Advertisement
Published: September 5th 2010
Hey everyone!
I can already tell that writing these blog entries is harder for me. The free time that I would have been spending on it is now being spent on hanging out with either friends or my host family, which is great! So far, the blog has been a great coping tool for dumping a bunch of feelings and potential frustrations when I am going through culture shock moments and feeling a bit empty. However, right now, I'm finding enough to keep me occupied that I'm not as likely to want to just hide away and write for an hour... except for right now. Expect these to come about once every week, where I will recap what has happened, my loves, my frustrations, and my deepest desires (probably not those actually...)
So! Disclaimer over! I last left you all with news of settling in with my host-family, which is so far going swimmingly. I've been able to hang out with Jun (their 33 year old son), actually, and he and his wife are really warm. The first time we met, he kept saying to me "Welcome to my family" and "We're joining forces!" in English. I was very
Jun!!!
Such a great guy. touched. On Tuesday night, there was a huge birthday party at the bar, so Jun decided to take me over to his place while my host-mom and dad were occupied. I got there and was fed, I tried Natto (this goopy, stinky, bean mix that you eat with rice, which, just thinking about now I'm gagging slightly), and we played Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart on Wii. The whole night was filled with me communicating anyway I could and not getting hung up on trying to always speak Japanese perfectly (which has led me to just freeze up and not talk at all), and with Jun pulling out his phone with an translation dictionary on it to help us all understand what was going on! Great times.
I have school off every Wednesday! This Wednesday, we went to Jun's tennis school where I got royally schooled in tennis! Having never really played before, I was way below everyone else's skill level, but Otou-san and Jun's right-hand girl, Kaori, hung out with me and taught me the basics. It was really fun, I could see actually getting into Tennis... Kaori is very cute and bubbly, and she's my age
too! 😉 Don't get any funny ideas, I'm just saying it was nice to meet her. Jun has been the #1 tennis champ for four years running in all of Saitama (our prefecture)!! Sugoi!!
Switching it up a bit, I finally have a schedule! Thank god. I really like having at least one thing in my life here that I can rely on, and a schedule of 3 classes is not a bad thing to fill that void. My Japanese class is alright: Each Japanese class each week has two different professors that switch off. Our middle of the week professor, Nishigaya-sensei, is an older woman with a small, tired voice, who seems to be all over the place all the time. She's pretty absent minded, and also makes less of an effort to pretend like we aren't annoying the shit out of her with our lack of skill. Shiotani-sensei on the other hand, is awesome. She loves screwing around with language, she's much more receptive to questions, and she makes class fun and understandable, which is great. I'm happy that I like at least one of my Japanese professors!
I'm also taking Japanese History and Japanese Pop-Culture,
Going to TIU
My host-parents have taken pictures of me every day before I've left... two classes that are taught in English by white guys and are organized solely for the JSP students (although 1-2 really ambitious TIU students are taking them as well). We only have these once a week, but they are long (3 hours each) and they go over a lot of a material. I realized today that my desire for a schedule hadn't included a desire for homework, but it's a necessary evil, I guess! I have a lot of homework to do today, as a result... boo.
Tokyo. Yesterday (Saturday), we commenced a trip into Tokyo that I organized loosely the week before. The idea had been to go in for the day, be wowed by Tokyo and it's awesomeness, and then hit up the D concert at night. Tokyo ended up being kinda disappointing for me, though (at least the part we were in). First, I met up with Melissa Collins (a friend of Sean and Jenny's that I met once earlier in the summer in the Bay area), which was great! She has been living in Tokyo for a while going to school, so she was really great at helping us find our way around. Secondly, there
were actually other gaijin around that were people I didn't know!! It was great to see other non-Japanese faces that I didn't know for the first time in a week and a half.
First stop was Harajuku, a shopping and clothing kind of district, which really isn't my scene, but the majority of people wanted to go so I tagged along. People made a beeline for the Softbank store (a Verizon-style company in Asia) because everyone wanted phones! WHAT?! I was being swept along by the tide, and ended up wasting about 45 minutes just waiting around, before I snapped out of it and decided to leave.
