Today at my elementary school visit I had occasion to chat with a couple of adorable first graders in the hallway. This conversation was in Japanese:
Me: I have to go now. Bai bai! [That last part is "bye bye" but pronounced the way the Japanese do.]
Little girl: Bai bai! *pause* How do you say “bai bai” in English?
Me: “Bai bai” is English.
LG: *pause* But how do you say it in English?
Me: Well, we say “bye bye”.
LG: You say the same thing?
Me: Yes.
LG: Wow!
I am seriously exhausted today. It’s my own damn fault, of course. I stayed out too late at the bar with Nick last night. We were talking about important stuff and then suddenly Yoichi and his buddies came in and good judgement just went out the window. I ended up quite intoxicated and hitting the bed around 1am.
That doesn’t actually seem super late except that I had to wake up at 6am for work today — at an elementary school visit. I was very muddled this morning. I had that pseudo-hangovery feeling of being a little off balance and very, very sleepy.
I was a little worried because the staff and kids at this school were especially cool and I wanted to summon up my maximum genkisa (er, energy and “verve”) for them. But luckily, as soon as I got into class and the kids were all excited and playful my head cleared right up and I got totally into high-energy mode. I had back-to-back classes all morning so I was able to keep it up for a while. I felt tired the whole time but the kids were feeding me so much energy that it was alright.
So in the end I had a good day. I played with lots of bright, cheerful kids and learned a bunch more about Japanese kid culture. It was good times.
Now I’m going to go home and crash for several hours.
Lately I’ve been going to Sapporo’s biggest park, Nakajima Koen (“koen” means “park”), quite often. It’s a big place full of beautiful nature and happy people. I find it’s quite revitalizing to go there. Unfortunately, in winter it’s covered in snow and basically inaccessible except for the cross-country ski trails.
So I finally passed the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) level 2! It basically means I qualify for a lot of bilingual jobs (but not interpreting — that’s well above my level.) I have more details on the joint blog I share with my wife (she passed, too!) I studied for this one for a long, long time so I’m stoked to be done with it.
おかげさまで合格しました！
I’m sure this is old news to many, but I’ve recently had my first experience with spammers who “follow” me on Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday mostly so my dismissal of it could be based on real information instead of blind disdain. Since then, 3 people have started “following”1 me: my friend Jeremy, a dating-site tout account claiming to be named “Rochelle”, and some guy named Jay Benoit who is writing Twitter software. His tweets are variations on “Yep, still writing my software. Workin’ hard.”
The reason this was interesting is it’s the first time I personally have seen spam that uses a pull rather than push model. Email spam pushes email into your box, for instance. This kind of spam does something that is minimally intrusive (except the notifier email becomes a kind of spam, of course) and can be safely ignored. But many people are likely to at least view the spammer’s profile, knowing they can trust the Twitter site to not start trying to feed you viruses and popups. By generating tons of tweets, the spammer might even even garner followers (indeed, both of the above-mentioned spammers have hundreds or thousand of followers.) The tweets themselves offer no computing-world danger since they follow the rules of the Twitter website. So if someone is interested in the spammer’s pitch, even just a little, there’s no danger in following their tweets.
So of course the signal-to-noise ratio for my Twitter account is going to get hammered by this activity, and it will likely be something that pushes me away from Twitter. Unless, of course, those with more net time than I do already know a good solution to this problem?
Hey, I moved servers and this is a test to confirm everything is hunky-dory. Please don’t mind me…
Japanese TV is really weird.
Electra and I found an awesome site called Lang-8 that acts as a special journaing site. You make posts in a foreign language that you are studying. Then native speakers correct your writing. It’s pretty addictive. We’ve been correcting lots of English and are amazed at how quickly the Japanese members jump in to correct our stuff. I decided that since I never write anything here, I should cross-post so my friends at home can see what I’m writing about.
The Japanese is pre-corrections. So it contains (numerous) errors.
—–
Today was a little rough. It was blizzarding in Sapporo. Despite a cough and a runny nose, I walked from the subway station to the clinic through the strong wind. But I wasn’t able to make an appointment. However, the nurses were very helpful. They recommend a clinic near my house.
However, I did have another issue besides the cold. So they also recommended Hokkaido University Hospital. The problem is, Hokkaido University campus is close to the clinic, but the university hospital is far away. So I left for the campus. The campus is beautiful. It’s especially beautiful with the snow piled up. But the wind (and my cold)1 were really rough, so I never made it to the hospital. Halfway across campus, I decided to go back home.
Now I’m taking it easy. This is much better, I think.
—-
今日はちょっと大変でした。札幌に吹雪きました。せきとはなみずが出たのに、地下鉄駅から病院まで強い風に通りました。でも、病院に予約をできませんでした。しかし、病院で、看護師がよく手伝いました。家の近い病院を勧めました。
でも、風邪以外の希望としましたから、北海道大学病院も勧めました。問題は、北海道大学の構内は病院の近いですけど、大学の病院は遠かったです。そして、構内へ行きました。構内は美しい。特別に、雪が積もって美しかったです。でも、風（と風邪）は大変でしたから、大学病院に着きませんでした。構内を通る途中、家に戻ると決めました。
今のんびりしています。これの方がいいと思います。
In case any of my fine readers were unaware, I went back to Portland a couple weeks ago. I went from July 16th to July 30th. I saw lots of people that I love and just generally reveled in home-ness.
