Q&A Day Off

I slacked off this weekend, and didn't do a whole lot of anything interesting. It rained like crazy Saturday, so I caught up on the mundane business of laundry. Quick culture note: Nobody around here does laundry when it rains. Why? They all hang their laundry outside. Now, I'm a paranoid man. I don't trust that. Either someone's gonna walk off with all my superbig America size clothing, or (more likely) I'll come outside and our burgeoning population of spiders will have used my favorite teachin' shirt as their new home base. Though I'm far from arachnophobic, these things are HUGE- I don't want to get in a fight with one over a shirt. If I'm taking on Spiderzilla, it's going to have to be for a better reason. So Saturday was boring- with the exception of another culinary delight. I have been to the mountaintop. I have eaten takoyaki- the aforementioned deep-fried octopus. It's delicious. It operates on the "stone soup" theory- if you throw enough sauces and cheeses and other things that I dare not ask about nor mention AROUND the chunk of octopus in the center, it just tastes good, rather than tasting like chowing down on rubbery eight-armed sealife.

Sunday, I returned to Otsu, as the weather was so nice that a day of studying Japanese by the lake seemed to be just the thing to recover from the past week of madness.

It was.

This is Lake Biwa. I believe you've seen it before on a cloudy day. This is a bit nicer. In Otsu, all of the beaches are in fact a rocky shoreline like this- which is perfect, as the locals have discovered, for fishing.


I saw, shortly after I took this picture, a man haul a fish out of Lake Biwa that was larger than most of my students. I no longer think of everything being smaller in Japan- things that ought to be small, like fish and bugs, are GIANT, and things that we're used to being big... like people... are smaller. Everything gravitates towards a standard size. I couldn't get a picture of this mystery fish, because the man was struggling to pull it up and then holding it steady until it was still enough to wrap up, and I'd feel like a jerk taking a picture of his battle rather than helping out- so I did the sensible thing, and walked on by.

The thing I really like about Otsu, besides the huge lake, is the way that Old Japan and New Japan rub up against each other. There's not so much of it as in the bigger cities, but the little instances are striking.

I also like the sense of humor. This, in case you can't read the lettering, is a hair boutique that specializes in bleach 'n color jobs. The name?

Feik.

So Sunday was very relaxing, and got me ready for today. Today, in addition to school "as normal" (ha), the kids had an assembly about saying No to Tobacco. The presentation was mostly drawn from American Cancer Society material- they used the commercial with the smoking baby- but what alarms me is that this sort of thing is so very necessary. CULTURE TIME!

A giant majority of Japanese people smoke. Testament to this is the fact that there are cigarette vending machines one block away from EACH of my middle schools. The teachers smoke. The staff smokes. The folks you walk by on the street smoke.

And the students smoke. Not in school, of course- it's technically illegal for folks under 20- but they do, all the time. I see them at the shopping district, I see them on the corner. Everywhere. This presentation, though inclusive of some of the gory glory of American stop-smoking campaigns (the tumor-infested lung picture, the smoking baby ad) was by in large carried out with Japanese courtesy and efficiency. It wasn't "Smoking Will Kill You", it was "Please, say no to cigarettes. Please." A request, rather than a threat. I thought it was interesting.

When I got back to the teacher's office (where I spend roughly four of my eight hours a day) I snapped a quick picture, so everyone can see what one of these things look like.

My desk has big red Photoshopped letters on the side.
I also snapped a picture of the (somewhat despondent) view from the teacher's office window- it looks almost post-apocalyptic, on review.

All right, you're all up to date. Now, question time. (Proof that we keep our promises, no matter how late we fulfill them.) This week's questions courtesy of Vorrt.

1. Game Culture?

I haven't seen a whole lot of non-electronic gaming going on. There's Go, which is huge, and Japanese Chess, which is similarly huge, but they're huge in the "Old Guys Playing in the Park" department. There's one D&D style "game shop" here, called the Yellow Submarine, which has a branch in both Tokyo and Kyoto. For there to be two, there must be a market- but it's not one I've seen or found. Sorry.

What there is an incredible market for is card games. As one might imagine, the country that brought you Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon is flush with the things- kids play 'em EVERYWHERE, you can buy them in the grocery store, there are video games that operate by reading RFID chips in collectible cards, and there's never an empty seat at those in the arcades.

2. Do the students express interest in things outside of the school clubs?

The students express interest in nearly everything. They approach nothing without a great deal of gusto. Even the bad kids approach slacking off with a dedication that borders on the fanatic. The difference between American and Japanese school clubs, though, is that in Japan you belong to ONE club, and it meets every day all year round. You're in soccer club? Congrats. You just bought yourself 365 days of soccer. I don't know if they practice and meet on Sunday, but they certainly do on Saturday. You're in band? Have at. All year, every day.

Outside of the clubs, they have juku (high school prep), circles of friends from other schools that they grew up with, that sort of thing (like any kids), but the primary focus seems to be on what you've joined up to do. Your in-group, as mentioned before, is the alpha and omega of your social web.

People without an in-group (nerds and foreigners) are, of course, free to do as they please. They just can't expect a whole lot of company- everyone's got previous club engagements!

3. What do you miss most about American food?

I miss the variety we have in America. In Japan, it's pretty much Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Korean, or "American" food. I put the last one in quotes because they're the only type of restaurant not staffed by members of the nationality in question. Chinese food, Chinese folks. Thai restaurant? Thai people. Korean? Yup. But American... Japanese. I hear tell there's a Brazilian restaurant out there somewhere, but I have yet to find it. In America, you can find as much variety in a mall food court as I can find for nine train stops. Nine goes to Osaka, beyond Kyoto, by the by. It's a long way. We're talking an hour by train.

4. -snip question about individuality and the Japanese psyche and replace it with...-
A question from Banky! "Do you like it? Do you miss home? How about a comparison between American and Japanese culture, just for kicks?"

a. I love it here. It's great.

b. I miss the people back home, but I really don't have time to get all mopey about it. Too much to do. Too much to see.

c. They do not believe in the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. They merely have never thought of the idea. I was talking with a coworker today, and part of our school lunch was a pair of slices of bread and some apricot jam. I mentioned that this is all right, but we really need us some raspberry jam and peanut butter. She looked at me confusedly, and said "Why?"

Evidently, the combination of flavors is something they simply haven't been exposed to. My heart broke just a little there, just for a moment- until I realized that now, if I bring in a loaf of bread, two jars and a knife, I can make culture history.

pax.