karaoke and Kobe

So, gosh, I have so much to catch up on... I had a pretty cool weekend after a pretty lame week, but today (I wrote this on Sunday) I'm glad that I finally have some time to myself because... it's been a while.

This weekend, one of my host family's former host students Mary came to visit with her boyfriend, Taka. She's been doing JET for the past 3 years in Nagano. It was really great to hang out with another native speaker of English, and she brought a lot of upbeat energy to the house. We went out for karaoke (my host dad, Aika, Ryoto my younger host bro, Mary, Taka and I) and sang our hearts out. I hadn't been with my host family yet, even though I know they all really like to sing (and they're all very good, as well). Hiro, my host dad, was taught how to sing by (are you ready for this) his host dad's ex-wife in New York City, where he then had a job as a lounge singer for a short while. His favorite singer is Billy Joel. It was really a pleasure to hear him sing finally (he sang in Japanese, English, and Korean). I hear my host sister Aika singing to herself all the time, and she belted out some JPop, sometimes teaming up for a duet with Ryoto, who surprised me the most. He's 16 (almost 17 I suppose, he's pretty much the exact same age as my brother) and he sang soulful JPop ballads that will surely make any girl swoon. His English pronunciation was also excellent (his "major," I guess specialty? concentration? in high school is English, but I don't ever hear him speak it). I busted out my usual fare and kicked off with the Evangelion opening, since it's by far the nerdist song I know in Japanese. My host family likes to make fun of me for being a nerd (otaku), and I figured it doesn't get much nerdier than Eva (probably the most influential giant robot anime of the past 15 years). They had never heard me sing before and said nice things about my Japanese pronunciation. I fully stand by karaoke as a great means of improving your language skills, since you have to read fast, and also you can hear what you're supposed to sound like and mimic that to your best ability. It's pretty effective.

Sadly, I don't have any really cool PVs to share (this karaoke place, or maybe it was our song selection, wasn't so big on the official PVs).

The next day, Aika, Mary, Taka and I went to Kobe, which is a really cool city. It's not all that far from where we live (maybe an hour and a half all together, including the 20 minute walk from our house) and I would really like to spend more time there. It's very international, which is maybe the most interesting thing. We went to this cute district with lots of European-style houses that you can walk through (you have to pay to get in, though), which isn't that exciting if you've been to Europe or New England, but I can see how native Japanese people (or someone living abroad here) would get a kick out of that kind of architecture. We took a lot of great pictures, although unfortunately my camera battery was dying so I had to conserve.


Uroko House, so named because the exterior walls look like uroko (fish scales).



We ate all-you-can-eat Chinese food in China Town, which was welcome at the time because I was starving (it was about 3 PM by the time we finally ate), but towards the end I definitely started to feel a little sick, probably because I ate too much.

I took this from my cell phone since my camera battery was dying. This is Kobe Port Tower, I think it's called.


Pirate ship, I'm not sure why.

Our next stop was Merikan Park/Harborland, which is definitely another futuristic date spot. I think if there's a Ferris wheel, it automatically counts as a futuristic date spot. We took some purikura and rode the Ferris wheel and walked through the malls, which were really cute. I wish I weren't so broke right now, because I would really love to go shopping... I desperately want another pair of Japanese shoes, but they're pretty expensive and they also don't carry my size a lot of the time. I'm an LL in Japanese sizes (that's large large) despite being an average 8 in the US, and most places don't carry that size (or at least, whenever I ask they're like, no way). Harborland also had a disproportionate amount of gelato and boba (which is called "tapioca" in Japanese, you may know it as bubble tea), but I am definitely okay with that.

