February Takoyaki

How time flies. It seems that I always have a million things to do and nothing ever gets done, at least without sacrificing something else for it. Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but hopefully the amount of information contained within this post will offset that a bit. As well as detailing a few of my adventures for this month, I included some Japan-related questions and answers from a recent thread I was hosting. Informative? Of interest? You decide!

...I see you...

Shadow me!

The following pictures are from a day when I decided to take a bike ride around my area and see what there was to see. As well as finding myself closer to the center of Nagoya I perused some interesting residential streets of Japan and found quite a large park. Japan is strange in that you can turn corners and never know what to expect. The residential suburbs and commercial streets seem so randomly mixed, and even the back streets have small businesses like hair dressers or fruit and vegetable stores. Typically the main streets have the chain businesses and the residential streets have the family-run businesses, I guess. Makes for interesting exploring.

A look back at where I came from.

Types of bushes and grasses regularly found by the roadside in my area.

A walk spanning the length of the park.

Houses nestled in the centre of a large park with an open green space. It seems a quiet haven.

Looking down the hill at a suburb of Nagoya.

Having no school on a Thursday due to some sort of holiday, I overheard plans for a takoyaki party at a classmates house. Because I was unsure of the location and the classmate seemed to have trouble drawing me a map, she agreed to come meet me at a store nearby my house so we could proceed to her villa by bike. Her house turned out to be up and over a huge hill which in the past I had only traversed by bus. While the way up was tough, the way down was a lot of fun, and aside from the rather imposing obstacle our houses wouldn't have been far away at all.

The takoyaki party/actual Japanese school girls.

We also rode down to the station to pick up some other girls who were coming by train, including Louise, the German exchange student. I'd never seen Louise out of her school uniform before, but she seems to have picked up quite the Japanese fashion, replete in tights, shorts, and an interesting assortment of colours.

Takoyaki cooking. Also contains wieners, cheese, shrimp, or a mix of all. I felt rather sorry for the poor octopus, fascinating creatures as they are. Even their curly cold tentacles are beautiful.

We cooked normal takoyaki (doughballs filled with octopus) in special takoyaki hot plates for lunch.

Delicious dessert... Takoyaki batter with yummy stuff in them. Chocolate and marshmallows, anyone?

Later made some sweeter dessert-type doughballs as well as stuffed ourselves with convenience store chips and candy.

Everyone contributed to the snacks.

Japanese sweets can be quite different from typical North American stuff, including aloe vera juice, a million varities of tea, shrimp-flavored chips, sour plum snacks, blueberry-filled marshmallows, and a million other strange things all with their packages covered in Engrish.

A park.

Random shot of me.

Oasis 21, an area in Sakae where outdoor performances like magic shows are sometimes held. A Pokemon Centre store and Ghibli shop are also here.

As for other random adventures, I also met some of the foreign students (mostly Americans) studying at the university nearby my school this February. Some of them were having a Dissidea tournament, the FF7 battling game, and after a party for one of the students who was leaving due to a shorter stay, but sadly I didn't get to go to the latter because of a lack of way home after 5:30.

Palm tree? For some reason there are a lot of these in Japan.

One day, after spending the afternoon working on things at home, I decided to bike down to the vending machine near my house so I could get a Coca Cola Zero and have a hill to climb for exercise, even if it was only 15 minutes all together. (However, apparently one can't even go that long in Japan without running into something odd.)


Mission accomplished. I was biking back up to my house when I decided to take a path less trod for change and fun, and when all of a sudden I heard a crowing "Cockadoodledoo!!"

Following the sound, I came upon a chicken and some sort of budgie in a cage at an elementary school near my house. Turns out I live less than 10 minutes from a very vocal rooster.

Good to know.

Questions and Answers

Do the Japanese often use instant messengers?
Japanese tend to text with their cellphones and rely on that for instant communication. Cellphones aren't limited to younger people and most adults have them, with the exception of some seniors. Not a lot that I've met use instant messengers, but of course there are exceptions. A cellphone is basically a must here and you'll be lost, confused, and out of the loop if you don't have one. They don't usually text using phone numbers either. Each cellphone has a personal email-type address that you can use to send and receive messages, files, and pictures from computers as well as text other phones. As for personal profile sites like Facebook, they use www.mixi.jp, though it requires an invite from an existing member to join.

How long did it take you to become fluent in Japanese?
I'm not yet fluent, but I can hold normal conversations and watch TV/play video games/read comics without a dictionary. To get to functional fluency and literacy, it's taken me 4 years. I first studied Japanese for a year in high school. I spent my next school year in Japan, but at first when I arrived in Tokyo I could hardly speak the language at all, I just knew basic grammar, vocabulary, and sentences like "I will go to school." When I returned to Canada from Japan the first time I took up translating game material as a hobby and that really improved my Japanese. Now that I live in Nagoya I've polished my speaking so I don't hesitate to say things or grasp for vocabulary and I can think in the language without a lot of trouble.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, so why do you like Japan?
The different culture, the kind people, the unfailing do-your-best attitude, the history, the different sights and sounds, the language, the atmosphere, etc. Japan obviously has its problems and incredibly frustrating aspects too, but for me it's a different country and I'm not sick of it, so I'm happier here than North America.