So what was the result? What did I learn and what happened upon returning to Portland after a year of living in Sapporo? Let’s make a bullet-list!
I had gotten accustomed to the Japanese tendency to keep to yourself. Just going from the airport to the Hollywood district I had 7 people talk to me, and only 3 wanted money. One of the guys asking for money even had a friendly conversation with me after I said no. It was both jarring and welcome. I gave a couple people directions. There I was, carrying enormous amounts of luggage and sweaty-dirty from 36 hours of travel and I was giving people directions. I used to live in the Hollywood district, y’know?
It took about 5 days for me to become my old noisy American self again. I’m glad I did, because I’ve managed to keep some of that coming back here again. Now that I can speak Japanese relatively well and I know the lay of the land, I find it’s easier to be whoever I am. If people are confused or seem not to like it, now I can understand what they’re saying or talk to them about what’s happening. I find that the people around me aren’t put out by my behavior nearly as often as many of us foreign residents seem to think they are.
I made a budget for my stay in Portland and actually couldn’t spend my daily entertainment allowance. So I spent it on more clothes, which is good ’cause I need them.
In Sapporo, a can of high-quality beer at the grocery store is about 500 yen (~$5). A beer in Portland that is several times as good costs about $1.30. Coffee is pretty much the same equation. And it’s not just my vices that are cheaper. You can get many more fruits and veggies for much cheaper in Oregon (note that I live in Japan’s most major agricultural prefecture.) And mass transit — oh, man. A subway ride in Sapporo is based on number of stops. It’s at least 200 yen (~$2) and goes up to about 340 yen. My usual ride is about 240 yen. And that’s each way. In Portland, you can ride around the main city area for about 3 hours for something like $1.80.
However… in Sapporo I can go somewhere with amazing service and have them bring unlimited alcoholic beverages for 90-120 minutes for usually around $15. In many of these places I can also get wonderful sashimi that is unrivaled at home for just a few bucks. You can also get a tasty bowl of perfectly healthy ramen for about the price of a very unhealthy meal at McDonald’s, et al. In fact, Japanese food, speaking generally, seems to be of higher quality and nutritional content. So there are trade-offs. But Japan is certainly more expensive.
I knew before I left that I had reached a threshold of ability that qualifies as “speaking Japanese.” But when I was travelling, I found that I had no trouble navigating airports, train stations, etc. — places I hadn’t been before. I could speak to people who needed to talk to me. In general, I had no trouble making my around Japan. So from my door in Sapporo to Jesse’s door in Portland, I had no significant difficulty with language differences. It was pretty rad.
As much as I am learning to fit in here, I will still be defined in many contexts by what I’m not, that being Japanese. It can be really easy to get caught up in the idea that what I am is a foreigner. I can run around calling myself a “gaijin” and generally reinforcing my outsiderness by behaving as if all that really matters is that I don’t get punished for what I do. It can be pretty easy to fall into that pattern. I’ve been quite vigilant about not doing that as I’ve lived here, but occasionally it can feel a bit oppresive when I’m not feeling like the society where I live agrees with my assertion of non-outsiderness. Going home and being myself in my home environment for a couple weeks really helped reset the “self settings” in my mind. Combine that with the fact that this time coming to Japan I can actually communicate and navigate in this society and I find myself being much more, well, myself this summer. Being vigilant about my refusal to make myself into an outsider feels much more natural and simple at this point. I hope to get my Japanese skills up to a more Chatty Cathy kind of level so I can strengthen relationships with my coworkers, too.
I’ve learned a ton about me and the world just by living in a very different country from my own. Going home helped me realized what I had learned in the past year. It’s immense. It’s just really, truly mind-bogglingly immense. It’s like I’m 2 years old again and every day is so full of learning that it verges on painful (and sometimes more than verges.) This includes the obvious stuff like Japanese language and cultural norms. I’ve also learned more about language and norms in the countries where my fellow ALTs come from. But the real kicker is in the synthesis of this all. We get a lot of worldy info from the Internet. But as much as the info is real and useful, the experience is not really very real. Industrial science has yet to create a replacement for experiences. The experiences I have here so often force me into the Piagean crisis where I have to reconcile things I don’t understand and find some way to synthesize the new info. And I know that technically happens all the time. But for me it happens in that difficult 2-year-old way a lot. It’s tough. But now I’m really revelling in the learning it’s given me.
I think I am at the point where I can say with some comfort that I “speak Japanese.” I am not fluent, but I can speak about basic stuff pretty fluidly and I can communicate have communicated to me pretty complex things. And I am sometimes surprised by how “literate in Japanese” I am, but that’s a whole different ball of wax.
So ya, that’s cause for celebration… neh?
PS — I used to speak Spanish okay but Japanese has evicted it from the “foreign language” sections of my brain. So unfortunately I’m not really trilingual. :p