Week 2

At the close of my second week in Japan and my first week of classes, I thought it was time for a quick post before a bit of studying and then bed.

The first week of classes was not particularly difficult.  I think it will get harder as the homework starts to stack up, but the only class that has so far offered the same amount of work as a UBC class would is one of my various Japanese classes.  However, this work is doable, and much closer to my level than the UBC Japanese classes.  In other words, the class is not designed to be challenging to Korean speakers (who already speak a language with a grammar often analogous to Japanese) and Chinese speakers/readers (who, despite many differences in the languages, have a leg up when it comes to reading and writing.)

But enough about my frustrations with UBC Asian Studies.  This last Thursday was a holiday of some sort, so I took a day trip to Takarazuka, which is about 20 minutes to the north on the local Hankyu line. Takarazuka is known for the Takarazuka Revue, a musical featuring an all female cast which has five different rotating casts.  Apparently they are well known, and I believe I saw someone in a commercial for a food product of some sort who used to be in the production.

Takarazuka is also known for the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum, devoted to the creations of the Osamu Tezuka.  You may not know the name, but you would probably recognize his character (in English) Astroboy, if you saw him:


He also created a variety of other characters, and the franchises he created are continuing to release successful films, including this one:

The character was created long before Disney's The Lion King, but a film based on the manga was released several years after the Disney film.  The adult lion is named Kimba, and the manga and Japanese film feature many characters and sequences that correlate to the Disney version.

On Saturday I wasn't feeling so great so I spent most of the day in the house.  I did venture out to finally buy the newest Kamelot album, Poetry for the Poisoned.


I was also informed via facebook that Jardar bought the CD and was listening to it as well.  We live in a strange globalized society where I in Japan and my second cousin in Norway buy the same CD by a (mostly) American band on the same day.  But enough about that...

Today I went to Kobe-Sannomiya with friends.  The day consisted of wandering through various stores, some more disturbing than others.  (Creepy, super expensive dolls with big eyes and clothing that costs more than mine is all I need to go into.)  It was a bit of a culture shock, to say the least.

Next was Kobe's Chinatown.  Kobe's Chinatown is essentially a tourist trap designed to trick you into buying somewhat Chinese (inspired) street food and various apparel featuring pandas.  Needless to say, Vancouver's Chinatown, or Richmond, or UBC club days, is a much more authentic Chinese experience.  Because of the proximity of the Autumnal equinox we were able to witness a bit of the Tai-Chi performance, in which my friend Jacky participated.  (Guess which one is a Canadian student) 

We then took a limited express bound for Umeda, detrained at Nishinomiya-Kitaguchi where I separated and walked home for a teppan dinner: Okonomiyaki and Yakisoba.

I also watched most of a program about a family in Okinawa which has something like 12 kids, which is pretty much unheard of in Japan for the last hundred years or so.  The father lives in Aichi prefecture (north of Nagoya and south of Tokyo) while the mother cares for most of the kids in a big, old style house on Okinawa in what appears to be poverty.  Kind of strange, especially for a country like Japan which generally doesn't mix home life and public life.  Needless to say, there was conflict which makes these sort of programs interesting.  

Lastly, my friend who is pictured above keeps a videoblog of his time in Japan.  I appear semi-frequently in the videos.  We have different focuses but if you are interested the link to his channel is here: Youtube Channel Jakumi

Osaka and Nishitani Village

This last Saturday I took a trip with friends to Osaka Umeda, which is probably the central hub of Osaka.  There Osaka Umeda station is located there and Shin Osaka Station is nearby.  The trip was surprisingly easy.  I walked to the nearest station, which luckily is a hub for the Hankyu trains.  I met my friends there, and then boarded and Limited Express for Osaka Umeda.  The trip took about 12 minutes and cost a little more than 200 yen.  It can add up if you commute or have to make multiple transfers, but I was surprised at how cheap it was to travel between cities.

The next day I traveled to the complete opposite of the concrete jungle which is Osaka.  With a small group of friends I took part in a trip to Nishitani village.  It was essentially a rural sightseeing excursion put on by a "fieldwork" class interested in economic revitalization projects for the city of Takarazuka, Hyogo-ken.  On this day trip we took the train out to the meeting place, then boarded a bus which took us up and out of the lower lying cities of Kansai into the "mountains." (We would probably call them hills.)  As soon as you get out of the cities the roads start to wind around mountains and rice fields start to appear. (Well, they appear more frequently than they do in the city, although I do pass several on the way to school.)  The style of houses becomes more traditional and the houses triple in size.  It also, luckily, cools off a little bit.  We visited several two shrines and Buddhist temple which is part of a Kansai area pilgrimage.  We had a translator so I now understand a little more than I did before about the religions.

