Emperor's Birthday Eve!
Today I am keeping a rolling blog, open to questions about Japan, in honor of the Tennou Heika.
I'll be posting answers to questions here in this entry, linking to other random About Japan posts I come up with today. Feel free to frolick in the comments.
Ready? Let's celebrate!
***
A post on useful phrases below...
The second question of the day posed by Rosalee Luann.
And Chris Kastensmidt will start us off with questions for the morning:
"How do meals work in Japan? How many per day? How often do people eat out vs. at home? What are the typical meals?"
A fun cultural tidbit:
People will eat out for lunch a lot at a noodle shop. There are lots of little hole-in-the-wall or mom-and-pop shop noodle restaurants because its something you'll just step out with your friends to do at your favorite place.
I'm pretty sure some people tour other places revolving around the different noodle places they see.
I'll start with a little story about this. When my family was still in a hotel, waiting to set up house, we woke to a breakfast in the lobby that was not "Western". There was fish, rice. Soups. The big vat of brown soup that filled the whole place with its aroma had boiled eggs simmering in it, potatoes, cabbage--it smelled vile to us, so early in the morning. There was a fish-paste tang behind the cabbage and also a mixture of sweet and salty that just was not appetizing.
One of the mornings because we hadn't gotten to the tiny little grocery store (where I had first impact with trying to negotiate a family of 7 in Japanese shop aisles) I think my mom actually got tiny cups of Hagen Daz ice cream out of a vending machine.
Four years later I volunteered to work at the church we were going to, and stayed in their dorm for a week. Toward the end of the exhausting experience, I had a fun time putting together and devouring a soup with a friend, Eiko. It was only as I saw an egg, in its shell, tinted brown, that I realized it was exactly the same soup.
The Japanese eat three meals a day, as far as standard goes. Dinner is generally pretty because they keep long working hours, be that at cram school after sports clubs or when they finally leave the office to go network at the bar.
In terms of eating out vs. making food, it depends (as it does anywhere) whether they live deep in a city, or are in a more rural area. I was fortunate to spend my time in Japan in a small city that still was surrounded by rice-paddies, was as traditional as the power of television could make it, and had a very different pace of life than Tokyo. Most stories of Japan come out of Tokyo, or the surrounding cities that make up that metropolis. That's fine; most Japanese people live in Japan. It's just not all there is.
Where I lived, you had to go find a restaurant if you wanted to eat out in the way we think of it. (Except for the noodle shops.)
I know my best friend Iyo shopped for a day or two at a convenience store when she was in college, and I bet she ate out a lot.
Oh, that's something else. A Japanese woman will go shopping pretty much every day, to get her fish and vegetables and such. Of course they have big huge bags of rice, and jars of the pickles they like, but the fresh thing they will get as they want to make them.
My mother did this also (though she'd been on a very homeschool-mom-like two week shopping plan in the US previously) because you just couldn't get big enough portions to last a family with five kids longer than a few days. Also, she was carting it home on a "mama chari" bicycle.
(We started out with a van, but decided we were so close to everything in the city we didn't need to spend the crazy money for gas to live.)
"And another: do you know people who have studied Japanese later in life? How long does it take for someone to learn enough to hold a decent conversation? To understand a movie? To read a comic book?"
I knew of lots of "JETs" (exchange teachers), some who could carry on conversations because they'd decided to master Japanese. Otherwise, it was easy to let the Japanese use their English.
One man was very famous (Dan something...) because he spoke the nearby backwater city's dialect perfectly. He was making a living on television.
I think with immersion it could be about two years to a decent conversation. But then...it keeps on building, and language is one of those things. I peaked out the day we landed in the US for good.
It really depends on your will and circumstances. My dad learned very little (to his own mind) because he was in a work situation where he had to communicate NOW, and relied on those who spoke English well. It would have benefitted his job to be able to spend a little time studying Japanese intensively in the long-run, but NEC Yonezawa did not have that framework up.
Reading is a whole separate skill, actually. But if you are a reader anyway, one who's learned a lot of vocabulary contextually, I think reading wouldn't take that long after you master the basic characters (around 500? Not as overwhelming as it seems, as long as you're willing to do a little rote). Then you could definitely read a comic (after all, it's generally conversational Japanese) if you can find the story-specific phrases in the dictionary. Or just keep guessing, like I do.
A newspaper, now, would take some thousands, so that's what the Japanese use as a threshold for reading. Of course here you have literacy in lots more specific fields: science, politics, history. Because an incident may have it's own combination of kanji to mean something totally unique this is a much harder thing.
