Final Days in Japan

I now bring you the conclusion of my wondrous trip to the far east.

I only had one day in Hiroshima because of how long I had allotted myself for this last sightseeing trip. In retrospect, it was a bad idea to try to visit so many cities in a week, but it turned out all right. I was pretty tired when I got there, so I didn’t do much exploring. I just got some sort of soup with breaded pork cutlet and then chilled at my hotel for that night. The next day, I visited the Peace Memorial Park. It was interesting, I suppose. The most interesting thing was a building that remained standing after the explosion of the atomic bomb. It’s appropriately named the A-Bomb Dome. The pictures pretty much speak for themselves.
More shots of the dome.
Some sort of remains
Fountain near the dome
Plaque explaining the history of the dome: 1 2 3 4
And, pictures on the plaque: 1 2 3 4
Bench in the park. The plaque reads: “Let us join hands with the people of the world and become happy”
Some sort of arch/dome. Hanging in the center is an origami crane.
Eternal flame
This was pretty cool, especially since you can see the A-Bomb Dome through the arch.

There was also this peace bell, which was kinda cool. I took a video of myself ringing it, for some reason. And here’s a plaque explaining the meaning behind it. The bell also has a map of the world and some signatures on it. Oh right. I forgot to mention that this sightseeing kinda sucked, because it was raining all day and since I had to check out of my hotel I was carrying my fully-loaded backpack around with me. I suppose I could’ve left it at the front desk, but I was already leaving my suitcase there.

After Hiroshima, I boarded the Shinkansen again and headed for Kyoto. The hotel was supposed to be close to the train station, so I decided to just walk there. It ended up being a bit farther than I wanted, but it still wasn’t too far. The worst part was when I thought my walking was over, but I had actually found a different hotel that was in the same hotel chain, so it had the same name but I hadn’t made a reservation there. The one I actually made a reservation at wasn’t too far away, so I don’t know why they have two hotels so close to each other. In Kyoto, I visited the Kyoto Tower, which was your typical touristy observation tower. I guess I saw some interesting things from the tower, but something else held my attention more than that. July 7th is a festival known as Tanabata in Japan. It’s too bad I couldn’t have seen it while I was there, but oh well. This plaque pretty much explains what it’s about. What it doesn’t explain, though, is that a custom for this holiday is to write a wish on a piece of paper and tie/tape it to a tree branch, though in the Kyoto Tower they just had them on Post-it notes on a bulletin board. I took some pictures of some wishes that I thought were interesting.
“I want to date an Italian”
“I LOVE YOU; Kanta <3 Misato; I hope we can be together forever"
“I hope to grow taller!!”
“I hope my mother and father will always be healthy.”
“Money”
Some people missed the point
Something in…Swedish? Norse?
More traditional wish displays
The mascot for the Kyoto Tower. Kinda creepy if you ask me.
There was a wall of birthday wishes for the Kyoto Tower, and I thought this was pretty funny

After that, I visited the shop at the base of the tower and picked up a baseball hat for my brother, which is emblazoned with the kanji for samurai （侍）. I also visited the International Manga Museum, which would have been more interesting had I known more Japanese. It was less of a museum and more of a large manga library where you can just pick stuff out and read it. They did have a small exhibit on Comiket (a huge convention for manga and anime in Japan), though, which was pretty cool. They had a book that listed all the dealers and stuff for one of the ’07 conventions, and it was like…a phone book.

Next, I headed to Tokyo. Pretty much immediately after arriving, I knew there was something I had to do, a duty that had to be accomplished. Recently, they have constructed a life-size model of a Gundam, which is the titular robot of the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam, so I had to go see it. Not much to say about this, but I put a bunch of pictures of it in a gallery on Facebook if you want to see.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/album.php?aid=134645&id=666115800&ref=mf

Also, I took a short video for some reason. There was music and sound playing, so I guess just pictures can’t capture that.

The next day I headed to Akihabara, a huge electronics/anime/game district in Tokyo. It was…pretty impressive. I got the feeling that if there was any sort of electronic equipment you needed to buy, you could undoubtedly find it there in twenty varieties. It seemed like most stores sort of specialized in one or two products. For instance, there was a store that sold just light bulbs, next to it was a store that sold cables and wires, etc. Contrasting that were 6-8 stories-high stores filled with more doujins, figures, and random merchandise than you can imagine. Every store had at least one floor dedicated to adult merchandise. For some reason, a lot of these stores prohibited photography, so I just adopted a philosophy of, um, taking pictures unless I actually saw a sign that said otherwise. I asked a store clerk why they didn’t allow pictures, and he just replied with “because it’s prohibited” and pointed at the sign. I guess that’s more of a question for the manager or something, but I didn’t feel like pushing it.

