私は一日中日本語が勉強してと思っています。
I am thinking of studying Japanese for the whole day.
去年の誕生日に母が時計をくれました。
My mother gave me a watch on my birthday last year.
Tidbit #8: Studying Technique
Study cards. Time to go for it.
Nothing beats simple effective word cards that you can bring around in your pocket and commit to memory. Along the road to the supermarket, I was constantly reading them out loud and trying to conjugate them along the way. For example:
お金を下ろす：to withdraw money
お金を下ろせます：can withdraw money
お金を下ろしましょう：go to withdraw money
It definitely helped a lot cause I was able to cleanly memorize all the vocabulary including the kanji so I’m happy ^^
Homemade Food
Yaki Soba 焼きそば、おいしかった！
Every Tuesday, there is a huge sale at the supermarket, where they sell fresh food at much cheaper prices. I bought some pre-seasoned beef (seasoned with soya sauce and onions), yaki soba noodles, codfish, mackerel, jellyfish, asparagus, and shimeji mushrooms. These will last a week for sure! ^^ Today, I made some yaki soba, really easy to make.
1) Cook the main ingredients first
2) add the yaki soba
3) add 30ml of water
4) add any other ingredients you wish to add
I added yakitori sauce and it tasted so good. I’m gonna be cooking a lot more for sure over here. And it’s a lot cheaper too. For my stash, I spent 1920円, which is around SGD$25. For 7 days worth of food, I think I got my money’s worth.
Ikebana (Flower Arrangement)
Today we had an ikebana (いけばな、生け花) class, which was a rather soothing experience on the soul. It is a disciplined way of arranging flowers that merges nature and the human imagination. Influenced by Buddhist philosophy, ikebana plays on the nature of space and of asymmetric relations to create an aesthetically appealing look.
The background: For this lesson, we learnt from the Ohara school, founded in the Meiji period, as it gives the most creativity to the arranger within the limits of the rules it imposes.
The two most important forms we needed to know was first the rising form, and then the inclining form. For this lesson, we learnt the rising form. This is what happened:
We were given 5 stalks of flowers, wrapped in a newspaper and not trimmed at all, in its original state. We were also given an elliptical ceramic pot, half filled with water, and a base with spiky nails poking out from it. We trimmed the flowers to their appropriate length, before sticking them into the base. This is what we got:
生け花（いけばな）
There is a lot of discipline required when handling the flowers, and it’s also a “follow the instructions policy”. Seems to come from the school of thought where if you follow the rules, you’ll get the point sooner or later. I wanted to ask lots of questions, but the teacher wasn’t so smooth with English, and also, I think it is much better to master the basics of form and composition before trying to ask any questions about further development.
I enjoyed 生け花 thoroughly cause it was soothing to the soul and nice on the eye. After days of grey, it was relaxing to be in contact with some nature. It also slows down your mind when you put your entire focus to making the arrangement look as satisfactory as possible. The pre-requisite to a good arrangement, is to do many iterations of it. This is an interesting philosophy, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the designs will develop from there.
Tomorrow, I will be visiting the Nagoya Castle, and having a takoyaki たこ焼きcooking party. Excited!
It’s only the first day and I feel both overwhelmed and underwhelmed. It’s 12am now and I just finished one revision section as part of my homework. Except that it wasn’t really revision. I hadn’t learnt many of the grammar, vocabulary and I had a lot of catching up to do. Turns out that I just needed to do 2 more chapters to be at the class’ pace. Sigh. Luckily today was a more kanji-focused lesson, which I was more confident, but still had a lot to brush up on. I’m so thankful for this team of warriors who stayed back to help me out with my revision, revising the で and に particles as well as the あげます and もらいます sentence constructions. THANK YOU ❤
Tidbit #7: Self-learning is efficient only if you know how to learn
Most people don’t. They think they do, until they actually take some sort of instruction that they realise that there are so many rules to take note of, as well as contextual clues to figure out, which you might miss out when studying on your own. That’s the difficulty I had to struggle with. There are some misconceptions that I had to deal with, especially with more grammar to take note of, where some particles serve more than one function.
I’m feeling a little confused right now, cause there’s so much that happened in one day, but I’ll go slow here.
Conversation Lessons
I didn’t take a picture of the lessons mainly cause I woke up late and rushed to lessons with my head still a little woozy. 8.58am for a 9.20am lesson is simply unacceptable and I’ll wake up a lot earlier later today.
We started off with revision for 会話 (conversations). Yamada Sensei asked 6 questions:
今、どこへ行ってみたいですか。
Where do you want to go?
外国語ができますか。
Can you speak a foreign language?
よく映画を見ますか。一年にどのぐらい見ますか。
Do you watch movies often? Roughly how many times do you watch in one year?
子供の時、何が欲しいかったですか。
When you were a child, what did you want?
嬉しかったプレゼントは何ですか。いつ、誰にもらいましたか。
What present makes you happy? Who did you receive the present from, and when?
