Maiko!

Well! Today was exciting! I woke up to a beautifully cool and cloudy day, and then headed to the supermarket with my host sister and host mother. It was mostly like a supermarket in the US, except that its tea and snack aisles were unusually large and there were only about three kinds of cereal. Also, all of the aisles were shorter in both height and length. While I was in the sake aisle, I discovered something especially amusing. Do you remember juice boxes from when you were a kid? Well, in Japan they have that sort of packaging for single servings of sake, which include the little plastic straw.
After this, my host sister and I went for a walk around Gion, which I’ve mentioned before, only this time we focused on the historical section (read: where the geisha live). It was here that I saw my first real live fully attired maiko-san! There were two of them, but they were too busy to take a picture. Later on, we walked by a theatre where a group of people including three maiko were protesting the presence of the mafia in Kyoto. These ones were, again, fully dressed and everything! But the crowd was big and they looked like they were on a mission. After this, we went across the river to Pontocho, where we ran into a young maiko-san dressed in day-to-day kimono while on her way somewhere. This time, however, she wasn’t too busy to stop for some pictures with me, which was so exciting! So I have some of my first maiko pictures in Kyoto! After this, we walked around for a little longer, then met up with one of my host sister’s friends, who wants to brush up on his English before he goes to Duke University to learn from a doctor there. He was very nice, and the place was (amusingly enough) a traditional-style Japanese townhouse very much like the one that I’m living in now, only made over as a café with a surfer/Hawaiian theme. At one time, the song ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ from ‘Mary Poppins’ came on, only it had been made-over with an island beat and instrumentation. Only in Japan. Oh, and they had something that they referred to as ‘Monkey Banana tea”. I heard that a monkey banana is just a special type of banana, but I was still amused. After that, we headed home. On our way back, however, we ran into an older woman walking her pet. At first I thought that the dog was moving rather strangely, but then I realized that that was because it was actually a raccoon. He was very lovely and friendly, though I don’t think that he liked my camera, so my pictures of him are rather bad. My host sister said that she had heard that you could buy raccoons to keep as pets, but that this was her first time seeing one as well.
-Maiko really do have bells in their shoes.
-The Pontocho Maiko seem nicer and less self-important than the Gion ones, but this could just be me projecting.
-2 out of the 2 younger Japanese people I polled had never heard of ‘Mary Poppins’
-A cup of tea and a slice of cake in a café here can put you easily over ¥1000 ($10ish).
-There are homeless people here, but I really don’t know their status. One appeared to be living in a house made out of umbrellas on one bank of the Kamo river.
-There are love hotels everywhere in certain areas.
- The word ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ is in Microsoft Word’s spell check. I bet that there’s an interesting story behind that.

The Buddhist Version

Sunday I went to the Buddhist counterpart to the Shinto festival on Saturday night. My host mother and I went with her sister to a large temple where the monks served us lunch. The food was completely vegetarian in keeping with the rules of their sect, and it was good if simple. There was a miso soup, sesame tofu, rice, and various seaweed and pickle-related dishes. Later that evening I went with some other members of my premodern class to a demonstration of Noh and Kabuki dancers performing the same story in their particular styles. Basically, a lot of Kabuki plays draw on Noh, but the dancing is different. To be simplistic, Noh is slower and more stately and abstract, while the Kabuki tends to be more flamboyant and quick. I liked the Kabuki dancer's performance of the woman’s section, it was definitely feminine, but I like the warrior’s part of the Noh more, since it was more startling and looked effortless. After that, my host sister returned from Okinawa and gave me a pen with the Okinawa regional Hello Kitty on it! Every major region of Japan has its own Hello Kitties, and the one she got me was Kitty in traditional Okinawan dress. She also got me a sake cup that was an example of traditional Okinawan ceramics, which was also lovely. After that we went out to an Italian restaurant and ordered off the ‘set menu.’ Basically, it was a pre-decided meal that included an appetizer, bread or rice, pasta, choice of entrée, coffee or tea, and desert. It was quite good, and the smaller portions made about the perfect amount of food.
-When a family member goes on a trip, for business or pleasure, they bring back gifts for everyone in the family and then some.
-They really don’t drink much soda here. There appears to be only one major domestically produced soda, Mitsuya Cider, which is rather like Sprite, apparently.
-When you go to a restaurant or café where you sit down you will, apparently without exception, be given a little packaged wet napkin.

