Japan equals banana

Welcome to my website. This is a photojournal of my (Justin's) experiences in Japan, though it's more like a weblog since I post updates without pictures more often than not. I'm currently spending the summer in Hikone, a small town southeast of Lake Biwa. I spend my days at the Japanese Center for Michigan University and the rest of my time living with Skip at the Nakagawa's abode.

I'll try to update this as often as I can with new pictures and stories for real-time vicariousness. Hope you like sushi.

Some of the links don't work, cause I haven't taken pictures for them yet. I'm just leaving them there as reminders to myself.

2003/08/01 - Sitting here with my professor and a bunch of JCMU folk joking around while we wait for the time when we find out our grades. Yesterday after the final I spend the rest of the day at Hikone Castle, probably one of the best kept castles in all of Japan. Nice and pretty. I probably won't be able to upload any more photos until after I return to America, since I probably won't be able to find any place to connect my laptop. Unless I break into a wireless network or something. I hear Starbucks has wireless, but I'm not sure if that includes Japan. Graduation tomorrow followed by puppet practice. I'm going to try to see Pirates of the Carribean with puppetfolk tomorrow, since that's when it comes out in Japan. Sunday is the big puppet performance. I'm in the first play of the performance. Should prove to be fun. Monday I mail stuff home and Tuesday I start travelling. First on the list is Kyoto again. After that, I climb Mt. Fuji and visit Hiroshima, Nara, Nikko, Yokohama, and finish in Tokyo. Wheee!

2003/07/30 - We just finished the last day of classes. The final exam is tomorrow. Shouldn't be too bad. I need to remember to buy "Springtime of Youth" JR tickets for cheaper travel. Currently I'm planning on going to Kyoto, Nara, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Nikko, and Tokyo. Lots of youth hostels are fully booked for most of August, and I'm too uncertain about when I'll be getting to each place to make a reservation. Therefore, it'll be interesting to see where I end up sleeping some nights. There'll probably be one night of me sleeping on the train from Hiroshima to Tokyo. I've put off uploading pictures all month waiting for when I had caught up with annotating them, but apparently I'm out of time. So, here's 300+ pictures from the last 4 weeks with sparse descriptions. If it's got a title on the thumbnail, it's got a deeper description inside. These pictures range all over the place: Otsu, Nagahama, Kyoto, JCMU, Nagoya, and more. They're in chronological order, so at least that's easy enough to make sense of it. Doododoo... sure does take a while to upload 300 pictures.

2003/07/25 - Final presentations today. Went alright. Made a makeshift 'Masuyama-sensei puppet' out of soda bottles, socks, and a t-shirt to aid in my presentation. Ate tasty cake. One week of classes after this. Final exam next Thursday. Another Bunraku performance next Sunday. Apparently lots of farewell parties starting next Friday. Still annotating and taking more photos. I hope to have them posted next Monday.

2003/07/18 - The Lawsons (convenience store) was playing the X-Files theme as ambient music this morning. Second draft of my paper is due Tuesday. Final paper and presentation next Friday. Final exam Friday after that. Puppets all weekend. Woo.

2003/07/14 - Classes are extra busy with final project preparations getting underway and new material to study, so it'll take a while to get all of my latest pictures up. There are a lot of pictures with a lot of notes that need to be added.

2003/07/13 - Hefty party at Tonda after practice today. Many people have birthdays in July, so we celebrated them all on Eric's birthday. Mine was yesterday. Eric's was today. Keiko's is the 15th. Johnny's is the 16th. There were quite a few more, but I can't remember them all. After the celebrations we took turns chasing around Lin, one of the host-families' kids. She didn't slow down even after two hours of airplanes, piggyback rides, and hiding in closets. By then it was late, so I biked home in pouring pouring pouring rain. I was very wet. Anyway,this is what I look like with a puppet. This is what Kinkakuji looks like with weirdos in front of it. People have taken to pretending I look like David Beckham. When I say people, I mean John and Eric. They mostly yell 'Beckham' in crowded train stations and point at me until people stare. So far it hasn't worked much in tricking anyone -- they're all staring at me already.

2003/07/12 - 3 minutes left of my birthday according to Japanese clocks. Very uneventful day.

2003/07/11 - I'm sorry for not updating in a while. Classes got even more busy and the urge to update this page was replaced by an urge to eat ice cream. The rainy season's supposed to be over by now, but it's rained almost everyday of this week. I'm going to let the pictures + their notes tell most of what's happened in the past couple weeks, but I'll write something brief here too.