The Lock-Up

The night before Andy left for Shikoku, we went up to Kyoto to hang out with Jess. After hanging out in the fanciest McDonald's I've ever seen and doing purikura (which are golden, I wish I could show them to you), we met up with some of her friends and went to dinner at The Lock-Up, which is a prison/dungeon-themed restaurant. They put you in a cell where you sit on the floor around a low table (Japanese-style!) with one blaring light hanging above you. Every hour and a half, I suppose (you're there for 2), they turn off the overhead lights and turn on the blacklights, and paintings of scary faces and handprints appear on the walls and monsters come around and terrorize you. I'm a total wimp, so my screaming was greatly enjoyed by the rest of the party (and I was the closest one to the door), but it was all in good fun. We ate a lot of food and drank a lot of delicious drinks. I always love hanging out with Jess and Andy together, as they're some of my lulziest, closest friends, and we always have a good time. She told us all about her spring break in Australia, which sounded like a much-needed break from Japan for her. I was quite pleased with the whole excursion.

お台場 Odaiba

We spent our last day in Tokyo (well, evening--the first part of the day was spent getting Andy a cell phone, which was no small feat, and doing karaoke) in Odaiba, which neither of us had heard of (shocking, I know), but hit up at the suggestion of Koizumi-sensei. Odaiba is a fancy shopping area on the coast, and also a futuristic date spot. Maybe my favorite part was that we found a cat store where they not only sold cat-related goods (both for humans and for cats), but had a kind of cat petting zoo where you could pay a ridiculous amount of money (it was somewhere between 800 and 1500 yen) to play with real live kitties. I can't bring myself to sink to that level though, no matter how much I love kitties.

We were pretty exhausted and dreading our night bus back to Kyoto and the subsequent train ride to my host family's house in Osaka, but we managed to take some pictures anyway. I hope to go back when I'm not so dead sometime.




The lights on the boats in the water were great, very pretty.


And for some reason, they have the Statue of Liberty there. You can also see Tokyo Tower in the distance in this picture... it's that orange thing to the left.

We ate dinner in a fancy Italian restaurant that had a great view of the city over the water.

横浜 Yokohama

Andy and I have this joke about おしゃれデートスポット (oshare deito spotto) trendy date spots in Japan, mostly because of Detroit Metal City. But anyway. We went to a couple, including the futuristic Minato Mirai 21 in Yokohama before we had dinner with Koizumi-sensei, my former Japanese teacher who was at Oberlin for my first 2 years.





One of the clearest indicators of an オッシャレデートスポット is a Ferris wheel (観覧車 kanransha). The one at Minato Mirai is beautiful, and huge, but we couldn't ride it because it was the one day of the year that it wasn't open. So we took pictures instead.








It was windy.

Yokohama is totally cute. We also had an adventure trying to figure out where all these gothic kids were coming from... at first we thought they just like to hang out at Minato Mirai, but eventually we followed them and found out the cause: a Nightmare concert in the convention hall. They did the OP and ED to the first half of Death Note... unfortunately, those are their only good songs. I really love that fashion though, and want to try it out sometime. It's so fancy though, so it's expensive. But we had a great time checking out all these kids in their crazy outfits.

We had a great time eating delicious tonkatsu (fried pork cutlets) with Koizumi-sensei at a restaurant which overlooked the street by Yokohama Station, which was delightfully filled with taxis and pretty lights (I'm an absolute sucker for nice cityscapes). It was so great to see her, and she told us that she just signed a contract with Oberlin and is coming back in the fall! I told her everyone is going to be so excited to hear, and it's true. Man, I love Oberlin, and Oberlin's presence in Japan is also pretty fabulous. I'm glad I picked a school with a great East Asian Studies program by coincidence.

Tokyo Disneyland

So I have approximately a million things to say about Tokyo Disneyland... I really wanted to write an academic comparison paper comparing it to the one I am familiar with in Anaheim (god, what has a liberal arts education done to me?). Andy kept mentioning an article he read about it in a book called Remade in Japan which I guess I'll have to check out now.

Anyway, in case you are not familiar with my relationship with Disneyland, I grew up in LA, and therefore have been to the original Disneyland quite a few times in my life. This summer, I went 3 times with different people, and had lots of fun! So naturally, I wanted to check out Tokyo Disneyland.

