More Pictures !

here are my most recent photos. there's a field trip to sakura, chiba in there, a day at the zoo with my host family and friends, sushi-eating, Tokyo Game Show, another field trip to look at buildings in Ueno Park, and more pictures of other things, too.

for now, i'm headed out to Nagano for four days with my program. we'll be about three or so hours north of Japan in, from what i've heard, seems to be a pretty cool town. when i come back, photos and stories.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2023766&id=1539510122&l=80a7bbf2cb

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2023770&id=1539510122&l=88f117f943


much excitement,
mimi

There's a typhoon a-coming...

I checked email this morning to find a message from the American Embassy in Tokyo. It warned all Americans in the Tokyo area to prepare for what the Japan Meteorological Agency categorizes as a “very intense” storm. It also instructed us to keep our passports on us at all times and to"make appropriate provisions for food, water and shelter". Here's an article on the typhoon: Strong typhoon bears down on Japan. While it looks like it shouldn't hit Japan very hard, Taiwan it seems has not been so lucky.

In other news, yesterday we found out that kids in both of my hostsisters' classes at school have H1N1, or what they simply call here 'influenza' （インフルエンザ）. 2 kids in Koko-chi's kindergarten class have the bug, so she now has an entire week off. They're scheduled to go back to school next Tuesday, but it's on TBA basis. They're going to wait and see, my hostmom said. Yuzu, unluckily, still has school, but had to have her field trip cancelled, since a group of kids two classrooms down from hers now have the flu. One more kid in her homeroom class with it means no school for her, too. Wooo!

Expectedly, they're both wearing face masks any time they leave the house now.

Tomorrow I was scheduled to go to my field placement at Tsuga Elementary, but I woke up this morning feeling like a sack of rocks and ended up sleeping until about 3 in the afternoon. Given that this H1N1 is running rampant among schoolchildren here, it's probably not the best idea for me to walk in there tomorrow with a rundown immune system. Plus, the teacher who oversees my placement told me, while laughing, that I should stay home "if I'm scared of the typhoon". I'm not exactly sure what she meant by that..

Other than those mild panics, I'd say I'm doing pretty well here. The initial adjustment period is mostly over for me. I know where things are. I have a routine down. I know some people and most of the time can get what I need through basic conversation. It's a good feeling. Now the greatest challenge that awaits is sheer memorization of loads and loads of vocabulary and kanji. Now that I have the foundations in place, I have to accumulate data like crazy. It's amazing how few words you actually use from day to day. When something as mildly uncommon as gardening pops up in conversation, it can be too much for my school-oriented vocabulary to handle. The only solution? Incessant study. It can't be too bad, right? Everyone likes a good flash card, no?

good moment

this happened tonight after dinner. i'm sitting on the floor with the girls and my hostmom, talking. i say,

"tomorrow i'm meeting a tutor."

koko-chi says,

"is it Pooh bear?"


i have no clue what the connection was there.

tonight i also learned that bubbling food goes "gutsu-gutsu" and young people and shrimp are both described as being "pichi-pichi", or in their peak, fresh. besides that, the teacher i was following at my field placement today took me to the elementary's cooking club after school. mothers and other locals lead the school's clubs, thus the name "mama club". together with them and some fourth and fifth graders we made a sort of Korean savory pancake out of tuna, eggs, rice, and leeks called "kawari chijimi". every surface and object in the room was scrubbed clean afterwards.

friday i'll be going to ueno with my architecture class and sketching buildings for the first time. i have a sketch book and some scented pens, but i don't really know what to do with them. it will be interesting, for sure.

until later, (and yes, eventually i will backtrack, i think!)

photo update--

go here.


In the morning I'm leaving the house at 6:15 am to teach children all day! Or observe the teaching of children. Let's hope my sponsor speaks slow enough for me to grab one or two words of what she says!


And I'm off--!

at the end of the day...

Today was busier than I expected and also came bringing a surprise - homework. Tomorrow I might also be wiped out after class, considering I'm going to have to leave the house Wednesday at/before 6:30 am to be at my placement school by 7:45am to greet every school child individually alongside the principal. It is going to be a long week.

Come Friday afternoon, however, we unexpectedly get a five day break, deemed "Silver Week" here in Japan, since it does not quite merit the same excitement that the blooming cherry blossoms do during the "Golden Week" of May. Actually, there's nothing really even to celebrate as far as I can tell, since I still wind up sweaty and sunburned wherever I go. When will the fall colors and weather show?

small delay

It's been a busy week, finishing up orientation, trekking out to my field placement for the first time for an interview, registering for classes, and so on. Plenty of fun and tasty things happened somewhere in there, too. And today I went on the first IES field trip to Asakusa, the home of a large temple with a long line of small stalls and shops leading up to it, and then on to watch sumo wrestling at the Kokugikan. I have a few stories and pictures to share, but right now, I'm beat. So tomorrow, after my first official classes.

