Hello Again Everyone. Sorry it has been so long since we last posted about our travels. It's getting busy I guess? First of all we finally got our movie from early September up on youtube.com! Go to youtube.com and search for "Adventures in Yanai Part 1" or "Erin Isaac Yanai Adventures" there should be 5 parts, therefore there are 5 videos. It's kinda cheesy but we had fun making it. Check it out!
Well, life if Japan is still weird but we are adjusting. We are beginning to really enjoy ourselves here now, with less of s shock to the culture and less worry in general. I'm sure Isaac will give you the scoop on his classes when he writes so I will leave that up to him. I on the other hand am still trying to get it together with work and filling my time.
Lately, I have been writing. Which has been filling a huge part of my soul. It's nice. Since I have been feeling this way I have been looking into writing programs for when I get home. I am even working on some writing pieces right now. So at the very least this experience has pushed me in the direction of writing, which is helpful. Isaac is thinking about teaching when we get back so at least one of us will be employable while I continue to "feel" it out. :o)
Money is proving to be a little bit more tight that we anticipated so I am trying to get a business of sorts together for teaching English Conversation. People are interested and I would love to teach them. So far so good. We shall see how it goes! I'll keep you updated.
In the meantime, other than working on making a buck and writing my little heart out I am making friends! I am in three hobby clubs, all of which I have been to at least 2 meetings for. I am in Japanese Kimono, Tai-Chi, and Japanese Tea Ceremony. All of them are so different and have their own personalities. My Kimono class is a bunch of women of all ages who have been sweet and fun to get to know. My teacher is so cute- about 65 and always wears her kimono to class. I gather from the constant laughter at her remarks that she is rather funny. Either that or she's making fun of me.....either way we laugh a lot even if it is at my expense. She's very kind to me and has given me her business card, which in Japan means A LOT! So that's good!
Tea Ceremony is a private lesson a 30 minute walk from my house in a neighborhood on the hillside. The teacher is awesome. Doesn't speak a lick of English. And I don't speak any Japanese, so it's interesting. But a lot of fun and very interesting. The class was arranged by a woman from my Tai Chi class who has taken it upon herself to get me all the things I need for Tea Ceremony- this is a big deal because these items are very very expensive. A fan, a red cloth, and some other things that I have no idea what they are for.....hehe. I will learn and then I can tell you. She's a very sweet lady and has told me, via my translator friend Hatsue, that she gets very lonely in her house since her husband died and would like me to come and have dinner with her. I think I will too. Her house is the first Japanese house I have been to. And I am looking forward to spending more time with her.
Lastly, there's Tai Chi. Let me tell you, it is never a dull moment. I think this class has been together for at least 2-3 years, some of them have even been in attendance for 10 years. They are a hoot. Always joking and laughing. Flirting with the teacher, the teacher flirting with the students. Keep in mind everyone in this class is 60 or older, I am by far the youngest and I feel like I have become something of a mascot for them. And according to my dear friend and constant translator, Hatsue, who I mentioned before, the teacher jokes about adoring me with the rest of the class. I enjoy it even if I don't know what the hell they are saying....all the time....
We have a Tai Chi performance coming up in a week. I am very nervous and excited about it! They are so good and I am still learning. I also stick out like a sore thumb so if I mess up....it's noticeable. I will let you know how it goes and I am sure we will have some good pictures too.
In the pictures you will notice Isaac and I went around on our bikes to LOTS of places......those places including the beach and awesome temples are all right here in our town. We had no idea but now we do....Yanai has proven to be an awesome awesome town!
Our big news is that Isaac and I went on an awesome trip with our good friend Chris Blackstock who studied abroad with us in Istanbul. He's been living here 2 years now and loves it. He is helping us learn to love it too......like I said the culture shock has been rough but our trip with Chris was very therapeutic.
We took a ferry from our town to the Island of Shikoku next door where we spent the day in Matsuyama. We saw the castle, walked all over, ate some awesome Indian food and had a great time. That night we got to our ferry port and hopped another ferry, this one overnight, to Osaka. We arrived to Osaka at 6am with a full day ahead of us before we met up with Chris that night. We walked all over the city with our backpacks on....ugh.....and ate good food, saw the crazy Japanese city life, and even went to the Osaka Human Rights Museum.
When we met up with Chris we all hung out and planned our next three days. We went the next day to Kyoto, which was charming old style Japanese and absolutely beautiful! We went to the northern part of the city, where we walked through some beautiful nature: a bamboo forest and along a big river cutting through the mountains. Then we took the romantic train through the mountains. It was awesome! All of this is in the pictures so please check it out. On the train Isaac and I found a beautiful Japanese baby that we wanted to take home with us......the cute babies here are doing nothing for our baby craze we have been going through lately. Really, the cuteness here is ridiculous. Just ridiculous.
That night we went back to Osaka where the three of us shamelessly searched for a pub serving a decent hamburger. Yes.....that;s what we wanted. Only God can judge us. On our search we found too other Geijin (foreigners) who were looking for a good pub. So they joined us! We didn't find a pub or burgers but we found good food that included french fries and decently priced drinks. The two people we hung out with are Americans and live in Tokyo teaching English. It was fun and cool to hang out with a group of people who spoke English.....again shameless. But also cool to talk with them because they have lived in Japan for over a year and have been living in Tokyo doing what Isaac, Chris, and even I am trying to do now.