The day after that, I took a trip to go see the Tokyo Tower, which is essentially Japan’s version of the Eiffel Tower. On the way there, I visited Zojo Temple. Forgot to specifically take a picture of it, but you could see people’s Tanabata wishes tied to tall stalks of bamboo outside the main building. Inside, I saw some monks praying, which was kinda cool. There was also a cedar tree planted by President Grant. By the way, in case any of you aren’t aware of the difference between a temple and a shrine, it’s pretty simple. Temples are Buddhist and shrines are Shinto. I guess if you wanna remember it, the two S’s go together.　I also looked around the graveyard a bit. This one was notably less labyrinthine than the one I visited in Fukuoka.
Statues of Buddha?
No clue what these are supposed to symbolize
Some sort of…something at the temple
Prayer incense. I didn’t do it myself, but I saw some other people praying. I guess you take some of the, uh, “raw” incense and sprinkle it on top of the already smoldering incense in the larger pot, then pray, then sprinkle some more on.
I don’t actually know what this is
A window where you could look down towards the base of the tower

Tokyo Tower wasn’t anything terribly special except that they had a bunch of side attractions near the base, like some sort of exhibit about the Guinness Book of World Records and an aquarium, both of which I didn’t visit.
View from the Tokyo Tower
Pretty smoggy.
Strange-looking building

And that was my last day in Tokyo. The next day I took the train to the airport and flew back to the USA. The flight was 11 hours long, two hours shorter than the flight there. I only got about an hour of sleep, so I was dead when I got back. Not too different from the flight to Japan, except that I arrived at night so I could just go right to sleep. I got back in the US at around 1:30 PM, so I had to stay up for another 10 hours before I could sleep. It’s been some of the most intense jet lag I’ve ever had. I’m only just now getting over it, even though I’ve been back for about 5 days.

Time to throw in the rest of the pictures that didn’t fit in the above text.
Pepsi Shiso If you go to Japan while they still have this, I’d recommend not trying it. The bottle describes it as “Japanese Refreshing Flavor”, but it tasted to me like Mountain Dew with an aftertaste of Big Red.
Ad for something called “Gundam World 2009″
Ad for a maid cafe in Akihabara
Body pillows with anime characters on them
Elevators in the US are never this cool
Lucky Star in a can…?
Didn’t realize they had one of these in Japan, too
Ad for an anime movie called Kara no Kyoukai
I…don’t know what this is advertising. The text at the bottom says “Do you like science?”
…Tommy Lee Jones?
The most ridiculous parfait I’ve ever seen
An arcade game about making sushi. I kid you not.

More Engrish, some of the best I saw on the whole trip
On the bathroom door at my hotel in Tokyo
Near the elevators in the lobby
At a restaurant
Another restaurant

Here’s all the stuff I bought while in Japan:
Overall picture
Mega Man Zero artbook
Evangelion 2.0 pamphlet
Some games I wanted to get
Album with remixed video game music
Novel that got turned into an anime and a manga
Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, basically an encyclopedia of a game series I like.
First volume of Yotsuba&, significant to me since it was the first manga I was able to read completely in Japanese.

So…yeah. I guess that’s it. Hope you enjoyed reading my ramblings as much as I enjoyed being in Japan.

Last Days in Fukuoka

Picking up where my last post left off, a couple weeks ago my host mother, a couple of her friends, another student that was also staying at her house (from Italy), and I went to an onsen (Japanese hot spring). No pictures for obvious reasons. First off, let me say this for those who don’t know: in an onsen, everyone’s naked. You get a hand towel if you kinda wanna cover yourself up, but that’s it. That said, it wasn’t really that embarrassing. At first it was kinda awkward, but it’s really…not that bad. You’re there to relax and everyone’s very civil about it. One of the nicest parts about it was the part of the bath that was outside. Unfortunately it was overcast that night so we couldn’t see the stars, but it was still pretty cool. By the way, the water is…really hot. I can’t give you an estimate for how hot it was since I don’t have any benchmarks to go off of, but I’ll just say that I had to get out and just sit down on a bench for a while to cool off. I suppose that’s probably normal, though. We were there for about an hour, so that’d be a pretty long time to be immersed in a hot spring. One of the (male) friends of my host mother that we were with gave us the advice of going into the cold water bath for about 10 seconds before leaving because, as was the case, you felt warm when you got out. It felt like sitting in an ice bucket, though.

After that there was a bit of a gap in me doing interesting things because going sightseeing almost every day is tiring, especially when I have 5 hours of intensive Japanese classes every day. I need time to chill, yo. This is also why I haven’t posted in a while.

The next few weeks saw me going to my host mother’s friend’s house to eat a few more times. While free food is always nice, I always felt like I was being rude because I’d never finish all the stuff they seemed to be expecting me to eat. A line I often heard during these meals was “takusan aru kara, takusan tabete kudasai” which means “There’s a lot, so please eat a lot”. I’m…not a terribly big eater, so it was kinda troubling, stressful even. She’d keep putting more food in front of me and I’d just smile and say thank you while mentally wishing she’d stop because I don’t know how to politely refuse something like that in Japanese. Anyway, here are some pictures of my host mother and said friend. Also, me and my host mother.

