Kind Strangers

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the kindness of strangers

One of the silver linings in the tempestuous time that was the end of my JET days was the kindness of strangers. Well, not complete strangers, but people whom I only knew in passing, or just not well enough to think that they’d do for me what they did. People who had no reason to feel a need to do anything for me at all. It made me wonder about how people tend to take those they “know” for granted, and just how bad it is to make assumptions about people.

The Ladies from the Gym

I had joined Konami Sports Club in February of 2011 and continued going there 3 days before I returned to the States. The instructors were kind, there was minimal gawking, and I made a few “gym buddies,” so to speak.

One of the first was an older woman who would go to the same Body Pump class as I. We’d exchange small talk before and after class. One time she said to me, “Don’t worry about making conversation. Just come every week.” I figured that maybe, having someone in the class other than the instructor to feel responsible to, helped motivate her to go. For me, it had that effect. Not because I had a problem with going to the gym to work out, but because just getting to the gym, which was a 15-minute bike ride away, wasn’t easy in bad weather, and a huge hassle in the rainy season. But I started thinking, “Ya-ko drives there, so she’ll be there. I need to go too, even if it means taking a taxi.” I didn’t like taking taxis to the gym because it felt weird to not exercise in order to exercise, so at least I’d walk home.

Around June of 2013, Ya-ko’s husband developed a medical condition, and she became unable to go to the gym regularly. But she’d still show up to Body Pump on Thursday nights, until even that was too much time away from her husband, who needed her to take care of him. We were talking in the stretching area, saying our goodbyes, when she handed me a small packet. I honestly thought it was a rice cracker wrapped in tissue paper. I asked if I could open it there, and she said, “Maybe you shouldn’t.” I kept on thinking it was a rice cracker until I went to the locker room after saying goodbye again. Then it hit me: if she didn’t want me to open it in public, it could only be one thing. I lifted up the layers of tissue paper and sure enough, inside was a crisply folded 10,000 yen note. A woman I’d mostly just exchanged pleasantries with had given me about 100 USD! I ran about looking for her, but she was already gone. I at once felt bad for receiving the money, and was deeply moved by the gesture.

Another woman I’d met at Konami, Yo-ko, had spent a year or two as a volunteer in Zimbabwe through the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). She still spoke a bit of English, so we’d converse in a mix of English and Japanese. When she found out I was leaving Japan, she asked me if there was anywhere I’d like to go, and that she would drive me there because she loved to go on long drives. I mentioned Mt. Aso and Amakusa, but that they were both too far away. I didn’t expect anything to come of it; the locations were both on Kyushu but very far south, and we didn’t have each other’s contact information. But then the last week of July, we ran into each other at the gym again, and Yo-ko said we could go to Amakusa on Sunday. It would have to be a day trip, but it could be done if we left early. So we finalized plans and went. She drove 8 hours in one day. It took four hours to get there, we spent about four hours in Amakusa (I’ll write about that later I wrote about it here), and then spent another four hours on the road back to Fukuoka.

We conversed about a lot of things on that long drive, from the auto industry in Detroit, to how she liked the combination of salty & sweet flavors in American breakfast dishes like pancakes soaked in syrup on the same plate as sausages. But what really stuck out to me was what she said about something she learned in Zimbabwe. To paraphrase, she said, “Everyone was kind to me. But even so, I know how lonely it can be to live in a foreign country. So I try to reach out to foreigners living in Japan, because I know what they’re going through.”

I almost cried.

I hadn’t told her I was lonely. I had said it to one person straight out, and to others indirectly. What I was going through personally was perhaps the reason I became unable to deal with the problems at work. I had no real support structure, while I was acting as the support structure for everyone with a problem, minor or major, in my jutaku. I was a rock teetering on the edge of a cliff, and no one noticed. Yet here was this woman who only knew me from a few conversations at the gym, who knew that being kind isn’t necessarily something you do because you see an immediate need to do it.

I send encouraging emails to my former English Club students every now and then, before tests or when I know they’re going to take on some big extracurricular role. Part of me feels incredibly cheesy saying stuff like “do your best!” and “don’t forget I’m cheering for you!” But I figure, at worst, I’ll sound corny; at best, it’ll help them get through a rough patch, and it forces me to embody the spirit of fighting on that I’m preaching to them, even when it’s really hard to do so. If nothing else, everyone likes knowing that someone’s thinking of them, right?

The New Neighbor

For three years, I lived across the hall from an incredibly kind teacher. He was the only Japanese resident in that jutaku who always greeted everybody. And when I say “greet,” I mean he actually spoke words and bowed, instead of grunting, mumbling, or giving a quick shake of the head that could be misinterpreted as a sneeze, like everyone else did. One time, he randomly gave me an umegaemochi as I was walking into the jutaku and he was driving out.

As you can only live in the teachers’ jutaku for 10 years, he had to move out at the end of the school year, in March, in what was my fourth year on JET. I was sad to see him go, and thought the apartment would remain empty for a while. Much to my surprise, someone took the room about a week later. It was a young teacher, fresh out of college. I actually ran into her parents as they were helping her move in. They introduced themselves to me and called their daughter over, concerned about having her live alone for the first time. My presence seemed to put them at ease, since I’d been there for years. I was amused by the thought of being a foreigner playing sempai to a Japanese teacher 8 years my junior, but I was grateful to the parents for treating me precisely like that. They didn’t see I was a foreigner and assume I knew nothing, they saw I spoke Japanese and had lived there for 4 years and, even if only symbolically, asked me to look after their daughter.

Around June, I learned that my successor was married to another ALT’s successor, and given the water problems my apartment had, I recommended that they move into the other ALT’s apartment. Unfortunately for me, that meant I had to completely empty my apartment. One of the harder things to dispose of was my little TV. Other ALT’s didn’t want it because they either didn’t watch Japanese TV, or didn’t want a TV that was only 19″. So I took a shot and offered it for free to my new neighbor. I knew that she still didn’t have a TV, and I explained to her that if she wanted it, she’d really help me out by taking it. I told her everything about it: it was made in 2010, I’d bought it new, it was a 19″ HD Toshiba Regza, the headphone jack was a bit messed up, but otherwise it worked perfectly. Knowing all that, she still slipped me a pretty envelope and apologized that it was “such a small sum” when I took the TV to her apartment. I told her she didn’t have to give me anything, she was helping me out, after all, and it was such a small TV. She insisted, so I thanked her and accepted the envelope. I thought it’d have 2,000, maybe 5,000 yen, tops. Instead, I was greeted by yet another crisp 10,000 yen note. Considering that was one fourth the price of what it had cost three years prior, I thought it was very generous. I was quite blown away.

I made sure she knew who the new ALTs moving in would be, who lived nearby and who worked at her school, to try to repay her kindness that way. I really wasn’t expecting anything for the TV, and I didn’t want to throw it in the trash, the way I had to do with an incredible amount of the things I’d amassed in 4 years’ time.

