perspective...

A response from a high school student tonight during the adults' class when I asked her how she was:

"I'm great. ... I can enjoy almost every type of fruit."



I didn't really understand her explanation of why this was important or significant or how this has changed in the past week, but, still...

rainstorm in ishinomaki

It was thundering when we got done with work and walked out of school today. Tonight is my second night in my apartment here and was my first time riding home from work in the dark on my bicycle. Thunder, thunder, thunder, thunder, pedaling my bicycle for the first time through the Ishinomaki night. There's something so incredibly romantic (in the Anne of Green Gables sense) about riding a bicycle through the streets of a foreign city on a thundering evening after dark. (while singing "Oh Yoko") So, I decided to enhance the romance with a stop for some beer at the 7-11... when I came out, the thunder had produced rain. (Earlier today, when TK and I were driving to my apartment for the mandatory lesson on how to reduce the likelihood of blowing oneself up with the gas stove, he commented on how the fish smell in town meant a south wind and a south wind likely meant rain.)

So, with my messenger bag across my shoulder and the intersection almost deserted because it was leaning toward 11 p.m., I rode through the rain to my new home. What I hope will be my new home.

i now intend to sit and eat a mayonaise-slathered sandwich and sour cream and onion Pringles and drink beer and watch an American movie. ("When Harry Met Sally." It's one of two movies in the apartment. The other is "Dawn of the Dead," and features a critic's exclamation, "Scary as Hell!" on the cover.) No Japanese tv tonight. Although I think Monday night is when SMAP's show (SMAP is a J-pop band) is on. Last Monday at Ai's house we watched their show. It included a "Roulette Bowling" segment in which SMAP members and a rival pop band (I think) threw bowling balls down an alley that was spinning roulette-style. And, also roulette-style, they had to predict a number that their ball would land it. I liked it. It was entertainment that could be appreciated across the language barrier. I've been here almost two weeks, and I think I may actually know less Japanese now than when I arrived, if that's possible. I keep learning phrases (including two words for "thank you" that Japanese people traditionally say at the start and the close of a meal) and then forgetting them. I also think I'm spoiled now because Adrian is here. When he leaves, I will have no native English speakers to converse with.

But now, movie. Later, tales of my first encounter with sushi; or, plots to determine how I can show my face at Sushi Zen again.

go and beat your crazy head against the sky

"Why do we hurtle ourselves through every inch of time and space?" - Indigo Girls, "Get Out the Map"

About a month before my last day at work for the newspaper, I interviewed an exchange student who was going home (to Japan, coincidentally) after a year studying and living in the United States. The hardest thing about coming to America was leaving her friends in Japan; the hardest about going home was leaving behind friends she had made here, she said.

'Why,' I wondered as I wrote the story and thought about my own experiences - to Japan, to Oregon, to DC so briefly - 'do we do this to ourselves? Why do we rip ourselves away from a place that's familar, with people we know (and most often people we care about a lot) to settle somewhere else, another temporary resting point?' There are good (and obvious) answers - you can't see new things or meet new people or even fully appreciate where you've come from if you don't do something new. In DC, Dameon said that his mother always classified the early and mid-20s as a time in life that is defined by being far away from people one cares about. But why, why, why? Why do we do something when we know it will be so hard?

I've now officially been in Japan a week. I've tried all sorts of food, went sliding down a grass-covered hill (on purpose), climbed (part of - a very small part of) a mountain to see a panarama of Ishinomaki. (At the top of the mountain were miniature monuments with coins in a bowl. The inscriptions on the monuments were ways to honor the earth, TK said.) What's amazing is how much fun it can be to communicate with someone through a language barrier - what a thrill (and relief) it is to recognize a common word, how you can both smile and laugh when you pass along an electronic translator that has just one adjective typed in. Communication becomes so much more light-hearted and consequently the world seems lighter and easier. One of the best parts of this last week was at TK and Shigeko's home last Saturday night. TK's two daughters were there, as was his mother and Adrian and myself. Adrian and I don't speak any Japanese (aside from a stray phrase or food word.) TK and Shigeko speak a lot of English; Keiko a little; and Kyoko and TK's mother hardly any at all. Thanks entirely to TK and Shigego, we were able to communicate at dinner - We had an indoor barbeque with squash and squid and octopus and salmon and onion and more. After dinner and dessert, we went outside to light sparkler - so simple but so much fun. Just sitting in their driveway, laughing about each other's tricks with the miniature explosives. So innocent and so much fun and so uncomplicated with pretensions. At Ai's house (the school secretary whose home I have stayed at for the last several nights), her mother put on I Love Lucy after breakfast Monday morning - it was the first episode I'd ever seen actually, where Lucy and Ricky are in Hollywood and she sees one of her favorite actors at the next table - and it was just so much fun to sit and laugh together at something we could both understand (the scene had almost no dialogue).