The next day we went back to Kyoto where we toured some temples, walked on the philosopher's path and walked around the Geisha district. Which was also very very cool. We tried not to spend too much money so we did a lot of sitting, watching, talking and walking. It was relaxed. That night we went back to Osaka where we found yummy Belgian food and an English Pub. Haha. It was a fun last night. The three of us stayed up late talking and debating about life....we were all in theology and philosophy at Hanover together so...it was fun for us anyway.
On our last day we hit up Osaka all day. We found a Turkish restaurant this day which was AMAZING. They were real Turks selling REAL Turkish food that was Really Damn Good! I literally had tears in my eyes.....I'm seriously not joking either. Ask Isaac and Chris. Then we went to the Osaka aquarium which was so much fun! They have some really strange creatures int he water around here as you can probably imagine.....so it was fascinating to tour it all. After that we had time for one last stop at the Turkish restaurant before we all had to catch our trains heading in different directions. It was sad to say goodbye.....but we all live in Japan together so it wasn't that sad! :o)
Out trip home was easy and since then we have just been hanging out and living simple.
My birthday is coming up and I think I will be having a party with another ALT friend who lives in the town next to us. Her birthday is in a few days also so it should be fun. Other than that we have some fun plans for day trips with American Canadian and Japanese friends. That will all be for another post though so stayed tuned.
Talk to you soon and Take Care!
Hugs and Love
Erin
--
http://loveandengrish.blogspot.com/
http://picasaweb.google.com/EEHoug
Friday, October 2, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
New Pics
Hey Everyone
We have 2 new albums up online. We went around our town and went on a trip to Osaka and Kyoto with Chris Blackstock. Sorry ahead of time for all the ridiculous photos we indcluded in the albums. One of us thought they were funny and the other was too lazy to go through all of the photos and delete them. So there ya go. Our blog updates should be coming soon.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
IN again...
So, I didn`t think this warranted a mass mailing, but I was feeling that feeling again. The one that prompted me to wax philosophical the other day, and the result was the same this time.
So, I was feeling a lot of anxiety this morning. Erin says it`s the anxiety that comes along with living in another culture where everything is different, and I tend to agree with her. But I was riding my bike along to work and the feeling was just getting greater and greater. I pass students from my school on the way to work, them walking and me on my bike, and the feeling gets greater and greater. I keep thinking to myself about how I feel so afraid/anxious/worried on the inside and there`s no way for me to appropriately indicate that on the outside.
So I get to my desk at school and the work day starts. Of course, I realize that this feeling is coming, once again, from my sense of being cut off from everything around me, it is a sense of being alone.
I`m thinking, though, that I wouldn`t call it being `on the outside` though I still tend to think that has something to do with it. I`m starting to move beyond simple insides and outsides with the way I`m thinking about this/culture. I still think there is this fundamental desire or need or presupposition that we, as human beings, be `inside` of something. That which we are inside is what we typically refer to as our `outsides` (`I am inside my outsides` is manifest), though we delimit it physically in different ways. Some people think of their outsides as that which is on the other side of their skin, and some people think of it as all that which is physical about them, with that which is inside being their `soul, spirit, etc.`
Being in another culture, it`s not so much that I feel outside while everyone else is inside, as I wrote in my last entry, but that I have a different outside than everyone else around me... Additonally, this is not painful or anxiety inducing simply because they are different. Where the anxiety comes from is the experience of their insides and outsides being completely meaningless to me.
I want to try and ground this in my experience. What`s going on around me at this point, as I sit at my desk, is that people are going about their daily lives, like any office workers would do on a Monday morning in any first world country in the world. What`s cutting me off from that, though, is that none of it can have any meaning for me. Another way of saying it is that I don`t understand `why` so and so is going to the copy room. I know they go to make copies, but copies for what, about what, meaning what, what motivates them, who made that decision for them? I know they laugh, but about what, for what. `Why` is another way of asking the meaning. By meaning, I mean that something fits into my outsides, or that which I am in. When I ask why, I am asking how it fits into my outsides. In my office in Japan, I am surrounded by people for whom I can`t answer why, people who I can`t fit into my outsides, and so I am surrounded by mostly meaningless people.
In order to be something, my experience, it would seem, has to have meaning, or, it has to be a part of that which I am in.
The actions of those around me, these mundane daily tasks I`ve seen hundreds, thousands of times before, idle chit chat, making coffee, opening and closing windows, making copies, reading books, are meaningless because the insides of the people around me are meaningless. That is, the people around me, as insides, are nothing. Their insides are not a part of that which I am in. Though I can clearly see that there are insides there where there are people doing what people do, those insides are exist as nothing.
Language, then, must be that which makes other`s insides a part of my outside. Without understanding what people are saying, writing, hearing, and reading, their insides aren`t a part of that which I am in. Additionally, vice versa, my inside (this which is in) is not a part of that which they are in. Language, more symbols in my existential outside, gives their actions context and it gives me, however tennuous, a means of constructing their insides as a part of my outside, of giving them meaning, and of making them something.
I am nothing to them because my insides remain cut off from that which they are in, because I can`t bring my inside into their world of symbols, their outside, that which they are in. They can`t bring their inside into my world of symbols (language) so, though they are acting exactly as I would expect people to act, their actions are the result of nothing. Their actions, their insides, their world, their outsides, are all meaningless to me. They are a part of my outside but a part that doesn`t connect with my outside. This, obviously, brings me face to face with nothingness.