Everyone Who Came to The Mayhem

“The Mayhem” is what I call my last days in Fukuoka. Even though I had to turn over the apartment that week, I still had a lot of stuff in the room.

Wednesday, August 7th, two days before I had to vacate the apartment. I’d sold the vanity, thrown away the bed & mattress, and was sleeping on a futon I intended to roll up and throw away in a large burnable trash bag on the morning of my departure. I looked at the mess and in my stress-induced lunacy had to laugh and take a picture.

That week, the building manager had decided to get stupid with me. It’s a long story and I don’t want to ruin the vibe of this post, so suffice it to say that I was massively short on time. Of course, I was partly to blame for not getting rid of things sooner as well, but it didn’t have to play out as horribly as it did.

Anyway, about three hours before the building manager was supposed to come and inspect the room, I called the school and told the secretary, “there’s no way I’m gonna make it in time.” To my surprise, she said she’d come and try to help. She dropped what she was doing at school and went to help me put stuff in the trash! The school secretary whom I’d only known for a few months, and had only spoken to for discussing paperwork and taxes. She even gave me a small bag of cookies, and thanked me for always giving the office their own box of omiyage. I apologized for not traveling often like other ALTs (thus making omiyage from me very rare), and for not getting the apartment ready in time.

Another person whom I recruited to help with the Mayhem was a new ALT who had just moved in about a week prior, to the apartment above mine. I was going to give her some of my stuff the day I left, and had gone to leave it in a bag on her door. When I finished sweeping my apartment and went up to leave the broom by her door, I saw that the bag was gone. So I rang the doorbell and was surprised to find she’d come home while I was running around like a headless chicken. She offered to help and I accepted quickly. At least, I had taken her to an Indian restaurant the night she came. Otherwise, what a terrible welcome to the neighborhood!

Then there was the metal scrap collector I’d called on short notice. Granted, I was paying him to take away some of the wooden furniture no one wanted, but then he took it upon himself to seek out metal objects I hadn’t thought of. I told him, “if it’s still in here, it has to go.” And that was all I needed to say for him to set to work.

Lastly, there’s three people who were certainly not strangers. Still, I thought they went above and beyond for me that last stressful Friday in Fukuoka.

One was a (then) first year ALT, who had offered to let me stay in her apartment after I had turned over mine. Her husband and in-laws were also visiting at the time, so I decided to ask my co-ALT if I could stay at his place instead. Still, she had been willing to take me in, even with her house full as it was. And when I went up to give her some leftover cleaning supplies, and broke down from the stress and stupidity of the day, she gave me a hug and let me cry on her.

Another was a former ALT who had stayed in Japan after her JET tenure. In my last week, she had been helping me take boxes to the post office, she took me to sell my manga at a manga buy-back place, and when I called asking for help on the last day, she told me she was meeting someone for lunch, but would go to my place immediately after that. She helped sort stuff and throw it away, and even vacuumed while I was talking to the building manager. She and her boyfriend drove me to the post office in downtown Fukuoka City at 10 o’clock at night to mail one last box of stuff. Without her, a much greater fraction of my Fukuoka life would’ve ended up in the trash, and I would have felt pretty abandoned.

Lastly, there was my former co-ALT. He let me stay in his apartment after I turned over mine, even cooked me dinner at midnight after he found out all I’d eaten all day was a stale melon pan and a jug of green tea. He told me I was working too hard to get the apartment clean, and while I wanted to leave the place spotless, I figured it was better to listen to him. When I had returned from the night run to the post office, he made me fajitas and let me watch Star Trek: The Next Generation on his Apple TV. Even as he himself had to get ready for a trip to China.

The Mayhem was one of the most stressful days of my time in Fukuoka, and the people who came through for me were people I either didn’t know very well, or didn’t expect would end up helping as much as they did. It was a bittersweet experience. I suppose it’s like Björk says: “Maybe not from the sources you have poured yours / Maybe not from the directions you are staring at.”

Bachata en Fukuoka Updated Translation

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バチャタ・エン・福岡, Bachata en Fukuoka, 福岡でバチャタ, Translation, 和訳

I’ve created a new blog to round up all the fan translations I’ve done over the years. In doing so, I’d be remiss not to give Juan Luis Guerra’s love song to Fukuoka a coat of fresh lyrical paint. You’ll find the tweaked Japanese & English translations here: Bachata en Fukuoka.

今まで愛好家として翻訳してきた曲などを新しいブログでかき集めていきます。フアン・ルイス・ゲラの福岡へのラブソングももちろん、バージョンアップしました。書き直しの和訳・英訳をこちらからご覧ください: Bachata en Fukuoka.

The Tip of the Nose-berg

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All Nippon Airways commecial, ANA, gaijin-san, racism, stereotypes

This is a very long post. To summarize for the TL;DR crowd, what I’m getting at is that the stereotype of “Gaijin-san” doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that there is a host of racial problems in Japan and that’s part of what makes Gaijin-san so aggravating.

Recently I found out about All Nippon Airways’ unfortunate decision to air an ad featuring a man in Japan’s ubiquitous “Gaijin-san” costume: a large nose and a blond wig. Honestly it left me stupefied because 1. the nose used was extremely large even by Gaijin-san costume standards, and 2. I had come to believe that the Gaijin-san costume was fading out of use. I remember seeing it in the variety shop InCube, being sold with Halloween costumes in 2009, but never again after that year in that store. I’d always check for it because the first time I saw it I was blown away. Can you imagine a “Mr. Black Guy” mask being sold in the U.S. in the year 2009 with no repercussions?

The first time I saw the Gaijin-san costume: August 2009, on some sort of variety show. The premise here was that people from different countries were eating at an international sushi restaurant. Here are the “American” and “Indian” patrons, both with fake noses. To my disappointment, neither a samurai, ninja, sumo wrestler, nor geisha showed up to represent Japan. The inclusion of a Japanese stereotype would’ve at least opened the door for the interpretation that the show made fun of everyone. And wouldn’t it have been funnier if the sushi chef was preparing the fish with a katana?

As I spent more time in Japan, I came to find the Gaijin-san costume increasingly offensive. It popped up everywhere, from TV shows to skits at school, and no one ever questioned it. I don’t think it would bother me as much if the extent of Japan’s stereotyping went no further than that, or if Japanese people would at least acknowledge that yes this is a stereotype, or if all the stereotyping did was make Japanese people think that all white people have humongous schnozes and hair in a Barbie shade of blond. But none of these scenarios is the case. Gaijin-san’s nose is just the tip of the iceberg.

