a year in japan

Japantown for some Japansickness

2008-09-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

Today I went to Japantown, ostensibly to go grocery shopping. Of course I ended up spending the whole afternoon there, feeling very nostalgic. Also, Japanese keeps popping out of me at unexpected times. Today, as I was squatting down in the supermarket aisle looking at ochazuke seasoning, I had my little shopping basket on the ground in the middle of the aisle. A man coming down the aisle said excuse me as he passed the basket, and I moved it, saying "sumimasen" just like I would have in Japan! "Sumimasen, I mean, sorry!" is actually what I mumbled.

Yesterday, I went to dim sum in Chinatown. In response to the lady pushing the food cart, asking if I wanted something, I said "Hai, I mean yes, uhh...okay..." and then ending lamely in Mandarin. It's like the switch in my head that means "foreign" has been thrown over to "Japanese."

So I wandered around the supermarket today, feeling very excited about sesame salad dressing, Japanese roasted rice green tea (I paid a fortune! comparatively speaking), the aforementioned ochazuke seasoning, and gomoku rice mix. Ahhh...I wouldn't mind living in Japantown and going every few days. I saw the meats packed the way I was used to seeing it in Matsuyama--none of that Safeway frozen meat in big bags shit. I'd gotten so used to shopping every few days. I know that I complained about it at the time (have to go shopping again!!) but now I kind of wish I had the luxury to do that. Not to mention lived near enough to an affordable supermarket.

Then I wandered around Ichiban-kan. Earlier I was bemoaning the fact that there is not a Daiso in SF (closest one's in Daly City, and there's one right by my house). But Ichiban-kan in the peace plaza is a pretty close substitution. The selection is smaller but pretty similar, and the prices are variable but still in the $1-$4 range. Score! I got myself some random kitchen things, like a rice scoop with a suction cup holder which sticks to the side of your rice cooker ($1.25).

And there was an Andersen bakery inside, with the workers wearing pretty much the same uniform as they do in Japan. I'm convinced now that the Andersen bakery chain here is the same as the one in Japan, despite a complete lack of internet evidence to indicate that. It's just too eerily similar.

Yesterday, I tried to get into the DeYoung museum to see the Chihuly exhibit. At 2pm, the tickets were sold out. I was really disappointed, but since I was in the park already, I just wandered down the street next door to the Japanese Tea Garden. It was kind of nice, and much larger than I expected (larger, for example, than Hakone Gardens in Saratoga). Pretty little ponds, a few fish, bridges, trees, rock garden, and (the highlight) one of those really really steep and round bridges ("drum bridge" ?). Usually when I see those in Japan they are roped off and you can't actually walk on it, but I got to climb on this one :-D The story behind it was really sad, though. Apparently the architect sold his family rice fields to complete the bridge and the gate to the gardens, and then his son stayed in the U.S. nearly half a century, working and saving to repurchase the family rice fields! Cool as it was...I don't think it could have been worth that. There was also a little pagoda in there, and some painted gates and stuff.

It was lovely, nostalgia-inducing, but also I couldn't help but feel that everything was fake. The pathways were a convenient grey roadway tar, whereas in Japan they would have been shoe-killing gravel. The pagoda was ridiculously miniature...so small that you would have had to crawl into the first floor, if that were allowed. There were little garden statues of frogs and birds around (like, WTF?). And the tea pavilion was being served by young Asian women (most likely not Japanese) in badly worn touristy kimonos. :-/

All in all, I think I prefer the pilgrimage to the supermarket a bit more. If the Japanese tea garden were free, I think I'd go more often to get a little fix of Japanese park prettiness. But...yeah. Next time I will RESERVE TICKETS to get into the DeYoung.

the people are different...

2008-09-02T23:17:00.001-07:00

also on the list of things to get used to:

Diversity. Hearing different languages on the street actually startled me the other day. Though, not just ethnic diversity but diversity of all sorts. Matsuyama was a pretty uniform kind of town, with the same sorts of people in it. Not too many stand-outs in the crowd.

Attitude. Need I say more? Americans got attitude. At least, some of them have a lot of it.

done?

2008-09-01T23:12:00.000-07:00

Other thoughts:

Man, it is SO NICE to be able to communicate in English. Or really, to never have to worry about communication problems and wondering if I'll be able to do what I need to do. I can just call up ATT and order internet, or call up PGE and turn on gas, start a new bank account, clear up issues with online orders, or any number of things, in my native language, and it works! No worries! Wow. Always, though, at the back of my mind, I think, "This would be really hard if English weren't your native language. Gee, there must be some way to make this easier to understand for non-native speakers."

I was driving in SF the other day, moving stuff in. It was kind of not very easy, as I am used to driving in suburban San Jose. But it was still loads easier than driving in Matsuyama would be. I was struck by how wide the roads are, even in a biggish city like SF. The U.S. is biggggg....

I got thirsty and lamented the fact that there weren't vending machines conveniently everywhere, like in Japan. The landscape is just totally different.

I miss my Japanese phone.

Suddenly, I can afford to buy fruit again. And clothing. Japan is the world's second largest economy...but I still think the general quality of life here is better--there is more that is affordable and within reach for the average (or even not quite average) person. Starting with deliciously juicy white peaches...mmmmm.

I suppose now that I'm no longer living my year in Japan, I ought to bring this blog to a close. Or rename it, or something. Hmmmm...

goodbye, Japan -- hello, San Francisco

2008-08-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

Home....I am home. In the U.S., in my parents' house now. Things have been so busy with the traveling, the unpacking, the re-packing, and the preparations to move to my new apartment in San Francisco. I haven't had time to post anything.

reverse culture shock...going to eat at Chili's the night of my arrival home. Wow...obese people. Wow...it's a dirty mess (at least the one near my house is). Wow...customer service. Wow...having to pay tax and tip on meals again.

On the plus side, I spent a weekend in SF. I saw the Frida exhibit at Moma, I saw the Dark Knight in IMAX at the Metreon, and I saw Jacqui Naylor perform at Yoshi's Jazz Bar and Japanese restaurant. (Well, I also picked up keys to my apartment and stuff). I was feeling really ambivalent about SF and having to readjust to a big city. But, I was really happy this weekend and couldn't help but think that wow...SF is just so...vibrant! I know that "vibrant" is a total cliche for describing a city, but I just couldn't help but feel that. It's so alive. It's much bigger than Boston. There are soooo many huge and amazing museums, performances, concerts, festivals going on all the time. It would be hard to get bored here. And yet, it's not hugely overwhelming like Tokyo or NY. I <3.

So...I should enjoy my last few days of freedom before having to start freaking out over medical school and actually starting to study again.

totally off topic, but...

2008-08-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

Well, I am in Tokyo traveling with my family. They are jetlagged and asleep. I am awake at 12:43 am when I should clearly be asleep so I can stay on the same schedule as them. Instead, I am awake...because I have been caught like a fly in the web of blogging and commenters!

While I was following links and links through several feminist blog posts (very interesting stuff, as usual, rec'd by a good friend of mine active in the feminist blogosphere) I finally found this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/a_suggestion_for_the_comments.php

In the end (haha) on a science blog. I guess I like it a lot because it speaks to how I feel about dialogue, especially dialogue carried out not in person with people one doesn't really know.

Naoshima

2008-08-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

Last week Tomoko and I drove to some neighboring prefectures for a short bit of travel. The highlight was definitely Naoshima in Kagawa prefecture. Naoshima is a small island in the Seto Inland Sea that is known primarily for its art and architecture. In addition to several large sculptures dotting the landscape around the island, there are several buildings designed by renowned architect Tadao Ando, some of which house artworks by various artists, including James Turell and Walter DeMaria.

Maybe those names don't mean anything to most people (they didn't to me) but the whole experience was amazing. Stepping into the Chichu art museum was like stepping into an alternate universe. I felt like I had wandered into something like the world of Mirrormask. That particular museum was a kind of winding white building that penetrates three stories into the earth. It really only has 4 exhibits. One was a very very white room holding several enormous Monet paintings. It looked cool, but it was certainly the most conventional of the exhibits. The other exhibits were a first of its kind to me. Those three artists I named--I can't even describe them. They could be sculptors? There were works of art that I could walk into, interact with, experience, breathe...I mean, Tadao Ando was the most obvious, as his museum is itself a building that people enter--and thus it creates an environment like an alternate universe. But I was so impressed by Turrell's work in the Chichu museum. You walk into a room that's kind of dimly lit in a burnt orange. There are black marble stairs against a wall, and they seem to lead up to a large glowing purple rectangle on the wall. The purple rectangle looks like a glowing sheet of paper or perhaps a light projection. You walk up the gleaming marble stairs to just inches away from the purple rectangle, and it still looks like...otherworldly. The guide prompts you to put out your hands and you realize that it is actually an opening to a room. He then prompts you to step up, through the glowing doorway and into the purple room. Everything is a weird unearthly shade, and even kind of hazy, as if stepping through a fog. You can explore the room, see where the light source is coming from, feel the rounded edges...I mean seriously, otherworldly. Like being kidnapped by aliens.

A similar piece of work was another Tadao Ando/James Turell collaboration. There is an area of Naoshima known as the art house project, where artists have taken old homes or shrines and kind of reformed them. This other building was also kind of an experiential light design art. You walk in to a large warehouse...and simply by virtue of a few turns and well placed walls, arrive in total, complete darkness. It was downright frightening--blink all you want, wave your hands inches in front of your face, and there was absolutely nothing. You sit down with others at a bench and kind of just stare into the darkness and wait. Waiting is unnerving. You blink a lot and kind of see the floaters in your eyes. Then you kind of see some patches of very very faint light, orangeish maybe, greenish maybe, float across your totally dark field of vision. Are those floaters? Is that a product of your brain adjusting to the darkness? Or are you really seeing those lights undulating and pulsating in faint blobs? Finally you realize that they must be real lights, because the rectangular shape of the far wall settles into a faintly lighted form. If you wave your hands in front of your eyes, you can kind of see the outline of them now. And then, the guide says, please walk towards the light. I was with Tomoko at the time and, still genuinely freaked out, still largely in the dark, clasped her hand as we both walked forwards. Reaching the far wall revealed that it, too, was a kind of rectangular opening that cleverly hid the light source. The lights sources on either side that were responsible for the undulating blobs were cleverly hidden by undulations in the ceiling. They had settled into an orange-ish color, I think, and were no longer undulating. I'll never know if I imagined the color changing and the blobs moving, because the lights didn't look as though they were capable of moving or changing color, especially silently.

Turell is like, the ultimate light designer.

Anyways, those were two of my brief out-of-this-world experiences. Wayy cool. I'm addicted.

Climbing Mt Fuji

2008-07-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

For all you even thinking of climbing it...it's HARD. Yes, it's touristy and stuff, especially during the on-season. But it's not like it's paved all the way up. And it's HIGH. You WILL find it hard to breathe, regardless of whether you actually get altitude sickness.

Well, okay, some background to put the following comments into perspective. I'm Asian, 5' 2", 120 lbs ish, and not terribly in shape. My idea of a workout is a 45 minutes of a dance video.

Fuji was HARD. The ascent was difficult; the descent was difficult and horrifying. We were a group of 10, starting from the 5th station at around 6pm. We got to our rest house somewhere almost at the 8th station at around 10:30 pm. We were then told that most people, in order to reach the summit to watch the sunrise, leave around midnight. Midnight! Uhm, yeah, so we caught like an hour's worth of sleep and set out again. I didn't think the altitude would affect me much. After all, I'm relatively small and so I don't need as much oxygen, right? WRONG! It was definitely hard to breathe. Every step made me pant. It felt like there was a weight on my chest all the time. By the time I reached the top (not in time for the sunrise, but almost!), any kind of exertion faster than a snail's pace made me feel nauseated. Yah, this shit is no joke, it sucks.

The ascent was just tiring, but there was the tantalizing reward of ever greater views. The descent was by the Fujinomiya route, which was a zigzag route down the mountain. It was awful. Fuji is like how I'd imagine Mars to be, all red volcanic scree, some loose gravel and some big rocks. I couldn't decide which was better, going down. Big rocks offer stability, but you have to pick your footing through them. Loose gravel you can just slide down...but sliding down it sucks and I fell on my butt/twisted my ankle/screwed up my knee about a zillion times. Permanent damage! And it was sunny and hot.

Okay so here's the advice.

Things I particularly couldn't live without:
Headlamp. I definitely needed BOTH my hands to help me scramble up the mountain at night, and the headlamp was invaluable in letting me figure out where to put my feet.
Gloves. Volcanic scree, remember? Without gloves I couldn't really have used my hands to help me up. Or gripped the rope tightly to keep me from falling so much, all the way down the mountain.
Sunglasses. Sunrise at the top, brutal sun on the way down. And since we were above the clouds...yeah. Even more brutal. On that note...
Sunscreen. The power of sunscreen, man. Some of us in the party had huge stripes of red from where they missed a swathe of skin with their sunscreen. I applied it twice, and I still got burned on my neck. And I rarely burn! I usually just tan.

Other stuff:
Hiking up the mountain in jeans is okay. Really. But really, I should have brought a complete set of clean clothes and an alternate set of shoes or something, cuz after the climb I spent like 8 hours of the rest of the day on a train, feeling pretty gross.

The ascent was totally worth it. The descent? Not so much. We were lucky...it didn't rain, and it wasn't even that cold. And our group was very good.

the end in sight

2008-07-13T04:45:00.000-07:00

Today was the last day of dance class...

I'm sad. My teacher and all of the other students have been so kind to me, and it just makes me really sad to think that it's all over, and that it's unlikely I'll ever see them again...

It was a lovely class though. My teacher let me take a video of her doing my dance, so that I can have a record of what the steps are supposed to look like. I feel a little less bad about not really being able to finish learning it (I finished learning all the steps yesterday, but I still can't do it without messing up and i forget the sequence), because the video is more than 12 minutes long. It's pretty long, for a dance. And some of it was cut, at that.

And another student gave me another kimono...I think she received it from her grandma, but it was way too small for her, so she was kind enough to pass it along...

Again, so grateful!

*sigh*

fundamental mistakes, fundamental passions

2008-07-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

A conversation from Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (keep in mind it was published in the 1930s). Still thought-provoking.

