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.

Aw, cool, blogger is in Japanese now, 'cause I'm in JAPAN

Sometime in the middle of last night it struck me exactly how terrifying what I’m doing is.  I’m moving to a foreign country for a year, and I’ve never even lived on my own before, not really.  Needless to say, not a whole lot of good sleeping went on, which means that I am writing this while REALLY TIRED.  Please forgive grammars and typos.

So I took a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo this morning.  Despite hearing stories about how much better Japanese airline food is than American airline food, I cannot say that I found this to be the case.  Yes, the dinner was almost entirely edible, but I could not bring myself to eat more than the fruit from the breakfast.  Of course, it probably helps that air travel makes me horribly queasy, and stress makes me queasy as well, so I was just a queasy factory.  YAY.

I spent a while watching X-Men: First Class with Japanese subtitles, which was exciting.  I’ve watched American movies dubbed into Japanese before, but never subbed.  Japanese subtitles are very strange, in that they will turn three lines into half a sentence.  And sometimes they’ll completely change what people are saying.  Like this (actual example from the movie):

The English dialog:

Charles: Are you ready?

Eric: Let’s find out.

The Japanese subtitles:

Charles: 大丈夫か? (Alright?)

Eric: ああ.  (Yes.)

Not a huge change, but the English dialog says way more about the characters.  They also cut pretty much all the snarky lines (although that’s mildly understandable, because there’s no concept of sarcasm in Japanese) and the fast-talking nerd humor.  Ah well.  It probably has something to do with how quickly you can read in Japanese, but then again, I read really slowly and I didn’t really have a problem reading the subtitles.

[/X-Men nerd out]

I also read Fahrenheit 451, which I have had on my shelf for about two years now and only just worked up the courage to read.  I was wincing through most of it (BURNING BOOKS AUGH IT HURTS MY SOUL), but Bradbury is such a good writer, his prose just kind of blows me away.  MUST READ MORE OF HIS STUFF.

...and then I landed and stuff got pretty lame.  So, first of all, being sleep deprived means that my motor functions start dying.  So useless things like hand-eye coordination go out the window, as do my abilities to judge distance (which are already sketchy at best).  So first I managed to fail at steering my baggage cart a lot, and then I managed to drop all the money I changed on the floor.  Fortunately, a really nice girl helped me pick all of it up...and then it turned out she was another Fulbright grantee.  Awesome times.  Except for, you know, the part where I kept dropping money as fast as I picked it up.

...and then I went to get the baggage delivery worked out and discovered you can't do takuhaibin (home delivery) without a telephone number!  Of course, the folks at my dorm didn't bother to mention this...or to give me a phone number to contact them...so I paid $8 for internet and looked up a friend's phone number to write down instead.  Of course, she's in Kyushu and won't be any help if they're trying to deliver baggage, but I'm going to friggin' hope they don't call that number.  (They said they could write down a friend's number...  They didn't specify which friend...  I AM JUST A DUMB GAIJIN; IT'S NOT MY FAULT.)

And then I couldn't figure out which bus I was supposed to take, but the nice lady behind the bus counter pointed me toward it and I ran like the dickens to catch it.  And then I met up with three other Fulbright grantees and we talked on the bus.  And then, to add further insult to injury, I managed to somehow lose my baggage claim slip, so I had to stay afterwards and hand over my passport to prove to the bus driver that I wasn't trying to steal my own suitcase.  AUGH.

But I finally managed to get to the hotel room, and went to the convenience store with a bunch of other Fulbrighters to buy onigiri and STRAIGHT TEA (oh, how I have missed straight tea).*  And then we hung out and ate onigiri and tried to figure out what was in mine (one of them definitely had wasabi and the other had some kind of ginger).**

You know how your eyeballs start feeling like someone’s been rubbing them with paper towels or something after you’ve been on airplanes for a while?  Yeahhhh.  Mine have been feeling like that all day.  I think it's time for me to sleep.  For reals.

Orientation starts tomorrow morning.  Hopefully it'll be pretty okay.

*Straight tea is kind of like normal black tea with sugar, except it's not grossly sweet like most sugared teas are, and is a lot lighter than most black teas.  Basically, it is everything you could want in a tea that is not prickly pear tea.

**It was 生姜のうま煮, which I assume is some kind of cooking technique and has nothing to do with horses.  Then again, I could be really wrong.

Leaving in the morning

I give you an incredibly exciting picture of my half-packed suitcases from this afternoon (they are now entirely packed).

(You can also see my incredibly packed bookcase and the pile of books that don't fit on my bookcase.  Yay!)

P.S. This picture thing was mostly to test that I can upload photos from my camera to my computer, thanks to my handy-dandy turn-an-XD-card-into-something-you-can-actually-read converter.

I'll be leaving for Japan tomorrow (well, actually, today, now that it's after midnight) morning, so I probably won't have internet (or sanity) for a while.  I'll post as soon as I have internet (which will hopefully be at the hotel in Tokyo), but I may be horribly jet-lagged and not make any sense.  So consider yourselves warned.