In a country with so few foreigners, why would you need a phone to have emoji of a white man (the only one shown in profile to showcase his splendid proboscis), a thinly mustachio-ed slit eyed Chinese man, and a turbaned Indian? What did the text message say, “Guess what I just saw on the train?” And where’s the stoic karate master or the sumo wrestler? If Capcom could do it for Street Fighter on the Super Nintendo, I’m sure SoftBank and Panasonic could’ve done it on this phone. At least newer phones seem to have the emoji of the white guy from the front rather than from the side; this is the phone I got in 2009 and had all 4 years in Japan.

On the Lack of Intent, Criminal or Otherwise

One of the most common ways Japanese and non-Japanese alike justify things like Gaijin-san is by saying “No one is being hurt by this,” and “It’s just a joke.” True, between seeing someone put on a toy prosthesis and display their ignorance, and being followed around in the mall by clerks because I’m Hispanic, I’ll take Gaijin-san. The problem with this idea is that it only takes into account immediate, direct harm. But can anyone say with certainty that making a toy out of an entire group of people doesn’t harm the real human beings of that group indirectly? When students don’t take ALTs seriously, when schools don’t take ALTs seriously, can we say with certainty that constantly presenting foreigners as punchlines isn’t reinforcing this type of behavior? How much English and cultural awareness can students get from a person whom they may subconsciously view as little more than an entertaining distraction, a break from the academic rigors of their real classes? When Japanese people see a gag more often than an actual foreigner, is it surprising when they do things like stare, or say rude things in Japanese assuming the foreigner won’t understand? What’s that attitude going to do to the country’s bottom line?

Another common excuse is “Japanese don’t mean to be racist.” For the most part, I think that’s true. But saying “Japanese don’t mean to be racist,” means that they are indeed being racist, just not willfully. And if that’s the case, I don’t think that the conclusion “and therefore people shouldn’t speak up about things that are bothering a whole lot of them” follows logically from “Japanese don’t mean to be racist.” I think students donning Gaijin-san costumes, or the ANA commercial, are chances for real-world dialogue and learning that should not be missed because of the idea that lack of intent justifies slighting people.

Disclaimer: Neither (clockwise from top right) Kim Soo Hyun, Takumi, nor GACKT had anything to do with the making of this illustration.

The above image is based on a student’s English Passport (a name card which students could either attach purikura of themselves to or draw themselves on) that I saw in my first or second year on JET. I had directed the students to draw an arrow pointing to themselves if they used a photo that had their friends in it, so that I could learn who was who faster. To my surprise one girl labelled not only herself, but also the three other people in the photo, writing in “me,” “friend,” “friend,” and “Korean.”

I’m sure the girl who did this had no malicious intent. I’m sure she didn’t get the implication of not labeling the third person as “friend” like the rest. It may well be that the student who did this loves Korean pop culture, and feels like being in a photo with a real Korean person gives her some street cred or cool factor, and that’s why she wanted to let it be known that the person was Korean. But doesn’t that turn the person into a sort of status symbol, like wearing a sweater whose main feature is the massive logo “Marithé + François Girbaud” in huge letters across the torso? And is it not worthwhile to address this possibility with the student, regardless of how much she didn’t intend to offend anyone?

If I get drunk, crash my car into a pedestrian and kill them, I’ll still get charged with a crime, right? The charge might be manslaughter rather than murder, but no one will say, “She didn’t mean to kill that pedestrian, so let’s just leave that corpse in the street and act like it’s not there.” And if some guy asks me to deliver a package somewhere, but I don’t ask what’s in it, when the police catch me with a box full of meth, “I didn’t know what was in the package” will not be an excuse. Is it in Japan’s best interests to insist that their box is empty and completely ignore people who tell them there’s some racism in there? Especially when it will be hosting an international event like the Olympics in a few years?

If Japan chose to shut itself off from the world completely, none of this would matter. It’d be their decision to make. In their isolation they’d be totally free to think whatever they wanted to about anyone. But as long as Japan wants to buy products from abroad and sell its products abroad, it doesn’t seem wise to play the “we didn’t know” card rather than the “we didn’t know, thanks for telling us, can you explain it further so that we may understand?” card. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with true cultural awareness and understanding springing up from a need to protect one’s pocketbook. It’s not ideal, but it seems more realistic. It’s a fairly easy concept to understand, after all: “Anger these people, and they won’t give us their money.” I don’t for a second believe that a lot of the progress Hispanics have made in the U.S. wasn’t due to the economic and political power that Hispanics came to wield as an ever-growing group.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right

It was almost painfully predictable what would happen if I tried to bring up the subject of discrimination against foreigners in Japan to a Japanese person: “But when I lived in X country the people there treated me like I was different and asked me rude things.” “Oh, but America had slavery, didn’t it?”

These things are logical fallacies. Since when does one fact cancel out another fact just because it’s a fact too? Both are true and neither can make the other go away, nor does either justify the other.

I first saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 2013. I couldn’t believe the character of Mr. Yunioshi. I’m sure that to audiences in 1961 it was no big deal, but live and learn eh? No need to make the same mistakes.

If it’s okay for Japanese to strap noses to their face and put on blond wigs to become Gaijin-san because white people have done black face and yellow face, and otherwise discriminated against people of color, when will it stop? I mean, a character as blatant as Mr. Yunioshi would probably not make it into an American movie these days. Yes, Asian characters are often portrayed by Asian actors of a different ethnicity (e.g. Japanese-American soldier Jim Morita played by Kenneth Choi, who is of Korean descent, in Captain America: The First Avenger) but that’s a step up from casting white people in those roles. So for how long do people have a right to stick it to the white man when the white man’s ability to stick it to minorities (at least in media depictions) has been curtailed? For as long as there was slavery? For as long as Breakfast at Tiffany’s has existed? For as long as white people command vast amounts of political and economic power? And if so, is that the best we can do, as people of color? Poke fun at how big The Man’s nose is?

Gaijin-san doesn’t do anything to rectify these wrongs, it just creates more problems. And not only for white people in Japan, but for non-white foreigners there too.

Half the World Doesn’t Exist

I have a problem with how differences are emphasized in Japan to the point of completely ignoring similarities. There’s a hilarious but sad example that illustrates this all too well in the book Hi! My Name is Loco and I Am a Racist. That same conversation is also up on author Baye McNeil’s blog (this post).

My last October as an ALT I whipped up what I thought was a witty lesson introducing Halloween, its precursor Samhain, and the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. I made sure to include the vocabulary words “ancestor” (which the students had just had in their Vocabulary book as well), “grave,” “altar,” “offering,” and “spirit” on the handout with Japanese translations, as well as show many pictures of Day of the Dead festivities, which center on cleaning ancestors’ graves and making food & drink offerings to them at altars. Before moving on to the last part of the lesson, a Venn diagram, I asked the students, “Samhain and Dia de los Muertos especially are both very similar to a Japanese holiday. Can you think of which one?” When no one would answer I told them to read over the passage about Dia de los Muertos again, and to look at the Japanese in the vocabulary list again. Out of 10 homerooms of 40 students each, only in one homeroom was there a single student who immediately saw the similarity between these foreign holidays and the Japanese festival Obon, during which cleaning the family grave and making offerings at altars is also very important. In other homerooms, the first answer shouted out was Oshougatsu (New Year’s), and there was even at least one spirited yell of “Taiiku no Hi!” (Health and Sports Day, which is in October).