Also, teaching is not easy.

all hail doraemon!

What some may argue is an irresistably adorable blue cat (who it turns out is apparently actually a robot from the year 2112) = Doraemon.

fresh fish

I had my first raw fish yesterday.

It was “tarako,” or raw cod eggs which was covered with a spicy red seasoning. Pink (almost a salmon color) and round. Keiko had shown me a picture of it in a booklet/magazine on Sendai which we looked at on the train to Ishinomaki. She came in from the kitchen when we were about halfway through dinner yesterday, cut me off a piece, told me what it was, that it was spicy and a “very Japanese food.” She likes to eat it for breakfast when she’s at school in Tokyo, she said. But instead of eating a biteful of fish with rice, one is supposed to mush up (for lack of better word) the fish with the rice and eat it as a mixture – at least I think that’s how it’s supposed to work. It was spicy (the spicy almost overwhelmed the texture and mental image that one is eating raw fish – raw fish, a whole chunk of it), but not as cold as I thought it was be, and the thing I remember most about eating it was how little round bits of the fish stuck to the chopsticks afterwards. It was so just so different than anything I’d even had before that I’m not even sure if I can say whether I liked it or not. But I’m sure it won’t be the last time I try it.

I knew my first raw fish encounter would happen eventually, but wasn’t expecting it to go down as it did. On our walk yesterday afternoon Keiko and I first went to a 7-11 store (it’s actually called something different on the sign like ‘7-i open’ or something like that) a couple of blocks from their home. I’ve been trying to think of what exactly I mean when I say that I forget that I’m actually in Japan. The 7-11 was a good example. The logo was almost exactly the same as one in America, there were banners with Snoopy hanging above the entry way (people love ‘Peanuts’ here. Keiko loved it when I told her Charles Schulz was from Minnesota. We talked about it on the train ride after I saw she had a ‘Peanuts’ folder and when I pointed out the banner yesterday, she remembered.), yet when I you walked in, what was there was completely different. In addition to the kanji and hiragana and katakana writing, what was in the coolers and on the shelves was different in scale, appearance and variety (although I am pretty sure that I saw some corn dogs in the hot deli-like case at the front of the store). Sweet red bean cakes (I forget what they’re called, but they’re TK’s favorite) and dango (rice flour dumplings shaped vaguely like popsicles and put on sticks) and different types of gum and candy and dried meat products at the end of an aisle which Keiko said were in a classification called “susami” – “good with beer.” We went to the book/cd/dvd store next and were looking at the food/cooking section of the magazines (Keiko’s favorite part of the store), there was a book entitled and dedicated to “susami.” Also looked at travel magazines, fashion magazines (including one called “Crea” which is dedicated to cats and fashion – as in models posing with cats), some of the aisles and aisles of magna, an English-Japanese (NOT Japanese-English) dictionary for me, CDs (which one can rent like movies), and, of course, movies. So many of the movies there were American: “Finding Nemo,” “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” “Where’s Waldo,” “Dirty Dancing,” “Winnie the Pooh,” etc., etc. It’s odd to suddenly be pointing to something that one really doesn’t feel that much affinity for (like “Finding Nemo” or “Winnie the Pooh”) with such glee – it’s something that 1. you can recognize, 2. that can serve as a conversation piece for awhile, and 3. it seems to make one’s host feel more comfortable that you see something familiar or there’s something you can both relate to. It’s also odd how, when one doesn’t understand the language or alphabet, how strongly one can suddenly feel comforted and drawn to something romanized letters (romanji), even if I have no idea what it says. Keiko also introduced me to a rotund blue and white cartoon cat (whose name starts with a “d” but I can’t remember what it is even though she repeated it numerous times) who travels through time to help a boy. The cat is universally loved in Japan, according to Keiko, and I can understand why even though I’ve never seen his cartoon. So adorable that I literally reached up to a sign with his image and pretended to tweak his cheek as a way (albeit a very strange, maternally, middle aged, Midwestern way) of showing Keiko how much I liked the cat. Cats, cats, are everywhere here.

