In Which I Resolve to Keep on Studying, Despite Having Grammar Destroy My Brain, and Subsequently Gaze Upon Impressive Wooden Contraptions

At Nihon University's Funabashi campus, I realized that I've still got a long way to go.

At the store, station, or in small conversations I can usually make myself understood in Japanese in a broad, general way. Lots of hand gestures and grammatical approximations and such. In other words, I'm okay at communicating.

But this weekend, faced with the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, third level, asking me about the specifics and such of Japanese grammar, I had quite a bit of trouble. I could read everything on the test- oddly, I found the Kanji section to be the easiest. But when it came to choosing between subtly different sentences and properly using adverbs, I found myself at a loss.

I know I failed the test, and I stressed out about this for some time before hand, but oddly, now, it doesn't really bother me. If anything, I'm more motivated now to study and learn more, shoring up my grammar and such.

After having my brain liquified by the test, though, Kori and I headed out to Saitama Prefecture to the small town of Chichibu. We were meeting up with a few coworkers to attend Chichibu's annual winter festival, considered one of the best in Japan. And, it was indeed something.

We showed up in the evening, and already a bevy of stalls selling grease-laden festival food had been set up near the station. Fireworks exploded overhead at intermittent intervals, and as we exited the train platform we could hear the sounds of taiko.

But, the main draws of the festival were the floats.

Well, I don't know if I can really call them "floats," actually. When I think of a parade float in English, I think of some gaudily colored chassis that's been put on a truck. These floats were nothing like that. They were more like mobile shrines, some larger than small buildings, each pulled by a team of people in festive uniforms. The things creaked as they moved, the wood of the wheels squeaking and creaking against the frame, forming a creaking accompaniment to the sight of these huge, brightly colored vehicles.

All of this thrilled me. Not only the sight of the things, but the whole of it. The teams of people in costume pulling the things about, the fireworks, and the hugeness of the crowds. More than once we were approached by (to all appearances, drunk) Japanese people who decided that we'd be fun to speak English with. Normally, this sort of thing annoys me, but on that particular evening I was more amused than anything else.

We crashed at a coworker's place, and the next day saw it all again in the daylight. This time, the food stalls were out in force, I found myself freely indulging in eating greasy festival stuff. After sampling the street food, I now find the common stereotype that Japanese food is so healthy to be sort of laughable. Everything in sight (and smell) was something "yaki." That is, fried on a hot skillet. There was takoyaki (fried octopus), okonomiyaki (fried veggies and meat), yakitori (fried chicken), meat on sticks, sausages, sweets, and all manner of other decadence. Sure, miso soup and natto might be the ultimate in health foods, but Japan seems as adept as any place in terms of piling on the grease.

Even more people were out during the day, and the floats made an encore appearance. Convenient for me, as I'm not exactly adept at taking nighttime pictures. It was a blast, and after some time, Kori and I got back on the train for Tokyo, going through a landscape that, with its trees and hills, looked uncannily like the northwest.

Not a bad weekend in the slightest. It's not all the time that I get to have my brain melted by an academic pursuit, and then my senses overloaded with stimuli all in a 24 hour period. Life is good.
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Even Amidst the Millions, Routine

I've moved to the Tokyo area, and this is what my life is like right now-

I wake up in Funabashi, Kori's town, most mornings. Funabashi is in Chiba, but is basically one of the several towns that are indistinguishable from Tokyo. It's a place where neon alleyways and the sound of trains are never far away, where the streets run thick with pedestrians even when I come back at nearly eleven at night, and where massive blocks of concrete hold up the various train lines that criss-cross Kanto like electronic blood vessels.

Every morning, I board one of those massive, noisy electronic blood vessels and make my way out to Narita, where I work. Invariably, the train is filled with dozing commuters and dozens of travelers, slumped upon rolling suitcases, ready to leave this archipelago in favor of a jaunt away. Perhaps others are Chinese or Korean immigrants, returning home. There are sometimes a few westerners.

I work with another native English speaker, so my schedule is lighter now. In Okayama, it was only me and a Japanese man at our school. He would teach the low level classes, teaching them “what,” and “who,” and “how,” and I would teach the advanced classes. Now, I work with another American man and two Japanese women, and my schedule is more cleared out. I have more time to read and study Japanese, more time to stare at the trees and sloping temple view from my classroom, more time to make lesson plans and be lost in my thoughts.

At night, after ten when school is over, I usually return to Funabashi. Kori, is there, of course. Even after ten the trains bustle with salarymen and sleeping pedestrians, suitcase carrying travelers and commuters. I wind my way through the dark, but hardly deserted streets, and walk along the tracks. All the while, trains blustering like Kanto's blood vessels beside me as I make my way back.

