Why Japan

For those of you that don't know... I'm sick. Ha ha... I've been walking around these past few weeks wondering why the heck half the population is wearing flu masks... I think it took awhile because my immune system was still acclimating... but my allergies finally hit. Unfortunately this is a country full of allergens... so there's really no hope escaping it... and worse yet, the concentration is quite high... so... as far as I can tell... the allergies are hitting pretty hard.

Back to the topic that I never got to...

The girls upstairs that I've taken to hanging out with are all 18 yo (fresh out of high school) and for the most part... they're addicted to Detective Conan... its kind of funny... especially since the whole anime/manga thing is supposed to die with age. I don't know if that will happen with this generation as the target audience for most anime is expanding... or maybe its just because i'm getting older.

We do have a self-proclaimed otaku in our group... but this proclamation comes with a few caveats... well really... just one... he's 17 (as he so proudly claims). Now why would I even care? As far as I am aware... the term otaku carried (and still does even after densha otoko probably granted to a lesser extent) a very negative connotation. Another japanese word to describe otaku: maniac. The english doesn't really have a comparable term to describe an otaku as the old connotations for geek and nerd have more or less been thrown out to be more fashionable to today's tech savvy youth. Even the word otaku has been stripped of its negative connotations in the west, but I wouldn't be caught dead calling myself an otaku, however I feel like I walk a fine line between normalcy (whatever standardizes normal) and just being really informed... ie. geeky. This topic can be a rather deep and egocentric one so I'll go ahead and skip on to what I want to talk about...

Why Japan? I've met tons of people that have gone abroad since my high school days... and maybe its because of my status of being overseas chinese... this whole lack of national identity thing... but I feel slightly disgruntled when people harp on other countries... saying how much another country is better than another. It used to be much worse than it is now... and perhaps the fact that I care about how another place is better than my home means I have national pride... I don't know. I don't care much for America's reputation or what "my country" means to everyone else... but it kind of pisses me off when people start talking about how much better it is over there... because then it feels like they're putting down my home... maybe its that reincarnated japanese soul of mine (ie. you don't say today's weather is nice... you say today's weather is also nice (just like any other day)). So why did I choose to want to study in Japan oh so long ago? I did this before I joined taiko... so my only exposure to Japan was through what I saw in anime. In a way, how I started to become interested in Japan (in a more extreme case people would call it being a Japan-o-phile... I don't feel like I'm at that point... but I may very well be) was due to what I'd like to call my otaku past. I've never quite been ok with the whole "yeah... Japan Japan Japan... everything Japan is cool" school of thought. In fact I was a bit discomforted by it... especially since a number of my friends were all gung ho about Japan.

As time dragged on... and I became more involved with taiko, my approach to culture slowly changed as I learned more and more about the history of this region (which is painfully neglected by our high schools... or maybe its because I simply didn't study hard enough) and while I did got through the China phase a few times, I don't think modern China has peaked my interested quite yet. But in essence, my interested in Japan has developed far beyond simply what manga and anime has to offer. Ironically, I probably watch and read about as much as I used to. Possibly a little less now because I spend a lot more time doing other things, but when I'm in the burnt out mode... that's all I really do... So does manga and anime represent anything intrinsically Japanese to me? no... not really... for what they are to me now... they're just stories and a preferred format... It's something I've grown up doing, so I prefer it over most other media. Is there anything redeemable from this particular media? no... I don't think so... the only series I ever got anything worthwhile from... was 12 kingdoms, and that was more a part of my own development as a person than anything.

So why Japan? When anime and manga aren't even really a reason to be here at all? I don't list anime and manga as an interest anymore because they've stopped being anything more than stories to me. I've recognized that Japanese and American Taiko are different and as far as I can understand, they are different entities with the same root, but like the homo-sapien and chimpanzee... their common ancestor probably looks nothing like either. I admit, taiko is a major reason for me being here. Its one of my interests, and I feel diversifying my taiko portfolio will greatly develop my taiko ability or artistic skill, talent, whatever you want to call it... but I can just as easily do that back in the states by hunting down taiko internships with portland, san jose, or the taiko institute...