I went on another expedition with my pop culture class, this time to one of the local game centers. We, uh, studied the games there and I had to ask the employees what the most popular games for male and female customers were and why. For men it was, predictably, the Gundam vs. Gundam games (based off of the popular anime, Mobile Suit Gundam). For women, they said Puyo Puyo (a puzzle game). Oh right. This was around the time when my ATM card decided to stop working. I guess my bank was trying to confirm some account details with me, but couldn’t because my cell phone doesn’t work here and they decided to close my account. Meanwhile, I couldn’t fathom why the card worked when I arrived in Japan, but then suddenly stopped. Despite this, my pop culture teacher was cool enough guy and paid for us to play some games. He also bought me ice cream for some reason, which was cool. Kinda surprised that there was an ice cream vending machine in the game center, considering how ice cream and arcade games don’t tend to mix well.

On the topic of the ATM card, I had to go through a bunch of stuff with calling my bank and being on hold for a million hours and having them express ship me a new card, only to not be able to activate it because I couldn’t reach the automated activation service by phone for some reason. I swear, I tried like every possible combination of country codes and the number I was trying to reach (with/without leading 0s or 1s, respectively) and it still wouldn’t connect. I ended up having to get some money from my parents’ account.

And so, last Friday my stay at the Genki Japanese and Culture School ended. After classes end on Fridays there’s a graduation ceremony where all the people leaving that week get a certificate saying how many hours they studied and at what level, and then have to give a brief speech. After that, I went to the game center with some friends and played the Gundam game again, the one where you get in a pod and it’s like you’re actually piloting it! Kinda. It’s such a moneysink, but it’s so fun. I recorded a couple videos at the game center, but Youtube won’t let me upload them for some reason. I’ll try again later. After that, there was a party at a cafe owned by one of the teacher’s family. The food was pretty good. They had fried chicken, sushi, bream, some sort of pasta, and some other dishes I don’t remember. For dessert they had some really good sorbet. Flavors included grapefruit, banana, apple, and green tea. And yes, the green tea flavored sorbet tasted exactly like green tea. It was kinda gross. Also, as I just found out, sherbet and sorbet are the same thing. Furthermore, it’s not spelled “sherbert” as I previously thought. Also, for some reason, the family has a couple of horses for pets. Here’s a group shot of everyone that went to the party.

Not gonna say much about this, but yesterday I saw the new Evangelion movie. Neon Genesis Evangelion is an anime series that came out around 1997 and happens to be my favorite anime. Recently, a series of movies has been coming out that’s remaking the original series and adding new stuff. Being the huge Evangelion fan that I am seeing it in a theater was amazing. It was epic by itself, but seeing it on a movie screen was way too good. They were selling movie-related goods at the theater, which was pretty cool. I picked up this pamphlet that has a bunch of stuff about the movie that I can’t read yet. Someday I’ll break the Da Vinci Code and read the delicious contents those devious kanji are hiding. Oh right. Japanese movie theaters are unreasonably expensive. Going to see the movie set me back $18. I was also gonna go see the Fukuoka Tower and I heard it was best to go at night, but by the time I got there it was closed. All I have to show for myself is a grainy picture.

Earlier today I got on the Shinkansen, left Fukuoka, and am now in Hiroshima. Tomorrow I’ll be checking out the Peace Memorial Park and later on be heading to Kyoto. After I do stuff in Kyoto, I’ll be in Tokyo for three days and then come back to the US.

Random observations:
More people use parasols here than I’ve seen anywhere else.
It’s not uncommon for stores to, instead of taking your orders in person, have you buy a ticket from a vending machine that has your order on it.
It’s damn near impossible to find notecards here.

One of the students at the school showed us these videos on “how to speak Japanese without saying a word”, which are hilarious imo. The first one I linked is part 2, but it covers everything that’s in part 1. As a small warning, the second one has a bit of foul language.

Random pictures:
Pokemon promotion thing at McDonald’s
I did a double-take when I saw this
Nanak, Kyushu’s self-proclaimed oldest Indian restaurant
Sign in the subway warning against smoking and littering
Dragonball-related stuff in a jewelry store. Really, Japan?
Soylution. It loses a bit of the effect if it has to be explained.
The name sounds cool until you realize it’s a dry cleaner.
Do we have this kind of mannequin in the west?
A lunch of things I wanted to try in Japan: manjuu, chocolate cornet, and melon bread.
Picture of everyone at GenkiJACS
An amusing shirt
Lizard I saw outside my host mother’s friend’s house.
These are…kinda creepy
Interestingly enough, this shop is named “Don Quixote”. Why they have a penguin as their mascot, I’ll never know.
Freshness Burger
Me standing in front of the Shinkansen