I'm enjoying this, and find it remarkable that even in the world's largest city, simple routines prevail. Of course, this makes sense when one thinks about it. On the weekends, we dip into the insanity and the bustle of the metropolis, and it's amazing. Perhaps irregularities will show up. But for now, my daily system is clear- teach, commute, and return. All the while, surrounded by the bustle millions.

In Which I Move. Also, I Mingle With the Myriad Freaks.

About a month and a half ago, I was at a party on a boat in Tokyo harbor when someone, a guy in IT, asked me how long I'd been in Japan.

"A year," I told him.

"Oh," he replied, "so you must be getting pretty settled, then."

"Yes," I said, "which is why I'm moving."

He seemed puzzled by this, and I told him that I didn't want to be settled, that I didn't want things to become ordinary. I came here trying to get away from the ordinary, and early on in my stay I decided that if I were to keep on in Japan for more than a year, I would move to a different city. I considered Osaka and Kyoto as well, but when I visited Tokyo for the first time last March, I immediately fell in love with the place. Not only that, but I fell in love with Kori as well. The busy streets of Osaka and the temples of Kyoto were fine to visit, but I knew that I might as well go for the big one: Tokyo, a massive sprawl that I now live, comfortably, on the outskirts of.

Sayonara, Okayama

I hate, and sort of love, cleaning out apartments. On the morning of my move, the sun was brightly shining through the tower apartment that I'll probably never see again, and I was blasting Japanese hip-hop into the sunlight. The mix CD was a goodbye gift from my rap-loving coworker, and I found myself liking it a great deal. I'm continually fascinated by how Japan processes and then spits out other western, and was quite liking the bilingual hip-hop blaring from my speakers. I'd slept little the night before- partially out because I'd been out late, and partially because of excitement.

I cleaned out my place, packed up the last of my things, and sat down to way for my successor, who was quite late. When he did show up, he looked like the dead. The night before, my school's staff had thrown a goodbye party for me, and my replacement had a fair amount of booze foisted upon him. Having to move the next day, I was smart enough to avoid abject drunkenness. But, my replacement, new to Japan, seemed to have succumbed to the alcohol-soaked zombification that Japan can inflict upon foreigners.

"Here's the apartment," I said, showing him around and giving him the keys. He took in the place, and I packed away my things into a taxi. I'm actually quite happy with my replacement- I worked with him for a week, he observing my classes and me watching him teach, and I felt entirely at ease with his capabilities. My students, I know, are in good hands. However, the last I saw of him was as a bewildered, nauseous, and dead-looking foreigner. I'd been in his position a few times. It's part of the learning process, in a way.

I boarded the Shinkansen to Tokyo, and leaned back in my seat, sleeping intermittently. When I woke up, near Shizuoka, I could see Mt. Fuji massively looming up through my window. I'd never seen it before on any of my trips on the train before- it had either been cloudy, or I'd been asleep, reading, or on the other side of the train. This time, though, I woke up just in time to see the conical, snow-capped mountain looming over a bristling industrial field.

I was thrilled to be unsettled.

"So, what do you do?" "I work at the airport."

I live, now, in Narita, which is about 35 miles from Tokyo proper, and an hour away by train. It's a nice placement, actually. My school is right next to the train station, and my apartment only 15 minutes away on foot. Kori lives in Funabashi, about 45 minutes away from Narita, and fairly close in to Tokyo proper. My commute, then, is fairly good for Kanto- my work is 20 minutes away from my own place, and an hour away from my girlfriend's. I go against traffic both to and from Narita, so I can sit down and read on the train, which makes the commute pass rather quickly. Best of all, I don't have to change trains. This is the land of two hour commutes and train switches, so I have it quite good, actually.

My school overlooks downtown Narita, and from my window I've got a direct view of Nartia-San, the city's famous Buddhist temple. From my window, I can see the sloping green roof and the tall main pagoda with it's gold spire jutting from trees. It's an ideal sort of landscape view, actually. Almost all of my students are involved in some form or fashion with Narita International Airport, which serves as Tokyo's (and indeed, all of Japan's) main link with the rest of the world. Regrettably, I don't have very many kids' classes.

What I've found strange about Narita, though, is the sheer amount of foreigners. In Okayama, I did a double take when I saw another foreign person. In Narita, I can't seem to walk down the street without seeing non-Japanese people. I suppose this makes sense, what with the gigantic international airport and all.

It makes me happy, though, that my first year in Japan was in Okayama, a fairly English-free place. I was motivated to learn Japanese because of the undeniable necessity of it. Now I'm studying not only for pragmatic reasons, but also because I've discovered that I love foreign languages. I question, though, whether or not I'd have discovered this new passion if I'd initially been placed in Narita. My coworker seems to get by without speaking a word of Japanese, and that makes me slightly apprehensive that my studying may slacken a little. I don't think it will- I get far too much joy out of learning to stop.