An “ofrenda,” or altar for the dead, and a butsudan, or Buddhist altar, with Obon offerings. The tiers, the lights, the flowers, the food offerings, the photo and/or plaque for the deceased…why did I ever think the similarity was obvious?
(I found the ofrenda photo on several blogs saying it was from Wikipedia but couldn’t find it there. The butsudan comes from Hasegawa Butsudan, a company that sells altars & altar accessories.)

I was blown away by how hard it was for the students to make the connection between Obon and Dia de los Muertos. By the fourth or fifth time I’d given the lesson, I was ending it, perhaps too gleefully given some of the weird looks I got, with the revelation “Every culture has a death festival! EVERYBODY DIES!!!”

Some of the teachers blamed the students’ inability to make the connection on their being young and therefore not familiar with traditional Japanese culture. But I find it very hard to believe that they didn’t know the very basics of Obon. Are 399 of the students in that grade in families with zero filial piety? To me a much more likely explanation is that students have never been asked to find similarities before, so when they get asked that simple question their brain crashes. What students are constantly asked, at least in their 3 years of high school, is what are the differences between Japanese and Westerners. How and why are students who by and large have never been to the West expected to answer such a question?

But getting to a story that more directly illustrates the problems that the Gaijin-san costume causes:

The high school English Communication I textbook ELEMENT for the current academic year is generally pretty good. I read the entire book before classes started and of its ten chapters I only had a problem with one: Chapter 3, “How Asians and Westerners Think Differently.” I figured I was in store for sweeping generalizations, and indeed I was. I don’t remember many details now, only that the bulk of the chapter cited a study whose subjects were Chinese and American children. So why wasn’t the title “How Chinese Children and American Children Think Differently?”

Anyway, the school I was at sometimes had to host demonstration English classes. Teachers from other schools as well as people from the Board of Education and college professors would come to sit in on and evaluate the new English-only English classes. One of these demos used the chapter mentioned above. So the teacher giving the class opened the lesson with the question, “What do you think are some of the differences between Japanese and Westerners?” A student was called on, and after hesitating a while, he offered a wonderful answer: “I don’t know.”

I was so glad in that instant. “I don’t know” is a perfect answer when you really don’t know and are being set up to display a bad kind of ignorance, which is ignorance masquerading as knowledge. But the student was prodded for an answer. And what he came up with was: “Westerner’s eye color is different.”

マジで？ This is the Westerner who works in your school, whom you’ve been seeing for several months, and what you come up with is “Westerner’s eye color is different”? And the teacher just co-signs on that? While I’m in the room?

The episode made me realize the monumental proportions of the stereotypes and ignorance that I, as an ALT there for cultural exchange as well as English education, had to fight. I was disappointed by the student’s answer but at the same time I was fully aware that he was only regurgitating what his culture had fed him.

Brown eyes are the most common in the world. Even if we assume that “Westerner” excludes Mexico, Central America, and South America, there are brown-eyed Europeans. Only you’d never know that when you’re constantly presented with the caricature Gaijin-san that tells you Westerner = Caucasian = blond & blue-eyed.

Every now and then, you’ll see representations of Westerners that aren’t white. Unfortunately, many of those tend to be mere stereotypes as well.

Coke with a music downloads promotion (I think) in 2009.

From the same bottle. Somehow I doubt the American Coca-Cola would’ve put something like this on their products Stateside.

I Ain’t Been Dropping No Eaves, Sir, Honest!

Being a foreigner who can understand Japanese can feel like being an eavesdropper, only it’s not hard to catch what people are saying because they say it right in your face.

My first year on JET, I pretty much kept to myself. Being dark-haired, dark-eyed, and silent kept me safe from prying eyes. I didn’t feel at all the sort of discomfort I’d end up feeling in my second through fourth years, when I would more frequently be around other foreigners in public.

One time I was going home from Japanese class with 3 other ALTs who lived in the same jutaku. One was a Japanese-American man, another was a white American woman, and the other was a white New Zealand woman. We were talking, not too loud but louder than everybody else, and I noticed an older Japanese man staring daggers at us from the priority seats. I lowered my voice hoping the others would follow, but it didn’t have much effect.

We got to our station, but it was the old man’s station too. He was on the escalator, I directly behind him, followed by the guy and the 2 girls, who were still talking. As we rode up slowly the old man huffed and puffed, till he could take it no longer. He leaned forward a bit to speak over me and address the guy behind me, saying 「女はどこでもうるさいね。」(=”Women everywhere are noisy, huh?”)

I was flabbergasted. The statement was sexist. But perhaps more than that, what punched me in the gut with bittersweet irony was that the old man skipped over the foreigner who understood what he said perfectly, to say it to the foreigner of Japanese descent who probably didn’t catch half of it! Without thinking I blurted out at the man in the overly textbook-y Japanese I had in my first year, 「必ずしも外国人の女性は日本語を話せないわけじゃないです。」(“It’s not always the case that foreign women can’t speak Japanese.”) The man was taken aback, asked me if I spoke Japanese (D’UH what did I just say to you?!), and grumbled on his way once the escalator reached the top.

The ANA commercial is like this old man on a much wider scale, and far less excusable. Japanese is a language largely written and spoken on the assumption that the people who will read it and hear it are Japanese only. Even if it’s true that there are few non-Japanese who have a solid command of the Japanese language, the news media exists. Stuff gets translated and spreads around on the internet. No company, no public figure, should assume that what they say won’t go all the way round the world and sneak up behind them to bite them in the tush. Even private citizens have to be careful what they post online, lest they lose a job because of a raunchy Facebook photo.

On a lighter note, this reminds me of Tiziano Ferro, an Italian singer who was also popular in Latin America. In 2006 he went on an Italian talk show and said that one of the things that made touring abroad hard was having to compliment each place he was in. Among other insulting remarks he said that Mexican women all have mustaches. To his surprise the Latin American media got wind of it and his popularity in Mexico plummeted.