The reason for our walk, I thought, was were going to the store to buy things to make a “hamburger steak supper” – which is what the electronic translator said when Keiko showed it to me before we left. But instead of buying things for supper, when we went to the grocery store, we went to the McDonalds inside to bring back food for us and Kyoko and she and Keiko’s grandmother. Thus, my first time eating that quintessential Japanese food was also accompanied by a Filet-O-Fish.

Keiko and I have been using primarily Yahoo’s English to Japanese and Japanese to English converter to communicate with each other (which works very well as it allows one to type in a whole phrase.) TK and Shigeko’s other daughter, Kyoko, doesn’t speak as much English and so our conversations have been generally limited to smiling at each other and occasional interpretations by Keiko. It’s pretty unreal (although I guess very, very logical and rule number one of communication) how the dynamics of a conversation can change based on language. I do need to learn some more basic, basic Japanese because when we go to the convenience store and the grocery store, I have no idea what people are saying and/or what the appropriate response back to them would be. At the 7-11, I bought some candy for Keiko’s grandmother (who lives with the family), and I didn’t know what to say to the person before the counter as I’m sure she greeted me and extended other professional niceties, but at the end of the transaction, she and Keiko smiled at each other when I said “arigato.”

My first real observation about Japanese and culture: food is so important here. Brochures at the book store, tourist brochures for places, all prominently feature food pictures. In TK’s photographs (he likes to take photographs and got at least three of us at the grocery store alone yesterday), he shoots pictures of the food – by itself and also with the person who is eating it. The television was on during dinner last night, and the program that was on featured two teams going around to different restaurants on a scavenger hunt to try different meals. And I feel like I’ve been eating so much here. Last night in addition to tarako and half sandwich and french fries from McDonalds, I had sticky rice, tempura left over from lunch, a fried wedge of potato which TK’s mother (Keiko’s grandmother) made, slices of cucumber with a salty brown paste, and dessert. Keiko really likes a type of dessert that is like fruit cocktail – pieces of fruit in heavy, sweet sauce, but also with cubes of tofu and clear gelatin, and red bean sauce to mix in - but I just couldn’t finish it last night.

My jet lag has been weird, almost non-existent – I slept about five hours the first night I was here even though I had been without real sleep for close to 30 hours. Last night I went to bed early – slightly after 9 p.m. and am up early (5 a.m.) today. The plan, however, is to try to get a little more sleep if no one is up by the time I’m finished with this.

Today will be first time visiting the school, which I’m looking forward to.

zuihitsu

Post-layover, post-first trans-Pacific flight, post-train rides from airport to Tokyo and Tokyo to Sendai and Sendai to Ishinomaki, post-night time car ride through a muggy Ishinomaki night (the sun sets here at about 6 p.m. as there is no daylight savings time), my first day in Japan.

Last night, the son of the man who owns the school where I'll be working met me at the airport, and his daughter met the Sendai train station and we rode together on toIshinomaki. We communicated using their English skills and electronic translators and my pathetic little Japanese phrase book which has a (very) limited dictionary as I left my "real" dictionary in the luggage that was shipped to TK's house, where I'm staying for the next week. Oh yes, in Japan they have a service in which at the airport you can have your luggage delivered to your door. Also carts to help you carry your luggage are free, which made life so much simpler. My flight was almost an hour early, but it took almost 45 minutes to get through immigration (customs took less than a minute), so TK and Shigeko's son had to wait about 2 hours at the airport, in addition to the hour it takes to the airport from Tokyo, an hour ride back to Tokyo and waiting for about 20 minutes to help me onto the train to Sendai. I ended up getting into Ishinomaki after 10 p.m. and in addition to a night time tour of Shigeko and TK's house, the evening included some food (which was good because I got sick from the first of two meals served on the flight over and as such didn't eat anything else on the flight) and meeting dog Choco-chan. Choco is a dachshund shape and size with coloration and fur styling of a Golden Retriever. When I arrived he had a fake flower attached to each of his ears (he had been groomed earlier this week I found out) and his eyes were literally rolling back in his head he was barking so much and was so upset to see me, a stranger, at his house. (Within minutes, he was my friend after Shikego gave me three bits of food to feed him. He still barks incessently when left alone in a cage in the front hallway, but is so incredibly adorable when out and being admired by people that it's forgiven.)