This nothing that exists evidently as a part of that which I am in bares a constant reminder of the nothing out of which I continually fashion that which I am in. That is where the anxiety I`ve been feeling lately comes from, from a nothing in that which I am in that I am constantly coming into contact with. I am constantly coming into contact with that Nothing, dark, lonely Nothing out of which nothing can emerge but within which all things exist.
So, I was feeling a lot of anxiety this morning. Erin says it`s the anxiety that comes along with living in another culture where everything is different, and I tend to agree with her. But I was riding my bike along to work and the feeling was just getting greater and greater. I pass students from my school on the way to work, them walking and me on my bike, and the feeling gets greater and greater. I keep thinking to myself about how I feel so afraid/anxious/worried on the inside and there`s no way for me to appropriately indicate that on the outside.
So I get to my desk at school and the work day starts. Of course, I realize that this feeling is coming, once again, from my sense of being cut off from everything around me, it is a sense of being alone.
I`m thinking, though, that I wouldn`t call it being `on the outside` though I still tend to think that has something to do with it. I`m starting to move beyond simple insides and outsides with the way I`m thinking about this/culture. I still think there is this fundamental desire or need or presupposition that we, as human beings, be `inside` of something. That which we are inside is what we typically refer to as our `outsides` (`I am inside my outsides` is manifest), though we delimit it physically in different ways. Some people think of their outsides as that which is on the other side of their skin, and some people think of it as all that which is physical about them, with that which is inside being their `soul, spirit, etc.`
Being in another culture, it`s not so much that I feel outside while everyone else is inside, as I wrote in my last entry, but that I have a different outside than everyone else around me... Additonally, this is not painful or anxiety inducing simply because they are different. Where the anxiety comes from is the experience of their insides and outsides being completely meaningless to me.
I want to try and ground this in my experience. What`s going on around me at this point, as I sit at my desk, is that people are going about their daily lives, like any office workers would do on a Monday morning in any first world country in the world. What`s cutting me off from that, though, is that none of it can have any meaning for me. Another way of saying it is that I don`t understand `why` so and so is going to the copy room. I know they go to make copies, but copies for what, about what, meaning what, what motivates them, who made that decision for them? I know they laugh, but about what, for what. `Why` is another way of asking the meaning. By meaning, I mean that something fits into my outsides, or that which I am in. When I ask why, I am asking how it fits into my outsides. In my office in Japan, I am surrounded by people for whom I can`t answer why, people who I can`t fit into my outsides, and so I am surrounded by mostly meaningless people.
In order to be something, my experience, it would seem, has to have meaning, or, it has to be a part of that which I am in.
The actions of those around me, these mundane daily tasks I`ve seen hundreds, thousands of times before, idle chit chat, making coffee, opening and closing windows, making copies, reading books, are meaningless because the insides of the people around me are meaningless. That is, the people around me, as insides, are nothing. Their insides are not a part of that which I am in. Though I can clearly see that there are insides there where there are people doing what people do, those insides are exist as nothing.
Language, then, must be that which makes other`s insides a part of my outside. Without understanding what people are saying, writing, hearing, and reading, their insides aren`t a part of that which I am in. Additionally, vice versa, my inside (this which is in) is not a part of that which they are in. Language, more symbols in my existential outside, gives their actions context and it gives me, however tennuous, a means of constructing their insides as a part of my outside, of giving them meaning, and of making them something.
I am nothing to them because my insides remain cut off from that which they are in, because I can`t bring my inside into their world of symbols, their outside, that which they are in. They can`t bring their inside into my world of symbols (language) so, though they are acting exactly as I would expect people to act, their actions are the result of nothing. Their actions, their insides, their world, their outsides, are all meaningless to me. They are a part of my outside but a part that doesn`t connect with my outside. This, obviously, brings me face to face with nothingness.
This nothing that exists evidently as a part of that which I am in bares a constant reminder of the nothing out of which I continually fashion that which I am in. That is where the anxiety I`ve been feeling lately comes from, from a nothing in that which I am in that I am constantly coming into contact with. I am constantly coming into contact with that Nothing, dark, lonely Nothing out of which nothing can emerge but within which all things exist.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
IN
So...
I put my philosophy degree to work this afternoon. And I just have to write this out because I think it's important for me and may be interesting for some. But this is your warning: mind-numbing abstractions and made up words ahead. Turn back now if you're looking for funny stories! Please read on if you can help me reflect on this some more! If you're a busy professor and just want the philosophy, have a look at about the last two paragraphs.
OK. This afternoon at work, to kill some time, I started writing about the feeling I get when walking into the classroom on a daily basis. That is, I started reflecting on the state of being that I experience when entering the classroom. It's a pretty unique experience for me. Further, I think it's generally somewhat of a poignant, telling human experience. This all began because I was trying, as I often do, to 'put myself in the shoes' of the Japanese students that I'm working so closely with. The teachers reading this will know that understanding your students' perspective is crucial if you hope to make a connection with them, and connecting with students is crucial if you hope to effectively teach them things.
So I was thinking about this and I was wondering what it must be like for them to be sitting in class and have this foreigner walk in and start talking to them in English. And I realized, I really and truly have NO IDEA what that must be like. I can kind of imagine myself as a high school student in Spanish class and the possibility of this hired Spanish person walking in who is straight of the plane and ONLY speaks Spanish. That would've been interesting in high school. BUT, that doesn't really actually help me understand what that would be like for a JAPANESE person. That's because, as far as I can tell, being Japanese is something considerably different from being American. I can't explain that.