"I quite agree with you," said Miss de Vine, "about the difficulty of combining intellectual and emotional interests. I don't think it affects women only; it affects men as well. But when men put their public lives before their private lives, it causes less outcry than when a woman does the same thing, because women put up with neglect better than men, having been brought up to expect it."

"But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose," said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, "suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?"

"You can usually tell,' said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes _fundamental_ mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is."

"I made a very big mistake once," said Harriet, "as I expect you know. I don't think that arose out of lack of interest. It seemed at the time the most important thing in the world."

"And yet you made the mistake. Were you really giving al your mind to it, do you think? Your mind? Were you really being as cautious and exacting about it as you would be about writing a passage of fine prose?"

"That's a rather difficult sort of comparison. One can't, surely, deal with emotional excitements in that detached spirit."

"Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?"

"Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day--for a bit, anyhow."

"Well, that's what I mean. You expend the trouble and you don't make any mistakes--and then you experience the ecstasy. But if there's any subject in which you're content with the second0rate, then it isn't really your subject."

"You're dead right," said Harriet, after a pause. "if one's genuinely interested one knows how to be patient, and let time pass, as Queen Elizabeth said. Perhaps that's the meaning of the phrase about genius being eternal patience, which I always thought rather absurd. If you truly want a thing, you don't snatch; if you snatch, you don't really want it. Do you suppose that, if you find yourself taking pains about a thing, it's a proof of its importance to you?"

"I think it is, to a large extent. But the big proof is that the thing comes right, without those fundamental errors. One always makes surface errors, of course. But a fundamental error is a sure sign of not caring. I wish one could teach people nowadays that the doctrine of snatching what one thinks one wants is unsound…If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller--all other interests, your own and other people's….However painful it is, there's always one thing one has to deal with sincerely, if there's any root to one's mind at all. I ought to know, from my own experience. Of course, the one thing may be an emotional thing; I don't say it mayn't. One may commit all the sins in the calendar, and still be faithful and honest towards one person. If so, then that one person is probably one's appointed job. I'm not despising that kind of loyalty; it doesn't happen to be mine, that is all."

"Did you discover that by making a fundamental mistake?" asked Harriet, a little nervously.

"Yes," said Miss de Vine. "I once got engaged to somebody. But I found I was always blundering--hurting his feelings, doing stupid things, making quite elementary mistakes about him. In the end I realized that I simply wasn't taking as much trouble with him as I should have done over a disputed reading. So I decided he wasn't my job." She smiled. "For all that, I was fonder of him than he was of me. He married an excellent woman who is devoted to him and does make him her job. I should think he was a full-time job. He is a painter and usually on the verge of bankruptcy; but he paints very well."

"I suppose one oughtn't to marry anybody, unless one's prepared to make him a full-time job."

"Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don't look on themselves as jobs but as fellow-creatures."

one! small! victory!

2008-07-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

After spending two days cleaning up data from limesurvey, importing/exporting it across 5 different file formats, I FINALLY got ALL the quantitative and network data to read properly into UCINET and NetDraw. And here, finally, is one small piece of evidence of my success!!

This shows all the people who responded to my survey and how they are connected to each other.
Black is me, Red is females, and Blue is males. Arrows indicate direction of invitation...

I'm so happy! of course it's all preliminary, but hey! You can't analyze data if you can't get your program to read it, so this was a very necessary preliminary success!

Also, I am starting to get a blister on the end of my right index finger, from using the mouse on my thinkpad so much...

being an adult, independence, maturity, musings

2008-06-22T01:45:00.000-07:00

My bf fwded me an awesome essay entitled, Why Not to Not Start a Startup, by Paul Graham. Here is the link to the full thing.

Basically, Graham takes all of the doubts and insecurities plaguing those who would try a start up, and tries to refute them (or, in some cases, validate them and draw lessons from them). It's quite a long essay, but there are many interesting points.

While it is geared specifically to would-be entrepreneurs, I think even non-entrepreneurs could learn from the way he handles doubts and fears. Those of us thinking about what to do with our lives, whether to follow the traditional path or strike out on our own, all could benefit from his analysis.

In particular, there were a few points that really struck me. First was his definition of "adult" (by extension, definition of maturity), and second was his treatment of independence and determination.

Here are his two tests for measuring adulthood:

When you're a little kid and you're asked to do something hard, you can cry and say "I can't do it" and the adults will probably let you off. As a kid there's a magic button you can press by saying "I'm just a kid" that will get you out of most difficult situations. Whereas adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They still do, of course, but when they do they're ruthlessly pruned....

The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If an adult says "that's a stupid idea," a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"

I've been thinking lately about what maturity is on an emotional level, particularly, in the way we relate to other people.

(On a sidenote, I got Alanis Morisette's new album, Flavors of Entanglement. Mostly a disappointment, except for the song Versions of Violence, with lyrics here), which made me think some more about emotional maturity. And don't look at the youtube video on the lyrics page, because I think she is a horrible off-key performer).

Anyways, Graham offers a different angle on it than the one I'd been taking. As for the magic "I'm just a kid" button...I don't feel like I'm used to pushing that particular button. But then, I think, just substitute that with the magic "I'm just a student!" button. I think that in academia, at this level, it's not about kids and adults anymore, as far as challenges go. It's more about students and everybody else above students, like, say, professors. There's a pretty rigid hierarchy in the academic world, and you typically know where you stand on it. It's tough to respond to a challenge from, say, a tenured professor at Harvard with anything other than a sense of being !pwned! and throwing up the "but I'm just a student! I don't know anything!" excuse for being ignorant. Well, I think that's just me. There seem to be plenty of people who are brave enough to go head to head with the eminents in their field (or not EVEN in their field!), and they believe in themselves that much. Is that what it means, to be adult? To stop thinking to yourself "but I'm just a student" ? In which case, I need to hurry up and grow up. And to speak up more. Though to be fair, I always to ask critics, especially critics higher up on the academic food chain, exactly why what I'm doing or saying is wrong. No slinking off into the rain. The problem is, I think, that I'm not as willing to defend my ideas? There are pretty famous stories about profs being discouraging to students, who then go on to become really famous or successful with their idea. Then again, I don't think I have any particularly amazing ideas worth defending.

The other doubts that plague would-be entrepreneurs and independent thinkers, Graham says, include worrying that one is not determined enough and worrying that one needs structure.

How can you tell if you're determined enough, when Larry and Sergey themselves were unsure at first about starting a company? I'm guessing here, but I'd say the test is whether you're sufficiently driven to work on your own projects. Though they may have been unsure whether they wanted to start a company, it doesn't seem as if Larry and Sergey were meek little research assistants, obediently doing their advisors' bidding. They started projects of their own...

I'm told there are people who need structure in their lives. This seems to be a nice way of saying they need someone to tell them what to do. I believe such people exist. There's plenty of empirical evidence: armies, religious cults, and so on. They may even be the majority.

If you're one of these people, you probably shouldn't start a startup. In fact, you probably shouldn't even go to work for one. In a good startup, you don't get told what to do very much. There may be one person whose job title is CEO, but till the company has about twelve people no one should be telling anyone what to do. That's too inefficient. Each person should just do what they need to without anyone telling them.

If that sounds like a recipe for chaos, think about a soccer team. Eleven people manage to work together in quite complicated ways, and yet only in occasional emergencies does anyone tell anyone else what to do. A reporter once asked David Beckham if there were any language problems at Real Madrid, since the players were from about eight different countries. He said it was never an issue, because everyone was so good they never had to talk. They all just did the right thing.

How do you tell if you're independent-minded enough to start a startup? If you'd bristle at the suggestion that you aren't, then you probably are.

This makes me nervous, because I wonder if I am a meek little research assistant, after all, doing my advisor's bidding. (Well, not this year, because my advisor doesn't have much to say to me). I've had a whole year to work on any number of my own projects. I feel like if I were determined enough (to publish, write a novel, become absolutely fluent in Japanese) I'd have worked a lot harder. All day long. Gotten more done. Basically this feeling boils down to the somewhat depressing fact that I'm staring the end of my fully funded year in the face, and feeling like I haven't got much to show for it. Of course, I've learned a lot this year. I've gained experience in new fields, new methods, etc. But of course, that's what you're supposed to do with failures, you're supposed to learn something. It's the consolation prize. I feel as though I haven't been as happily passionately obsessed as I would have liked to be.

I worry sometimes that I could lump myself in with the drones who need structure in their lives (e.g., need someone to tell them what to do). When the Fulbright year started, there were certainly some fellows who mentioned that they felt a bit bewildered with the sudden lack of structure. I didn't. I reveled in it. Reveled in my independence. But just because I like being independent doesn't really make me suited for it. Yes, I have been independent and loved it, but I haven't been all that productive, either. It could be another way of saying, I love being lazy and on vacation. Who doesn't?

I think about how hard I've worked in my life up until now, and why it was that I was so productive. I can't think of reasons that don't boil down to the idea that there was structure in my life supporting and expecting me to work hard. There were expectations made of me, and I fulfilled them. I took pleasure in exceeding expectations. I liked to please my teachers, my parents, to strive to do my best against a metric that was well-defined. It was always a way of earning somebody else's approval, doing well against someone else's judgment. Typical drone-behavior.

Even in the hobbies--currently, knitting being my current biggest hobby. Even then, I like being told what to do--i.e., to have a pattern to work off of. Sure, I do some design work and a great deal of reverse-engineering, but even in those cases there's a model telling me what my work should look like.

The soccer team analogy is really interesting to me, actually. It reminds me of technical theater, of all things! Something I was thinking about the other day, and how much I missed it, and why, and how I could apply what I've learned about myself from doing tech to my life. In your perfect soccer team/early startup, nobody is telling anybody else what to do, because people just did what they were supposed to do. I think a well-running tech team (for theater) is like that. Nobody is telling the sound designer/light designer/set designer what to do, because they just do what they're supposed to be doing. I like that. There's a great deal of freedom, but it's still set within a structure that sets expectations and determines roles.

Of all the various things I've tried to do in college, none of them really stuck except for tech theater. I volunteered, I played music, I did layout for a magazine, I even did production for theater once, thinking it could have been a good fit. Nothing stuck, except tech. Nothing else was as hard, either, which makes me scratch my head. Tech weeks were hard, food- and sleep-depriving, physically grueling and socially taxing. Come on, separate me from sleep and food? You've gotta be kidding me. And yet, I kept going back to it, signing up to work more shows. Why?

Nobody was telling me what to do. I knew what to do, and I did it. More or less, I didn't have to rely very hard on other people to do their jobs for me to do mine. The commitment was short-term--just a week of tech, maybe a month or a bit more of planning beforehand, and boom! Done. Time for another exciting new project. I didn't sit in meetings in which I didn't have a role other than "passive listener" to play. Very little time wasted in listening to what other people want me to do, sitting in huge general meetings doodling on handouts. If I'm listening to what others want (usually the director) in a good relationship it's more of bouncing ideas off of each other in creative collaboration, rather than a true directive. I entered the theater and more or less from the get go, am on a ladder with a wrench in my hand--less time in front of a computer, writing emails, coordinating meetings, making handouts, asking people for favors.

So all that makes me suspect that I would have the capacity to work hard on my own projects. I have. Well "own project" being a relative term, since a show is the result of a collaboration of many people, and is more a product of the director than anyone else, I guess. But yeah, I can play soccer, work for an already-existing startup. But the structure is already in place, the goal predefined (put on a show, win the game), expectations and roles set.

Research is different. Writing a novel is different. The kind of independence that I've had this year is totally different from the kind I have within the confines of working a show. With research, you set your own goals and expectations, truly. Nobody is really counting on you to produce anything, except maybe yourself. Well, I don't know how true that is of research in the real world, but at least it is true of writing and of how this year has been for me. It makes me worried that I can't handle true independence, can't spearhead my own project and make my own goals and have the drive to see them through. I'm feeling a lack of inner motivation, and it worries me.

Next year I'll be plenty motivated, by zillions of external factors. But I don't think that's really enough to achieve anything other than the bare minimum of success. I'm still trying to find the right environment for me--maybe what I should be shooting for is finding that magical combination of independence embedded within structure.

to give and to receive

2008-06-17T03:52:00.000-07:00

A of big part of the Japanese language that is typically introduced in beginner's Japanese is all the forms of giving and receiving that abound. There's give, of course, ageru, and receive, morau. There's even a third one, kureru, which means "give to me," so there's an implied receiver of "me" built in to the verb. Pile on top of that the humble and honorific forms, causative and passive forms…it can be a mess. I remember when I first learned them, I was thinking what all the fuss was about, just two verbs, giving and receiving. They are not an integral part of the English language--or rather, they are not verbs that hold a status any more special than other verbs, like read, eat, sleep. It wasn't until very recently that I actively realized that the Japanese use those three give/receive verbs far more often than we in English use "give" and "receive." Of course, I knew that they were an integral part of the formal language of making requests and especially in customer service. But I also realized recently that it's not just customer service and requests/gift giving where you would naturally bring up "give" and "receive." Those three Japanese verbs can be tacked on to nearly any other verb to make up compound verbs. Contexts in which we would not normally think to include a "give" or "receive" as part of the sentence in English are natural in Japanese.

The example that really brought this to the fore was the ending of Shall We Dance, a fairly famous Japanese movie that is, more or less, about a middle-aged midlife crisis salary man who starts ballroom dance lessons without his wife's knowledge. Near the end of the movie, he and his wife are in the process of "making up" and his daughter commands (or beseeches) him to dance with his wife. In English, this would be an impassioned "Why won't you dance with her! Dance with her!" In Japanese, it came out to something like "odotte-ageru"--"odoru" = dance, and "ageru" = give. Upon further reflection, I think that a lot of phrases we would say "doing X for so-and-so" in English translate in Japanese with a give or receive verb. To my English-thinking mind, it seems as though it's the act of giving and receiving, rather than the giver or recipient that is emphasized.

Of course these are probably fine grammatical points that I should have grasped a long time ago. I'm no expert. I *still* can't effectively use ageru, morau, and kureru. But I think, more than the grammatical points, thinking about how these three verbs are used makes me think about how the Japanese fundamentally organize or conceive of their society. Such a great number of actions are conceived of as exchanges involving giving and receiving, something that I think is fairly absent in American society. Gift-giving culture is even more enormous in Japan than in America, particularly the souvenir culture. (Ok, this is a digression, but Chinese people give expensive gifts, but usually for a particular purpose, like social bribery. Japanese people give relatively inexpensive gifts and souvenirs to all sorts of people, all the time, not necessarily for a particular purpose but just to oil the social machine.)

