またな

Starting tomorrow, I am on vacation, so don't look for me.

jk I'm never that far away from the Internet.

Expect pictures.

♥ s

quick update and handy tool

I wanted to point you Japanese-learning types towards http://www.hiragana.jp/ which is a secret I learned a while ago but forgot about until just now. It takes all the kanji on a webpage and adds ふりがな。 Very useful in combination with lyrics in Japanese!

In other news, I had a rather awesome day. I bought 100 yen juggling bean bags at the 100 yen shop and while they are much too light, there are 4 of them (I need to learn how to do 4 ball, I can only do 2 and 3 ball), and I missed juggling. I also finally asked if I could play the guitar in my host brothers' room, which was ~the best~ idea I've had in a while. My fingers hurt because I haven't played since I've been here and I played a lot this afternoon. I've been busy learning more Neko Case songs and brushing up on my old repertoire of the pillows and Voxtrot. I wish I could play more but actually my fingers cannot handle it. The guitar was covered in dust so I'm just going to kidnap it unless someone wants it back. I don't know why it took me so long to ask. Just goes to show, you have to know how to keep yourself happy.

広島 Hiroshima pt. II

So what else did we do in Hiroshima... we wandered around some department stores and ate bakery food, because that's what we do apparently. Of course we had some Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, which in contrast to Osaka-style, is layered instead of mixed together and also commonly features soba. NOW, I love Osaka, and will thus defend it, and its okonomiyaki. My host father insists that they are entirely different and thus do not merit comparison... but I think eating it all mixed together is easier, even if it makes for a less dramatic preparation, since they generally make it on a hot surface at your table.

Our second day was a little cloudy, but we went and checked out Hiroshima castle, which is a reconstruction so Andy wasn't as interested in going in as he was in taking MySpace pics outside (though of course I love the MySpace pics and will never turn down an opportunity).





After that, we checked out the Hiroshima Museum of Art, which had mostly modern European paintings (impressionists and the ilk) but also some Japanese paintings in a European style, which I thought was interesting.

For lunch, we had Italian バイキング baikingu which is not biking, it is in fact viking and it means all-you-can-eat. The people working there assumed we couldn't speak Japanese, which I suppose is the product of being in such a heavily touristy area, but we reassured them that our comprehension level was at least acceptable. I realized a while ago that the first time I came to Japan after having studied Japanese, I thought that everyone was so impressed by the fact that I had some knowledge of the language, but now I know that everyone is just relieved that they don't have to try and speak English.

It was a little tough to come back to school after having such a fun weekend, but I studied all of my vocab on the shinkansen, so I didn't fall behind in my work. I'm really glad I decided to go, even if I didn't get to see Andy's mom who ended up arriving after I went back home to Osaka due to confusion about the international date line. And now Golden Week is only just around the corner, woohoo!

宮島 Miyajima

I've been feeling pretty down the past few days, but trying to keep myself entertained by keeping up with new anime (FMA, Bleach, Kuroshitsuji) and doing fun things, like going to Pokemon Center with Nella and eating various kinds of cuisine in Namba with Ryoko and friends; Jess and Althea, respectively. I still haven't caught up on the adventures Andy and I had last weekend in Hiroshima and Miyajima though, so it's time for a little catch-up.

Miyajima was overwhelmingly beautiful. It's an island off the coast of Hiroshima and one of the three famous "views of Japan" known for their beauty. On the ferry ride over, I stuck my face in the ocean wind and was exhilarated. The pictures I took from the ferry aren't too fabulous, but you can get an idea.





Luckily for us, we managed to catch the very tail-end of the sakura, as they are all gone now (at least where I live).

On the island, there are tons of wild deer just hanging out looking for some food from tourists. It was kind of hilarious to see them sauntering around, mostly minding their own business, completely accustomed to the whirlwind of human activity around them.



They even pose for pictures. We saw a tour guide of sorts persuading one to stand with a group of tourists as they were having their picture taken in front of the torii.

The torii is the quintessence of Miyajima, probably, so we took a lot of pictures. Supposedly, it is the most stunning at high tide where it looks like it's "floating," but we were there as the tide was almost all the way out. This did mean, though, that we could take off our shoes and wander into the water a little bit, which was a little cold but nothing years of practice in the Pacific ocean didn't prepare me for.









