Sons of Loki

Has it really been a month? 30 days since five confused and bewildered individuals, one of whom with a nasty case of the sniffles, boarded a 777 headed straight for the land of our dreams, this distant home of the rising sun, this Japan?

Apparently.

In honour of this momentous event, I have revamped the site banner, and also done some heavy thinking.

I think we are all of us beginning to wonder why on earth we started learning this damn language, and at the same time realising that if we could go home tomorrow, we just wouldn’t. It’s tough, yeah, but it’s what we have to do.

I don’t think it has to be this hard, though. We’re taught Japanese entirely in Japanese, and it’s absolute hell. Maybe some day we’ll be at the stage where we can understand convoluted explanations and examples of Japanese grammar in the language itself, but right now it’s just agonising lesson after lesson of trying to keep up with streams of Japanese that we just don’t get and just won’t get. They say you can pick a language up eventually just by hearing it, and maybe that’s what they’re aiming at, but I would just prefer a simple Minna no Nihongo style “This grammar thing is equivalent to ~ English” for everything in our textbook, and then I could learn it instead of stabbing in the dark at what it might mean, if I understood the examples. So I sit in the classes, and I don’t get anything, and my attention wanders.

I don’t know. Einstein said the only thing that interferes with learning is education. I kinda feel like I’d get better with a couple of months, a stack of Heisig’s lovely books, and a textbook that actually tries to explain things, than to be stuck in the classroom for a year.

On Sunday Chris and I went along, with a few other students, to a small cultural festival at a community centre just down the road from our uni. It wasn’t anything big – just a few performances by the kids from the local schools, an audience of their parents and old people – but it was a fascinating look at the side of Japan we don’t really see as young students, the world of kids and their grandparents and well-groomed old men in suits who happily give you free beer at the end. Ah, beer, the great connector.

We had to give a short self-introduction in front of a small crowd of Japanese grandmothers, which we found out about thirty seconds before we had to do it, but as I’ve done about a million self-introductions in the last month it rolled off the tongue. I even got a tiny bit of applause at my self-deprecating “日本語が上手じゃありませんけど、がんばります” (At Japanese I lack skill but I will persevere).

On Monday our JASSO came in – 160,000 delicious yen. Then, for a long time nothing happened.

At Ochanomizu, I caught this lovely sight of a middle-aged couple stopping to admire the view from a bridge over the Kanda. They remind me of Noguchi and Kazu from Mishima’s Utage no Ato, I write, pretentiously.

Yesterday I trawled Yodobashi Camera, giving the cameras a try in my long quest for Durrant’s Next Top Model (of Camera), snapping a few pictures on my SD card for later review. Verdict: Pentax K-m was so horribly bad with and lack of detail and JPEG mush that I wonder if the settings were screwed up. The Sony alpha series were nice, but it is not a camera made for human hands, as several people have pointed out. The Nikon D3000 is fine, but picking up the Canon Kiss X2 and trying it out seriously endeared me to it. It just felt right, and the photos are lovely. (Only problem is the expense. May just plump for the next model down.)

After that I met up with the guys for a meal with Ella’s friend Satomi. Had a wander through Shinjuku – will never get tired of that – and wound up at a very exclusive-seeming restaurant with private rooms, dark lighting, muted dark woods, trickling water features with fish in – the works.

We had shabu-shabu, a Japanese dish very similar to one I had in Korea all the time (and may be the same thing) – a pot of boiling water at the table with stock into which are dropped vegetables and bits of meat which are left to boil, and then plucked out and eaten. It was nice, but a tad unfilling.

We wound up at an arcade where the girls did purikura and the guys KILLED ZOMBIES WITH KEYBOARDS AND SHOT GUYS WITH GUNS AND PLAYED DRUMS

YEAH TAKE THAT DRUMS

EAT BULLETS!!!

TYPE YOU DAMN ZOMBIES, TYPE

bah how is this manly

Anyway, after spending too much on the UFO Catcher trying to win a foam pillow for some reason, we went home.