Expel the Barbarians!

Not much happened today in the way of excitement, but after class a small group of us went to see the Nashinoki shrine, which was about 10 minutes’ walk from Doshisha and a stone’s throw from the grounds of the imperial palace. It’s not very old, as shrines go, having been built in the mid-19th century to honour faithful retainers of the Meiji Emperor, who famously made the slogan ‘Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians’. So, clearly, as a large group of barbarians we had to make a pilgrimage there. Just the weekend before the bush clover festival had been celebrated there, so the bushes were still hung with waka and haiku poems. The shrine is also famous for having a spring there that is one of about 3 freshwater springs in Kyoto, and even though the shrine as a whole was pretty much empty on a weekday afternoon, there was a line to use the spigot at the purifying station, with most of the people carrying big plastic bottles. I bought a small tea from the vending machine outside, drank the tea, and then filled it at the smaller tap that fills the basin that worshippers use to purify themselves. It’s currently in the refrigerator, and I’m not certain what to do with it now.
-Now I kind of want a shrine of my own, though I doubt that the emperor would so honour a foreigner, especially while she was still alive. It would be a cool one, though.
-I’m not certain that filling my bottle the way I did was polite, but there was another (Japanese) woman doing it so I did the same.

Burgers and NASA

Monday was another day off of school, this time for the autumn equinox. There wasn’t a whole lot to do, so I decided to try out Mos Burger, which is a Japanese organic burger chain. It was actually pretty good, if small, and the menu only had coca-cola in the order of soda, so I had iced oolong. I also didn’t see any ketchup. Well, I decided to take my burger to go and eat it outside at a table in front of Family Mart (a convenience store on the other side of the street from Doshisha). Well, I was just sitting there eating my burger with my massive headphones on, when a woman on a bike came up behind me and asked me suddenly what country I was from. When I told her I was from the US she asked me about whether I spoke Japanese, and whether I was able to call home. I told her ‘yes’ on both counts, and she proceeded to try to communicate with me. I really wasn’t understanding anything but ‘NASA’, so she went into the convenience store to talk to the people there about how to phrase her request. I was sitting there waiting for her to come back when I realized that she might just be crazy, but I didn’t want to just walk off. She came back with a piece of paper that said ‘Bring space food for NASA’ with ‘Early NASA space food bring safety’ crossed out above it. I took her meaning to be that she wanted to make sure that NASA remembered to bring enough food on its next shuttle mission, based on both phrases, but I’m still not entirely certain. She asked me to convey this to NASA the next time I called home, and gave me ¥1000 ($10ish) to cover the cost of the call. Basically, I was so bewildered that I took the money and promised to do as she asked, at which point she went away. If I’d been dealing with English I might have been able to handle the situation better, but as it was I didn’t know what else to do. I think that this was my first encounter while in Japan with a crazy person. I think that I’m going to try and find a charity that helps the mentally ill to donate the money to, since I clearly can’t spend it calling NASA. After this I went straight home. We had Chinese food delivered for dinner, and then my host sister and I watched Hey!Hey!Hey! ‘s big anniversary live show on TV, which basically had performances by every major popstar in Japan, and one random guy with a blonde afro called DJ Ozma, who sang while surrounded by guys in masks wearing speedos with large plastic spiders on the front. It was strange.
-When you are on headphones, unless you are in someone’s way, no sane person will talk to you. This isn’t really specific to Japan, though.
-When you get food delivered here it comes on real plates, which you then leave outside your front door when you are done.
-You can get away with a lot more on Japanese TV than on American.

