So last night Louki and I went to the mochi party at the Nagoya University international dorm. On the way there, Itou-san regaled us with stories of when she went to Izumo Taisha (with her brother as a sort of college roadtrip) and managed to not stay in a hotel room...or pay for showers...or pay for food sometimes. Needless to say, there were extreme hijinks which involved bathing in rivers and sleeping in cars. Man, it makes my adventures seem so boring in comparison.
Anyway, we got to the mochi party where everyone from the Tomodachi no Kai (literally "the club of friends," but they host events for international students so they can practice their Japanese) was still setting up. We got to see a mochi machine in action! It is the craziest thing--sort of like a cross between a rice cooker and a bread machine. Basically, you throw your mochi rice in with water and once it has cooked, the machine starts spinning like a washing machine and the rice turns into mochi. CRAZY.
Also, as it turned out, they needed someone to make an announcement about the party over the dorm intercom in English, and Itou-san elected me to do it, so I got to announce the party. It was exciting.
Once the mochi was done, it was time to eat SO MUCH MOCHI. You have never seen so much mochi in your life. We had mochi with black sesame (definitely my favorite) and mochi with ground soy beans and mochi with red beans and mochi with grated daikon and mochi with spinach and fish flakes and mochi with cheese and seaweed (which is strangely delicious?). Oh, and one of the students from Laos brought some kind of excessively delicious soup that I might have been way too into.
Also, while eating the cheese-and-seaweed mochi, something went horribly wrong and Louki wound up with both her hands stuck to the mochi...which was also stuck to her mouth. The fact that she was laughing while trying to get unstuck wasn't really helping matters. Itou-san decided to be helpful by taking a picture.
Also, all the guys in the Tomodachi no Kai kept telling us, "Mochi has twice the rice of normal rice,* so don't eat too much or you'll get fat!" and all the women kept telling us to eat more. Clearly the women had their priorities straight.
As it turned out, most of the students from Nagoya U. who came speak absolutely no Japanese. (Literally no Japanese at all. I have no idea how they take classes, but maybe Nagoya U. offers them in English?) Some of the Tomodachi no Kai members speak English, but a lot of them speak very minimal English, so they were THRILLED OUT OF THEIR MINDS when they discovered that we could actually understand what they were saying. So a whole bunch of people came over to talk to me and Louki about a whole bunch of things, which was pretty cool.
...also there was this really awkward moment where this old guy asked if Louki and I were planning on getting Japanese boyfriends, and Louki (very sensibly) gave a very noncommittal answer while I said I already had a boyfriend. Then he told me that Japanese boys were cool. And I said I was sure that was so, but I kind of like my boyfriend 'cause he's pretty awesome. And then he told me that when I break up with my boyfriend I should let him know so he can hook me up with a Japanese guy. One of the older women overheard him and was horrified and told him he was horrible and made him apologize.
Yeah.
It was exciting?
There was also a guy who kept trying to convince Louki that Japan has significantly more equality than the Netherlands by citing the fact that less than half the population in the Netherlands is allowed to go to college. Except, of course, that's not true and we have no idea where he got this statistic from. (He appeared to believe that certain people are forced to become farmers because of their social class? Maybe he was confusing the Netherlands with the Edo period...)
The same guy tried to convince me that atheists don't exist.
It was an exciting conversation.
But I had a cool conversation with a Japanese woman who just finished up her master's at Nagoya U. in foreign language studies and with a bunch of older ladies who foisted food on me and with some Chinese master's students in engineering.
Also, this random guy called me cool? He said, "You strike me as the kind of person who, if a cockroach suddenly appeared, would calmly kill it while everyone else freaked out." Ahahahahaha. That's definitely not happened before.
So, yeah! It was fun! We ate SO MUCH MOCHI. And it was delicious. And we were invited back any time we like. Apparently they have activities every Thursday, so I might start going to those. It seems like a fun group, even if some of them are committed to seeing me with a Japanese guy.
I...I really don't know what to say about that.
Anyway, I am currently writing this post from a hotel room in Izumo! I took three trains (uggggh don't even talk to me about it) with my advisor and Torii-san (the only other girl in my advisor's seminar) to get here. It was about 8 hours in transit. UGGGGGH. There was some serious freaking out on the way (not on my part) 'cause there was no snow in Nagoya and then there was SO MUCH SNOW in Gifu and somehow my advisor heard that there was a foot of snow in Izumo and when we got to Tottori there was about a foot of snow and it was snowing and everybody (except for me) was freaking out everywhere...and then we got to Izumo and there was no snow at all and it's above freezing. LAME. I miss snow. Which is ironic because I've only really had one winter with proper snow. BUT WHATEVER.
Tomorrow we're going to see Izumo Taisha and also a museum related to Lafcadio Hearn...? And probably other things that I don't know about yet. But hopefully it will be exciting. Two of our other classmates are taking a night bus up, so we'll see how awake they are...
*I think they meant that because mochi is basically super compacted rice, it's twice as dense as normal rice...?
Showing posts with label zemi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zemi. Show all posts
Friday, January 27, 2012
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Who THOUght writING an ENTIre docuMEnt likE THIS was A gOOD iDEA?