The first big difference was that TDL (as they call it) is really only about 30 minutes away by train from central Tokyo, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to access than the one in Anaheim, which in itself is a good distance away from LA (maybe an hour in good traffic) but you also have to brave the 5, a treacherous freeway, which when faced in rush hour can mean about 2-3 hours. But even with crowded trains, it was no problem to get to TDL, and they drop you off almost right in front of the park. I was proud of Tokyo for not renaming the stop to Tokyo Disneyland (it's 舞浜 Maihama).

They have Cinderella's castle at TDL, where we have Sleeping Beauty's, and I liked Cinderella's asymmetrical design a lot more.


Here's me being a snarky American in front of it. It's their 25th anniversary. We had our 50th a few years ago.

Probably our biggest mistake was that we were there during spring break, which is Japan's equivalent of summer vacation, so everyone in the world Japan was there. I generally avoid Disneyland at its busiest times, so perhaps it's that I'm not used to being there when it's crowded, but I've never experienced 2+ hour wait lines before. The longest we saw, as we were getting ready to go, were 210 minutes (that's 3 and a half hours, kids!) for Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, I think.

Another interesting thing was lines for snacks, which were absurdly long. I really wanted a churro but never got one because the lines were always too long. T__T Also, their flavors of popcorn ranged from very strange to delicious-sounding (soy sauce and butter, curry, honey, and caramel) and tons of people had purchased the fancy popcorn buckets shaped like characters.

We did eat something Mickey-shaped... it was this pizza, which did a really good job of tasting like American and not Japanese pizza.



I wish we had a picture of the Mickey-shaped manju (meat buns), because we decided that was the quintessence of Tokyo Disneyland.

While we were waiting to get on Pirates, a cast member dressed as a very convincing Jack Sparrow came through, and when he passed by us he patted me on the shoulder and said, "'Allo, mates." Future career options: cast member at Disneyland in Anaheim who speaks to Japanese tourists, or cast member at TDL who speaks to English-speaking tourists.

The crowd was mostly Japanese college students, I felt. Of course there were families, and high school/middle school aged kids, but I saw a lot of groups of girls and also couples (Disneyland is a popular date spot in any country, after all). There were only a handful of non-Japanese people, but I imagine it's the off-season for them... although what with cherry blossom-viewing season right around the corner, they'll probably show up soon.

Everyone was wearing their special Disney headgear, which changes pretty frequently from what I gather. The must-have item of the moment were little hats that are attached to hair clips, so they're comically small. Probably the weirdest one I saw was a girl who had a Stitch hood/cape thing that pretty much looked like you had skinned Stitch and made him into a cape... his head was a hat on your head, and it went down to his hands which were little mittens for you. Kind of weird?

One of the more strictly Japanese parts of TDL was the gift shop at the end. As we were leaving, the crowd in the gift shop for omiyage (presents you bring your friends and family after visiting someplace special) was enormous. The line for making your purchases was just as bad as for the rides. I was glad I bought mine ahead of time in Adventureland. The sheer variety of differently packaged boxes of chocolate, snacks, candy, etc., was also staggering... omiyage is such an important, crazy part of Japanese culture, one I have definitely not mastered. But I get cut a little slack since I'm a 外人... hopefully.

We had a lot of fun, despite it being mad crowded. I hope to go back someday when it's not so crazy.

Adventures in Tokyo

Alright, so, adventures... Andy and I did a lot of cool stuff, where should I start?

While we were hanging out in 原宿 Harajuku, we stumbled upon a Mexican restaurant that claimed to have tacos, and since I miss Mexican food so much, we had to go check it out. What we ate wasn't really Mexican food though. I had taco rice, which is taco meat over white rice, and is the Japanese idea of Mexican food (I hear it originated in Okinawa).




Here's me showing off the decor. See, a Corona neon sign! Authentic!

