Fitting in

I'm in the writing mood, so you guys get a 2 for 1 bonus! Maybe it is the trance.....note to self, more trance!

So I've been in this country for a long time now, and I would say I am still very far from being an expert on Japan and such, but would also like to think that kinda know my way around Japanese society and such. So the question I want to raise is, how much do you change yourself to fit into a society? How much should I change myself, my habits, and my routine so that I fit into Japanese society. I have to say right now, that in my opinion, no matter what I do I would never be considered a Japanese. Even if I lived here for the rest of my life, naturalized, became fluent, none of that would matter to the Japanese people.

That being said, I have taken some steps to do what I can to fit in. Obviously I don't run around, acting like a fool, trying to get in to trouble, but at the same time some of my patience has been wearing thin recently. One of the things that is starting to aggravate me is having to take off my shoes in lots of different places. When I go to the gym, I have to take off my shoes to walk around inside. At lots of restaurants and stores, you might have to take off your shoes. Now I don't object to this at all when it comes to houses, but honestly, at a restaurant or at the gym, it is pretty ridiculous, especially considering the fact that I've seen some Japanese people NOT obey this rule.

For example, today at the gym, a kid took off his shoes at the entrance way, and instead of....standing on his shoes he just took off, stepping up, on to the level where you can only have sox on, and then picking up his shoes and putting them in a locker, he took his shoes off, stepped to the side, picked them up and put them in a locker (remember at this point he is standing on the same level where you walk with your shoes not your sox) and then proceeded to step up onto the level where you can only wear your socks! So the bottom of his socks touched the same place as the bottom of his shoes!! Isn't he supposed to burn for eternity and his offspring have bad luck for 10,000 years or something? I mean come on, it honestly makes no sense.

The gym...ALL parts of it, not just the place where you can walk with your shoes, is...incredibly dirty. I am really sure no one cleans anything in any of these places, and that is also starting to kind of get on my nerves. In the class rooms, you put your backpack down, grab the stuff you need for class, then class ends and you grab your backpack again, only to find that whichever parts of it touched the ground are now covered in dirt, dust, and grime. Restaurants aren't that dirty, but I still feel uncomfortable having to take off my shoes, that combined with the whole tatami sitting style, where you sit on the ground to eat. It is kind of fun the first 5 times you do it until you realize that it is incredibly uncomfortable to be in that position for longer than 30 minutes.

I'm also getting sick of the foreigner look. I know I am big, and sort of goofy looking, and look like I am angry sometimes, but honestly, some of the looks I get are just disturbing which is surprising because Japanese people try to avoid like, direct eye contact and staring, unless you are ancient, in which case you can just frown and do whatever you want at foreigners. Yeah, that's right, old Japanese women give me the dirtiest looks in the world. Sometimes I want to tell them their shoe is untied or something funny like that when they stare at me for an especially long time, just to try to distract them or something. I mean honestly I am not all that interesting, just buzz off. I guess I should be used to it by now, but on the flip side, can they really be that shallow that they dislike foreigners that much? I mean their entire economy is based on foreign countries buying their goods. They should be thankful I have come to their country and might some day work to better the connection between America and Japan.

This specific topic actually, has been raised by experts who have cited cases where companies have basically said F Japan, they are too unwilling to change and too stubborn and rooted in their old ways, and taken their business to other countries, say for example China. I don't blame them, honestly. In some of the places I have been there has definitely been simply an aura of dislike towards me, and I wouldn't want to do business in that kind of environment.

In the fall I went to a school in a rural area and spent the day with school children in the 8th grade, and it was a lot of fun. I might have another opportunity like that coming up again, but I had a sort of strange thought, possibly one that only I would have. The program would involve me making several short presentations on America, and having lunch with the students. Now this sounds like fun and a good experience and stuff, but I also just had the idea that I was being paraded around the school, like I was some foreign, rare specimen they had found that they were showing the kids.

Of course the kids wouldn't see it that way, and I suppose they do really look forward to meeting people from other countries, but it also just makes me sad that such programs in Japan exists, where they want people from other countries to come and explain their culture and history to the kids. I tried to think back to my school days if we had kids from other countries giving presentations in front of class, and the only thing I could remember was every year in middle school, we had inmates from the nearby prison come and tell us not to do drugs.

Which presentation would you prefer? lol

Hi there!

How often do you say hello during the day? 10 times? 20 times? Do you say hello, good morning, whatever to every single person you see?

When I first started studying Japanese, I never realized how important simple words like good morning, good afternoon, and good evening would be. You see, every time I go to soccer, I use one of these...maybe 15-20 times. You literally have to say it to almost everyone on the team. So let's say there are 30 people on the team, and you arrive after 4 other people, you will have to say 'hello' to each of the next 25 people that come. I guess I don't really have a problem saying hello that many times, but to be honest it is starting to wear on my nerves a little bit. It is definitely one of those group aspects of Japanese society, where you have to greet everyone in the group before anything can happen. I was trying to think back to my high school soccer days, and what it would have been like if I would have said hello to every single person each time I went to practice and I literally just started laughing by myself, at which point several of the other guys gave me funny look.