One part of it is... like just about every other youngster getting ready to hit a major turning point in their lives... the desire to see the world and explore and try those new wings that we've worked so hard to obtain. But wanting to see the world is a pretty common desire applicable to anywhere... but really my interests can only lead me to two other places... China (which is a no because I don't agree with China's current political environment) and hong kong (which is still part of China... so I'd rather not if I could help it). I have no real interest in England, or France. I have close to nil experience with Germany... and while I'm on a relatively Vietnamese diet... I'm pretty unfamiliar with the culture.

America is a pretty good place to get to know a number of different cultures... fortunately most asian cultures are included in the whole "its not a bad place to get to know.." Islamic cultures are a bit harder to come by in America, especially at this point in time... but for now I don't know much and am not interested (the ignorance feeds itself), which leaves how many countries do I want to deepend my understanding of? Language also plays a large role too. Since most of the stories I really like are in Japanese... the natural language to pursue... Japanese (its not about the means... its about the end in this case)... I decided long ago... Japanese reading comprehension first... Chinese can come later... listening and speaking Japanese and Cantonese can be concurrent, Mandarin will have to wait.

Its all about deepening my understanding. It great to go and check a new place out... which is great if you're going to be there for temporary stay... but to do anything long term, I feel having as much of a foundation as you can muster is the best way to milk the most out of your experience.




So why Japan? The answer is simple... to deepen what I already know...





because the more I get to know it... the stranger it becomes. I certainly feel that way about the language... the culture is right there beside it... as are the streets (the streets near my home are very windy... and physics... well... the deeper you go... the stranger it gets... quantum mechanics only gets harder after your infinite well, pauli exclusion, and heisenberg uncertainty...

ummm... yeah... not much to say unfortunately... ha ha

How long has it been since my last post? I believe the last time was somewhere in Tokyo… in the middle of the night trying. Oh? No… I think the last time when I was bitching about my graduation status….
Where should I start? What should I talk about? I suppose there could be a lot to say, but at the same time it all seems kind of normal… so what is there to say? It has all flown by so fast. Much has happened since: such as alien registration, getting national health insurance, a bank account, cell phone, internet, paying for my living arrangements, etc etc etc… honestly its nothing to write home about.
Things have kinda swung back and forth between good and bad. The good usually starting sometime around meal time… the bad usually after doing a ton of paperwork… In terms of my lab, it hasn’t been bad. The people are really nice, although I’m getting pampered. I’m sure my labmates all hate me for being babied so much… ha ha.
I did catch a cold however… so I guess that’s been interesting. The weather is getting warmer… whatelse?
It’s raining a lot…
The sakura are blooming… but it’s raining a lot… so… the sakura aren’t so happy.
I hang out with the international students a lot... international… and the freshman girls….

Oh… one cool thing that happened was hanging out with Yuta in Asakusa. That was cool. Granted it was just hanging out at the Miyamoto Studio. At the very least I got to independently study some taiko. I hope I can do it again sometime.
On a more taiko related note, I joined Kamo Tsunamura Taiko. They play taiko a bit differently than Asayake… so it’ll be interesting to see what techniques I can pick up. I kind of wish I saw practice more often… but in this area, it seems Taiko is a bit rarer… perhaps it would have been wiser looking for a group elsewhere. Oh well… we’ll make do with what we have now.

Japan and Graduation

heh... I don't know where to start... I mean, I've been figuring out how to graduate for the past 6 months now and even after all the trouble and worry, I'm still very far from the goal. It's a little unreasonable how difficult it is to find a class to satisfy these 3 small requirements: "must be 4 UC quarter units of upper division non-engineering/science/math related study"...