Karaoke Adventure

Let’s see, where to start…

The week that followed my last post was largely uneventful. I suppose the highlight of the week was going to this huge anime/manga/game/etc. store called Mandarake. It’s a pretty awesome store. The first floor has a bunch of recent manga and games, including really old stuff like NES/SNES and Game & Watch. The second floor has a lot of older manga, doujinshi (any work that’s published by the author without going through a professional company), and anime. Also, the sales counter on that floor had most of a series of games that I like lined up (and that can only be found in Japan), along with some of the games’ soundtracks which was pretty awesome. I ended up buying my favorite one. The third floor, around the escalator, has a bunch of cosplay stuff. The rest of that floor is mostly girl’s manga, so I didn’t spend too much time there. The fourth floor had way overpriced box sets of anime (like, $200-300), music CDs, and really old models and trading cards. The music they have playing in the shop is interesting as well. I haven’t paid much attention to it, but I’ve noticed a few anime and video game songs. Here are all the pictures I couldn’t fit in the above paragraph:

Cosplay outfits
Apparently figures are expensive (Note: 100 yen = $1)

On Thursday of that week, I went on another sightseeing trip offered by the school. This time we walked to a shrine (the other people pictured are, from left to right, Takahiro (our guide), Jessica, and Mandy (two other students)). We walked through a mall to get there, which was actually reasonably large. For some reason, in the mall was this huge parade…thing that people carry during some festival (as illustrated in this poster; apparently a given person only has to carry it for 100 meters or so before switching out). Not sure how best to describe a shrine, so I’ll let the pictures talk.

Rope thing tied around a tree
Not sure what to do with this
Shrine exterior
Koi
Corridor of torii – Part 2
Fountain
Stone torii
Some sort of ritual utensil storage room
Fountain for washing your hands?
Barrels of sake
Display of rocks I’m not entirely sure, but from what I understand of what our guide was telling us, I guess sumo wrestlers come here and if they can lift one of these stones up onto that shelf they get their name engraved on it or something?

After going to the shrine, we stopped by this folk museum that had some sort of ye olde Japan stuff.
Traditional Japanese room
Old toys
Textile machine
Old mailbox

One interesting thing to note is some of the customs associated with a shrine’s donation box. For those who don’t know, the custom for donation is as such: 1) Toss the coin in the box 2) ring the bell 3) clap twice and bow 4) while keeping your hands together, pray for whatever it is you want to pray for, and 5) bow once more. Then you can leave. Also, it’s important to take note of the denomination of coin you drop in the donation box. They’re puns in Japanese, though, so bear with me as I explain. For starters, “yen” in Japanese is pronounced just as “en”. Their word for “five” is “go”, so 5 yen is “go en”. As it turns out, “go en” is a formal way of saying “opportunity”, especially when referring to a chance of meeting someone and starting a relationship. So if you want to meet someone, 5 yen is a good amount to give. Though, with that small of a donation, don’t expect to be finding a lover or anything. If you want some more luck, you might consider donating 50 yen, which is “go juu en”. In this case, “juu” is taken as an abbreviation for “juu bun”, which means “plenty” or “sufficient”. A 50 yen donation is stronger than a simple 5 yen donation. 10 yen is also acceptable for luck in other areas, using the same meaning of “juu bun”. Any multiples of these are also acceptable. Another interesting shrine tradition is that of the ema block. I’m not sure exactly how it works, but if you want to wish for something you can buy one of these, write your wish on it, and then hang it up at the shrine. It’s kinda cool, because you can look at all the blocks people have left and see what they’re wishing for. Wikipedia informs me that it’s usually used for “annual success, success on exams, marital bliss, to have children, and to ward of illness”. Indeed, one plaque that I looked at read “This time for sure I’ll pass the exam!” Also, you can pay 30 yen to get a written fortune.

The weekend following that was uneventful. I went back to Mandarake and picked up a game for a friend back home on Saturday. On Sunday, some friends of my host mother invited us over for dinner, so I went to that. It was, uh, interesting, but I didn’t have much to talk about with them. I could understand what most of them were saying, though, so I guess that was pretty cool. Something that’s interesting is that apparently mayonnaise is a common dressing for salad in Japan. Other things we ate included potato salad, fried chicken, and…some sort of salad that I didn’t really know what was in it, but it wasn’t bad. For dessert was some sort of cubed gelatin with fruit. Then we had tea. I swear, tea will never cease to disappoint me. I know I’m in the wrong country to be not liking tea, but no matter what kind I try it always comes off as bland. It’s weird, because the tea they served even smelled really good. It was some sort of vanilla-strawberry stuff. But then when I tasted it it was…eh. Oh well.

On Tuesday of this week, after school I went to karaoke with some other students from the school. I have to say, it was pretty fun. It’s nice, because it’s not at all about how good you are at singing; just whether you do or not. I was really taken aback by one of the other students’ voice, though. He seemed good enough to be a professional singer as far as I could tell. I was also surprised by the large selection of western songs that were available. Since pretty much everyone else was singing American songs, I decided to make up for it by singing a bunch of Japanese songs. My selections included Cruel Angel’s Thesis, Sorairo Days, GONG, and Yuusha-Oh Tanjou.