So I realize that thinking about this, at this point, will get me more or less nowhere. I will only make headway in this department by being here and working with them and being around them and slowly developing an empathetic relationship.
So I give up on that, and I start thinking about what it's like for ME walking into that classroom. I start to write about the anxiety, the fear, the sadness, that all sort of sit in the back of my existence as I smile and talk and laugh through class. I do REALLY enjoy these classes, but these background feelings are undeniable. They're there.
What is that feeling? What is that experience? I wonder to myself as I sit at my desk. And I realize that it's all about being an outsider. It's the feeling that you get when you're in a group and someone says something like, "Man, that apple tasted funny, you know!?" and the whole group falls out with laughter because there's something deeper to the statement that you don't have any grasp of. It's being on the outside of an inside joke, a feeling we all certainly know very well. It's that times 1000. You're the outsider on and inside LIFE, the outsider on an inside WAY OF BEING. It can be really, terribly isolating if you don't just ignore the feeling and get on with the business of teaching class.
But I was thinking about this feeling. About where that comes from. And I started to think about culture as forms of inside and outside. To really get to know the students, I have to get inside of their culture. So, I started to think about culture as inside and outside, and how we create cultures as ways of being inside. In a sense, then, culture comes from the human feeling of isolation. Culture is maybe our way of covering up that isolated sense we all have. Simply put, if you don't feel an overwhelming sense of your existential solitude, thank your culture.
This led me to realize that human beings, it seems, or at least me, cannot feel at ease unless we are inside of SOMETHING. This is true both spatially and symbolically. To be in something is to be whole. If we are not IN something, we are nothing. Think about it, no matter what happens, no matter where you are, you HAVE to be in something. Imagine yourself not inside of something... That is, imagine yourself in NOTHING. I guarantee you cannot truly do it without obliterating your sense of what it is to be you. If you're like me, you imagined yourself suspended in blackness. But blackness is something. You are IN 'total blackness.' To truly be IN nothing you become nothing. It's like the thought experiment people sometimes try where you wonder what 'the world' or existence would 'look like' if there were no 'you'. But, if there were no you, there would be NOTHING, because you are the one who organizes existence into things to be IN. What's really rough about that is everything that is would not 'disappear.' It would still exist, it would just exist as NOTHING. For there to be something, YOU have to be IN it.
To be you, you have to be contrasted with the something that YOU are IN. If you're not in your room, you're in your house, or you're in your neighborhood, or you're in your city, or you're in your country, or you're in your planet, or you're in this galaxy (which, interestingly, is about when it's no longer 'yours'). This is why space travel is so terrifying to many. I think less because we might die in space, but we can't imagine what we'd possibly be IN when we're in space. Though we call it space, we also know that it somehow IS a whole lot of NOTHING.
So, this being IN is, I am thinking, the source of our culture in two ways, one more talked about than the other. First, we create things to be in (symbolically and really) and, second, we create ways to understand what it is that we are in. The second one is how we usually think of culture. When I was in America, I thought that people in Japan lived in the same reality as me, they just created different ways of understanding what we were both in. When you actually come to a different culture, you realize, no matter how subliminally, that, though you are standing right next to them, you are in the same classroom, you have actually created DIFFERENT THINGS TO BE IN and you are both outside of eachother's INs. Not only do we create the ways that we understand what it is that we are in (which is the shared culture we always talk about), we CREATE THE VERY THINGS THAT WE ARE IN (which we don't talk about because it's our own task). That, I realized, is what the existentialists are talking about when they talk about how we ourselves and nothing else sustain our own existence necessarily. And what the post-modernists mean when they are talking about situatedness: they are talking about the things that we've created to be in.
The point, then, is that walking into a Japanese classroom helped to FINALLY understand postmodernism and Heidegger a little bit better.
--
http://loveandengrish.blogspot.com/
I put my philosophy degree to work this afternoon. And I just have to write this out because I think it's important for me and may be interesting for some. But this is your warning: mind-numbing abstractions and made up words ahead. Turn back now if you're looking for funny stories! Please read on if you can help me reflect on this some more! If you're a busy professor and just want the philosophy, have a look at about the last two paragraphs.
OK. This afternoon at work, to kill some time, I started writing about the feeling I get when walking into the classroom on a daily basis. That is, I started reflecting on the state of being that I experience when entering the classroom. It's a pretty unique experience for me. Further, I think it's generally somewhat of a poignant, telling human experience. This all began because I was trying, as I often do, to 'put myself in the shoes' of the Japanese students that I'm working so closely with. The teachers reading this will know that understanding your students' perspective is crucial if you hope to make a connection with them, and connecting with students is crucial if you hope to effectively teach them things.
So I was thinking about this and I was wondering what it must be like for them to be sitting in class and have this foreigner walk in and start talking to them in English. And I realized, I really and truly have NO IDEA what that must be like. I can kind of imagine myself as a high school student in Spanish class and the possibility of this hired Spanish person walking in who is straight of the plane and ONLY speaks Spanish. That would've been interesting in high school. BUT, that doesn't really actually help me understand what that would be like for a JAPANESE person. That's because, as far as I can tell, being Japanese is something considerably different from being American. I can't explain that.
