Some Hope

I've recently applied for a job teaching businessmen (and possibly schoolchildren) English in Tokyo. I've got myself an interview, which was the first surprise, as I have no experience in teaching and no specific teaching qualifications. It seems to be a really respectable company, and the pay is probably better than what I'd get for a graduate position in England. 


To have a graduate job in Tokyo doing what I want to do, i.e. teaching adults, secured this early in the year would be unbelievable. Which is why I'm trying my best for it. It's just that, as I've found since the first time I ever applied for a part-time job in a printing shop back in London, I'm awful at interviews. I get nervous, freeze up and forget every word I ever knew. (You can imagine how I did in the recent Japanese language interview practice classes at university.) For this one, at least I won't have to speak Japanese, but even in English I have trouble. 


Also, the interview will be on Skype, which means I'll have to rely on the internet - never a good thing. 


Still, there's a small amount of hope building inside my head. And the very fact that I got an interview for this job is hopeful for others, if I have to apply again. 


So, in two weeks' time, I'll update you on how it went. Wish me luck...

New Ambitions

I left Japan from Hiroshima International Airport at 8am on the 13th August 2011. Two of my best friends came to the airport (one voluntarily, one following orders) to see me off. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. 


I've never felt particularly drawn to writing about it, because I'd rather not recall the memories, but now there's a positive slant. 


Since the very day I left, I knew I wanted to go back, but I'm not an impulsive person (and I have a very level-headed family who think I'm a little insane), so I waited until I'd gotten back into daily university life to decide properly. Nothing changed. I still dream of Japan now in November as much as I did in August. So I made the decision once and for all, to try and find English teaching work in Tokyo for after I graduate this summer. 


It's quite a bad state to be in, but I don't live for the present right now. Everything I do is thinking ahead to getting back to Japan. And I know while I was in Japan before I didn't keep up my blog very well, but I'd really like to try and keep writing about the process of finding work, getting back there, and starting teaching. 


So those are my new ambitions, and I hope you can cheer me on! 

Hisashiburi desu...

The title means "it's been a while". Sorry about that. I don't get much urge to write about things.

Well, a lot has happened since my last post - most noticeably, I went to see my favourite band in the whole world ever, Radwimps, live, and words cannot express how amazing it was. I didn't think it was possible to love them more, but I was proved wrong.

It's nearing the end of the rainy season and it's been very, very hot and humid for weeks now. One thing I've noticed - you never see Japanese people sunbathing. Caucasian people try their very hardest to be darker, but Asians see white skin as beautiful and do everything they can to keep theirs as pale as possible. It's common to see women walking around with umbrellas up when the sun is out. Another thing is that the Japanese have developed a very heat-friendly fashion sense - in England when it's hot people wear as little as possible and show as much skin as possible, but the Japanese just go with light and loose. It's practical and protects against sunburn - there's still people walking around with long sleeves. I don't know why the West hasn't caught on to this.

Naturally, with only a month or so to go, we've all started thinking about leaving. We had a meeting today to sort out how to cancel our internet and phone, how to move out of the dorms, etc. It's all getting a bit more real. I'll not lie, there are things I'm definitely looking forward to having back: BBC iPlayer, Marmite, savoury bread, HP sauce, roast dinners, chips, being able to phone official people instead of making Japanese friends do it, Meadowhall Shopping Centre, London... actually, I've been steadily making the list in my head to convince myself going back won't be that bad. But the fact remains that whatever I miss from my home country, it's far less than what I will miss about Japan. To be quite honest, I could do without most things, but it's the people I don't want to leave. We've formed an amazing close-knit group of friends here and I can't, or don't want to, imagine being away from them.

As a result of this, the mood is slowly turning to one of impending doom. The words 「あ～、帰りたくねぇな」("Aa, I don't wanna go back") are heard at some point in every conversation. So right now, we're just trying to make the most of our last few weeks together. We're slowly getting through the "We Should Really Do That Before We Go" list, which mostly consists of restaurants we've seen/heard of but never gone to, or restaurants we've gone to but only once. Yes, a lot of eating is involved. No, I'm not complaining. I think the Japanese restaurant next to Japan Centre in Picadilly Circus will be my Mecca for the next few years until I can get back to eat the real thing.

And I will get back, I hope.

