Demonstrating Ochakai for the American KCP Students

The first week of school at KCP was a good one. I have one of the same teachers from last quarter, and two new ones. I like all of them. On thursday was the ochakai for the American students and I was there to help. I served the food and then took it out and also gave them the cups of tea and removed them when they were finished. The tea ceremony class also started the same day and continued on Friday. It is different this time around, I suppose because its the winter. Instead of pouring water from a kettle you remove it from a larger pot on the floor with some type of ladle. So far its been tough on my legs. I can sit long enough to do the whole procedure I learned in those two days, but by the end I cant feel my legs at all. So far I have been alone in the morning tea ceremony instruction, but there will be a new American student joining me next friday. There is no practice this coming monday.

Everyday in KCP Level 4, we study new kanji and a lot arent words so commonly used in conversations but more so in writing. We now have small group discussions about selected topics once a week before we write a composition about it. These are opinion conversations and writings, so we have to either agree or disagree, which is different than our writings from last quarter. It is definitely a noticeable change from last quarter in Level 3. I think I will be more challenged, as Level 3 was a lot of review for me. Having to work harder, I will enjoy class even more this time around, not that it wasnt enjoyable before. There is one other American in my class, but he is a Japanese descendant from Hawaii.

The other day I went to a korean restaurant with some american students and we had yakiniku. The grilled meat was very good. After that I went back to Shinjuku and met one of the new korean students in my class. She brought her friend and we had a couple drinks at the bar. We stayed a little too long though so I missed the last train. I slept in McDonalds for a while and then went to a cafe and my friend came and met me. He’s the one who works in Shinjuku trying to save up money to go to Australia in April for maybe 2 years. He works at night so he was able to meet me at 4am.

I finally went to Shimokitazawa which is only 2 subway stops from the Shinjuku station. I went with Dave and my friend Joe who also lives in the Fuchu dorm with me. We saw a series of very odd short animations, including one about tooth man, the man who lived under the subway car seats, and a fish talking on its way from the market to being eaten. This trendy area is full of cheap stuff and interesting restaurants. I bought a jacket and jeans for $7 each. We went to this one Japanese restaurant and they were hiring staff. I forgot to ask but maybe I will go back to see if I can get a job there making use of my UC Santa Cruz dining hall work experience and my short time as a busboy in Long Beach.

No word from gaijinpot on the teaching jobs I applied for. Living in the dorms is proving to be far more expensive than staying with a host family. Even when I try to spend my yen carefully it just disappears in an instant it seems. Hopefully I will have a job soon to offset the terrible negative flow of funds. We have our first test on tuesday, so I will do some more studying again tonight. I guess thats it for now.

KCP Winter Quarter Begins

My parents called me on my mobile last week, as I was getting on the train to visit a guy in Shibuya who emailed me from the japan-guide.com. As you can see from my flickr pictures I met another girl through the Japan guide who is 19 and majoring in Spanish. Leading off this posting is our picture taken at one of the arcades where you can do artwork on it.

My second quarter has begun at KCP and I moved up as expected to Level 4. I did very well on the final: 95 on the kanji and composition, 96 on the grammar, but only about 75 on the reading and listening. This week, I am planning to go to an area I have not yet visited in Tokyo with Dave called Shimoto Kitazawa. He says its awesome; we're going to see a movie at a short film theatre there.

I have applied for some part time english teaching jobs, and I bought the monthly train pass which was about $150. Hopefully I will have a job soon though so that I will have more spending money. Also, this week is the new years party for tea ceremony, and the day after is the tea ceremony for the new american KCP students which i will participate in and also be wearing a kimono once more. Maybe I will get some more pictures from that up onto flickr.

Ive talked to some of the new American KCP students, they seemed pretty cool but I still dont know much about them. I also saw some of my Korean friends for the first time since school ended. The other day I studied my Japanese at Chikara's school, Chikara is one of my Japanese friends, and I went there with Chris. I’m starting to get to know more and more of Japanese locals in Tokyo. This one friend works 6 days a week, and with a break in his schedule, he called to take me out for dinner and a couple of drinks. He is planning to go to Australia in April, and he likes to practice English with me. His name is Yuki, just like my friend from Santa Cruz.

I would like to write more, but I am pretty tired now and still have to study a bit more and will upload later.