So I realize that thinking about this, at this point, will get me more or less nowhere. I will only make headway in this department by being here and working with them and being around them and slowly developing an empathetic relationship.
So I give up on that, and I start thinking about what it's like for ME walking into that classroom. I start to write about the anxiety, the fear, the sadness, that all sort of sit in the back of my existence as I smile and talk and laugh through class. I do REALLY enjoy these classes, but these background feelings are undeniable. They're there.
What is that feeling? What is that experience? I wonder to myself as I sit at my desk. And I realize that it's all about being an outsider. It's the feeling that you get when you're in a group and someone says something like, "Man, that apple tasted funny, you know!?" and the whole group falls out with laughter because there's something deeper to the statement that you don't have any grasp of. It's being on the outside of an inside joke, a feeling we all certainly know very well. It's that times 1000. You're the outsider on and inside LIFE, the outsider on an inside WAY OF BEING. It can be really, terribly isolating if you don't just ignore the feeling and get on with the business of teaching class.
But I was thinking about this feeling. About where that comes from. And I started to think about culture as forms of inside and outside. To really get to know the students, I have to get inside of their culture. So, I started to think about culture as inside and outside, and how we create cultures as ways of being inside. In a sense, then, culture comes from the human feeling of isolation. Culture is maybe our way of covering up that isolated sense we all have. Simply put, if you don't feel an overwhelming sense of your existential solitude, thank your culture.
This led me to realize that human beings, it seems, or at least me, cannot feel at ease unless we are inside of SOMETHING. This is true both spatially and symbolically. To be in something is to be whole. If we are not IN something, we are nothing. Think about it, no matter what happens, no matter where you are, you HAVE to be in something. Imagine yourself not inside of something... That is, imagine yourself in NOTHING. I guarantee you cannot truly do it without obliterating your sense of what it is to be you. If you're like me, you imagined yourself suspended in blackness. But blackness is something. You are IN 'total blackness.' To truly be IN nothing you become nothing. It's like the thought experiment people sometimes try where you wonder what 'the world' or existence would 'look like' if there were no 'you'. But, if there were no you, there would be NOTHING, because you are the one who organizes existence into things to be IN. What's really rough about that is everything that is would not 'disappear.' It would still exist, it would just exist as NOTHING. For there to be something, YOU have to be IN it.
To be you, you have to be contrasted with the something that YOU are IN. If you're not in your room, you're in your house, or you're in your neighborhood, or you're in your city, or you're in your country, or you're in your planet, or you're in this galaxy (which, interestingly, is about when it's no longer 'yours'). This is why space travel is so terrifying to many. I think less because we might die in space, but we can't imagine what we'd possibly be IN when we're in space. Though we call it space, we also know that it somehow IS a whole lot of NOTHING.
So, this being IN is, I am thinking, the source of our culture in two ways, one more talked about than the other. First, we create things to be in (symbolically and really) and, second, we create ways to understand what it is that we are in. The second one is how we usually think of culture. When I was in America, I thought that people in Japan lived in the same reality as me, they just created different ways of understanding what we were both in. When you actually come to a different culture, you realize, no matter how subliminally, that, though you are standing right next to them, you are in the same classroom, you have actually created DIFFERENT THINGS TO BE IN and you are both outside of eachother's INs. Not only do we create the ways that we understand what it is that we are in (which is the shared culture we always talk about), we CREATE THE VERY THINGS THAT WE ARE IN (which we don't talk about because it's our own task). That, I realized, is what the existentialists are talking about when they talk about how we ourselves and nothing else sustain our own existence necessarily. And what the post-modernists mean when they are talking about situatedness: they are talking about the things that we've created to be in.
The point, then, is that walking into a Japanese classroom helped to FINALLY understand postmodernism and Heidegger a little bit better.
--
http://loveandengrish.blogspot.com/
Monday, August 31, 2009
My Turn!
Hey Everyone! Konnichi-wa.
So, Isaac gave you the culture shock perspective so I am going to lighten to mood with some fun stories and adventures we have had. Forgive me for not reporting on everything we have done for that would take ages and I don't like to type that much. So far we are settling in, thank God because I wasn't sure at first how well this was going to go for us. As you may know I am currently without work and am thanks to Isaac living off of his hard earned cash. So to give myself some prupose and to help out in every way possible I have been cleaning this house from top to bottom, experimenting with cooking food, and working on some club activites in the community: namely Tai-Chi. To put it short, I have come to the Japan to play the role of 1950's house wife....? Well, here's hoping that something will come along and until then I am just trying to enjoy our new life here.
So, Isaac gave you the culture shock perspective so I am going to lighten to mood with some fun stories and adventures we have had. Forgive me for not reporting on everything we have done for that would take ages and I don't like to type that much. So far we are settling in, thank God because I wasn't sure at first how well this was going to go for us. As you may know I am currently without work and am thanks to Isaac living off of his hard earned cash. So to give myself some prupose and to help out in every way possible I have been cleaning this house from top to bottom, experimenting with cooking food, and working on some club activites in the community: namely Tai-Chi. To put it short, I have come to the Japan to play the role of 1950's house wife....? Well, here's hoping that something will come along and until then I am just trying to enjoy our new life here.