In Okayama, I was one of two foreigners who didn't really speak Japanese. In Kanto, though, it seems normal for the westerners to not speak any Japanese. I find this really surreal, actually, the sheer amount of people who haven't really bothered with the language. So, I've gone from being the odd man out because I could only speak a little and could only have basic conversations, to being someone who's considered skilled because I can speak a little and have basic conversations. Two nights ago, a student asked me if I could read Kanji. I replied that I could read a few.

"How many is a few?" she asked.

"About 450 or so," I said, sheepishly, "But I don't know all the proper pronunciations and word combinations."

"What?! Wow!" she replied.

In Okayama, a foreigner who knew about 450 Kanji was illiterate. Here, a foreigner who knows about 450 is considered skilled.

Weird.

The Panoply of Incandescent Awesomeness: In Which I Peruse The Offerings of Tokyo's Hipster Population, and Am Pleased With My Findings

The Tokyo Big Sight is rather aptly named.

Going there yesterday for the Tokyo Design Festa, I sort of wondered how I'd find the place after getting off the train. There was no need, really. Tokyo's gigantic conference hall fills the skyline heavily, and in yesterday's sunset I looked to it eagerly, happy that I now live in the largest urban area in the world. I'd come to the Design Festa to visit a friend of mine, a ceramics artist, who had a booth there. I went for purely personal reasons, and didn't really anticipate or think about what the rest of the outing might entail. I was pleasantly surprised.

The Big Sight, of course, is huge, and the Festa, which occurs every six months, took up a good half of it. The other half was taken up by a Dentistry convention. In the convention hall, I had to spend quite some time before I found my friend's pottery booth, and was amazed at the sheer amount of artists and displays in the offering. After saying hello to my friend and buying one of her tea cups, I set out to the rest of it.

Here's a bit of what I saw: A booth with various comical depictions of snot, extremely intricate doll houses, several graffiti murals, innumerable t-shirts, lots of girls wearing cat ear hats, a guy dressed as a leather-clad panda, another guy dressed as Winnie-the-Pooh, some very loud, abstract heavy metal videos, stained glass depicting characters from Hamlet, a guy who seemed to paint nothing but skeletal samurai, a trio of folks dressed as long-nosed aliens who walked about the hall waving and shaking everyone's hands, several grotesque horror movie monster sculptures, caricature artists, breakdancers, poets accompanied by bass players, a giant pillow made to look like curry and rice that the creators invited people to take naps on, an S&M rope-tying demonstration, three girls wearing dresses made out of balloons (think of balloon animals, but in gown form), random paintings, installment-style sculptures, traditional Thai dancing, and more goths, gothic lolitas, punks, cosplayers, and random freaks than you could swing a cat at.

The whole thing was incredible. I'm definitely going to the next one in May.

I found this all especially refreshing because I just read a book called Polite Lies by Kyoko Mori, a memoir by a Japanese woman who has since relocated to the States. I hated this book.

She has a few interesting observations to make, but for the most part I found her monochromatically negative depiction of all things Japanese to be incredibly irritating. Mori obviously had an abusive father, a depressed and tragically suicidal mother, and a complete bitch of a stepmom. However, the logical leap that she seems to make in her book is "My childhood was awful. I spent my childhood in Japan. Therefore, Japan is awful." Japan, according to Mori, is a colorless conservative, repressive place dominated by etiquette and hierarchy. This is true in some instances, but there's far more to this country than just the conservative element. Had she written about having a bad childhood, that would have been fine. But she seems to use her childhood as a referendum on an entire country, and that's quite unfair.

Walking around the Big Sight, I wondered what Mori would think of the congregation of Tokyo's freak population, whether she'd dismiss them as an aberrant minority or brothers and sisters in arms. Or perhaps she'd take a uniquely negative position and say: "Look how repressive Japan is- it turns the youth into graffiti-painting hooligans who dress up as cartoon characters and animals!"

In any case, I thought, amidst the artists weirdos, that countries, like people, are complicated. Mori's nasty simplicity, I thought, had to be wrong. If Japan can produce the fantastically weird stuff that was invading my eyes, then there was no way it could be the bland country she described. True, Japan's corporate culture and gender politics still have a long way to go, but walking around the panoply of the awesome and weird filled with hope.

And now, I live in the place that produced all of this insanity. This is going to be fun.

Kiddie Drama

The little boy pointed at Okayama on the map and said "You here?"

"Yes," I said.

And then he pointed at Kanto and said, "You go here?"

"Yes," I said.

His classmate stood there and just said "No," and I had to hurry them along so I could start my next children's class, which was due to begin soon.

I'm moving, in two weeks, to the Tokyo area. I'm very, very excited about this. I've enjoyed my time in Okayama, but I feel like I'm done with adventuring in this city. I'm settled, and because I'm settled, it's time to move on. From the outset, though, I considered living in more than one city here. I didn't want my Japan experience to by synonymous with Okayama, I wanted to experience more of the breadth of the country. The fact that I'll actually be in the same region as Kori is also awesome. De-longdistancing our relationship will be a wonderful, wonderful thing.

