I bring you a cat playing a theremin.
They sold these basic theremins, along with an instruction book, in most of the major bookstores in Japan. My friends and I would see the piles of boxes on display by the door. We called it the “My First Theremin Kit.” One of my friends was pretty tempted to buy one, but we wouldn’t have been able to read the instruction book.
You know when you think you know the lyrics to a song, but they turn out to be something completely different? The Japanese have a word for it, because they’re pros at it.
Be sure to read the examples.
I’m back in the US. I’ve been here since April 2nd, trying to relax. My Japan adventures have come to an end but that doesn’t mean that gaijzilla is done with. I have a lot more pictures to upload and a lot more tales to tell. Keep checking back and I’ll get them all up here once my life gets a bit more sorted out.
I wish I could give you some simple, brilliant synopsis of my year in Japan, but it’s just not that easy. My friends and I all stopped and asked each other what we’d learned, but very few of us had answers. I guess I have a little more self confidence that I can get through difficult situations. I now know my way around Tokyo better than I know my way around DC.
I went to Tokyo on the day right before I left for Japan. I wanted to see the cherry blossoms in Ueno park and the thousands of hanami (cherry blossom viewing) revelers, who are a wonder in themselves, drinking themselves into joyful, loud blackouts under the falling petals. It was a long, tedious train ride into Tokyo. As we approached the metropolis, I causually looked up from my book and thought, “oh… we’re in Tokyo.” A little more than I year ago, I would have lept up and shouted “Holy $#$@!$^&#@%$#!!!! I’m in TOKYO!!” The very idea would have been almost unimaginable. And now it was no more concern that “oh, we’re there.”
Ueno park looked just like it did when I first came to Japan. Almost. This time the cherry blossoms were a little bit fuller than when I came last year.
I’m left wondering whether I ever should have left Japan. Now I’m plunged back into a horrible economy with no job prospects and I’m missing the time when I had an actualy marketable skill. (I can speak English good.)
Don’t get mad, get even.
I got screwed over by Softbank and there’s not much I can do except get revenge by warning other people. Since it’s the end of March new ALTs will be coming into Japan for the new school year. I want to counsel people not to get drawn into Softbank’s scheme.
I work for Interac and had someone help me set up everything upon my arrival to Maebashi. Unfortunately, the woman helping me was as clueless about cell phone plans in Japan as I was. The deal was made by mobile phone shop lady explaining the perks of the service to my company helper who in turned tried to explain them to me in struggled English. My friend was on Softbank, so I decided to go with Softbank, too. I went with the well-advertised Softbank White Plan on a one-year contract with a free phone.
This is the worst phone I have ever had. It doesn’t really function very well on English. I can forgive the poor grammar (”An message will be deleted.”) but I can’t message in anything but all-caps unless I specifically change the settings for each individual message. (YOURE ENJOYING THE FIREWORKS RIGHT? I LOVE FIREWORKS! IM GOING TO BUY A CHOCOBANANA.) Often when the phone asks if I want to end an action “yes or no” the yes and no options are truly reversed, deleting my long, difficult, all caps text message. The phone also turned off randomly for a while and I had to get it replaced. It turns out the awful phone I put up with because it was free is not actually free, despite what I was told. I have actually been paying equipment fees for the phone all year and still haven’t finished. Apparently, for Softbank a “one year” plan is actually 15 months, which I also wasn’t told. If I cancel now, (12 months after the contract began) I still have to pay what I owe for the worst phone I have ever had (about ¥5900 remaining).
I also get around 20 spam messages a day (I just got one right now.), offering me porn, penis enlargement, and Viagra, since I foolishly chose an easy keitai email address and was not offered spam filter options. For this most excellent phone service, I pay as much as anyone else, about ¥6000/month. I found all this out today when I went to Softbank with a Japanese friend (another company representative). When I cancel the phone service, I’m going to go to Tokyo myself so that I can yell in English and someone will actually understand me.
So I encourage you, if you’re headed to Japan to just say no to Softbank. I don’t care how happy Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz look, I’m pissed off.
I’m making a slow catalogue of amusing and questionable Japanese signs.