It's true that I'm highly individualistic. I try not to make a mess, and when I do, I try to clean up after myself. This is because I don't want to clean up after other people, and don't expect them to clean up after me. One might say that I have a sense of boundaries about that. I don't litter, but I don't go around picking up other people's litter either. It's as though there's a strict separation: you|me. I do feel as though that separation is hazier here. People clean up after each other, and in a culture of such cooperators, there are surprisingly few defectors who free ride off of other people's cooperation (the only exception I've seen are some guys, and important-ish male people, like important-ish professors and such). But in groups of peers, people do each other's dishes, clean up together, bus each other's trays. The devastation of the auditorium at UCSF after us prospective students were done with it…the dropped forks, plates, paper cups, bagels cream-cheese-side-down on the beautiful carpet…what a far cry! It's offensive. It goes beyond individualistic; it's irresponsible. But of course, I didn't pick it up, either. Maybe I should have? I don't know.

So, anyways, I guess the not-so-original insight is that the interdependence of our society is reflected to some degree in our language. It shouldn't surprise me that giving and receiving is built so integrally into Japanese language in ways that my American mind had never considered. I don't think of my actions in terms of giving and receiving, so to think that way in Japanese and come out with natural Japanese seems like a part of being socialized into Japanese social interdependence.

Every step of the way here, I have relied on the kindness of strangers to help me out on critical things, from housing to classes to traveling. I think I've become somewhat less neurotic about being overprepared for every situation. I've learned to relax a bit, because I've started to trust in the kindness of strangers. I can ask for directions. People will help me. In some ways it's been a relief. I wonder if when I go back, I'll be reverse-socialized and go back to being a neurotic control freak again. To some degree I do believe that social ties are created out of favors done for and by other people. To be too independent, too self-sufficient is to cut oneself off in some ways, even though independence and self-sufficiency are traits that I admire.

Alright, I've run out of rambling thoughts about social ties for now.

flies

2008-06-14T06:33:00.000-07:00

I. hate. houseflies.

Fruit flies, I can deal with. They are small, quiet, fairly harmless, stupid, and easy to kill. HOUSEFLIES!! I HATE HOUSEFLIES!! They are big, ugly, buzz incessantly, and are really hard to swat. I've killed 3 today, shoo'd one out the balcony door, and THERE'S STILL ANOTHER ONE BUZZING AROUND MY HEAD!!!! I need it to land somewhere obvious and stay still while I bludgeon the hell out of it.

cali weather?

2008-06-12T23:56:00.000-07:00

So happy today! :-D

Bright blue sky, not a cloud in sight with lovely sunlight. And 80 degrees of dry heat...I couldn't figure out why I was enjoying it so much until I realized that it was just like a lovely day in the Bay Area...

And I got to break out my halter tops today...freedom for my shoulders! Makes me grin in girly glee! Of course, I wasn't nearly brave enough to wear something *so scandalous* outside in Japan. Thank goodness for light linen jackets.

rotary club speech

2008-06-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

First, a correction to the name of that cool award from the Emperor. Perhaps it translates to something more like, The Order of the Sacred Treasure and Rising Sun. The neck ring thing? I dunno, maybe means something like collar. Like the name of another imperial award, something about collar of chrysanthemums. Haven't quite figured it out yet.

Rotary club speech was today. Eh, it went alright. As I suppose I could have expected, everybody was very gracious, said it was great, despite my screw ups and nervousness. I should have adjusted the mike ahead of time, because it was a tad bit too tall for me, adding to my bizarre posture and nervousness. Then I had the paper to prompt me, the computer buttons to push next, and a laser pointer to point at stuff. Wayy too many things in my hands to keep track of and look at. So it was all around somewhat awkward. Ah well, a learning experience! And I'm extremely glad for everybody who has helped me out along the way...

Uchiko

2008-06-09T18:33:00.001-07:00

On Sunday my friend Tomoko came over and we went to Uchiko, which is a little town an hour and a half's drive away. It's primarily known today as a sightseeing spot for machi-nami, or like oldtimey streetscape. Lots of traditional looking houses and such. It used to be a huge town for wax production--perhaps the wax production capital of Japan in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In fact, Uchiko wax was world-renowned, known in Europe and the Americas for its high quality. It was exhibited at world exhibitions (like in Paris, Chicago) and even won prizes. So, the home of Mr Waxmaker was quiet educational. I had always assumed that wax meant beeswax. I had no idea that you could get wax from berries of trees...the sumac tree, in this case. I learned all about the complicated mechanism of hand-making wax, pressing the wax out of the berries, etc. etc. and how wax is used obviously in candles, but also in makeup, hair pomade, etc. Vegetable wax. Very odd. It's tough and hard, not very waxy-feeling. Feels more like soap.

The other thing that was cool was the house itself. It wasn't as nice as Yoshijima-ke in Takayama, but it was different. Many of the beams in Yoshijima-ke were machine-planed, but this house (Haga-ke?) had beams that were basically trees! I went up to the third floor attic sort of thing, and couldn't help but touch them. They were wonderfully crooked and unique and cool-looking. Pictures on facebook soon, I think. No nails, of course, all joinery, which added to the charm.

We also walked to Uchiko-za, a Japanese theater in the traditional style. We went in for free because they were rehearsing some sort of play, Love Letters. Pretty much couldn't understand any of it, but felt kind of nostalgic anyways for the whole tech thing. Like, look! the sound guy! and the lighting guy! well, gal in this case. And the theater was set up rather differently, on account of it being Japanese-traditional style. The balcony on either side was lined with cool looking lanterns.

the Order of the Sacred Treasure with Golden Rays and Neck Ring

2008-06-07T06:11:00.001-07:00

I kid you not. I went to a very formal awards ceremony today for the illustrious Miki-sensei. It was quite an experience.

Miki-sensei is the reason I am at Ehime University. He did Fulbright to the U.S. himself, many many years ago, and has since gone on to have a great career as a dermatologist/educator? He is the former president of Ehime University, former president of Shikoku Fulbright alumni association, and organizer of a great many Japan-US exchanges, collaborations, etc. He is an extremely charismatic, humorous, powerful man. He was the one who ensured my placement here.

Tonight was his awards ceremony. He got a very prestigious award (translated as the above) from the Emperor himself. I imagine it is not unlike a British Knighthood. While the actual awards ceremony was in Tokyo (with the Emperor, I think perhaps, and definitely the prime minister and such), tonight was a dinner party (about 100 ppl) in his honor. I had no idea, but the mayor of Matsuyama was in attendance, as well as the governor of Ehime Prefecture, the current president of Ehime University, president of Iyo Bank (the bank for Ehime prefecture, at which I bank too!), President of Matsuyama University, various presidents and representatives of MassComi(such as Ehime Newspaper), and pretty much every dermatologist in the city. Well, maybe not every, but at least one or two representatives from every dermatology clinic and hospital with dermatology department. Sometimes way more representatives. Retired department chairs, current department chairs, etc. etc. etc. Feels like nearly everybody important around here knows him...Umm..yeah. I was told to dress up nice, and I sure am glad I did! There were several ladies in kimonos as their formal wear (I love that Japanese culture still permits wearing their traditional clothing in non-cultural events). Of course, I was by farrr the youngest person in the room. I didn't get to meet the mayor or governor or anything, but it was pretty interesting nonetheless. And exhausting. And yummy. It strikes me that I'm at these events not because I've done anything cool, particularly successful, anything like that obviously. More like the expectation that, like Miki-sensei, I might be successful in my future, wherever I go. I'm someone to watch. It was a bizarre realization, laden with expectations, and made me feel...weird? I've always gone at it thinking "OMG, I don't belong here, I'm so young and these are all such important people...What the hell am I doing here..." Maybe if I thought to myself "I might not be great now, but I *will* be great in the future!" I could relax a bit and stop acting like a nervous idiot. Hah.

My speech for the Rotary Club is on Tuesday. There were several Rotarians present. I am informed that the company at the Rotary club might be even more...high up? The party might be bigger, fancier? geezuz. My only idea of Rotary club was a speech contest I did in high school, held in a dingy cafe with old unimportant people. It's certainly different here!

Even our chocolate is bigger...

2008-05-25T21:40:00.000-07:00

I brought back 2 boxes of See's chocolate truffles to give as omiyage to some people. One went to my lab, and the other went to my English tutee family. Universal first comment? "Wow, they are so big!"

milk carton toilet paper

2008-05-24T23:22:00.001-07:00

I just went to the grocery store...where I bought toilet paper made 100% from recycled milk cartons. I kid you not. There's even a little cartoon on the back showing what part of the milk carton it came from.

And yes, I am as big a nerd as my last post suggested. And a dork too, for being so happy in the supermarket that I rocked out to Justin Timberlake's sexy back while browsing for cereal and milk. :-P

brain rush on longitudinal analysis

2008-05-24T21:08:00.001-07:00

So I got a data set from some researchers which is longitudinal. I know nothing about longitudinal/survival analysis, basically. So, I picked up Singer and Willet's Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis. I have now read about 3 chapters (100 pages) on the survival analysis, the second half of the book. I am totally blown away by the awesomeness of this book! It is absolutely perfect. It is clear, well-written, logically organized, and fascinating. The examples they work through are real data sets from real published studies, which are all extremely interesting. The level of math is just right for an applied sort of researcher, i.e., they use the math and the equations to illuminate the concepts and let you know what's really going on in the model, so that you can interpret the numbers that come out of your program. They don't go into huge long proofs or derivations of interest really only to statisticians. And it's easy to understand!

When I started this year, I knew practically nothing about statistics. I.e., I didn't have stats even at the high school AP Statistics level. Then I kind of stumbled my way through multivariable analysis of cross-sectional data (which is the first kind of data I had to work with) by working through another excellent book, Multivariable Analysis: A Practical Guide for Clinicians, by Mitchell Katz. Then, I got a feel for some of the terms and what their values meant and how to interpret them. From there, was a long brain-numbing hiatus of doing practically no work, no data analysis, and feeling stagnant. Then, I got this new data set, full of bewildering and difficult to interpret variables and numbers. And this new textbook. And I am totally on a brain rush from learning about survival analysis. FINALLY, I know what "proportional odds" and "proportional hazards" means. Finally, I know the difference between odds and hazard, words I casually encountered all the time but only fuzzily understood. All kinds of things make tons of sense now, and are beautiful to boot. I knew from my other reading what a "logit" technically was, but it wasn't until I read this book that I suddenly realized *why* researchers apply this particular type of transformation. Ahahaha...things are falling into place. It is awesome. And it is a testament to how easy this book is to understand, considering that I would consider myself an absolute beginner and self-studier of statistics, and can still grasp and love these concepts as they are presented here. But there are no gimmicks. The insights can be quite deep. It's not like, "X for Dummies" style of writing, full of artificial humor or interest that is quickly tiring.

Yah. I'm on a brain high. It has been awakened out of slumber. Atrophy is beginning to slow, maybe even reverse. It's a nice feeling I'd forgotten.

back in Matsuyama

2008-05-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

It's raining in Matsuyama, but it's warm enough at night for me to sleep with my window open. So, I can hear the patter of the rain now as I type, and it's very soothing and breezy. Particularly nice, though, to be indoors and dry.

On the train ride from Nagoya to the Nagoya airport, I finally saw somebody else who sleeps with their eyes open. It was a young guy sitting across from me, and he was kind of slumped over to one side, such that when he slept, only one eye was partway open, instead of both! So it was extra-creeping. I know, because I also sleep with my eyes open sometimes (and have freaked out people with some regularity), that he really can't see anything out of that eye while he's dozing. But it was freaky nonetheless. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and because his eye was open, it sometimes looked like it was staring directly at me, giving me the evil eye! And, because when you sleep your eyeballs kind of drift, I watched his pupils drift in and out of view, sometimes rolling up towards the back of his head (so all you could see were eye-whites), and sometimes rolling directly into view so it was staring at me. Creepy. Cool. I finally know what it looks like!

When I got back I had a stack of utilities bills waiting for me in my mailbox. As I went to go pay them at the convenience store, I noticed that my gas bill was late, and the little slip with the barcode wouldn't scan at the store. So, worried that I would be slapped with huge late fines that would double every day i was late, I figured that I'd have to contact the company myself, rather than wait for them to hunt me down. They had a website, but no contact information for email…just fax and phone. Irritated, because I hate having to call people up in Japanese (even though I can do it now! Yay!) I just sucked it up and called them. They were surprisingly nice! In a momentary brain freeze, I forgot the correct word to use for "late" and didn't know the word for "bill" to begin with, but somehow the intention got across anyways. I said my name (didn't even need to spell it!) and the operator found me in their system immediately, together with my address. It was as though I was the only late payer that month or something. Then, shocker of shockers, they dispatched a gas company worker over to my apartment to collect the cash! She asked me how long and when I was planning to be home, and I said whenever. I called around 4pm, and she said, "we'll have someone over by 6pm." Ridiculous. 2 hr turnaround time!? For a house call!? I mean, the guy eventually showed up at like, 5 pm. I paid him for the late bill, and for the current month's bill as well, all in one go. How convenient! No late fines, as far as I can tell. I can't even IMAGINE if PG&E showed up at my house in California in order for me to conveniently pay a late bill. Never. It would never happen. Let alone within 2 hours of me calling. It's at times like these that I feel that Japanese society is very close. The call was so easy and hassle-free, it was as if I called up a neighbor and they said "Yep, coming right over!" Amazing.

Lost in Takayama

2008-05-21T05:13:00.000-07:00

So the second day in Takayama was somewhat eventful also. More meandering thoughts.
It rained like mad in the morning, due a typhoon kind of sort of passing over us. I passed by the morning market, then checked out the merchant house next door to Yoshijima-ke, which was also interesting. Unlike Yoshijima-ke, Kusakabe-ke has stuff in it. They have displays of everyday things that people used, such as combs, pottery, chests, etc. I suppose that solves the "where'd they put their stuff" question. They stored it in big chests and probably put it in the corner of a room or something.