Friday we had the big ol’ welcome party #2, which was fun. Spoke a bunch of Japanese to a bunch of people, leant my speakers (possibly unwisely, although they survived in the end) for Tom to do some DJing (must learn Ableton), was ridiculously excited when he put some Shinichi Osawa on (apparently he’s gonna be appearing in Shibuya sometime next month, which is a must-see) and was going to go to that holy-of-holies WOMB Shibuya until I realised that the increasing fatigue would not see me through ’til 5am. So I went to bed, which was probably the more sensible option.

In the morning I watched a game of American football from my balcony, which was actually rather fun to see. I don’t know why I harbour a secret love for gridiron – the action and aggression, the intricate chess-like strategies, the relative unpopularity of it in the UK, or the whole homoerotic machismo thing of it all – but I wandered down on my way to the supermarket and got a few action shots.

Later, after making a tuna pasta salad thing (is tuna expensive or what?) I decided, what with a free afternoon, to head to my old haunt of Akihabara and check out the prices on second-hand DSLRs. I’m realising that after two years of loyal service and one river dunking, my trusty S3 IS just isn’t as good as it was, and given how much I enjoy photography, it only makes sense to upgrade to a proper SLR. Judging by the cameras in the second-hand stores, I can get some nice kit for a reasonable price – currently I’m torn between the Sony a300 for 37,000 yen, or a real bargain: the Olympus E-510 for 26000 yen (which will probably be gone soon). Or I can head upwards to the mid-low-range SLRs, like the Canon EOS Kiss F (EOS 1000D in the West) for 44,000 yen – a little expensive but I do trust Canon for good cameras.

It was raining yesterday. Tokyo’s always best in the rain.



(blergggh, ISO noise)

I was in Yodobashi Camera when Rob gave me a ring, saying that they was hoping to head down to Odaiba to visit this onsen (Japanese bathhouse) with Kazuhisa (whom we know from Leeds last year), so I made a miserable journey in the rain down to Shimbashi station and caught the train with them across the Rainbow Bridge (upon which it was pretty bright tonight*) to Odaiba, the weird artificial island/waterfront district.
The onsen was pretty cool, though obviously more commercial than the little traditional ones. You got a choice of yukata and, like my beloved Seoul jjimjilbang, they had a communal area with restaurants and shops and amusements and such. (Not as good as the Dragon Hill Spa, but then what is?) The baths were extremely pleasant. We chilled/boiled in the outside bath, our bottom halves at a scorching ~40 degrees, our top halves pelted by the rain – consequently, we were quite comfortable overall. I took a plunge in the 20 degree pool (I can stand cold much more than hot, apparently) and then wound up with five minutes in the nicest bath of all, the one that was … just right.

Then ice cream. A lovely trip (even if it did bankrupt me).

* Belle & Sebastian, “Wrapped Up In Books”

Money is running tight, thanks to splurging on stupid kanji textbooks which I’m not even sure I need (given that I’ve got a perfectly good kanji dictionary), and what counts as a small amount here is a ridiculously huge expenditure back home, like Japan is some kind of magical shrinking land where all of £50 transforms into £5 after it passes through the mystical portal to Nippon.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The exchange rate has jumped 10 yen, which isn’t much but does make some difference. Plus I just picked up my MUFJ bank book and card, and the JASSO scholarship will indeed be going in next week, and I got my electricity bill and I only spent 1,214 yen (£8) for the period 30/09 – 18/10, which implies that my monthly cost will be a mere 1800 yen or so; which is far less than the 15000 I budgeted for – although the water bill could be ridiculously high, I don’t know.

Also I got some MEN’S HAIR STRAIGHTENERS and now my hair looks a bit like Nick Cave’s from when he was in The Birthday Party and on lots of heroin, which is good.

And it’s November soon, which means it’s Nanowrimo time again! Last time my bizarre tale of alien invasion utilitarianism floundered at ~34,000 words, but it was a good experience nonetheless, and I’m certain that it gave me the impetus to go ahead with my currently-in-progress novel, right now at about ~54,000 words. The thing is, do I cheat and use the month to finish that off, winding up with a choppy-but-complete 100,000 word novel? Or do I follow the spirit of Nano and start afresh with something totally original and unashamedly pulpy? The prospect of actually having a 100,000-word finished novel to my name in 40 days time is almost too good to resist, rules be damned.