But Even When People KNOW You Speak Japanese

I had this hilarious exchange in Japanese with some sweet English club girls in July of 2013:

Student A: It’s said that foreigners who speak Japanese start to have the facial features of Japanese.
Me: Really?
Student A: Yeah, the ones who live here.
Me: Hmm.
Student A: (Turning to speak to Student B) Once you get used to looking at them [=foreigners], you lose that sense that something’s off [=違和感], don’t you?
Me: The sense that something’s off…? *Bursts out laughing*
Student B: Ah! No no no…
Student A: Sorry…
Me: *Still laughing*

The conversation had started off with something I hadn’t exactly heard before but was no stranger to: the idea that there’s some physical component to being able to speak a language other than the movements of one’s mouth and tongue, such as the belief that only those with Japanese blood can truly speak Japanese. I suppose it’s possible that speaking another language could change the appearance of one’s face if a radically different set of muscles is being put into motion, though I have no science to back this up. They say long-married couples end up looking like each other, so maybe there’s something to this foreigners-turning-Japanese thing. In any case, the idea struck me as odd, but no biggie. It was the 違和感 (“iwakan,” a feeling that something is a bit off) comment that really surprised me. Even though Student A wasn’t directly addressing me anymore, without thinking, I just said, “Iwakan?” Student B seemed to catch on immediately that I was saying, by simply repeating that word, “There was a time when you looked at another human being and felt like their face was a mistake?”

Granted, Student A didn’t seem like she realized she’d committed a faux pas until Student B started apologizing on her behalf. Student A really is a very good-natured individual so I’m sure she didn’t think she was being rude. But it still felt like maybe she’d forgotten, for a brief second, that I could understand what she said and had even been conversing with her in Japanese just seconds before. Or maybe she forgot that I was a foreigner because I was speaking in Japanese!

Investing in Japan

When I was volunteering in City Year, I was heavily invested in the outcome of my work. Not just because I take pride in anything that’s gonna have my name on it, but also because I was a resident of the City of Detroit, working with the youth of the City of Detroit. Indeed, one of the things that had made me want to find a way to help my city was the many destructive things I’d see kids doing in the street. Ripping branches off trees for no reason, throwing rocks at birds trying to kill them for the fun of it, joining gangs and walking down the street talking about how they “run this” while probably not having the faintest idea of what real power looks like, and the fact that real power is not at all inconvenienced by people with no power killing each other off with drugs and violence.

When my City Year team was at a school in Southwest Detroit, AKA Mexicantown, it was easy to reach out to the students and have them respond to me. I was Hispanic like them, I was an immigrant like them, I had come to this country not knowing a lick of English like them. In my second year my team was at a K-8 school on Detroit’s primarily black east side. But I could still tell them, and indeed I did, I care about you because you live where I live. This is my city too. Your future is my future. There are people who want us to fail, because we’re from Detroit, or because we’re minorities. Are you gonna play into their hands? Even the boys most hell-bent on being thugs had to stop and think for a minute.

In Japan I likewise did the best I could as an ALT out of personal pride, but also out of the sincere belief that I could reach the students based on our mutual experience of learning English as a second language. I’d say to them, I had to learn English like you’re doing now, I made many mistakes in public but it’s okay, the U.S. is a nation of immigrants and we’re speaking English with different accents but we can still understand each other.

Four years and about 3,000 students later, I feel like this had no effect on the majority of the students I had in Japan. Perhaps the problem was that no matter what, the students had been conditioned to see foreigners as different from them. Idealistically I could have said that in a global world their future is my future even if we’re thousands of miles apart. But that’s much more abstract, and it’s a little bit harder to be personally invested in reaching people who are heavily invested in keeping you at arm’s length.

In Conclusion

This has been a very long, semi-stream-of-consciousness post. A lot of these things are things I’d been thinking about for years and just couldn’t find a way to put them together and express them. The ANA commercial served as a trigger to get all these thoughts out of my head. All of this, all these 4000+ words of thoughts, are the context in which I take Gaijin-san as offensive. ANA isn’t the first nor will it be the last to use Gaijin-san, though I hope we’re nearing the end of it. The United States still has a LOT of racial problems but I think it’s something to at least have moved away from stereotypes like Sambo and Mr. Yunioshi. I’m also of the mind that humanity isn’t GOING to hell in a hand basket, it’s been trying to LEAVE hell by way of a slippery ladder that we take two steps back on after going one forward. Humans seem naturally inclined to segregate themselves, stereotype, and give preferential treatment to “their own.” Maybe this will never stop. But I think it’s worth it to try, and we can’t try if we don’t acknowledge that it’s even going on.

The Hefty Hideaway

Tags

online shopping, plus size clothes, plus size shopping, Rakuten

My English Club has been obsessed with dancing lately. It started when they said they wanted to learn a simple dance, and I suggested “The Cupid Shuffle” and “The Cha Cha Slide” because it just doesn’t get any easier than dancing to songs that give you directions. They learned these and remixed the Cupid Shuffle quite a bit. They then taught these dances to junior high school students at this year’s Open Campus.

After that came the Halloween party. When the club captain was told that throwing pies at people was out of the question, she turned to me once again for a dance. Of course I suggested the “Thriller” dance, and the club members had a blast “dancing with Michael.”

Now that that’s done, they turned to the next thing: preparing for the next culture festival. Since they want to sing and dance, they figured they’d start practicing early. This time, the inspiration is the 2007 movie Hairspray. Specifically, the song “Welcome to the 60s.”

As this scene takes place in what would now be called a “plus size” store, Mr. Pinky’s Hefty Hideaway, I found myself explaining what “hefty” and “hideaway” meant, and why the store in the movie is called that. I told them that even when I was a growing up department stores tended to put their plus size sections in the back, far from the main entrance, and that there were few shops that sold larger clothes. But even as I said that, I wondered if the club members were getting the impression that now shopping for larger sizes was easy and that being fat wasn’t frowned upon by a lot of people.

Interestingly, this all was going on around the same time I was discovering more of the “big size” specialty shops on Rakuten. The Japanese Amazon is completely useless for plus size clothes, but Rakuten’s specialty shops are well organized and often have detailed sizing AND dimension info per garment in centimeters, not made up vanity sizes that mean who the hell knows what. The only bad thing about these online shops are the models.

Is this really a “big size” specialty shop?

Fashion-wise, the above shop, Gold Japan, is my favorite. A bit pricier than the shop Queen which I had mostly been using before, but the quality of the garments is also higher, so I think it’s worth it. But these models, I think, don’t look like they would be considered “big” even by Japanese standards. Well, some of them seem taller than average, but otherwise too little for the clothes they’re selling. (That is to say, the garments often aren’t even offered in the smaller size the model must be.) It doesn’t bother me that there aren’t plus size brick & mortar shops in Japan; there isn’t a big enough market here for such stores. (No pun intended.) But it is a little disappointing that even online plus size specialty shops use only thin models. Not only because it feels like a slap in the face, but also because then it becomes harder to know if the garment will look the same way on me as it does on the model.

Great piece, but what if you’ve got more sand in your hourglass than the model?

I’ve gotten pretty good at picking the right size by measuring myself, measuring garments I already have that fit me well, and taking into account what fit the garment is supposed to have (e.g., if it’s something that’s meant to be worn big as was extremely popular here back in 2009-2010, I actually order it one size smaller than usual as wearing baggy clothes usually isn’t flattering on a bigger body). But as with the shirt above, it’s harder to tell. If the top of the black part of the shirt ends up at the bust line it can be a good look, but if it’s in the center of the breasts you end up with button nipples.