Train station in Kamakura 2/24/08
On a train 12/2/07
A van outside a clothing store in Kawagoe, Saitama 12/1/07
Tokyo
Shibuya, Tokyo
Tokyo
Harajuku, Tokyo
Shibuya, Tokyo 6/9/07
Shibuya Tokyo 6/9/07
Ashikaga, Tochigi
On a train going from Isesaki to Ota, Gunma
The 6th years at my Thursday school are trying to make picture books. This mostly consists of them copying down Japanese phrases and then showing them to me determinedly, as if they could will me to know Japanese and translate the stories for them. But some actually try to translate on their own. One group was doing The Monkey And the Crab. At one point the monkey slips in cow poop. I’m just wondering exactly what dictionary they’re using that’s translating “cow poop” into “shit” and “goddamned dung.”
Today I was walking up and down the aisles of one of my second year junior high classes, with nothing to do, when one of the girls beckoned me over. She asked me (in Japanese, no less, she didn’t even try English) how big my nose is and got out a ruler.
Well, at least I can always console myself with not being this dude.
Eric, the ALT.
In a sake and sakura fueled euphoria, former ALT, Will Ferguson, swore to his coworkers that he would one day hitchhike the entirety of Japan in pursuit of the cherry blossoms. Unfortunately, everyone around him remembered this unwise oath and reminded him about it for three years until he finally decided to do it. He wrote his memoirs of the trip in Hitching Rides With Buddha.
Will Ferguson was determined to hitchhike from Cape Sata, Kyushu, to Cape Soya,, Hokkaido, following the blossom season north. He would be mirroring the path of his hero, the hiker Alan Booth, author of Roads to Sata. It proved to be a more difficult, lengthy, and expensive journey than he ever imagined.
Some of his travel tales are inherent to traveling anywhere, getting lost, getting arrested, marooned by poor weather, ineffable loneliness, fleeting friends and enemies, an unnatural fears of snakes; but much of it is distinctly Japan. Where else is the traditional greeting for a Gaijin-san something so nearly as annoying as “Harro! Zis is a ben!”? Ferguson gets sucked into enkais of drunk salary men he had nothing to do with, and cannot escape. He encounters a ghost with a business card. He tries the Japanese national pastime of reading standing up with a magazine teaching English pornographic phrases of questionable utility.
By hitchhiking he sees strangely intimate snippets of people’s lives. He rides with a konyaku farmer and a pachinko company man. Occasionally, families invite him into their homes. He hears the nightmarish confessions of a Japanese POW and fawns over his little Godzilla loving granddaughter.
I do not known if this book would be so delightful to someone who has not lived in Japan. Actually, it seems like a bunch of inside jokes for gaijin most of the time. At the very least, Will Ferguson’s book is just so easy to sympathize with as a resident gaijin. His introspective interpretations of his experience provide insight into the joys and frustrations of a foreigner. He is alternately welcomed with smiles and insulted with aggression as he makes his way up the country. One moment someone compliments his Japanese and tells him how much he understands Japan and the next moment someone is telling him how inferior he is because he is not Japanese. He knows the outsider is always an outsider and no outsider can ever understand the hypocrisy of Japan.
Will Ferguson set out to follow the cherry blossoms, but they cannot keep up with him. He is pulled along by the unstoppable momentum of the traveler, to the end of Japan, even past Hokkaido. He is in a race with his money and his vacation days. In the end, his journey sees less cherry blossoms and more strange towns and strange people.
Here’s an article about Japanese men trying to say I love you. It’s pretty cute and also heartbreaking in a typically Japanese way.
An interesting note… every Japanese person who I’ve talked to on the subject wants Obama to be chosen as the Democratic presidential candidate (although no one has any vehemence against Hillary).
No one has even brought up the Republican primaries. No one has even acknowledged the existence of a Republican candidate.
There’s a store chain in Japan called Don Quijote. You can buy anything there from import foods, to furniture, to cell phones, to pet supplies, to sex toys. And it’s open 24 hrs a day for your late night booze munchies.
You can also buy clothing. Look how Japan uses black stereotypes to market men’s underwear with a little extra room.
I just went in to buy shampoo. And look what they’re selling next to the shampoo. Oh good. Condoms. Wait… what’s this?
Um…. well… that’s specialized.