I should probably sleep, but instead I will double check that I actually packed the things I'm supposed to pack.  Hurrah.

Researching =/= converting to, I actually do some research before showing up, and other miscellaneous goodies

Loooong post, most of which isn't important, unless you like reading about Random Shrines.

But first, kind of ranty bit ahoy; you can skip ahead if you are bored by my rationalizing things:

So apparently certain people assume that because I am researching Shinto, I must be converting to it.  I think this is a kind of odd assumption for a couple of reasons:
1. You can't actually convert to Shinto.  You just do it or you don't do it.  It would be like converting to Halloween or converting to Labor Day barbecues.
2. I could be studying the ideology of Hitler without people assuming I am a Nazi, but apparently studying religion falls in an entirely different realm than studying political science or philosophy.  People (and these are mostly people from an older generation than mine, I have found) assume that for you to be interested in a religion, you must believe in it.  But the thing that fascinates me about Shinto is not actually the doctrine (or lack thereof, because, let's be honest, there is no real shared doctrine), but how people think about it and react to it and integrate it into their lives.
So, no, I am not converting to Shinto.  You don't need to tell me about all the horrible things people have done in Shinto's name (I already know about them, because I wrote a thesis about it) or awkwardly ask me how I feel about Shinto or try to convert me to a different religion instead.  You also don't need to tell me about how terrible Japan is for women or about the Japanese war atrocities or about your terrible experiences with drunken Japanese businessmen.  I am marrying neither Japan nor Shinto, and I do not believe either to be entirely faultless.  I am studying Shinto because it is interesting and I am studying in Japan because I happen to speak Japanese and also it is pretty hard to do fieldwork on Shinto outside of Japan.  Oh, and also my experiences in Japan have been overwhelmingly positive up to this point.  That helps too.

[/ranty bit]

In related news, I am attempting to draw a dorky-finger-puppet-version of the history of Shinto.  It seems like a good way to get my younger brother to remember what I'm studying in Japan.

In other news, I am actually doing research before I show up!  Yay!  My advisor sent me a bunch of websites for shrines in the Nagoya area, so I am looking at them and trying to compile information on them.  Unfortunately, shrine websites are notoriously difficult to read, because they are A. horribly difficult to navigate (it took me five minutes to figure out how to get to a different page on Atsuta Shrine's website) and B. written in kanji I don't know.
So I am using The Internets and Rikai-kun* to piece together whatever I can about them.  So here's what I've got.

Atsuta Shrine (熱田神宮)
Enshrines Atsuta as well as "The Five Gods of Atsuta," who include Amaterasu and Susanoo.**  It was a first-rank shrine during State Shinto, which basically means it was SUPER DUPER IMPORTANT.  It's also supposed to house THE SWORD, as in one of the three sacred treasures.***  But, most importantly, IT HAS A BOY SCOUT TROOP.  I really, really, REALLY would love to do research on Boy Scout affiliations with shrines, because nobody has done ANYTHING on it.

Ueno Tenmangu (上野天満宮)
...I actually don't know if I have the correct reading on this one.  The first two characters are normally read "Ueno" in a name, so I'm assuming they're the same here.  Reading their website kind of feels like going back to 1997.  I can't really find that much information on it, except that the shrine is dedicated to Tenjin, who is a Japanese poet who was exiled and then people were afraid he was going to come back as an angry ghost so they deified him and now he is the main god of education.  So my guess is that it will be primarily targeting students taking entrance exams, as most Tenjin shrines are.

Shiroyama Hachimangu (城山八幡宮)
Once again, not a whole lot of information on the site, but I assume that it's a Hachiman shrine (linking to Wikipedia for people who are interested because eventually the footnotes will get out of hand).  Apparently it is built on the ruins of a castle and also has a tree which was split in half but then grew back together, so it caters to people wanting love omamori**** or ceremonies having to do with love.  Their website tells me that I should come pray there if I want to have eternally good relations with my boyfriend.  Also, apparently they have night festivals!  Awesome.

I'm gonna wander around Nagoya to see if I can find any tiny shrines as well, because those tend to be quirkier than the big tourist-draw ones.

And now I shall sleep, because I must finish packing up my room in the morning.

*My wonderfully helpful Japanese character recognition software.

**If you've studied the Kojiki, you should know who they are.  If not, they're the sun goddess and her poo-flinging brother.  (No, I'm not kidding.  He really does fling poo.  He also throws a skinned pony through her weaving hall roof.  And you thought your younger brother was a pain.)

***Long story short: Amaterasu (the sun goddess) said to her grandson, "Hey, go become emperor of Japan," and her grandson said, "Okay, sure."  So she gave him three treasures to prove that he was emperor: a sword, a mirror, and a jewel.  The three treasures were then passed down the imperial line.  There's a lot of debate as to where the treasures came from/what they are made of/whether they have stayed consistent through all of history.