How many foreigners have you met there?
I've met some friends from online, I've met a German exchange student attending the same school as me, I've met some students studying Japanese at a nearby university, and I've met two foreigners teaching English at my high school. Maybe 15 in all?

What are your favorite places in Japan?
Kyoto and Tokyo. Typical choices, perhaps, but Kyoto's gorgeous, and Tokyo has that big city vibe and cool atmosphere combined with a lot of weird things you wouldn't find elsewhere. You can walk around the popular districts and busy places, and then turn a corner onto the backstreets and suddenly find yourself in a quiet residential area with a lot of little houses, nice gardens, and family-owned laundromats.

I haven't travelled much since I've been attending school, but Takayama is a really nice city (quite small) in a rural area of the Japanese alps. Nice views, a picturesque city centre, and a feel for the countryside.

I've never been to the Ryukyu islands where Okinawa is but it looks gorgeous.

Do most Japanese people listen to Jpop or do they like other music?
It's the same ratio as people who listen to the radio's top 40 hit list in western countries, I'd wager. Of course there's different stuff, and of course a lot of people listen to what the stations decree "popular".

What's the weather like?
It's different all over Japan, the north can be cold and snowy and some areas are tropical, but where I am it's quite mild and we haven't had any snow this winter. Most days it's about 15 degrees celcius, sunny and quite warm, and it occasionally rains. Summer is really humid, though. It can be a cloudy day and you'll be sitting there sweating.

Do you go clubbing?
No, I'm not old enough to go clubbing here as the drinking age is 20 (though I guess the US is worse), but I'm sure I could get in as foreigners tend to look more mature to Japanese eyes and no foreigner I've met has ever been ID'd.

Do you drive?
I walk, take the train, bus, and go by bicycle. Driving age here is 18 and I don't even have my license in Canada, though you'd probably have to get a special international one to drive here or take the Japanese test. I've heard it's quite expensive in Japan and because of the convenience and reliability of public transportation some people don't bother to get it.

Any advice for learning Japanese?

www.guidetojapanese.org/

This site is really useful and goes from the very basics all the way up to more advanced grammatical stuff.

irc.2ch.net #japanese

Friendly chatroom filled with Japanese people seeking to learn English and foreigners seeking to learn Japanese. Really good place to practice/make friends/ask questions.

James W. Heisig's Remembering the Kanji

Best thing you can ever do for yourself in regards to learning kanji. You can learn like, 30 characters in an hour and only write them once. You'll remember them forever. The link above has the first 125 pages as a PDF in the links section, take a look!

My advice for you is to find a way to practice and improve your Japanese in a manner that you enjoy and can do for recreation.

For example: Find a conversation partner, chat online, watch movies, read manga, play games, anything you wish. There's a whole world of options out there and don't limit yourself to studying from a text book.

With anything you do, keep a dictionary on hand and look up any word you don't know, then write it down as well as its meaning. This method will go slowly at first and you'll often have to look up the same word many times before it will stick in your head. However, you'll eventually be able to understand the whole thing perfectly and things will just get faster from there when you move on to something else. I played Chrono Trigger this way, it took a long time to get through the game but now I can play just fine. I learned many words and grammatical constructs that have appeared in other things I've played and read since then.

Good luck!

Are kids in Japan happy to attend school, or is it more of a chore?
The kids here work way too hard studying, school and homework take up so much time that they almost don't have a chance to develop passions and pursue them by themselves. It's unfortunate in that regard. Everyone treats school as very important, and while students work their asses off usually resulting in lack of sleep, failing a class or dropping out is almost unheard of. Basically, while it's hard work and school sucks, it's just like western countries in that there can be fun things about it too. Seeing your friends, experiencing school life, doing something cool, etc.

When you turn on Japanese TV, how many foreign faces do you see? Is it all Japanese people?
Mostly Japanese faces. There are very few foreigners who make it on to prime-time television as part of Japanese programs, though it occasionally happens. You can see some half Japanese people too. The ratio of foreigners to Japanese in Japan is very small, thanks in part to xenophobia, cultural and linguistic barriers, and strict government policies.

Any more photos?
You can see photos of my first stay in Japan at http://berriblog.blogspot.com under Photos on the right link bar.

January in a Nutshell

Long time, no update. After the busy-ness of New Years, I had nothing to report on for the start of January as I mostly spent my days at home translating and working on my website. Once things started happening I got quite busy and as such I've been rather deprived of sleep for the last little while. Hopefully this post doesn't reflect that too much (except that I just wrote "two" instead of "too," oops).