Sometimes in the shop Queen I’ll find clothing modeled by a woman who looks to be just a wee bit bigger than what’s considered fashionable in Japan–but her face is always cropped out. From what I can see of her face I think it’s the same woman in all the shots where the face is obscured.

Mystery Model

I assume this was done with the model’s permission, if not by specific request. Given the pressure to be thin, especially in Japan, I wouldn’t be surprised if bigger women would be ashamed to publicly model plus size clothes. Then again, who knows, maybe plus size Japanese women prefer to shop with thin models.

From Ashley Stewart’s site, for the sake of comparison. It’s not so hard to sell plus size clothing with plus size models, is it?

おまけ!

An article I came across and the inappropriate ad to the right. *Headkotatsu*

FAIL Mercedes Benz, FAIL

Violence

Tags

current-events, violence

I was having dinner with some friends when one says, “Did you hear about the stabbings in Hakata Station?” Apparently, some guy just suddenly got the urge to stab people Friday night/early Saturday morning. Thankfully, there were no fatalities, and only one person was seriously injured. (Here’s an article in English about it.)

Up till now, the random stabbing sprees that occurred in Japan always seemed far away. Not that they were common anyway. It’s true that Fukuoka has one of the highest crime rates in Japan, but that seems to be mostly because of all the yaks. And with things like that, as long as you’re not involved with them, you tend to be safe.

Growing up in the City of Detroit, I learned to always have my guard up. But I also knew that random crime was uncommon. Most crime, in any place, tends to go on between people who know each other. Yes, sometimes completely innocent people get caught in the cross fire. And sometimes family members get mixed up in a relative’s mess. But for the most part, looking at crime overall, I always figured I’d be more likely to get beat up by a boyfriend than to be assaulted at random by a stranger, especially since back then I obviously wasn’t carrying a single thing worth stealing.

Suffice it to say, I find completely random violence pretty disturbing. There’s no way you can guard against a stranger who suddenly decides this is gonna be the day they slash or shoot people up.

I found myself thinking, “Thank goodness people in Japan don’t have guns.” If someone open fired with an automatic or semiautomatic weapon in a place as jam-packed as Hakata Station, it’d be a blood bath.

Recently I saw on the news here the story of Yoshihiro Hattori, an exchange student who was shot and killed 20 years ago in Louisiana when he went to the wrong house for a Halloween party and the homeowner thought he was trying to break in (despite Hattori’s having rung the doorbell). I was just a kid when it happened, so I don’t remember if I knew about this incident back then. But seeing it on the news here, and reading up about it, I thought, “I wonder if this is the reason my English Course students, when doing skits that took place in the States, would ALWAYS have a part where one of them gets shot.” There was always something too personal in the sense of persecution they seemed to display. It wasn’t just the idea that everyone in the States had a gun, it was the idea that if they went to the States, they would be shot by these weapons.

Reading about Hattori, I couldn’t help thinking of Trayvon Martin. How many other unarmed youths have been shot and killed at close range without provocation?

I’ve noticed an increase in police patrols in my city. I hardly ever used to see police cars at all. I don’t think it’s that I didn’t notice them; even though I never had anything to hide from the police, I can’t say I trust them completely, so I tend to note their presence. Now I often see them rolling around with their lights flashing.

Meanwhile, Detroit was getting more bad press. I saw this article this morning. More than the article itself, the comments made me sad. Here is a city in need of TLC, and all people can say is “raze it to the ground” and “it’s the minorities’ fault.”

*Sigh*

MOON SAGA Week

Tags

GACKT, MOON SAGA, MOON SAGA Yoshitsune Hiden, MOON SAGA〜義経秘伝〜

This is over a week late, but I’ve been crazy busy. During all the mayhem, I was able to squeeze in one showing of MOON SAGA~Yoshitsune Hiden~ and one visit to the GACKT X KIMONO Project exhibit.

I went to the kimono exhibit on Tuesday the 14th with two friends. Admittedly, I only went to get the free “GACKT produced” tenugui advertised on the site. So I made a reservation and anxiously awaited the invitation as the day drew near.

If it weren’t for the Nemuri crest I’d think this envelope was from the Liar Game Office.

We get to the exhibition venue and not a soul was to be seen. This was Obon week, but it was still surprising considering the hustle & bustle just one block away. Our invitation was for 7PM, but we were a few minutes early. The friendly staff welcomed us, showed us around, and told us about the kimono. Two kimono that GACKT actually wore during Nemuri Kyoushirou were on display, and one staffer informed us that “at first, it smelled very strongly of Platinum Egoist.” >o<;

Perhaps the staff sensed that we weren’t gonna buy anything, as they just kept on emphasizing how expensive the kimono were. The older gentleman did say once or twice that the yukata were much more affordable, but still, no hard selling going on. Which is a shame for them as salespeople; despite my nearly complete lack of interest in wearing kimono or yukata it probably wouldn’t have taken much swaying for me to get the hot pink & black yukata with the Nemuri crest just for the hell of it. ^_^; It’s one of those “I’m in Japan, might as well” things.

The other piece that had me seriously considering parting with my hard-earned dough was the black and white kimono with the DEARS logo on it. I would never wear it, it was too beautiful for that! I think it may be the “secret model” the Kimono Project site was talking about; at least I haven’t seen it in any of the photos on the site of the various lines.

Shining just as brightly as the kimono were the huge posters of GACKT. When we jokingly asked how much for the posters, we were told, “we can’t sell them.” But when I squealed at one of them the older gentleman said, “100,000 yen.” I said, “I’ll pay! Give me time!!” XD

Anyway, despite our invitation saying that the showing was from 7 PM, at a little past seven the staff said to us, “We have the venue until seven, so…” With that they collected our invitations and the gentleman brought over the tenugui. Only what we saw in his hands wasn’t the tenugui my friends and I were expecting.

Perhaps the feeling that we were being given leftovers was what made getting this disappointing. Can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but…not as advertised!

We left the exhibit feeling a bit confused, but oh well. Only two more days till seeing GACKT live again!

My ticket for MOON SAGA was for the final Fukuoka show on the 16th. The difficult thing about this was that I had a business trip to Nagasaki that same day. x_X

Well, saying “business trip,” the common translation for 出張, sure conjures up a different image than what it actually was, but that’s what it’s called when one goes somewhere other than their usual workplace on some work-related thing.

The thing that had been keeping me crazy busy was planning for the first ever overnight English camp put on by Fukuoka Prefecture, taking place in none other than the Dutch-themed park Huis Ten Bosch in Sasebou, Nagasaki Prefecture. It was decided that all ALTs involved in this camp should go to the park for a preview (good) on the 16th (yikes!).

