Missive from Pokemon Land
When I came to Japan I thought briefly of starting a "travel blog," but then I realized that those are for people who actually travel, like people who study in Europe and spend their weekends hopping from country to country. The only traveling I've been doing is on the train between Seto and Nagoya, so I've decided not to start any special blog, as I don't think entries about commuting and homework would be of much interest. But when I write entries on LiveJournal about Japan, I'm going to start making them public (instead of friends-only) posts, so that anyone can read them. Just thought I'd mention that.
So I've survived almost a month in Japan so far, and I thought I should write a brief entry about what my life here has been like, for anyone who's interested. I live in a city called Seto, which is spread out over so many mountains and hilly areas that I'm really not sure how big it is, but Wikipedia says its population is about 2.5 times that of Ames. The host family I'm living with live way out on the edge of town, so I haven't seen much of Seto proper, but I actually like where I'm living now - the green rice fields and forested mountains are really pretty, and it's easy to go for a short, aimless walk and end up in what looks like real My Neighbor Totoro territory, all secluded shrines and bamboo groves and everything very Japan-picturesque.
To get to Nanzan University in Nagoya, I have to take a commuter train into Nagoya and then the Nagoya subway to campus. It takes about an hour total, but I don't really mind too much. It has its benefits, actually: today I spent the train ride doing the grammar worksheet I forgot to do last night. By the time I arrived at Nanzan, it was finished.
The classes I'm enrolled in here are Intensive Japanese 400 (this is the one that meets every day, for either two and a half or three hours, except Wednesday when it's only an hour and a half), Japanese Writing 3 (essay writing and hard-core kanji review), Intermediate Translation, and a sociolinguistics course called Japanese Culture (originally I was going to wuss out and take Flower Arrangement, but it was boring so I dropped it and picked up Culture instead). It's a lot of work - some nights, a lot of work - but I can tell I'm already learning and measurably improving.
Nanzan has a really small campus, to the point where the odds are pretty good that if you walk in a straight line (which is basically how campus is arranged - a long line with a few shorter lines branching off of it), you'll just bump into whoever you're looking for, rather than having to make actual plans to meet. But for the times when actual plans are necessary, I bought a cell phone. It was the cheapest model available and yet, because this is Japan, it contains email, a television, and what is very possibly a better digital camera than the actual camera I brought from back home. Everybody in Japan has charms dangling from their cell phone straps, so I bought a small Totoro to hang from mine.
Japan is split in half between being incredibly advanced and surprisingly low-tech. Cell phones and TVs (which can be found on car dashboards) are really something to see, but computers and Internet connectivity are surprisingly terrible. Other modern conveniences are lacking for reasons like conserving space or saving energy. Almost nobody has a dryer, so sunny days are laundry days in Japan, and when I have to do laundry I need to be sure to hurry home from school early so that there's enough daylight left to dry my clothes by the time I get them on the line. There are hardly any electric hand dryers in bathrooms, either - everybody carries handkerchiefs with them to dry their hands after using a public restroom. Speaking of which, I was surprised by how prevalent floor-level squatting toilets are here. I thought there'd be Western toilets everywhere, and in fact when I first arrived I fervently vowed that although I'm all for adapting to new cultures most of the time, it would be November at the earliest, or else a REALLY big emergency, before I used one of the non-Western toilets. But that fell by the wayside pretty quickly, so now while I definitely still have a preference for what I'm used to, the alternative doesn't gross me out.
Sorry if that was a bit more than you wanted to hear on that subject; it was one of the differences here that gave me culture shock at first, so I thought it'd be worth mentioning. Another thing I've had to get used to is sorting my trash, which my friends who've studied in European countries will think nothing of, but I will say this and no more: it's harder when you can't read the characters on the garbage bins. Not to mention the pieces of trash that don't seem to fall into either the "burnable" or "non-burnable" categories: what about gum, for instance? I'm not a habitual gum chewer, but I chew it enough that I've had this dilemma a few times. Once or twice, I ended up just swallowing it; on an occasion when I was feeling less saintly, I dropped it in an ashtray, but don't tell the Japanese police.
Just like I've read about in books, it really is a little strange living in a country where nearly everybody looks (and even acts) completely different from you. I've never been such a visible minority for such a long period of time before. I do get stared at by a lot of children, even in urban, theoretically cosmopolitan Nagoya (in real life, although Nagoya is one of the biggest cities in Japan, it's a lot more run-down and tired-looking than people here want you to think). Even adults look startled to see me at times. On the subway or the train, even putting ethnicity aside, I can't help but feel like I stick out when everybody else is wearing either a suit or a school uniform.
Of course, Japan isn't really a "homogeneous nation" - that's just a myth that has been propagated for decades. But I'll say this: it's a lot more same-looking than anywhere I've been in America. I don't think there's much of a question that Japan likes thinking of itself as being all the same. Good social relations do seem to be really crucial here, even though a reluctance to buy into these "Americans think as individuals, Japanese think as groups" stereotypes makes me hesitant to say it. I've been interested to notice that advertisements, posters, and even warnings or announcements are often phrased as "Let's…!" invitations instead of commands or requests - "Let's clean up our train station." "Let's try to be careful of the doors." "Let's make our country great with Tokyo Academy." It's like there's a reluctance to sound too bossy. A poster I often see when walking through one of the train station corridors is full of advice, written in both English and Japanese, that sounds curiously reasonable and empathetic - almost passive-aggressively so at times:
"I offered my seat to someone on the subway. It didn't cost anything, but it delighted someone."
"My foot stepped on my cigarette, but the trash still remains."
"Smoke issues from my cigarette after I put it on the ground. If it were my house, I wouldn't be so unconcerned."
