Sunday, September 30, 2007

Nihongo wa Muzukashi Desu

yoip. i'm an alien resident of japan. i live here. i'm not here for a little vacation or nothin, I LIVE IN JAPAN! sometimes i forget to remind myself not to forget to remind myself what's going on. yeah. feel a little weird and disconnected today. campus is very deserted and quiet. time still moves strangely, and things that happened yesterday afternoon feel like they're the distant past. i had plans to go to senshu park yesterday, which overlooks akita city and has the ruins of an old castle in it, but those plans got scrapped, so i just kind of sat around on the front lawn watching the craziness going on in our parking lot and across the street for the national sports meet being helt at the massive complex over yonder. about 20-25 busloads of people from all over the country disembarked right in front of the dorms for yesterday's opening ceremonies. i stood out by the street with a few folks to watch the emperor, who was here giving the opening speech, roll by in his motorcade. he makes a special visit to one prefecture a year, and there are 47 prefectures, i think, so an emperor won't be back here for a special visit until 2054.

so saw the emperor of japan, whatever, ate some onigiri and fell asleep. woke up, had some dinner, ran into an australian with a mohawk named max and a japanese lady friend, went to the konbini (convenience store) for some beer, drank um, and then went out on the town for some karaoke with rikako, sakiko, and two americans named katrina and gillian. it was in some big entertainment complex on the outskirts of town (rikako drove). we ordered some greasy-ass food and sang songs for 3 hours. i did tom waits' "christmas card from a hooker in minneapolis" elvis costello's "allison" and "all through the night" and "time after time" by cyndi lauper which, obviously, brought the damn house down.

tonight, the taiwanese girls, who i now calls "m'ladies" are making meatloaf and philly cheese steaks just because i mentioned them in passing one day at lunch when i was talking about what i'd rather be eating. this is how good m'ladies are to me. i spend less than 3 seconds saying the word "meatloaf", and later that day, they go to the computer lab, print out a recipe, and today they're at the market getting the ingredients so they can cook it tonight. m'ladies. i've only been here a month, and they've fished me out of the whirlpool more times than i can count. hina helps, too. she's goddamn bonkers. she cut her hair short, dyed it orangeish brown, and flies around on her rollerblades all day and calls herself "rollermonkey". i was up until 3am a few nights in a row last week talking with her about stuff and whatnot and non-bloggety items. she'll be gone at the end of this year to go to school in mexico, which is one of the sad parts about being in school halfway around the world. i meet all these great people, connect with them, and then they're gone almost immediately. people that have the potential to be integral lifelong friends having to sort of be relegated to acquaintance status.

blabbity. i need to stop now before this damn thing trails off anymore. gonna go wander, i think.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Shashinjutsu 5






some shots from last weekends trip. from top to bottom: small shrine at the temple stop, a big gate at the temple entrance, the sea of japan, the view from atop chokai-san, and the dairy farm with some incomprehensible gorgeousness or other in the background.

Dare wa Nan desu Ka?

hoi. i have a little bit of homework now, things keep moving a little too fast, and some psychological turds are hitting some psychological fans, same turds i thought i'd managed to polish a little...

agh, enough.

i bought a cheap little children's guitar at the local mall on sunday. the clerk gave me a look like "that's a guitar for kids, you dolt", but i don't care, gaddammit, i like cheap little toy music makers, and i stand behind my purchase. the next day i bought a phone i'm not quite sure how to use. i don't have much time on the thing, and i'm not sure if i have international capabilities or whatever, so i'm still using calling cards for int'l calls. after the phone purchasing with the help of some of the taiwanese ladies who are fluent in japanese, i bought some pizza makin's at the mall grocery store, came back and put together a few small pizzas in the res hall kitchen. red pepper, mushroom and basil with a massive ammount of cheese. they was tasty as heck. i shared them with some folk and made pizza pals.