It’s been a while since I’ve cut something that close!

We left the park an hour and a half behind schedule. Doors for the play opened at 5:45, but we were still on the bus some 17 kilometers from the city at that time. I was getting really anxious, and texted the friend who would also go to that performance to pick up one of each of the clear files for me just in case.  Once we finally got into the city I started checking subway times on my phone. The next 25 minutes of well-orchestrated timing and running, I must say, I’m rather proud of. >o<;

18:00 Check subway on phone, aim for the 18:07 subway
18:03 Our chartered bus pulls up to Hakata Station, our group leader just says “Go, go!” to me and I dash off forgetting to even say “otsukare” to the team.
18:07 Catch the subway
18:13 Arrive in Tenjin Station. I stay underground for a bit but since I’m not too familiar with the underground I go up once I see a sign for the Fukuoka Building. When I get on the top streets and cross Showa-doori, I notice another person running. I wonder, “Are they going to the play too?!” but then it hits me: the lights on these two blocks must turn green at the same time. So I dash off after this guy and just barely make it across the next light. I keep running!
18:23 Arrive at the Fukuoka Shimin Kaikan (normally a 15-20 minute walk from Tenjin Station, depending on pace)
18:25 Am seated in my 16th row seat sweating profusely but with time to spare before the curtains rise!

Unlike with the play Nemuri Kyoushirou, I didn’t want to read fan reports before seeing the show myself so that I could see how much I understood on my own. All I knew was that this was going to be some sort of magical fantasy version of the life of Minamoto no Yoshitsune, and that eventually there would be vampires, or the precursors to vampires (it is a part of GACKT’s whole MOON SAGA project after all).

The play initially did not disappoint. It was funny, GACKT was adorable, and there was pandering to the local audience by the truckload! One of my minor “complaints” about Nemuri last year (or whenever that was) was that GACKT did not participate in what little Fukuoka gags there were, but this time, the whole cast busted out niwaka masks while saying 「ごめーん！」during…I don’t even remember what scene it was. I was just geeked to see the masks. Later in the show, Benkei’s actor went down the left side of the audience handing out these autographed masks, saving the one signed by GACKT for a girl near the front.

About midway through, however, I started to wonder, “what is the point of this?” It probably didn’t help that I needed to use the bathroom and was waiting anxiously for an intermission that never came. Anyway, I had done very little reading up on the play, so other than the characters I didn’t know much what the story would be about. The sets were interesting, the costumes were cool for the most part (not impressed by the bootleg Jack Sparrow look on Yoshinaka ^_^;), the music was fitting, and the dancers did a great job. And Kage’s fight scene! WOW.

But still, as a story, I was left unsatisfied by ~Yoshitsune Hiden~. It felt anticlimactic. I know it’s part of a larger work, but the play should still be strong by itself, but that last fight scene left me thinking “…that’s it?” The use of wire work as cool and all, but…that’s it? I think I would feel like this play didn’t have a proper ending even if it weren’t for the Swarm of Green Ninjas scene from Nemuri Kyoushirou to compare it to.

The play ended, but then the cast did a slightly changed version of an earlier scene as an encore. (I assume it was an encore, as most of the audience seemed surprised by the cast reappearing on stage ready for that scene.) I can’t remember now if the credits rolled before or after this. In any case, as it was the last Fukuoka showing, I wanted to stick around and see if GACKT would peek out, but since I hadn’t bought any goods and didn’t want to end up in a long line (I had a seat close to an exit), nor did I want to make my friend wait, I busted out with the other patrons and went to get some goods.

I see Kage and think of Sephiroth, but my friend, a CLAMP fan, thought of one of their other characters.

It would be nice if shows were added at venues on Kyushu, then I’d like to see this play again and see if maybe the latter half doesn’t leave me so “meh” after having seen it once already. As it is, I was happy for the chance to see GACKT again for the first time in 10 months, and enjoyed the overall artistry of the play. Story-wise…I’m gonna have to wait and see what else the MOON SAGA has in store.

A Special Guest

Tags

ありがとう, Dazaifu Tenmanguu, Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki

Late in June I finally had the pleasure of meeting one of my college era Japanese teachers here in Fukuoka. (先生、こんにちは〜！) I showed her around my neighborhood, had tonkotsu ramen at award-winning shop Danbou (暖房), and took her to Dazaifu Tenmanguu, where we had the local specialty umegaemochi (a mochi bun filled with red bean paste imprinted with a picture of a plum blossom. And I don’t know if “mochi bun” is a legitimate word.). We reminisced and made fun of my mistakes, past and present. I learned that finally, the Legend of the Toilet Paper has been surpassed. Well, it has been eight years since I did the homestay program. Eventually, someone had to do something as interesting as misinterpreting “take tissue paper with you because there is none in restrooms at temples” as “take toilet paper with you, even in the form of 2 whole toilet paper rolls.” >o<;;;

It’s a rare treat to see Tenmanguu without a huge crowd.

I was happy to receive some very Detroit omiyage. Uh, souvenirs? Ahaha…

Cheetos で赤くなった指．．．なつかし〜い！

It was pretty nostalgic to see my fingers turned red by the Cheetos. Some stores around here have the regular Cheetos, but I’ve never seen the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in Japan.

…man, that sounded way more dramatic than it needed to! XD

I also received a kit for Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. I’m afraid I couldn’t make it very well form-wise, but it tasted good!

You’d think it’d be hard to mess up with a recipe that spells things out as clearly as “Put in Packet 1, put in Packet 2.” But I’m special like that.

And this is what it turned out like! You can barely tell that it’s okonomiyaki, but oh well.

先生、わざわざ福岡までいらっしゃって誠にありがとうございました。楽しかったです！

My Life in Japan Through Memes

Tags

bad pun coon, condescending wonka, hipster kitty, internet memes, memes, philosoraptor, rage comic, success kid, troll

It all started when my school installed a new projector and AV mixer in the Language Lab. I love the new equipment, but there’s just one little thing: for some reason, I can’t set the external display’s wallpaper independent of my desktop’s wallpaper anymore. With the old projectors I could just right click on the external display and set its wallpaper, but now when I try to do that, it changes the wallpaper for both my laptop’s screen and the external display. I don’t have dirty pictures set as wallpapers so it really doesn’t matter; I’ve so far just let it go. Which is why one fateful day 3 Japanese Teachers of English were introduced to the world of LOLCats and other internet memes.

First one teacher and some students saw Catnarok as the wallpaper on the external display. Then another teacher who had a little bit of free time strolled over for a chat just as I had finished writing the midterm test and was taking a break with Philosoraptor. Later the JTE who sits next to me wondered why I was failing at stifling my laughter and she learned about Advice God. These last two JTEs, who got a more in-depth explanation of the source of all this insanity, ended the conversation with “you should make some.”