I realized that I didn't talk about Ueno Tenmangu yet, so I should probably do that.
This past Saturday, due to a series of confusing circumstances which may or may not have had to do with it pouring rain on my fieldwork, I decided to go wandering around Nagoya. I wound up at Ueno Tenmangu.
One of the things the shrine sells is these little dolls, which come with a fortune rolled up inside. People apparently tie up their fortunes and then leave the dolls at the shrine. There are SO MANY DOLLS, as you will see shortly.
Also, these little guys all had acorn hats.
See all the multicolored dots on the statues? They're all dolls.
Here's the front of the main shrine building.
SO MANY DOLLS.
AND EVEN MORE.
Here's the shrine from a different angle.
These are gourds. They're a special charm that the shrine sells.
Ema for traffic safety.
If you can't read Japanese, on the back of the ema is the name of the requester (bottom line) and the car's license plate.
So that was a fun side excursion, even if I got kind of unpleasantly damp. I...still don't have an umbrella. I am kind of hoping that it will miraculous reappear so I don't have to spend money on a new one. Anyway, as it turns out, the head priest of Ueno Tenmangu is friends with one of the guys who works at the Nanzan Institute of Religious Studies, which means I have an in! Mwahahahaha.
On a side note, miso donuts are delicious, but don't really taste like miso. They make the underside of my tongue tingle, though, which I don't think is a normal reaction. I am eating a miso donut while typing this. That is your context. Yes.
So today I hiked over Gosha Shrine for penmanship class. (I need a better name for it, but that's...the literal translation.) This was what I worked on today:
I'm actually pretty proud of this one, except the bottom of the left side of the 5th character. Ew. I don't know what happened there.
Of course, this also took me about ten minutes to write, because I was trying so hard...
...I somehow managed to forget the date momentarily. It was amazing.
This is what a sheet with corrections looks like. (Circles represent "you did pretty okay here.") As you can probably tell, Nakano-san's corrections look better than my characters. Oh dear.
After class we had tea and marron youkan, which is a kind of jelly-block-thing made out of Spanish chestnuts. DELICIOUS. Also, lots of interesting discussion, some of which I will have to save for another time (and lots of anonymizing). We also talked about Kaminazuki, 'cause it's finally over. Kaminazuki (神無月) is another name for the month of October. If you read kanji, you know that it's literally "month without kami." Essentially, all the kami in Japan go to Izumo Shrine for a big meeting where they decide a bunch of important stuff for the coming year, including who's going to marry who. BUT, as Nakano-san pointed out, October is also when all the fall festivals occur. So why hold a festival for a kami who isn't there? We were trying to come up with explanations, but didn't come to a real conclusion. The best anyone could come up with was, "Maybe the kami have better concentration than humans and can concentrate on their own shrines while at the meeting." (Nakano-san made a face and said that they should be paying attention to the meeting.)
Also, as we were finishing our tea, the other women said that I should teach English as a part time job. (There was then much agreement that they would take English lessons from me.) I explained that I'm not allowed to have any part-time jobs while on Fulbright, and their first reaction was, "Well, you can just not tell anyone..." I tried to explain what a spectacularly bad idea that was, but then they had a better idea. "We can pay you...in FOOD!" So, to make a long story short, I'm going to be teaching English conversation to a group of women from the neighborhood on the 25th in exchange for lunch. I kind of adore teaching, so that'll be cool. Plus, it was decided that the conversation topic will be shrine-related stuff. So. It'll be exciting, at the very least?
In other news, THE SHINTO DIRECTIVE IS SO HARD TO READ. We had to read it aloud in class today, which would have killed me dead, except that I read better than some of the other students and even the Japanese students were struggling with it. There are several things that make it really hard to read:
1. It's written in an older form of Japanese. Thus, there's weird grammar all over the place.
2. It uses a lot of really weird kanji. Like 而して. If you have no idea what that means, it's しかして. Also, いかが has a kanji????
3. All the hiragana is katakana.*
If you want to try to read it, the full text is online here. Ow, my eyes.
...and now I should probably start heading toward bed. So tired.
*If you don't speak Japanese, here's a simple explanation:
There are three alphabets in Japanese: katakana, hiragana, and kanji. The first two are phonetic. You normally use hiragana to write the bits of words that aren't in kanji, but for some reason, the Shinto Directive is written so that all the hiragana is katakana. It looks really weird, and is really hard to read. ImaGINE IF you were READing a documeNT that lookED likE THIS. ExcePT it'S WOrse in JAPANese.
This past Saturday, due to a series of confusing circumstances which may or may not have had to do with it pouring rain on my fieldwork, I decided to go wandering around Nagoya. I wound up at Ueno Tenmangu.
One of the things the shrine sells is these little dolls, which come with a fortune rolled up inside. People apparently tie up their fortunes and then leave the dolls at the shrine. There are SO MANY DOLLS, as you will see shortly.
Also, these little guys all had acorn hats.
See all the multicolored dots on the statues? They're all dolls.
Here's the front of the main shrine building.