****Omamori are little amulets intended to either ward off danger or beckon in good fortune.  They most commonly take the form of a brocaded pouch containing a bit of sacred text or a written prayer.  A lot of shrines have the same sort of omamori, like "protection from traffic accidents" and "success in examinations" and "prosperity in the family."  I feel like I should just copy and paste my thesis here, but that would kind of be overkill.

Four days 'til departure

So, clearly, the GRE did not kill me.  Although it was like going to a secret prison.  It turned out that the directions in the email from the GRE test center pointed toward an equity union, and the address they gave me didn't exist.  When I finally found the testing center, it was in a building marked "Kaiser Permanente."  And then they made me empty my pockets, and I was only allowed to carry my ID and a key to my locker.  And then I got my picture taken and they ran a metal detector over me and there were CAMERAS in the TEST ROOM CEILING.  It.  Was.  Ridiculous.

But now it's over, and I am still alive!  And I didn't even fail it, which is an added bonus!

And I really need to finish packing.

I spent much of yesterday randomly singing for my old choir*, being bitten by FIVE THOUSAND MOSQUITOES**, hanging out with cool homeschooling kids and parents, watching a horde of small children punching my going-away-party-balloons, hanging out with cool homeschooling kids and parents some more***, and reading my little brother Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.****

Also, a bunch of exceedingly nice people gave me exceedingly nice presents, and for that I thank them, and also rearrange my partially packed suitcases.  Seriously, I need to get on this packing thing.

In other news, I got an email from my advisor telling me that he could meet me when I come to Nagoya from Tokyo as long as I come after 3 p.m. (and for that I am so grateful, because, seriously, I thought I would have to find my way around Nagoya alone).  That's not really a problem at all, since there's a Shinkansen (bullet-train) from Tokyo to Nagoya that gets in at 3:21 p.m.  The only problem is that I can't figure out how to get to the Shinkansen.  On a whim, I tried Google maps, which worked surprisingly well...except that it's convinced the only way to get to the Shinkansen is to take a $60 train.  What the heck?  It's not even a long train; it says the train ride is 7 minutes.  Compare that to the Shinkansen, which is an hour and forty-one minutes for $45, and you have to wonder if the train is made of solid gold.  So I'm trying to figure out a way to use the Tokyo Metro to get to the Shinkansen instead of paying $8.57/minute.

A final note: I have forgotten all of my useful Japanese.  I know how to say "sexual generative organ" (生殖器) and "marijuana" (大麻) and "friction" (摩擦) and "the act of carrying a coffin out of a home or temple" (出棺), but I cannot for the life of me remember how to say "train timetable."  GAH.  Add that to my normal stutter in Japanese, and my first few weeks are going to be mildly terrible, from a speaking perspective.

*My old choir director decided that she would make me sing the Japanese verses of "Tonari no Totoro" rather than braving them herself.

**OW, the bites itch so much.  Ugh, I hate mosquitoes.  Or at least female mosquitoes.  Dude mosquitoes are okay.

***Maybe this is news to some of you, but I actually was homeschooled (until I was 15-ish).  Then again, it's still news to some people that I'm 20 years old...  YES, I AM 20.

****We're trying to finish it before I leave.  We haven't even gotten to the second task yet. I leave on Monday.  Yeaaaaaah.  We're going to have to read A LOT.

Generally Ridiculous Exam

You know how sometimes you're so nervous you feel like you're going to puke?

I think I've surpassed that.

Let the record show that if I die for no particular reason this afternoon, the GRE did it.

Two weeks 'til departure

I finally got my housing assignment, so that's all settled.  All that's left is for me to hop on the plane and fly to Japan.

Well, that and pack.

I really need to start on the packing thing.

Speaking of packing, I spent FOUR HOURS shopping for business casual clothes today with my aunt.*  If you're one of those poor, misguided people who ever tried shopping with me, you'll know it's like pulling teeth, except that with teeth at least you can sedate the patient.  But my aunt was really, really patient, and I managed to not punch anyone through a wall, and I now have a business casual wardrobe.  I AM NEVER DOING THAT AGAIN.  These clothes better last me through my whole grad school career!

In other other news, I'm trying to get through as much of my kanji book and my grammar book as I can before I get to Japan.  I'm 1565 kanji in, but only about 120 grammar forms.  Ugggggh.  I'm going to feel so dumb for about three weeks and then I'll stop stuttering (mostly) and hopefully remember to grammar when I'm speaking.  Too bad I have to meet my advisor before then.

Speaking of my advisor, I still need to get him a hello-I-would-really-like-it-if-you-don't-think-I'm-a-culturally-insensitive-stuttering-moron present.

SO MUCH TO DO.  SO LITTLE TIME.

*Not my biological aunt.  She's my adopted aunt.  She's pretty much awesome and puts up with shopping for four hours and trying to find clothing that fits me.  Did you know that there's such a thing as petite extra small?  I didn't think I was particularly small, but apparently I was wrong.