Music

It seems, unlikely, I know, but Japan's rock music industry is huge. Since I've been here the quality of the music is one of the things that's really struck me. Actually I've decided to write my dissertation on it next year. But anyway, what I wanted to do was introduce a couple of bands I've come to know, because really, if some of them had been born American, they'd be world famous. I find it a real shame that generally, if people can't understand the words straight away, they don't even try listening.

One thing - I know some of them have strange, messed up English names, but look past that. Anyway, here's a few bands I really recommend looking up on Youtube (most of them have official legal channels):

Radwimps

Well, I can go on about this band for hours, as my friends here know. One of the best bands, musically, I've ever heard. These guys have, over the course of six albums so far, covered almost every variety of music you can think of, all while keeping a distinct Radwimps sound, with picky guitar lines, genius lyrics, and most of all the singer's very unique high clear voice. The singer (Noda Youjirou), as it happens, is also the sole composer, writing all the music and all the lyrics. His voice isn't the strongest, I'll admit, but he knows how to use it, and he writes music for himself in that knowledge. And, best of all, I'm going to see them live in June *jumps around in excitement*.

Songs to look up: おしゃかしゃま (Oshakashama), セツナレンサ (Setsunarensa), 狭心症 (Kyoshinsho, 'Heart Attack'), 揶揄 (Yayu, 'Ridicule')... Well, there's a selection, but all the ones on Youtube are worth listening to.

ONE OK ROCK

These guys sound like a cross between about five punk-pop bands I used to listen to when I was in secondary school. They're brilliant. The singer, hilariously, was an original member of a cheesy pop boyband called Kat-tun, who are still very much at the top of the charts, but couldn't be more different to what he gave it up for. Thank goodness he did, though.

Songs to look up: アンサイズネア (Answer Is Near), 自分 Rock (Jibun, 'Self Rock'), Keep It Real.

シド(Sid)

Okay, this band are in the genre Visual Kei, which is an almost exclusively Japanese thing, and can seem a bit weird to people who haven't come across it before. Basically they have a very distinct look, which involves over-done hair, makeup and clothes. Actually these guys are pretty normal compared to some other ones I could name (cough cough Vidoll cough), and their music is really good. Also, it's worth looking up The Kiddie as well - they have a slightly different more in-your-face visual style (it's called Oshare Kei) but their music is also pretty good.

Songs to look up: 乱舞のメロディー (Ranbu no Melody), レイン (Rain). The Kiddie: Smile, Elite Star+.

Acid Black Cherry (ABC)

This is in fact less a band and more a vocalist with backing musicians. The vocalist in question, known simply as Yasu, was the singer of a very very famous and popular Visual Kei band called Janne D'Arc, and when they split up he went solo with new band members. He's one of the strongest Japanese male vocalists I've heard and he has one heck of a stage presence. The band's music is heavier, around the middle of the Visual Kei spectrum I'd say. One note: ABC rather like dressing up as their alter-egos, girls and geeks, and having very silly music videos.

Songs to look up: Black Cherry, 眠り姫 (Nemuri Hime, 'Sleeping Princess'), 20th Century Boys

Doping Panda

Stepping away from the rock for a minute, these guys are a bit different - punky electro dance pop, is how I can describe it. But they're fantastic. And mad. And they have a name which makes people on youtube find them accidentally while hoping to find a video of a panda on drugs. Not me, I'd like to point out, other people on the internet. Oh, they also write a lot of their stuff in English. Well, not perfect English, but you can forgive them for that.

Songs to look up: Beat Addiction, Miracle, Nothin'

I could come up with more, but I think that's enough to be getting on with. Oh, just one more thing - the song 'Tonbi' by Androp is absolutely divine, but unfortunately is their only notable track. Still very very much worth listening to, though. I had it on repeat for two days.

Lecturers

We started lectures again two weeks ago. Due to bad scheduling, almost everything I wanted to do clashed with something else I wanted to do, so I ended up with very little choice. Timetable wise, I have Wednesdays and Fridays free, with four lectures in a row on Thursdays and three spread between Mondays and Tuesdays. It's probably the worst timetable I've ever had. Yes, I have a lot of free time, which might sound fantastic, but in a tiny little country town like this, there's nothing else to do but go to lectures.

