Here's the video, and the link just in case:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ejSu0T-_ZY
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Why do Japanese people hate foreigners?
So maybe some of you readers have heard that Japanese people aren't the biggest fan of foreigners. If we think about why for a minute, we can come up with a bunch of reasons, but I would like to point out a couple more legitimate reasons that Japanese people have to actually dislike foreigners. So lets take a quick look at these pictures:
Pretty cool right? The University provides housing, internet, and other services to the people who com to the university to study, only to be repaid like this. This is honestly disgusting. The school year in Japan restarts in the spring (April) unlike America where it restarts in the fall. Thus over the last month or so you've had a bunch of people moving out and such, and I guess they thought that since they were leaving the country, they would just throw their trash and stuff out into the grass because they really don't give a damn. Honestly disgusting.
You can see on the sign that it specifically states no dumping of well, anything, but people have disregarded that and just strewn everything about. In the brochure we received when we moved in, it gave specific instructions for the disposal of all of this kind of stuff, but once again people didn't even abide by that. There are 2 piles of trash, both are next to the dumpsters where we place the smaller bags of burnable and non-burnable garbage and such, but this is so embarrassing for me honestly.
Not the best blog entry I know, but it kind of shows why Japanese people might not have the highest opinion of foreigners.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Monday
Monday
So let’s talk 5 minutes about kimonos before I get into the story of Monday. Kimonos are actually NOT part of Japanese culture, something I got wrong on this Monday. When talking to the very nice women who worked at the store, she asked me and Kay why we had wanted to wear kimonos, and I replied that they were a very easy way to really try to experience Japanese culture, and something totally foreign and yet accessible to foreigners such as ourselves. And I asked her how long Japanese people had been wearing kimonos because I thought they had been wearing them for thousands of years but she said that they had only been in Japan for about 600 years. This totally surprised me because honestly I thought they had been one of the centerpieces of Japanese society for like thousands of years. She said that they were actually brought over from China, along with basically tons of other cultural ideas and such.
Anyway, we left the hotel in the morning around 9:00 after eating all the toast we could for breakfast and made our way outside of Tokyo into Saitama-ken, and to the city of Oomiya. Entering another ‘Ken’ is basically like entering another state in the United States, but overall the train ride was only 1 hour, so things are on a much smaller scale in Japan. We arrived at Oomiya station with no problem, but with me being the ultimate trip planner, I actually didn’t have a map of the city with me, didn’t have the phone number of the store, and I didn’t know its address…So I decided the best plan of action was to…wander around for a little bit.
This would have been okay if it wasn’t for the fact that it was absolutely freezing cold outside. The sun was warm, but the cold was pretty chilly I must say, and when you are aimlessly looking around a city for a single small kimono shop, that kind of wind can be pretty annoying. So we gave up wandering aimlessly and went back to the station to ask for help. We asked these two little ladies at the ‘information’ desk if they knew anything about the store, but they actually had no idea, so we said goodbye to them and walked over to a pole where I decided to call my friend Kenji and ask him to look up the place for me lol.
While on the phone with him, one of the little ladies actually came running over with a map and said that she had found the store and gave me the map so that we could find it. Turns out my aimlessly wandering had been in the right direction but the store was about twice as far from the train station as I had originally thought. It is also incredibly hard to tell what qualifies as a street on a Japanese map because the difference between allies and street is so small because they are basically the same thing. So when you are looking at a map of just a bunch of white squares, it becomes rather difficult to decipher just what is what. But we made our way to the store and the women who worked there was actually standing in front of the store waiting to greet us.
So this was a tiny little shop owned by a single family for 3 generations, pretty cool in my opinion. We got to meet all 3 members of the family, I’m assuming the youngest daughter, who was our age, and her parents, and they were all extremely nice and helpful. It took us about an hour to get our kimonos on, but we finally did, and I must admit that it was totally worth it. Kay was wearing a light purple kimono with a golden obi (the sash that goes around the middle) and I was wearing a blue kimono that well, just wasn’t quite long enough…
Japanese people love the phrase: sikata ga nai, or syoo gai nai. A literal translation yields there is no way of doing anything, and it basically means ‘it cannot be helped.’ So the girl our age told us she had searched for the tallest kimono (I had told her my height before hand) and this was the best that she could do. Well, I am just too tall for Japan.
After getting our kimonos on, we made our way to a shrine, a park, and a bamboo forest that were all within walking distance of the shop. The shrine was a rank 1 shrine which means it was of the highest ranking shrines. Whenever there is a new emperor he must visit this shrine (and possibly all the rank 1 shrines) so it was pretty important to the Japanese people. Oomiya actually means large shrine, pretty cool. The shrine itself was super cool. We couldn’t take too many pictures of the interior because that stuff is super important, and we didn’t really know what a lot of it meant but it was still very interesting and the artwork was really beautiful.
After the shrine we walked through a pretty large park that was really beautiful. The Sakura (cheery blossom) trees weren’t really blooming yet, but they still have a pink tint that was pretty cool. There was also a river and small amusement park, and at the time we didn’t know it, but it had actually been a holiday so there were tons of people everywhere with their families, enjoying a day off.
The bamboo forest wasn’t a natural one, just one that had been made on this one corner plot but it was still super cool. The trees were so straight and thick they almost seemed fake, and the roots looked like worms. Yay.