Wednesday heralded another trip back to Mandarake, this time with my Pop Culture class. I say “class”, but I’m the only one in it right now. To make it an actual activity, I had to fill out this worksheet-thing describing what’s on each floor and stuff. I ended up finding a doujinshi manga I had been looking for, so that was pretty cool. It ended up being more expensive than I anticipated, though (~$20). Apparently doujinshi are expensive, as my teacher commented. Also, we had a lot of fun making fun of how the covers of boy’s love manga (a popular genre for girls) all look the same. There’s always one guy standing behind another guy with one or both arms around him. Other options include either or both guys being shirtless, chains, or handcuffs.

Tonight we’re supposed to be going to an onsen (hot spring), so I might make a short post after this describing that.

A couple things I wanted to mention that didn’t fit into any of the above paragraphs. First of all, it’s not easy to find the same kind of beverages that we have in the west. Restaurants often don’t have a beverage section on their menu and just provide you with water or iced tea. The ones that do will usually just have Coke and some juices. In fact, there don’t seem to be many western carbonated beverages in general, especially not outside Coke. I think the only other one I’ve seen is Mountain Dew, and only in one store. Also, in my previous entry I posted a picture of a sign that requests that you don’t walk and smoke. It was brought up in class the other day, and apparently the reason for that is because if you’re holding a lit cigarette and have your hand at your side, that’s just about the right height to hit a child in the face. Admittedly, I would not have thought of that.

As usual, random pictures:
Poster for the Lion King
Statue in front of the shrine
Yakitori restaurant
Traditional Japanese wooden sandals. I see people wearing these every so often
The creepiest hats you will ever see
A truly Japanese sub
Japanese stop sign. What’s on the sign is also written on the street in large characters.
A selection of Japanese novels in my room
Dunno how I forgot to mention this before, but the bathroom near my room has an automatic toilet. There’s a control panel on the wall that has various bidet options, seat positions, and two different flushing options, big and small.

Also, I made a brief video tour of the house I’m staying at.

Soba, Sushi, and Sightseeing

Sorry about the large-ish delay between posts. Hopefully the sheer density of images in this post will make up for it.

Three days ago, on Thursday, after classes the school had a soba making party. If you haven’t heard of it, soba is a type of Japanese noodle made from buckwheat (according to Wikipedia). Some people that I was assuming were from a local soba shop came and showed us the process. We got to try making it first-hand, which was pretty cool. I’ll entail the steps here for your reading enjoyment. First, you sift the flour into a bowl. Then, while slowly adding water, mix the flour vigorously with your hand until it starts clumping together. Once the clumps are big enough, you can mash the whole thing together into one big ball of dough. Then you sort of like…knead it, folding it over onto itself. We had to do it 30 times. After that, you do a whole lot of flattening with a rolling pin. Once you have a nice, big square of dough, you fold it over onto itself to make a smaller square 1/4 the size and chop it into noodles. I didn’t see what they did with it after that, since they took it elsewhere (probably to a sink near the bathroom; I think you just soak them or something). Then, we got to eat the noodles we made. It was pretty good, I suppose. Tasted like noodles. They had soy sauce to add some flavor.

Also of note that day was the game center I visited. It made me happy to see that arcades are still alive in Japan, at least. I’ve been to a few game centers so far and it seems like a common theme is to have a million crane games on the first floor. I knew Japan was crazy about them, but I don’t think I’ve seen so many in my life. Second floor is “medal games”, which as far as I can tell is just gambling-type games. Slot machines, simulated horse racing, and some sort of game involving balls and some intricate machine that I haven’t inspected enough to understand the gist of. In hindsight, I should’ve taken a picture. I saw a bunch of arcade games that aren’t in the US, though, which was pretty cool.

Every Friday our school has a party, and this week’s happened to be a sushi-making party. It was pretty fun, but mostly delicious. You took a sheet of seaweed, put whatever you wanted on it, rolled it up, and ate it. Possible ingredients included rice, eel, shrimp, beef, avocado, egg, and some sort of cheese. Japanese rice is really good, by the way. Not sure what’s different about it.

