Holy Crap! A White Person!

In an earlier post I mentioned that all the subgroups of people in Kusatsu are old, young, male and female. I feel a little elaboration is needed.

There are practically no foreigners here. In fact, outside of my one American coworker, I have met one person in Kusatsu who is not Japanese. This environment leads native Kusatsans to strange reactions when they see a 6-foot American with curly hair walking down the street.

The most common reaction is The Stare. This is a wide-eyed (forget that stereotype that Japanese people have small eyes!), mouth agape, full-on ogling. These starers are completely unabashed - nothing short of a car crash gets them to re-focus their attention on anything other than the gaijin (pronounced guy-jeen). Staring back at them does nothing. As does making faces (smiling, growling, or cross-eyed), or even speaking to them (in any language). They simply don't get the hint. I'm slowly becoming more accustomed to the ways of The Stare, but it still can be a bit unnerving. Fortunately Kyoto is 20 minutes away by train, and its full-blown city status lends itself to contain many foreigners. The Stare exists there too, but to a much lesser extent.

Even so, the Japanese-only effect has taken its toll on me as well. When I first encountered the rare gaijin, I started thinking "Oh boy! I can speak to someone here!" Of course, the irony here is that all white people look the same. Or, rather, all white people look like Americans. So several times I have started speaking to these assumed English speakers, only to find out they don't speak English at all - instead they're Russian, German, Italian, or some other denomination of "white."
Numerous such experiences have left me strangely gun-shy about speaking to people who I share the same foreigner status with. I keep prodding away though - I did meet a guy from New Zealand and a chick from Atlanta. So the number of peers I know in this country has skyrocketed to 9.

So let the good times roll!

Catch Up

It's been a little more than a week without an update. So there must be a lot to share, right? Well... actually... yea, there is plenty.

Did a bit of travelling over this past week. Spent a couple days in Kyoto (I don't know if it's fair to call that "travel" - it's only 20 minutes away), and a couple days in and around Hiroshima.

Hiroshima was really nice. Certainly pretty heavy, as we visited the A-Bomb dome, and the museum dedicated to that fateful day in 1945. The bomb apparently exploded about 600 meters above the ground and, not surprisingly, decimated everything within a few kilometers. A few buildings managed to withstand the blast. One of them, which is now known as the A-Bomb Dome, has become the center monument to that event.


When we got there, there was an eerily apropos cloud over the treeline...


A plaque near the dome has an image of the area after the bomb went off and after the ensuing fire which consumed a few square kilometers.


A Peace Park was constructed at the site of the blast, and contains numerous monuments and memorials. My personal favorite was the one dedicated to the children who died as a result of the blast, which included a lot of origami art work. All the art you see in these pictures is origami, and most of that is of paper cranes.


Other sites seen in Hiroshima include the Hiroshima Castle and the Shukkeien Garden. Having spent a year in Prague, the castle was very different from what I had come to mentally associate with castles. One thing I found interesting is the stark contrast between old and new, as the city has grown and been modernized directly outside of the castle walls.


The Shukkeien Garden was stunningly beautiful.


We stayed at a hostel about 30 minutes outside of the Hiroshima, in a town called Iwakuni. Nice place, nothing too exciting there. Did see this dude fishing, which I thought looked really cool.

A funny experience in the hostel. As I'm sure most of you know, it's custom in Japan to remove your shoes when you enter a residence, school, etc. Some places provide slippers for indoor wear. Some places require indoor slippers. Our hostel required said slippers. The lady clerk, who was incrediby nice, said in broken English, "You big. I give you velly big slippers." Hmmm....


Halfway between Hiroshima and the hostel in Iwakuni was Miyajima - a beautiful island with a rather famous gate, the O-Torii Gate. During low tide, the waters recede far enough that you can walk right up to it, which was pretty cool.


The reason for the week off was the O-Bon festival. Basically, O-Bon is the time when dead spirits return to the area. Not as a menace or because they're lost souls, but it's when they re-connect with this world. It's custom for people to visit graves of dead relatives. They don't mourn their loss; rather, they say a prayer and will lay flowers, light incense and/or bring Japanese sweets to the gravesite.
At the end of O-Bon is the Daimonji festival. For Daimonji, fires are lit in the shapes of Japanese characters on the mountains surrounding Kyoto. We got a good view of "dai."


So all in all, a good week. The best part was that within an hour of returning to work, I was given the key to my new apartment. So, after a month of sleeping on the floor and sharing a studio apartment with one (and most recently, three) other people, I finally have a place I can call home. It will be a few more weeks until I have internet access at home - I need my working visa to finish processing first - but I'm definitely turning a corner in my comfort level here.

I leave you with this. Suppose you're driving a car, and see this configuration of lights. What do you do?

Karaoke

So I had my first genuine karaoke experience the other night. Now, I'm not much of a singer. In fact, I'm pretty awful. I usually sing just in environments where I know I won't make anyone cringe due to my off-key wrangling of most any tune. And many of those times, I stop and laugh to myself, audibly thankful that no one is around to hear my wailing.

That being said, I went to karaoke with some co-workers. I gave them fair warning, but it wasn't so bad. Especially when compared to Pat's rendition of "Anarchist." Everyone reacted pretty harshly to him...