Today was a field trip day. I went to Kyoto again, this time with JCMU, to meet some students from Ritsumeikan University and spend some time at Kinkakuji (the Golden Pavillion) with them. I saw Kinkakuji last year, so I wasn't all that dazzled by the gelded three-style house as some of the other people. Kinkakuji isn't really all that great compared to the other temples in Kyoto -- all it's got is the one shiny building and that about it. I'm personally a fan of Ginkakuji's gardens (Ginkakuji = silver pavillion, but it's not really all that silvery). I grouped up with Skip, Martin, and a cute sophomore international relations major from Ritsumeikan named Mio (that's MEE-OH). We almost ate lunch at a family restaurant called "Jolly Pasta", but instead opted for the Japanese style restaurant across the street. Zarusoba (cold soba noodles) is a really good way to cool down on a hot day, and it was really hot and humid today. With Mio, we mostly talked about our backgrounds, music, and asked for explanations of odd sayings we'd heard on TV.

After lunch we had to say goodbye to our Japanese friends and went on to the Movie Village, basically Toei Studio's version of a theme park. You get to walk around on their sets and be bored for hours. There was nothing to do there except hide in barrels and sit in the air conditioned gift shop. After that we loaded onto the buses and slept through most of the hour ride home.

Thursday was the second midterm. Not bad. I don't get to find out my grade until Monday, but since I won't have the opportunity to upload this before then, that doesn't really matter. We're starting work on our final projects now. 20 minute memorized oral presentation and a 5 page paper on something related to Japan. I'm doing mine on bunraku puppetry, 'cause that's the easiest thing to do right now.

Last weekend was lots of puppets with a bunch of people who were obviously recovering from an Independence Day celebration. On the 20th, I'm going to be one of the puppeteers in a performance for something somewhere. I'm the lead puppeteer of one of the two puppets for Sambasou, a "make our rice fields bountiful" play that always gets performed around this time of year. Lots of dancing and shaking rattles and walking in circles around the puppet to make it look like it's turning. That's a week from Sunday that I'll be doing this. Hopefully I don't get stage fright or anything so annoying. I'll most likely be too busy trying to not fall over in the huge platform sandals they make me wear to even notice the audience.

The weekend before that, we went with Tonda folk to watch them perform at a cultural festival at Biwako Hall in Otsu. Nice long bus ride followed by really hot weather. We spent most of our time hanging out back stage joking around. After the performance was over, we walked through a gauntlet of applause -- really uncalled for since we didn't do anything but show up and eat their food. After that we came back to Tonda and threw a celebration and went to karaoke.

Tomorrow's my birthday. Sunday's Eric's birthday. Tomorrow we practice puppetry. Sunday we celebrate the birthdays of Eric, John, Keiko, and me all at once. I wasn't really paying attention before, but I'll be 23 in an hour Japan-time. It's still 14 hours till then back home. I'm sure I'm forgetting to recount lots of things, but that's what the pictures are for.

2003/06/26 - Wow, I really need to upload these in a more timely manner. I though I had uploaded the one below already. I've got 124 pictures from the trip to Kyoto from last Sunday, the 22nd. Annotated version to follow. Looks like my birthday's going to be on a Saturday instead of a Wednesday like I originally guessed. Eric's birthday's on the 13th and I think John's is on the 16th. After I get home in August I'm going to start working towards funds for a new computer. I'm currently a little more than halfway through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Tomorrow, instead of class, we go to local schools to be gawked at by little Japanese kids. My group of 5 people is going to Sawayama to talk to 3rd and 5th graders, i think. My particular group has been asked to teach them 'traditional American childrens' games' which will most likely result in duck-duck-goose and patty-cake. I've heard some mention of a bus from my host-mother, but I really have no idea what the weekend holds this time.