so, thems was the highlights of the week. i haven't written about the mountain trip yet... herm. it went by really fast and seemed too rushed. we made some extra stops and got going late, so we had to shuffle off the bus, snap a few shots and shuffle right back on at every location. we stopped at a big station right on the sea of japan that had elevated lookout platforms along the shoreline, a long covered marketplace area with street stalls selling vegetables and yakitori, and a big goofy novelty gift shop. we also stopped at a large temple area with several shrines and statues, a big room lined with urns and offerings, and dirt paths leading from gravestones to smaller srines and effigies. another stop was a museum dedicated to the first japanese explorer to go to antarctica, loaded with his journals and eqipment and a huge tank/truck thing. everything was written in japanese, though, so i couln't pick up too much info on him. it took over a half hour to wind up the side of chokai-san, and then we only had 20 minutes to get out and look around. it was pretty damn incredible up there. i could see the whole town against the ocean, and all the surrounding peaks and farms. we stopped at a well known local dairy farm, which is like a weird novelty in japan, and ate some ice cream while listening to john denver being piped out over the cows and sheep, and we visited a 100 year old sake brewery, padding around to the different production rooms in ill fitting rubber sandals. a lot of crap to cram into one day. it seems like a damn decade ago now. upcoming plans are nearly nil. maybe go into town to see senshu park if i can get someone to go with me, get my gnarled ass photographed for the mr. aiu contest, papers to write, pluck my shiddy little guitar, suchlike. i'll post some pictures now, and let you know what happens when something happens.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Freeballin'!



i'll get to the stuff about the mountain and ocean and whatnot later, but right now i have to detail this little example of how far away from everything we are here. today after lunch, some of the westerners were sitting outside with nary a thing to do, (it's a friggin beautiful day, incidentally) and i wasn't there for it's genesis, but i'm guessing someone said something like "i'm so goddamn bored" and then someone else responded with something like "hey, i know! let's see if we can bounce this tennis ball off the building and get it to land on the testicles of someone lying under the path of the ball!" and apparently everyone with testicles said "yeah! great idea!", because i came out to the first round of a new aiu game called "freeballin'!". one point for the face and chest, two points for thigh, and a big three points for a direct hit. if you hit the person sitting on the sidelines reading their book, that's a negative two. the person with the lowest score after someone gets to ten or there's a direct hit is the next to be prostrate in front of the big lobby windows. i crapped out one round and had to assume the position, but nobody got a bullseye with me. we're all still finding our way around the game, i guess. so that's how you spend a sunday afternoon in the sticks in japan, everybody. i'm gonna go eat now and then buy a ukelele.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Tonkatsu wa Totemo Oishii desu Ne?

whelp, it's been a spell, and i want to get an entry out before the big one about tomorrow's trip, so i shall detail my uneventful (except for the part about being in japan and meeting 10 new people every day) week's goings on. i needs me a phone. i needs me a phone because i want to know where the hell everyone's been all week long during the day. it seems like i'm the only one here with nary a damn thing to do all day long. i want to take the train into town or go for a big long walk somewhere, but it's not too terribly fun on my own, so for the middle parts of the days this week, i've been mostly wandering the campus. i only have three classes, two of which have no homework whatsoever, and all the japanese students i talk to take about 20 credits with heavy reading in english in every class, so it's them working their asses off and me plodding.
so that part stunk, but there's been some good stuff. i joined the guitar club, and i might learn some actual chords instead of making them up. i watched some more taiko practice, falling in love with every badass who stepped up to whack the drum. i tried to help start a photography club, which may die a very unnoticed death. i guess i'm officially in the running for mr. aiu, whatever the hell that means. i've been answering yes to every question beginning "would you like to..." so there may be some hairy weirdness (aside from my fugly arse) i find myself wrapped up in. i'll be volunteering at a booth for the school festival next month, doing somesuch and sundry. so yeah, not too dang bad for not knowing what the hell i've jumped into from one minute to the next, i guess. send lots of letters, i'm taping them to the wall under my bed, and i've got lots of room left. i'm going to bed now, gotta get up extra early to go climb a damn mountain. oya sumi.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Nani Shiteru?! Oide! Ima!

hullo. i'm sitting on the floor in my dorm room with cords stretched every which way to facilitate simultaneous power charging and internet useage. the last couple days have been banana cakes. on friday night, my intro to japanese society prof. took a group out on the town to a german style brewhouse that makes a friggin tasty apple/rice beer, a restaurant called ichibantori, which means "number one chicken", and a jazz club in a tiny, narrow, 400 year old building on the river that runs through akita city. ichibantori's specialty was making all sorts of yakitori kebab stuff on a big grill right in the center of the restaurant. the chef would throw some new stuff on and a massive cloud of smoke would poof up and get sucked into the vent above the grill. we ate their specialty sampler platter with all the skewers, and a hotpot soup thing. at the brewhouse, we met some graduate students (daigakuinsei) from tokyo who were in town to present some research on something i'm not so sure i could understand even if english were their first language. at the jazz bar, a tiny, dark, beautiful old (i mean ooold) place with original wooden beams from the edo period (1600's), we had some more of that locally brewed beer and talked about some whatnot for a while, and a drunk feller came up to us and honked his nose a few times before leaving. herrmmm... caught the last train home and went nappy-byes.