SO MANY DOLLS.
AND EVEN MORE.
Here's the shrine from a different angle.
These are gourds. They're a special charm that the shrine sells.
Ema for traffic safety.
If you can't read Japanese, on the back of the ema is the name of the requester (bottom line) and the car's license plate.
So that was a fun side excursion, even if I got kind of unpleasantly damp. I...still don't have an umbrella. I am kind of hoping that it will miraculous reappear so I don't have to spend money on a new one. Anyway, as it turns out, the head priest of Ueno Tenmangu is friends with one of the guys who works at the Nanzan Institute of Religious Studies, which means I have an in! Mwahahahaha.
On a side note, miso donuts are delicious, but don't really taste like miso. They make the underside of my tongue tingle, though, which I don't think is a normal reaction. I am eating a miso donut while typing this. That is your context. Yes.
So today I hiked over Gosha Shrine for penmanship class. (I need a better name for it, but that's...the literal translation.) This was what I worked on today:
I'm actually pretty proud of this one, except the bottom of the left side of the 5th character. Ew. I don't know what happened there.
Of course, this also took me about ten minutes to write, because I was trying so hard...
...I somehow managed to forget the date momentarily. It was amazing.
This is what a sheet with corrections looks like. (Circles represent "you did pretty okay here.") As you can probably tell, Nakano-san's corrections look better than my characters. Oh dear.
After class we had tea and marron youkan, which is a kind of jelly-block-thing made out of Spanish chestnuts. DELICIOUS. Also, lots of interesting discussion, some of which I will have to save for another time (and lots of anonymizing). We also talked about Kaminazuki, 'cause it's finally over. Kaminazuki (神無月) is another name for the month of October. If you read kanji, you know that it's literally "month without kami." Essentially, all the kami in Japan go to Izumo Shrine for a big meeting where they decide a bunch of important stuff for the coming year, including who's going to marry who. BUT, as Nakano-san pointed out, October is also when all the fall festivals occur. So why hold a festival for a kami who isn't there? We were trying to come up with explanations, but didn't come to a real conclusion. The best anyone could come up with was, "Maybe the kami have better concentration than humans and can concentrate on their own shrines while at the meeting." (Nakano-san made a face and said that they should be paying attention to the meeting.)
Also, as we were finishing our tea, the other women said that I should teach English as a part time job. (There was then much agreement that they would take English lessons from me.) I explained that I'm not allowed to have any part-time jobs while on Fulbright, and their first reaction was, "Well, you can just not tell anyone..." I tried to explain what a spectacularly bad idea that was, but then they had a better idea. "We can pay you...in FOOD!" So, to make a long story short, I'm going to be teaching English conversation to a group of women from the neighborhood on the 25th in exchange for lunch. I kind of adore teaching, so that'll be cool. Plus, it was decided that the conversation topic will be shrine-related stuff. So. It'll be exciting, at the very least?
In other news, THE SHINTO DIRECTIVE IS SO HARD TO READ. We had to read it aloud in class today, which would have killed me dead, except that I read better than some of the other students and even the Japanese students were struggling with it. There are several things that make it really hard to read:
1. It's written in an older form of Japanese. Thus, there's weird grammar all over the place.
2. It uses a lot of really weird kanji. Like 而して. If you have no idea what that means, it's しかして. Also, いかが has a kanji????
3. All the hiragana is katakana.*
If you want to try to read it, the full text is online here. Ow, my eyes.
...and now I should probably start heading toward bed. So tired.
*If you don't speak Japanese, here's a simple explanation:
There are three alphabets in Japanese: katakana, hiragana, and kanji. The first two are phonetic. You normally use hiragana to write the bits of words that aren't in kanji, but for some reason, the Shinto Directive is written so that all the hiragana is katakana. It looks really weird, and is really hard to read. ImaGINE IF you were READing a documeNT that lookED likE THIS. ExcePT it'S WOrse in JAPANese.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
In which I slay centipedes in pitched combat
So last night we had a meeting about the Halloween party...where I discovered that despite volunteering to work security, The Powers That Be decided that all the people who volunteered for security had also secretly volunteered to work publicity. Now, I think this is frankly ridiculous and also rude (being told "well, your name's on this list and we wrote 'publicity' on the top next to 'security,' so you have to do XYZ" was extremely unpleasant), but apparently The Powers That Be weren't interested in listening to our (that is, the foreign students who suddenly found themselves doing double duty's) arguments, or, in fact, in listening to us at all. I basically sat there for an hour while being entirely excluded from the decision-making process and then being told that I would have to hand out flyers on campus during the lunch hour.
Needless to say, this did not go down well with me, and there shall be a reckoning. I learned how to complain in Japanese, and darn it, I am going to find the guy in charge of organizing the party and use those set phrases.
The only highlight of the meeting was that at one point a centipede meandered into the room, everyone freaked out (apparently they're really dangerous? And a quick Google search tells me that, yes, they are really dangerous) and screamed and ran, and I beat it to death with a book. Then it resurrected as zombie centipede (apparently centipedes are about as easy to kill as cockroaches) and I stomped on it until it was sufficiently gooey for someone to pick it up with a tissue and throw it in the trash can.