2003/06/21 - Birthday party at Tonda puppet place for Alexis, one of the UMass students. Mr. Abe invited a bunch of middle school students to come by and talk with Americans. There was also a girl from Shiga University who was doing research for a presentation on puppetry at Tonda. Interestingly, Mr. Abe has only ever had girls come to visit. The middle school girls had fun guessing everyone's age and marveled at my height. They also said I look like Keanu Reeves. I'd imagine all white people look the same to them in many ways, just like asianfolk look the same to a lot of americans. They tried to teach me the words to 'Ue wo muite arukou', i.e. the Sukiyaki Song, but I already knew the words. They weren't all that surprised. Then we sang 'Hey Jude' with them and they already knew the words to it, better than some of us. Too much food was bought for the birthday celebration and we were all forced to eat the majority of the leftovers over the course of several hours. I spend roughly 3 to 4 hours a day eating now, usually one to two on dinner alone. I start my days at 68kg and end them at 70kg. It's my host-mom's well-established goal that Skip and I are to become enormously fat. She said today that my face already looks heavier after just 3 weeks, but I think she just hasn't seen me well-rested in a while. Also I haven't shaved for a couple days, and facial hair tends to give the appearance of weight. Nonetheless, the Justin Biggification Project has begun. Had okonomiyaki for dinner tonight. The name means 'what you like, grilled'. It's basically a pancake or omelette with egg, noodle, and cabbage as the basic ingredients. Beyond that, it's whatever you feel like throwing in. Tomorrow I go to Kyoto. I'm going to try to buy the new Harry Potter book and an extra memory card for my camera, because I'm going to be taking lots and lots of pictures in Kyoto. Classes next week don't look very bad. We're going to start watching some TV show called "Kazoku Geemu" (Family Game) which I'm told is interesting and not as bad as the last show we watched. With a name like Family Game, I'm pretty certain I don't need to worry about explaining in Japanese my thoughts on Schoepenhauer's thoughts on suicide, unlike I did for the last one. I've probably written enough for a day so devoid of new pictures. Tomorrow should prove enjoyable.

2003/06/20 - It's probably pretty odd to read this webpage when I update it frequently but upload it only once or twice a week. Anyway, I just took the midterm and it was both easier and harder than I thought it would be. It's been a while since I've had to write an essay of any kind on a test, and doing it in Japanese didn't make it any easier. I'd have had no trouble if I could've typed it out on my laptop. I've lost the ability to write well in a linear fashion. I'm too used to writing multiple paragraphs at once and writing from the end backwards. I'm looking forward to lunch and dinner and sleep today. Expect pictures from Kyoto on Monday. Unless another typhoon comes.

2003/06/19 - Midterm tomorrow. Not too worried since grades here don't transfer back home. I've already learned the material as best I can and have had enough practice explaining it in class everyday. Typhoon 6 is missing us by many, many miles, but that doesn't mean we aren't getting strong gusts of wind that make me imagine flying debris outside the window to my back. Hopefully the winds will be weaker tomorrow than they were today. Biking through some of the streets and rice fields around here is like navigating the high seas in a storm, tacking against the wind and dropping the sail in erratic winds to keep from capsizing.

2003/06/18 - It's odd that I'm spending the first free time I've had in a while reading Python tutorials. Better than playing video games I guess. Hopefully I'll find time to make use of it. I've ended up being a vegetarian so far thanks to Skip's spite for protein. I've eaten red meat all of 2 times since coming here. Most of the meat I'm getting is fish and that's on rare occassions as well. This Friday is a midterm, mildly worried about it. There's a typhoon coming that may end up cancelling the midterm, mildly worried about having to bike through strong winds and heavy rain. We're solidly into the rainy season now. The past few nights have been very humid and devoid of restful sleep. The relaxing bike rides that make up our commute have turned into dreary, headachey treks. My shoes never get a chance to dry; I hope they don't mold. This Sunday I'm going to Kyoto with puppet people. Hopefully there will be a calm after the storm, and hopefully the storm won't blow away Kyoto's many sights. I visited Kyoto for a few days last year, but I barely scratched the surface in terms of what there is to see and what I want to see there. Apparently I'll have something like 8 hours to do whatever I want. I guess I'll spend Friday after the midterm with the Lonely Planet guide to Japan in the library.

2003/06/16 - We had to write newspaper articles for today's class. They suggested we watch TV news programs to get ideas, but everyone made up stuff. Mine had a title of "Soirento Gureen wa Ningen!" = "Soylent Green is People!". The teacher liked mine so much that he photo copied it and handed it out to everyone else. I made loads of mistakes, but I'm probably the first person to use "population explosion", "cannibalism", and "protein content" in the same sentence. I'm not even sure how to read it anymore, cause I just copied half the kanji straight out of my computer's dictionary. Words like the "Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare" and "dietary fiber content". Woo.