Lost in Translation

Over the past week or so I havent really left my dorm in Fuchu during the day except to get food. But when night comes around I've been going to this local bar. I've met a lot of great people there so far, but I've been spending too much money. Without school its harder to keep from spending so much money. One guy from the Fuchu bar who is really cool is from Brazil. He has a German Father and a Japanese mother; he has been living in Japan for several years, is 35, works for Toshiba and has a Japanese wife. He offered me a job because Toshiba needs more workers to help construct a new shinkansen (high speed train), but he said working 4 hours a day would not be enough. Another guy I met is from Canada and he said he might want Japanese lessons from me. He hasnt responded back yet though.

Two nights ago I had an especially strange experience, almost out of “Lost in Translation.” I was at the bar alone when the woman sitting next to me noticed this hat my friend gave me. It was gachapin, which is some frog guy from Japanese TV. She said she really wanted it but I didnt really want to give it to her. She spoke decent English so we talked more in English than Japanese, but still used Japanese. She was talking about an exchange where if you give somebody something you will end up with more in return, i.e. part of Japan’s culture of gifting. She was 38, and accompanied by her boyfriend/husband. She asked whether I wanted to go somewhere else to get something to eat/drink with her and her boyfriend/husband.

There was a place nearby called Misato that was also owned by the bar, so we decided to go there. I told her she could have the hat at the end of the night, but I just ended up giving it to her before we even left the Fuchu bar. She seemed so suprised that I actually gave it to her and kept asking if it was really hers. She was already pretty drunk at this point. So we went to Misato and since I dont know anything about sake besides the fact that I like the dry kind, I told her boyfriend to pick something for me. They asked me what I wanted to eat and I said I like sashimi. Yoko (the girl) asked me what kind I didnt like and I said kai (shellfish). Then she asked me why I dont like tai, and what that is in english. Tai is seabream and I told her, but I said I didnt say tai I said kai. I said I really like toro, maguro, and tako. She asks me what the difference was between tai and tako, I told her I like the way tako feels in your mouth but I dont really like the flavor of shellfish too much. On a side note I do enjoy shellfish more than I used to, but its still not a particular favorite. So the sashimi comes and it is in front of Yoko. I'm eating it, and I think she is very surprised at how well I use chopsticks, as I reach across to pick up the sashimi.

As I was eating she says I look like the emperor and she tried to adjust my posture. Either I was slouching too much or sitting up too straight... I really dont know. Then out of nowhere she starts saying I shouldnt eat the fish. During oshogatsu (Japanese New Year celebration) the fish market closes down for several days, so she said it was old. It doesnt taste good. And I said I never said it doesnt taste good, I like it. I know but it doesnt taste good says Yoko. Tell the chef you dont want to eat it. I was getting really confused at this point. Once again she asks if the hat is really hers to keep. I said yes. I said I came to Japan by myself, that I have no family here. My parents are planning to come to Japan and she says no they cant. I was very suprised and said why not. Because you dont have a koseki. Whats a koseki? Oh its very hard to explain. I (yoko) have a koseki but you dont. If a foreigner marries a Japanese person, then they would get one. At this point I looked up koseki and it is family register. Then I told her they were just coming to visit me so she says ok thats fine then.

At this point, Yoko is very drunk and is staring at me. She then wrapped her fingers around my necklace and gazed at it for a few moments. I said you want this? No answer. Finally I took her hand away from my silver Japanese necklace (which was a holiday gift from my parents a year ago) and asked her, what do you want now? She started talking about how much she loved her boyfriend, mixing in English with the Japanese, such that at times I was not sure what she was really saying. Around this time her boyfriend said that its time to go. But she says no you go on ahead, I'm gonna stay here. He says no we're going right now, so lets go. He almost had to drag her out the door and without saying anything he apologized to me with a look alone. I still had my second glass of sake and the food, all of which they paid for so I continued to sit there and eat and drink. I asked the man working behind the counter if he had any idea what really happened and he said no..... It was so bizarre.

There are several websites like Gaijinpot.com that have been useful for living and visiting Japan. I got an email today from a Japanese girl responded to an ad I posted on one of them, Japan-guide.com looking for friends. Straight up she said she has a guitar but never plays it, so she is willing to give it to me so someone can make use of it. That would be fantastic, so I'm going to respond to her and see what happens.

I still havent gotten my KCP Level 3 grade back, I dont think I will know until I go back to school when the next term starts. I will be absolutely shocked if I didnt pass though which is scoring better than 80%.