...so probably half the dorm now thinks I'm That Crazy American Girl Who Beats Centipedes to Death with The Scarlet Pimpernel, but I got a bunch of random high-fives (all from guys who looked completely awestruck)? Yeah.
Maybe this is why I have no friends.
Today I had to get an x-ray taken for some reason (it's required of all students at Nanzan), and I discovered that Japanese women wear SO MANY LAYERS. We had to strip down to wearing only a t-shirt, and I removed two articles of clothing whereas the Japanese woman next to me removed about seven, not even kidding. Then again, she was wearing three shirts (!!!) plus two jacket-like objects. It seems to be in fashion to layer the heck out of your clothing, but I think I would probably die of heatstroke if I tried it. (Then again, according to the students in my Japanese class, I am impervious to cold, because I wasn't wearing a jacket when the rest of them were wearing at least one. This prompted the question, "Is California really, really cold?" to which I replied that it was, in fact, not.)
Then I had my professor's seminar...where I discovered that I had bought and read the first chapter of the wrong book. To be fair, the two book titles are almost exactly the same (literally, it's a one word difference), the publisher is the same, the cover is the same, and when you input the title of the book we were supposed to buy into Amazon.jp, it redirects to the book I actually bought. Still, I feel extraordinarily stupid. Thankfully, nobody else realized my mistake, because I apparently already know all the material covered in the chapter we were supposed to read. It was kind of amusing, actually, watching everyone's minds be blown by the idea that "Shinto" is a relatively modern term, and what we consider "Shinto" today didn't exist several centuries ago.* (Plus, I got to explain what syncretism is, because apparently the other students didn't know what 神仏習合 meant. )
In other news, 生チョコサンドメロンパン. It is. DELICIOUS. It's probably full of Death and Terror and Things That Will Destroy My Liver, but SO DELICIOUS. It's basically chocolate melon bread (does not contain actual melons; it is named melon bread because of its shape) with some sort of vanilla and chocolate cream inside.
And on a final note, if you mix soft tofu and egg together in stir fry, it looks like vomit but tastes like OM NOM NOM.
*I will write a post about this...eventually. But not now.
Needless to say, this did not go down well with me, and there shall be a reckoning. I learned how to complain in Japanese, and darn it, I am going to find the guy in charge of organizing the party and use those set phrases.
The only highlight of the meeting was that at one point a centipede meandered into the room, everyone freaked out (apparently they're really dangerous? And a quick Google search tells me that, yes, they are really dangerous) and screamed and ran, and I beat it to death with a book. Then it resurrected as zombie centipede (apparently centipedes are about as easy to kill as cockroaches) and I stomped on it until it was sufficiently gooey for someone to pick it up with a tissue and throw it in the trash can.
...so probably half the dorm now thinks I'm That Crazy American Girl Who Beats Centipedes to Death with The Scarlet Pimpernel, but I got a bunch of random high-fives (all from guys who looked completely awestruck)? Yeah.
Maybe this is why I have no friends.
Today I had to get an x-ray taken for some reason (it's required of all students at Nanzan), and I discovered that Japanese women wear SO MANY LAYERS. We had to strip down to wearing only a t-shirt, and I removed two articles of clothing whereas the Japanese woman next to me removed about seven, not even kidding. Then again, she was wearing three shirts (!!!) plus two jacket-like objects. It seems to be in fashion to layer the heck out of your clothing, but I think I would probably die of heatstroke if I tried it. (Then again, according to the students in my Japanese class, I am impervious to cold, because I wasn't wearing a jacket when the rest of them were wearing at least one. This prompted the question, "Is California really, really cold?" to which I replied that it was, in fact, not.)
Then I had my professor's seminar...where I discovered that I had bought and read the first chapter of the wrong book. To be fair, the two book titles are almost exactly the same (literally, it's a one word difference), the publisher is the same, the cover is the same, and when you input the title of the book we were supposed to buy into Amazon.jp, it redirects to the book I actually bought. Still, I feel extraordinarily stupid. Thankfully, nobody else realized my mistake, because I apparently already know all the material covered in the chapter we were supposed to read. It was kind of amusing, actually, watching everyone's minds be blown by the idea that "Shinto" is a relatively modern term, and what we consider "Shinto" today didn't exist several centuries ago.* (Plus, I got to explain what syncretism is, because apparently the other students didn't know what 神仏習合 meant. )
In other news, 生チョコサンドメロンパン. It is. DELICIOUS. It's probably full of Death and Terror and Things That Will Destroy My Liver, but SO DELICIOUS. It's basically chocolate melon bread (does not contain actual melons; it is named melon bread because of its shape) with some sort of vanilla and chocolate cream inside.
And on a final note, if you mix soft tofu and egg together in stir fry, it looks like vomit but tastes like OM NOM NOM.
*I will write a post about this...eventually. But not now.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Too much reading
I have to read 61 pages for my seminar before next week.
Did I mention that a page can take me up to 30 minutes to read?
GAH.