on saturday afternoon, i walked to a local shrine in the nonsensical heat with a couple folks. we took a back road and cut between some rice paddies to get to the gate which stood before a long staircase to another gate in front of a clearing where there were a couple large ornate buildings with dragons and lions carved into the woodwork, and a few smaller structures for offerings and prayers. most of the offerings were packages of pasteries from the gas station down the street. we poked around for a while and headed back to school with the asshole sun strangling us the whole way. i was taking some pictures on the road when i fell right into a four foot deep concrete dich which was hidden by some overgrowth and sliced up my hand. it still hurts like an absolute bastard, but the taiwanese ladies took good care of poor me.

saturday night was hina's birthday party number three or four. we were supposed to have it in the bonafi house, a room attached to the convenience store on the corner, but it looked and smelled like a bait shop, and the convenience store owner came in to read us a ream of rules for using the room, so we took our vending machine spirits to the sporting complex parking lot and hung out in the near total darkness until it started to rain, whereupon we moved our party to the residence hall lobby. eventually, through various means, i was in the mood to apply some lipstick and vamp about through the lobby with some of the thirty-odd folks that showed up. some res. hall rules may or may not have been flouted, and i didn't go to bed until almost 5am.

today i woke up very slowly and decided it might be fun to not do much of anything. i ate, wandered, slept, ate, sat, tried very hard to complete the bulk of my sentences, and also sat. and ate. some of the westerners are out tonight singing karaoke and whatnot, but i am an old old man, and they are at the zenith of their verility, and tonight i cannot match their zeal, so i will write some letters, do some more sitting and turn in at a reasonable hour. tomorrow is respect for the elderly day, so no classes. sweet stuff.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

O Namae Wa?

evryone smells nice today. maybe like a general peaches and cream breeze in the hallways or lilac mist or something maybe called "dewey blossoms". i got the japanese gut rot right now, the j-grot. too many egg bricks for breakfast, i guess. i met a cool and awesome nihonjin named taro with a bright green moped helmet who noticed my john frusciante shirt, asked if i liked his music, and invited me to join the guitar club even though i play upside down and backwards. fulfilled another little fantasy last night by watching two japanese girls whack the living shite out of a taiko drum, and then i got a chance to try it. it kind of wraps up alot of my ideas about why i love japan so much, combining intense and serene into one thing. it was so loud and strong, and they were exhausted after 2 minutes of playing, but as they were playing, they were both totally calm and kind of swaying rather than frantic. i get to go watch and try a few things again tonight, and then officially join the team in october. i've got 6 and a half hours till my next class, and not a damn thing to do till then. maybe go to the convenience store on the corner, or rope someone into wandering around with me to a shrine or a spring that is supposedly somewhere back in the woods. shimmidy shimmidy gabbuh urrrnt.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

House Wellness Physical Drink


laundry day, no classes, moping around. while i wait for events to report, (i guess i could go generate some reportable events, henh?) i'll post this badly snapped photo of a farking brilliant sign in akita station. party on saturday for hina-chan, bus trip to mt. chokai/sake brewery/sea of japan in a few weeks, and maybe a story about joining the kanto club, which starts on thursday. until then, marvel at the dang sign.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Shashinjustsu 4






okaaaaaaay...top to bottom, a cart that was ramming into another cart, some kids on one of the carts, the cutest goddamned kid in the universe, the group that went to kakunodate, and finally, hina on the right, eating lettuce with a friend who was not one of the beard touchers, i don't think.

Shashinjutsu 3





let's see, what do we have... from top to bottom, the old bad ass singer/sensei we met at the soba shop, dancers on one of the carts, rope pullers, and two shots of carts being maneuvered.
now i think i'll post some general shots from the day and maybe some from akita city

Ore wa Kuma Desu

sheesh. there's no way i'll ever be able to do justice to the doings of the last few days with this dinky little blog. i guess i'll go chronologically and start with friday night and the residence hall greeting party or whatever the hell it was called. i milled around for most of it talking to a few folks and picking at the food set out on the thirty some odd tables, general whatnot transpired, and then i met hina. hina is maybe almost 5 feet tall and whacked me in the gut three minutes after meeting her. a crazy japanese girl more along the order i'm accustomed to. we talked for a half hour or so, hina leaping or taking a swing at me intermitantly throughout, and then went over to a party in the "global village" area, the student apartments that some kids pay extra for to get their own bathroom, fridge and stove. there were ten or twelve people crammed into the room, passing around a brick of exotic wisconsin cheese and doing choreographed dances to some j-pop song about fire or something. hina brought some of her "how to speak american slang" books and read some of the entries, which included the terms "baldwin", as in "dude, you think you're so baldwin, but you're totally not even baldwin", and the insult "ass-eyes". but then guess what? are you ready? this is what happened: two japanese girls touched my beard in tandem. lets just stop for a second here and all travel back to that moment together. the ridiculously cute hina and her ridiculously cute friend rummaging through my face hairs and sqeaking to eachother in japanese. so, yeah, that was friday, i don't remember anything after that, having blacked out.