〜たらどうですか。
If you tried ~, how do you think about it?
Of these, I didn’t understand the last one. The feeling that you didn’t learn something isn’t gratifying. It’s more horrifying because you learn that there are things that you have to catch up on, usually without help. In fact I think she asked more questions but they flew by me. I’ll have to ask her again to catch up.
Reading and Writing Lessons
After which, we had a reading and writing lesson. Since the course was made up of largely non-Chinese learners, kanji was the top priority as usual. As in my previous post, kanji is much harder for non-Chinese learners because they don’t have those years of foundation, so radicals and stroke orders are relatively foreign and new to them. I kinda breezed through EXCEPT for some words where I mixed up small details. Note the kanji for North, which is kita:
take this kanji, and contrast it with this. Puzzle for the day: Can you spot the difference? These are the subtleties that I’ve to get used to when learning Kanji 漢字 in Japanese language learning.
Japanese Studies (Cultural) Lesson
Refer to my previous post for my description on the syllabus. We embarked on a study of the Manyôshû, one of the oldest forms of Japanese written literature. The name 万葉集 literally translates to 10,000 leaves anthology, a metaphor for poems by leaves. Written in the Nara Period, it is also the time where the Japanese oral tradition was put into print, so it’s very similar to Homer’s Odyssey. What this set of poetry does, is let high-brow scholars into the country to access what it means by true Japanese culture.
There were two other books, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, which means the “record of ancient matters” and “the beginnings of Japan”, that took old Japanese myths mixed them with supposed historical facts. That became the official history of Japan. Herodotus anyone?
The Manyôshû held much more power though, because for me, the act of poetry softened the lines between fact and fiction, and the people didn’t need to take things at face value. People were allowed to be moved by the rhythm and metaphorical imagery of the words and conjure up their own vision of the world.
The Professor Sharif Mebed had this little powerpoint slide, where he was telling us the gap between the worlds of a writer and a reader. The reader can’t understand the world of the writer unless he reads about it, and what more than understanding it in its context?
Thus, a little elaboration on its context. The Manyôshû was written for high-brow scholars, which included the royal families, highly educated citizens (a rare few), and was arguably meant to be used as a political tool to stamp one’s authority on another. In Japan, there were many competing religions that monarchs stood for. When natural disasters struck, it meant that the heavens were disapproving of a leader and the leader was subsequently replaced with a newer one. Poetry in this context could therefore be seen as a authorial stamp on one’s validation as the mandate of heaven. The second poem Kaguyama illustrates this point:
Many are the mountains of Yamato
But I climb heavenly Mount Kagu
That is cloaked in foliage
And stand on the summit to view the land
On the plain of land, Smoke rises, rises from the hearths
On the plain water, gulls rise, rise.
Splendid a land is the dragonfly island
The land of Yamato
The poet, Emperor Jomei, uses visual cues to tell people that he is the connector between the gods and the earth. The idea of the emperor at the summit, the gods in the sky, and the people on the earth, showed his visual placement as the communicator, the chosen one. How is he the chosen one? The prosperous civilisation as hinted by the “smoke rising” and the “gulls rising” and the “dragonfly island” denoting a bountiful harvest shows that the gods are in his favour. Of course, science had not advanced to a point where predictions regarding such agricultural exploits could be made, so the Emperor could use this vagueness and ambiguity to touch on the mystical and the unknown, furthering his own status as Emperor. I could go on, but I shall pause.
Downside to the class, the teacher is a little boring, but I think if you have enough interesting materials, you can definitely get over it. I’m hearing mumurs of discontent all around, but I will try to press on with this, and learn something solid from this course. There is a Japanese Arts class tomorrow and I’m gonna do some 生け花 ikebana, or flower arrangement. Will tell y’all more soon ^^
Meanwhile, I’ve to go to sleep. 1:17am here, and I don’t wanna wake up late. Alright, more updates tomorrow!
The day ends at 11pm consistently everyday. By 7-8pm I would be sitting around in the community room, chatting with my hostel mates and uploading photos from the day. Usually I try to study a little more, but I decided to give myself a break today and just goof around. The mornings are the times when I’m most focused and productive. Usually I spent 1-2 hours revising and recapping new words that I’ve learnt as well as covering new material. However, in the past few days, I’ve learnt so many words they’re starting to inundate my mind. Sometimes it is good to trust passive knowledge. They’ll come back sooner or later. I realised that it’s perfectly fine to struggle with the first few times you recall, because it is the struggle that will help you remember those new words or new grammatical structures.
New Grammar
Today, I’ve 1 grammar point that I reinforced from the previous day and 2 new ones I’ve learnt.
1. The Potential Form. ーれる
For る-verbs, drop the ーる and add ーられる.
e.g. I can’t remember! – 覚えられないんですよ！
For う-verbs, drop the ーう, change to -eru.
e.g. I can swim. – 泳げますよ.
The potential form is super useful when saying whether you can or cannot do something.