I might check out the Tokyo zoo this week based upon a suggestion from my father. When he visited 30 years ago, the pandas were the rage in Tokyo. I have no idea whether there are still pandas, but maybe it would be a good place to go.

My friend Tim who returned back to New York said he is sending me some books. Tim was my best friend at KCP, we ate lunch together almost everyday just because we would run into each other before class. He is also a linguist and is fluent in Russian and English. He also knows some German, and Italian. Of course he knows Japanese as well, but he had no experience before coming to Japan. Out of all the level 1 students I knew though he had the best Japanese. He has been studying in Holland but he didnt know if they were going to let him back in the school. Hopefully that works out for him. A picture of Tim leads off this posting.

And if Jacki Breger is reading this blog, a big hug from Tokyo, as you saw my parents at a downtownLA holiday party. Its too bad it never worked out having a small City Life reunion before I left for Japan.

New Years on Takaosan

So on New Years eve I decided to go to Takaosan which is a mountain nearby Tokyo that has a Temple. You can take a cable car which only takes maybe ten minutes or walk the nature path which requires about an hour. I talked to a older man as I was waiting for the cable car, and we walked together up to the main temple area. My plan was to rest on the mountain and then go to a different section but I was in the rest room when a family of two small kids, maybe 5 and 7, the husband and wife, and then probably the wife's father sat down in front of me. I started talking to them and like most people they seemed very surprised by my Japanese. The husband has some sort of trading business so he often takes trips to California. He has been to Long Beach once. I ate one of my mikan (mandarin orange) and offered the other two to the family. The kids didnt want them so the mom says well if you kids wont eat it then I will. At first the kids were very shy of me, one of them couldnt stop staring at me but wouldnt say a word. The mother said dont worry he's just like Bob, except his Japanese is much better than Bob's.

One of them bought some mini donuts and offered me one. As I got the donut, I was in the middle of writing in my notebook simply because I havent written Japanese in a while. I was actually surprised how good my characters looked this time because sometimes when I write fast, its really sloppy, but this time I was very pleased. I basically wrote about coming to the mountain by myself but no longer feeling alone, to protect my family, friends, and everyone, and then a request for world peace. I showed it to the husband and wife and they were very surprised by the kanji I could write. I think they made some comment about me knowing more characters than them.

They asked me if I wanted to join them in the temple where the monks would come and do some sort of ritual. It happened around midnight but we entered the room at about 11 20 pm because it was filling up so fast we needed to get a seat on the floor. Eventually a man started beating a taiko drum, and then the monks entered sounding conch horns. They gathered in the middle of the room and starting chanting. I couldnt really understand anything they said but the vibration of the sound was very powerful. They would also hit these weird bells that rang for a long time. Another monk started playing the taiko in the middle of the room and te conch horns started up again. There was also a fire in the middle of the room which one monk kepts going with a fan. I think there was some significance to the fire consuming your desires or past grief or something like that. To sit in the room and just close your eyes was an amazing expereience.

During this whole time the kids could not sit still, they were getting very restless and the mother was obviously doing her best to control them. Before the monks came in I was showing the grandfather, mother, and one of the kids some of the photos I've taken. The child was very interested. After the new years opening ritul some bells rang outside and everyone was cheering. Obviously it had become 2008. The older brother of the youngers asked me if I wanted to eat soba with them. Even though I wanted to see the sunrise I decided to go eat with them. So I also forfeited the nature walk down the mountain, but I can always go back to Takaosan again, it is fairly close after all.

On the way back to the cable car the father bought me a cup of sake, and it came in one of those wooden box cups. It had the taste of the wood, maybe its cedar. It still has a strong pinish smell, it must have been freshly made. So we got to the bottom of the moutain and sat down in the soba shop. They ordered tororo soba, I'm not sure exactly what made it different from other types of soba but like often there was a raw egg. Ive come to enjoy eating eggs recently, even raw eggs dont bother me. Especially in soba its pretty good. I asked the father what his wish for the new year was, and he said to raise his children well without them getting hurt. I told him my wish was to find a girlfriend in Japan. Despite the amazement of this night I failed to really take pictures. However I did take a picture of the family (which led this post), minus the husband because he hadnt sat down yet; I didnt even know of his existance.

On a side note, my two years of summer savings are dwindling, and won't get me to June. ... I have been looking at jobs a little bit and I think maybe english teaching would be the best thing for me. I need to update my work history. Another time, I will tell more about my travels to Echigo, Yuzawa, and Niigata, but for now I need to get something to eat... so hungry...