizuka ni," or "be quiet," and had a cartoony picture of a dude in pajamas passed out under the moon and some stars. I thought it was kind of funny that these were all over the highway, but I guess public transportation is a big thing here. I'm also not sure who these signs are for, since this entire nation seems to be stone silent. Anyway, at TCAT we switched to the Hanzoumon line of the Tokyo Metro subway, which goes all the way to Jinbouchou, where our hotel is. We wandered around in the rain looking for our hotel, walking past it twice without noticing. No, the sign wasn't in Japanese. We don't even have that excuse.

We were meeting up at the hotel with a friend of ours who's lived in Japan before and knows his way around better than the rest of us do. He was already there, so we went out to a Yoshinoya, which is this giant chain that serves beef bowl -- which is basically what it sounds like, beef over rice in a bowl. I'm starting to question the conventional wisdom that the cost of living in Japan is astronomically higher than in the US; the smallest size was almost more than I can eat -- and I'm a big dude -- and it was only 380 yen. Apparently they have these places in LA and they're talking about expanding out over the rest of the US. I hope against hope that this is true.

After some sputtering and confusion over Internet access, my malfunctioning laptop and phones, we decided to head to Akihabara, which is like the electronics district of Tokyo. Yeah, yeah, I know. We just kind of wandered around and went to Club Sega in Akihabara -- this was obviously my idea, since I'd heard this was arguably the strongest arcade in the world for Guilty Gear. I don't know if that's true or not, but I'd believe it now. There were two Slayers, a Faust and an ABA all on giant win streaks and I couldn't beat any of them at all. According to some Baiken player on my side of the cabinets (who wasn't winning either, but he was really good) the ABA was probably Fumo. Figures.

We didn't get back home until about midnight, and the computer area was finally open so I e-mailed my family members and crashed.