In happier news, Japanese class continues to be awesome. We practiced reading kanji today, and I could read most of them, so yay for that. Also, chocolate-covered potato chips are weirdly delicious? I mean, I don't particularly care for potato chips, but cover them in chocolate and they are suddenly brilliant.
...in other news, our colander has gone missing and I managed to scald most of my fingers while trying to drain my soumen without a colander. Thus, typing is kind of painful.
So tired.
Should sleep.
Did I mention that a page can take me up to 30 minutes to read?
GAH.
In happier news, Japanese class continues to be awesome. We practiced reading kanji today, and I could read most of them, so yay for that. Also, chocolate-covered potato chips are weirdly delicious? I mean, I don't particularly care for potato chips, but cover them in chocolate and they are suddenly brilliant.
...in other news, our colander has gone missing and I managed to scald most of my fingers while trying to drain my soumen without a colander. Thus, typing is kind of painful.
So tired.
Should sleep.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
台風が来た！D:
To say the weather has been miserable would be an insult to miserable weather. A typhoon hit us last night, and we've had torrential rain* since then. It's supposed to clear up by Thursday, but right now walking outside is sort of like having someone dump buckets of water over your head while wading through a river.
That might explain why there was no one else there when I went to apply for my Alien Registration Card (ARC) this morning...either that, or I was up so early that no one else in their right mind would want to go at that hour. (9:30 isn't that early...is it? I've been waking up at 6:30 or 7 every morning, so it seems pretty late to me...) So instead of taking Hours and Hours (as some people said it would), it only took about twenty minutes. And most of that time was waiting for them to issue me my temporary card certificate. Plus it wasn't anywhere near as difficult as people were making it out to be; a lot of people told me I should go with an interpreter, and Makino-san (the woman in international student services who has been helping me out) said I should only go alone if I wanted "a challenge." I also tried to enroll in the National Healthcare Program, but apparently a post card was sent to my dorm with information, and I need to wait until it arrives? I'll be heading back to the ward office to pick up my real ARC in a couple of weeks anyway, so it's not a big deal.
After that, I went over to international student services to turn in my form to get an inkan (name seal) and to pay my rent. They have a really strange rent-paying system where you buy tickets from a machine and then turn those in to the student services office.
On a slightly related note, I have so many problems with money in Japanese. Not in the normal "problems with money" sense (I'm incredibly reluctant to ever spend money, and probably will be until the day I die), but rather in the "YOU ARE SAYING NUMBERS TO ME AUUUGH WHAT DO I DO?" sense. Of course, Japanese doesn't have the easiest numbering system to begin with. In English we count things in groups of three zeros: you have thousands, and then when you have a thousand thousands you have a million, and then when you have a thousand millions you have a billion and so on. Well, SOMEBODY decided that in Japanese they would count things in groups of four zeros: you have ten thousands (man), and when you have ten thousand ten thousands you have a different number (oku...which is...100,000,000...one hundred million, I guess?) and so on and so forth. So 1,000,000 is "one million" in English but "one hundred ten thousands" in Japanese. To further confuse matters, the best way to mentally change yen into dollars is to lop two zeros off the end.** So if someone asks you for "one ten thousand seven thousand eight hundred fifty yen" in Japanese, you have to first mentally convert the number into something you can actually picture (17850) and then stick a decimal point before the last two numbers (178.50). Moral of the story: JAPANESE NUMBERS LARGER THAN 9,999 CONFUSE ME TO NO END. And that's very unfortunate, since my rent is all in ten thousands. I almost accidentally paid 1400円 instead of 14000円. YIKES. Good thing I stopped to double-check the zeroes.
So after my adventures with paperwork, I waded (literally waded; the water was over my ankles) to my professor's seminar, which turned out to be a graduate-level course. There are four other people in the class, two in their second year of graduate school and one in her third. (The last guy is in seminary, I believe, and is going to Rome in March?) We had gotten about fifteen minutes into the class (and I was just about to introduce myself) when an announcement came over the P.A. saying that class was cancelled because of the typhoon. Yikes! So we had to leave the school, and we won't be meeting again until next week. From what little I have seen of the class, everyone has significantly better Japanese than I do (there are two Filipino students and two Japanese students) and knows more about Christianity than I do, but I knew how to read 仏 (the kanji for "Buddha"; it's read "hotoke") and the Filipino students didn't. Small victories, I guess. I'm sure I'll learn a lot from all of them, and hopefully they won't think I'm too overwhelmingly pathetic.
So because classes were cancelled, I went down to the common room for the dorm and started reading the assigned article for my advisor's seminar. It's called "What Is Shinto?" (「神道は何か？」) and although I have to look up 1 word in 20 (my academic Japanese is somewhat lacking, especially since I don't use terms like "sublime" and "ten thousand volumes of doctrine" all that often), I am understanding it perfectly, which, I think, is pretty much amazing. Of course, I spent the last year reading about Shinto obsessively, so maybe it's not that amazing. But the fact that I can read an academic article for a graduate-level course in Japanese? That's something worth celebrating, I think.