What are your favorite parts of Japanese culture? I'm a video game guy, so I've always been fascinated by that part. I enjoy books and movies a lot (translated, of course). Which of those do you like and what other parts do you find interesting? How would you compare their output vs: The US, England, France, China?
My favorite part of Japanese culture are their temple gardens, the funky way they've integrated Western culture just as they integrated Chinese concepts and writing systems, and the way once the "Asian" filter is off they have such different faces, shades of brown hair and eyes.
Mostly I love the people I knew there, and the little city I lived in. I didn't like being bored because there's no "hang out" for someone not in a school group or work group.
I've only watched MIYAZAKI Hayao films, really. Some scattered anime. I love watching it to hear the Japanese. I think you could understand most of that after a little immersion in Japanese culture. Not Miyazaki's films, though. Mononoke Hime has a lot of archaic Japanese concepts and phrases--and he tends to do that, use Japanese to the fullest. I can't blame him. But it would be frustrating if every scene wasn't so pretty.
I think they have a hold on horror movies for themselves, and they pretty much dominate the none DC/Marvel style comics world, as far as I can tell. Novels I'm not sure what the scene is. I've read a few, but the state of the art in the culture? I'm not sure.
Rosalee Luann asked, in my "sounis" community alert:
Ok, heres my question. What is the coolest thing you know about Japan that you want to tell all of us? :D
Well... the feudal defense tactics involved in capitals is a pretty neat thing.
I lived in a city that grew up basically when a lord was exiled after Sekigahara, a very important battle you may just see mentioned again sometime in your life if you ever read about Japan's history. The old city, the streets part of the actual feudal town as established by the Uesugi lords (blacksmith street, etc...) are Never Straight.
That is, they go crookedy so no road goes directly into the heart of the town...where the castle was.
I believe that in the castle I visited in Osaka (the museum Osaka Castle) the floorplan exhibited a similar tactic.
This was a standard practice, the unstraight streets so armies couldn't come at the castle easily.
I was just reading a really good [in Japanese fashion=tragic] historical "fantasy" called Across the Nightengale Floor.
Apparently there was also such a thing in Japan as a "nightengale floor" which was built so that everywhere you stepped on it, it made a note of some kind. This was a preventative measure, so that no one could cross it undetected.
I think that's pretty cool stuff...
I'll be posting answers to questions here in this entry, linking to other random About Japan posts I come up with today. Feel free to frolick in the comments.
Ready? Let's celebrate!
***
A post on useful phrases below...
The second question of the day posed by Rosalee Luann.
And Chris Kastensmidt will start us off with questions for the morning:
"How do meals work in Japan? How many per day? How often do people eat out vs. at home? What are the typical meals?"
A fun cultural tidbit:
People will eat out for lunch a lot at a noodle shop. There are lots of little hole-in-the-wall or mom-and-pop shop noodle restaurants because its something you'll just step out with your friends to do at your favorite place.
I'm pretty sure some people tour other places revolving around the different noodle places they see.
I'll start with a little story about this. When my family was still in a hotel, waiting to set up house, we woke to a breakfast in the lobby that was not "Western". There was fish, rice. Soups. The big vat of brown soup that filled the whole place with its aroma had boiled eggs simmering in it, potatoes, cabbage--it smelled vile to us, so early in the morning. There was a fish-paste tang behind the cabbage and also a mixture of sweet and salty that just was not appetizing.
One of the mornings because we hadn't gotten to the tiny little grocery store (where I had first impact with trying to negotiate a family of 7 in Japanese shop aisles) I think my mom actually got tiny cups of Hagen Daz ice cream out of a vending machine.
Four years later I volunteered to work at the church we were going to, and stayed in their dorm for a week. Toward the end of the exhausting experience, I had a fun time putting together and devouring a soup with a friend, Eiko. It was only as I saw an egg, in its shell, tinted brown, that I realized it was exactly the same soup.
The Japanese eat three meals a day, as far as standard goes. Dinner is generally pretty because they keep long working hours, be that at cram school after sports clubs or when they finally leave the office to go network at the bar.
In terms of eating out vs. making food, it depends (as it does anywhere) whether they live deep in a city, or are in a more rural area. I was fortunate to spend my time in Japan in a small city that still was surrounded by rice-paddies, was as traditional as the power of television could make it, and had a very different pace of life than Tokyo. Most stories of Japan come out of Tokyo, or the surrounding cities that make up that metropolis. That's fine; most Japanese people live in Japan. It's just not all there is.