But what if you wanna say that you can, but you tried? To try, you have to use the form てみる(te mi ru), which expresses the idea of doing something tentatively, or trying something.
2. To attempt to do something ーてみる
Conjugate the verb to the ーて form and add みる
e.g. 食べるー食べてー食べてみる
I tried eating okonomiyaki and I liked it:
私はお好み焼きを食べてみたけど、とてもおいしかった
It really helps to think in Chinese now, where てみる is really like 做做看看吧. Thanks A for the tip!
Last one, where if you want to express an ‘even if’ point, you use ーても. You use a verb or adjective before that particle.
3. Even if: ーても
E.g. Even if I don’t go to class, I will still have a lot of work to do
私は授業が行きませんても、たくさん宿題をしましょう
New Useful Word
羨ましい（うらやましい）：Jealous
エミーさんは新しい家をかったので、私はとても羨ましいです。 Because Amy got a new house, I am really jealous.
Discovering Anime
Onto the more touristy bit of my trip, I followed a group out onto Osu-Kannon Temple, where there is a huge shopping arcade. You can get all sorts of stuff there, and in one 6-hour journey, we hardly covered a quarter of the whole place. We said our goodbyes to our warm and hospitable Japanese students Yu and Shiho with a selfie. Loved their energy and enthusiasm in making us feel like we were at home.
Selfie to say goodbye to a good few days together ^^
I guess the highlight was in touring several anime highlights and seeing B, K and V all hyped up over their favorite anime characters. I never got the hype, but it was really interesting to people watch. We went to a KidsLand where a majority of the people were adults, went to an anime store where the third floor was full of pornography of all kinds. V was all scarred from the experience – it is always shocking to see something so explicit the first time round. Went to another anime store, where there was a Magic the Gathering session going on in the top floor. At each of these places, there were plenty of middle-aged men and teenagers alike milling around, spending a good time on a Sunday afternoon chilling out. I wonder what are the demographics of people who go to these places on the weekdays. I also wonder about the nature of these sub-cultures.
Magic the Gathering gamers on a sunny Sunday afternoon
The peak of my touring experience was this: Anime Art. Oh so beautiful.
The art is just spectacular
I wished I had more photos but I soon found a “no photos” sign and I stopped promptly. But this is what I found most exciting. The shades of colours make the art seem both life-like yet artificial. You know you’re looking at something that isn’t real, but you also know that is the point. Your mind ascends to heaven-like proportions, floating amongst the clouds, and always surprised by the astonishing clarity of expression and attention to detail. The characters seem to glow, sparkle, and the background of the canvas complement the main character, never taking away attention from the lead. There were spectacular portraits of fire, ice, moon and the sun that transported me to another world altogether.
I’ll remember this shopPart of the interior.
After 6 hours of walking, we were tired, a little hungry and sore battered feet. 疲れ様でした！
Tired warriorsYupp always staying chill
To end off, YOU KNOW WHAT? I visited an animal shop and the animals were SO CUTE. Sorry. Outburst can’t be contained for this moment. Behold such cute thingums.
犬（いぬ）猫（ねこ）可愛い犬 ^^
FIRST DAY OF CLASSES START TOMORROW. I. just. can’t. wait.
Signing off…
But first, good food and snapshots of beauty and cuteness.
Neat lil’ plastic bags for wrapping. The Japanese people like to wrap stuff with nice paper.We go wandering into the woodsReally unique practice of covering mini Buddha statues in cloth. Can’t even find this in wikipediaThe ol’ willow tree weeps next to the bridge.And a beautiful bowl of 味噌ラーメン (Miso Ramen).
On Scandalous Words
On the train, while we were looking at advertisements, I saw this kanji and looked it up on my phone. It was 美人 (bi jin), or beautiful woman. But since the phone searches for related words too, I chanced upon this:
美人局（つつもたせ）：scheme in which a man and woman trick another man into a compromising situation for blackmail, badger game.
Like what. I showed this to those around me and M thought of more “scandalous words” as I call it. Here are the results:
ぶす：An ugly woman
逝け面（いけめん）：Exceptionally ugly man
目障り（めざわり）：Eyesore, Unpleasant sight, Obstructing a view
Yup, learning bad words are a pre-requisite to getting access to a culture. You have to know the bad to know the good ^^
Deciphering Kanji
The advantage with knowing Chinese prior to learning Japanese is that the kanji (漢字) becomes less of a problem. There are quite a few compound words that borrow the pronunciation (発音) from Chinese, such that it sounds almost like a dialect when spoken. Example:
恋愛（れんあい）：To be in love.
The pronunciation sounds similar to the Chinese way of speaking.
Japanese: Ren Ai. Chinese: Lian Ai.
I didn’t even know the hiragana prior to seeing the word, but when I saw it, I intuitively had an approximation to how I thought it would sound like in Japanese. Got it right the first time.