Morning. This morning started waking up before everyone else and taking a shower, and discovering too late that I didn't know how to turn OFF the water and thus having to wake up Shigeko (actually having Choco wake up Shigeko with his barking) to show me how as the water continued to run. Brilliant. Before breakfast, Shigeko, Keiko and Kyoko and I watched a Japanese soap opera (a woman was dying and I think it was set in the past) and, before we ate, the Yankees game came on. That was before 8 a.m. This international date line thing throws my mind for a loop. Here, it's 14 hours ahead of central time zone in the United States, so as we were having breakfast, it was time for the baseball game to start in New York. First morning here also included decidedly western breakfast of orange juice imported from Brazil, sandwiches with lunch meat and processed cheese, and salad). Then, because today is the last day of Ancesors' Week (which, from what I understand, is when people across Japan return home to be together and discuss and remember and honor their deceased relatives) TK and Keiko and I drove to their temple to lay bamboo boats and flowers in rememberances of their ancestors. They were put on a pile almost as tall as I am and the temple parking lot was very crowded. TK let me put one on the pile (I'm pretty sure he got a picture of it), which was surprising as I didn't know these relatives and they weren't my ancestors, but it was nice. TK said that later priests burn the gifts and that it's believed that the ancestors' souls are released again after they spent a week with their family. I like that idea - the idea of a time set aside specifically for remembering people who were important to you who are dead. There's the Day of the Dead in Mexico, but I don't know if any other cultures or religions have a time set aside for this.

Apparently, at the school, we teach kindergartners at the temple's kindergarten, so I'll be back. And I'd like to go back and walk around.

After the temple, Keiko and I accompanied TK on his daily walk in an Ishinomaki park. Apparently, the first time he went there was when he was on a grade school trip and he and Shigeko had their first day at the area overlooking the park's tiered green tea bushes. We parked at an area in front of a stairway that leads up to a 800-year-old Japanese temple. And on our walk, we passed by a marker which commemorates a woman (the woman who Miyagi, the name of the prefecture that Ishinomaki is located in, is named after) who lead resistance to the emperor's warriors when they attacked the area over 800 years ago. (TK said the emperor wanted to acquire the area to mine it and acquire gold to make pure gold Buddhas.) On the drive up there, I realized that this is just the beginning, this is just the start of a year here. I will likely go up that road and into that park many more times. After the walk, we picked up Adrian (felt a little guilty for speaking so much English with Adrian and also became aware how quickly one modifies speaking her primary language when talking to people who speak the language she's speaking as a second language) and went to the grocery store, which was huge and had peaches that cost $2 apiece (fruit, according to Adrian, is expensive here.)

We had a big lunch, a welcome and thank you lunch, TK said - welcome for me and thank you for Adrian. For lunch we had sukiyaki (stew with beef, onions, cabbage, several types of mushrooms, cabbage and other vegetables) and tempura (which I had always thought was just fried squid, but we had deep fried squid and squash and onions and green peppers and mushrooms. Lunch was followed by dessert of ice cream, custard and/or cheesecake and coffee or tea. Also, these people laugh a lot.

TK and Adrian went to school after lunch, but TK said that I didn't have to go today and I should stay home and "relax," which is what I'm doing (when not on edge by Choco's all-the-time barking). At 5, Keiko and I are going for a walk around town and apparrently dinner is at 6 p.m. School goes until 9:30 or 9:45 p.m., so I have a lot of free time today, which is nice. I still really can't fully believe that I'm in Japan.

One of the last stories I wrote for the Gazette was about a woman who was teaching a class on travel writing for the Haystack Program. One of the things she talked about (but I didn't put in the story) was how sometimes people need to let things sit and settle for awhile, even years, before they write about them. Even though I've been here less than 24 hours and been traveling for less than 48 hours, I can see how that's true. There's so much. So much that's different, so much that happens, so much that one learns and wants to remember that it would be impossible and drive one to distraction thinking about how to write about what happens as something is happening (which is typically what I do, maybe that's from my experience in journalism where you had to think about what details you want to include in a story as you're experiencing an event or a conversation). So, I will not be too upset with myself if this blog isn't a daily account of every little thing that happened or something that has profound insights about Life and Humanity with artful writing. This is just a place for me to record things that I choose during a once in a lifetime opportunity living in a different culture for the first time.

Man, is it hot here. Humid.