On festivals

I spent most of today catching up on my reading for class and the like, but this evening my host mother took me to Seimei Shrine to see a festival held to honour the autumnal equinox. It really was quite lovely, with a seemingly perfect merging of modern and ancient elements. Outside the temple itself there were stands such as you would expect at any fair: shooting and ring-toss games, stands selling food and candy (takoyaki and candied grapes in this case) and a goldfish catching game that has been a staple of Japanese festivals for a long while, I believe. Inside the torii arch there were displays of the portable shrines that will be paraded around tomorrow morning, surrounded by Omiyage including massive amounts of sake. On the other side there was a shrine shamaness dancing with her bells in front of a small altar accompanied by traditional instruments, and then a big display of lanterns. At the very back of the grounds was the actual house of the shrine god, in front of which people were praying. It was really all very beautiful, and if I had been at home I would have been tempted to get Norbert (my sister’s goldfish, for those of you out of the loop) a friend. It had been horribly hot all day, but since the festival was at night it wasn’t all that bad, though still a little warmer than I would have liked.
-There is such thing as bacon and egg taiyaki (a fish-shaped griddle-cake), in addition to the traditional red bean.
-Hagi appears to be the traditional snack for this time of year, since I’ve had it about 3 times in the last two days. It’s basically sweet sticky rice covered in red bean paste.
-Anything containing egg or egg-shaped is appropriate for the season, as this is the time for moon-viewing and eggs suggest the moon. The most interesting manifestation of this is the ‘moon-viewing burger’ that McDonald’s is currently offering here. Basically it appears to be a burger with one of their molded scrambled-egg things on it.
-On that subject, rabbits are also in season, as they (according to Japanese folklore) pound sweet glutinous rice cakes on the moon. This is also how Tsukino Usagi gets her name (Sailor Moon, anyone?)

Acting like a real student

I have to say that Friday was unusually eventful, and also ridiculously hot. I actually only have one class (Japanese) on Fridays, but one of the classes was going on a fieldtrip to the Toji Temple Market near to Kyoto station, so I decided to tag along. Well, it was not as easy to find as we had originally thought, but once we actually got there it was extremely large. The Toji Market happens on the 21st of every month, weather permitting, and is essentially a flea market with various vendors selling everything that you can think of, from tomato plants to old violins to kimono. Since it was my first time there and I still have plenty of time to shop around while here I restrained myself to a hairpin (which I haggled for! In Japanese!) and a bunch of huge grapes (since it was so stupid-hot). After that, though, we hurried back to campus to meet the other students to go to a welcoming party held by a Doshisha student group for us. Unfortunately, a full day walking around in full sun sweating like a pig had taken a bit of a toll on me, but I still managed to carry on a couple (simple) conversations in Japanese with the students at the party, and afterwards a bunch of us went out for Thai and then headed back to, you guessed it, Kyoto station for some karaoke. We had some difficulties navigating, but we did end up having a good time with the karaoke, and found it especially amusing that the company that produces the equipment appears to have created music videos for any song that doesn’t have one of its own. This meant some very random video clips to songs like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Hollaback Girl’ to name a couple. I managed to make it back in time for my curfew. My host mother was awake when I got back though, which made me wonder: when/does she sleep? She’s always up before me (my first week here I got up in the early hours and she was already awake and bustling about) and she’s always in bed after me (around midnight is my guess). This is only one of several paradoxes that I’ve noticed since being here:
-There appear to be no public trashcans, but there’s no litter either
-This is the land of vending machines. They are on every street corner and in front of every drug store, but it’s impolite to drink or eat while walking and I have yet to see a Japanese person doing either.
-On the subject of drugstores, every convenience store has a sampling of liquor from beer to whisky in levels of alcohol content, but if you want to by a bottle of aspirin you have to go to a (hard to find) special store for it.
When I first got here I started thinking about the vast amounts of money that people must spend yearly on Omiyage (gifts) and thought that it probably counts for a considerable portion of a family’s budget, but then I realized that the average household probably never has to buy tea snacks for any sort of event, since there’s a pretty constant stream of them from the various gifts that they’ve received.