The rest of the day we spent climbing Mt. Misen, which we misjudged in terms of time commitment. We saw a sign warning about wild monkeys, which I did not believe until I saw some... much like the deer, they were just chillin'. There was something distinctly East Asian about climbing a mountain via millions of tiny stone steps surrounded by luscious foliage and wild monkeys.



Andy said, "Didn't you know, the days I don't bike 100 km I have to climb a mountain."

About halfway through I lost steam (when we started paying attention to how much more we had left to go, it was 2.2 km [1.37 miles]) but with a lot of encouragement, I made it. We were thoroughly rewarded with the view from the very top of the mountain and also the knowledge of our baddassery.









After that, we took the gondolas down (which we could have taken up, but after all that I'm glad we didn't) and gradually made our way back to our hostel in central Hiroshima and then had delicious, spicy, cold tsukemen for dinner at a restaurant called Bakudan, which means bomb, so I'm glad someone has a dark sense of humor somewhere. I am notoriously weak when it comes to spicy food, and on a scale of 0-20 I chose 3, although the gradation was pretty steep according to their chart... I think flames started coming out of your mouth at around 7 or so. After dinner, we did some very last-minute 花見 as the flowers were about halfway gone, and found a party organized by 外人 in the Peace Park and chatted with some New Zealanders about life in Japan.

痴漢

A few days ago, the Center for International Education at Kansai Gaidai sent out an e-mail advising students to be careful around town, as lately there had been a couple of reported incidents of girls being groped around the area. Today while I was walking home around 6:30 PM, on a street almost directly in front of my host family’s house, some young guy rode by on his bike, grabbed my ass, and rode away. Flustered, I yelled at him, though couldn’t do anything else because he was faster than me, and the only other person on the street was a middle-aged woman at the opposite end. I wished I knew how to say what I really wanted to tell him in Japanese, but I was glad I did anything at all instead of remaining silent, like so many Japanese women do. When I got home, I told my host father, who was extremely sympathetic, and was glad that I wasn’t hurt or robbed, and told me to forget about it. And sure, I’m glad I wasn’t hurt or robbed either, but the incidence rate of this kind of sexual harassment is so high in Japan, and women are told to just forget about it because there’s nothing you can do. So much of it goes unreported, because women don’t think there’s anything the police can do for them, and they’re pretty much right. So for exactly that reason, I told my host family, and I e-mailed Kansai Gaidai about it, because at least it’s being reported somewhere, and I am not silenced. (To Kansai Gaidai’s credit, as I was writing this they e-mailed me and asked me to come in and provide more details so that they could report it to the police by my host family’s house.)

I am the most frustrated and angry because I already feel like as a woman and a foreigner, I can never be an integrated member of Japanese society. It’s hard for me to articulate how I feel oppressed as a woman here, but I definitely do. And it’s clear to me, and my host family, and Kansai Gaidai, that foreign women are a particular kind of easy target for chikan (perverts), probably not only because we’re exotic but because we have less agency. I understand that this kind of thing happens everywhere, and of course it happens in the United States, but because this kind of sexual harassment is so common in Japan, and because Japan is otherwise absurdly safe, and because women have significantly less agency here, etc., I am outraged.

広島 Hiroshima

So I went to Hiroshima last month as part of my Peace, Development, and Democratization in Asia class, and did not blog about it, mostly because I needed more time to digest and organize my thoughts. I wrote a reaction paper about it which I planned on putting here. I think I will.

March 7, 2009

So today I went to Hiroshima.

I wasn’t even sure I was going to go, but ultimately decided I would be sorry if I didn’t. Especially after watching Peter Jennings’ Why the Bomb Was Dropped on Hiroshima in class, I felt I had to go.

My father, who was born 7 months after the end of World War II, once said to me at the beginning of my Japanese studies about how he was raised to fear and hate the Japanese, and that he thought it was interesting (to say the least) that both of his children had become engrossed in the culture and studied the language (we even took a family vacation to Japan in 2004). He probably doesn’t remember telling me this, since my fascination with Japan began long ago. His father immigrated to America from Ecuador and served in the Navy during the end of World War II, and he was also who I was thinking about prior to my trip today. I felt I owed it to both of them, my grandfather the veteran, and my father the historian, to go on this trip to Hiroshima.

