Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Baseball 野球

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The weekend that Joe moved up to Yokohama was a three day weekend, as we had Monday the 20th off for Ocean Day. The weather was lovely, and we took the opportunity to go see a baseball game, Yokohama Bay Stars vs. Chunichi Dragons. The photo above is Joe exiting the subway, below is us in our general admission outfield seats. Even though the Bay Stars are the worst in their league, the game was really crowded, so we had a hard time finding seats. As we stood near the top looking for a place to sit, two kids (behind us in the photo) came up to us and told us to come with them. They and their Mom had two seats near them, and gave them to us. Their Mom was a former English teacher and was using the opportunity to have the kids practice their English. They were really cute, and we scored first row seats!
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As most people do, we brought in snacks and drinks from the convenience store across the street (no bag check, no ban on outside food and drink), but Joe still wanted to buy a beer to have the full baseball stadium experience. We decided against buying food, as it was hot dogs or takoyaki (fried octupus balls), neither being a favorite of ours. His beer came with an almond and fish snack packet, which he said was good. I stuck with my conbini peanuts, though I do love the almond and fish shaking hands on the packet.
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Literally, almonds and fish.
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It's Hoshi, the Bay Stars mascot!
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The field at Yokohama Stadium; all astroturf except for small areas of dirt right around the bases and the pitchers mound.
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Scoreboard. They had a Hamster Dance Competition, and this guy, perhaps in a hamster suit, won. It was hilarious.
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The fans in the outfield were crazy. Each player has their own cheer, and there were cheerleaders in the crowd who organized the chants for each player. There were also two bands in the outfield. You can get a better idea of the crowd unity and enthusiasm from the video I posted below.
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The outfield crowd. We didn't win the game, but there were lots of exciting moments, and it was really fun to see how enthusiastic people were. We also thought it was interesting how the gender ratio of the crowd was almost even, and there were not many intoxicated people, it was a very family-oriented atmosphere. Go Bay Stars!
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Yokohama Bay Stars Video

Monday, July 27, 2009

Birthday! 誕生日!

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Joe's birthday was at the begining of July, a few weeks before he moved up to Yokohama permanently, so he came up for a birthday weekend visit. He arrived on Thursday night and spent Friday wandering the record shops of Shibuya while I was in class. Each Friday afternoon I have a field trip, and on this particular Friday I was in Tokyo to see kabuki at the National Theatre. Unfortunately, photography wasn't allowed in the theatre, but the performance included an instructional 'Kabuki for Beginers' lecture, showing the tricks of the theatre, and a performance of the beautiful Fuji Musume. After the theater performance, I met up with Joe and we wandered around Shibuya together for a while. Above is the famous intersection near Shibuya 109, where a few streets meet in a maze of pedestrian traffic, it's in lots of travel videos and movies, and quite an iconic Tokyo image.
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On our way back home we stopped near Yokohama Station (above) for a while, mostly so Joe could wander around Yodobashi Camera.
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Most of Saturday was spent studying and reading, but in the evening we walked around near Minato Mirai in Yokohama as the weather was perfect, and the breeze from the bay was lovely.
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For dinner we decided to try Bubby's, an outpost of the New York restaurant. We were not dissapointed! Much of the Western or American food in Japan is the reverse of Japanese food in America, kind of authentic, loosely based on the original, but catered for the palette of the country in which the food is being served. Bubby's was actually American food, but with smaller portions. Joe had the Salmon Pot Pie with Hush Puppies and Mashed Potatoes, and I had the Fish and Chips with Sauteed Spinach and Onion Crisps (of course we shared, as usual). We also had the Nachos, which came with actual tortilla chips, black beans, and salsa, heavenly!
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For dessert, of course, it was pie- Chocolate Cream for me and Chocolate Bananna for Joe. Yum! In the U.S. I would probably yelp Bubby's with 4 stars, the service was good, the location lovely and the food was fantastic, but considering it is in Japan, absolutely 5 stars. Next time I feel a longing for home, Bubby's it is.
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Thursday, July 23, 2009

Moved


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Well, Joe arrived this past weekend (permanently), and all of our belongings from Hyogo have been either shipped up to Yokohama or were carried by us on the Shinkansen. We are settling into our apartment and had to make a big Ikea run to finish up outfiting the place. While we used the convenient and not too expensive delivery service for the couch, we had a moment of American-style independence (defiance?) and decided to carry the rest of our purchases home on the subway. This is definitely not the Japanese way. We saw people using the delivery service for as little as two six-pack boxes of wine glasses. We both received strange looks while dragging heavy suitcases up here on the train (travel is another time when most Japanese people use delivery service), but wow did we confuse people with our mass of Ikea goods. Regardless, while we may have been quite the foreigner spectacle, we made it and now have a comfy apartment. Yay!
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Monday, July 20, 2009

A Metaphor for a Hot Summer Day...