Dance and the like

Well, nothing all that interesting has happened for the last couple days. For the most part I’ve bee going to school, then coming home and watching some baseball before homework and then bed. It is nice to be settling into some sort of routine though. Today was a rather longer day than usual because I had three guest lecture-type things. The first was from the American consulate, which I had thought was going to be ridiculously boring, but I was happily mistaken. She told us a little about procedures and paperwork having to do with our situation, and then told us that the two main reasons that Americans end up in jail in Japan are 1) drugs, in the order of possession and trafficking and 2) what she called ‘drunken stupid’. I guess that this is basically the result of becoming over-stressed in a foreign country and having no outlet but sake and picking a fight with someone. The second lecture was by the producer of a documentary that we had watched in my joint seminar class and the third was the one that I was really looking forward to: Nishikawa-sensei’s presentation on Japanese dance. Nishikawa-sensei appears to have excellent credentials, having not only reached the point where she performs in foreign countries, but is also able to create her own works, which is something that only masters are allowed to do in Japanese arts. I was very excited throughout and really cannot wait to take lessons starting in October. There were also a lot more people in general and attractive men in particular on campus today, as apparently grades from last semester were being handed out. In the US, men on TV dress 100x better than men on the street. In Japan, it’s almost even. They also all have fantastic hair. Unfortunately, I have heard that they are unlikely to approach strangers, and I’m unlikely to approach large packs of people whose language I only barely speak. It is possible that this changes with the addition of sake to either party. I’m actually writing this at about 1am, since for the first time since coming to Japan I can’t sleep.
-Anyone with enough hair (read: not me) can go to a hairdresser here and get a period hairstyle. Which I find amazing.
-The most expensive seats at a Sumo tournament are those that are closest, about a foot from the small raised ring. In these seats, however, once is in constant danger of having at Sumo wrestler thrown at them. Is it really worth it?
-When people here touch something hot they touch the scalded finger to their earlobes.

Noh Plans for Monday

Today we had no school, as it was ‘Respect for the Aged Day’. Sakiko and I went out for a short walk down to see the hotel where my family will be staying when they come to visit and discovered that it was very close. After that, we went back home for lunch, and Sakiko made me somen, which are thing noodles that are iced and, like soba, dipped in dashi broth mixed with whatever you want, in this case sesame powder, salty seaweed and wasabi. My pre-modern literature class had been given tickets to a traditional dance and music recital at a Noh theatre, so I took Sakiko with me to see that. It really was lovely. The first dancer was an extremely good-looking guy who did a remarkable piece with jumping and many sharp movements. After that, it was an older woman doing a very popular piece called ‘Kurokami’, or ‘Black Hair’. After that, there was a trio with two koto and a traditional Japanese bamboo flute doing a piece that was based on the ‘Akashi’ chapter of the Tale of Genji. The third dance was a woman with an umbrella (instead of the standard fan) doing a piece called ‘Yuki’ or ‘Snow’. The final piece was to my mind the most unusual, with one woman dancing and about four men singing in unison with no other instruments. It was a very strong, resonant sound that I almost preferred to the previous music. The audience contained many older women in a variety of different kimono, which always makes me happy. After that, one of the other students and I went in search of a café, but ended up buying bread from a local bakery and sitting outside of the Family Mart convenience store. When we were crossing the street to get to said resting place, we comented (in Japanese) on the extreme heat and humidity to a businessman standing next to us. We didn’t think anything of it until a bit later when he passed us where we were sitting and gave us flavoured ice packages and left. We were very surprised, as we had at no point been properly introduced, and he gave us no time to thank him as he sped on his way. It really did hit the spot though.
-People really don’t seem to worry about their stuff being stolen here. A couple of middle school girls sitting near us left their bags sitting outside the convenience store with no one to guard them.
-There are only ever cafés when you aren’t looking for one.
-It seems perfectly fine to take video or flash-photography during concerts and the like here. I can’t say that I know why that is.
-Noh plays can only run for one show, though some now have ‘practice performances’ that are less expensive but are in all actuality full performances in order to generate enough interest and revenue.