We also had a pretty great time in 秋葉原 Akihabara (Akiba to those of you in the know), also known as nerd heaven, cuz that's where all the anime shit is, and fancy electronics, and maid cafes. Before you ask, yes we did go to a maid cafe. It was great because they have to tell you that you're so good at Japanese (it's part of the whole subservient, ingratiating shtick), and you can pay extra to take your picture with a maid or play a game with one. We have pictures, they're Polaroids, and hand-decorated at that. I did my best to photograph it.

The pink in the middle is the Japanese equivalent of "meow." At the bottom it says @home cafe (the name of the cafe, obviously) and Mistress Siena ♥ Master Andy ♥ Rinka (the maid). Uhhh... lol.

What else did we do in Tokyo... we hung out in 新宿　Shinjuku and 渋谷　Shibuya, and of course around our hotel in 上野 Ueno. We ate a lot of bakery stuff, cream puffs, and anything 抹茶 green tea-flavored that we could get our hands on. I think my favorite might have been the green tea cafe latte we had in Shibuya... green tea AND coffee? What could be better?

上野公園 Ueno Park

I am terribly behind on my spring break adventures so here's the digest version.

The night bus to Tokyo was definitely an adventure, and not one I think I want to repeat in the near future. I got to to Tokyo Station at 5:30 in the morning (ACK) and had to kill a lot of time before I went to pick up Andy at Narita at 2, so I wandered around Ueno Park and took a million pictures and eventually went shopping when the stores opened up at 10. Here's some photo highlights, there's an entire album on Facebook.


Okay, so this isn't actually Ueno Park, it's Ueno Station, but I love this mosaic and remember it from the very first time I was in Japan with my family. We must have been here to take the train to Narita, because I remember being exhausted but thinking this was really cool.


You wash your hands here before approaching the shrine.


These are fortunes. You tie them up.


Some cherry blossoms.


I looooove five-story pagodas. I could only photograph this one from behind a fence and some trees, though.


More sakura.

dress, and hair clip collection

Interesting turn of events this evening... but anyway...

I bought this dress in Tokyo and I'm in love with it.

Strap detail.

Also I think that my hair clip collection is suitably complete for the moment. I've been on a bit of a rampage. These are all the hair accessories I've purchased since I've been here. I think I'm done for a while.

サボった

Funny linguistic note: the Japanese verb for "to skip class" is サボる (saboru) which comes from the word "sabotage," and is written with the alphabet for loan words, so you know it's true.

So now that Andy is on his way to Shikoku for organic farming adventures, I have to deal with the fact that my spring break is really over. It was so wonderful, though. I have lots of good stories that I'll hopefully be able to document later, but unfortunately, I have my midterms in Japanese this week (1 oral, 2 written, and a paper, but I had to turn in a draft of the paper already) and I should really get to studying oh, about... right now. I decided this morning to skip class today (!) so that I could go with Andy to Umeda where he got on his bus, and I think that that was a really excellent idea. We put his bike together and loaded it all up, and I borrowed a ママチャリ mama chari (housewife bike--I talked about them once in that post when I went to the public bath with Aika) from my host family and we rode to the subway station by my house. We considered riding all the way to Umeda, but didn't really know how to get there. Andy's bike is really cool. I feel bad that he hasn't really been able to ride it yet and has had to haul it around in a bag. I'm not one for lots of physical activity (although biking is fun) or camping, but I found myself really wanting to go with him on this great adventure he's about to have. I'm hoping we can hang out during Golden Week.

春休み！！！

UUGGGGHHHHH IT'S FINALLY SPRING BREAAAAKKKKKKKKKK

Okay, so it's still Friday, and it's raining, but who cares? I don't have to go to class next week!!! And in fact, I am going somewhere completely different... Tokyo, that is. It is the beginning of Andy's epic bike journey (hey, look man, I'll even plug your blog for you to my devoted readership http://andybikesjapan.blogspot.com) which means we're going to go to Akiba and Tokyo Disneyland, and all those other biking-related places.

So, I'll spend this weekend resting, cleaning, packing, and prepping myself for my overnight bus ride to Tokyo (leaves at 10 PM, gets there at 6:30 AM! FUN). The thing I am the most concerned about is hauling my luggage to the station from my house, which takes like 17 minutes. I'm such a wimp. At least I'll get that part out of the way first, right?