Then, I decided to go on a walk. This turned out okay. I tried to follow the "west mountain walking course" on my map and ended up climbing a huge hill. If I had known it was such a hill at the beginning, I might not have done it, so I'm glad I didn't know. The rain was just clearing up and it was fine and misty and a little wet and drizzly. And I was alone, on a hill, in the middle of huge tall cedar trees. I felt…good? Walking alone gives you a lot of time to reflect about a lot of things. My life suddenly felt so trivial in some ways…well, not so much trivial as cluttered with trivial things. What do I do on weekends for fun? I eat, I shop, I watch tv. My life is filled with stuff, with the material. I don't consider myself to be terribly spiritual, but I'm not immune to finding meaning in the everyday. It's the novelist in me :-P Standing in front of shrine that's flanked with cedar trees 3 times as tall as it…was breathtaking. There's something that speaks to me about the cleansing that occurs before entering a shrine. Usually, there's a fountain of water before the entrance, with one or several ladles laid out. You purify yourself in the water by grabbing the ladle, scooping some water, and pouring it over one hand, then the next. Then you take a handful of water to your mouth, also an impure place. You finish by tipping the ladle towards you, letting the water run out and purify the handle where you grabbed it with your impure hands. The act of touching the cold water to your mouth is I think what does it for me. Walking towards the shrine entrance, I do suddenly feel purified and cleaner, somehow. And then standing in awe of the woods just heightens it. I need to cleanse my life of trivial "stuff".

Anyways, back to my walk. Due to insufficient signage and a terrible map, I got lost. I wandered through a graveyard in the hills, then down a tiny staircase cut into the hill. My Teva flip flops are amazing, except for the fact that the treads will only last about a week's worth of walking through gravel and dirt. :-( So much for that. I come down off the hill, fully prepared to be lost, but lo and behold, it deposits me in front of the museum I was planning to visit next. Not only that, but I am exactly in time for a performance scheduled to start in 5 minutes. I enter the museum and it's only me and another obviously tourist couple. I watch some very cute mechanical dolls. I even get served green tea and sweets by a mechanical doll, and one of them writes me some calligraphy to take home (kind of ugly, but sweet anyways).

In the afternoon, I was feeling pretty broke so I thought hey, why not embark on the "east mountain walking course" ? It supposedly passes by a zillion temples and shrines, and hey, unlike museums, those are free! So I embark on what's supposed to be a 4km/2hr walk. Again through the hills. Again much self-reflection, until the point where the signs disappeared and I walked right off the map and ended up on the other side of the hills from the main town. At the last point where I definitively knew where I was, which was a rusty playground park, I went to the bathroom. This would be the first shit-pit experience I've had in Japan…i.e., a gross bathroom in the middle of nowhere which doesn't flush and is basically a hole in the ground. But! But! But! There was toilet paper!!!! Who on earth stocks these bathrooms with toilet paper? Or perhaps a better question might be, how old was that toilet paper? I don't want to think about it. Anyways, I definitely ended up in the middle of nowhere. I think I was still in Takayama. By this time, I was getting tired, so the prospect of getting more lost was rapidly losing its appeal. On top of which, I realized that I'd lost my sense of direction, so I didn’t know whether turning right or left would take me towards or away from town. I think that finally convinced me to double back to where I knew I was, and go all the way back. Sadness. I don't like doubling back, generally. And I got really tired. Later, I found the rest of the trail and realized I had wandered way way way off course, because the rest of the trail was actually fairly close to the town. But by then I was too tired to wander it all and just headed back to the hostel.

A few minutes after getting there, my talkative Belgian-turned-Israeli roommate came back. Apparently she had a similar experience with the eastern mountain walking course, except that she started from the other end. So I felt less silly, though of course I had the advantage of being able to read Japanese. Because I had some delicious soba for lunch, I wanted to get some more for dinner, and I invited her along. She is very religious, with very religious dietary restrictions, resulting in her being generally vegetarian outside of Israel. On top of which, despite having previously traveled in Japan, she'd never actually eaten Japanese food in Japan (like in a restaurant), relying instead solely on conbini bread, yogurt, and cheese. So I thought, hey! We can eat soba. She might like it. It sounded like a good idea. Except for the part where on Tuesday, practically every freakin restaurant is closed for holiday. And Takayama is DEAD by 7pm. There was just NOTHING out there. We walked, and walked, and walked a bit further, stopped by several remaining open places to discover that they were out of budget, or not vegetarian, or whatever. So, an hour and a half later, we'd circled back practically to our temple lodgings, and given up. I spy a nearby Lawson and head over there to pick up something cheap to eat….and she tags along before going back to the temple. Lo and behold, there's this tiny diner-type place right next to Lawson which was super-cheap, and had udon. Was it vegetarian? Yes, says the nice lady behind the counter. Woohoo! So we sit down at the counter, and she eats the udon, and I order the katsu-don. Yum. She picks out all the wakame, which looked pretty funny I guess. But, her very first Japanese meal in Japan! (she'd also never ever eaten with chopsticks before in her life, so we asked for a fork and spoon, and she ate the udon spaghetti-style). Yah. Triumph. We left the diner and she was like "I did it!" and I said, "Now that wasn't so bad, was it?" :-D

Anyways, I am back in Matsuyama now, and past the initial rush of being back in my own place, my own apartment, am settled back into my lonely evening routine. And have a pack of people on back about my presentation, which I must finish a draft of pronto…even though I've still got like 20 days til the actual presentation. Yay, work. Yay class tomorrow. Detect the sarcasm? I'd much rather be traveling still...

Takayama thoughts

2008-05-19T04:25:00.000-07:00

disorganized and random, as they come to me.

Yoshijima-ke (Yoshijima house) is amazing. The ceiling is perhaps one of the most interesting parts. And the patterns of doorways. Looking through each doorway yields a surprise, a new viewpoint, and they seem to be able to be rearranged in infinite many combinations. I love also the connection between the outdoors and the indoors, the veranda running around the outside of the rooms, overlooking gardens. Though it suddenly occurred to me that to keep the veranda clean enough to walk on barefoot, a significant amount of daily scrubbing would be required. Just witness the deck on my house…could be walked on barefoot when we moved in, but filthy after not very long. The kitchen area is connected with a cute living area is connected with the well and is partly open to the sky! The gorgeous breeze blowing through the house.

It was very quiet, with only a few visitors. I could sit on the tatami and flip through gorgeous magazine articles and a book about the house. I could sit on the tatami and contemplate the gardens, while looking through shoji screen doors. While listening to bach's preludes on the piano.

It struck me that part of what was so peaceful was that there was practically nothing in the house. There was so much open space, so many empty rooms, huge open spaces in the high ceilings, populated only by soothingly three-dimensionally geometrical (but oddly irregular) rafters. So much space to just feel the breeze and contemplate. AND NO STUFF!! The lack of stuff amazes me. I wonder what the house looked like when people lived there. Perhaps not so different. I didn't exactly see a lot of closet space, though, so I wonder where people stowed their clothing. But perhaps back then, people didn't have so much clothing. Even for a rich merchant, how many kimonos or whatnot could each person own? But then, one must calculate that even under such a large roof, it must still have been crowded with the number of people who had to share it. So…stuff? Anyways, its stuff-free now. I only mention it because I remember thinking what a gorgeous place it was, a beautiful serene retreat. I would want to live in a house kind of like that. Ideally, a cross between Yoshijima-ke and the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. They both have the indoor-outdoor connection quality that I like. And yet, I catch myself wondering if I could practically live in a house like that. I think every wall would have to be a sliding door concealing storage space in order for me to stow all my stuff out of sight and maintain the clean minimalist lines.

This morning I was at Hida-no-Sato, or Hida village, which is a collection of amazing traditional architecture--mostly farmhouse type architecture. All the houses were moved and collected in one place, for easy preservation and viewing. At the first house, I struck up a conversation with an elderly man sitting in the entrance. I thought he was something like the house-attendant, and I thought there would be one at every house, explaining the details of the structure. It turns out he was a volunteer guide, and he kind of attached himself to me as I went through the other 11 or so houses, explaining each one each step of the way! It was so awesome. Of course, it was all in Japanese, and old person-ish Japanese, which meant that I only understood about half of it at best. But still, I learned a lot more than I would have otherwise, I think.

The houses there were also soaring, sort of similar to Yoshijima-ke. Because they have extremely deep roofs (picture a rectangle as the first floor, topped by a ginormous isosceles triangle thatched roof), they had enormous attic space, two or three stories by itself. Hugeness. The attic space was where work such as sericulture (silkworm raising) was carried out. The isosceles triangle shape provided stability against strong winds and earthquakes, as my guide informed me. Huh. Geometry to the rescue.

They keep fires burning in the houses 24/7. Most of the time it's just a small tinge in the logs in the irori, or lowered hearth. There are no chimney's or anything. The second house I went into had a full on huge fire burning, with smoke pouring out of the house even. I went in anyways and got a lungful of smoke. And a stinging eyeful, too. But I asked about the no-chimneys thing, and about smoke buildup. Apparently, the smoke is good for the house. Most of the homes were so tall that anyways the smoke dispersed high up. And, a small amount of smoke was good for the wood, especially to keep insects out of the wood and out of the house. Not to mention good for the winter cold.

Takayama is deep in snow country, with snow as early as autumn and as late as April. Sounds like Boston, but maybe a bit worse. In fact, spring is so late that Girls and Boy's festivals which are usually 3/3 and 5/5, are celebrated a month later than usual. So, Hida-no-Sato was flying carp banners in anticipation of boys festival.

What I ate all day: Hida beef. Hida is land-locked, so it's not known for it's seafood, but rather for it's beef. It was indeed lovely and tender.

Miso. I've had two local miso-based dishes so far on this trip. The first was a few days ago in Nagoya station, where I had miso-katsu, which is tonkatsu (deep fried pork cutlet) rubbed with miso sauce. It was divine. Actually very good. I was surprised, because I'm not the hugest fan of tonkatsu, and wasn't in the mood for really fried greasy food. But, the miso paste somehow made the tonkatsu less greasy-feeling, probably by absorbing the oil. And the miso paste itself was really, really yummy. Then today for dinner I had hoba-miso, which is miso and vegetables grilled over a big dried magnolia leaf.

Again! The miso paste, melted all over the veggies and beef, was so divinely yummy. I'm a miso convert. I mean, I liked miso soup but I never thought it was anything to write home about. Maybe because I grew up with it. But I think that it's also possibly because most miso soup is actually quite dilute. Having hoba-miso, which is very strong, salty, and….miso-ey….has changed my mind about miso. Mmmmmm.

musings on home

2008-05-01T17:38:00.001-07:00

oh my god, I feel ridiculously petite. Obesity. Everywhere. And I had a huge huge burrito of heaven for lunch. Portion sizes, seriously. That burrito was the size of my head! No wonder Americans are so obese. I am *not* that petite!

The notable absence of kawaii. I feel cute-deprived.

Service--I miss the service. The quality of it is different here. Macy's sucks. "Omatase-itashimashita" goes a long way towards making me less frustrated at having to wait or being ignored by personnel.

There is so much freakin' space, everywhere. The mall is depressing.

The cute kitten that I left in October is now a full fledged cat. It's the spitting image of our old cat, except bigger, cleaner, friendlier, and probably without the psychological flaws of having once been homeless.

My grandmother ordered NHK on cable tv for $30/month. Totally worth it, considering that she watches tv pretty much every waking minute of the day. But it's so bizarre to hear it all the time in the background, playing the Japanese news and stuff. As I left today, I even heard her watching "furusato ichiban," which is the show that I usually watch at noon while having lunch in the lab. It's almost like I never left at all!

Nice yarn can be had for cheaper in Japan. Nice yarn like luscious 100% merino in zillions of colors.

home again home again

2008-04-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

...home again til the 16th. It's so surreal. Japan is really not that far away. The flight from Nagoya was about 9 hours long, which feels SOOO much shorter than the flight from Beijing. Now I'm home, and it didn't take that long at all. Like my body and mind haven't yet caught up to my surroundings.

So now it's ridiculously early in the morning, and I'm finishing this post. Jet lag sucks. Body definitely hasn't caught up to the surroundings.

Everything's different here again! Right-hand faucet twists in the wrong way. Toilets aren't as water saving. And to top it all, when driving home from dinner last night, for a brief few hundred yards I drove on the wrong side of the road. Yikes! oops, I wasn't thinking. And I've never even driven in Japan.

But, it's been deliriously awesome to see family and friends again.

end of sakura season, farewell party

2008-04-20T03:11:00.000-07:00

So the two week long sakura frenzy here is over. Most of the petals have fallen and disappeared, replaced by green leaves. It was so gorgeous to see the streets lined with fallen pink petals, and bike around in the wind with the petals swirling around me, rolling along the road. Mmm....so pretty...I want a sakura tree in my future garden...as IF I'll have any time for a garden at any point in my life, before retirement! Hah!

Last night my host family hosted a farewell party for Tomoko. I made some Vietnamese-ish spring rolls and...well...they were okay. I was so excited to find mint at my local supermarket! Adding mint leaves made the spring rolls so much more springy. It was awesome. I got to see their son again, who is now 3 kg heavier than when I saw him last. I held him for awhile--he was so soft, warm, cuddly, and baby-smelling! It was awesome (though, no inclination to one of my own anytime soon, hah!). But it was kind of nice to hold him, and to watch him burrow into his parents' chests. He's gotten so that he can hold his head up on his own, and is trying to turn himself over (though without success so far). He's also gotten quite strong, becoming quite a kicker and grabber. Annd...he smiles now! He's not just a kind of...lump. He's got facial expressions, which makes him so much more interesting.

Here's a picture of me, him, and my host mom:

Because we all had a bit to drink and Tomoko drove us to their house, we again called that useful dual-driver taxi service thingie. Surprisingly, the driver recognized us from last time! The same driver came, and not only did he remember us, but he even remembered where our apartment was!! Bizarre. They probably assign drivers based on patrol area, and there are maybe not so many per area? It was strange. So, Tomoko and the driver chatted a bit while we drove back. It suddenly struck me that Japan is strangely a simultaneously close and lonely society. Close, because there's a lot of social trust. I was thinking about this taxi service and wondering if it would ever work in the U.S. Would Americans allow a complete stranger to drive *their* car? I mean, hopping in a taxi seems risky enough to some...but to let somebody else drive *your* car? While you are presumably drunk or under the influence of alcohol? Hmm...But of course, there's no problem with that here. Another Fulbrighter remarked that she saw a woman calmly leave a thousand-dollar-handbag unattended at her table while she got up to go order her food at the counter. Unheard of in the U.S.! So, there's kind of a societal trust or unconcern. I don't even always lock my door at night (though I know that I really should!).