More Shopping

On Sunday Sakiko and I did another run around Shijo, this time with an eye on the kimono shops. There were quite a few of these. They range in pricing from extremely upscale sections in department stores (many of which sold kimono some 180 years ago) to little used shops, and in styles from the very simple and traditional to the modern boutique-styles with lace and cameo broaches. I have to say though that the highlight of my day was seeing an actual maiko-san (an apprentice geisha and the official symbol of the city of Kyoto) doing her shopping. She was not in full dress, and didn’t have the distinctive white makeup on, but she had her hair done in the traditional style and was wearing an informal yukata (cotton summer kimono) with a younger girl trailing behind her carrying the shopping bags. I chased her down and asked for a photo, but she was too busy at the time. That day I also discovered 300 yen (or about $3) shops. Everyone says that Japan is ridiculously expensive, and it is in some respects, but I’ve found that if you know where to look you can get very good deals on a great many things. At the 300 yen store there were lovely dishes, accessories, stockings and many other fun things, including very cute, 99% UV protected sunglasses, which I purchased to replace a pair that’s currently missing a screw. When Sakiko and I first entered the store though, we rounded the corner as a small group of middle school girls was leaving the store. One of them looked up at me, stopped in her tracks and made a face (and a noise to match) of complete surprise, which startled me pretty badly. After that it was back home for dinner and some television. This time, it was another jidai geki that I couldn’t understand, this time about the feudal period, but it had Gackt, a Japanese pop-star that I’m rather fond of. I had seen him once before in a movie and thought his acting atrocious, but last night I realized that the over-the-top style of TV period dramas very much suits him.
-The way to tell a real maiko from a tourist dressed up on a ‘maiko experience’ package is their hair. A real maiko always uses her own hair to form the tall hairstyle with the bun on top and the swept back sides, and never a wig of any kind. This also allows you to tell that someone is a maiko even if she is in non-descript dress. With a geisha it is almost impossible to tell, since both real geisha and fake ones wear wigs.
-When you eat cold (or ‘zaru’) soba, take the noodles in your chopsticks and drop them into the bowl of sauce that you are given, to which you can add green onions, wasabi, or whatever else is on the tray.
-When you are done with your noodles, you can ask the waiter for the water that the soba was cooked in to add to your leftover sauce to make a sort of soup.
-Even very attractive lingerie is not as expensive here as it is in the US, especially if you buy sets.

The Plague

Well, Saturday was a lot of fun, even if it was 1,000 degrees and about 500% humidity. One of the other exchange students had had a birthday recently, and his host-parents were throwing him a birthday party at their house in Uji, maybe 40 minutes worth of train-riding away. When I was on the train heading to meet up with everyone at Kyoto station, I realized that this little kid was staring at me with his mouth hanging open and a look of disgust or dismay or something like that on his face. I have to say that this was the first time that this had happened to me since I arrived in Japan, though I have heard of it happening to other foreigners. Well anyway, a TON of us showed up in Uji. Like, probably almost 30 big, hungry foreigners, but his family were really nice about it and showed us a great time. We had Japanese-style barbecue made by his host-father on an iron grill in the front garden, and tons of other food and more than a little alcohol. After we had, locust-like, consumed everything that could be considered food or alcohol in their entire house, a smaller group of us went shopping at Kyoto station, where I replaced my trusty fan (which had fallen apart during the party) with another of the 100 yen variety.
-Onigiri (balls of steamed white rice) with umeboshi (pickled under-ripe persimmons) are remarkably refreshing in extreme heat. Those, and slices of pears on ice.
-When you buy your train ticket, make sure that you are on the correct side if the platform is divided.
-If you are changing lines on the subway, make sure to indicate that when you buy your ticket by paying for the full price of the trip, and then pushing the flashing button with the line that you will be changing to written on it.

Today we went to the Kyoto Disaster Prevention Centre to learn about what to do in case of fires or earthquakes. It was so much fun! We started out in the earthquake simulation room, which shook at up to a magnitude of 7 on the Japanese scale. Next we learned the proper use of fire extinguishers by aiming training versions filled with water at a screen that played a movie of a fire while responding to where and how much we were spraying on it by lessening the fire gradually. After that was a simulation of getting through smoke to an exit during a fire, which my group failed at spectacularly. We took a wrong turn and ended up in front of a wall, with the people in back yelling at the people in front to open the door and move forward, and the people in front yelling at the people behind to turn around because we’d hit a dead end. The operator had to come get us and point us in the right direction. The typhoon wind simulator was also a ton of fun. We went in four at a time to stand in a chamber and be blasted with winds of up to 32 meters/second. I went twice. After that! A whole group of us went to Shijo to see an exhibit of movie costumes and sketches. It was amazing. They had costumes from Rear Window, My Fair Lady, Gone with the Wind, Last Samurai, Fight Club, the Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge, and Titanic to name a few, and worn by Joan Crawford, Liza Minelli, Julia Andrews, Barbara Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and more besides. Overall it was a pretty amazing day.
-Sake is expensive in restaurants, but that could just be me, because I’ve never ordered alcohol in a restaurant before.
-Trash day comes twice a week here, I guess that they just don’t have to space to hold on to as much of it as we do in America.
-If you lay down in the hallways of your university, be prepared for some odd looks.
-Do not eat while walking, it’s unseemly. Of course, I broke that rule twice today.
-They grow sweet corn in Hokkaido, who knew?

