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.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Friday, June 6, 2008
In a few days, I'm going to be leaving for Japan for about a year of study abroad.
Originally I'd intended to start some kind of bigger-deal collaborative blog with a few other people, but the more I got to thinking about it the more it seemed like it'd be too much overhead to deal with while abroad and the more I research the Americans-studying-Japan blog community the more I think the signal-to-noise ratio is kind of skewed -- so rather than go for something higher-profile I figured I'd just keep a personal blog and pass it along to friends.
I don't know what my Internet access is going to be like in Japan and I've been told by several friends of mine who've studied abroad that it's quite difficult to force yourself to write while you're over there, but I'm going to try to keep this thing going even if it means keeping a handwritten journal and uploading entries when I just happen to have the time and the means -- we'll see how it works out.
I'm spending my first two-and-a-half months in Nagano prefecture where I'll be studying puppetry and possibly shamisen, then I have a few weeks to kill before my academic year program starts in Shiga prefecture, where I'll basically be studying the Japanese language like crazy.
Since some of you don't know me that well (and since this is the Internet and the way these things work it's possible some stranger will stumble across this and make it most of the way through the first entry), let me tell you a little about how I got into studying Japan.
First off, I'll get it out of the way since this is the white guy in Japan stereotype, yes I was crazy about anime in high school and early in college and no I'm not really into it these days. Yes I play video games, although I really only do arcade fighting games (especially Guilty Gear) and retro stuff, like from before 1996. So yes, I'm a nerd and yes, that had something to do with it.
As for how I actually got interested in studying Japan beyond a superficial level, when I was a freshman it was actually notoriously difficult to get into Japanese at my school; there were only twenty seats and more often than not they got taken up by juniors and seniors who were trying to finish off their language study requirements. The school had just hired a new Japanese teacher who taught a class on Japanese literature in translation, so I figured if I couldn't get into the language I could give that a try at the very least.
I actually had no particular interest in literature at this point and wasn't expecting much out of myself in this class, but I actually ended up enjoying it a lot; some of the works either weren't that good or went over my head, but some of them really fascinated me -- Tanizaki Jun'ichiro in particular at the time, although he's not really my favorite these days. Even though I could have done better in this class (this was the one where when I tried to give my presentation in class I started seeing things in my peripheral vision and lost my ability to read my notes, so I couldn't even do it) the teacher must have seen that I was interested enough and allowed me into the first semester of Japanese language the following semester.
I'd been having a hard time in college until this point and I was starting to think maybe it wasn't for me at all, but it turned out cultural and language studies could hold my interest pretty easily and Japanese became my first A (and it single-handedly pulled me out of academic probation since it was six credit hours by itself) and maybe the first class I never deliberately skipped. Aside from a short crisis of faith when my first teacher had left and before our most recent teacher arrived, I've been able to keep at it. Ultimately after I graduate -- whenever that happens -- I'd like to translate Japanese literature, so to that end I enrolled in what seemed to be the hardest study abroad program available to me.
Anyway, you know my life story now. If you've got any questions, suggestions for things to do in Japan, writers I should look into or anything else, comment here or email me at ottersransom@gmail.com.
Originally I'd intended to start some kind of bigger-deal collaborative blog with a few other people, but the more I got to thinking about it the more it seemed like it'd be too much overhead to deal with while abroad and the more I research the Americans-studying-Japan blog community the more I think the signal-to-noise ratio is kind of skewed -- so rather than go for something higher-profile I figured I'd just keep a personal blog and pass it along to friends.
I don't know what my Internet access is going to be like in Japan and I've been told by several friends of mine who've studied abroad that it's quite difficult to force yourself to write while you're over there, but I'm going to try to keep this thing going even if it means keeping a handwritten journal and uploading entries when I just happen to have the time and the means -- we'll see how it works out.
I'm spending my first two-and-a-half months in Nagano prefecture where I'll be studying puppetry and possibly shamisen, then I have a few weeks to kill before my academic year program starts in Shiga prefecture, where I'll basically be studying the Japanese language like crazy.
Since some of you don't know me that well (and since this is the Internet and the way these things work it's possible some stranger will stumble across this and make it most of the way through the first entry), let me tell you a little about how I got into studying Japan.
First off, I'll get it out of the way since this is the white guy in Japan stereotype, yes I was crazy about anime in high school and early in college and no I'm not really into it these days. Yes I play video games, although I really only do arcade fighting games (especially Guilty Gear) and retro stuff, like from before 1996. So yes, I'm a nerd and yes, that had something to do with it.
As for how I actually got interested in studying Japan beyond a superficial level, when I was a freshman it was actually notoriously difficult to get into Japanese at my school; there were only twenty seats and more often than not they got taken up by juniors and seniors who were trying to finish off their language study requirements. The school had just hired a new Japanese teacher who taught a class on Japanese literature in translation, so I figured if I couldn't get into the language I could give that a try at the very least.
I actually had no particular interest in literature at this point and wasn't expecting much out of myself in this class, but I actually ended up enjoying it a lot; some of the works either weren't that good or went over my head, but some of them really fascinated me -- Tanizaki Jun'ichiro in particular at the time, although he's not really my favorite these days. Even though I could have done better in this class (this was the one where when I tried to give my presentation in class I started seeing things in my peripheral vision and lost my ability to read my notes, so I couldn't even do it) the teacher must have seen that I was interested enough and allowed me into the first semester of Japanese language the following semester.
I'd been having a hard time in college until this point and I was starting to think maybe it wasn't for me at all, but it turned out cultural and language studies could hold my interest pretty easily and Japanese became my first A (and it single-handedly pulled me out of academic probation since it was six credit hours by itself) and maybe the first class I never deliberately skipped. Aside from a short crisis of faith when my first teacher had left and before our most recent teacher arrived, I've been able to keep at it. Ultimately after I graduate -- whenever that happens -- I'd like to translate Japanese literature, so to that end I enrolled in what seemed to be the hardest study abroad program available to me.
Anyway, you know my life story now. If you've got any questions, suggestions for things to do in Japan, writers I should look into or anything else, comment here or email me at ottersransom@gmail.com.
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