so saturday, another day i'll never be able to explain correctly, a large group took the train out to kakunodate for their season ending matsuri. we got there a few hours before most of the stuff started, and just walked around watching street stalls setting up. i ate at one that was serving some friggin delicious kebab things of asparagus wrapped in bacon. we were milling around at the kebab stand when we heard chanting and someone blowing a whistle down at the end of the street. we walked down and saw thirty or forty people pulling a giant wooden card with dancing girls in kimonos, taiko and shakuhachi players, and a papier mache tiger on it. the whistle blower was standing on the cart directing all the people chanting and pulling the cart around the streets. whenever they had to turn a corner, the rope pullers rushed under the front of the cart, lifted it with their backs and ran sideways to move the cart around, while everyone chanted, the drums and flutes played, and the director shouted, blew his whistle, and waved his arms around. walking around a little, we saw another similar cart a few blocks away, and then another one, and another one, and eventually, i think we counted at least ten or fifteen giant carts being pulled around town, all of them stuffed with dancing girls in bright kimonos, drummers, flute players, and the whistle blowers shouting and flailing around. the carts would stop in front of some important houses, and the dancers would perform for money or blessings, then move on to the next house. if two carts approached eachother on the same street, there would kind of be a little theatrical stand off for a while, and then the rope pullers would get under the carts and maneuver them around each other. there was a space in front of a park at the center of town where two of the carts geared up with some dancing and music and chanting, and then charged full force at eachother, crashing and breaking chunks of the carts off. in between some of the cart watching, we visited some old samurai houses. we couldn't walk in, but the sliding doors were all open and we could see the fire pit in the cooking room, all the tatami rooms, and wells behind the houses. we also ate some tororo soba at a noodle shop, and talked to an old guy with a giant beard who told us he lived in california, then became an art teacher in kyoto, and now lives in kakunodate making his living as a singer. he demonstrated by croaking "iiiiii can't stop laaaabiiing yooouu!" and laughed his head off. we had to leave early to catch the last train taking us to wada station, so we missed some of the best stuff that happens at night. i'm not exactly sure what they do, but i saw posters with the cart teams lifting the carts off the ground and crashing into eachother. every cart was followed by a smaller one carrying giant bottles of sake, so i'm sure everyone is out of their damn mind by the time the sun goes down. saturday was the first time i understood where i was, and that i wasn't just in some vague place away from everyone i know. this little post is so tiny and lame compared to what i saw and felt yesterday. it's so completely impossible to explain. i'll post some pictures and maybe that will help a little, but you won't be able to feel how overwhelming and beautiful the whole thing was. the whole town was filled with nonstop music and chanting and drums pounding. i'll look for some of the best pictures and post them next.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Doko Kara Kimashita Ka?

they's a typhoon comin'. we saw it on the news yesterday kicking tokyo's ass. it's too far south to effect us too much up here, but the weather's been weird (extremely humid and extremely windy at the same time) and the kakunodate festival could get postponed or canceled altogether. i haven't been up to a whole hell of a lot lately. been talking a lot with a few groups of people, hanging out in the res hall lobby and the cafeteria, blabbing for hours at a time, so that's been good. i dropped the art history class, so now i only have three classes. next month, i can join the kanto club here at school and play taiko in next year's kanto festival. sugoi. yaddle wadle woddle, stuff and whatnot, pfft. yeah, not too much to report right now...

my intro to japanese society class seems really cool. the teacher basically started with a long family story about how his connection to japan developed, and he didn't leave anything out, including stuff that most people might consider too painful to talk about, like his wife's death and great uncles p.o.w. experience. he routinely takes groups of students into town for movies and jazz shows, and the only assignments are one or two presentations anytime during the semester, and a final report for which we pick our own subject. sounds pretty damn good. shherrrmmmmm..... gonna go eat lunch. more as events develop.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Itadakimasu

sharles says he is an american now. he buys stuff he doesn't need, and he now owns a gun. squirt gun, but still. theres a secret squirtgun assassin game that has developed in the residence hall of late. any one of us could be squirted at any moment.