However, this means that I need to tell my students that I'm going. This is not a pleasant process. With the adults, it's pretty manageable. Many of them have said things like "good luck," or "I'll miss you." A few have seem irked (one went so far as to complain to my manager) but on the whole they all seem to understand that a foreign teacher is a person who's going to move around a lot.

Kids, though, are not so diplomatic or understanding.

Before I had this job, I never really had that much experience with kids outside of having three siblings. And, before this week, I never really had the experience of disappointing a child. I didn't really know what it would be like, but it seems that that instinctual part of the human brain that tells us to take care of the little 'uns and whatnot has been firing up. Stupid parental instincts.

It was bad on Tuesday, in the incident I described above. The kids speak only a very basic level of English, and didn't have the language skills to talk about whatever they were feeling. It was wrenching, in a way. I've been able to effectively communicate with these kids through a mix of simple English, gestures, and facial expressions. In the classroom, I built this sort of mini-language where me and the kids could communicate. Here, though, that mini-language was suddenly deficient. I very much wanted to explain things myself in Japanese, but I limit myself to English at work, and handed them an explanatory letter for their parents.

On Kori's advice, I decided to merely give the letter to the parents later in the week. This worked out much better, though there were two incidents later that were still a bit difficult. The first was on Wednesday, which was my birthday. One of my students, a little girl, came into the school with a bakery bag in her hand, and told me "happy birthday." I was touched, really. After class we opened the bag, and inside was a pumpkin custard concoction in a little Halloween coffee cup. Me and my student ate the custard together in the lobby while her mother read the letter that I gave her after class. In a few minutes, she would find out that I was leaving.

And then there was Friday.

On Friday I have a rather special class- three siblings who all used to live in the U.S. Two twin girls, eleven years old, and their brother, eight, who speak perfect English. In fact, they speak better than perfect English. These kids are smart, smart cookies. There's no international school in Okayama, but their parents very much wanted them to continue with their English education. They shopped around, and settled on me. So, instead of teaching these kids the basic stuff that I teach other kids, or the communicative stuff I teach adults, we've been doing stuff like reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Phantom Tollbooth, books I read and loved when I was their age.

The class has been mostly successful, I think. I've had to do more work for it than any other class I have, and I'll miss them quite a bit. And, on Friday, I told them that I was moving. With these kids, I didn't think it would be right to just give them a letter for their parents.

The young one, the eight year old, then asked me a very hard question. He asked "When are you coming back?" I told him that I was moving to Kanto permanently. "So you're going forever?" he said. Having an eight year old say this to you is not fun. In fact, it's the opposite of fun. I tried my best to talk up my successor, whom I admittedly know little about.

"He's from England," I said, "he went to Oxford."

"We don't care if he went to Oxford," said one of the girls, "you're our teacher."

"And," said the other, "I don't like English people. They talk funny. And they're strict. I'm a xenophobe." ("Xenophobe" had been a vocabulary word in class.)

I tried to convince them that not all English people were strict, just like not all Americans were loud, and not all Japanese are shy. They seemed buy this but replied that English people "still talk funny." I reminded them that they still had me for two more weeks, and invited them to the school's Halloween party.

Admittedly, hearing "you're our teacher" does do wonders for one's teacher ego. If I'd told them I was leaving and they said "Okay. Whatever." I'd be a bit disappointed. But, I've never had the sensation of dealing with disappointed children before. It's a new feeling, and I don't like it. Maybe I'll be more practiced at it the next time I have to move on, but for now watching little kids point at maps or say "forever" has stressed the hell out of me.

But I'm bound for Kanto. Despite this speedbump, the future is looking nifty.

In Which I Once More Talk About Books. This Time- Milan Kundera.

Okay, so as much as I sometimes put on annoying airs of smarty-intellectual-ness, I've got a heart that's in love with pop culture. I mean, really- my last two posts included cartoons and video games. And, my love of pop culture seems to seep over into my bookish side every so often. For instance, nearly every time I hear the title The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I think of John Cusack in High Fidelity looking into the camera and saying;

"Hey, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I've read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and I think I've understood them. They're about girls, right?"

So, when I recently read Milan Kundera's big, important, existential novel, I couldn't help but think of Cusack's snarky record store owner saying the above, and going on to describe how he's just kidding, but that his favorite book is, actually, Cash: The Autobiography of Johnny Cash by Johnny Cash.

But, I'm sure you'll all be pleased to know, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is, indeed, about girls. Sure, it's about a bunch of other stuff, too. But there are several bits about girls in there. Also, death and communism. In any case, it's awesome and you should read it.