I don’t get everything right all the time though. I get words like 理想（りそう）wrong cause I don’t really know how to approximate “Li Xiang” to its Japanese counterpart. And 道場（どうじょう）doesn’t sound really similar to “Dao Chang”. But here’s one more successful approximation just to show you that it’s worth trying:
最後（さいご）：Last. Chinese: Zui Hou
相談（そうだん）：Consultation Chinese: Xiang Tan
It’s not just in terms of pronunciation that is easier, the stroke orders are a lot easier to get too. I don’t have to painstakingly relearn the way they’re written; I can somewhat deduce a stroke pattern even if I’ve not seen the kanji before, by breaking down a character into its radicals.
Cons: Sometimes you get mixed up with the pronunciation if you keep thinking in Chinese, so it is usually better to just learn the words without associating them with Chinese words. However, I don’t really have the time to learn from scratch just yet, I have 2 chapters to catch up on eeeeep.
Studying Techniques
I’ve been on the hunt for the best studying techniques, and I think I’ve found one. I’m currently carrying around this small notepad (可愛いね) and writing down plenty of words that I don’t quite know of.
I try to be as neat as possible
This helps so much cause I can always look at it, and keep repeating it in my head. But it’s not just mere repetition. It is also about repeatedly associating it with an image in my head and locking it in. It is a lot easier this way. Context is super important, so I’ve got to keep remembering where I saw that word. Context helps to make the situation a lot clearer for people whom you ask, cause language is contextual after all, and has exceptions from time to time. English is no exception to this rule of exceptions.
I’ve tried flashcards on a smart phone but they don’t work so well. The act of writing gives so much power to your memory, particularly cause the words get stuck in your head. With a smartphone, memory doesn’t seem to do its job as well. I think I’m pretty set on this method. Let’s go.
Words / Phrases of the Day:
ごめんね、待たせる：Sorry, I have kept you waiting.
(Extremely useful when meeting someone who came early or if you were late)
いいのかな：I wonder (Good to use if you wanna cast doubt or something)
インターネットの接続がとても遅いです：The Internet Connection is very slow!
大多数の客さんは中年の男です：A large majority of customers are middle-aged men.
Grammar pointer: させる is used for expressing causation. Thus 待たさせる is like saying something is the cause of someone else to wait.
More words:
助け（たすけ）：To help
移す（うつす）：To transfer
決める（きめる）：To decide
Of course there are more, but I’ll stop here. Classes start next Monday. It’s only day 4 here, and there’s so much to pick up already. Tidbit from Cal Newport:
The way to excellence is through deep work, and being obsessed with what you do, such that the way you manage your time, is through allocating slots for yourself to breathe. But in any case, you’ve been infected, and you have that drive to go get what you want.
Thanks for reading! ^^
Of course, I can’t resist putting this up at the end. Cats always make nice endings to anything ^^
I woke up feeling a rather blank optimism. It’s like I was happy, but yet not sure why I was happy. It was an optimism devoid of meaning, like the feeling when you wake up feeling light and jovial, not really having a care for the world as of yet.
As a team we went over to the testing place. The level of preparation by the Centre for Japanese Studies: Japanese. There were ushers lined up along the entrance to guide us into the venue even though I kinda knew the place inside out already, but I really appreciated the gesture; made me feel more at home 🙂 Time: 9.20am. Ushers were there 40 minutes before the test was about to start. Incredible. This won’t happen in Singapore haha.
The test started, and when I flipped open the page, it was the first time I saw waves after waves of Japanese in so long. The font was a little smaller than usual, with lesser spacing too, so it was like being confronted with a newspaper. Never mind, 100 minutes, let’s go.
10 questions in, and I already had doubts on my own abilities. I knew what was going on, but there were some options (MCQ) where I didn’t know what they meant at all, so I wasn’t sure whether I was choosing the right answer. 20 questions in, and it started going down hill. Awfully strange words kept appearing every 5 or 6 questions like ばかり, which has several meanings such as “only, merely, nothing but”, “approximately, about”, “indicates emphasis”, and “always, constantly”, and わけ, which I don’t really have a desire to know now cause the explanations were way too complex.
30 minutes in, and we had our first test-taker to complete. I was just thinking, did she give up?
Never mind, trudging on, by the last 15 questions, I was reading in Chinese. There were so many kanji words I didn’t know that I just gave up reading in Japanese. I still kinda understood what was going on though. There were a few small passages to read and 2 long ones, about the creativity of Japanese and their inability to innovate now, also about global warming and carbon dioxide emissions, but well, the test was torture. Was it wise to give up? I wondered about that girl who finished after 30 minutes.
At this point, it dawned upon me that the test was designed to separate the stronger ones from the weaker ones, like it was deliberately made harder so that the norm is that everyone does badly and only the outstanding ones get put to higher levels. So there you go, with this realisation, I moved back into my state of blank optimism.
The test didn’t just shake me up though, it shook almost everyone up. For at least 1 hour, no one really spoke any Japanese cause it was just so tiring on the brain.