last couple days have been good. i walked over to the sports complex with some taiwanese girls and watched the aiu soccer and judo clubs practice, then came back, got all my hiragana down, and went nitenite. today was the first little overview for my intro to japanese society class. as charles would say, "i find it clearly so great". the teacher seems pretty cool. he's a huge kurosawa fan, and supplements the lectures with kurosawa's movies. keen. later, i sat around with the ladies from taiwan and ate fresh peaches and apples, which i have seen hide nor hair of since touchdown, and watched a crazy ass japanese show about a girl who dresses up as a boy and attends an all boys school because she really likes a boy at the school. there was some weird sub plot about a dance contest and another about a sports rivalry. there was a huge group watching and everytime something dramatic would happen, all the japanese girls would go "eeeeeeeeeiihhh" the way only japanese girls can. tomorrow, i haven't a single solitary thing to do. dunno what i'll get into. this saturday, there's a group taking the train up to kakunodate to see the last big matsuri, or festival, of the season. should be something friggin special. i'm all hopped up on more of those chocolate covered almonds, but i'm going to poke around a little and get to bed. oya sumennasai!

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Pharque

first day of classes - done. the japanese language course seems pretty intense, but fun. i have to practice about 15 of the 40 some hiragana for tomorrow morning. japanese art history was kind of a slog, the teacher talked to his belly the whole time. i might drop it, which stinks because i really want the content of the course, but it's hard to deal with when it's delivered that way. my tohoku culture class was cancelled, and japanese society is tomorrow, so i don't know what they're like yet. hoooooooooooooooo...

yesterday, didn't doo much. it rained for half the day. i walked for a few miles along a frontage road next to the freeway and found a park with a big fountain and a tower on top of a sculpted hill. from the tower i could see the airport, the sports complex, the school the surrounding mountain ranges, and rice paddies for miles. i walked back, had some dinner, sat in the dorm for a while, and came out to find another party in the lobby. bunch of people drinking tea around a table, some watching some american movie dubbed in japanese, and the french kids, with a chinese girl that seems to follow them everywhere, were playing some card game called "pariah", which i joined in on.

i've been going through weird crappy emotional extremes, and i hit about every limit yesterday at some point or other. i feel like i've made some good connections, but i also feel like i've been written off by other people i thought i had established something decent with. i get the impression sometimes, not just here, but at home too, that everyone around me understands something essential about the mechanics of social interaction that i somehow missed. i know i should give it more time and keep trying, but it feels like it's harder for me than it looks for everyone else. i'm going to relax for a while, then go study and see what happens tomorrow, this week, this month.

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Ai Shiteru

i've got the sound of the aiu gospel club practice squatting in my head. i swear, gospel songs with a thick japanese accent. yesterdaaaaaaayyyyy... oh, yesterday we had the matriculation ceremony. all the new international students got gussied up, listened to some speeches, stood up, said "hai!" and bowed when our name was called, and then shuffled out. didn't do much of anything until later last night when a group took the train into akita city. we ate at a modernized traditional restaurant, shoes off but the waitresses had a walkie talkie system. i had some sashimi and octopus balls, little fried clumps of breading and spices with chunks of octopus in them. we wandered around a little and found a bar in a kind of scuzzy area. i had a glass of barley shochu with a baseball sized sphere of ice in the glass. then half the group wanted to stay in the city all night, and the group whith whom i alligned myself wanted to get back to the station for the last train. we stopped off at a soba shop so one guy could get some tempura udon, and then tried to find the station. got a little lost and had to stop and push the best japanese speaker in the group toward an old guy walking his cat on a yarn leash to ask how to get back to the station. eventually found it, got off at wada, and caught a ride with some japanese students who were in the city to watch a jazz festival. when we got back, chiaki-chan and kashi-chan were in the middle of their third viewing of high school musical, repeating some of the english in goofy voices and nodding off in the big res hall lobby chairs. i guess the other group who planned on staying in akita city all night at some karaoke bar caught a ride back at three am with some trucker they met at the train station.

today, not a damn thing to do. i can't quite tell yet if some of the japanese students actually feel like talking to me, or if they're just being polite. sometimes i feel like i'm in the way. maybe it's the whole kinumo-chan bullshit that i can't seem to shake, i don't know. come visit me, dudes. i will go for a walk now, and then tomorrow i start classes.