Sons of Loki

I think most of my problems in life stem from being a determinist at heart. I’m not completely sure free will exists. I feel like innate personality (determined by biological and external social factors) determines your actions, not your consciousness and not free will.

This raises big, scary questions. Like, is it fair to punish criminals if they had no control over their actions anyway? Can a leopard truly change its spots? If I simply put my mind to something, can I do it?

More specifically, if I decide to work hard at Japanese, would I get better? Yes, but can I actually decide to work hard at Japanese? It’s like sleep paralysis; you’re awake and fully conscious and trying so desperately to move your legs, feeling like you’re suffocating, but it’s impossible. It’s physically impossible. I sit down to study Japanese, I get bored and do something else.

Is this an error on my part? Should I try really, really, really hard instead of merely quite hard? Or is it blind deterministic mechanics, that I am a product of my upbringing, that I will always pick the easy path, that I have no patience, that I get easily distracted?

I don’t know. It’s a philosophical question, anyway. The main thing is, do I want to keep doing Japanese?

I don’t know!

I think my honest feelings are: I’d like to do Japanese if I could just coast through like I always do, turning up to most lessons and doing enough of the homework and doing sorta okay. But it’s a damned hard degree, and I apparently just won’t do all the work that’s necessary to pass.

I think my honest feelings are: I don’t want to do Japanese. I know enough to get by, and I basically only took this degree because I wanted to live here for a year for free. I can read Yotsuba-to and that’s enough for me. I’d much rather do English or Graphic Design or something like that. I don’t really have any desire to learn the language.

I think my honest feelings are: I love Japanese. I want to become impeccably fluent. I want to watch films and read books and talk to interesting people. I want to learn all the kanji and all the words. It’s just the teaching style here I can’t get on with. When I think about it, I really miss the Leeds department. Somehow everything was easier there, more fun.

Indecision. What’s made my day is that I emailed Leeds to let them know of my possible intentions, and I just got a reply to say that I can put a request in to the English department in May if I want to switch to Single Honours, and they’ll decide in June by the earliest. Meanwhile, I get to finish my year here whatever happens.

That’s the best news I could get. (Well, realistically winning the lottery isn’t going to happen, especially since I don’t play.) I’d hate so much to go home early, to encounter enormous visa and financial wrangles, to possibly have to pay back all my JASSO (god that would ruin me) and generally ruin my year. I get to stay.

Kinda makes me want to start studying again…

In other news, I’ve put up the teaser page for Yoshida, my work-in-progress visual novel salaryman simulator. Demo someday. I worry I made the titular Yoshida rather too stylish, rather than the chubby sweaty salaryman I envisioned him as.

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.

Just been for a small gym session with Fran and having sweated out most of the 100-yen “Postonic” energy drink, took a very pleasant shower. As I write this, the rain pours down outside the window amongst the tan-coloured concrete blocks of university buildings and on the deserted sports field and with the looming electricity towers towering off in the distance, and it looks like a scene from the episodes of Evangelion when they did some ass-kicking character development instead of ass-kicking battle sequences, with every single character staring out of windows with their head resting on their hand and thinking complex interior monologues about the nature of being and the intricacies of solipsism.

Yesterday we got up far too early to head to the Fuchi-shi city hall, where we were to go through the process of alien registration. We sat waiting for our number to come up, me sipping delicious Calpis and eating not-so-delicious Calorie Mate (as eaten by Snake) (essentially tasteless shortbread), signed a few forms, and there we was, officially non-citizens of the state. (The clerk babbled at me in Japanese, and remarkably I got the gist of it. Of course, a foreign language is a lot easier in context rather than in a classroom.) After that a quick trip upstairs to sign up for the Japanese national health service (no more untimely deaths for us) and then a visit to a cute little shrine in the sunshine, where we tossed a donation in the box, bowed, and clapped to awaken the spirits.

Von links nach rechts: Ella, Hattie, mich, Dan, und Fran.

We rolled into Fuchu-shi, the city we live in (which is a sub-city of Tokyo) and spent some time wandering around the shops. At the 100-yen shop I picked up a bunch of necessities: plates, chopsticks, a glass, a periodic table mug, and shampoo/conditioner. Wound up paying about 1000 yen, I think. Then lunch at a smallish restaurant – think I had katsu, which is rapidly becoming an unhealthy additction, and had a nice chat in Japanese with Kazuki (one of our student tutors).

We came back via Tobitakyū station on the Keio Line, which offers a direct service into Fuchu station and into Shinjuku, but which is a decent 15-minute walk from our halls; unlike Tama station on the Seibu Tamagawa Line, which is closer but has poorer connections (essentially going nowhere unless you change to the JR Chuo line, which handily goes straight through Tokyo).

We are quite close to Ashinomoto Stadium, home of Tokyo Verdy and the young upstarts FC Tokyo.

Dan said he saw a spider twice this size.

Chilled in our rooms for two hours, then emerged downstairs for our trip to SHINJUKU. Shinjuku. CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE, or at least it feels like that when you get there.

AAARRGHHH

HAAAARGH

BAAAARGHHHHHH

Wifi in great supply.

Went for some grub, which was as delicious as ever, eating in a smallish ticket-place which was possibly on Koshu-kaido according to this map. Discussed many things. On the way back to the station we wandered through Bic Camera for a bit. I thought about splurging on some lovely T20 speakers, but in reality I think I’ll be happy with something cheaper.

I am feeling Mixed. Right now everything is very fun, I’ve got a good boost from the gym, and I’m feeling up to – gasp – actually doing some studying in a bit before heading out to Akihabara later with t’others to meet up with Katy, pick up some obnoxiously-bassy speakers and possibly, maybe, a bit of karaoke.

But I hear rumours that our JASSO scholarship is frozen, or even worse. The deal was that only a handful of people would get JASSO, but then they expanded it to more and more people, including Muggins here, and such a sudden change of policy raised alarm bells for me. Still, they promised it, they better deliver, or … what? I dunno. People will complain, but if the government (the new government) doesn’t want to spend the money then they won’t. Oh well. Easy come, easy go, it seems to me. I’d happily accept half the money, say, 40,000 yen – 80,000 seemed a tad ridiculous – but it will be very, very tough to get by without it.

Every once in a while you get a letter, or an email, that initially makes you smile, then bite your fist, then put “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys on and walk around the house in a daze laughing to yourself.

I got an email today from Oato Hisami, form the Student Exchange Division at Tokyo Gaidai.

Turns out, somehow I’ve been accepted for the Japanese government’s JASSO scholarship, a scholarship to fund poor Japanese students like myself. That means 80,000 yen a month, and a 80,000 yen relocation allowance to cover my air fare.

Thanks to the lousy exchange rate, this works out to £5,820 over the year.

Guh.

I’m stunned.

And … I dunno. I’m hardly well off, and finance for Japan was not going to be easy, but I’m sure there’s people who deserve six grand more than I do.

Still, I’m going to update my Excel finances spreadsheet with a big fat 80,000 in each cell and grin like a loon.