2003/06/15 - The past 3 days have been a welcome change from normal school days. On Friday we went to Shigaraki, a town known around the world for its pottery and not, as one might expect, for its remoteness and eeriely huge population of tanooki statues. In Shigaraki we visited a pottery place that allowed us to try our hands at making ceramics of our own. But before that we made a quick stop at a natural history museum that was good mostly for its aquarium. And between each stop was an hour or so of watching pretty trees and cloud-topped mountains go by. Saturday was lots of puppet practice followed by a filling dinner of veggie stew and yakisoba. Today was also puppet practice, though not for quite as long. I'm still working on getting decent pictures of us practicing -- it's always badly lit and very blurry. They're harvesting some of the rice fields today, and there's a flurry of birds picking out all the bugs laid bare in the fields. We have our first mid-term on Friday. Should be interesting to see how things go.

2003/06/12 nighttime update - The Japanese are ridiculous for not believing in toilet plungers.

2003/06/12 - One month to my birthday. I wrote a long message at the beginning of the week and never got the chance to upload it until now. Now it's the end of the second week. No classes tomorrow, for we have a field trip to a garden of some sort and to play with clay. Lots of pictures from last Sunday's trip to Osaka here. All that rain they said would come doesn't seem to be coming during daylight hours. Hopefully it stays that way. I wonder what I should make from the clay they give me tomorrow.

2003/06/07 - I've been here almost two weeks here now and have 11 more to go. 8 more of classes. Between classes on the weekdays and playing with puppets on the weekends, there has not and will not be a single day to myself. For the next two months I have no choice but to spend all of my time reading and talking about essays in Japanese. And blowing all of my money on transportation and admission to mandatory field trips. After this maybe I'm spending a couple weeks pretending to be a monk in a nearby Zen temple. Apparently arrangements for that still haven't been settled.

Classes are a little annoying. In the original information pamphlet and at the initial orientation, the teachers all said that they would correct our mistakes and make us better speakers of Japanese. Instead, they just mark us down for the day and don't even tell us we said anything incorrectly. There are people in my class who read out loud completely different words from what's written there and the teacher rarely corrects them. It's like the classes are aiming for speed over accuracy, even if the conversation turns to gibberish by declaring everything to be a direct object. I'm beginning to think that maybe I'd have better luck getting better with my speech in level 3 classes, but as of Monday it'll be too late for that. These classes are all about doing lots of self study and practice, and I'm all for that -- I just don't like it when they don't correct bad habits.

It's the weekend and I'm putting off the rest of my homework until tomorrow, so I'll spend a while typing into here. Classes are really draining. Until yesterday, I had no release of any kind from the stresses of study besides eating and sleeping. It was with great pleasure that I rediscovered the existence of my iPod and it's wide selection of Beatles songs. When in an environment as foreign as Japan, listening to something so familiar as music from home is an incredibly relaxing activity.

Something else I really need to get my hands on are quality chocolates in large amounts. Now I understand why the Japanese girls on my floor brought back so much candy from the US -- there's no cheap or good chocolate in Japan. No 1 lb. Hershey's bars with almonds or Snickers or Twix or truffles or Whitman's Samplers. Instead you can spend 3 dollars and get something akin to a small brown block, chock-full of the astringent flavor I call 'burning'. What the Japanese do have a good supply of is fruity type candies. You can tell they have an overwhelming preference for fruit over chocolate from the Pineapple Kit Kats which line convenience store shelves. They've also got lots of good gummy snacks etc. Unfortunately, I'm obsessed with chocolates and am left somewhat distraught without them. Yesterday, after classes got out I looked around local shops with Skip for a new dictionary to replace the one he had lost. As we were doing this I gained a need for chocolate, so I looked into various shops which looked like they would carry such amenables. Lo and behold, not a one had anything with chocolate in it. There were many snacks with red bean paste, which the Japanese love and I don't. There was even a store devoted to weird shrimp flavored crackers they served in paper cones, which was just weird. And at 5 bucks for a sundae at any regular restaurant, I was somewhat without reasonable options. Tomorrow, Skip and I are going with the Tonda Puppetpeople into Osaka, where I will hopefully find some amazingly large sack of truffles or petitfours or something to eat while studying and typing words along these lines.