Aaand now we’re current. This morning my host mother kindly made me a very neat map that clearly showed the best route to and from school, which I was able to follow without a hitch. Of course, this morning I also set it down in the hallway at school along with two of the notebooks that I bought yesterday and I have not seen since. As a consequence of this, I became very lost again on my way back to the house, though I did eventually find it again. I think that I was wandering around Ogawa-cho for about an hour before I finally found my way home. I now have a new map, and am thinking that I might need to have it tattooed on my arm. After dinner we drank matcha, the kind of tea used in tea ceremony which comes powdered and is whisked into hot water to make a slightly bitter, frothy tea. I’ve heard that a lot of people do not like it, but I myself find it quite enjoyable. This afternoon we also had a lesson on road rules for riding bikes in Japan from two female police officers. Almost immediately upon leaving the classroom, we saw a whole slew of illegally parked bicycles, a couple of people riding on the wrong part of the street, and a woman riding while carrying an umbrella, which we had been expressly warned against doing.
-When in Japan, walk against traffic and ride with traffic.
-Buy your school supplies at a 100yen store, they are much cheaper.
-If you are in a major city, you probably don’t need to actually purchase tissues, as they are given out as a form of advertising at major street corners, malls and train stations. I have a whole drawer-full already.
-Try not to use your fan during class. I’m not certain that it’s necessarily rude, but it does seem to distract the teacher.

The best way to describe Monday is to say that it was frustrating. I woke up nice and early for my 9am Japanese class and then promptly got myself lost on my way to school, which should only take 15 minutes. I arrived, winded and sweaty, at school about 5 minutes after 9 only to discover that class was actually starting at 10:30. So, I figured that I’d finally check my email and update this blog using the Doshisha wireless. I tried, and my computer found the connection, claimed to be connected, and did not actually allow me to use the internet at all. So, after class I tried again, and then looked for an internet café thinking that the problem was some sort of feud between my computer and the Doshisha internet. I paid for a lovely café, had a cup of tea (included in the entry fee) and was still unable to connect. So, after searching all over Doshisha campus for a computer lab to no avail, I got lost again on my way home. My host mother was kind enough to give me a cup of cold tea and a snack after coming to find me, and the rest of the evening was very nice. I later on we watched a jidai geki, which was a TV drama about the Shinsengumi, and which had beautiful costumes but was virtually incomprehensible to me.
-Get a map. Carry it with you always.
-Buy an adaptor for your computer power cord, as most all of the plugs here in Japan are two-pronged.
-You cannot send text messages here between phones of different makes or companies, so make sure that you have people’s email addresses so that you can email using your phone instead.

To pick up where I left off, yesterday (Sunday) Sakiko and I went with the rest of the AKP students and their various host family members to Shimogamo Shrine, which is old enough to be mentioned in ‘The Tale of Genji’. The actual buildings are fairly recent, but the small forest that surrounds it and the grounds themselves are quite old. Once there, we purified ourselves at a fountain outside and entered the actual temple proper, where we were led just outside the man area of the shrine by one of the priests and a priestess in full regalia, who then conducted a full prayer to ask the shrine god to grant us exchange students a successful year. There was chanting, music, offering of food to the God, a dance by the priestess, and then ceremonial cups of sake for everyone. At the end, we were given small talismans for ourselves, and then blessed food for our host families’ household gods. Sunday’s points:
-The proper way to pray at a Shinto shrine is as follows: Bow twice, Clap twice, bow your head with hands in prayer position in front of your face concentrating on what it is that you want, then bow again.
-Don’t stand dead-center in front of the God’s house, it’s disrespectful.
-When giving someone a gift from a shrine, don’t use the usual ‘this is nothing but here you go’ (Tsumaranai mono desuga, douzo) ritualized phrase, since the actual item is not from you, but rather from the shrine God.
-Some brands of liquid soap, shampoo and cosmetics have special refills, so that you do not buy a whole new bottle every time you run out, but rather refill the one you bought the first time.
-It might be better to buy an electric Japanese/English dictionary before you leave America, since the ones sold in Japan are for Japanese people, and thus the manuals are in Japanese. There are, however, translations available.