At the tail end of winter vacation I visited my host parents' friends' house, the Furuyas'. We went over for lunch and I met the family's son, a 22-year-old fellow with intentions to travel to Australia on exchange in April. I chatted with him for a bit while we made homemade pizza, the choice of ingredients provided being corn, mushroom, sausage, cheese, tomato sauce, and crab. Two pizzas were made, with one being a corn, mushroom, sausage, tomato sauce, and cheese type, and the other being crab, mushroom, tomato sauce, and cheese. Definitely not my first choice for pizza, but corn is actually not a bad topping. The house also had 5 dogs, including 2 corgies, one scottie-looking-thing, one dachshund, and a tiny little who-knows-what. Corgies are a strange blend of proportions, with huge heads and ears on relatively stubby bodies. Cute, though. Like a dog army. They also had a piano, so I got the chance to play a little bit, rare these days.

Upon my return home, I heard that my host father's business associate was coming to dinner. Expecting an older man, I was surprised to find that the manager of the company is only 27 years old, and quite a young and fashionable-looking guy. He was interesting to talk to as well, and we discussed various hair salon conventions around the world, such as the Japanese inclination to never close the shop if there were still customers coming, whereas English or North American salons would just apologize and say they were closed, shooing you away.

I also met up with the Canadian guy from the chatroom, Brian, his Finnish friend who was visiting, and an American fellow also living in Nagoya. We went to a restaurant near the station for dinner and hit up a cheap karaoke place. Though it's definitely not my first choice for non-embarrassing entertainment, it was okay, and fun to hang out with some other English speakers. I was asking the regular questions of the American student about how long he'd been in Nagoya and what have you, and he told me he was taking Japanese lessons at a university with a number of other exchange students, mostly Americans. It took awhile to register, but all of a sudden I realized that he went to school on the same campus as me. It's nice to know there are some other foreigners close by.

Speaking of foreigners, I met up with the cousin of a friend from Kelowna who was living with two other girls near Nagoya since I think September on a program through Capilano College. Sadly, she's returning to Canada now that it's February, but it was nice to have a chance to share our experiences. We went to a nice pizza place for dinner and had Italian-style margherita and basil mozzarella parmesan pies. Delicious! I miss cheese.

I've learned that my host father owns a series of restaurants as well as his hair salons. My grandparents took my host sister and I there for lunch one day, a slightly upscale place with traditional Japanese food. I had a lunch set of beef on rice, miso soup, sashimi, and apple sherbet, all presented very nicely. I walked home as the restaurant was not far from my host and the others were going grocery shopping.

Since school has started I've had many days off because of the students studying for exams. I've been going by bike since winter break ended, which is about 40 minutes and includes walking up steep hills. It's quite a lot of exercise for the early morning and if I go too quickly I feel sick. Yay Nagoya. I've also been practicing a dance routine for gym class with the girls at school and getting better at Chinese as the class plods its way through one textbook (they're on the 4th chapter and they've been studying since April). I'm learning, but I still don't have a handle on pronunciation.

As for other activities, I met up with the Furuya's son Shunsuke again to go see K-20, a sort of silly Indiana-Jones-style comical-but-kind-underdog-becomes-hero Japanese adventure movie. It was at a really nice theatre in what used to be an airport, now a mall beside a smaller army base airstrip. The building retains its airport-like style and it's difficult to believe it isn't one anymore. Japanese cinemas are very comfortable and well-kept, with wide aisles, spacious comfy seats, clean floors, and a polite audience.

I had recently finished the two fantasy books from the same series that I'd brought to Japan, and was despairing to the Australian English teacher, Carone-sensei, about how I wouldn't be able to continue them. She told me about a small second-hand store in Nagoya that also had an English book section. As she was going there soon she offered to look for some of the series for me, but I asked her if I could go along. It was such that we arrived in the fairly out-of-the-way place packed with all sorts of interesting things and started browsing through the racks. The owner, apparently a very nice man on good terms with my teacher, came up to us and said that a television crew was going to come by and do a segment on the shop since second-hand stores are rare in Japan, would we mind being interviewed? I said yes, and we browsed books until the crew arrived. I wasn't really certain what they expected of me, but they put some books in my hands and sent me in through the door again, looking as though I was just coming into the shop. Since they gave me a false premise, I ran with it and pretended that I came to the shop often, answering factual questions truthfully but lying about my own experiences on camera. It was strange, but they didn't seem to have a problem with this when I told them after since I hadn't known what to do. They also wanted me to pick out books on the spot and I wasn't sure what to choose, so I just made up reasons why I had picked them when the interviewer asked me. Funny business, news. In the end, the final program cut most of the interviews the customers had done, but I was there for a question or two about why I was in Japan and whether bookstores were common in Canada or not, the studio audience (made up of celebrities) said "Oh, a female high school student..." and that was about that.

Anyway, that was my January.