So far we have been able to go to the beach 3 times and we have been to Shimonoseki, Fukuoka and Oshima. Shimonoseki is the last big city in the Yamaguchi Prefecture. If you look on a map it sits right before the last large southern Island of Kyushu. Shimonoseki is a major port to and from S. Korea so there is a lot of Korean influence in this city. This city is also fairly large so it was my first experience of Japan city life. We went there with several other jets for a Fireworks festival!!!! It was so fun. We met a bunch of new people, made some friends as you will see in the pictures, and we got to see some awesome festival activites. You see August is the month of festivals, or "festival season" . Basically the Japanese pick a theme, i.e. floats, fish, water, and they dress up in their kimonos, eat squid on a stick, Octopus fried dough balls and a variety of things dipped in different flavored sugar and watch the biggest damn fireworks I have ever seen.
We did try the Octopus....not too bad actually. But the fireworks really were some of the biggest and most amazing I have ever seen. It was so funny too. First of all this particular festival was itself a fireworks festival where the city we were in was competing with the city across the water on the southern Island of Kyushu. So it was double the fireworks activity. The two cities were competing for the best fireworks display....they literally competed and someone won. Luckily for us, our side won. We still aren't sure what happens to the losing side, but we have heard it's something involving giant live fish and "swim for your lives". But those are just rumors.
Next we went to Fukuoka which is on Kuyushu the last big southern island in Japan. It was a really big city and unfortunately we didn't actually see that much. We did see a temple which was my first time in a real Buddhist temple and we ate some really good noodles. I think the highlight however was the Shinkansen, or "shink" as Isaac likes to call it. You may have heard it called the
Bullet train. IT. WAS. AWESOME. Seriously. It took 4-4.5 hours to travel down to Fukuoka from our home in Yanai on the regular train. It took 45 mins to get home from Fukuoka on the Shink....You be the judge. Needless to say we were a little jet lagged when we got off the shink. We were completely befuddled for having made it home so quickly. We knew the shink was fast but holy crap! we had no idea. So that was definitely amazing. Ashley Caveda, if you're reading this: it's the closest thing to teleportation I have seen so far. Just FYI.
Bullet train. IT. WAS. AWESOME. Seriously. It took 4-4.5 hours to travel down to Fukuoka from our home in Yanai on the regular train. It took 45 mins to get home from Fukuoka on the Shink....You be the judge. Needless to say we were a little jet lagged when we got off the shink. We were completely befuddled for having made it home so quickly. We knew the shink was fast but holy crap! we had no idea. So that was definitely amazing. Ashley Caveda, if you're reading this: it's the closest thing to teleportation I have seen so far. Just FYI.
After this we attended another festival with a new friend also in our program named Tiffany. We went to her island Oshima that later hosted an English Summer camp and saw even bigger fireworks and a local Buddhist ritual and of course more festival food yummies! It was a lot fo fun!
Next I spent some sad days alone in the apartment while Isaac went off to English camp. The funny story from this pathetic 3 days of my life here was when I got Internet. You see getting things in Japan, or doing anything has at least 10 rules that come with it or 10 tasks or challenges if you will. So naturally internet was a 15 pages of insturctions rule jumping phenonmenon. Major things I needed to do : be at home when they deliver the modem because if I am not home then they will leave me a "message of no delivery" all in japanese and I will have to find a japanese-english speaker to help me call the company delivering my modem to set up a time for them to deliver the modem. If I do not know anyone- at the time I did not- then I should contact the english help line but it would take days to set up. There it was the internet at my finger tips and I had stepped out for a couple hours and came home to find the dreaded "message of no delivery" paper in out mailbox.
I was destated, and it was only enhanced by the rapidly blinking light on our home phone that indicated we have 3 messages, and becuase our phone is in japanese I could not figure out how to hear the messages......I tried though, for an hour to no avail.
The next day I was a little more than depressed realizing there was no way for me to spend my time here without some connection to the outside of Japan, or my apartment for that matter. I finally decided after gazing at the slip of paper that I would just call the phone number that was listed on the paper amongst all the japanese script,
A woman answered, "blah blah blah, Japanese words I don't understand....."
Me: "Uh....English?"
She: "Uh....no no. No I can help you. No English."
Well, she wasnt getting away that easily.
me: "Message of no delivery."
She: "Ah yes. Message of No delivery..... uh.....number?"
Well what do ya know, she could understand me....and she said she didn't know english! too modest.
Me: a bunch of numbers
She: "Time to deliver?"
Me: "Anytime! All Times! All Day!"
She: "Okay okay. hai. arigato gozimas."
Me: "Arigato arigato arigato arigato!" (thank you thank you thank you)
2 hours later I had internet!! It was a great day and very exciting if I do say so. So obviously internet has become our lifeline to the world and we are loving every minute of it. I am happily technology's slave.
After that I was invited to the next English camp at Oshima and treated just like Isaac and the rest of the native english speaking teachers. It was awesome and a ton of fun. We were put into groups to come up with skits......please do ask Isaac about his sometime.I will tell you what I saw:
It involves one japanese middle school boy with very limited english as aladdain. 1 canadian as the narrator. 1 Hawaiian as a race car and giant cemntipede bug called the mukade. 1 japanese 45 year old man who announced to the men of the native english speakers that he was an alocoholic and proceeded to get sick form drinking too much at a the teacher's party on the first night there- this gentleman was the "genie of the lamp" and wore what I think were bunny ears and whenever he appeard made a "wooo wooo wooping" sound.....Isaac said the japanese gentleman came up with this all on his own. And lastly Isaac dressed in a hawaiian skirt wearing a wig as princess jasmine.