Saturday I decided to head to a big mall in Fukuoka named Canal City. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary. A lot, a lot, a lot of clothing stores. I’d wager that at least 90% of the stuff there was clothes, and this was an 8 or so story tall mall. It was kinda disappointing. From what I could tell on the map, there wasn’t a single game store there. In fact, the only thing of note I saw there was the Jump Store, which sold all sorts of Shonen Jump related merchandise (Shonen Jump is a comic magazine in Japan). I suppose something else to note is that it was right next to the Ultraman store, which I don’t know much about. Oh right. There was a Pokemon store, too. Afterwards, I walked around that part of town and visited a nearby temple. There was some sort of stone basin with running water and some sort of ladles for some sort of tradition that I’m not aware of in front of the main building, so I just let that be. I walked around the graveyard for a bit, which was pretty interesting. Kinda labyrinthine, though. For those interested, a sign entailing the history of the temple. Also, I noticed on my map that there was a high school relatively close to where I was (note: it was farther than I thought), so I decided to drop by there as well. Japanese high schools are pretty different from western ones as I’ve noticed from anime and such, so I had to see one for myself. It was pretty much everything I expected. The exterior was probably the only thing that defied expectations. The hallways, the classrooms, and stairs were all as expected. I was kinda surprised to see as many students hanging around in classrooms as I did, though, since it was Saturday and all. I think some Japanese high schools have a half-day on Saturdays, though.

Today I went back to that park that I mentioned in a previous post where I forgot my camera and couldn’t take pictures. The park is centered around a lake that has a bridge that spans the entire length and goes across some of the islands in the middle. Walking along the lakeside I saw koi, turtles, and some rare Japanese birds. There were also these short post-type things that had what I assume to be children’s games/rhymes on them. For you birdwatchers, I also saw some, uh, herons. Or egrets. Or something. There were rowboats and paddleboats that you can rent, and it seems they’re pretty popular as there were a reasonable number of them when I was there. Also, a pagoda. There was also this river-like thing going along part of the park, which was pretty cool.

And now, more random pictures:
The view from Susenji station
Train platform
This is what a Japanese keyboard looks like
Suburban streets don’t really have sidewalks
A typical address placard. The top line indicates that it’s in the first block of the Susenji neighborhood
On the way to the subway
Susenji Station, where I go pretty much every day
A sign on an overpass going over the train tracks telling kids not to play there
Bridge/river/skyline
Poster in the high school talking about how bullying is a crime
Speed limit sign. Interestingly enough, the sign doesn’t say anything about speed. The text just reads “from here on”.
Sign on the sidewalk telling people not to walk and smoke
Sign in the subway warning potential molesters that they’re unwanted
I thought this was kinda funny, but what’s shown in vending machines aren’t the actual products. They’re just fakes that look like the real thing. Not sure if you can tell that from this image.
I somehow missed this before, but this danger sign might be more interesting than the one I posted before with the kappa
Some sort of notice about birds or something at the park
Different dishes at a restaurant in the park
A pretty slick car I saw in the parking lot. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this make or model before, though.

Even in Japan:
7-11
Coca Cola
The Sports Authority

Only in Japan:
am pm, a chain of convenience stores. (I only assume that this is Japan-exclusive because I haven’t heard of it before. As a side-note, the signs below the name of the store advertise sake, beer, and cigarettes)
Kimonos at a clothing store

And now, time for some Engrish:
Mr. Good Smoking
I like woman
Yes! Bilding
Keep you best

Expedition to the Maid Cafe

As I wasn’t feeling up to describing yesterday’s events, well, yesterday, I’ll cover both yesterday and today in this post.

Yesterday…nothing out of the ordinary in class. Watched the first episode of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure in my Pop Culture class, which was pretty cool. Every so often our teacher would pause the episode and explain a certain word or phrase that someone said, which was helpful. During my lunch break, I found a manga/anime shop that I ended up being able to explore more in depth today. More on that later.

The most interesting part of the day was a sightseeing tour that the school offered. Unfortunately, I forgot to take my camera with me that day, so I don’t have pictures. I’m planning on going back maybe on the weekend or something to take pictures, though. Anyway, we went to Ohori Kouen, which is a nearby park. The name means, roughly, Great Moat Park, as it was built over the ruins of an old castle. The moat still exists today, however. Every time I hear the name Ohori Kouen, though, I think of Otori Kyouya, the name of an anime character. Inside the park we visited a Japanese-style garden which was, in truth, beautiful. I’ll leave it up to your imagination until I go back to get pictures. Sorry.

Our tour guide was a Fukuoka resident named Takahiro Nagano. Though he said he was 30 years old when asked, he could’ve easily passed for being in his early 20s in my opinion. We talked for a quite a while, though a lot of it was me asking “what do you call this in Japanese?” to try and expand my vocabulary. After walking through the park, we headed to a nearby shrine. I unfortunately don’t recall the name, however. There was a lookout point that had a spectacular view of the city, but again, I didn’t have my camera with me.

Something interesting happened on the way to the shrine, though. We’re walking down the street and there’s a group of high school girls standing on the sidewalk by where we’re walking. That’s normal, I see them pretty often. As we approach, I hear one of them call out “Hora!” (which is more or less like “Hey!”) in a louder than normal voice. It wasn’t really my business and I didn’t want to gawk, so I was trying not to look at them. I noticed that a couple of them were looking at us, though. That’s not too out of the ordinary, though, since there really aren’t many foreigners here. I notice people glancing at me a lot. Anyway, after we’re a little ways away Takahiro turns to me and says “Those girls wanted to talk to you. They were just too shy to say anything.” I just kind of responded with some sort of “Oh, really” comment, but inside I was wondering what in the world they could have wanted to say to me. I couldn’t go back because at that point it would’ve been awkward to walk back there and ask if they wanted something. Even if he was right, I know it probably would’ve been something inconsequential, but it’s going to haunt me for the rest of my days. Fate might have been knocking at my door and I might have slammed the door in its face.