What also made it easier to sing was that a karaoke setup here is quite different than that in America. It's not one machine in the corner of a bar. This is a complex of rooms. Each room is about 10 by 20 feet and has its own machine, and a mostly sound-proof door. A phone in the room links patrons directly with the bartender, for when new refreshments are required.
So being in this private room, and after downing a couple beers and others' embarrassing performances, I warmed up and ended up bring a slice of home to Kusatsu with a rendition of "New York, New York."


What I found humorous about the onscreen lyrics was that many Japanese songs had English words mixed right in.


I mentioned the mis-use of English before, with the Reeses shirt, but Engrish is bastardized in other, sometimes humorous, oftentimes confusion, ways. Take, for example, my co-worker Naoya's hat.

If you can't read it, it says, "We can go anywhere, if we want. Huh, you?"

So... huh, you?

The Rainy Season

So I arrived in Japan in the middle of the rainy season. Nothing lifts the spirits quite like clouds and rain for 15 days straight. I started feeling like Forest Gump ("We had all kinds of rain... big ol' fat rain, rain that flew sideways...").

But finally, the rain cleared. We're now in a hot and humid streak, a precursor to monsoon season, which starts imminently. Fortunately the town I'm in, Kusatsu, is sheltered by mountains all around, which protect it from the worst of the monsoons' fury.

A bright spot to the rainy season is the flora it brought out. Some examples:



Also, saw this. Now, I know things can get confusing with the International Date Line so close, but this is going a bit too far, no?


After two weeks of work, I've earned a vacation. Well, not really, but our "summer vacation" starts tomorrow and lasts a week (I love how "summer vacation" is only one week long). So a couple of us will head to Hiroshima, and I hope to spend some quality time in Kyoto as well.

Will be back with pictures and stories.

Culture Electricution

So I recently watched "Lost In Translation" for the first time. First off, it's pretty remarkable how closely my recent attitude resembles Bill Murray's. Except for the movie star part. Well... even that has its moments. In a land of people who, on stilts, reach my shoulders, and have straighter hair and fairer skin than I, I am frequently the target of gawkers of all sorts. Old. Young. Male. Female. (Yes, those are all the subgroups of people in the town I'm in.)

I have been asked how getting used to life in Japan has differed from getting used to life in Prague last year. In many ways, Prague was much easier. For one, I could get by on English in most places. It was easy to find menus with at least some English. Signs were in the Roman alphabet, so even if I didn't know what the words meant (e.g. zmrzlina), it was easy to find that in my pocket dictionary. Not so much the case here.

Also, Praguian culture is pretty lax. It's very much a laissez-faire attitude. "You do whatever you want as long as it doesn't infringe upon me." Simple. Free. Lax.
But the list of unwritten rules here is staggering. Some of them I knew before arriving. Others make sense, and some appear to be someone's personal whims.
For instance, the taking off of shoes when entering a school, house, etc, is a nice, and sensible, way to keep the floors pretty clean. It provides an air of really welcoming someone into a place. That one is an easy adjustment.
On the other hand, the other day I went to the immigration office to get my work visa paperwork started. I was asked to bring 2 passport-sized photos. No problem, I went to the little automatic photo machine. The machine took 3 pictures, and I picked the best one. Alright. However, upon presenting the pictures, I was chastised for smiling. "Japanese people don't smile in these pictures. It's not right." When asked why, I got a shrug. They didn't make me re-take the pictures, so I guess this will be just one more way in which I will stand out.
Even the things people say to each other when coming and going from work are ... different. For example, I'm used to mutual "bye"s when someone leaves. Yet here, the people who are staying say something which is loosely translated as "You must be tired." Because the work ethic is so strong here, if you leave, even if you've put in 10 hours and your shift is up, it's almost as if you have to have an excuse for leaving.

Now, I don't watch that much television. Simply because I don't understand any of it. However, a couple nights ago I was pleasantly surprised to come back to Pat's place to find Shrek on TV, in English. Happy to have an American comedy to watch to round out my day, I sat down and enjoyed it.
It was on network television, so it had commercials. Now, I'm not quite sure how to describe the way of the Japanese television advertisement. When they have live actors, they are quite... animated, and the style is very child-cartoonish. For instance, there was a commercial for a local electrician / handyman. A woman and her son had some problems with an appliance, so they called this number (all done very cartoonishly). The electrician receives the call and then flies to her home. Now, I don't mean "flies" as in he goes there very fast. No. He actually flies. In the air. With a cape. And this was a relatively calm commercial, from what I've seen. But it's the easiest to explain in words here.

Some searching on YouTube yielded a small sampling which can better illustrate what I'm trying to describe...




After seeing commericals like this, I turned to Pat and said, "What's up with Japanese commercials being pretty... insane?" He replied, "I'm not sure. But I wonder... what year, exactly, did Japanese people, as a whole, start smoking crack?"

Experiencing something a little stronger than culture shock...

Back Up and Running

Yes, the brog was down recently due to some bandwidth issues. We here at Jimbomania believe we have isolated and fixed the problem, and so we're now back in business.

Thanks to those of you who let us know we were having issues. Game on!