One of my favorite skiing experiences was from my time in Oregon. Skiing on Mt. Bachelor, sometimes the clouds would come in low and sit mid-way up the mountain. I would take the chair lifts up to near the top of the mountain, above the cloud line. From there all I could see were the other distant cone-shaped volcanic peaks of the Cascade Range poking through the sea of clouds. It was incredibly clear, exhilarating, and beautiful, yet a little creepy, isolating, and surreal at the same time. As I would ski down the mountain I would enter the cloud cover, and everything became slightly foggy. It was hard to see the trail ahead of me, but I was still able to follow it, and had to let go of my urge for complete control over the situation. Eventually, I would near the bottom of the mountain, and things would clear up again below the cloud line. By then I was fatigued, and while I had an impression of the skiing that I just did, everything was a bit convoluted. I was thinking about this experience today as an apt metaphor for my current study of Japanese.

Right now one of my daily class assignments is a reading passage. These are “real world” passages, things from the newspaper or books, not the nicely edited textbook passages of beginner and intermediate Japanese. For homework we read the passage, and then answer comprehension questions on the passage and the more difficult vocabulary (in Japanese). When I begin my preparations for these passages, my feeling is like that at the top of the mountain, I have all my tools for study (dictionary, grammar reference book, pencil, eraser, glass of water, and a clean sheet of paper) and things are clear and exciting. All too soon the cloud cover comes in- I get mixed up on a certain grammar point, or a vocabulary word is used in a sense that I’m not familiar with. I usually fall down a few times here, as I feel like I have blue square ability (intermediate) but I’m on a black diamond run (advanced). Then I get to the comprehension questions and it’s all a little bit blurry, yet somehow I manage to get it (or at least most of it). By the end, my brain is tired and I feel exhilarated that I just completed something challenging and rewarding.

Perhaps my metaphor seems flaky or far-fetched (especially for the non-skiers or language learners), but in many ways skiing and Japanese elicit similar emotions for me. I love both of them, yet they both involve a bit of pain. For the most part they are good for my health, yet they probably are also causing me some problems (knee problems from skiing and carpel tunnel from practicing kanji). Neither is an inexpensive pursuit, and in the end both the mental exhaustion from my course and the humidity of the Japanese summer have me wondering, how many days until ski season starts?

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Tanabata 七夕

Yesterday was Tanabata, and because everyone likes to make a wish, I thought I'd share a little bit about this holiday. Basically, the stars of Vega and Altair meet in the sky only one night a year, and they represent star-crossed lovers separated by the river of the Milky Way. There are some lovely legends about the story, which you can read about on the Wikipedia link above (I couldn't find a reliable web source with any length of information, so we'll have to go with wiki on this one, it seems pretty accurate). I think the stars actually meet on 7/7 of the lunar calendar, so the holiday is celebrated in July in some places and August in others. At some point in history the story spread from China to Japan, where it became a festival for the general public, and the thing to do on Tanabata is to write a wish on a slip of paper and tie it to bamboo. Well, I don't have any bamboo, and didn't feel like wandering the neighborhood in search of some, so I substituted by writing my wish on a piece of paper and wedging it into my houseplant. I'm also going to interpret the holiday in a modern way by recycling the paper instead of burning it. Seems like a good enough substitute, ne? There was a big festival in Hiratsuka (sister city to Lawrence, KS!) over the weekend, but I didn't find out about it until yesterday. Ah, well, I hope my wish comes true anyway.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Independence Day

I am now in my third week of class at IUC, and I am definitely being kept busy. Each day I have four hours of class and at least five hours of homework, if not more, not to mention the additional studying and reviewing that I put in when I have the extra time. Basically it's all I am doing, and I love it! For now I just wanted to mark the Independence Day holiday in some way, and to post this great someecard. Living abroad I often forget what season it is, as the usual markers are absent. For example in early spring I didn't hear anyone mowing their lawn (as there are no lawns here), and it really threw me. This month there are Rose of Sharon blooming across the street from my apartment, but beyond that I might forget that it was July, as there aren't obnoxious displays of American-themed merchandise at every store and beyond Facebook I don't hear the same usual summer narrative of barbeques, afternoons at the pool, and road trips. Of course there are signifiers of summer in Japan, such as seasonal food, summer sale season, and the upcoming fireworks festivals, but I'm not as tuned into them as in my own country. Anyway, I need to get back to studying, but I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend.

Independence Day reminds me how fortunate we are to live in a country that eschews violent street protests in favor of snarky blog commentary

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

The end of JET

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything, but with good reason. Things were a bit hectic as my year on the JET program came to a close. I am now living in Yokohama and attending the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, an intensive program in intermediate and advanced Japanese language, where I will spend the next year. One chapter has ended, and the next has begun. I’m pretty excited to be back in an academic pursuit, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to devote a year to language study at such a well-respected institution. Living in Yokohama is pretty awesome as well; it’s Japan’s second largest city, and it is located smack next to Tokyo.After our Golden Week trip to Beijing Joe and I had many social engagements and tasks to complete to prepare for moving. We enjoyed dinners in Kyoto with friends, art exhibitions in Nara and Kyoto, and days hanging out with the friends we made in Hyogo. It was nice to make the rounds in Kansai one last time before moving, and to see everyone in the area. The first photo was taken in the backyard of our Ono apartment, having dinner with friends, the second photo is at Harborland in Kobe.
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We also tried to see some of the sights in Ono that we had always intended to see, such as the 5th century Ono Kofun, (tomb, first photo) and the Ryuno Shrine (second photo).