If I keep up writing at length like this, I may need to make some journal archive page or something like that. What I should really do I set up an account with blogger. If anyone wants to catch me online to chat, the most likely time you will see me is from 1:30 - 3:00 AM EST. I get out of classes at 2ish over here (there's a cat meowrling outside my window right now) and usually sit down to check my email, upload this page, and see who's online. Conversely, if you'd like to avoid me those times will come in useful for you as well. I think I've written enough for today. I should have lots to say about Osaka and bullet trains and what not tomorrow evening. Then again I might be really tired and busy with the homework I'm putting off from today until tomorrow. Who knows. It's worth noting I've found a great supply of gifts of all kinds for all people. Now I just need to find a way of buying and transporting them home for to distribute them at a later date.

2003/06/06 - First week gone by, classes over for the day. Weekend = more puppet stuff. Gallery of a few pictures from the first week here.

2003/06/04 - Starting to get the hang of class. Still extra difficult. I should be studying more rather than typing this, but I need to do something else for a change. In response to requests for an explanation of where I am in Japan, I direct your attention to the image above. For a more detailed view, click on one of these words. I'll try to get some non-blurry pictures of Tondafolk in action this weekend. Apparently we're going to Osaka to see some sort of museum or something. I can't figure out a few of the kanji in the title, so I'm not entirely sure. Whatever it is it's going to take all day, thus making it difficult to prepare for next week. Lunch a couple of days ago was choconatsumeronpan + magurozushi, aka chocolate nuts melon bread + tuna sushi. Today was a ham sandwich and a bunch of riceballs. Skip's appetite for oolong tea has pushed our host-mom into getting several liters of it for us to carry in our water bottles. Oolongcha's not bad stuff, but tea doesn't really quench one's thirst like water. It's supposed to rain in a few days. Should be interesting to see how biking goes in that. I'm going to be so sick of Japan after this program ends that I won't be able to enjoy my last couple weeks by myself. I'm thinking of visiting Hiroshima and Nara in that time. One had a nuclear bomb dropped on it and the other has the largest wooden building in the world with the largest statue of Buddha inside, the Todaiji no Daibutsu (Big Buddha of Todai Temple). I've got a pretty strong farmer's tan going here too. I whipped up a Quicktime VR panorama of my room the day I got here, a week before now. It's an 8-mat room, which means it's about 4 meters across in both directions.

2003/06/02 - Busy weekend. Spent Saturday with the other UMass folk -- Hale, Brayton, and JCMU UMassfolk -- practicing Bunraku puppetry with the Tonda Ningyo Bunraku Troupe. It was more like hanging out acting silly. Sunday was allllll studying. Still didn't prepare me well enough for today. Level 4 is some hard stuff. If I can pull this off I'll have no difficulties in any Japanese language class ever again. Just need to learn enough grammar and kanji. 4 hours of classes interrupted by 1 hour of lunch on a grassy beach. Sushi and aburage. Yummy. Breakfast was half an orange, a thick slice of toast, and pineapple juice. Not sure how often I'll be able to update this page or if I'll even be able to organize my pictures well enough to put them online in any logical format. I've really got to spend all of my time studying to keep up with this. I can understand everything they're saying just fine, give or take a few nouns like 'syntactic structure'. The real problem I'm having is that I just can't find the words I need to explain myself in Japanese. I know them, but they hide in the back of my head when my mouth opens. That should come with time. They're going to be moving people around between levels over the next week, so hopefully they'll be understanding and will give me time to improve.

A typhoon came over the weekend. During the day on Saturday it was extra extra windy. So windy we couldn't stay on our bikes at times. Oh yeah, I'm getting better at riding bikes too. I should see if I can't set up a picture of me on a bike in some sort of pose to prove this. The routes we take to and from the train stations are really lovely, especially the first leg of the trip in the morning. We ride through lots of rice paddies and birds of all sorts appear from nowhere. At any rate, here's a picture of Japanese architecture to prove I'm really in Japan.

2003/05/30 - So I've been here a few days now and I'm just barely ready for what's to come when classes start next week. I didn't know how to ride a bike until a few weeks ago, and now I'm biking a couple hours everyday to commute to and from class. I'm still not sure what's a good route to get to and from school, so I leave extra early for now. We took the placement exam today to see which level we get to be in, and I managed level 4, the highest there is. Unlike the other levels, there's no textbook. Instead we get a packet of newspaper articles and essays to read and give our opinions on, in addition to watching videos in class and taking kanji quizzes. This also means I need to learn 400 more kanji by Monday to catch up to the 4 students in there other than Skip and myself. According to their test I can't speak, read, or write, but I understand grammar perfectly which makes up for all that or something. Woo.