Can’t say no to that now can I?

If you don’t get some of the ones that don’t have an explanation, you might get a helpful hint by hovering your cursor over the image.

Bad Pun Racoon

Philosoraptor

Around 2009 through about 2011, there seemed to be a booming trend among the young women in Fukuoka City of walking in high heels as if they didn’t know how to walk in high heels (e.g. knees constantly bent, feet pigeon toed, taking flat-footed steps, and often wearing shoes a size too big, or too small in the case of high-heeled sandals). A fellow ALT told me that a Japanese girl had told him that walking that way makes them look vulnerable and therefore cute. To him, the walk reminded him of velociraptors in movies. His label stuck.

Rage Comic Troll

There are several ways to romanize Japanese, that is, write Japanese using the Roman alphabet. While some Japanese characters are written the same way across all systems, others differ depending on whether you’re using Hepburn style romanization, or something else. For example, にんじゃ would be written as ninja in Hepburn romanization, but as ninjya in another common system, kunrei-shiki.

文部省 (Monbusho) is the Ministry of Education. While every other ministry of the Japanese government uses Hepburn romanization as the standard, the Ministry of Education has both Hepburn and kunrei-shiki as standard, so students learn both ways to romanize their language, but aren’t told what the features (and therefore potential uses) of each system are.

Hepburn makes it easy for English speakers (and, I dare say, speakers of other languages that use the Roman alphabet) to pronounce Japanese words correctly because it’s based on English phonetics. For example, the Japanese phonetic characters た、ち、つ、て、と are written as “ta, chi, tsu, te, to” in Hepburn style. (Notice the chi and tsu.) Kunrei-shiki focuses instead on regularity and Japanese phonetics. So those same characters get written as “ta, ti, tu, te, to.” This of course wouldn’t be a problem if Japanese were the only ones looking at romanized Japanese. But if you’re gonna have kids studying English, presumably so that they can communicate with English speakers, isn’t it worth mentioning that to English speakers, “ti” makes a different sound than “chi”?

二日市 is a place name. In Hepburn it’s written as “Futsukaichi.” In kunrei-shiki, it’s written as “Hutukaiti.” That’s a huge difference.

You can read another misadventure in romanization in this post, under the section labeled “Kaizen.”

Success Kid

Forgetting to shave and going to the gym with some leg stubble and putting my socks on incorrectly are both things that I’ve done. ^_^;

Condescending Wonka

For the record, I don’t think Japanese people are being intentionally condescending when they say “Your Japanese is so good!” when all you’ve given them to go on is a heavily accented “konnichi wa.” While increasing numbers of people with no ties to Japan are studying Japanese, it’s true that there’s still very few foreigners around, and many of them aren’t fluent, so I can understand if the utterance just slips out of people’s mouths out of sheer surprise. The desire to be hospitable and say something nice is probably also a factor. But whether you’re a beginner and you know that you are so totally not jouzu, or you’re so jouzu you made Level 1 of the Nihongo Kentei beg you for mercy, the comment probably rubs you the wrong way every 20th time or so.

I know that my L-R jokes could themselves be seen as condescending, but the Success Kid memes are jabs at myself. I think it’s okay as long as we all FAIL together, as one world in love & harmony. ^o^/♡

Hipster Kitty

Credits:

All made with the LOL Builder and Dan Awesome’s Rage Maker. Though I did just screencap the preview instead of making an account and saving it to those sites.

Really Quick Update

Tags

Spain, YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz

I’m still here yo. Ahahaha…

Well, just what happened? I had meant to add photos of my ehoumaki and the corner I faced as I ate it, but never got around to it. There was just so much going on, and now that classes are over (for me, not for the students), I just wanna relax. I’ve been bumpin’ YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz’s first album, playing Star Ocean: The Last Hope, and buying omiyage.

I’m going to Spain next week. @_@

That came outta nowhere, huh? Ahahaha…it’s actually been in the works since…mmm…maybe last June or July? I’d been scheming with my mother’s Spanish penpal of 30 years until I could see my mother in person in December. Once we decided on dates within my spring break (since now my mother’s retired and so is her penpal), it was just a matter of buying the tickets. I bought my tickets shortly after returning to Japan.

And now I have less than a week before I fly over Asia and Europe. I’m going to have pretty long layovers in Seoul and Paris. I hope I can remember something of my 7 years of French! J’ai oublié tout!

Watch, I’m going to accidentally speak in Japanese or some weird chimera of Japanese and French in Paris! It might even come out in Spain too, since I don’t even hear Spanish very often over here, much less speak it. >o<;

Ahem, anyway, I’ve bought most of the omiyage I want to take from Japan, and figure I’ll round these gifts out with some sweets from Korea and/or France.

A pretty different school will greet me upon my return. One of the teachers from my old school will transfer to my current school! @_@ I was so surprised. That, and the whole new English curriculum requirements…it might be a wild year.

Well, I’ll have GACKT and his YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz to get me through. ^o^ Enjoy a song from them. It starts off a little bit…uh…well, let’s just say that when he mentions an accelerator, brake, and shaft, he’s probably not talking about car parts. ^o^;;;  The song is 「恋愛Driver~Fooさんの歌」(“Ren’ai Driver ~Foo-san no Uta~” which would mean something like “Romance Driver ~Mr. Foo’s Song~”). I don’t know who Foo-san is, and apparently, neither does anyone else. I Googled 「Fooさんは誰」(“who is Foo-san”) and found that no one seems to know just who he is. *Shrugs*

Oh well. HEADBANG!!! >_<\m/

Facing Lucky 2012

Tags

ehoumaki, lucky direction roll, risshun, setsubun

It shall soon be February, which means it’s time for school marathons, JLPT results, and throwing beans at people.

Setsubun is in the air!

I introduced setsubun and ehoumaki in this post last year, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, please look there. But, in short, part of the tradition for welcoming spring involves eating an uncut sushi roll, the “ehoumaki” or “lucky direction roll,” while facing the year’s lucky direction. As the recorded message over the loudspeakers at Daiei told me, this year you’ll need to face 北北西, or north-northwest, while eating your ehoumaki to ensure good fortune.

Interestingly, as I looked up this issue in Japanese to verify that the lucky direction was north-northwest, I came across this Yahoo Answers page where someone asked what direction to face while eating the ehoumaki. One response goes into great detail explaining how the year’s direction is determined according to the 10 signs of the calendar. But at the bottom, a commenter responded, “That’s all well and good, but is there such a custom in your region? If not, then it would be good to eat it facing whatever direction you like.” Is it just me, or is that a saucy answer? >o<; Like some of the people I spoke to last year, this person must feel that the ehoumaki is encroaching on strictly bean-throwing territory.

Well, tomorrow I’ll be making my weekly stop at Daiei, so I’ll probably go looking for an interesting ehoumaki to eat this year.