I think the story line was something like Jasmine (isaac) and Aladdain (middle school english boy) were in Indianapolis at a Indy 500 race and Aladdain got board, although Jasmine seemed to be really enjoying herself eating what looked like corn....Then Aladdain says he is going for a drink at the concessions but never returned. he found a lamp, and out wooping pops a rather peculiar and hung over genie who gave Aladdain 3 wishes. Aladdain wishes to go to Canada, but Jasmine followed and found him. So then Aladdain wishes to go to Hawaii, but Jasmine followed and found him. Finally Aladdin wishes to go to japan. And when Jasmine followed she was chased away by a giant Mucade bug...leaving Aladdin in peace.
With that, I will leave you with your thoughts..... :o)
Please do look at the pctures if you have a chance. Maybe you will get to see Isaac as the lovely princess Jasmine. And besides that we have a new video of our various adventures here in Yanai.
P.S. if you feel like sending us food packages we are craving and unable to find the following:
Dark Chocolate
PEANUT BUTTER
Cheddar Goldfish
Wheat Thins
REAL HONEY
Orbit Gum
We Love you guys! Until next time!
xoxo Hugs,
Thursday, August 27, 2009
August
Erin arrived in Japan on a Saturday evening, 6pm. We took a coach bus from the Hiroshima airport into the city where we could catch a late train for the two or so hour ride back to Yanai station. Erin had been travelling for nearly 24 hours by then, and I had walked all over Hiroshima that afternoon, so we were both plenty tired. We left the platform at Yanai just as it started raining a fairly dismal mountainy mist. Here, though, we`re not in the mountains, so it`s not that refreshing cool of a mountain mist. It`s something more like the humidity has gotten so thick in the stiff night air that it finally just chrystalizes into this gellatious myst that just sits there in the air and oozes overy your body as you push your way through it. The feeling is that your mind knows it must be cool, it`s night and it`s raining, but your body is on overdrive to stay ahead of the heat that`s pressing down on you. It can be hard to handle.
But, combined, the two of us had eight days of experience of living in Japan, which, as a foreigner, is the equivalent of being about two and a half years old. And two and half year olds can`t call for a cab. It`s a fifteen minute walk from the station to our second floor apartment, in Sunheights, but I`d never done it in conditions quite like these. We start out and knew almost immediately that this isn`t going to work. Erin had everything she was going to live with for the next year(s) there with her in her baggage, and as it was getting wet we realized we were in for a long haul.
Miraculously, a lone taxi appeared on the side of the street we had turned down and we began waving our arms frantically. As it often is when you find you need it most, fate was on our side as the cab slowed to a crawl and whipped a u-turn to come to a stop at the karaoke bar now accross the street from us. We clambered over our wet, sweaty, tired selves and our baggage to cross the street and get to the cab. Just as I got to the door, a smartly dressed woman, possibly in her sixties, staggered out of the backseat of the vehicle, mumbling in Japanese, paid the driver, and staggered into the karaoke bar for another round. We hopped in her place and in our best two and a half year old Japanenglish told the driver `Sunheights. Uuuuuuuhhhh, hmmmmm, sumimasen, sumimasen, ummmmmm, Sunheights?` I remembered I had brought a map with me that my predecessor had left, which had my apartment highlighted on it, so I pulled it out and we were whisked away for the short drive to our new home, like lost children at the mall, in the care of whatever passer-by happens to stop and ask what`s the matter.
There`s been a story like this everyday for us here in Japan, with nary an element missing. There`s always the oppressive heat; the somewhat desperate, impossible situation; the fortunate twist of fate; the shred of dark humor; and, so far, the unlikely satisfactory resolution, though sometimes lately we`ve even had some joyful successes (maybe these are becoming more common). I`ve been here now for 25 consecutive days, Erin for 19, which seems like it should qualify for the record for world`s longest emotional roller coaster, until you realize that some folks are going into their third year at this gig.
Unlikely as this may seem at this point, I`m not saying I don`t like it here. To the contrary, I`m in love with this adventure. To some degree, we knew what we were getting into when we signed up for this gig. That is, we knew we were getting into something that we knew absolutely nothing about. Still, you expect a roller coaster ride when you make that decision, and that`s exactly what we`re getting.
I guess the point that I want to make right now is that this country, these people, this geography, these streets, the menus, the currency, the service, the norms, the taboos, the culture, the physics of this place are more different on the whole than anything I could have possibly ever imagined before I stepped off that plane in Narita International Airport and had my first thick, steamy breath of (this was `air-conditioned`) Japanese air. And they're different in a way that is even different than anything I've ever experienced. Even the things that are the same are still different, sometimes mind-meltingly different. I don`t know if there`s anything you can do to prepare for that. Sure, I read some books (three or four, I think) about ``The Japanese,`` so I had an idea of when to bow for what, how the alphabet was contstructed, who was in charge, how I should act when and how not to stand out like an American. But no book or lesson or dialogue could ever prepare a person for how utterly foreign you feel from the moment you take that first breath of Japanese air. It`s like the entire country is in on some secret that I`ll never be able to understand.