Apart from that, the lectures are much the same as last term: generally boring, with a few rays of sunshine here and there, and very very easy to pass. One of my classes requires 60 points to pass, and gives 60 points if you turn up to every lecture. As we've found, Japanese universities don't put too much emphasis on actually studying. It's bad for me; I've become very lazy since being here and going back to England is going to be a shock.

Grumbling aside, what I was going to write about was a trend we've noticed among Japanese lecturers. Basically, they ramble. I don't mean they go walking over moors looking at flowers, I mean they spend 90 minutes of a lecture talking about everything except the actual subject.

My level 4 Japanese language teacher is a fairly good example (he once spent twenty minutes at the beginning of a lesson teaching us about palm reading), but the worst I've experienced is my new Classical Japanese teacher. In the first lecture we had with him, we did around ten minutes of actual work, and spent the rest of the 80 minutes listening to him air his views on a range of topics. His name, as we learned, can be read both Tawata and Tawada, but is indeed definitely Tawata, and any poor soul who gets that wrong must beware the consequences. Korean characters, as well as Japanese ones, are also derived from Chinese kanji. The phrase "I think, therefore I am" is said in old-fashioned language in Japanese, English and French.

The second lesson brought us discussion on the stupidity of English plurals, particles in Russian, and Japanese puns. If the rest of the term is the same, I will come away with absolutely no knowledge of Classical Japanese, but a large range of fascinating and entirely random facts, mainly based on Languages of the World.

Well, it should be fun, at any rate.

Spring

Japan is famous for its cherry blossoms (sakura).

For the last four days in a row, I have been to four different sakura-viewing parties (花見, hanami, literally "flower watching") in the same place. My mother, on hearing this, responded with a sarcastic comment about the wild life of teenagers these days, so I felt it was important to explain the concept of hanami to those who are less in the know.

In Japan, the sakura obviously have a massive significance, although exactly what, I'd have to look into. Every year they all come out at almost exactly the same time; in fact, a friend told me that on our campus, the sakura trees along one particular road purposely all have the same DNA, and therefore flower at exactly the same time every year. So, couples, friends, families and other groups go to sit among the trees and admire their beauty.

I got the idea, from a rather rambling teacher, that traditionally hanami is quiet reflection, revelling in the beauty of nature, poem writing, that kind of thing. Nowadays, however, at least among young people, it usually involves a lot of alcohol, snacks and general merriment. I say among young people, but today while we were sitting there, a group of middle-aged men came and set up a barbeque right underneath a sign which said "Barbeques prohibited".

So I hope that clears things up for my mum.

Safety

It's something a lot of people know about Japan and it's something I've noticed a lot since being here: Japan is an incredibly safe country. To the extent that I can walk home from a bar alone at 2am and know that no-one will even look at me. To the extent that when I went back to Sheffield I noticed how unsafe I felt walking down the high street and into MacDonalds with a huge overnight bag.

Today, though I got an extra reminder of it. I got very very bored of sitting in my room and decided to walk to the big second-hand DVD/CD/bookstore in Saijo (which takes about 50 minutes). By the time I came to walk back, my foot, which is still injured from a previous outing, felt like it was on fire, so I waited for a bus. Except I missed one, and ended up sitting at the stop for about half an hour.

While I was waiting, the elementary school (shougakkou, ages 6-12) behind the bus stop ended its day, and a steady stream of about two hundred small children suddenly appeared. As they got to the double crossing, half of them went across straight, and half of them turned right. As I watched them get further away I realised that there was not one adult with them. It was so different to the end of my day at junior school (for you Americans, that's ages 7-11).

When our lessons ended, we used to go out into the playground, where mummy or daddy or both would be waiting to take us home, whether it be walking or cycling or driving. Only the oldest kids with the closest homes used to walk by themselves.

I began to wonder about the reasons for this. Perhaps it's partly because Saijo is such a small country town that all the children live within twenty minutes' walk of their school. Perhaps the schools arrange it so that the children who live near each other walk home together. Or perhaps it's because Japan is such a safe country that the parents don't feel like their children will be unsafe walking the streets alone.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone living in a different area of Japan - do young schoolchildren walk home alone in Tokyo, for example?

City Centre

In the last two days, I have been to Hiroshima city centre twice. This is partly due to bad timing on my part - I organised a trip to say goodbye to a good friend who's going abroad, not realising that another friend was having a birthday party the next evening.