Student life orientation. This got me hyped up after I saw our student package. Besides the intensive 5 times a week Japanese lessons for 3 hours each day, there is also an optional 2 times a week Japanese studies program and a once a week Japanese arts program. All of them are graded, and the Japanese studies program has 2 components: one is on culture, and the other on politics and economy. The titles look really cool, but they don’t really tell you whether the content is actually good, so we’ll wait on that. In any case, here are some snapshots of the syllabus that got me hyped:
Man’yōshū: Students will learn about the origins of Japanese poetry and see some very early works in translation. We will discuss the cultural, historical and political background. Finally we will try to write our own waka-style poem. (AHH)
Edo Literature: Basho’s “The narrow road to the Interior”. Students will discuss life in the early modern era. Who was Basho? What is Haiku, and why is it important? (A superb supplement to my knowledge of Basho and the haiku)
Post-Cold War economy and economic policymaking: “The evolution of the Japanese Policymaking System”, “The Politics of Economic Reform” (really cool cause that’s the time when Japan started to boom)
The Japanese arts portion on the other hand, involves two sections as well: Hanga (Woodblock Printing) and Ikebana (Flower Arrangement). The Japanese aesthetic has always interested me, so I am really really looking forward to learning more about the value systems behind these forms of expressions.
After all the orientation, there was a welcome party organised by the centre, and there were plenty of Nanzan students around to just chat. I could tell some of them felt a little awkward, but I tried asking several questions, like “Which Japanese films do you like?” (どれの日本の映画が好きですか ? ), but in the end, the proverbial awkward turtle took over and I moved on to talk to other students. I really should learn how to deal with these situations better, but I’m an awkward turtle myself haha. One thing I learnt: Miso Katsu in Nagoya is famous.
The night was the time for a little fooling around and buckling down to some studying. We took some props and did some roleplay, laughing at how we looked so ridiculous.
With our resident funny Japanese Yu ^^Santa Paul!怖い. 妖怪 hahawatch the horse
Studying was good because I learnt two important grammatical structures:
し(shi): Used as an appendix to each phrase to denote an explanation. Also, くて or て
なら(nara): “If, if it is the case that…”, Used after a reason is given to a question. Used in this form (Subject) なら (Verb)
e.g. 今日ちょっと行けないんですが、明日なら行けると思います 。
しているんです：”run”, used when either replying to a question, or when seeking an answer.
e.g. どうしてこのアルバイトに興味があるんですか。
e.g. ここでアルバイトをしているんですか。
and then new words
広告 (こうこく）：advertisement
募集（ぼしゅう）：recruitment
駄目（だめ）：not really good.
一時ごろ：ごろ means approximately, used as a reference to a specific time
In general speech:
ふわふわ：soft
調べる（しらべる）：To reference, to check
わくわく：to be excited
平ら：flat
太い：fat, thick
困る：to be in trouble
Alrighty, more vocab, and more learning to come. Let’s do this.
When you’re learning a language, you need the environment to be able to learn quickly and feel comfortable enough to have the time to elaborate on your sentences. It also feels good to have people take the time to correct your syntax. Today’s highlight was the incredible support I got from the people around me, and that would not have been possible without the feel good factor that everyone brought in. There was a sense of optimism, coupled with a tiny bit of anxiety as we all tried to navigate each other’s skill in Japanese.
Initially I stumbled at introductions. Of course there was the typical, “こんにちは”、”お名前は？” (hi! what’s your name?) but I stuttered through further descriptions of where I came from, and why my background was so intriguing. I stuttered through my own questions too: “日本語がいつから勉強しましたか？” (How long have you been studying Japanese for?) and it was hard to get used to the grammar and conjugation.
As more people arrived, it got easier to make my introductions and soon I had better explanations for where my parents came from. “私の両親はカナダの留学生です、そして大学であった。” (My parents are exchange students in Canada, and they met at university). Meanwhile, for 3 times in two days, I went to this restaurant called モウンテン(Mountain) where I had pretty much the cheapest meals I’ve had in Japan. For 500円 you get a huge bowl of rice or spaghetti or pilaf. I was so surprised at the size. It filled me up each time I ate there.
There was a lot of lazing around actually, and not exactly doing much. But by lazing around, we were able to sit around as a group and have some interesting conversations and attempt to translate some sentences in English into Japanese. I learnt so much from these mini conversations.
写真を撮ってもいいですか。
Is it alright to take a photo?
お疲れ様でした
Thank you for the hard work.
ケーヴィンさんは何でもたべるけど、バナナスパだけ食べられません Kevin eats anything except for banana spaghetti. (Banana Spaghetti is an acquired taste)
アスリサンはどこでもセルフィーを撮りますよ Alice takes selfies everywhere
面倒くさい!（めんどうくさい） What a bother
いたいたしい (痛々しい）
Painful
はずかしい【恥ずかしい】
Embarrased.
びっくり
Surprise
もしだれかその言語(げんご)で話すと、私もその言語で話す
If someone speaks in that language, I will also speak in that language.