Alas.

———–

Today was pretty fun. Class was interesting and I learned a bunch of new words, notably stuff relating to the ocean and diving. We read some apparently true story about a mailbox on the sea floor in some prefecture near Osaka where you can scuba dive down and mail some sort of special waterproof postcard.

The highlight of the day, again, was my pop culture class: we visited the maid cafe Tenjin Style (Tenjin is the name of the downtown area of Fukuoka). A maid cafe is, as its name implies, a cafe where the waitresses are all dressed in French maid outfits. Unfortunately, the cafe didn’t allow photography. I dunno. In my opinion it wasn’t anything terribly special, but the maid costumes were kinda novel. The waitresses were indeed cute, though. I suppose the most entertaining part was how we had to talk to one of the waitresses as part of a “report” we had to do. We each had to ask at least one question (there were three other students). Maid cafes largely appeal largely to the otaku community (otaku: Japanese slang for geek/nerd/enthusiast), so the waitresses are all familiar with recent anime/manga/games. The cafe had little photo albums with profiles of the different waitresses with what sort of things they like and such. I was impressed by how knowledgable the waitress we talked to, whose name was Hinata, was about those sort of things. I asked her what she liked to do on her free time and she responded that she enjoyed watching videos on Nicovideo, which is the Japanese equivalent of Youtube. The rest of the discussion was stuff about the cafe and such. I believe she said that there were about 20 waitresses total, which was kinda surprising. Also, I somehow ended up getting a Tenjin Style points card. I can’t read enough of the Japanese on the back of the card to figure out what happens if I fill it up, though. It seems like I’d need to spend about $200 to fill it.

The other highlight of today was the aforementioned anime/manga store. It was really cool for me, but its contents are likely not your cup of tea. Regardless, here are some pictures of merchandise relevant to my interests:
Vending machines outside the store
Remixed video game music CDs
Novelization of a game series I enjoy
Anime theme song single
First volume of a book series whose anime adaptation I like a lot

Other random pictures:
Poster for Angels and Demons
Cool fountain clock
Local church
Mass schedule
Church exterior
A small bit of Engrish
Astro Boy statue at my school
Hiragana chart in my classrom
Aforementioned classroom
A sign to keep out of some sort of reservoir right next to my house.
Something interesting to note in that last picture is the creature that’s grabbing the child. Although it looks like a turtle, it’s actually a mythical Japanese creature known as a Kappa. In short, they’re river-dwelling creatures that enjoy cucumbers and sake.　The main text reads: “DANGER! Swimming or playing in this vicinity is forbidden.”

First day of class

I guess I missed a day of journaling, so I’ll have to catch up a bit. Yesterday was my first day of classes. Classes start at 9:30, so I have to leave the house at about 8:30 to make it there in time what with walking and the subway and all. It’s 10 stops from here to the stop closest to the school, so it takes a little while. Here’s a map of the Fukuoka subway if you’re interested (I get on at Susenji and off at Akasaka).

Consistent with Japanese culture, you have to take your shoes off as soon as you enter the building, put them on a rack, and put on a pair of slippers that they provide for you. The first thing I had to do after that was undergo a brief oral interview to determine my level of proficiency. It was basically just a bunch of simple questions like “Where are you from?” and “What are your hobbies?” Then, I underwent orientation. Nothing really of note there. After that, since the level check and orientation only took about an hour and my classes didn’t start until 12:30, I had a couple hours to kill. I wasn’t really hungry, so I just kinda wandered around the city until it was time to go back. I tried a Fanta Shaker, which was kinda interesting. I suppose the best way to describe it is carbonated jello in a can. Like the name implies, you have to shake it before you open it or, well, it’s just a big lump of jello that you’ll have a hell of a time trying to get out of that small a hole.

After that, classes started. It was sort of different from what I expected. A lot of…talking. It feels kind of slow to me, but I guess I’m used to the pace of a college education. For some reason, we were talking about different kinds of children’s games in Japan. The only two I had actually heard of were sugoroku, which is some kind of board game, and janken, which is better known to us as rock paper scissors. After class ended, I was starting to get hungry so I looked for somewhere to eat. Admittedly, I wasn’t feeling very adventurous and it’s still kind of hard for me to read menus, so I copped out and went to McDonald’s. I have to say, though, it’s set up pretty differently from the ones in the west. I wasn’t sure, but from what I could tell there wasn’t any menu for ordering things a la carte. There were just 4 or 5 different burgers with an individual or combo (they call them sets) price listed. Interestingly enough, none of the options had no cheese. I ended up going for a quarter-pounder combo. I didn’t realize it until someone pointed it out to me later, but it’s interesting that they still call it a quarter-pounder when the rest of the nation uses metric.