I should probably be using this space to write something really profound about the first half of my semester (has it really been that long?). Maybe I should show you a graph of how I feel like my Japanese has improved.

Yeah, how do you like that? That's mostly in reading and speaking. Writing, whatever. As Mike Wert always said, you don't need to know how to write Japanese. But I definitely feel like my exposure to kanji I didn't know before has been really high and this has been tremendously beneficial. And, of course, chatting with my Japanese friends and trying to listen to their conversations... always challenging. My listening skills could definitely use improvement though. I will strive hard.

I probably won't update while I'm in Tokyo, but I'll try and take lots of pictures.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

This is what studying looks like

I got up to go take my bath, and laughed at the state my bed was in. Just add me and my laptop and here's my evening! That's a political cartoon in the foreground, just for your information.

I have a midterm tomorrow, so that's why.

I ATE A コロッケバーガー　CROQUET BURGER FROM MOS BURGER TODAY, IT WAS SO GOOD. Croquet (I'm not sure if that's the right spelling in English) is like, deep fried potato mash. Sometimes there's meat, or pumpkin. THEY'RE SO GOOD. My burger also had shredded cabbage (or lettuce, I'm not sure, but Japan is all about the cabbage) and something that tasted like okonomiyaki sauce. DELICIOUS.

PVとプリクラ

Ugh, I am so tired!! I had fun tonight though. I've been slacking a little on my documentation of fun things that I'm doing... so I'll take this moment to catch up a little.

I've been to karaoke 2 more times, once with Ryoko and her friends Kana and Mahoko, and also a fellow exchange student (and Californian) Andrew (he's Ryoko's other Speaking Partner as well, by coincidence). Andrew and I had a pretty good time doing various ridiculous duets, including but not limited to Britney Spears' Toxic, My Heart Will Go On, and A Whole New World. It was definitely fun to have another native English speaker around for the ride.

Here's the プリクラ to prove it happened:

This one cracks me up, although some weird digital glitch happened and Ryoko's face got all distorted, so she stuck a flower over it (I think she did this from her cell phone? Crazy).

This was the PV of the night, care of Mahoko. I really enjoy the SNES motif and the multiple costume changes.



Hey, did you know YouTube lets you choose your video control bar when embedding videos now? I chose blue to match my blog!

And then today, I went out with my other Japanese crew (Ai and her friends Asami and Misato) and switched off English and Japanese every other song. I rocked Pat Benetar's Heartbreaker, which I have been searching for. I also got to do Sublime's Same in the End, which came as a great surprise to me because they only had 2 Sublime songs (the other being What I Got, I was looking for Santeria) and that one is not that well known. Asami won the best song choice though when she pulled out Queen's Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy. I was in the middle of singing Say It Ain't So when she queued it up, I stopped and went I LOVE THAT SONG!!! We were happy because no one ever knows that one, Japanese or American, and it's one of my personal favorites. I also got to do the pillows' Century Creepers which I had been wanting to try out. I can't hit the very lowest lines but it was otherwise a success. I closed with Life Is Like A Boat, because nobody knows who I really am.

I seem to have started a tradition of always doing the pillows' The Third Eye for my first song. I really like that song.

Have your プリクラ:

I think the effects they do on the eyes make me look kind of like an alien. Not to mention the skin color thing.

Prompt: karaoke, obviously. I gave it my all. And Misato drew us some nice microphones.

PV of the night was this one, from Misato. Possibly the most female-empowering PV I've ever seen? It's also really weird, but enjoyable! I picked pink this time! ALSO, I can't seem to find the official PV anywhere on the Internets, so this isn't the original, it's some random person singing, but the important part is the video. This girl sounds cute though.