This trip also provided a chance to practice my Japanese.  I found that when trying to explain complicated subjects, I easily confuse both myself and the person I am trying to speak to.  This is probably because English grammar and Japanese grammar are structured in almost the opposite way. If this wasn't complex enough, when you support a statement (using the equivalent of "because") the "because" part of the statement comes in a complete phrase before the actual point you want to make.  I find this to be counter intuitive.

Yesterday was my first day of class at Kwansei Gakuin Daigaku.  I only had one class so it was a bit underwhelming, but it was fun class and I like the people in it.  It is the speaking, listening, and composition component of the intensive Japanese program.  Assuming I find my way to school again, today I will have the reading and writing parts of Japanese, followed by a Japanese history course.  For the lunch break between I will meet up with one of my "Nihongo Partners", a student who volunteered to meet with me and help me work on my Japanese.

Today it might rain but the internet still predicts a temperature of 34C (93F).  Luckily, on Thursday it's supposed to drop down to 26C (78F).  I for one am looking forward to it.

Orientation - Owari!

I've been on the ground for almost one week now but haven't really adjusted to the Japanese/Exchange student lifestyle.  Hopefully that will start to happen soon.

As mentioned in the title, today we finished up the orientations.  Tomorrow we are going on a field trip of sorts to Nara, which is east of Osaka.

I had some extra time today so I wandered with friends around campus.  For some reason I still haven't gotten my bearings in the city yet.  It is layed out in more of a grid in the south near the station so I have very little trouble there, but anywhere around campus I am completely lost.  Part of our explorations today were to attempt to find where our classes, which begin Monday, will be located.  I also noticed the view for the first time:



It is always surprising to look around and realize that you can see the Umeda district of Osaka from school.  The campus is very beautiful (rated the most beautiful in Kansai by some survey.)  It looks like I always have imagined universities in the southern parts of California to appear: Mission style architecture with some palm type plants which don't survive in Washington or BC.


We also took a walk out to one of the stations near the school.



As the sign suggests, we were on our way to Nishinomiya Kitaguchi station, which is the main station in the area, although it is privately owned and operated by Hankyu, I believe.  To the south of Nishikita (or whatever the slang used is) lies a large, new shopping mall called Nishinomiya Gardens.  (I think).  Anyway, it is a really big mall but there were a shocking number of exchange students from Kwansei Gakuin there.  We visited two stores as most of us were going home for dinner.  The first was called "Loft" and carried a variety of home goods, books, accessories, etc.  (Phil - you should start watching One Piece because you can buy One Piece everything and I haven't seen ANY Naruto yet.)  Next we went to a department store with an electronics section my friends are looking for cell phones.  I took this last picture on the way home.  I tried to improve the colors but gave up because and just made it black and white because then I know it isn't purple.

Nishinomiya Gardens and Nihongo Partners

On my first full day in Nishinomiya my host father and I walked to Nishinomiya ACTA building to see about getting a phone sorted out.  It's not a very long walk.  Along the way he pointed out buildings that were destroyed in the 1995 earthquake (basically all of them), which was reassuring.

  A year or so ago my host mother got a new phone so their exchange student at the time started using her old one.  They just added a small plan onto their family plan.  This has several huge advantages.  The first is I don't have to buy a phone or enter into my own contract.  Also, it is cheap and I get free contact with others in my family.  The only drawbacks are that the phone is a little bit older (but still light years ahead of my Canadian phone) and there are some passkeys in strange places that are inconvenient because several other people had the phone before me.





After they figured that out, (And I sat and nodded at the Docomo salesman as he went into intricacies of phone contracts in Japanese) we went out to eat on the top floor of Nishinomiya Gardens.  Nishinomiya gardens reminded me of a slightly smaller, but much nicer, version of Metrotown in Burnaby, BC.  We went to a Teppanyaki restaurant on the fifth floor, where I had Okonomiyaki.

University orientation started on Monday.  On that day also we met our Nihongo Partners.  Kwansei Gakuin assigns exchange students Nihongo Partners to help them develop their Japanese skills (Maybe in part so they don't produce a bunch of students who speak old fashioned Kansai dialect like their host families.)  My partners are Ryo and Ritsuko.  Ryo is studying western history, while I believe Ritsuko is in a program for academic counseling.  (But I'm not sure on that count.  The word they used in connection with university usually means "guide", so maybe she is studying to give campus tours.)  (On another sidenote, for all you James Clavell fans, the word for guide is "annai", which sounds like it shares a root with "anjin".  Therefore "anjin" no "anjin san" literally means "guide person". It does not however, show up in my dictionary as anything so it's either really old or made up.)

Anyhow, they are patient with my horrid and strange Japanese.  Ritsuko spent a year in Canada so when I get totally stuck we can usually find a common word in English and then translate it.  This afternoon they were given the task of helping me with my alien registration card.  We took the bus to the city hall, filled out a form, helped the bureaucrat deal with my English handwriting, and were done in fifteen minutes.  As we were finishing, a group of about ten other Kangaku students came in.  I'm not sure how as we were all waiting at the same bus stop together.  