...and then my friend in Niigata emailed me, because apparently the U.S. Embassy sent out a warning about the typhoon??? (But I didn't get it for some reason, even though I'm signed up for their emergency alerts... Hrrrm.) Apparently sections of Nagoya are being evacuated. And the international students who live outside of the Nanzan area are being allowed to stay at our dorm tonight, because it's too dangerous for them to try to go home. And classes might be cancelled tomorrow too. Basically, it's crazy, but DON'T FREAK OUT, MOM AND DAD. I'm fine. And I will continue to be fine, as long as I don't do something stupid, like try to climb a mountain or go hang-gliding.
Last thing! I stand corrected in regards to the comment I made earlier regarding tying up wishes. You do do it in Japan (I've even done it)! You tie wishes to bamboo for Tanabata, but since it's not normally done at shrines (a lot of stores set up bamboo outside, so you most commonly see Tanabata wishes in shopping districts) it totally slipped my mind. So thanks to my mum for having a way better memory than I do.
*Unfortunately I cannot use my favorite Japanese word here (ゲリラ豪雨; guerrilla downpour) because the typhoon was expected, but I AM USING IT IN A FOOTNOTE, OH HO.
**This is no longer true, since the exchange rate SUCKS (74 yen to the dollar, last I checked), but I still do it just to get a ballpark figure.
(These pictures are from about noon, before it started getting bad.)
That might explain why there was no one else there when I went to apply for my Alien Registration Card (ARC) this morning...either that, or I was up so early that no one else in their right mind would want to go at that hour. (9:30 isn't that early...is it? I've been waking up at 6:30 or 7 every morning, so it seems pretty late to me...) So instead of taking Hours and Hours (as some people said it would), it only took about twenty minutes. And most of that time was waiting for them to issue me my temporary card certificate. Plus it wasn't anywhere near as difficult as people were making it out to be; a lot of people told me I should go with an interpreter, and Makino-san (the woman in international student services who has been helping me out) said I should only go alone if I wanted "a challenge." I also tried to enroll in the National Healthcare Program, but apparently a post card was sent to my dorm with information, and I need to wait until it arrives? I'll be heading back to the ward office to pick up my real ARC in a couple of weeks anyway, so it's not a big deal.
After that, I went over to international student services to turn in my form to get an inkan (name seal) and to pay my rent. They have a really strange rent-paying system where you buy tickets from a machine and then turn those in to the student services office.
On a slightly related note, I have so many problems with money in Japanese. Not in the normal "problems with money" sense (I'm incredibly reluctant to ever spend money, and probably will be until the day I die), but rather in the "YOU ARE SAYING NUMBERS TO ME AUUUGH WHAT DO I DO?" sense. Of course, Japanese doesn't have the easiest numbering system to begin with. In English we count things in groups of three zeros: you have thousands, and then when you have a thousand thousands you have a million, and then when you have a thousand millions you have a billion and so on. Well, SOMEBODY decided that in Japanese they would count things in groups of four zeros: you have ten thousands (man), and when you have ten thousand ten thousands you have a different number (oku...which is...100,000,000...one hundred million, I guess?) and so on and so forth. So 1,000,000 is "one million" in English but "one hundred ten thousands" in Japanese. To further confuse matters, the best way to mentally change yen into dollars is to lop two zeros off the end.** So if someone asks you for "one ten thousand seven thousand eight hundred fifty yen" in Japanese, you have to first mentally convert the number into something you can actually picture (17850) and then stick a decimal point before the last two numbers (178.50). Moral of the story: JAPANESE NUMBERS LARGER THAN 9,999 CONFUSE ME TO NO END. And that's very unfortunate, since my rent is all in ten thousands. I almost accidentally paid 1400円 instead of 14000円. YIKES. Good thing I stopped to double-check the zeroes.
So after my adventures with paperwork, I waded (literally waded; the water was over my ankles) to my professor's seminar, which turned out to be a graduate-level course. There are four other people in the class, two in their second year of graduate school and one in her third. (The last guy is in seminary, I believe, and is going to Rome in March?) We had gotten about fifteen minutes into the class (and I was just about to introduce myself) when an announcement came over the P.A. saying that class was cancelled because of the typhoon. Yikes! So we had to leave the school, and we won't be meeting again until next week. From what little I have seen of the class, everyone has significantly better Japanese than I do (there are two Filipino students and two Japanese students) and knows more about Christianity than I do, but I knew how to read 仏 (the kanji for "Buddha"; it's read "hotoke") and the Filipino students didn't. Small victories, I guess. I'm sure I'll learn a lot from all of them, and hopefully they won't think I'm too overwhelmingly pathetic.
So because classes were cancelled, I went down to the common room for the dorm and started reading the assigned article for my advisor's seminar. It's called "What Is Shinto?" (「神道は何か？」) and although I have to look up 1 word in 20 (my academic Japanese is somewhat lacking, especially since I don't use terms like "sublime" and "ten thousand volumes of doctrine" all that often), I am understanding it perfectly, which, I think, is pretty much amazing. Of course, I spent the last year reading about Shinto obsessively, so maybe it's not that amazing. But the fact that I can read an academic article for a graduate-level course in Japanese? That's something worth celebrating, I think.