At the same time, though, Japanese society seems very lonely to me. Or maybe it's my own loneliness I'm projecting. But I see so many lonely people, eating alone at the counters of all the fast food places, and at all the ramen places too. Then there are tired, overworked people who don't have time to go home to their family, or don't even if they had the choice. People like my advisor who never talk about their family, or ever seem to spend time with them. The stereotypical desperate housewife, the equally desperate career woman. Of course, there are people like my host family who seem to be close and happy, but somehow, I seem to see a lot of lonely or alone people. Then there's the Japanese reserved-ness about expression their emotions...and the relatively high rate of suicide for their income.

Anyways, it's an interesting combination. A densely interconnected, interdependent society that is still somehow isolating.

weather, construction, etc.

2008-04-15T19:09:00.001-07:00

It's really turning lovely. I think I can pack up all my winter clothes and shoes now, and run around in short sleeves and sandals. Delicious! Being on almost the same latitude as LA is a contributing factor, I suppose. It was actually almost too warm last night! Of course, I was wrapped up in a big blanket with an overheated laptop. The big blanket may have to go...as well as the kotatsu blanket.

On the continuing theme of being startled by construction...it's freaking everywhere! I was walking near my apartment the other day, down a street I don't usually take, and was insanely surprised at the quick disappearance of things I've been used to. What used to be a gas station is now a plot of gravel. The arcade/karaoke place near my apartment is now also a flat piece of gravel. There are cranes working constantly to demolish yet another set of buildings (across from the now-gone gas station). Demolition is so efficient here! There's another square plot of gravel now for sale near my office. It makes me wonder why they bothered to demolish the building if they were just going to sell it. Surely, it was worth more when there was a building there? The next owners could just remodel or something. Hmm...interesting...

I'm just biding my time until I can launch my survey (yay!). Because I'm going to be running the survey from home for awhile (i.e., US) and I don't really want to leave it open for more than a month, I don't want to launch too early. I want to get people paid in a reasonable amount of time! And meanwhile...I am studying Japanese. My goal is to finish this textbook by the time I go home in May. It's a bit of a pity, since I really like this textbook, and I don't think there are more in the series. The articles are interesting, the grammar is useful, and the exercises, while not perfect, are pretty good. I think when I launch my survey I will regain some of the enthusiasm that I've lost. At the very least, I'll be busy with tracking invitations (hopefully I'll get some!).

welcome the new year

2008-04-09T22:34:00.000-07:00

I had my first class of the new Japanese schoolyear today--Nihongo D conversational class. It was kind of exciting to the see the campus abuzz with students again, and it was briefly nice to see some familiar faces (before the realization hit that after all, I don't have anything to say to them!).

It was cute. I saw a lot of alarmingly young-looking freshman walking around, clutching schedules and maps. 4 of them stopped and asked for directions, and I even saw one professor-looking person (older student?) ask for directions! There were signs everywhere that said basically "Any Ehime University student, you can use!" meaning of course that you can stop any student and ask for help. Of course there were the cute campus volunteers in their red shirts walking around too.

The only reason I knew that classes were starting was because that yesterday, almost by whim, I went to my office. I was hoping for some paperwork regarding the new semester, and it looked like there was nothing. A few hours later, somebody remembered to give it to me (in retrospect, I should have just asked). I was surprised to find that my first class was the next day! Of course, there was nothing like *where* the class might be, so I just showed up at our old classroom. Luckily, I met a student from last semester who seemed to know what was going on and said that the class had changed places. So I followed him to another building, where a bunch of old classmates were gathered in the lobby. We exclaimed over each other's haircuts, etc. until the teacher finally came and apologized about all the confusion. We walk into the new classroom and voila! no chairs! no tables! in fact, it was nearly a bare room, except for a chalkboard and, of all things, a tv set. Yeah, campus administration was probably pretty overwhelmed that day. We dragged all the chairs from the lobby and the lounge next door into the classroom and just sat in rows for our first class. It was somewhat amusing.

Japanese construction seems remarkably fast. Last semester, our entire library was wrapped in construction gauze (for lack of a better description). Half of the building my Japanese class was in looked like the ruins of a bombing. Completely gutted. One of the buildings of the Faculty of Law looked to be in a similar state. I show up to class a month later and voila! Shiny new buildings! Well, fairly ugly as far as buildings go, but still! no trace of the previous construction remained. I was really impressed, considering how freakishly long it took to build anything at Harvard. I have always heard that the construction industry in Japan is notoriously corrupt, faking earthquake-proof papers, or whatnot. But man, they are fast.

osaka - kyoto - nara - pt 2

2008-04-07T04:18:00.000-07:00

So the next day (Saturday) Andrea and I headed out to Yoshino mountain, which is supposedly the number one sakura viewing spot in Japan. What the hell, we're in the area, right? Despite the 2+ hour train ride required to get there from Kyoto, it was definitely worth it. We arrived shortly after noon and started walking around the mountain. It was super crowded, but I didn't mind so much. It just made the atmosphere lively and energetic. The cute, smallish mountain paths were lined with little stalls hawking all kinds of sakura-related wares: sakura candles, scented wax, salt, soba, sake, youkan, yatsuhashi, manju, tea, and on and on. Everything was all about sakura. It was a sakura frenzy!!! I started catching it too, and wanted sakura everything. It was fun to see what else they could make taste like sakura next.

The sakura themselves weren't fully open yet. There were quite a few gorgeous trees that were in full bloom, but most of the rest of the trees weren't yet. Maybe next weekend would be beautiful. I could imagine, though, what the mountain would look like with ALL of the sakura trees in full bloom. Exquisite.

We picnicked in the courtyard of a big temple. We ate ice cream three times that day (!). I ate a fish impaled on a stick (it was grilled).

It was so much fun, it was surreal. Gorgeous.

Next day in Kyoto was my last. Andrea had to run to Kobe, but was kind enough to stay and get us tickets to a dance performance at noon. It was really awesome, because all the dancers and musicians were geisha or maiko. There were several group pieces (where everybody dances more or less the same thing, and wears the same costume), and there were a few pieces that were more like plays. Two scenes from Genji were reenacted in dance form. It was all gorgeous. The group pieces were really impressive because I've rarely seen groups perform so perfectly in sync. And not just in sync, but the angles of all their poses were identical. The tradeoff though, was that sometimes they seemed a bit stiff, like they were simply hitting the pose on the beat rather than dancing in between the poses. But nonetheless, it was really good.

I then spent the rest of the day uncontrollably spending money on myself and on gifts for friends and family. Yay shopping. Yikes! Good thing I get paid this month.

osaka - kyoto - nara - pt 1

2008-04-04T06:43:00.000-07:00

Wheeee!! Kansai is awesome.

I took the overnight to Osaka, to arrive on Wednesday. I got one of the last tickets, so I sat in the very back row where there was no aisle, just 4 seats crammed next to each other. Fun fun, like wayy too close to my neighbors to sleep. Also, no air circulation. I arrived in Osaka a little before 6am. After wandering around a bit, found a cafe open at 6:30am, and then after studying the map and setting off to wander some more, found an awesome 24hr internet cafe called Aprecio. I had my laptop with me so I could avail myself of the free wireless (though I had to pay for a seat). Somewhere in there was free all you can eat ice cream, i think, though it's just as well that I couldn't find it :-P

I met up with Rick for breakfast, which was great. We ate at a cafe and chatted for a bit more than an hour--it was great to see him again :-)

Then, off to the Shinsaibashi/Namba shopping/arcade/commercial mecca area to wander around shopping and get a haircut. Andrea recommended me a place that was good, and spoke English. I made reservations a few days ago and so I went there. Wow, it was trendy! Music was TATU, all the stylists were tall and rail thin and wearing designer jeans. All the guys had overprocessed trendy orange hair. Got me a shampoo which was divine! I'm not used to be pampered while getting a haircut, and...well...it was an experience. MMmmmMMMmmm. Then a haircut while I chatted with the stylist. I told her it'd been over 6 months since I last got it cut, because I was scared of Japanese stylists! Anyways, it turned out okay, though it is dramatically nicer when she (+assistant, at the same time!) blowdried my hair. The way I treat it? Meh. Doesn't look that great. So the final verdict is, I can quit trying to get nicer haircuts. I should just stick with my $15 Vietnamese stylist at home, because she knows exactly what I want and I am ALWAYS 100% happy with the results. Sad about the no shampoo though...and the rather seedy sketchy atmosphere. Ah well--you can't have everything. And anyways Craive was a fun experience.

Yarn store. Need I say more? Noro Transitions was on sale. They had the colorway that I have 2+ skeins of at home. I bought some. Now I have enough to make a sweater out of it. Ohhhhh....indulgence.

So anyways, Osaka was all about shopping. Even the next morning! I've fallen in love with a makeup line, Ettusais. Everything they do is very acne-skin oriented. So everything is non-comedogenic, very light, oil free, and FRAGRANCE FREE!! And not Clinique-sort-of-fake-fragrance-free, but genuinely fragrance free. The absolute best most wondrous concealer-type stuff ever, also. Ah, more indulgence.

Then the train to Kyoto. That afternoon I caught Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion, along with at least 100 other high school students from Korea, all in their uniforms. It was kind of annoying, but also very amusing. They spoke (good) English with some other travelers (I overheard a guy trying to explain he was a "software engineer" to a slightly uncomprehending high school girl, which was very funny). Then they spoke Japanese to the temple people when trying to buy stuff. Uhh...I'm impressed. I suspect most American students could only handle one foreign language, at most.

I then swung by Hirano shrine, which I had passed on the bus on the way to Kinkakuji. Hirano shrine was apparently a huge hanami (cherry blossom viewing) place, and OMG it was gorgeous! :-D In fact, the cherry blossoms were everywhere gorgeous.

Walked through Shimogamo shrine...huge park, very foresty, very much the feeling of Ise Shrine. I think I like shrines better than temples, in general. Shrines are more naturey, and they feel bigger in some way. Like, spiritually bigger, soul-bigger? Temples and pagodas are incredibly impressive (and some very big, which I'll get to later) but everything is so controlled. The gardens, the lakes, gravel, courtyards...all very planned. The forests of Ise and Shimogamo had these huge tall trees that just made me feel...kind of more relaxed, more free in a way.

Cell phone died along the way and I worked, for the first time, a Japanese payphone. Had to call Andrea to meet up with her. So we did, and wandered off to dinner, which was an adventure! At first we tried a tempura place, but decided it was too expensive (cheapest set was 1500 yen). Then we wandered through some backalleys and found a sign that said yu-doufu (boiled tofu). Andrea really likes it, and it's a Kyoto specialty, and I'd never tried it before, so we were like, what the hell let's pop our heads in and try it. It was one of those places with no windows...well we went in, and it was an impeccably clean place. The only seating was an L-shaped counter that seated probably about 10 ppl, with 4(!) people behind it, to serve. Two were obviously an old married couple, and one younger woman probably a daughter, and another woman. One of the first things we were asked was, did a friend recommend you here? Uhh...no, we were just walking around. In retrospect, that question should have tipped us off. We sat in the corner, and, no menu in sight! All the items were stuck on the walls over and behind the counter, written out in lovely calligraphy. No prices to speak of. We ordered yu-doufu, because that's what the sign outside the restaurant said. Andrea remarked later that if it weren't for the sign, we wouldn't even have known what to order! And we were confused by the options, and just sort of went with it, having no idea what we were really getting (well, I didn't anyways, having never had yu-doufu before) or what on earth it would cost. So we ended up with two appetizers and two portions of the boiled tofu. It was yummy. Got a bill. 4400 yen!! Ironically, more expensive than the tempura place would have been. And the bill was the funniest thing ever. The little old lady spent some time drawing it up, but in the end it was just the numbers "4400" written on a scrap of paper. Forget about itemization! ...I thought these places weren't for real in Japan. They are just a myth...old school relic of bygone days. Maybe I haven't been to "real" Japan!

After that we trekked quite far, through another shrine, up and around Kiyomizu-dera, in search of sakura ice cream. Yes, cherry blossom ice cream. It was DELICIOUS!!! I had mine mixed with green tea ice cream, and it was just heavenly. Then we started walking back, and saw zillions of sakura trees being lit up at night. They were soooo gorgeous. Brilliant white trees, and some pink trees. Unfortunately my camera also died at this point and I couldn't take as many pictures as I wanted. But the sakura-tree-lined canals, lit up at night, were really a breathtaking sight. Very crowded too. Passing by a posh cafe, I spotted what might have been a maiko/geisha? She was sitting at the counter with some men, wearing a gorgeous gorgeous kimono with a very elaborately tied obi. Full-on white makeup, complicated hairdo, covered with sakura flowery hair decoration thingies. Andrea tried to get a picture, but it came out too dark :-( And we weren't the only ones outside the cafe trying to snap a picture of her back! at least two guys in front of us were blatantly shooting pics through the door. It's a bit of a weird kind of anonymous celebrity, being a geisha or maiko. Or even just dressed up at one. Everyone stops and gawks and tries to take a picture of you, but nobody really knows who you are (or probably cares). Andrea thought that maybe we didn't see a real maiko, just someone who'd paid to be dressed up as one, because her shoes weren't high enough. Real maiko wear super-high (like 3 inches or more) shoes, and these ones weren't so much. So, who knows?! but, it was gorgeous and fun, anyways.

Then we got to where Andrea left her bike, and she offered to carry me home on the back of her bike. So we did! Again, something of an adventure, though I feel a bit sorry for all the work she had to do to pedal us both. It also wasn't nearly as easy as I thought it would be, riding on the back! trying to balance myself sideways, while tucking in my knees and pointing my toes to avoid hitting the shrubbery on the side, and balancing, and holding onto Andrea, and all that...yeah, major oblique ab workout. But fun. Scary! Praying for green lights at intersections so we wouldn't have to stop and restart. Brushing my knees against parked bikes and shrubbery. Whipping by pedestrians and other bikers, with liberal use of the bell. Near-misses with other bikes. One lady tried to cut across us perpendicularly, then abruptly thought better of it (not before we already braked hard, though). Dude lady! Twice the momentum coming through here!!! :-P Haven't done that since I was 12, in Beijing.
Makes me feel a bit...I dunno, I want to say wild and crazy? But that just makes me sound like a lame person :-P Laugh like a child, then.