おすそわけ【お裾分け】 To share
今日はご飯を遅くなったから、今お腹がへってない
I ate a late meal today, so I’m not very hungry now.
誰か、何れか、どこか、何か、いつか
someone, a certain one from many, somewhere, something, sometimes
誰も、どれも、どこも、何も、いつも
everyone, any and all, everywhere, nothing, every time
たぶん（多分） probably
おかしい
ridiculous, strange
違う（ちがう）
different
顔（かお）
face
どうしましょう
how to deal with this situation.
In the midst of various conversations, we would laugh at ridiculously simple English phrases and how they translate so literally in Japanese, like “what a small world” translates to “世間は狭いものですね”. And we would laugh at seemingly the most ordinary things like, “You look skinnier in this photo”, and I would reply, “いいえ、幻想ですよ！” which means, “nah, it’s an illusion!” and they would burst out laughing. But this laughter is good, cause everyone feels at ease, and then we correct each other’s usage of words and laughing through them (I’m getting corrected most of the time actually, cause I recklessly spew out my thoughts). Humour keeps the brain going and locks it more concretely into my memory. Maybe that’s the way to learn.
In any case, lessons haven’t even started and I’m enjoying the time spent together. I’m still thankful for YNC, who sent me on this trip to acquire some knowledge and of course learn from life. Look out for the next post! Day 2&3 will be a combined double post, because while this one is for reflections, the next one will be for photos. Much cheers to y’all ^^
Tidbit #5: The Japanese take awesome selfies, like they can squeeze 18 people at one shot, no problem.
Did you know that maid cafés are rather xenophobic? The maids are starting to get a little disgruntled at the tourists who go there not knowing how to speak proper Japanese and they are not really happy about it. That being said, all the themed cafés are rather suspect in some way. I wonder how good it is for a congregation of animals to come together and be comfortable with it. Or for a maid café, like how healthy is it when you go there to be served like a king? These things are making me think twice about visiting.
Phrases for the day:
Sorry for making you wait: 待たせてごめんね Which country are you from? : どこに Just now: たった今｜ちょうど今 Same: 同じ｜Similar: 似てる Both please: 両方 お願いします Is there a hospital nearby? : 近くに病院はありますか。 Nah, it’s not like that: そんなことない。 My brother has travelled to Singapore before: 兄はシンガプールに行ったことがある。 What you said is correct! : あなたの言ったことは正解です｜。。。ことはあってます。 I don’t use chopsticks: 箸を使わない。
Nagoya (名古屋)
The 5 hour bus ride to Nagoya was a little tiring, but great that I got the chance to read William Zinsser’s book “On Writing Well”. He shows that writing is a very deliberate process that requires practice, and lays out some really good practices to keep in touch. Here’s one to chew on, particularly related to travel writing:
“For substance, be intensely selective. If you are describing a beach, don’t write that “the shore was scattered with rocks” or that “occasionally a seagull flew over.” Shores have a tendency to be scattered with rocks and to be flown over by seagulls. Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute. Find details that are significant”
It is extremely important then, to pick out one or two quirks for each place you see, and capture it in a way that is unique to its context.
When the bus first entered Nagoya, the sea of grey and dull beige buildings struck me. Every building was clad in really dull colours, almost as though to match the colour of the skies. It reminds me of the book “The Phantom Tollbooth”, where there is this town where everything turns to grey because everyone looks down as they walk. Soon, there is no colour around at all. Funnily, the sea of grey wasn’t depressing, more like toned down and muted.
I was received very warmly by R, who very warmly helped me with my luggage and we got into the cab. On the way, he asked me questions about where I was from, which school I went to, and gradually, my Japanese listening skills were tested to the brim. I had to keep asking him to slow down, to stop and explain some words, to offer my own suggestions of what I thought he said. That’s part of the listening experience, but it was tough and uncomfortable to some degree, just to get the gist of what he was saying. Moral of the story? Minna no Nihongo I doesn’t help you that much. You’ll end up sounding like a lame duck if you depended on the book.
Amongst people of my own age group though, everyone spoke really casually, and shared foods very easily. Maybe these students were the more open ones. Usually I’m used to hearing, “これは食べますか？” Instead I just hear, “食べる？” or “行くの ?” Another cultural shock: when I poured water for my Japanese host, he went like “no no no no, 大丈夫” and then “優しい” to mean gentleman, cause usually people of the same age group don’t do this for others. I knew you had to be polite to old people, but I thought this politeness applied to many situations. It was at once liberating to know this though, and not needing to call the Japanese students by appending a -san behind their names.
This is gonna be a Japanese laden post, so here are more phrases that I had to try coming up with:
すみません、ゆくりください：please slow down (cause the Japanese speak so quickly I can’t catch what they’re saying half the time!)