...and then my friend in Niigata emailed me, because apparently the U.S. Embassy sent out a warning about the typhoon??? (But I didn't get it for some reason, even though I'm signed up for their emergency alerts... Hrrrm.) Apparently sections of Nagoya are being evacuated. And the international students who live outside of the Nanzan area are being allowed to stay at our dorm tonight, because it's too dangerous for them to try to go home. And classes might be cancelled tomorrow too. Basically, it's crazy, but DON'T FREAK OUT, MOM AND DAD. I'm fine. And I will continue to be fine, as long as I don't do something stupid, like try to climb a mountain or go hang-gliding.
Last thing! I stand corrected in regards to the comment I made earlier regarding tying up wishes. You do do it in Japan (I've even done it)! You tie wishes to bamboo for Tanabata, but since it's not normally done at shrines (a lot of stores set up bamboo outside, so you most commonly see Tanabata wishes in shopping districts) it totally slipped my mind. So thanks to my mum for having a way better memory than I do.
*Unfortunately I cannot use my favorite Japanese word here (ゲリラ豪雨; guerrilla downpour) because the typhoon was expected, but I AM USING IT IN A FOOTNOTE, OH HO.
**This is no longer true, since the exchange rate SUCKS (74 yen to the dollar, last I checked), but I still do it just to get a ballpark figure.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Orientation Day 1
I woke up at 3:30 a.m.
Yeahhhhhhhhh. I tried to go back to sleep for about an hour and a half, but that failed, so I just got up really early. I am surprised I haven't crashed yet. I don't know why my brain decided that now would be a great time to run on 6 hours of sleep, but I completely disagree with its decision.
We (that is, all the Fulbrighters) ate breakfast* this morning, and then took the subway together over to the JUSEC (Japan-U.S. Educational Commission) offices for the first day of orientation. It was basically a everyone's-gonna-talk-at-you-about-great-things-ahead day. We were told very politely that we were incredibly privileged to have this opportunity and we will be attacked by man-eating monkeys if we waste it. (Okay, not that exact phrasing, but pretty close.) And then we had a guy come talk at us about the Japanese educational system for about an hour. It would have been interesting if I didn't already know pretty much all the information, and if he didn't speak in a monotone. He did talk about zemi,** though, which was strangely ironic, considering what happened later.
For lunch we had a bunch of sandwiches that no one could figure out what was in them (including the woman who had bought them), and then we heard about the Fulbright alumni groups (which we're probably going to have to do presentations for, eek) and then we got OUR MONEY. I will be incredibly relieved when I have a bank account.
I also bought a shinkansen (bullet train) ticket for Saturday. It turned out to be about $100, which is what I thought it would be in the first place but twice would Google said it would be. So I now know not to trust Google. GEEZ, GOOGLE. Next you're going to tell me that solid-gold train doesn't exist!
So then this evening we went to a reception/dinner sort of thing hosted at the house of the current Minister of the Embassy of the United States of America. I met my advisor there, and it was not as terrifying I feared it would be. However, within about three minutes of my introducing myself, my advisor informed me that I would be attending his zemi and THEN asked me if I could read Japanese. (I'm somewhat terrified to consider what he would have done if I had said no.) He also said he would introduce me at the local shrines. So, pretty much, he's awesome and I managed not to fall over myself. Yay! And then I spent the rest of the evening talking to cool graduate students about their projects, and also hearing about amputating the fins off of zebrafish from one of the girls working on stem cell research (there are two of them total; what are the chances?).
Tomorrow is day two of orientation, and we're going to learn actually useful stuff, like how to set up a bank account. So that'll be helpful.
Can I take a moment here to complain about the weather? 'cause, good grief, I had forgotten how horrible humidity is. I feel like I need a bath if I've been outside for more than fifteen seconds. Blech.
Also, all the other Fulbright grantees are so accomplished, I feel kind of lame next to them. One guy already has two articles published...in completely different fields. And almost everyone has already spent at least a year in Japan, and has a way bigger academic network than I do. They can do the academic talk thing too, while I mostly know a lot about sketchy internet websites. Oh, and Ian Reader. I've read a lot of stuff by Ian Reader.
The only place where I actually stand out (other than age) is that my Japanese is a lot better than most of theirs. We had to take a taxi over to the reception, and I wound up doing all the talking to the taxi driver, because the other two girls I was riding with couldn't understand anything he was saying. Then again, I also think I'm a lot more willing to try to speak Japanese than some people. I have done the whole sound-stupid-and-stumble-over-words-to-get-the-point-across thing, and I'm really okay with sounding stupid if it means that my Japanese improves. So that was why I was speaking 75% Japanese, 25% English with my advisor, and the other girls were speaking entirely English. I dunno. Maybe I'm just more willing to make a fool of myself.
In response to questions from last blog:
No, there is no concept of sarcasm in Japanese. There isn't even a word for sarcasm; you have to use the same word as "irony." One of my Japanese friends asked me to try to be sarcastic in Japanese once, and I couldn't do it. Sarcastic Japanese just sounds really confused.