Until then, anyone see the connection between a devil and shaving?

The semester begins

So, I made it! I’ve been here outside of Tokyo for almost a week now, and everything’s going more than well. Makuhari is precisely how I remember it – hyper clean, hyper polite, and hyper busy— and the same goes for what else I’ve seen of Japan as well. The highlight of my long but manageable flight was the dinner tray set on my table.

Very Japan, very early in the game. The largest turbulence I encountered was the American flight attendant garbling the Japanese announcements. The Japanese members of the crew stood by politely and listened, of course.

Some of my program’s epals met us at the airport to walk us through the process of changing money, shipping luggage, and not passing out from time difference/new country shock. Then we headed to a training center in Makuhari where we would be staying for the next couple of days until it was safe enough to cut us loose into real Japanese society.

When others readily speak your native language, as the Japanese do, it can be difficult to jump in and speak your secondary (or tertiary) language. I know I felt foggy and hesitant for a while about the whole speaking thing in general. Luckily, the epals here from IES’s two partner universities are very, very eager to speak English and meet English-speaking people. So they don’t really care whether I speak any Japanese or not. Instant friends!

Thursday, the long-awaited homestay family reveal took place. Okaa-san (Izumi) and her two girls (Yuzu and Coco-chi) came to pick me up. After listening to the housing director discuss swine flu prevention while the girls with the white face masks on playing in the back, we headed off to Ichikawa City. As it turns out, they’re wonderful. More than wonderful. Here are some pictures for proof.

They, along with their hard-working dad of late hours, live in a normal house in a quiet neighborhood about 20 minutes east of Tokyo by train. They have a pet hamster with a stripe down its back that they keep in a pink plastic bubble in the living room. His name is Purin-chan – Pudding. Basically all I’ve been doing since I came to stay with them is draw pictures of vaguely Disney characters, build stuff out of wooden blocks, and accept the many pink, scented trinkets they bring me every ten minutes or so.*

Besides spending time with my homestay family, I’ve mostly been trying to eat every new Japanese food I find and soak up as much of the language as possible from any source available: ads, menus, overheard conversations, Sunday morning cartoons. You name it, I’m probably scrutinizing it.

My goal is to be able to make at least junior-high level conversation, without all the pimples and giggles, by the end of December. We’ll see how that goes.

Until next Sunday, じゃあまたね！

*(These trinkets include: 1 bandaid, 1 eraser shaped like a milk carton, two holographic buttons with a winking bunny on them, two pieces of stationery, and two letters including pictures of stick-figure-us holding hands, with hair down to our ankles in pigtails.

I’ve been with them three days.)

The Dance of the Foreigner

The departure day is over a month away, but I decided to go ahead and get my blog up and running before then, to get used to writing things down often. The one thing I regret about my semester in Nantes was that I didn't write down more of my encounters. Many small details have left me now, unfortunately, and while I still remember quite a bit, I'm also sure there are a few important lessons I'm forgetting.

That won't happen this time though! I will update this blog once a week, I promise. Hopefully, even more often than that.

In preparation for the trip, I've read a couple of books on Japan. Here's an insight from one of them, Japanese Beyond Words, an excerpt from an interview with a former director of the National Foreign Language Center. Dr. Walton explains:

Cultural barriers with Japan pose special difficulties for Americans. This is because Japan is a modern industrial nation so you kind of expect it to be "like us." ... You land in Tokyo and you say, "Hey, this is a modern developed country." There is this feeling that "Sure they are different but they are also like us." I believe that feeling fools many Americans. It leads to the mindset, "So since the place seems so much like where I come from, you know, business is business, surely we can sit down and talk that common language."

The problem that you come up with is that linguistically you want to be as much of a native as you can...but culturally there is a delicate dance that you have to perform. In one scene the dancer behaves like the locals. In other scenes he pulls back and asks am I going too far, am I crossing a boundary...Occasionally the dancer goes too far and confronts an attitude of "Look, you're obviously not one of us; you're trying to pretend to be one of us and the more you pretend the more we find problems with that, the more you make us feel uncomfortable. You're intruding into our identity. You're being presumptuous that you can really be one of us." ...there comes a time in which you say, particularly in some cultures, "Look, I'm never going to be anything but a foreigner here."

I've never been very good at dancing. Anyone who's gone swing dancing with me can attest to that. Of course, it's easy to appreciate the art of it from the side, but actually making your feet do the steps and twirls... Well, it takes some time, to say the least. And luckily I do have that time - 3 months and 20 days' worth of it - to see if I can sort all of that out. I'm an American who will be in Japan to learn the ropes, to observe and learn and try new things, not to become Japanese (which is impossible! I know!). Just a foreigner. Hopefully I'll have enough time to figure out how to be a good one. One that doesn't get lost on the subway every day. Or insult anyone - too badly. It'll be fun. I'll just....listen to the music? I guess? The cultural music?