Anyway, on the first trip we met up with a Japanese friend of ours who is going to New Zealand for a year, and therefore won't be back in time to see us again. After dinner, he suggested we go and see the atomic bomb dome, which a couple of us had never been to before. I didn't realise exactly how close to the main shopping street it is - we walked for only five minutes to get there. It was already dark, but the dome is slightly lit up from inside at night, and it really does leave an impression. Pictures don't do this thing justice. It's not that it's huge, in fact it was smaller than I expected, but the level of destruction you see before your eyes is quite shocking, and they did really leave it completely as it was, with rubble lying around.

Then, when you walk over to the peace memorial park, you can see it from over the river, and it's eerily beautiful. I wish I'd taken some photos, now, but I imagine there's enough of them on the internet already. The park seems to have become a sleeping place for homeless people, in and amongst the monuments scattered about, which include a fire that never goes out, and a stone arc which is perfectly placed so you can see the dome through it. At the other end of the park are some huge perspex boxes with thousands of paper cranes inside, strung together to make long, colourful strings, all made by children from various schools. The place does make you think, but I don't regret going for a second.

The day afterwards, we went for okonomiyaki before heading to a bar. Before I came to Japan, everyone who heard I was going to Hiroshima said "try okonomiyaki!" and it really is fantastic, but I'd never been to a place like this before. There's a whole building, five floors, which is full of small, mostly family-run okonomiyaki joints, with seating for maybe ten people in each. The one we ended up in was run by a husband and wife, both around 60, who had obviously been doing the same thing for years and years, and had paper stuck up all around the walls with signatures of famous people who had been there. The food was delicious, naturally.

But what interested me the most was the fact that in the middle of a big city centre, there are still little family-run outlets doing business. In London, even in Sheffield, the city centres are full of massive chain stores - even in small English towns nowadays the family-run businesses are disappearing because of the big stores. But in Hiroshima, which is bigger than Sheffield, little husband-and-wife run okonomiyaki outlets are still there and still doing business. I love that.

Spring Break

The first few days being back in Japan have been different from what I imagined.

Because it's spring break, a lot of people are away, either travelling, visiting their home countries or, in the case of the Japanese people, their home towns. Two good friends are in Korea and a few more have been while I was in England; one is back in America; a few more are back in Osaka or their respective home towns. So it's quiet around here.

Still, I got to do the only travelling I've done since I've been here: I was invited to go on a day trip to Shikoku, the southern island, with a couple of Japanese friends and one of the Americans, which was fantastic. I didn't know this, but Shikoku is famous for soba (thick wheat noodles), so we ate half our lunch at one of the soba places and the other half at another one. This is down the road from the first:

The Japanese countryside is stunning, isn't it? There were miles of fields with houses just scattered seemingly randomly across them; traditional houses mixed with newer traditional-style ones and newer western-style ones. Outside you could see people working tiny little garden-fields, mostly elderly - it's only when you get outside the university town that you can really see how unbalanced the population is.

Between lunches, we went to a famous beauty spot - a traditional park originally built for one of the Tokugawa period prefecture rulers, the Daimyo. It really was beautiful:

And I got to try dango - it's a traditional Japanese sweet which I saw in a Japanese cartoon once and always wanted to try. I'm not sure what it's made of, but it's very very chewy and comes in three balls on a stick. It was nicer than I expected, actually.

I think I'll remember that day as one of the best - although hopefully there will be ones to rival it in the future.

Flights

Three Episodes which Prove why I Take After my Mother when it Comes to Public Transport.

Episode One

Firstly, I must explain the layout of this plane. It was hardly even half full, so I amazingly ended up with the whole middle three seats to myself. On the left was a young couple, and on the right was a mother with her 6 or 7 year-old child. Behind the couple was a middle-aged Australian man.

Now, about halfway through the flight, when everyone was asleep except, apparently, me and the Australian man (I can’t sleep on planes; I don’t know his reason), he suddenly decided to turn on his light. The positioning of his light, as it happened, made it so that I could make shadow puppets on the seat in front of me, so naturally, I made a dog and got it to sing along to the music I was listening to at the time. I was rather enjoying this, until I realised that the little boy at the end of the row had in fact woken up, and was now staring at me with sheer puzzlement. He of course couldn’t see the shadows and was therefore wondering why the apparently fully-grown lady along the row was making her hand talk to her.