I’ll admit I was nervous, but Hiroshima Station and the surrounding area looked like every other Japanese city I’d been in. I had been mentally preparing myself, but had let my guard down momentarily prior to getting off the tram at 原爆ドーム前　Genbaku Dome Mae (literally "in front of Genbaku Dome"). As soon as I stepped off, the ruins of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall (now better known as the A-Bomb or Genbaku Dome) completely filled my field of vision. I thought, Ah. This is it. and drew a shuddering breath and stepped closer.





It is haunting to see this blown-out skeleton of a building in the midst of green trees by the riverbank, surrounded by your normal, everyday, modern Japanese buildings and busy streets. Later, in the Peace Memorial Museum, I saw replicas of the area surrounding the Genbaku Dome (which was almost the hypocenter of the explosion) after the bomb was dropped, and with the exception of a small handful of other structures, everything else was completely obliterated, absolutely flattened by the bomb. It is remarkable to me that anything could survive such a powerfully destructive force that could yield no mercy, yet those who survived and the Genbaku Dome stand in defiance of that logic.

Emotionally, I held myself together while walking through the museum and listening to 被爆者　hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) Ms. Mieko Matsubara’s speech, but the phrasing of why Hiroshima decided not to tear down the Genbaku Dome but rather preserve it brought tears to my eyes. I don’t have the exact sentence, but what really struck me was the last word: forever. Hiroshima as a city has decided to keep the Genbaku Dome as it is as a reminder of the horrors of warfare and to promote a message of peace forever. It is a word so lasting, so permanent, juxtaposed with the unrelenting cruelty of the purposeful destruction of human lives, that said to me, Even though we are mortal, even though we inevitably die and our buildings are reduced to rubble, our wish for peace can never be destroyed.

Although this might sound a little strange, I am glad that Hiroshima as a city has been able to take this horrible tragedy and use it in order to promote peace and call for the disarming and destruction of all nuclear weapons. It offers some faint glimmer of hope for the future, even in the face of mankind at its absolute worst.

To which I would like to add, I'm really glad I went back to Hiroshima for a second time. I was pretty traumatized by the Peace Museum, and did not have the emotional energy to really think of fun things I wanted to do in the area. So I was glad when Andy was stopping over there to rendezvous with his mom who has joined him on his biking journey, because I wanted to go back and try and deal with the city as a whole. Also, the city itself is beautiful.

Since the dome is in a central location and also is a stop in the middle of the major tram lines, it's difficult to miss, but I'm glad it's there. I even found myself looking out for it whenever we crossed a bridge in the area. I don't think Hiroshima's experience of being the first city to have the atomic bomb dropped on it should be covered up or ignored, least of all by Americans visiting the city. I won't say that I came to terms with it, because it's not mine to come to terms with, but after spending a few days there, I gradually came to recognize that it's something the city carries, and it does it well. It's intense, but I'm glad it's there. It made me ask myself what I am going to do for this world.

桜 Sakura

Lots to catch up on, so I'll keep it brief. More on Facebook.

Spring

So today the weather was beautiful, and I hear it's supposed to be nice all week, and thank god. Although strangely enough, warm weather made me miss Oberlin in the spring, because it's so lovely when everything is green and you can hang out on the grass and all that stuff. I register for classes next week. Oh, Oberlin.

But anyway, Japan. Here's a picture of the front of Kansai Gaidai:


The sign says, basically, "Congratulations, Freshmen!" or new students, or more literally, accepted students (the new school year starts in April in Japan). The big building in the middle is administration, the one on the left is the library, I'm not sure what the one on the right is, but behind it (you can't see it) is where the Center for International Education is, which is where I spend all my time. I just thought it made a nice shot.

Before our Takarazuka adventure, Jess and I ate tonkatsu at a restaurant on the 28th floor in Umeda. We had a lovely view of the Ferris wheel at the department store HEP, which I rode last week but did not publish pictures of in the blog, so we'll play a little catch-up.


Me and Ryoko




You board the Ferris wheel at the 8th floor or something, so you're really high up.