After hearing about how difficult the UOEAP director can be in allow units to transfer, I found that I'd probably be able to get my upper div units via the Japanese language courses offered here at Tohoku because it seemed unlikely that the combination of the non-engineering courses here would be able to pass by the director... the so-called dragon-lady. My Japanese isn't great, but I figured it was good enough to be close to intermediate level, which would give me enough units to graduate... funnily enough, the level I got assigned to was absolute beginner, and it seems they want to keep me here...

Really... I don't know what to do anymore... I really want to just quit school just to make a statement against this type of bureaucratic idiocy.

Grades!

Whoo hoo! I made my highest GPA last quarter!

Now's the hard part T.T keeping it up...

grade inflation doesn't happen here in Japan. And the even harder part... dealing with a bureacratic nazi trying to get the necessary units to freaking graduate.

Japan Day 1…

My first 11 hours in Japan have gone very smoothly. I’m currently awake at 3 in the morning suffering from jet lag (I woke up to some night workers since my window is open… and it definitely feels like morning right now (its 11am back at home). That aside, things haven’t gone too badly at all.

The trip started off at LAX. I was a bit apprehensive about United as I’ve had trouble with them in that past, but the flight from LAX to SFO went without a hitch. We departed on time. We arrived on time. There were a heck of a lot of kids. It felt like a freaking day care with a group of obnoxious snot nosed what looked like 7th and 8th graders (maybe freshmen in high school… freaking kids get younger and younger every day) that I hoped I wouldn’t see later on as per their chaperone’s conversation with the flight attendant; they were flying to SFO to connect to an international flight to.

I made a lot of friends on the plane. My neighbor, a rather burly… asian? I don’t know… guy named Felix was off to Edinburg to hang with his girlfriend whom he graduated from USC with, him in some sort of broadcast communications, her in something that led her to law school. I remember it was a somewhat non-typical path to law school. He wore a thick ass suede leather jacket. Looked nice as hell… and about as hot to boot in the very temperate Californian weather.
Behind me was a guy getting to know a Swedish girl… it seemed kind of shady… but had something to do with Santa Barbara… sigh… I really shouldn’t listen in on people’s conversations… but I can’t help it when the guy’s blasting away.

People seemed pretty friendly, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the baseball cap. Waiting for the shuttle transfer to the international terminal at SFO wasn’t too bad… no impatient people pushing and shoving to get to their next flight, the guy behind me was like “did we make it?” as the bigass group of kids and chaperone took the last seats available on that shuttle… and he follows with “no… we didn’t make it…” the attendant tells us to wait a bit… and we hang.

I see the guy later as I miraculously am able to grab a bite to eat and we nod in mutual acknowledgement of having passed this rather innocuous trial, this right to continue our journeys. Adventures are always fun.

By the way… the gate for the Japan flight… abound with tons of hot girls… and it only gets better the closer I get to the country.

One thing that I know I’m pretty good at is that I can remember people… where I’ve seen them and how long has elapsed since I’ve last seen them. Obviously the system isn’t perfect, there are a fair number of people that have slipped through the net when I’m online… but I’m pretty good at remembering faces… I don’t think I’ll be forgetting these people any time soon… granted I don’t really remember that one Ukrainian girl I drove to a rather shady setup in Escondido to help my German sub-letter help his newfound friend… its prolly my first glimpse at the type of human trafficking that still occurs in the US… granted I don’t think it was anything illegal… but it was definitely shady business. However I digress.