And, no, I only ever call myself a gaijin ironically.
And now I'm going to collapse toward bed. Good night!
*Japanese breakfasts are so excellent. I have waxed poetic about them many times before, but they are basically the greatest thing in the woooorld. So many Japanese pickles, rice, miso soup, roasted fish, a fresh-baked roll and grapefruit juice--what more could you want?
**Zemi is the shortened Japanese version of "seminar." It's basically a discussion class led by a professor which can last anywhere from a semester to four years. A lot of the time, it's an invaluable networking opportunity, and the professor takes on the role of advisor/counselor/parent figure/employment finder/matchmaker. Also, a lot of the time, professors get to pick which students they take into their zemi, so being picked for one is a huge honor.
Yeahhhhhhhhh. I tried to go back to sleep for about an hour and a half, but that failed, so I just got up really early. I am surprised I haven't crashed yet. I don't know why my brain decided that now would be a great time to run on 6 hours of sleep, but I completely disagree with its decision.
We (that is, all the Fulbrighters) ate breakfast* this morning, and then took the subway together over to the JUSEC (Japan-U.S. Educational Commission) offices for the first day of orientation. It was basically a everyone's-gonna-talk-at-you-about-great-things-ahead day. We were told very politely that we were incredibly privileged to have this opportunity and we will be attacked by man-eating monkeys if we waste it. (Okay, not that exact phrasing, but pretty close.) And then we had a guy come talk at us about the Japanese educational system for about an hour. It would have been interesting if I didn't already know pretty much all the information, and if he didn't speak in a monotone. He did talk about zemi,** though, which was strangely ironic, considering what happened later.
For lunch we had a bunch of sandwiches that no one could figure out what was in them (including the woman who had bought them), and then we heard about the Fulbright alumni groups (which we're probably going to have to do presentations for, eek) and then we got OUR MONEY. I will be incredibly relieved when I have a bank account.
I also bought a shinkansen (bullet train) ticket for Saturday. It turned out to be about $100, which is what I thought it would be in the first place but twice would Google said it would be. So I now know not to trust Google. GEEZ, GOOGLE. Next you're going to tell me that solid-gold train doesn't exist!
So then this evening we went to a reception/dinner sort of thing hosted at the house of the current Minister of the Embassy of the United States of America. I met my advisor there, and it was not as terrifying I feared it would be. However, within about three minutes of my introducing myself, my advisor informed me that I would be attending his zemi and THEN asked me if I could read Japanese. (I'm somewhat terrified to consider what he would have done if I had said no.) He also said he would introduce me at the local shrines. So, pretty much, he's awesome and I managed not to fall over myself. Yay! And then I spent the rest of the evening talking to cool graduate students about their projects, and also hearing about amputating the fins off of zebrafish from one of the girls working on stem cell research (there are two of them total; what are the chances?).
Tomorrow is day two of orientation, and we're going to learn actually useful stuff, like how to set up a bank account. So that'll be helpful.
Can I take a moment here to complain about the weather? 'cause, good grief, I had forgotten how horrible humidity is. I feel like I need a bath if I've been outside for more than fifteen seconds. Blech.
Also, all the other Fulbright grantees are so accomplished, I feel kind of lame next to them. One guy already has two articles published...in completely different fields. And almost everyone has already spent at least a year in Japan, and has a way bigger academic network than I do. They can do the academic talk thing too, while I mostly know a lot about sketchy internet websites. Oh, and Ian Reader. I've read a lot of stuff by Ian Reader.
The only place where I actually stand out (other than age) is that my Japanese is a lot better than most of theirs. We had to take a taxi over to the reception, and I wound up doing all the talking to the taxi driver, because the other two girls I was riding with couldn't understand anything he was saying. Then again, I also think I'm a lot more willing to try to speak Japanese than some people. I have done the whole sound-stupid-and-stumble-over-words-to-get-the-point-across thing, and I'm really okay with sounding stupid if it means that my Japanese improves. So that was why I was speaking 75% Japanese, 25% English with my advisor, and the other girls were speaking entirely English. I dunno. Maybe I'm just more willing to make a fool of myself.
In response to questions from last blog:
No, there is no concept of sarcasm in Japanese. There isn't even a word for sarcasm; you have to use the same word as "irony." One of my Japanese friends asked me to try to be sarcastic in Japanese once, and I couldn't do it. Sarcastic Japanese just sounds really confused.
And, no, I only ever call myself a gaijin ironically.
And now I'm going to collapse toward bed. Good night!
*Japanese breakfasts are so excellent. I have waxed poetic about them many times before, but they are basically the greatest thing in the woooorld. So many Japanese pickles, rice, miso soup, roasted fish, a fresh-baked roll and grapefruit juice--what more could you want?
**Zemi is the shortened Japanese version of "seminar." It's basically a discussion class led by a professor which can last anywhere from a semester to four years. A lot of the time, it's an invaluable networking opportunity, and the professor takes on the role of advisor/counselor/parent figure/employment finder/matchmaker. Also, a lot of the time, professors get to pick which students they take into their zemi, so being picked for one is a huge honor.
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