Then today I went to Nara. I spent a great deal of the day on some form of transportation or another. We met up with Janina and took the train to Nara, which took like an hour. Then we had awesome Kansai style okonomiyaki. I got one laden with shrimp. I even got two big shrimp with heads still on them! Shrimp with heads...basically stir fried in oil...mmmmm...juices...it's soooo hard to find in Japan. I can't do my favorite Chinese shrimp dishes due to a lack of shrimp with heads. So Janina looked on in horror as I sucked and crunched on the two big shrimp heads. Mmmmmmm....

At least two hours of the afternoon...maybe 2 and a half, were spent on a bus. First, getting out to Horyuji, and then getting back. But it was totally worth it. Horyuji is this huge huge temple complex. Tall pagoda. Japan's first world heritage site. Dates back to like...the 6th century in some parts. It was beautiful with the sakura blossoms everywhere, lining all the paths. Peaceful, controlled, beautiful.

Then we finally made it to Todaiji in Nara park, at 5pm, half an hour before closing. Got lucky! Todaiji was also absolutely breathtaking. It has a gigantic Buddha statue, housed in a gigantic temple structure. Makes you feel really small. Built more than a millenia ago. And at that, built only 2/3rds the height of the original structure! How the heck did they do that. *sigh* It was a sight to see.

Then, finally, Nara park. There are free-roaming, extremely tame deer. They are like messengers from god. We got one of the last of the deer biscuits before the lady packed up and went home. Those deer are AGGRESSIVE! I unwrapped the paper and like half a dozen came running. They started bumping into me, nipping at my purse and my dress. Seriously, I felt teeth! Some deer tried to take a chunk out of my midsection! I think I have teethmarks on my jacket. I was too scared to really feed them. I ended up breaking up the biscuits and dropping them on the ground. I felt backed into a corner for sure! Ouch. But it was fun :-D

And so goes the Nara day. More later!

hiroshima, sadness

2008-03-30T06:37:00.000-07:00

A number of things have combined in this last week to make me sad. One has been the Hiroshima trip. While it was an amazing experience (great food, lovely shrine, did I say great food?) the peace memorial museum was very moving. I think it should be a mandatory experience for all heads of state, particularly heads of nuclear states. Maybe a mandatory experience for all politicians. Heck, why not for all people? *sigh*

Perhaps a more immediate concern is that my best friend here in Japan is moving away...she has been living downstairs from me all this time, but because she is a public school teacher, she has been reassigned by the government to teach in another city in the prefecture--one that is at least a few hours drive away. I will no longer be able to see her every weekend, go to the library or the supermarket together, etc. As much as I claim that I am a reclusive, anti-social loner, I'm not THAT much of a loner. I'm not made of stone. I will miss her. I've learned a lot from her and I've really valued all the time we've spent together. We are very similar people, and I feel very comfortable with her. I just hope she feels the same way about me (I always wonder, because, you know, it's not like Japanese people would tell you outright if you are boring or inconveniencing them). After she goes, I really won't have any more close friends that I can spend one on one time with here. It doesn't help that I've been feeling the bite of loneliness lately, anyways. This is sort of just salt in the wound.

To make up for it, I must keep myself and my mind occupied. Traveling helps a lot, because at least walking around alone distracts me from being alone, actually, probably better than traveling with people I don't know. All that crafty stuff I do is no good, because I actually have too much mind leftover to think about stuff while I'm knitting. Which makes it good for staying awake in class, but bad for distracting myself from the fact that I am lamely being lonely at home. Yeah yeah, I know I'm whining and wallowing, okay? Everybody does it once in awhile. Cut me some slack. I'm just so tired of solving my own problems all the time, picking myself up all the time, immediately after a problem presents itself. Sometimes you just want to whine about something before immediately jumping to enact some perceived solution. I already know by heart the supremely American mantra of get up off your ass and do something, pick yourself up by the bootstraps. I think I'll be spending lots more time in the afternoon in my twice-monthly dance studio. And I'll start working out again.

And I do have work to do. That stupid speech beckons. Ugh, Japanese! I have so little confidence in the Japanese that I can construct. I can understand a great deal of it now (compared to before), but am afraid of constructing sentences that make no sense, which is usually what happens when I try to express an idea of any complexity. Better stick to the autobiographical. It doesn't have to be perfect or profound, I tell myself.

Anyways, here ends the whining and wallowing about what has been, on the whole, a very lucky thing for me. I'm so grateful, really I am, but we all have ups and downs.

Beppu!

2008-03-19T07:13:00.000-07:00

Beppu is in Northern Kyushu, and is a 3hr-ish cheap ferry ride away. It is an onsen (hot springs) resort. So much so that in certain parts of town, the onsen steam is gushing out of the gutters, the sidewalks, everywhere on the ground there's like a little smokestack or chimney. And smells of sulfur-ish. It's quite amazing to see crystals of yellow and greenish stuff...sulfur?...encrusted on the grates in the ground, no doubt an effect from 24-7 onsen steam coming out of those grates.

I think I'm an onsen convert. I think sheer laziness and maybe some remaining nervousness will prevent me from becoming an active onsen-seeker-outer-addict in the future, but I definitely see the appeal now. Especially outdoor onsens (rotemburo) where there's a slight breeze and a gorgeous view...

speech ideas, anyone?

2008-03-14T05:06:00.000-07:00

I've been asked to give a speech next month at my local Rotary club, and I accepted without thinking. Now, on top of worrying about correct Japanese, I'm also agonizing over what I should speak about! I've been informed that the "members are the top of the bank, TV, newspapers, and other territories in Matsuyama," which leads me to believe that I will be addressing rather eminent men who are rather advanced in age. It's been a long while since I've had to address an audience that wasn't my peers, and wasn't about my research or some sort of fixed topic. In fact, I can't remember if I've ever done that. I'm at a complete loss. I don't want to waste these people's time, but I can't think of something they might find worthwhile to listen to, coming from someone like me. I have the quaint notion that speeches ought to be educational somehow, but what could I possibly teach them? Some have already had their formative study abroad experiences when they were young; for the rest, I can hardly advocate it as it's a bit impractical while not in school!
Speeches can also just be entertaining and funny, but since that's hard enough in English, I won't even attempt it in Japanese. I don't understand Japanese humor as yet...maybe never.
I can talk about my experiences of Japan--but even if it is from my viewpoint, something I consider to be wondrous and cool will just be everyday and boring to them, most likely. Or I could talk about the US, but what's to talk about really? Again, it's not like these businessmen have never been abroad.
I want to be somewhat educational and enlightening without sounding moralizing and preachy. And without spending tooo much time encouraging them to donate money to Fulbright (which I definitely will put in there, subtly, somewhere near the end).

Some thoughts so far:
Maybe a thoughtful treatment of what it means to have culture. Visible vs invisible culture, how I find it so fascinating how visible Japanese tradition is (shrines, architecture, kimonos, theater) and how that's made me evaluate American culture, which was something I considered basically didn't exist or was invisible in some way. It's certainly not as old, but instead of kabuki and noh we have musical theater, opera (not strictly American, but of a Western tradition nonetheless). Instead of oden and tako-yaki, we have french fries, hot dogs, burgers. And we have baseball, which I'm not into, but is nothing if not American. But we don't go around dressed in colonial wear much. I suppose colonial-ish architecture is still around...some cathedrals, as well...Why does it feel different? So yeah, I have nothing much insightful to say on this topic yet.

Cultural appropriation. I got asked, "You have Disney in America, right?" (Person in question thought maybe it was of British origin). I'm sure if I tried to remember harder, there were other examples of people being surprised that something was American in origin rather than Japanese or from some other country.

Something about encouraging people to take breaks. The wonders of rejuvenation. Don't discourage your grandkids from taking years off to do something interesting and worthwhile in the middle of their studies. It sort of devolves into taking risks, getting outside of one's comfort zone, finding a real-world passion, combating arrogance, developing empathy, broadening horizons, all kinds of other cliche preachy stuff. :-\

That's it, no more ideas. What would these people be interested in hearing from me?
Oh, and apparently, Powerpoint is okay. That poses a whole other problem like, what could I put in a Powerpoint for this kind of a speech? hah.

A sunny and beautiful day! despite research woes

2008-03-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

Yes! Today I get to break out my flip flops and waltz down the street not wearing socks or a jacket. It's sunny and warm and beautiful. I walked to work instead of biking to enjoy the outdoors. On days ands moods like this I feel dreamy again, like maybe I COULD be a novelist, a creative person. It's so lovely. And the only reason I'm going to work today is so I can use the printer to print out travel reservation confirmations. Traveling! It will make me broke. Next week will be Beppu, in Kyushu. The week after, Hiroshima. And now I'm planning the week after in Nara, for the cherry blossom season. If only I could get an affordable room...I don't know anybody in Nara and generally speaking I hate to impose on people...

As for the research woes. Last night I had to give a talk about my research. The only thing close to being done enough to talk about was my ROC BMI Metabolic Syndrome stuff. So that's what I put together. I tried really hard, honest! I tried to make my Japanese good. I practiced. I haven't tried this hard for a presentation in awhile. Maybe since working in the Sykes' lab. The foreign language thing was a twist, as I learned the Japanese words for things like cross-sectional and longitudinal study. Not to mention population attributable risk percentage.

And yet, it was horrifically awful. I wasn't prepared, and I didn't know what to expect. And I felt hung out to dry, as usual, by my advisor. So I didn't know exactly who the audience would be. I had the impression that it would be mostly other students of his. And given the quality of my advisor and his students, I wasn't especially worried or embarrassed by my work. It turns out that basically while I was in a room full of people, the only person who was really my audience was the new department chair of the public health department over at the medical school. Yikes. I met him and I felt the intellectual level in the room rise...a LOT. Apparently he considers as his mentor a Professor Czeisler of Sleep Medicine at Harvard--the very same awesome Professor Czeisler that I'd had for my circadian rhythms class. It's a small world after all!
*Sigh* So mainly, I didn't know what to expect or who I was talking to or the gravitas of the situation I guess? But I wouldn't have minded if this particular piece of research were something I was proud of. It's not. I've basically started from scratch this year, with nothing, nothing! nothing! about this field under my belt. Not even techniques (of the statistical sort). Just me and whatever I can get for free on Pubmed, a textbook and my critical thinking brain. Which is not too bad. But still, I know that this particular piece of research I presented isn't that important (the question has already been thoughtfully investigated in a number of other ways) and isn't particularly well executed (me! newbie! no idea what I'm doing!. I'm treating this thing as a learning exercise, to see what I can do and learn in a kind of hands-on way. And basically I couldn't count on my advisor at all. Maybe it's a good experience for me? I'm a bit used to having someone to count on to back me up in what I'm doing or saying to people like department chairs. You know, like an actual advisor. Yeah, no help coming from his corner.
On top of the embarrassing piece of research, the critiquing professor (who was pretty nice after all, when all's considered) often said things about my Japanese translation which was helpful, but I couldn't always understand. So then he resorted to English, which was quite humiliating for me, at least. He was like...well, did you adjust for these factors, did you calculate the odds ratios for multiple conditions together (which I did, and can't remember anything too interesting about it except that it wasn't spectacular, which was another embarrassing point since I didn't remember my own research!), and I couldn't always understand his explanations for why he was asking those things. grr
So yeah, I went home with that feeling like ouch! embarrassed myself in front of a super smart person. Yikes.
But there was a big dinner party later, and he took a few moments to talk about Matsuyama and how it was a good authentic experience for me, etc. He seems great. I'd love to see him around more often and work with him, except that he's far away on the med school campus that I have no idea how to get to. And I'm sure he's got his hands full with his new position, so...hate to impose. Yeah, those are lame excuses. I know.

Tokyo!!!!

2008-03-06T05:02:00.000-08:00

I've been back from Tokyo for a few days now, but I've actually been quite busy piloting the Japanese version of my survey and unfortunately preparing a presentation in Japanese on my research. Not exactly fun stuff.

In contrast to my 5-day trip to Tokyo! Which was totally awesome! Despite having to spend 13 hours on a bus each way. But hey, you get what you pay for. So, various thoughts, more or less in chronological order.

Thursday:
A quick trip around Senso-ji in the earlyish hours of the morning, after my arrival. After all, nothing is open until after 10am, except for temples. I dropped my stuff off at my hostel in the Asakusa area, and headed over to the neighboring temple. Pretty, peaceful, got me a little charm to help me "realize my heart's wish." Then, a quick yarn hop ending with a stroll up and down Omotesando and eating fantastically yummy Kyushu style ramen. Really, I didn't think ramen was anything special until I had this bowl. It was amaaazing and giving me some incentive to go visit Kyushu. And finally, to cap off the day, I got all dressed up and met a Toyota bigwig, a managing officer. Despite everyone's reassurances that the meeting would probably be in English, nope! It was in Japanese. And because I am an idiot, despite some amount of preparation in thinking through what I would say during this meeting, it didn't happen at all the way I anticipated and I ended up sounding like a stammering jabbering idiot, anyways. I also realized, 10 minutes before leaving for the meeting, that I forgot to bring some omiyage (souvenirs) from Matsuyama and had to fall for recourse on the Godiva chocolatier that was thankfully downstairs from the JUSEC office. I doubt it made much of a difference in ameliorating the faux pas, considering its lameness in not being from Matsuyama. Oh well. I did get invited to go visit their factory in Nagoya, and so hopefully I can do that and learn some more about the company.