I suppose I'll wrap this up for now. I hope it'll prove interesting to anyone who wonders what life in Japan is like. If you have any questions or anything, please ask them - it'll give me something to talk about next time that's not, "Man, I sure am tired from those four hours of kanji homework last night."
So I've survived almost a month in Japan so far, and I thought I should write a brief entry about what my life here has been like, for anyone who's interested. I live in a city called Seto, which is spread out over so many mountains and hilly areas that I'm really not sure how big it is, but Wikipedia says its population is about 2.5 times that of Ames. The host family I'm living with live way out on the edge of town, so I haven't seen much of Seto proper, but I actually like where I'm living now - the green rice fields and forested mountains are really pretty, and it's easy to go for a short, aimless walk and end up in what looks like real My Neighbor Totoro territory, all secluded shrines and bamboo groves and everything very Japan-picturesque.
To get to Nanzan University in Nagoya, I have to take a commuter train into Nagoya and then the Nagoya subway to campus. It takes about an hour total, but I don't really mind too much. It has its benefits, actually: today I spent the train ride doing the grammar worksheet I forgot to do last night. By the time I arrived at Nanzan, it was finished.
The classes I'm enrolled in here are Intensive Japanese 400 (this is the one that meets every day, for either two and a half or three hours, except Wednesday when it's only an hour and a half), Japanese Writing 3 (essay writing and hard-core kanji review), Intermediate Translation, and a sociolinguistics course called Japanese Culture (originally I was going to wuss out and take Flower Arrangement, but it was boring so I dropped it and picked up Culture instead). It's a lot of work - some nights, a lot of work - but I can tell I'm already learning and measurably improving.
Nanzan has a really small campus, to the point where the odds are pretty good that if you walk in a straight line (which is basically how campus is arranged - a long line with a few shorter lines branching off of it), you'll just bump into whoever you're looking for, rather than having to make actual plans to meet. But for the times when actual plans are necessary, I bought a cell phone. It was the cheapest model available and yet, because this is Japan, it contains email, a television, and what is very possibly a better digital camera than the actual camera I brought from back home. Everybody in Japan has charms dangling from their cell phone straps, so I bought a small Totoro to hang from mine.
Japan is split in half between being incredibly advanced and surprisingly low-tech. Cell phones and TVs (which can be found on car dashboards) are really something to see, but computers and Internet connectivity are surprisingly terrible. Other modern conveniences are lacking for reasons like conserving space or saving energy. Almost nobody has a dryer, so sunny days are laundry days in Japan, and when I have to do laundry I need to be sure to hurry home from school early so that there's enough daylight left to dry my clothes by the time I get them on the line. There are hardly any electric hand dryers in bathrooms, either - everybody carries handkerchiefs with them to dry their hands after using a public restroom. Speaking of which, I was surprised by how prevalent floor-level squatting toilets are here. I thought there'd be Western toilets everywhere, and in fact when I first arrived I fervently vowed that although I'm all for adapting to new cultures most of the time, it would be November at the earliest, or else a REALLY big emergency, before I used one of the non-Western toilets. But that fell by the wayside pretty quickly, so now while I definitely still have a preference for what I'm used to, the alternative doesn't gross me out.
Sorry if that was a bit more than you wanted to hear on that subject; it was one of the differences here that gave me culture shock at first, so I thought it'd be worth mentioning. Another thing I've had to get used to is sorting my trash, which my friends who've studied in European countries will think nothing of, but I will say this and no more: it's harder when you can't read the characters on the garbage bins. Not to mention the pieces of trash that don't seem to fall into either the "burnable" or "non-burnable" categories: what about gum, for instance? I'm not a habitual gum chewer, but I chew it enough that I've had this dilemma a few times. Once or twice, I ended up just swallowing it; on an occasion when I was feeling less saintly, I dropped it in an ashtray, but don't tell the Japanese police.
Just like I've read about in books, it really is a little strange living in a country where nearly everybody looks (and even acts) completely different from you. I've never been such a visible minority for such a long period of time before. I do get stared at by a lot of children, even in urban, theoretically cosmopolitan Nagoya (in real life, although Nagoya is one of the biggest cities in Japan, it's a lot more run-down and tired-looking than people here want you to think). Even adults look startled to see me at times. On the subway or the train, even putting ethnicity aside, I can't help but feel like I stick out when everybody else is wearing either a suit or a school uniform.
Of course, Japan isn't really a "homogeneous nation" - that's just a myth that has been propagated for decades. But I'll say this: it's a lot more same-looking than anywhere I've been in America. I don't think there's much of a question that Japan likes thinking of itself as being all the same. Good social relations do seem to be really crucial here, even though a reluctance to buy into these "Americans think as individuals, Japanese think as groups" stereotypes makes me hesitant to say it. I've been interested to notice that advertisements, posters, and even warnings or announcements are often phrased as "Let's…!" invitations instead of commands or requests - "Let's clean up our train station." "Let's try to be careful of the doors." "Let's make our country great with Tokyo Academy." It's like there's a reluctance to sound too bossy. A poster I often see when walking through one of the train station corridors is full of advice, written in both English and Japanese, that sounds curiously reasonable and empathetic - almost passive-aggressively so at times:
"I offered my seat to someone on the subway. It didn't cost anything, but it delighted someone."
"My foot stepped on my cigarette, but the trash still remains."
"Smoke issues from my cigarette after I put it on the ground. If it were my house, I wouldn't be so unconcerned."
I suppose I'll wrap this up for now. I hope it'll prove interesting to anyone who wonders what life in Japan is like. If you have any questions or anything, please ask them - it'll give me something to talk about next time that's not, "Man, I sure am tired from those four hours of kanji homework last night."