彼の言ったことはあってます：what you say is right! or you can just say: 正解！
うまい！：colloquial version of おいしい
じゃね！連絡をしましょう：See ya! Let’s keep in touch (really important when leaving for awhile)
Alrighty, enough Japanese for today.
Blog backlog: Insider/Outsider perspectives on travel | Nagoya day 2: Student life | Foods of Japan
It is cheaper and you don’t get the anxiety of actually searching for food. So I glossed over the cheaper part. It is a lot cheaper seriously, because you don’t pay for the rental and the labour involved. You may want to see how the Japanese do their craft, but if so, make a planned trip to actually see how they do it. Also, restaurants are also for instances where you know it takes time to make it and you don’t have the capacity to afford it. I would make the trip down once just to have that experience, but I wouldn’t go multiple times.
Miraikan 未来館 (The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation)
This is the coolest place ever, for one reason, I am a geek, and I love knowing what cool innovations are going on around the world right now. Why pay for this if you can simply go on your own? Simply cause it’s explained for you so clearly and it’s interactive. You don’t have to trawl through the web to filter through science jargon. Instead, you get a very crisp explanation of Quantum computing as well as some models that they use to show it. I went to two floors, the 5th floor first, called Explore the Frontier, and the 3rd floor, The 5th floor is divided into 5 different sections but I only visited three because there was one section that I didn’t care much for, and another which was clearly meant for kids.
So first, on the health and medical section. [Disclaimer: Every single discovery here was made by a Japanese, of course there’ll be bias!] There was a part on two types of stem cells — Embryonic stem cells and Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. I can’t remember the exact details of how it worked but the medical ethics section caught my eye. They give you some information before running you through a series of questions, one being, “What do you think should the limit be to use cells from an embryo?” Turns out that in most countries, 14 days is the limit before it starts developing its central nervous system. From this, you can deduce that this is the commonly accepted notion of what denotes a life. But the time is largely debatable. Some countries use the cells from an aborted foetus. Okay, let’s move on. There’s also a part on the human genome. The most interesting technology is the microarray. It works by having a set of genes already known to exist in the genome that causes a certain function. So to detect whether the genes for alzheimer’s is activated, all you do is match the microarray with the genome of that person.
Near the huge globe of the earth, there’s a section on the international space station and what benefits it can bring to people. Before my flight to Japan, I was watching a documentary on space travel, and there’s something philosophically very profound about astronauts seeing their own earth from a bird’s eye view. The experience of seeing environmental damage to the planet creates a sense of responsibility in them to protect the planet. Seeing is believing, but only when you see it first hand. Simply looking at slides of how the earth is degrading doesn’t do much to the soul. Because there’s a frame of your senses. Take away that frame and you have the full range of the impact coming down on you.
Then there was the part on environmental innovation. Did you know you could make plastic from plants? By changing the genetic information of plants, you can get plants to make plastic in its cytoplasm. The microorganisms that cause this process creates plastics that are too weak, so scientists have genetically modified them to make them stronger. Also, trees can be used in a more sustainable manner. Wood molecules used to make paper actually consist of many smaller components that can be reused, thereby reducing waste. For example, the lignin in the wood molecules can be converted to lignin phenol, which is combined with waste paper to (research on web). After that is used up, it can be recycled and added to biomass plastic for more flexibility. It is then used in solar cells as a pigment to capture energy before eventually being used as a petroleum substitute. This is just fascinating to me because the process is so streamlined and elegant. There was a part on environmental debates between rich and poor countries, about how environmental progress should be carried out. Countries have tried two methods, one to set a uniform quantity of CO2 across all countries, the other to scale a nations’ CO2 quantity to its economic structure.
On the third floor, there’s plenty of descriptions regarding new technologies. The one on quantum computing was best, partially because I already had an understanding of its potential, but also because the models were fantastic.
There was also one on artificial photosynthesis, a process whereby people try to mimic the way plants make food, Here are two really interesting parts to the process. First, the Honda Fujishima effect, where scientists use the electrode of Titanium Oxide to decompose water under UV light, and second, using light harvesting antennas created by an orderly array of chlorophyll to capture light.
That’s it for Miraikan, but there were plenty of other cool technologies which I’d like to share, but this post would be exploding with information. It was well worth my 2 hours there, and the 2 hours it took to get there and back (cause I was staying at Shimousa-Nakayama (下総中山) near Chiba and it was so so far)
After 2 days of blogging about Tokyo, I couchsurfed at a Japanese family’s house where I was cut off from wi-fi for 2 days and at the same time, I’ve got a case of the hives. So instead of doing a day-to-day account, here are some snapshots of thoughts that came to my mind.
Tidbit #1: When you get the hives, just rest. Nothing is worse than itching all over the body and having an uncomfortable day.
Groceries:
Supermarkets remain the best way to figure out a city. Prices tell you plenty of information. For example, really cheap prices of plums tell you that the season for making your own plum wine 梅酒(うめしゅ) is here. Prices also serve as comparisons to your own country’s goods, and you know which types of foods or goods can you get cheaper. Usually these indicate a larger culture at work.