My communication felt like it was improving so I was quite happy when I got home to study some random vocab dealing with university that I was given in an orientation session.  I then watched some Sumo, some baseball, the news, (no suprise that Ozawa lost) and now I'm remembering some Canadian companies that I need to pay, such as Koodo and BCRS.

How not to travel in Japan

Yesterday I managed to get from my hotel to the meeting place where I collected my orientation packet and was picked up by my host family.  It was not an enjoyable experience.  First off, I had two very large bags.  Maneuvering them was difficult to say the least.  Secondly, it was about 35 degrees C, or 95F and very humid.  Here is a picture I managed to take out the window of my hotel.  Osaka is not the prettiest city.

I started from my hotel after going over the directions one last time with someone at the front desk.  This was in part because they only had maps written in kanji (Chinese derived characters) which I did not know how to read.  With that I set off for the first train station.  The station was part of the Osaka subway line, but in an elevated segment.  I put my money in the machine, guessed what my fare would be, collected my ticket, and passed through the gate.  When a train arrived the air conditioning was a huge relief.  I rode my two stops and got off.  When I got back to street level I put my ticket in the gate in order to exit again, and it stopped me.  I'm not entirely sure why, but I may have bought a ticket for the wrong line. (I may have bought an outbound ticket instead of an inbound ticket.  I went up to a window which was luckily staffed, apologized, and expalined that I had no clue what was going on.  The attendant looked at the ticket, and then waved me through.  I'm sure that I paid enough, I just probably bought the wrong ticket.

Now the next challenge presented itself in finding the station for the Hankyu line.  I walked out onto the street into the full bore of noise and heat which gets trapped in the city.  I spotted the station about a block away and hauled everything down the street and up the steps.  I faced a new machine.  This one had no button for English, but that had been so little help last time that it didn't really matter.  I checked the fare to the station I wanted, paid and received a ticket.  For a moment I thought I was at the wrong station, because it wouldn't let me select the line I thought I wanted, but I read the signs again and was reassured that I was at least going the correct direction.  (Towards Kobe, not Kyoto.)  After just one stop the driver made several announcements which included mention of the station I wanted.  I was uncertain, in part because the train said Umeda, instead of Kobe or someplace in the direction I wanted.  I got off the train to take a closer look at the signs and try and figure out what to do.  Upon closer examination of the station, I realized that there were 5 platforms I could choose from.  The next train that came to the platform I waited on said Umeda as well.  However, I could see on the next platform over a mention of the station I was bound for.

I made the decision to cross over and check the signs.  I follwed the signs for the furthest platform and waited there.  The next train to come in was a limited express for Kobe-Sannomiya.  A quick check of the chart showed that one of the only other stops it made was Nishinomiya Kitaguchi.  I grabbed my bags and pulled them onto the train with me.  After about 15 minutes we arrived at Nishinomiya Kitaguchi.  I again took my bags and headed out into the heat on the platform.  I hauled everything up the stairs and headed for the North exit (luckily I can read some basic stuff).  As I came down the stairs I was greeted by Sean, the coordinator of the Kwansei Gakuin exchange program, and Anin, another UBC student I knew from a Japanese class a few terms earlier.

It took me quite a while to stop dripping sweat on everything after I got inside.  I was soon introduced to my host family and ushered down to the parking garage before we made the 15 minute drive back to the house.

Arrival

9-11-2010
Traveling to Japan by the numbers:
-hours since I woke up in Vancouver to go to the airport: 32
-hours I have slept since that: approximately 4
-hours in the air – 11
-Pages of Steig Larsson read since takeoff: 445
-number of times I have been asked if I wanted something hot or cold: 2
-number of times I have understood: 0
-hours of Japanese television watched while not sleeping: 5
-number of times I have seen the commercial for the new Tsunami movie: 3
-supposed temperature inside my hotel room: 21C
-temperature outside: 34C

That seems to sum up the highlights of my traveling. I’m reorganizing my bags once again before I brave the train system to go the meeting point for the university. The front desk gave me instructions last night on how to get there so I think I have it figured out. We shall see.

This is a test...

With 4 days remaining until my departure for Japan, I thought it time I put together a blog in order to share some stories, pictures, and perhaps videos with friends and family.

Currently, I don't have much to share.  Last Thursday I visited the aquarium in Seattle.



I'm also working on a little bit of packing.  I'm beginning to pile up the stuff on my list in a corner of the house.  After I have everything on my list, I will discover that it doesn't fit in the bag I have selected.  The next step will be to start thinking deeply about whether or not I actually need my Japanese language textbooks and snowboard goggles.