Episode Two

My sister gave me a little toy penguin to cuddle on the plane, which was very nice of her. This particular penguin stands up of its own accord and is about the right size to hold with one hand. Now because I had three seats to myself I decided to lie across them to see if I could get any sleep (result: none, see earlier). At one point I happened to be holding the penguin and lay on my back with my hand, holding the penguin facing my head, on my chest. Needless to say, I got the shock of my life when I opened my eyes a few minutes later and thought the Penguin of Death had come to get me at last.

Episode Three

Waiting in the “Foreign Passport” queue at Hiroshima Airport, I noticed that the man in front of me was white (that may sound normal but we were probably the only two in the airport) and had a passport coloured exactly the same as mine. I had also seen him on the flight from London. I now wonder why I felt I had to speak to him in the first place. I guess it was because, as aforementioned, we were the only two white people in the airport, but anyway. Great, I thought, another English person! I shall make a patriotic comment! “We’re winning the Six Nations!”, I proclaimed enthusiastically, waiting for a joyful agreement.

“That’s great,” he said, slightly sarcastically, in a very Irish accent. “How much are you winning by?”

Luckily, after I’d apologised, he didn’t seem to mind too much and we chatted until we got to the front of the queue. Later on, however, I think he was glad I’d made the mistake, because he couldn’t speak any Japanese, and I happened to be waiting for a bus as he was trying to explain a few things to an information assistant who couldn’t speak English, so I helped him out.

I think this proves, to anyone who has read my mum’s blog, that I take after her in more than just eye colour.

England

Sorry for not posting anything recently - I haven't had anything particularly interesting to talk about, so I haven't talked, as it were.

I'm back in England for a month. It's been two weeks already and I've got another two to go. And I have to say, I miss Japan. I don't really see it as "coming home", as such, because I haven't really had a proper home in England since I went to university and my parents moved up to the Midlands. Hiroshima, now, feels like as much a home as Sheffield or Leamington ever did.

That, plus the fact that the friends I've made on the HUSA program are some of the best I've ever had, makes it harder to be away than I expected. Facebook doesn't help either, with its daily reminders of how much fun everyone's having without me. Sure, I might be bored, stuck in my cold room, but at least in Japan there'd be people to be bored with.

Now I'm wondering what it's going to be like when I leave for good in August. Since most of my friends in Japan are in fact American, Japanese or Korean, there's a good chance I'll never see a lot of them again - and that's a horrible thing to think about. Shame I've had a lot of time to think about it.

Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if it were a few months, but a year is such an awkward length of time. It's long, but it goes so quickly. It's enough to get to know people but too soon to leave them. And language wise, it's enough to improve, but not nearly enough for fluency, which is something I was misled into believing.

Don't get me wrong; I don't regret going, not in the slightest. So far, it's been the best time of my life. It's just that being back in England has made me realise how fast I have to leave the best time of my life, and go "back home" to carry on as if it had never been.

Showers

In our dorms, there is a shower room on each floor with three showers in it. The shower rooms are not heated and it's minus temperatures outside. Also, each shower has a changing room area separated from the actual shower room by a curtain, but the changing room areas all have pools of water in them a centimetre deep.

If anyone has ever succeeded in taking their trousers off while standing in a pool of water without getting them wet, I commend you, Sir/Madam. It is an almost impossible task, hindered further by the freezing temperatures making you want to get them off as quickly as possible so you can turn the hot water on.

So, with the trousers hanging up on the door hook, sopping wet up to the knees, time to turn the water on. Except someone else is in the shower two cubicles down, and they keep turning their water off and on again, so the shower you just managed to get to a good temperature has a mini panic attack and decides it doesn't like working at full power or full temperature - for ten seconds, by which time you've turned the heat up and are now hit with a powerful spray of boiling hot water.

Okay, so you managed to shower. Back to the trousers dilemma. Do you risk trying to put them on while standing in the pool of water again (which, by the way, has become two centimetres deep)? Or do you run outside of the cubicle and pull them on as quickly as you can, hoping no-one comes in at the wrong moment?

Option two was a success. The shower has been successfully navigated. Tomorrow is another story...