A note on Japanese PVs: It is of note that Japanese music videos are not called music videos, they are called promotional videos, or PVs for short. To the native English speaker and liberal arts student that I am, this would suggest to me that these videos are not about making art surrounding other art, they are about promoting a product to be consumed. And certainly, not all Western music videos are intended as works of art, and certainly a cool music video helps you sell a song, but I'd like to preserve artists' integrity a little bit, wouldn't you?

Okay, and I want to leave you with one more PV, because I love this song (fans of Bleach will recognize it), and I had never seen this PV before and it's so cute. (See Andy, I told you this was a happy song.)



Ugh this girl is adorable. And look at her play that piano!

Okay, I think that's enough from me for tonight, I do have some homework I should be doing. ALSO THIS IS THE LAST WEEK OF CLASSES BEFORE SPRING BREAK YES!!!!

Right of the Family Mart, Past the Filtering Plant

~*~My Commute Part III: The Station to School~*~

I figured I should finish this up before I do posts about other things, so here is the last pic spam of my everyday route to school.


Here is outside the station.　That is a hill in the distance that I walk up. There will be a picture from the top of it looking down later.


Cute storefront featuring pigs.


The top of the hill. The point of this picture was to illustrate how vending machines materialize out of nowhere all the time.


Ah yes, the Family Mart. From here, I have to turn down this boring pathway which I probably didn't take any pictures of because it's boring.


Once the boring path ends, I turn down this residential street with lots of fancy-looking houses. They are pretty interesting, and I enjoy their landscaping.






The final stretch involves walking down this street past the filtering plant, and it's very plain and urban as you can see.


Here's the entrance to the filtering plant, which is conveniently right next to the west gate of Kansai Gaidai. They're not really separated, but if you try and walk through the plant gates, the security guy will tell you to go to next door.


And finally, we reach Kansai Gaidai. The gates say 関西外国語大学 which is the official name of the school (Kansai Gaikokugo Daigaku, meaning something like Kansai Foreign Language University). Inside the gates are always cute security guard who tell you good morning and help you cross the treacherous street (which is nowhere near treacherous but in Japan, no one crosses against the light). The people going through this intersection are on foot, on bike, on scooters (ugh, I want one) or motorcycles, in cars, or in big trucks making deliveries or something. But mostly when I'm there, it's just exchange students crossing the street.


Bonus Shot! From the top of the hill going back to the station at sunset.

And that concludes the thrilling journey of my commute. It takes about an hour 10 minutes from my room to my classroom. I'm starting to shave off a little on the walking parts, and I don't really notice how long it takes anymore, so I suppose you could say that I have adjusted to 通学 (tsuugaku, commuting to school). And it does provide a great excuse to play Phoenix Wright everyday... I finished the first game the other day, finally. Plus, it's good exercise which I don't normally get (ssh) so I can't really complain.

Get on the Train, Probably Transfer at Kayashima

~*~My Commute Part II: The Train~*~

My original plan for this post was going to just be a picture of the train accompanied by the caption: And then I get on the train for 15-30 minutes. But then I started taking pictures of more shit. So here we go!


Here is the inside of my station! This was a particularly busy instant, as a train had just arrived. Normally it's not this crowded... my stop is pretty much local-only. It's got a mall, but from what I understand, not much else.


Train tracks. Cool. This is the direction I will be traveling in.


Most of the time, I have to transfer 2 stops after mine (some mysterious train scheduling business is going on) so it's normally pretty empty, although I guess I took this pic relatively late in the morning.


Here is my train, devoid of passengers, ready to go wherever it is that trains that aren't in service go...


And then, conveniently, a few minutes later another train arrives across the platform, and I continue on my merry way. I'm normally engrossed in my game of Phoenix Wright at this point, and generally play standing up until I can snag a seat. It's only about 15 minutes total if I don't have to transfer, but if I do, it takes about a half an hour. Which means more time to play Phoenix Wright!

Anyway, I really like the Keihan, you never have to wait long for a train, and they're pretty new and shiny-looking. And it will take me all the way to Shijo for when I play with Jess.

Don't miss the last installment of this thrilling trilogy, coming soon...