There were a few things about the novel that I found oddly disconcerting, and I don't mean that in a bad way. In fact, "oddly disconcerting" here is intended as a compliment. I actually really liked how strange the book was. The two things that struck me immediately were that it was very, very light on dialogue, and that that most intriguing and active character in the book is the narrator.

When I think of stories, I usually think of people talking. In fact, I remember showing my dad a short story that I'd written once and he said, "This is just people talking. It's like CNN with aliens." In retrospect, he was right, but I find speech extremely central to written fiction. To have Kundera, then, simply describe speech are broadly paint pictures of multiple conversations gave many parts of the book a ghostly distance for me. And a "ghostly distance," like something that is "oddly disconcerting," is a good thing. I like having my expectations messed and biases challenged. I am, in general, a fan of things strange, and the distance at which Kundera constructed his characters was a strangeness that I quite liked.

However, the narrator is hardly distant. I hesitate to call the narrator Milan Kundera. While he does, indeed, present himself as the author of the book in question, meta-commenting on events a la Kurt Vonnegut, the persona of the narrator is too... I think "godly" is the right word... to be the presence of the author himself. He goes so far as to say how he created his various characters, how elements of his own life played into their creation, and even how he's digressing, and he should really get back to the story.

The active nature of the narrator also contributes to the ghostly distance through which the reader must reach for the characters. In conventional novels, the narration takes the role of environment- it is the air that the characters breath, the water they drink, the ground they walk on, etc. It is what the characters move through. In Unbearable Lightness, though, the narration is a mediation. By digressing, presenting events out of sequence, and in general making his own presence the largest in the room, the narrator is a third party between the reader and the characters. You see and hear what he shows and tells you. Yet, Kundera pulls it off grandly. He's like a stage magician who says in his act- "This is fake. My illusions are all deceptions," and who then impresses you with his performance more, not less, because of his admission.

I'm generally scornful or suspicious of dichotomies, but I do like the theme that Kundera comes up with in the book. A sort of subtitle of the book is The Unbearable Heaviness of Being, and the give and take between lightness and weight is one of the central themes of the novel.

Now, I generally don't like dichotomies, because all too often they're extremely facile. For instance, I believe that the political landscape is far more complicated then a simple dichotomy between "liberal and conservative." There are gradations and irregularities that such categories cannot take into account.

However, Kundera introduces his dichotomy as something that entails complexity and conflict from the outset. And, his seems to be a tool for understanding the world, not the thing of understanding itself. And, I found myself curiously identifying with Kundera's characterization of lightness and weight, and how they can both be destructive in their own way. An excess of responsibility or a complete lack of boundaries can both be stultifying. The novel seems to be crying for this existential middle ground, which I like, actually.

But, the best written part of the book, and what I really want to talk about, was Kundera's bit on kitsch.

I've always been fascinated by propaganda posters, both from the U.S. and abroad. Communist propaganda, in particular, is particularly fascinating. Everyone in Communist propaganda, it seems, has been injected with a certain mixture of steeliness and joy. Everyone has their shovels or pitchforks or whatever other agrarian/industrial instruments that they happen to use, and seem just thrilled to be whatever they're doing. They people are all bathed in this sort of golden light of stoical worker productivity that seems to suffuse everything. Do a search for "soviet propaganda" and you'll probably get a ton of examples of what I mean.

Anyway, Kundera has a great summation for this. "Kitsch," he says, "is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from it's purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence." And later, "When the heart speaks, the mind feels it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart remains supreme. Kundera goes on to say that there's all manner of kitsch- Communist kitsch, American kitsch, liberal kitsch, conservative kitsch, Christian kitsch, etc. Kitsch, he admits, is inescapable.

I like this characterization of kitsch and propaganda, and when I was reading it, I couldn't help but think that there, of course, would also be Japanese kitsch. Mentioning this to Kori a while back she said, "Well, yeah. Do you think Hello Kitty ever takes a shit?" I have to agree that she doesn't. Hello Kitty, I think, lives a gleefully shitless existence.

But, I think that there are different degrees of kitsch, and, to take Kundera's idea a bit further, I think that the differences in degrees have to do with how the kitsch in question relates to shit.

In the world of Hello Kitty, there is no shit. None. Hello Kitty lives in an improbable universe where shit never needs to be denied because it is never even produced. So, I think I'll call the first degree of kitsch Hello Kitty kitsch. This type of kitsch is basically harmless, and easily subverted.

But there is another, worse form of kitsch. In those old Soviet propaganda posters, workers seem overjoyed simply by the fact that they have a sickle or hammer to grip. Their work, it seems produces nothing but energy and joy. It seems that one merely has to grip a tool, and rays of joy will emanate from it.

But obviously, industry and agriculture require toil. Work is a world of sweat and blood and shit, and those old propaganda posters take away all of the sweat and blood and shit and replace them, as if by cruel alchemy, with an indistinct joy.