Where I lived, you had to go find a restaurant if you wanted to eat out in the way we think of it. (Except for the noodle shops.)
I know my best friend Iyo shopped for a day or two at a convenience store when she was in college, and I bet she ate out a lot.
Oh, that's something else. A Japanese woman will go shopping pretty much every day, to get her fish and vegetables and such. Of course they have big huge bags of rice, and jars of the pickles they like, but the fresh thing they will get as they want to make them.
My mother did this also (though she'd been on a very homeschool-mom-like two week shopping plan in the US previously) because you just couldn't get big enough portions to last a family with five kids longer than a few days. Also, she was carting it home on a "mama chari" bicycle.
(We started out with a van, but decided we were so close to everything in the city we didn't need to spend the crazy money for gas to live.)
"And another: do you know people who have studied Japanese later in life? How long does it take for someone to learn enough to hold a decent conversation? To understand a movie? To read a comic book?"
I knew of lots of "JETs" (exchange teachers), some who could carry on conversations because they'd decided to master Japanese. Otherwise, it was easy to let the Japanese use their English.
One man was very famous (Dan something...) because he spoke the nearby backwater city's dialect perfectly. He was making a living on television.
I think with immersion it could be about two years to a decent conversation. But then...it keeps on building, and language is one of those things. I peaked out the day we landed in the US for good.
It really depends on your will and circumstances. My dad learned very little (to his own mind) because he was in a work situation where he had to communicate NOW, and relied on those who spoke English well. It would have benefitted his job to be able to spend a little time studying Japanese intensively in the long-run, but NEC Yonezawa did not have that framework up.
Reading is a whole separate skill, actually. But if you are a reader anyway, one who's learned a lot of vocabulary contextually, I think reading wouldn't take that long after you master the basic characters (around 500? Not as overwhelming as it seems, as long as you're willing to do a little rote). Then you could definitely read a comic (after all, it's generally conversational Japanese) if you can find the story-specific phrases in the dictionary. Or just keep guessing, like I do.
A newspaper, now, would take some thousands, so that's what the Japanese use as a threshold for reading. Of course here you have literacy in lots more specific fields: science, politics, history. Because an incident may have it's own combination of kanji to mean something totally unique this is a much harder thing.
What are your favorite parts of Japanese culture? I'm a video game guy, so I've always been fascinated by that part. I enjoy books and movies a lot (translated, of course). Which of those do you like and what other parts do you find interesting? How would you compare their output vs: The US, England, France, China?
My favorite part of Japanese culture are their temple gardens, the funky way they've integrated Western culture just as they integrated Chinese concepts and writing systems, and the way once the "Asian" filter is off they have such different faces, shades of brown hair and eyes.
Mostly I love the people I knew there, and the little city I lived in. I didn't like being bored because there's no "hang out" for someone not in a school group or work group.
I've only watched MIYAZAKI Hayao films, really. Some scattered anime. I love watching it to hear the Japanese. I think you could understand most of that after a little immersion in Japanese culture. Not Miyazaki's films, though. Mononoke Hime has a lot of archaic Japanese concepts and phrases--and he tends to do that, use Japanese to the fullest. I can't blame him. But it would be frustrating if every scene wasn't so pretty.
I think they have a hold on horror movies for themselves, and they pretty much dominate the none DC/Marvel style comics world, as far as I can tell. Novels I'm not sure what the scene is. I've read a few, but the state of the art in the culture? I'm not sure.
Rosalee Luann asked, in my "sounis" community alert:
Ok, heres my question. What is the coolest thing you know about Japan that you want to tell all of us? :D
Well... the feudal defense tactics involved in capitals is a pretty neat thing.
I lived in a city that grew up basically when a lord was exiled after Sekigahara, a very important battle you may just see mentioned again sometime in your life if you ever read about Japan's history. The old city, the streets part of the actual feudal town as established by the Uesugi lords (blacksmith street, etc...) are Never Straight.
That is, they go crookedy so no road goes directly into the heart of the town...where the castle was.
I believe that in the castle I visited in Osaka (the museum Osaka Castle) the floorplan exhibited a similar tactic.
This was a standard practice, the unstraight streets so armies couldn't come at the castle easily.
I was just reading a really good [in Japanese fashion=tragic] historical "fantasy" called Across the Nightengale Floor.
Apparently there was also such a thing in Japan as a "nightengale floor" which was built so that everywhere you stepped on it, it made a note of some kind. This was a preventative measure, so that no one could cross it undetected.
I think that's pretty cool stuff...