And here's the view from the tonkatsu restaurant.

Aside from the sun, the other thing that comes out in the springtime in Japan is sakura. Jess and I had our own version of 花見 (flower-viewing) in Takarazuka, which I will just commemorate with these photos.


Jess is alive, I promise!






First time I have ever used the macro setting on my camera.



Hopefully I can take some better shots before they all disappear, which I hear happens fast.

Takarazuka

(I never take enough pictures!)

Yesterday, Jess and I made the pilgrimage up to the town of Takarazuka, which is coincidentally where Osamu Tezuka is from (probably the greatest mangaka of all time, he created Astro Boy), and that's where the Tezuka Museum is as well. But that's not why I was there (although chances that Andy drags me back there for the Tezuka Museum: very high). I was there to see a musical version of Zorro put on by one of the famous takarazuka troupes.

If you are not familiar with takarazuka, it is an all-female troupe that performs gaudy, sparkly musicals for the benefit of their legions of obsessed fans, who are mostly middle and high school aged girls and housewives. The subtext here is incredible, but I don't really feel like going into it right now.

Ever since I learned about takarazuka when doing my independent research project over Winter Term my freshman year on Japanese queer identities, I've been pretty fascinated by it. It's highly competitive, and of course like any other mode of entertainment, once you get too old, you're out, and it's time for the next wave to come in. We watched a documentary on it once in Wert's Modern Japanese History class, and that said that former otokoyaku (the women who specialize in the male roles) are supposed to make really good wives, because they understand a male perspective.

Before Zorro, we were treated to a dance performance centering around wind and woodblock prints, and Japanese things, which is kind of rare for takarazuka (although I did see some posters for some Japanese-looking plays coming up). Mostly they tend to stick to very Western themes. They're big on historical romances. But I was thoroughly impressed with the technical elements of this performance, they clearly have quite a LOT of money to spend. I think my favorite was when a giant circle in the middle of the enormous stage began to rotate, with dancers frozen in male-female couples wearing nice hats, while the main male-female couple (in their nice kimono) wove between them and the lanterns. It was like they were on a lake, it was very stunning.

Zorro was pretty fabulous but needed more sparkles. The costumes were very nice though, I liked those a lot. I can't say too much for the music--the chorus to one of the main songs was, Viva Zorro 今から, and in case you don't speak Spanish and Japanese, that means, "Long live Zorro, starting now!" which just doesn't sound that great, let me tell you. But it was still really enjoyable, and there was lots of dancing, and when there were sparkles, oh, there were sparkles. After the story had clearly ended, they segued into Jazz Zorro, where every main character got to do one last huge dance number in more modern-looking outfits with a more abstract feel.

So I mean, I would go again. I'm really sad that we missed the Phoenix Wright one, I don't think anything in the world will be able to make up for that loss. But I'm glad I got to go. And you know, it was all in Japanese, but I understood the most important parts (though I did get lost when the fancy Spaniards were talking). Hooray listening comprehension?

Sora Cafe

Yesterday, I went with Ai and friends to the Sora Cafe in Hirakata for lunch. It was really cute. It's almost open-air (sora means sky), but not quite because Japan's weather isn't that nice. But they do a really nice job of incorporating the space with an outside feeling despite the fact that you're on the 6th floor. You get a set lunch with a kind of Japanese-Western fusion going on which comes with a ton of food and all the fruit juice and iced tea or coffee you can drink. They also have a 200 yen discount (about 1/3 off) on 2 desserts-of-the-day, so for all that food (and fruit juice!) it was really a pretty good deal. We had a good time talking about school and language and music. The Japanese students at Kansai Gaidai start classes in a week and a half, so they're all in a tizzy over the last traces of their spring break (which is like our summer break, so they're all about to become 2nd years after being off since the beginning of February). They're taking a trip to Korea beforehand though, so hopefully they won't get hit by that missle. Honestly, North Korea, what are you thinking?

I'm going to Takarazuka on Sunday (!!!) so look out for a post about that. And next weekend I'm going back to Hiroshima to meet up with Andy and his mom, who's joining him for part of his biking journey. Fun things!

P.S. Chris said it seems like all I talk about is food and Ferris wheels. This is probably true, isn't it?