This kitsch, this propaganda kitsch, is dangerous. In the world of Hello Kitty, one simply does not think of shit. In the world of propaganda, though, shit is the enemy, and, when it appears in the real world, an aberration. Propaganda kitsch, I think, is the type of kitsch that tells you that killing your personal life for the sake of your job is admirable, that breaking the veneer harmonious loyalty by dissenting is something worthy of shame, and that sexual quirks are sources of guilt. This is the kitsch of those old Soviet posters, and the kitsch of religion and self-help books. This kitsch is the sort of thing that is something actively contrary to what it means to being a balanced human being.

But, much like Kundera, I'm digressing a lot. I could go on and on about Kundera's other asides and digressions, riffing on what he says and whatnot. But, instead of that I'm just going to recommend the book. I don't agree with all of the ideas and conclusions that Kundera comes to, but The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a high-quality mind-tickler. I can see myself reading it again, which doesn't happen often with books.

Also, it's about girls.

In Which I Watch Anime

I'd sort of forgotten that anime existed.

This is somewhat ironic, given that I'm in Japan and all. I mean, this is where anime comes from, and it's sort of a big deal here. Yet, this weekend I had a grand old time watching cartoons and eating Thai noodles while hungover. Carbs and cartoons (along with hydration) are probably my favorite anti-hangover recipe. The next day was even worse- having no plans until the evening, I stayed in intermittently practicing Kanji and watching Full Metal Alchemist. I could even tell myself that watching anime constitutes some sort of Japanese language practice.

Which is true to an extent. I can recognize a small percentage of what the characters are saying, but, like American TV, anime characters don't talk like real people. Imagine someone who learned English from a combination of Spongebob Squarepants, Star Trek, and The Simpsons. They'd sound entirely strange and socially inappropriate, but would probably be fairly entertaining in the right context.

But anyway, I'm addicted to the stuff. This will probably pass, but for the time being, I can't get enough of it. This is probably because I'm just thrilled that I can understand maybe 10% of what the characters are saying. When studying Japanese, I find it rewarding even to be able to go outside and read signs. If I can read and understand everything on a sign or placard, or understand everything in an audio announcement, or even pick up on people's conversations, I'm thrilled.

Having a supply of sugary, addictive, geeky, hyperactive media-crack all in precisely the language that I'm studying makes the process all the more rewarding. Not only is it a forum in which I can listen to Japanese, it's a forum in which I can listen to Japanese that has explosions and robots. And nothing quite spices up an academic pursuit like explosions and robots.


Anyway, here's what I've been watching:

Full Metal Alchemist
I've seen a bit of this, but it was dubbed in English, and it's what I spent most of yesterday watching. I'm convinced that the people who made this show are actual alchemist who know how to transmute pure awesome into cartoon form. I like the fantasy style that they've gone for here- it has a sort of 18th century, vaguely steampunk-esque look. Prussian style military uniforms, mechanical arms, giant guns, and mandala-like alchemy circles all combine in a way that just works, visually. The show also balances the super-cute and super-dark aspects of anime pretty well- I'll probably finish the series soonish.

One Piece
This what I was watching during a hangover. The main character is a Reed-Richards style stretchy-man, and another guy fights with three swords simultaneously- two in his hands, one in his teeth. It's a completely brain-free pirate show, so I imagine that it could also be good after a few shots of rum.

Last Exile
I haven't seen much of this one, but damn it's pretty.

Read Or Die
The characters in this one have a rather cool superpower- they're telekinetic, but only with paper. So, they basically use origami to fight bad guys. Tres nifty.

I'm a little worried because there seems to be an endless supply of this stuff. Stupid shiny, beguiling pop culture and its addictive ways...

There and Back Again

I once had a student tell me that "Asakusa is for foreigners." I think he's right, but... most of the people who mill about one of Tokyo's most touristy districts are Japanese tourist, snapping pictures and buying plastic trinkets. But, it's sort of neat anyway, what with the big gate and all the rickshas and all.
To the left, is the lovely and wonderful Kori, and with her is Joseph, who came over for a whirlwind tour of Japan after I did a quick trip to the states.
Also pictured are Joseph, Josh, Eric, and myself smoking cigars in Portland, giving ourselves delicious mouth cancer at Sydney and Pete's wedding.
Bumming around the touristy crush of Asakusa and going to one of the two best weddings that I've every attended were two parts of a long vacation that consisted of me going to the States for many festivities, doing Tokyo with Kori and Joseph, and then hosting Joseph down at my place in Okayama. It was good to get off work for a while, see old friends, and be reminded how great it is to be over here. Some random snippets from the trip, as well as pictures of Asakusa and Kamakura:

Really, they should have been playing NWA

"This music," said the teenager, "has no dick."
And he was right. It didn't have a dick.
I was sitting in seat 39A of an NWA flight out of Narita, waiting to go back to Portland, and all the while my brain was in pain whilst the same three muzak songs were piped through the airplane. The two teenage brothers sitting next to me, though, made it all worth it with their perfect assessment of the soundtrack. The audiophonic accompaniment had all the verve and life of a Ken doll.
I find it a little weird, actually- airplanes, when you think about it, are pretty cool. We pile a bunch of humans into a metal tube and shoot it through the sky so it can transverse half the world in a day. Air travel is a wonder of modernity- the ancients would have shit themselves with amazement if they saw an airplane, and yet we fill these giant, superspeedy things with music that conveys exactly none of the awesomeness of transversing an ocean in a single day.
In fact, the whole experience of flying seems designed to be banal, boring, and beige. The food is bland, the movies are edited, and on this flight they closed the exterior windows midway through, rendering it impossible to look at the ocean or clouds.
I guess I shouldn't gripe- when I got to Portland Joseph asked me how my flight was. "Boring," I said.
"Oh good," he replied, "I've been on exciting flights. You don't want that."
Which is a good point, I suppose. But that doesn't give muzak any more dick.

Big Chilled

We were piled into Joseph's new (used) car, and on the way to the wedding Katie said "I feel like we're in that one movie where they all get together because someone dies and they're all older."
"The Big Chill?" I said.
"Yeah. Except without the dying." I've only seen bits of The Big Chill when it's been on TV, and Joseph had never seen it, but it seemed to be an accurate description. We were all older (well not truly old. I'm 26, and I like to think that's still young) but it had been some time since we'd all been in one place.
I've been in Japan (obviously), Joseph in Eugene, Katie and Michael in D.C., Lisa, Syd and Pete in Portland, Eric and Steph in Boston. I'd been away from the states for ten months, and hadn't seen most people for more than a year. I wondered what it would be like. Would it, I wondered, be this really dramatic thing where everyone has changed immensely and is now utterly unrecognizable? Would my old friends and acquaintances be different people, older shadows of the ones whom I used to know?
No.
No, not at all. Stepping into the wedding party, I was actually amazed by how similar everyone was. Certainly, there have been some sizable changes (I mean, Syd and Pete got married- that has to count as some kind of change) but I was pretty awestruck by the fact that I was able to walk into the room and all of a sudden I was snapped back into relationships that I'd been away from. I dare say, it rocked.
Meanwhile...
Nicotine, I hate to say, is awesome. I used to smoke, and am very glad that I've given it up. In Japan, everyone smokes and I'm proud that despite the easy availability of cigarettes and constant offers from coworkers, I've resisted the seductive lure of tobacco. But, Eric proposed we all light up cigars at the wedding, and I just had to take part. And, it was a really intense tobacco high. I hate to admit it, but I loved it. So tasty and cancerous. Now that I'm back here, I'm looking at the omnipresent cigarette vending machines with more suspicion than ever.
Anyway, now that I'm 26 and two sets of my friends are married, I've discovered that weddings are actually tons of fun when you actually know the people who are getting married. I hated them when I was a kid- Weddings were all about sitting quietly at the kids table.
Now, weddings are all about hanging with friends and celebrating lovey-ness in the midst of an open bar. Screw childhood nostalgia- adulthood is awesome.

Now With 100% More Lunar Eclipse!

Eugene is entrapping.
It was easy to live there. Very, very easy, actually. I had an alright job, good friends, a nice house, an okay car, etc. There was enough beer, fun, and sex to keep things interesting, and it took a fair amount of effort and willpower to leave. In retrospect, leaving Eugene was a little like getting out of bed in the morning when you're especially drowsy: you know you should get out of it, you would theoretically like to go do other stuff and such, but it's just too damn easy and comfortable. So, you linger.
I lingered in Eugene. Longer than I should have, really. I was eager to go back, but also a little apprehensive given my attitude about the place. Not the people, mind you (I love you, Eugene folks! You're awesome!) but the place itself. It seems that plenty of people have tried to get away, only to be sucked back into it, their attempts at escape frustrated by their own desire to stay. It's like the mythical land of Faerie or something. Hell, it even looks like the mythical land of Faerie, what with all the hippies and such.
The first thing I did was revisit the dysfunctional (but charming!) local bookstore where I used to work. It was the same old messy place with all manner of books on the floor, the same mess that I spent three years dealing with. Going in there made me quite glad that I'd left. I was worried that some latent flare of nostalgia would spring up amidst the books and whatnot, but instead I just felt relieved that I'm now in Japan. Weird.
At Joseph's place, we had a nice little get together wherein some of us stayed up to watch the total lunar eclipse. I think it's a bit fitting that my international comings and goings should be accompanied by trippy celestial phenomena. I'm just awesome like that.