Melissa, George, Hillary, and I booked it to the nearest train station and decided to salvage the day by going to Akihabara, the Electric Town. We traveled across town and emerged into the heart of electronic doo-dads and nerdy male culture. Akihabara is fulls of these GIANT buildings with almost no windows that are full of small electronic stores, action figure stores, arcades, and other stranger things that I didn't have time to delve into. We searched through a store FULL of action figures from Final Fantasy, One Piece, Naruto, Neon
Genesis Evangaleon, everything Hayao Miyazaki has done, and countless other things that I didn't even know!
Next, we decided to go into an arcade. The first and last thing I saw in there was a pirate game! I crawled into this seated booth with a big gun in front off me and a steering wheel to my right, George slid in behind me, and we popped the equivalent of 2 dollars EACH into this beast to play. Ouch. It was amazing though, and completely worth it. The whole booth shook when we got hurt or knocked down, and the steering wheel was used to dodge out of the way of a huge snake beast that was trying to eat us! So fun! After that, we tried some of these photo booth things, where you go into the booth, take some pictures, and then you get to decorate them. It was great fun, but the photos we took looked nothing like what we got at the end! The booths are supposedly designed to actually make your eyes look bigger, because the Japanese find big eyes attractive!!! Wow! My eyes were a bit bigger and seems to have eyeliner on them,
That is ONE store...
It's like a 9-story Colosseum of electronic goods. and our faces were all over-exposed and our lips had been turned pinker. Wow, very weird and hilarious at the same time.
Eventually, we rolled over to Akasaka to wait in line for the concert. If you had told my high-school self that I'd be standing in line for a D concert with a bunch of Japanese visual-kei fans, dressed to nines in corsets, lace, leather, and a sea of perfectly applied hair-gel, I wouldn't have believed it. But it was funny, standing there, how unaffected I was by the whole seen: I guess I've been out of the Japanese music craze for long enough that I wasn't wowed by the fact that I was there.
I couldn't believe it when I saw a girl staring at me with the "Wow, a gaijin" face while standing in line. 'How am I still the most stand out thing in this sea of ridiculously dressed up people!?'
The concert itself was awesome. D was amazing, and their new music is pretty solid. They didn't play anything off the two first albums, which was disappointing, those being the ones I know best. I was also the tallest person in the
entire club, so I had a great view! 😊 Before we went in, there were baskets lined up with the band members' names on them, each with a few little gifts from fans in them.
The crowd was intensely different, though. I've never been in a concert setting where the band had so much control over the audience. They were so obedient. I still have no idea why it happened, but there were entire periods between songs when the ENTIRE club was dead silent: like not even a breath. I was shocked. No one clapped really (except me) until the very end of the show, and very little cheering happened. During songs, there were all these specific hand motions that everyone did, and from what I could see there were getting many of there cues from the lead singer, Asagi. At one point, a stage hand ran out and gave him a huge flag, and literally everyone in the audience magic-ed two mini flags, one red and one black, out of thin air and started waving them ina pattern that they all must have learned in D Boot Camp or something!! It was such an intense outsider experience for
Gift boxes for the band
Never seen this before!! all of us gaijin, and it was compounded by when, later on, the same thing happened with traditional Japanese folding fans! How did everyone have these flags and fans? Where did they get them? How the FUCK were they all doing the same thing at the same time in perfect unison??? It was like we had wandered into an ant hill, and everyone was hooked up to the same overall conscious and we were left out.
After that we headed back to the boonies and called it a night. So freaking tired but some how we made it.
Next weekend, I'm climbing Mt. Fuji straight to the summit (weather permitting)!! Super excited for that one, it's going to be quite the trek.
Much love to everyone out there,
Rowan
Advertisement
Tot: 0.091s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 10; qc: 55; dbt: 0.0499s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Dad
non-member comment
Wonderful!!
What a wonderful start to this whole adventure! You look so happy and so much great stuff is happening, connections with people you like, threads from your earlier self like the visual kei, new things (go to Japan, pick up tennis!): I am just glowing reading about it and thanks for so many photos too, your mom and I went through all of them together just now. Tons of love, Dad