Friday:
First, the conference. After a nice evening with the Fellows, I then met everyone else at the conference where we pow-wowed about our year. Of course, there being 15 of us, mostly very talkative, it took awhile. Even though we read each other's reports and all, I found that seeing everybody face to face was very nice. I actually would have liked to shift focus a bit more from the conceptual to discussing more concrete measures we could take to improve our productivity and to "make every day count." But alas, we didn't get that far. But overall, I think the conference was great, and I came away quite reinvigorated to carry on my research.
Another issue that came up for a lot of people was the issue of Japanese-ness, Asian-ness, etc. in Japan. Some of the fellows talked about struggling with when and with whom to be more Japanese, and when and with whom to act the American. It started me thinking more in depth about why I didn't apply to do a Fulbright in China being more Chinese than Japanese. I think being in Japan is sort of more liberating than China, in a sense. I have enough of a connection to Japan to make it exciting and meaningful, but not enough to really identify with Japanese-ness in myself in any way. On the other hand, my Chinese-ness is constantly reaching out to get me whenever I'm in China. Even though it's a hopeless cause, I'm always trying to "fit in" somehow whenever I'm in China (mostly to avoid getting ripped off). I don't even try in Japan, really, and occasionally I'm mistaken for being Japanese or at least fluent in Japanese. Everything in China seems to implicate me somehow, whether it's pollution, corruption, manners or lack thereof, anything and everything. It's like being embarassed of your lover. Hearing China criticized is the same way, it's like hearing someone badmouthing your significant other. Even if the critic is right, even if China really is polluted and corrupt and dirty, the hackles rise in a guttural emotional way because I still feel like it's an indirect attack on me. Even though I have nothing to do with China as it is really and I can't help being of Chinese descent and I'm American for God's sake! So there's that sense of implication, of identity confusion, of Chinese-ness reaching out its hands to claim me for its own. Fit in! Be Chinese! These are your roots! These are your people! Etc.
No such complications in Japan. I can be a more objective observer and delight in my discoveries and criticize its shortcomings without feeling implicated or guilty. And I can escape some of the identity confusions. Though I always have to explain that I'm Chinese-American and explain what that means, there's nothing interfering with my primary self-identification as American.

Enough of that stuff. Then Friday evening, WICKED!! I saw Wicked in Tokyo because Rick, my friend from high school, is working on it. I wasn't sure how it would work, but it did turn out to be an identical production translated into Japanese. I feel so lame, but it made me cry. Multiple times. The people sitting around me must have thought I was crazy. Just the opening number made me cry. It was odd because the production was identical, but I was comprehending the Japanese at the same time as remembering what the English words were supposed to be, and remembering my first experience seeing the show, which was 5 years ago the last time I saw Rick. Yeah. Tons of sniffles.
But, it was lovely to see Rick again, and he was an awesome host. Later I rushed to meet up with the Fulbright fellows again (and our director) for a quick beer before closing time. Managed to get off at the wrong station once, but otherwise made it in time for Rick to meet some of them and again, to say goodbye to many of them for the time being.

Saturday:
Day on my own, spent in Kichijoji doing more of the yarn thing, then Shinjuku and Ginza and Akihabara for dinner. Anyways, so I HAD to stop by Yuzawaya in Kichijoji, which turned out to be everything it was cracked up to be. Huge emporium, big half of a floor devoted to all kinds of yarn, including the first Noro I've see in Japan. And...gorgeous, gorgeous 50% cashmere 50% silk yarn. Ah! Couldn't resist. Also had to get the whole set of cute and useful 30cm plastic circulars, and finally a set crochet hooks for those pesky dropped stitches and zillions of stitches to be picked up. I was all yarned out and didn't even make it to Avril (aka Habu textiles), so I just spent a few more hours wandering around the Kichijoji neighborhood, which I really loved. It's small, cute, boutiquey. Definitely want to go back next time I'm in Tokyo.
Then Shinjuku, wandering around. Not terribly impressed, but by then it was already dark. Lots of food places, cheap places, flashy young clothing (ugh) and I dunno. General uncuteness. (It was better on Monday when I visited with Rick. Apparently I was wandering around the wrong area of Shinjuku). Then Ginza to pass some time before meeting up with Rick again, and by then it was dark and late and everything was closed. But I did see lots of amazing store fronts and very high end stores. Meh. Nothing I can afford or would buy even if I could, anyways, so...yeah. Kichijoji wins for neighborhood with the most personality, I think.
Then, dinner with Rick in Akihabara, at the top of Yodobashi at a Chinese restaurant. OMG!!!! GOOD CHINESE FOOD!!! totally hard to come by in Japan. They are known for their Dandan noodles, or spicy Szechuan style noodles. MmmMmmm.

Saturday was ALL ABOUT DISNEY!!
Rick is a big Disney fan and has been since I could remember him, so of course we went to Disney. I picked DisneySea instead of DisneyLand, because apparently DisneySea is a unique experience only in Tokyo. Ordinarily it would not occur to me to spend a day at Disneyland, but with Rick's buoyant enthusiasm, I had a great time. Because he goes several times a week, he's got all the insider information, the ins and outs, the knowhow about avoiding lines, which lines are worth waiting for, what food is good, etc. It was sooo incredibly relaxing to just put away the maps and the planning and to go along with the ride, doing anything worth doing. Disney really is quite magical. Entering the park is certainly entering a different world, getting away for a day. I can see it being addictive! The landscape, of course, is a different world. It requires a bit of a suspension of disbelief and a kind of acceptance of man-made artificiality (a la Las Vegas, which I know lots of people really dislike), but nonetheless I enjoyed myself. We ran around all day and did pretty much everything--all the big rides, and some of the small ones too. Yeah. Happy. I was really smiley all day. I think you can see on the pictures Rick posted--just exuberantly smiley and happy. Okay, enough gushing about Disney.

Monday's highlights included Kabuki theater and the Imperial Palace. Yeah. Rick and I went to one act of a Kabuki show which was about 45 minutes long and made of three separate dances. I won't even go into that much, except that I enjoyed it a lot, especially the female dances. As someone appreciative of traditional Japanese dance, seeing Kabuki in a theater was incredibly exciting to me. Also, the English explanations broadcasted through headphone receivers were really useful too :-D
Then, we had MEXICAN FOOD for lunch!!!! AHHHHH!!! I have been in mexican food withdrawal for awhile now. It's like...a visceral need, and there is NO MEXICAN FOOD IN MATSUYAMA. Yayyy El Torito!! Finally, an afternoon stroll through the outer grounds of the Imperial Palace. Right in the middle of a ridiculously busy city (okay, I don't know if it's the middle, but it feels like it) there's this huge huge space full of trees that's almost completely dead silent. In it's own way, like Disney it's a different world. The difference is you can see the cars rushing by and the sky scrapers just maybe a few hundred meters away, but you're standing in gravel surrounded by trees and it's nearly silent. It was amazing. Couldn't get very close though :-(

Phew! Done. I had a great couple of days, especially since Rick was such a hospitable host. It was so great to catch up with him and talk to him about Japan, theater, and all kinds of random stuff. Yep. I've changed my mind about hating Tokyo :-P If only it weren't so expensive to go there...

the solution to the soggy sushi issue

2008-02-22T21:39:00.000-08:00

Yes, that's right. You know what I'm talking about. Sushi from your local supermarket, cafe, convenience store, whatever. You know it's been sitting there all day, refrigerated. The nori (seaweed) is probably all soggy from sitting wrapped around the rice. It's probably not going to be very good. Not unlike what this sushi roll looks like:

You know, some cucumber, some imitation crab, and some mayo, knowing how the Japanese love to put mayo in everything. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing too appetizing.

Wrong! Open up the packaging and you discover...

...the nori is packaged separately from the rest of the roll!!

Thus, ensuring its awesome crispyness.

Just peel back one side to expose some nori...

..which is exactly the amount required to stick to one side of the rice roll, if you roll it over.

Then, slowly, keep rolling the nori around the rice, all the while extracting the rest of the nori from is plastic packaging.

Voila! Crispy, crunchy nori-wrapped sushi roll. One of the yummiest ever! What a difference it makes. Ingenious!

the post office

2008-02-22T07:42:00.000-08:00

The other day, I had to go to the post office to mail home some forms. I didn't have the right postage for overseas mail, so I figured I'd just go in and get it dealt with. I'd been procrastinating all week, because the thought of bureaucratic errands makes me cringe, and usually, leaves me pretty frustrated.

Every time I've had to go to the post office at home (in the US) the wait has been, on a good day, 10-15 minutes, and on a bad day, up to an hour of standing in line. I know that postal workers are busy, underpaid, etc. but they just don't seem to be in any extraordinary hurry to do anything. Between serving each person, they inexplicably disappear for a few extra minutes. Though at each post office I've been to, the counter has had room for 5 clerks or even 7 or 10, I've almost never seen more than two clerks out at a time, even when the line bends around twice.

So imagine my pleasant, bewildered surprise when I walk into a post office and a clerk is immediately available to help me. There's no line. I mail my letter. I'm done. In less than 5 minutes flat, I'm on my bike again. It doesn't even register until I've gone a good ways how painless that was, and how comparatively amazing. I feel stupid for having put it off all week.

Let's not forget how quickly domestic shipping itself takes. I've mailed and received letters, merchandise, etc. I live on Shikoku, which is the smallest and most "rural" and out of the way of the four major islands, in some ways. Plenty of Japanese people have never set foot on Shikoku. And yet, mailing a letter or package within Japan STILL takes only one business day to arrive (Okinawa excepted, because they really are far away). Granted, Japan is the size of California, but even if I mailed a letter/package from San Francisco to San Diego, I guarantee it will not arrive the next day. Probably not the day after, either. And the one time I used a private shipping service (takkyuubin) to ship my oversized, overweight luggage from the Narita Airport to Shikoku, it still got there overnight for a reasonable fee.

Why? Whyy is the Japanese post office so quick? (Okay, to be honest this letter mailing episode isn't my first time dealing with them. It was the first time it dawned on me how different the system works from the US though. So I think it's fair to say they're mostly quick.) For starters, there are zillions more Japanese post office branches, I think. I can think of 4 different ones I've been to in this city, off the top of my head, and I know there are more. In contrast, I can only think of two post office branches in my much more populous and sprawling suburban city at home, and they are a good drive apart from each other, as opposed to a short bike ride distance apart.

The Japanese use their postal system as a kind of bank too; they can open savings accounts and deposit money in them. This money can then be withdrawn at any post office branch or post office atm machine in the country, which is a distinct advantage to the mostly local and regional "real" banks that dominate the banking system here. For example, for my upcoming trip to Tokyo, I have to withdraw all the cash I plan to be using in advance, because there are no branches of my bank outside my prefecture. (I mean, I suppose I could try to withdraw money from other atms? I don't know if this is possible? I definitely would have to pay an extra fee. And I'd rather not risk being cashless in Tokyo.) So anyways, digression on banking aside, the Japanese use their postal system for more purposes than mailing letters, so it stands to reason that there are more branches. More branches = fewer people at each branch at any given time = less of a wait. Though, that cannot be the full reason because their "real" banking services do seem to be slow. I've always had to wait, and sometimes pretty long times, in order to do business with my bank. And there are always a waiting room full of people, despite having even more branches than the post office. Perhaps people have to do business with their bank way more than with the post office, who knows? And shutting down at 3pm can't possibly help matters much.

Anyways, the speed of the Japanese post office is a miraculous, mysterious phenomenon that I will cherish and dearly miss when I return home.

dance video, finally uploaded somewhere

2008-02-10T20:48:00.000-08:00

After being rejected by all sorts of video-sharing tools, I finally got it up. It's big, be forewarned. Somehow my video converter wouldn't process more than a second of it.

Right-click save-as to download.

Gion Kouta video

Gion Kouta dance performance

2008-02-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

Whew! I'm exhausted. The dance performance was nearly 5 hours long. It was also set up in a way unlike any other performance I've been to. It was billed as a "maezomekai," which basically means "first dance gathering of the year." All the students sat at two long tables in front of the stage, facing each other. At the beginning there was quite a ceremony with the teacher on stage toasting all the students below with a little plate of sake. Then the teacher handed out new fans to all the students. I asked her what it meant, and she said the idea was that her students would try extra hard and dance this next year with their new fans. She picked me to help her with this ceremony! I carried her sake to her, and handed her the fans to hand to her students. Even my friend, Tomoko, was surprised. "She treated you like a princess!!" It's that obvious, huh? My teacher really does favor me, doing all sorts of things for me. I think I must be her first (and only) foreign student, probably, and she wants me to get the fullest experience possible. Hence, the fantabulous furisode (long-sleeved kimono) that she lent me, and doing my hair all fancy, and letting me participate in the opening ceremonies. Heehee! I'm glad I haven't managed to disappoint her yet. But, I was ridiculously nervous. With all those people fussing about me, I was afraid I would screw up badly (like drop my fan or something) and disappoint them all!

I've uploaded a video that my friend took of my performance. It should be on facebook soon...in about 4 hrs, if the upload progress bar is correct. I haven't watched it yet, because I'm too afraid too. I'd rather bask in the illusory glow of all the praise that various little old ladies have showered on me, than to watch the video and face the truth that I am, after all, just a beginner (although a fabulously costumed beginner). One lady even told me that she was so moved that she cried! Maybe it was something about seeing a foreigner do something so traditionally Japanese. But then again, I think that the fact that I look Asian has facilitated my acceptance by the group. The little old lady who did my makeup (she's 81! looks not a day over 60, at most) commented casually that she expected I would be like one of those tall foreigners, but instead I'm so cute. HA! There were lots of "ooh ahh you're so cute" and "you look so good in your kimono/hair/etc." going around. Clearly, looking Japanese helps.

A lot of people came! Tomoko came, of course, but so did my host family with their new baby in tow. I handed out a few fliers to my Japanese culture class, and two of those students came (total surprise!). Also, Mrs. Yano and her daughter came--them being the family that I spent New Year's with. They even brought me some chocolate truffles. I must have been the single most represented dancer there! I was overwhelmed with everyone's kindness.

And finally, there was a ridiculously cute little 5 year old girl who danced before me. Sadly, I was backstage so I couldn't see her dance, but I did exchange some words with her backstage, and later in the audience we were sitting close to each other due to the show order. Well, apparently she took a liking to me! By the time of intermission, she was loudly broadcasting to everybody that she's "become Sophia-san's friend!" She dragged me into pictures with her family (a mother, older sister, and older brother, all performing that day) and held onto my leg, and played with my hair. She even took my cell phone from me and took pictures with it (preventing me from taking pictures of her family's amazing performances too, while she was at it *sigh*). But she was so adorable. Japanese kids are so adorable.