Akihabara! Your One-Stop Choice for Hitler Dolls and Anime Boobies!

So, Joseph hopped on a plane with me to Japan, and Kori and I spent a few days bumming around the Tokyo area. I'd asked Kori to take care of hotel arrangements, what with her knowing Tokyo and speaking Japanese far better than me. The first night, she was unable to meet up with us because of work, and took it upon herself to book me and Joseph in a capsule hotel in Akihabara. Yes, my girlfriend's idea of humor is sticking her boyfriend into a small, confined space nestled in the otaku capital of the world. Funny girl, her.
Seriously, though, it was kind of awesome. Staying in a capsule was one of the many cultural experiences that I'd hoped to have here. It was a bit odd, but honestly it was less like sleeping in a cyberpunkian techno-coffin and more like camping. Except without the campfire. And in the morning you shower with a bunch of old, naked, grunting, hungover Japanese businessmen. And there's TV. But, other than that, it was a lot like camping.
Joseph and I hit Akihabara the next day, and it was a good deal of geeky fun. We checked out a bunch of shops that were redolent with action figures ranging from the awesome (Darth Vader as a samurai) to the kitschy (three foot high KISS dolls) to the downright strange (a lovingly sculpted foot-tall Hitler doll that was selling for an obscene amount of yen). And, of course, there were tons of soft-core porn figurines. Nearly every shop had model kits for robots and aliens in the front, and statues of mostly (or sometimes entirely) naked anime girls in the back. Before coming to Japan, I would have never really thought of action figures as a pornographic medium, but I suppose there's no limits to the inventiveness of the human spirit. Or something. Or maybe otaku are just insanely deprived of sex.
But anyway, we found an arcade.
Back in Eugene, Joseph and I devoted a rather ridiculous amount of time to playing Soul Calibur. First, it was Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast, and then SCII on the PS2. There were countless nights when we'd stay up far too late, drinking beer, and shouting things at each other like "Astaroth wants a hug!" (if we were playing as Astaroth) or "Fear my marshmallows!" (for Sophitia) or "Disco biscuit!" (for Maxi. I forget why this made sense.)
Anyway, we found an arcade, and it had SCIII. And, even though we were in the middle of an arcade and surrounded by Japanese gamer geeks, it was a lot like old times. Astaroth did indeed want a hug.
Joseph and I met up with Kori, and we proceeded to bum around the city a bit, get drunk, and go to karaoke.
I've already written about Japan's permissiveness with regards to drinking and the awesomeness of Karaoke, but it was nice to do it with an old friend. Even better, seeing someone who had never been to Japan before get acquainted with it was quite the interesting experience. A lot of Japan has become normal for me, so it was a nice change of perspective to see Joseph look at everything for the first time.

Kamakura: Giant Buddha Statues Are Really Growing On Me

Later, the three of us went a bit south of Tokyo to Kamakura, wherin there are a few nifty temples and shrines. Like Nara, Kamakura has a Daibuttsu (Great Buddha) but theirs is smaller than the Nara Buddha, and also outside. As an added bonus, though, we were able to go inside the Daibuttsu, which was every bit as cramped, hot, and dark as you can imagine being inside a big metal statue in summer would be. Nifty, though.
We also made a stop at Kamakura's Hase-Dera, a temple full of, among other things, a huge amount of Jizo statues.. Kori informed us that the statues were dedicated to the lives of either stillborn babies or aborted fetuses. Given that abortion is completely permitted in Japan, I found such a dedication to be rather curious. The tiny statues were oddly compelling in their uniformity, though.
From a Western, Catholic-raised (but now secular) perspective, I find this a little curious. All of the statues depicted Jizo, the same figure and were lined up in identical rows. In a Catholic church, there's just as much iconography, but the holy figures are presented in a singular manner. Surely you'd never see row upon row of Virgin Marys lined up like the Bodhisattva was. Anyway, secular guy that I was, I found the rows upon rows of the Hell-dedicated saint oddly aesthetically pleasing.

In Which I'm Still Here

Before leaving I was mildly worried that when I got back to Portland, I'd end up missing everyone and everything all over again. I'd put a fair amount of effort over here into staving off homesickness and such, and had no desire to feel it bursting back onto the scene.
But, visiting actually had the opposite effect. Everything, everyone, was still there. Everyone was as awesome as ever, and Portland's still standing. My friends are all their stellar selves, irony and indie rock still rule the day in the City of Roses. Awesome.
I know, of course, that people change and whatnot- that there will be things that happen while I'm away that I won't be able to take part in. But, I don't really believe the phrase "you can't go home again." Home always changes, of course, but everything does.
Now that I'm back, I'm happier more than ever that I'm abroad. I know that I've changed for the better (this got mentioned a few times in Portland) and now that I've gone back to that which I feel is rooted, I'm all the more enthusiastic about going on flights of fancy out in the world.

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