I’m cycling. I’ve gone out for a bike ride. Listening to Mark Kermode’s podcast, I turn to go down into a tunnel, and I’m not entirely sure if bikes are allowed to, so I stop and turn around.

A Japanese policeman is running towards me.

For a split second I think “Oh, he’s just going to tell me that I can’t go that way.” But then I realise the truth. He wants to card me.

This is it! This is my Rosa Parks moment! Except I fold like a piece of origami before the cop. I forget all the advice I’d read on Debito Arudou’s website about asking for their ID and asking why I’m being stopped and instead, shaking slightly, I try to work out what he’s asking for. I assume it’s because I’m biking, and he wants to check the bike is mine. Fair enough. I’m sure Japanese people get stopped all the time, too, for the crime of being on bikes.

So I show him my bike registration card, explain that I’m a foreign student and it’s rented from the uni. Then I think I catch him asking for my alien registration card (half-remembering the Japanese gaikokujin tōroku shōmeisho), but I don’t have that yet, and I don’t know how to explain, so I show him my student card.

He radios it in.

I’m on edge.

It all seems fine.

So I can go now, right? No, not yet. Now up to this point, it’s been a little disturbing but – fair enough, he has to check that it’s my bike, fair enough, I might be an illegal immigrant or something. But then he asks to look in my bag. This is when I should have stopped and asked “doushite?“, but then I already know the reason, don’t I? Being an entirely legal foreigner on a bike I am legally entitled to ride, I must instead be in possession of drugs. Yeah. Of course. That’s why he has to search me.

Anyway, I give in, and he sees my friggin kanji dictionary and digital camera for what it’s worth, and he sends me on my way. Of course, he doesn’t check the inside pocket, which is chock to the brim with two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, semtex, and a HK MP7 4.6mm SMG. So the joke’s on him!

The initial shock gave way to anger – why me? because I’m dangerously-coloured and threateningly-bearded, in the wrong part of town? – then grudging acceptance: I know he probably didn’t mean anything by it, it’s pretty much the norm here. But – eurgh. Still leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Take us out, Jay.

I heard “Son, do you know why I’m stoppin’ you for?”
“Cause I’m young and I’m black and my hat’s real low?
Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don’t know,
Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo’?”
“Well you was doin fifty-five in a fifty-fo’,
License and registration and step out of the car,
Are you carryin’ a weapon on you? I know a lot of you are…”

Friday was … no good, man. No good. 駄目、even. So I spent most of Saturday convalescing, playing a bit of the old Half-Life (almost eleven years old! and it still shines) and reading Simon Singh’s Big Bang (an un-put-downable history of cosmology, and an excellent summary of how science works – someone spots something weird, someone comes up with a theory to explain that, and over time enough boxes are ticked and it all comes together to make perfect sense). On Sunday I did a bit of shopping at the local suupaa, fried up a bit of yakisoba. Delish (if incredibly greasy).

Japanese study … uh … well, it continues, at least. I’m loving Heisig – it’s not 100% foolproof, but I keep spotting kanji in the wild that I’ve only looked at once or twice and finding that they’ve stuck. I’m confident that if I keep this up, I should have no problem with the big kanji test, whenever that is.
It’s just so sensible. I don’t think any other system I’ve seen – JLPT, Minna no Nihongo – bothers with giving students a sensible order of kanji when learning, other than going from simple to complex – which sounds sensible, but Heisig’s radical-based method is a billion times better. You learn the base radical, you learn a bunch of kanji with that radical in. Move on to next radical.

Class is a bit harder. It’s entirely in Japanese, which you’d think would be beneficial, but … actually, it’s pretty obviously not beneficial. I don’t know Japanese yet! And so explaining complicated grammatical constructs in Japanese in Japanese, to me at least, seems impossible. If only the teachers would use a little English to explain!
Perhaps this is all part of the plan; perhaps we learn better if we’re forced to look it up ourselves, or if we make an educated guess. Perhaps the day will come when it all clicks.
It is pretty remarkable, though, how much we do know. I think everyone pretty much takes it for granted, but the fact is that after barely a year of study we can all follow the basic gist of Japanese. Of course, push us past that and we fumble and quiver like fish out of water, but we’re getting there. We’re evolving lungs.

Also legs.