Touring the City

Well, I’m a bit behind here. I’ve already spent a couple of days here at my host family’s house and toured around the city with my host sister, Sakiko. My room is surprisingly spacious, so I’m thinking that they must have given me the biggest room in the house, since there’s actually plenty of room for my things, which is saying something. It has been VERY hot and humid though. My first night I woke up in the middle of the night sweating, but I think that it’s getting better though. Saturday morning there was a small memorial service for the 7th year anniversary of one of the family member’s deaths. For this, my host father’s siblings came over and then a Buddhist priest came and chanted, struck a gong-like bowl and beat rhythms while kneeling at the family shrine in the formal living room. I spent the entire afternoon with Sakiko, first at Shijo, which is a street with a number of shops that are very popular with local young people. After that we walked to Gion!!! This is probably Japan’s most famous geisha district, especially since it was where ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ was set. Grr. If you want that rant you’ll have to ask in person, I’m afraid. Anyway, we had to pass by Pontocho in order to get there, which is where my hero Liza Dalby lived as a geisha to do research for her book. The shops in Gion were beautiful but way too expensive for me, except for Yojiya, which appears to be Kyoto’s most famous cosmetics store, where I bought Uguisu no Fuu, which is a cosmetic that has been used in Japan for centuries. Afterwards, Sakiko treated me to tea and ice cream with red beans (adzuki) and sweet rice dumplings (dango).
-Buy a fan. It’s worth it.
-Buy strong deodorant and antiperspirant even if you do not usually use them at home.
-In Japan it appears that they honour the 3rd, 7th, and 15th anniversaries of someone’s death with decreasing amounts of ceremony.
-Japanese people seem, almost as a whole, extremely fashionable. I'm going to have to step up my game!
-You can buy foreigner-sized clothes at UNIQLO, just be prepared to buy an extra-large.

A New City

Today I met some actual Japanese people! Everyone was assigned 2 or 3 Doshisha University students to help with getting alien registration cards and commuter passes and find the best routes to and from school. Since my home stay is only a 15 minute walk away from the University, it really shouldn’t have taken all that long to get there, but we got kind of lost. When we did find my house it was beautiful! It is a very traditional-style Japanese house with tatami (straw mat) floors, sliding panel shouji doors, a garden in the entry and then another in the inner courtyard. My host mother served my guides and myself tea and snacks and was very nice, though I was really worried the whole time about having arrived unannounced when she might have been busy. I think I’ll just apologize tomorrow at the welcome party. I just finished wrapping the gifts for that, actually. ‘Omiyage’ are very important in Japanese society, in case you don’t know, and are meant to be given to thank people for various things, and in my case they are to start out my home stay on the right foot. Based on suggestions from a Japanese friend of mine, I got my host mother smoked sockeye salmon, my host father a Colorado Rockies baseball cap, my host sister some of my favourite earl grey and lavender tea from a shop in my home town, and the host dog a blue toy bone with white stars on it. I also saw the Kamo river today with my guides. Right in the middle of the city is a big, clean river with cranes, tall grasses and manicured drops, and at one section it is flanked by the geisha districts of Gion Kobu and Pontocho.
Anyway, people were going to go for karaoke tonight, but it’s gotten too late for me after such a long day. There will be other chances, since this is the land of karaoke anyway.
Lessons from today:
-Though a great many bathrooms are thoroughly modernized, there are still a lot of old-fashioned toilets left in Japan (read: no seat).
-‘Akan’ is Kyoto dialect for “bad” or “no good.”
-The Mister Doughnut in Kyoto Station doesn’t open until 8am.
-It doesn’t matter what side of the sidewalk you walk on, you are in constant danger of being hit by people on bicycles.

Whew!

Well, after an almost 24-hour travel day and with over 100lbs of luggage, I’ve arrived in Kyoto, Japan. Really, even after only about a day and a half here, I’ve learned several little cultural details:
-Japanese people carry tissues and napkins with them, as many bathrooms and restaurants do not provide them.
-Since the smallest denomination of paper currency is 1000 yen (about $10 American), it is important to invest in a coin purse.
-You have to take off your shoes in changing rooms in clothing stores.