Miscellaneous that I know now that I didn't know about yesterday:
* J-Pop: Like Brit pop, but the Japanese version. On our train from Sendai to Ishinomaki, there was a banner advertising a boy band called "Cartoon" (possibly spelled wrong, but it sounds like cartoon.) When talking about music with Kazuhiro, he said one of his favorites was Mariah Carey (which isn't J-pop, but it is pop.) When Keiko brought down CDs to listen to this afternoon, one of the about 10 she brought down to chose from was Mariah Carey's Christmas album.

Japanese words/phrase of day:
- zuihitsu: my dictionary defines as "essay (consisting of the writer's random thoughts)." I like very much, but I am also a comedy of errors. I discovered this word because I got out my Japanese dictionary today, happy to not have to rely on the 10-page section of my Japanese phrasebook anymore, only to discover that I do not own an English-Japanese dictionary as I originally thought, but a Japaneseo-English dictionary - meaning that it has Japanese to English translations of words, but not English to Japanese.

Quasi-Japanese words for the day: Banana, tomato and interneto. Interneto is pronounced pretty much the same as "internet" but with an "o" at the end. Tomato is like pronounced like the second "tomato" in "you say 'tomato,' 'I saw tomato'." Banana is pronounced with the syllables running together.

enroute; or 'first time meeting'

In O'Hare airport in Chicago, and after months of talking about it, it's finally hitting me that I'm actually going to Japan. To another country. To another country with a different language and completely different alphabet(s) and with things I've never seen before and things I have no idea existed and where nothing and no one will be familiar and after 13 hours on an airplane (13 hours on a plane) I'll be there. For a year. ... And ... I had a little bit a panic attack sitting in gate C11. Panic attack sounds so clinical and serious, but as I sat there, reading my "Culture Shock!: Japan" book (which, really, I wish I would've looked at more closely before I bought because the author made a lot of assumptions when he chose his "voice" for the book and they're not assumptions that I neccessarily want to buy into). But, anyway, I was there, in this empty gate, with my book, not knowing which gate my flight was in because they ahdn't posted flight information yet because it was still five hours until when the flight left, and not knowing where to go to find out where to go to ask about my flight because all the "?" booths were empty, and feeling stupid and silly and incompetent for not knowing where to go to ask and stuffing my carry-ons so full that I couldn't walk comfortably very far. And then realizing that I did have this long, long flight before complete immersion in ... I have no idea. And feeling very out of control and wondering why I did this in the first place and how I would be able to be friendly and open and nice to people if I was feeling so scared and unsure.
But, then a lesson that I'm sure I will need to remind and re-remind myself of over and over again during this year (and likely for the rest of my life): when you feel overwhelmed or sad or too sorry for yourself, it is infinitely good to get up and go out and do something. I walked around. Just to the monitors with flight information, and the flight still wasn't listed, but I remembered the flight status was listed on United's website this morning. So I checked that, and found out I happened to be right across the corridor from the gate where my airplane was scheduled to come in. And then I saw an Asian family speaking a language that I couldn't understand (which, unfortunately, definitely means it could have been Japanese) walk into that gate. Awesome. And then a woman, unasked, saw I was looking for a plug in for computer and pointed one out to me. Again, awesome. So, I don't know if I actually resolved any of the feelings that caused me to feel so unprepared and so overwhelmed, or if I just distracted myself, but I felt better. I feel better. So, don't get caught up in the little sphere of your life immediately surrounding you, and if you do, remember that - get out. And, see? A lesson and a happy, happy ending in the O'Hare airport.

Other things of note:
- Saw the sun rise on the flight from Fargo to Chicago. Reflected red in the lakes.
- Over some PA system in the airport - I don't think it's from the airport-wide system; it might be from the Brookstone across the corridor from my gate - a cover of 'leaving on a jet plane' is playing.

Japanese phrase of the day: hajime mashite. how do you do? (This is apparently a basic Japanese phrase, according to both Culture Shock! and my Japanese phrase book. Somehow it didn't get included in my flashcards of basic phrases. It must be memorized before I meet TK's son at the airport.) Hajime mashite. How do you do? (According to phrase book, it's a phrase that one uses only when one meets someone for the first time. I remember Tony used something that he said literally translated as "first time meeting" and that you only used meeting someone for the first time when he wrote out how to say "My name is..." on a sheet of paper that, somehow, got misplaced during my move.) Hajime mashite. First time meeting. Here we go.