Tip: Get a local or someone who’s been there for long. He’ll tell you what’s good. We bought Udon うどん, salmon, yoghurt (which Japan doesn’t really have good ones), and dill. There was a sore lack of baking equipment in Japan though. And ovens are really rare in Japanese households.
Ohi Racetrack Flea Market
I get the hype behind this: 600 stalls, selling almost any kind of item you can think of. I was really surprised to find a telescope, brass instruments and wheelchairs!
Tidbit #2: This is a side of Tokyo one wouldn’t normally see. I was on a hunt for yukatas, because I heard they go really cheap here, and I found one at the corner of an intersection. I asked, すみません、これはいくらですか, which meant ”excuse me, how much does it cost?” It was 4000 yen. I was a little disappointed, but then this old lady comes along and asks, and he says 1000 yen. That got me puzzled. So I unfold the yukatas and try to look at it, but I can’t fold it back properly. That’s where the vendor knew I definitely wasn’t a local and started speaking to me in a coarse tone. He then tried to chase me away. Here’s a hidden part of the story. Before I unfolded the yukatas, I spoke to the lady for a bit, because she knew my Japanese wasn’t fluent and asked if I was from China. Well, I naturally spoke to her in Chinese that I wasn’t, but that probably got the vendor suspicious. Maybe, maybe it was the Mandarin Chinese that got me kicked out. But I also saw a few disgruntled-looking tourists (they were white and black) walking out of the flea market empty handed so maybe they felt a disconnect with the place.
Food brings people together
Last Saturday (31 May), I arrived at my Couchsurfing host’s place which was near Shinkoiwa 新小岩 (しんこいわ). G, our host, made some wonderful eggplant teriyaki with spaghetti and that became our talking point. The eggplant must be cooked to perfection – getting the temperature, time, and the amount of spices just right. It took many different trials and errors to get there. Then, G knew that I baked cause of my couchsurfing profile, and we went to get the ingredients at a shopping mall. This is a Japan where baking isn’t the norm. You can’t find ovens in a typical household. There simply isn’t the environment to bake. Only Costco, which is American, sells these equipment and ingredients at really low prices, but it is way out of Tokyo.
The conversation naturally shifted to working hours. Working in Japan sounds tough, especially when a majority of the population does 60-hour work weeks. That’s really unheard of in most parts of the world. G’s wife, N, does 80-hour work weeks. Sometimes I wonder how these people can cope, and then I realise that there is a sizeable number who don’t. Suicide rates are high here. Hotlines are available throughout the city to discourage people from committing suicide, and on train stations where suicide is more common, you have 8 wardens patrolling the platform to keep people away from the rail tracks. When you need to resort to physical intervention, you know the situation is becoming dire.
Of course, most Japanese people don’t commit suicide, but instead, the weekends are there to relax. G & N watch dramas, host couchsurfing events, hosts couchsurfers like me, go on day trips (though that is at a premium now), or just relax or lounge about at home. Usually N is really tired and won’t do much. (Interjection: I am now at my airbnb’s host place and he gives a different account – The Japanese spend 12 hours working, but most of that is bull. They spend most of their time doing nothing, or packaging folders or doing really menial tasks. I’ll check this out later on).
But now I have to bake, and we get these glorious muffins out on a rack:
From here, we talked about Couchsurfing, and the warm hospitality that people showed to us, and that’s why we were here in the first place. Couchsurfing is about sincerity, about giving without thinking of being given, and also about graciousness. When a host lets you into his/her house, he is letting you into his world for those few days. There is a degree of vulnerability that make words inadequate. You see tensions between couples, slight irritation, a sense of routine and monotony after a while. All these are seen behind a façade of initial hi-s and bye-s. There is no substitute for seeing them in their normal daily life and noticing little quirks between them. From my host, I managed to gain a view of Japan through the lens of an expat, and at the same time, contrasted with the lens of a Shizuoka-native who moved to Tokyo. There are subtle differences in the way they approach life, and also the way they present themselves to others.
For example, the biking culture in Japan is terrible and ironic. The Japanese government seeks to promote environmentally friendly practices, but they remove bike lanes from the streets. They cordon off previously approved bicycle parking slots before removing them. As a result, many cyclists in Tokyo cycle on the walkways but that disrupts the flow of pedestrians and makes it unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists alike. The environmentally friendly habits in Tokyo are also not so strictly enforced. Households don’t recycle as frequently as you think they do. Many types of plastics are still thrown away. Reason being that these agencies don’t keep a close watch on the rubbish anymore. Has complacency crept in?
I can go on and on, but the stories will have to end here for now.
Works in Progress: Foods of Japan | Insider/Outsider perspectives on travel | Day 5: Miraikan & Sushi
Puzzle for the day: Can you spot the difference? These are the subtleties that I’ve to get used to when learning Kanji 漢字 in Japanese language learning.
NINJA WANDERER: Tales of Travels 