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Also, I never posted photos of our apartment in Ono, or wrote much about my JET experience, and now seems like the appropriate time to do so. In all honesty, our apartment was one of the things about JET that I liked the least. While our rent was dirt cheap and we had a lovely view of the surrounding mountains, our apartment was a complete dump and had been neglected for many years. When we moved in it was disgusting; our predecessor wasn’t a very clean person, and left some things that I consider unspeakable (think expired food, shampoo, bugs and fungus) along with a ridiculous amount of her own personal trash (think magazines, postcards on the walls, and stained textiles). We spent weeks cleaning, throwing out trash and attempting to make the place as livable as possible. We even painted the kitchen and bathroom, for which the school (our landlord) wouldn’t reimburse the cost of materials. I don’t think the walls had been painted in ten years, and our predecessor had a particular love of blue poster putty, which stained the walls. After we were through with it the apartment was no longer a hygienic hazard, but I never came to like it. It was hot in the summer, as the one window air conditioner was upstairs in the living room, and cold in the winter, as there was no central heat, only space heaters. The windows had gaps surrounding them and were thirty year old single pane windows. On windy nights the sliding doors would rattle relentlessly from the drafts in the windows. In January I can remember sleeping under electric blankets with three layers of clothes. Thankfully, Japan is not a cold place, and the temperature rarely reached below freezing, but there were a few days that we had frozen pipes and frozen toothpaste in the mornings, and a few times that we cooked dinner when we could see our breath in the kitchen. Perhaps the biggest disappointment about this situation was that everyone at the numerous JET orientations we attended told us that we would be treated really well upon arrival and that most JETs have a great living situation. This is definitely not true for Hyogo Prefectural JETs, from whom we have heard numerous stories similar to our own. The fact that our landlord couldn’t even take down the posters and throw out the old food and shampoo was pretty insulting. Nonetheless, we endured and made the best of our situation and even had some good times in the apartment. The apartment was about a 15 minute bike ride from the grocery store, a 10 minute walk to the train station, and within walking distance of a few restaurants. Ono is a pretty small town, and most of it is spread out across the countryside, but all the necessary services were relatively close by. In the photo below, Joe is putting air in our bike tires in front of the Ono apartment, ours was the unit on the end.

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What other reflections do I have after a year of JET? The work situation was really easy, and we had a good deal of down time. Most days I only taught two or three classes, but had to sit at my desk for a full eight hour work day, giving me lots of free time, which I mostly spent studying Japanese, reading books, and reading the newspaper online. We also had many days when we sat at school during holiday breaks with no work to do, I probably had three months of complete downtime at work over the course of the year.
I had two schools, Miki High School and Ono Technical High School. The former was my base school, where I spent three days a week. The academic level was decent, and there was a special English language track which was a lot of fun to teach, as the kids were really interested in learning English. In the English track we were able to do things like English debate and model UN conferences, and the students were college bound and generally motivated to learn. Ono Tech was quite different. The students were mostly boys who majored in a variety of trades such as electronics, metals, or machine shop. The girls all majored in home economics. As these students were not college bound, the academic level was quite low and there was zero motivation to study English, which made my job challenging at times. There were also a lot of behavior issues and undiagnosed cases of ADD, as well as some kids who I suspected had domestic problems. The good thing about Ono Tech though was the outspoken nature of the students and that it was only a five minute walk from home. I was also really pleased to see that the students really engaged with their major, and took a lot of pride in their particular specialty. They may not have excelled in English, but they were quite talented at wiring electricity and making robots, things that I have no idea how to do. In many ways I think that this system of vocational education is better than the U.S. high school system, because it gives kids who are not college bound a reason to attend high school, and also allows academically oriented kids to be surrounded by like-minded students. Of course there are also lots of issues with determining someone's future by testing them when they are in junior high, and I think the Japanese system could benefit from some flexibility as well. Below is Miki High School from the front gate of the school property.


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Overall, JET was a great experience. We were able to travel extensively, and at the same time save money. We never took work home with us, which was a treat after years of me being in grad school and working multiple jobs, and Joe working a demanding salaried engineering job. Interestingly though, at the end of our year, we are both ready to go back to being busy. I often referred to our experience on JET as “Japan Fantasy Camp,” as I felt that it was so laid back and easy that it was a surreal experience. As our year break comes to a close I am writing this from our lovely (and clean!) urban apartment in Yokohama, four minutes from the subway and a block away from a grocery store. While I am happy to have moved on, I will definitely cherish the memories of carefree evenings reading or watching PBS online, and of Joe and I being able to spend lots of time together traveling and relaxing on weekends. I enjoyed many of my students, and made some good friends along the way. As one chapter closes, another begins….