You can find all kinds of writing about this in literature about Japan. People say it has to do with the island`s historical isolation, it`s geography has basically encouraged it`s growth into the antithesis of a melting-pot, so that there`s this entrenched, unbending concept of us vs. them, insider and outsider, moreso than is natural in every culture. That sounds weird to me, but it`s the best way I can make sense of it right now. Also, that is the very reason for the JET program at all. Someone in a position of power realized that the lack of inter-cultural understanding in Japan posed a lot of problems in the face of rapid globalization, and the JET program was one method developed to encourage internationalization. I can only imagine what it must have been like for those first ALTs, back in the 80s, placed in towns and schools where no one, literally no one they came in contact with, had ever had any exposure to people of a different race, culture, or even background. This is a cakewalk compared to that, and it`s still really hard.
I also want to make note of this experience that I`ve been having of feeling somewhat guilty for being here at all. Like I said, I feel like about a two and half year old here, with no parents and no one who`s responsible for me, so completley cut off from the ``grown up world`` of insiders. So I`m constantly imposing on random strangers for favors, and I have no idea what it means when I do that, or how to appropriately thank them, or even if they mind or not. I`m just so very cut off from the entire country`s shared reality. It is really, really isolating. And it`s something you can`t prepare for until you`re here, and by then it`s too late. The thing that I feel bad about is the fact that I saw that problem coming before I came here, but I didn`t worry about it very much, telling myself that things would just take care of themselves. I feel like this is a very western, probably very American attitude. That I`m somehow entitled to impose on other cultures and have them take care of me, no matter how ill-prepared I am to engage in meaningul dialogue with them.
In reality, this is probably where a lot the isolation that Erin and I feel is coming from. We came here with an attitude that we could "get by" because of our "industrious," much like we did for a time in Turkey. Indeed, we'll get by, and we'll thrive here, but it's painfully more evident here that when you're getting by it's not because of your industriousness. It's because someone is going out of their way to help you out. And in a country that values things operating according to "the norm" so highly, this can be a really stressful thing to do. In Turkey asking for help was a great way to get involved in the culture, here asking for help is more often than not accompanied with a feeling of being cut-off from the culture.
At the same time, people are just people, no matter where you go. Sometimes I can remember that, and the diffferences don't seem that intense. The differences then seem interesting and exciting. Hopefully this blog will be able to document the story of how we came to get more and more comfortable with these differences that seem so confounding right now.
All that being said, we are getting our footing here. The countryside is stunningly beautiful, and we`re short train rides away from a multitude of nice beaches. We can go to the grocery store now, and we know what are good prices and what are not so good prices.
PLUS, great news, we`ve finally got our apartment arranged so that it actually feels like a home, instead of a place that we`re staying in, where the person who did my job before me used to stay. I`ve learned that, for me, a comfortable, well thought out home is FIRST for feeling comfortable in general. It feels like we'll get more comfortable living in Yanai, Yamaguchi, Japan as a result of having a comfortable home to come back to. We`ll get up pictures of it online soon. The problem with the apartment was these tatami rooms. Our place is actually really big by Japanese standards, two tatami rooms, another room, a kitchen, dining room, a bathroom with a separate shower room, and an entry room. But we didn`t know what the rooms were for. We`d never decorated a tatami room, so we didn`t know how they were supposed to be used. Tatami is realatively fragile so you`re not really supposed to just pile furniture on it. When we got here it was used as a closet, and there was a western bed in the non-tatami room that is attached to the kitchen. We put the desk in it and tried to use it as an office, but that didn`t work. Turns out, tatami rooms are used for sleeping in on futon mats! So we got rid of our western bed and I`ll let the pictures explain the rest. Bottom line, we both really like it and just spent last night feeling quite relieved and comfortable about our new place. That was honestly the first time I`d felt completely comfortable since I got here.
That`s all from my end. It intense but it`s nothing to worry about. We`re as safe as we`ve ever been in our lives (small town Japan is like 1950s rural America, crime wise) and we have generally been enjoying ourselves. We`ve made a lot of trips and have a lot more in the works. We`re planning on buying some nice road bikes as soon as we can save up enough, because we have some beautiful countryside to explore and could ride to many of the beaches near us with suitable bikes. Also, Japan`s roads and drivers are all very bike friendly. Japan is definitely worth a visit and I definitely feel like what I`m doing here is worth all the effort it is taking. Plus, so far I do really enjoy my job a lot. I`ve been to two different summer camps and just enjoy teaching immensely. Plus, the teaching is about as easy as it gets for me, since I only have to fill in the blanks of other teacher`s lesson plans or come up with games, and Japanese kids seem pretty easy to keep entertained. It`s a long leap from kindergarten and public schools in the states, that`s for sure... For example, it`s been summer break since I got here and most of the teachers have come into school for eight hours every day, and most of the students still get here by 8AM to take part in club activities or various other school sponsored events, or just to hang out in the teacher`s room... It`s not like summer break in the states, that`s for sure.
One other thing, if you`ve possibly made it this far (sorry this is so long):
Here`s our address and our location on the map:
Sunheights 202
4711-19
Yanai-shi, Yamaguchi-ken
742-0021
If you feel like sending stuff, it would be awesome if I could get small, cheap 'America/Indiana/Indianapolis' memorabilia. For example, sheets of "Indy500" stickers or something along those lines. I meant to pack more stuff like that but never got around to it, and they're really useful for handing out in class and to general people I meet.
There`s obviously so much more to write, and so many stories to tell. Hopefully Erin will fill in a lot of them when she posts later. But those are my reflections from the first month.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Pics.
New pics and comments on picasa page. Check it out. New blog posts to come soon. Nearly one month in Japan!!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