So that was basically our entire Kimono adventure, overall super awesome.
Once we got back to Tokyo we met up with my friend Kenji and, actually went to a pizza place! I know it sounds funny that we are in Japan, but he told me that this place was super good and his friend worked there so we might be able to get some special discount or something, and I had been dying for some real pizza. We met him in Ikebukuro and went to this pizza place and I have to admit it that it was worth it and totally delicious. The pizza was made pretty well, they had a real large stone oven that they made them in, so it was pretty authentic.
So a full day of beautiful weather, getting into some Japanese customs and sight-seeing, and ending with some pizza made Monday a very good day indeed!!
So let’s talk 5 minutes about kimonos before I get into the story of Monday. Kimonos are actually NOT part of Japanese culture, something I got wrong on this Monday. When talking to the very nice women who worked at the store, she asked me and Kay why we had wanted to wear kimonos, and I replied that they were a very easy way to really try to experience Japanese culture, and something totally foreign and yet accessible to foreigners such as ourselves. And I asked her how long Japanese people had been wearing kimonos because I thought they had been wearing them for thousands of years but she said that they had only been in Japan for about 600 years. This totally surprised me because honestly I thought they had been one of the centerpieces of Japanese society for like thousands of years. She said that they were actually brought over from China, along with basically tons of other cultural ideas and such.
Anyway, we left the hotel in the morning around 9:00 after eating all the toast we could for breakfast and made our way outside of Tokyo into Saitama-ken, and to the city of Oomiya. Entering another ‘Ken’ is basically like entering another state in the United States, but overall the train ride was only 1 hour, so things are on a much smaller scale in Japan. We arrived at Oomiya station with no problem, but with me being the ultimate trip planner, I actually didn’t have a map of the city with me, didn’t have the phone number of the store, and I didn’t know its address…So I decided the best plan of action was to…wander around for a little bit.
This would have been okay if it wasn’t for the fact that it was absolutely freezing cold outside. The sun was warm, but the cold was pretty chilly I must say, and when you are aimlessly looking around a city for a single small kimono shop, that kind of wind can be pretty annoying. So we gave up wandering aimlessly and went back to the station to ask for help. We asked these two little ladies at the ‘information’ desk if they knew anything about the store, but they actually had no idea, so we said goodbye to them and walked over to a pole where I decided to call my friend Kenji and ask him to look up the place for me lol.
While on the phone with him, one of the little ladies actually came running over with a map and said that she had found the store and gave me the map so that we could find it. Turns out my aimlessly wandering had been in the right direction but the store was about twice as far from the train station as I had originally thought. It is also incredibly hard to tell what qualifies as a street on a Japanese map because the difference between allies and street is so small because they are basically the same thing. So when you are looking at a map of just a bunch of white squares, it becomes rather difficult to decipher just what is what. But we made our way to the store and the women who worked there was actually standing in front of the store waiting to greet us.
So this was a tiny little shop owned by a single family for 3 generations, pretty cool in my opinion. We got to meet all 3 members of the family, I’m assuming the youngest daughter, who was our age, and her parents, and they were all extremely nice and helpful. It took us about an hour to get our kimonos on, but we finally did, and I must admit that it was totally worth it. Kay was wearing a light purple kimono with a golden obi (the sash that goes around the middle) and I was wearing a blue kimono that well, just wasn’t quite long enough…
Japanese people love the phrase: sikata ga nai, or syoo gai nai. A literal translation yields there is no way of doing anything, and it basically means ‘it cannot be helped.’ So the girl our age told us she had searched for the tallest kimono (I had told her my height before hand) and this was the best that she could do. Well, I am just too tall for Japan.
After getting our kimonos on, we made our way to a shrine, a park, and a bamboo forest that were all within walking distance of the shop. The shrine was a rank 1 shrine which means it was of the highest ranking shrines. Whenever there is a new emperor he must visit this shrine (and possibly all the rank 1 shrines) so it was pretty important to the Japanese people. Oomiya actually means large shrine, pretty cool. The shrine itself was super cool. We couldn’t take too many pictures of the interior because that stuff is super important, and we didn’t really know what a lot of it meant but it was still very interesting and the artwork was really beautiful.
After the shrine we walked through a pretty large park that was really beautiful. The Sakura (cheery blossom) trees weren’t really blooming yet, but they still have a pink tint that was pretty cool. There was also a river and small amusement park, and at the time we didn’t know it, but it had actually been a holiday so there were tons of people everywhere with their families, enjoying a day off.
The bamboo forest wasn’t a natural one, just one that had been made on this one corner plot but it was still super cool. The trees were so straight and thick they almost seemed fake, and the roots looked like worms. Yay.
So that was basically our entire Kimono adventure, overall super awesome.
Once we got back to Tokyo we met up with my friend Kenji and, actually went to a pizza place! I know it sounds funny that we are in Japan, but he told me that this place was super good and his friend worked there so we might be able to get some special discount or something, and I had been dying for some real pizza. We met him in Ikebukuro and went to this pizza place and I have to admit it that it was worth it and totally delicious. The pizza was made pretty well, they had a real large stone oven that they made them in, so it was pretty authentic.
So a full day of beautiful weather, getting into some Japanese customs and sight-seeing, and ending with some pizza made Monday a very good day indeed!!
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