After lunch I boarded the plane… which had already been half way boarded so the gate was empty. There was no one just milling around waiting to get on an overcrowded flight. The pressure to just move bodies someplace was absent and people seemed to actually be treated like people should be when embarking on such a trip.
My carryon was huge. I got to my seat and this lady was totally setting up her personal space in my seat and she even went so far as to ask me to help her put her luggage up in the bin. It wasn’t until after a minute of her continuing on with her space that I had to intervene and claim my seat. She turned out to be a researcher working on statistical analysis of the TOEFL at Tokai University and had just returned from her sabbatical at Cambridge, and more importantly, my first newfound friend in Japan. We talked about a ton of topics and I won’t enumerate them all cuz… well frankly I don’t remember all the details of such small talk… especially when it amounted to about 14 hours of small talk, as she gave me a crash course on the train system used in Japan, and more or less held my hand through the ticket purchasing procedures, and helped pass the time to boot as she was going in the same direction. I’m still getting used to it, but I seem to be getting the hang of it. She also helped me with the pay phone system in Tokyo… which sucks btw, everyone is on cellphones here so pay phones are very much a thing of the past, but I have no choice as I won’t get my cellphone for a few more days. We said our farewells at Tokyo Station where I got off to connect to my next train, the Chuo-line, what has so far been my lifeline to Tokyo as my hotel is right next to the station in Musashisakai.
I was able to get in contact with Yuta. At this point the jetlag was hitting me pretty hard. The pay phone definitely didn’t help because we decided to hang out in Shinjuku and we decided to meet at the EAST Entrance to Shinjuku Station. I couldn’t find the EAST entrance so I hung out at the SOUTHEAST exit and the SOUTH exit until I finally discovered (quite some time later) that the entrance did in fact exist, and I was about a block away from it… because Shinjuku Station is underneath a freaking MALL… and the old man at the Southeast exit train booth was like “Denwa nai desu” ‘X’-ing his hands so I couldn’t tell Yuta where I was exactly. I ran to the right exit when I discovered this and it turned out the East exit is freaking enormous…. which is funny because I got in to the exit through an alleyway which was this puny thing that smelled of urine and even housed two homeless guys. Talking to the guys at this exit was much better as they were a little better with the whole shitty Japanese/English combo and even let me into the station to make the call.

Caught up with Yuta, ate some Ramen… rather I ate, he drank as he had some business prior with some other friends, and caught up. For those of you that are curious as to how he’s doing, he’s not doing bad here in Japan. In terms of taiko, I think he’s doing amazing things, but at the same time I don’t feel as if what he’s doing is that far beyond my reach. By no means am I anywhere near as talented as he is… its just that I can sort of relate to his experience and that it is not so far above and beyond what I have seen in taiko that I feel like I’m talking to a celebrity.
My next stop is a ginko to ensure that I have enough cash for later, and then Asakusa. As much as I should take pictures… I don’t feel like being all touristy right now, so I’ll refrain. Something that I noted in a previous entry to my paper journal (where I’m keeping track of stuff) is that I don’t seem to feel that sort of excitement that one feels about embarking on an adventure. One way of looking at it is that to me life is an adventure at this point. I certainly don’t want it to end although it seems like an end to sort of free lifestyle might be in sight. I did crazy shit as early as last summer where I traveled some 3000 miles in a month, 3 plane rides to the great North West, and 1 solo drive to freaking Corvallis. Another way of looking at it stems from a conversation I had with this one lady awhile back where she was like… maybe you’re a Japanese person reincarnated. She’s funny though and one should take that with a grain of salt especially when she follows up with, I think I used to be Native American… amazing. I have no idea what I was in my previous life (probably a caterpillar that got stepped on by a moose), but it sort of feels like I’m coming home even though I’ve never been here before. By no means is Tokyo the same as San Diego or Los Angeles, and I certainly feel like a foreigner here, but at the same time I don’t. Japanese is something I’ve pretty much heard on a daily basis for the last 7 years as my primary source of entertainment: anime (otherwise known as TV) and music, and my experience in Paris with the metro has given me a primer or foundation to work the train system here in Tokyo… so while I certainly feel lost slowly getting used to the names and Kanji here, I feel much more at home and much more grounded than I probably should.

I guess that kind of leads in to the next topic… which is much more theoretical by nature and much more related to ethnic studies, but I think I’ll just grab a bit of granola and try to catch a few more z’s. Hopefully I will be up to discussing it later as it is pretty important… dealing with my own terms with this vague notion of a national identity… which more and more… I feel like I don’t have.