But seriously, it is something that happens every single practice, every single day.

I had a good time this past Monday night as well. After my 4 hour Japanese zemi class, we all went out for a drink to a place called Tapa. I'm not sure if the name of the bar/restaurant has any significance, but it was actually my second time going to the place. We ordered the, all you can drink all you can eat 2 hour deal, sat down, and waited for our drinks to come. The system at this place was if you have 13 people, you can order 13 dishes, and when you finish one, you can order one more.

Now when I first came to this place with the soccer team, I think there were 10-15 starving guys, so we developed a pretty good system. As soon as the waiter came and put down the first plate or bowl of food, say for instance 5 hot wings, we would instantly grab all 5 of them, start eating them, give the waiter the plate back, and order another dish, thus maximizing the amount of food we could order.

It was a good system, but this place was still super slow. This past Monday, we sat down at 6:30, ordered, got our drinks within 5 minutes, but our first round of food didn't come until 6:50, and a bunch of our food never even came at all. We ordered 4 orders of karage, or basically fried chicken ball appetizers, that come in a single bowl, with one bowl holding 4 chicken balls. At 6:50, a waitress came up the stairs (we were on the second floor), with 1 single bowl of karage, that had 4 pieces of fried chicken in it. As soon as she left we were all discussing just what the f happened. Where were the other 3 orders of the karage? One of the other guys suggested that we ordered 4 orders of karage, and that since the bowl had 4 pieces of chicken in it, supposedly the place had filled our order of karage.

I quickly objected, pointing to the picture of a bowl of karage on the menu, saying that there is no way an order is a single piece of fried chicken. Then pointing to the picture above that of a bowl packed with fries, I asked 'What if we order fries? If we order 4 orders of fries are we going to only get literally 4 fries?' This actually made everyone laugh (including the professor), and I don't like to brag about my jokes because 99% of the time they are horrible anyway, but there are very few opportunities where my language and cultural Japanese abilities align with a situation where I can really get a good joke in. I have to admit I am super proud of this one.

Spring is in the air..

Hanami is the word that literally means looking at flowers, hana = flower and mi = to look, but to the Japanese people it is so much more. They have a tradition in the spring that when the cherry blossoms begin to bloom, everyone packs a basket of food, and they go and have a picnic under the cherry trees. This is a really cool tradition and stuff, but for me it was really surprising to find out that when they do this, they also drink like mad. So over the last couple of days, we have actually have blooming cherry blossoms, that noon or two in the middle of the day, you will just see a group of like business men and their wives, completely hammered, trying to stumble their way back to their homes or to the train station. Pretty funny.

Note: Next little bit has a bad word...
So I'm taking this class about 'women who have changed our world' and it's a pretty interesting class, and there are several Japanese kids in my class. Now these HUSTEP classes are in English, but Japanese students can take them as well if they have a high enough language ability. I would like to share one of the conversations I had with another one of the Japanese kids in the class. We had just read a reading selection on Jane Goodall, and we were supposed to discuss what we thought of her. So when we got done, I asked this guy next to me, 'what do you think of Jane Goodall?'

He sits there and things for a minute, then he says "she is fucking women!" I kind of sat there laughing and almost crying for about 2 minutes because just the way he said it was hilarious. I had no idea what he was actually trying to say, and he just sat there with this confused look on his face, wondering what he had just said. Man I was dying...After I finally had control of myself I asked him what he really meant and he said sugoi in Japanese which basically means great, so I think he was trying to say that she was great or something, and be cool at the same time so he decided to throw the f bomb in there just for kicks...but man was it funny.

Back to Japanese language. The kanji system is basically drawings that represent ideas, things, or places and such. So like 鳥　means bird, and 牛 means cow. One day we were in Kanji class and the sensei is trying to pronounce this Chinese guy's name, so she asks him what character he uses to write his name. Well the guy is a bit heavier than your average Chinese male, and he replied with "buta" 豚 which means pig. The sensei was doing everything she could to not laugh, and so were half the students. I felt really bad for the guy, but apparently not very many people choose to name their kids after pigs and such, but man it was pretty funny. The sensei's face was getting super red and she kept having to just look down and facepalm.

Also the Kanji for women is 女 and it is read onna, so I don't know much about the history of Kanji and all but I am pretty sure it was invented by guys because the Kanji for loud and annoying, is written by putting 3 女 figures together...thus the idea is that 3 women are loud and annoying lol.

Spring is in the air

Well, after the winter that lasted forever, then traveling to Honshu and enjoying spring there, only to have to return to a cold and barren Hokkaido, spring has finally reached campus. And oh was it worth the wait. The last few days have been absolutely gorgeous, and although I've had the last couple days off, we've had a couple of scrimmages. Here are a couple of quick pictures:


I tell ya, it's pretty hard to beat playing soccer in 70 degree weather, with a slight breeze, with snow capped mountains in the background.

2nd video blog

Here's the video, and the link just in case:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ejSu0T-_ZY

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.

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!!