After returning home, I did the simple homework that was assigned that day (fill in the blanks with new vocabulary). Because I was tired, I ended up going to sleep around 8 PM. I’m equally tired right now, but I’ll elaborate on my exploits today in a different post because I don’t feel like writing any more right now.

Cyborgs and Customs

So, I’m finally in Japan. The trip here was more or less uneventful. Unfortunately, the flight to Tokyo was unbearably long as I got tired pretty early on but couldn’t get more than an hour or so of sleep. It’s hard to find stuff to do for 13 hours. Also, I had to fill out a form distributed by some Japanese health ministry describing whether I had a fever in the past few days or whether I’d come in contact with any feverish or coughing people. Predictably, there were quite a few people on the plane wearing masks.

As we were coming in to land, I tried to look out the window and find something that would identify that this is actually Japan. Pretty soon I noticed that I could see people driving on the left-hand side of the road. While not a strict identifier of Japan, I thought it was kinda cool. After we landed, a flight attendant made an announcement saying that some Japanese health officials would be coming on board to collect the forms and that they would have thermal sensors to check – my half-asleep mind totally thought she was going to say “if anyone on board is a cyborg” – if anyone has a fever. There were no incidents and I got off the plane fine.

Then came customs. Lemme tell you, there’s nothing more terrifying than a Japanese customs officer wearing a surgical mask. Some customs officers are intimidating enough as is, but the mask adds another degree of intimidation. It made me feel like I was walking into a yakuza base. I had a bit of trouble communicating to the guy why I was coming to Japan, but it worked out in the end. Let it also be known that all the random Japanese people that I’ve talked to so far have defaulted to speaking to me in English. Not very good English, necessarily, but English nonetheless.

The Tokyo airport wasn’t terribly interesting. Kinda smaller than I expected. I had to take a bus from the international terminal to the domestic terminal, which I would’ve never figured out had I not asked for help. I did learn the word for “domestic”, though. Also, I totally missed the stop on the bus due to misunderstanding what the “next stop” automated recording was saying and had to wait for the bus to go around again. Luckily, my holdover in Tokyo was 3 hours, so it didn’t really matter. I did manage to get a picture of some bamboo growing outside the airport, though. I guess it makes sense that the domestic terminal is so small, though (only two gates, A & B). Japan is notably smaller than the US.

There were a bunch of rowdy college guys or something waiting to get on the same plane as me, but they calmed down/fell asleep once we got on the plane, so that was cool. (Oh right. I didn’t mention this earlier, but the flight to Tokyo was on a 747. That plane is unimaginably huge. I couldn’t even see from one end to the other from inside.) I was unconscious for most of that flight, and was kinda disappointed since that plane had a really comfortable-looking recline feature, but I didn’t get to try it out because I fell asleep before we took off and when I woke up again, I wasn’t sure if we were still on the ground or not and it turned out we were landing.

After getting off the plane, I dragged my ass to the subway. The instructions for how to get to the house I’m staying at said to buy a 540 yen ticket, which was fine except that the ticket vendors only sold up to 340. Too tired to figure out what to do, I just got a 340 and decided to pay the difference once I got where I needed to go (Susenji station). It was a bit disconcerting when some locals tried to help me out, but hadn’t actually heard of the station I was heading too. It worked out fine, though, and I just payed the extra fare when the exit turnstile refused my ticket.

After that, I used a nearby pay phone and called my host to let her know I had arrived. A few minutes later, Ms. Hatsue Aoki drove up and took me to her home. I don’t have any pictures yet, but I’ll post them when I do. I was pretty tired last night, so all I got to do last night was just shower and go to sleep.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll probably be making a post later on tonight (currently 9:18 AM).

First post!

‘Sup. In theory, I’ll be using this blog to document my experiences in Japan and all the wacky stuff that goes on in the land of the Rising Sun. Currently it is T -21 hours to my departure from the USA. I still can’t believe it, really. It doesn’t feel like in a day I’ll be on a plane flying over to Japan of all places. This truly is like a dream come true for me. I’ve been interested in Japanese culture ever since my friends in high school introduced me to the wonderful world of anime and manga (Japanese animated shows and graphic novels, respectively). I’m pretty nervous, just about things like forgetting to pack something and not knowing enough Japanese to get by. Though, yesterday I had to cancel a reservation I had made at a hotel, and I conducted the whole affair over the phone in Japanese. So, I suppose I’ll be fine. My biggest worry is probably that I won’t savor the experience enough, or that I’ll come back unsatisfied knowing that there was something I still wanted to do. Well, my next post here will be from Japan. As they say over there, ittekimasu*!

*This is a phrase you say in Japan when leaving the house. It literally means “I will go and come back”.