Yesterday I was at the children's classroom, I was lightly berated by another young Japanese girl for "sitting like a boy." I had just changed out of my kimono and was sitting cross-legged on the floor. I was so startled by her comment! I told her that this is how we are taught to sit, even from a very early age in kindergarten. I asked her how Japanese girls sit, and she demonstrated for me (basically, legs tucked under and off to one side, or another uncomfortable and hard to describe position. I call it W-sit, because the legs are shaped like a W). Ah. Right. I tried to explain to her that Japanese girls probably have to sit that way because they are always wearing a skirt uniform in school, so sitting cross-legged would be difficult, whereas very few American students wear uniforms, so most girls wear pants to school and thus sit cross-legged like everyone else. She was so surprised, I think a lot by the fact that I could manage to explain that in Japanese! Ah, cultural exchange. Gotta love it. Then she and her sister were so impressed when I said that "tai-iku" is "physical education" in English. Impressed and surprised like, ::gasp:: with mouth agape and eyes wide open. So cute!

electronic writing

2008-02-08T06:22:00.000-08:00

Emoticons! Don't get me started on Japanese emoticons. There's already plenty of websites on them out there already, because there are a staggering number of them. For example, this page lists only emoticons that mean I'm sorry! I stumbled on it because my advisor put the following emoticon into an email: m(__)m

I was so stumped. I figured it didn't make any sense, so it must be an emoticon. At first I thought--an angel with wings? Then I figured out that it's roughly supposed to mean "sumimasen" (the equivalent of sorry, excuse me, etc.) But I still couldn't understand what it was supposed to depict. Then, finally...AHA! It's a picture of a person bowing! The m's are the shoulders, the (__) is the top of the person's head, which you can see because he's bent over bowing. AHA! So, this emoticon also means "yoroshiku onegaishimasu", roughly meaning in my context "thank you in advance for taking care of that thing for me." Amazing.

I thought that was the end of that. Japanese emoticons are a sophisticated language, I get it. But tonight, Tomoko showed me some of the notebooks of her sixth grade students. Some of the girl's notebooks were very colorful and covered with little red hearts, pink flowers, etc.--something one might expect for a girly notebook at that age. But what really struck me was that there were those really sophisticated emoticons!! In handwritten notes! I was floored.

I couldn't imagine using an American emoticon in my handwritten notes. This is perhaps because American emoticons are mostly meant to be read sideways, like <3 and :-). So, if I wanted to convey the feeling of the emoticon in a handwritten note, I'd just draw a right-side-up heart or smiley face or something like that. No way would I draw less-than sign and a 3 to stand for a heart, or a colon and a parentheses to stand for a smiley face. These girls, though, were mimicking the punctuation marks down to the letter. So, I literally saw marks like these ヾ(＠⌒▽⌒＠)ﾉ (=^^=) etc. drawn into the lines of their notebooks.

It's almost as though the symbols themselves have become a universal language that has taken on its own meaning. Our happy face or tongue-stick-out face :-P is merely representative of the feeling. It was created out of the limitations of the typed word. When those limitations are removed (i.e. handwriting) we can just draw the relevant smiley to convey the feeling better. But ヾ(＠⌒▽⌒＠)ﾉ doesn't just represent "I'm super happy," that particular combinations of symbols is actually invested with some meaning, such that even when expressing the feeling in handwriting, one uses those symbols in that combination (and some variants, of course). It's like spelling--emotions now have spellings and words and vocabulary to be used in correct, acceptable, recognizable combinations, except that they aren't words, they are collections of symbols that create emoticons.

Or this could all just be b.s., and Japanese girls just draw out the symbols because their emoticons are so sophisticated, and it's tough to do better with a freehand drawing. I can't imagine hand writing （ToT）instead of *cries* or ::cries::, or m(__)m instead of *bows* or ::bows:: though. That bowing one is a pretty non-intuitive emoticon to me.

Hmm...I don't think I've done a good job of conveying what I feel is intuitively different about Japanese vs American emoticons, and why Japanese ones are used in handwriting. Maybe I'll think on it some more.

On a related note, some will recall that novels written, sold, and read entirely on cell phones have become quite popular. Many authors are young teenage girls. I'm willing to bet that those novels are rife with emoticons.

the to do list

2008-02-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

...is empty. A couple months ago I had extensive to do lists on each of my projects. But somehow, I've hit a wall. Or drawn a blank. Because the pages of my notebook/calendar are notably blank.

I've been wishing for a few months for a more solid block of time away from classes to spend at the research office just working. Well, now the schoolyear is over. Classes are done until the new year starts in April, and oddly enough, I have no clear idea of what to do! It's a bit cold to travel, still. I want to go to Nara but I'm wondering if I should wait until April to go for the cherry blossoms. So, here I am at work on Thursday for the first time, blogging and twiddling my thumbs. The initial draft of a paper is done, the survey is on hold being revised into workable Japanese by my very busy host family, and I'm not sure what to do about all the other stuff. I guess I should try to write up my other work too, even though it doesn't stand a chance of being published? At the very least, Fulbright will get a copy even if they don't read it. It's good practice? That's not very motivating.

Now that my Japanese classes are over, ironically, I've been studying Japanese out of my textbook. I'm on lesson 5! (Nearly halfway!) It's quite satisfying, even without me diligently trying to commit vocabulary and grammar to memory. Simply working through the exercises and reading the lessons is interesting, mainly because the lesson texts are taken from newspapers and other such "real" sources and are often very educational (in a good way). So that's what I'll do today, probably. After all, there is a clear to-do list kind of direction there: work through the lessons.

three against two, useful taxi services

2008-02-01T23:02:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I always feel compelled to blog after my dance lessons. Maybe because they're so exciting to me? Honestly, each time I really do learn so much, either in terms of fixing my dance posture, or background of the dance, or principles of Japanese dance in general.

For example(s):
One principle of dance goes something like "Through lies, one can see the truth." This discussion came up when I was trying to do a move where I hide behind my sleeve. I'm supposed to be too embarrassed or depressed to see the people, so I hide. But, the teacher instructed me only to raise my sleeve a little bit. She told me, "Of
course when you want to hide you hunch over and shrink totally behind the sleeve. But that's not pretty, so we only do it halfway, like this, with erect posture. It's much more beautiful that way. It suggests the truth; the audience can see the truth through the lie in your posture."

In the new dance I am learning, there is a constant drum thud sound in the background. Because the rhythm didn't seem to have anything to do with the music, at first I thought it was the neighboring construction! I asked my teacher what it was, and she said that the constant thud usually represents waves (like of the ocean). I thought that was really interesting because usually we think of waves as being sort of continuous and whooshy, but the drumming brought out a kind of ominous relentless aspect of it. Then I listened more carefully and realized that it DID have a recognizably rhythm, namely, three against two! AhA! After practicing how to do that on the piano for so many years, I would have thought I'd recognize it anywhere. Now every time I hear the drums I just keep thinking about how perfect the three against two rhythm is, and how interesting to dance to it.

There is another saying in dance, something like "Return to where your heart was first." My teacher was exhorting me to dance bigger, spread out wider, draw bigger arcs in the air with my fan. She said that as one becomes used to performing a certain dance, the movements become smaller. I was actually surprised by that at first--why smaller, when one becomes more confident in remembering the moves? She said that when we first learn, simply to remember what comes next we exaggerate our moves so as to fix them in our memories. Once we remember and become used to them, we unconsciously get lazier and shrink the moves. So, she told me, return to where your heart was first--remember how it felt at the beginning, when you were just learning the moves and had to dance big.

Enough of the dance stuff.

Last week my host family invited me and Tomoko over for dinner. We had oysters! cooked every which way--boiled, steamed, smoked, and in rice. Soo delicious! And, fresh spinach grown from my host dad's brother's garden. Their baby has grown immensely. It's almost unrecognizable from the last time I saw him. His cheeks have puffed up hugely! He looks like the huge baby in Spirited Away. My host mom says she's always hungry and eats a ton, but it doesn't matter because she can't gain any weight. I guess all of it is going into feeding and fattening her son!

I also saw a pretty weird contraption they have. It's an oil heater? It's round, about waist high, made of metal with some bars running up and down. It burns oil to make heat? I think? It was hard to explain it, so I didn't quite get it. It doubles as a lamp because it's so bright, and as a stove because it's so hot. The oysters were steamed on top of the heater! Interesting...

I was complaining lightly about my electric bills and how I'm now freezing in my room. Voila! My host family lent me a space heater they weren't using. My host mom said she used it in her working days in Nara, and now she doesn't need it because there are plenty of space heaters scattered around the house (there really are, because they have no central heating). Wheee!! It's so awesome. It has an on/off timer, it humidifies if I so desire (need to fill up the attached canister of water), it apparently deionizes the air (whatever that does), AND it's pink!! She says it's more energy efficient than my air conditioner. Well, this month's electric bill will tell, I guess. Meanwhile I'm basking in its warmth :-D

We all had a bit to drink, of course, including Tomoko who had driven us to their house. In Japan, the drunk driving laws are extremely severe. You can't drive even if you've had a drop to drink. In fact, their breathalyzers are so sensitive that they can even pick up alcohol you've had the day before! So, driving home was out of the question. Instead, we called a special taxi service just for solving these sorts of problems. Call one taxi and TWO drivers appear: one to drive you and your car home, the other to follow in the taxi (for obvious reasons). So convenient! So quick! And, all told the trip home took about $18. I don't know if that's the regular taxi rate, or if that's double the taxi rate to account for calling two drivers, but either way I don't think it's very expensive. Of course it would be totally, extremely, more worth it if one were really drunk and in no shape to drive home. Mmmm if only such services were as cheap and as widely available in the US.

Kitto Katsu

2008-01-21T21:03:00.000-08:00

In other words, a break me off a piece of that Kit Kat Bar!

This past weekend was round one of the Japanese college entrance exams. All the public universities are apparently on this system, wherein students take the first round, and depending on those scores, qualify to take the second round of various individual Japanese university entrance exam. It seems like a grueling two day marathon in a zillion subjects. There are a lot of superstitions governing success on exams, many involving food. For example, Katsu-Curry, or pork cutlet curry, is very popular among examinees because Tonkatsu sounds like Katsu which sounds like win!

So....Obviously...KitKats have got to be popular too. KitKat sounds like Kitto Katsu, which translates to Certainly Win.

I snapped a photo of the KitKar bar packaging here. The text roughly translates as: Picture your own dreams. That will certainly become your strength (probably translates idiomatically to "give you strength"). (Ok, that last sentence I'm still not sure about. You're welcome to clue me in on the correct meaning).

There's the cultural tidbit/Westernization of food thing of the day.

In other news, it's cold and rainy and gross. I skipped out on work because it was so darn cold. Then I decided to avoid getting depressed and/or freezing to death I should eat and study some Japanese at a local cafe. After walking there (in the rain) I discovered it's not open on Tuesdays! So I keep walking further (in the rain) all the way to Dogo Onsen hot springs area and pick another cafe. It's crowded, but I find a nice cozy spot to do my Japanese reading. Lovely classical music, nobody bothering or really distracting me. Until! Until! A group of 4 English speakers comes in for lunch. I think they were American from the accent. SO loud and obnoxious. So I cut my studies short and start walking back. Meanwhile, I stop by my favorite used kimono store and start drooling at the gorgeous silk kimonos (not literally, of course). There's a nice old lady there whom I feel compelled to explain how I'm studying here for a year and want to buy a nice kimono before I go home. Somehow or other we really get to talking (or she does, anyways) and end up talking about people understanding each other, Japan/Korea international relations, all sorts of things. Of course, we talked about kimonos too. It was really cool, even though I did a lot of uncomprehending smiling and nodding.

I feel like less of a waste of life now. Yay how human contact works sometimes.

time for another blog post

2008-01-18T16:45:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I'm finding it so hard to keep up with the blog. Maybe it's that as long as I'm typing, I'm not knitting :-P Though, I did finally finish my major knitting project of December (check it out here). Also, I've been guiltily looking at knitting stitch pattern books. It's nice that they're all charted here in Japan, but also there are some that are very, very different from anything I've ever seen! Mostly the very complicated lace ones are quite fantastic. Suitable for small projects or panels though, because I tried using them in a pair of small-gauge legwarmers and got tired really quickly. I feel guilty to admit that I bought two stitch pattern books. They were actually surprisingly hard to find compared to the plethora of pattern booklets on the shelves.

Nothing especial has been going on, other than the general return to school and work. Sort of. It's been pretty cold (highs in the 40s) so I've been sleeping with my cute bunny-shaped hot water bottle. I got slapped with a ginormous electricity bill, nearly 5 times what it usually is at nearly $100. That was rather sobering, so now I'm trying to use my heat as little as possible and being extra vigilant about turning off the lights and various appliances. Boy is living without heat painful.

I finally finished learning my dance, Gion Kouta. I'm going to be performing it in February. Yay! Today I have another dance lesson, where I'll be starting a new dance, Oomi no Okane. This one is less well known, I think, but still very interesting. I'm not sure on what the background of it all is, yet, because there's not as much stuff on the web about it. But supposedly, it's about a woman who is super-strong. I saw some pictures where she is doing laundry or some other work, and just kind of yanking guys around with her super strength. Also, instead of using a fan (the usual prop), the dance uses sarashi, which are cloth streamers. They're a bit like Chinese dance streamers (same idea) but constructed differently because they are white, much wider, and the base is much heavier and wider as well. It'll be interesting to practice with those.

I'm procrastinating on hanging up my laundry. I HATE hanging up my laundry. Maybe I should stop doing such big loads and do laundry more often. I also think I should go grocery shopping on this fine Saturday morning, were it not for my inclination never to go anywhere in the mornings unless I have to.

Oh, what else. I just got some details about the midyear conference I have to attend in Tokyo. I get a half-hour courtesy visit with my grant sponsor, Toyota (Yes, THAT Toyota). Meaning, I meet with the executive director of Toyota, together with various directors of the Fulbright offices and alumni associations of Japan. When I read the email I started hyperventilating. I need to practice my Japanese to prove to them I haven't wasted all their money!! AHHHHH!!!

Well, I've calmed down a bit since reading the email. Maybe the meeting with be in English. One can only hope. But anyways, I DO need to start studying from my Japanese textbook (the one that I brought with me) some more. I've now generally completed Lesson 4, suitably on Japanese consumer shopping. The next one is about weird customs of Japan--sounds interesting.

new year's activities

2008-01-10T02:11:00.000-08:00

Because I've been so lazy, I've let almost two weeks go by after new year's before saying anything about it. So this is going to sound so old.

My advisor arranged for me to spend new year's with a friend of his and his family. The dad is a doctor (very successful! owns his own clinic!), the mom is a pianist/housewife, and they have three kids one of whom is college age. So from Dec 30 to Jan 2, I spent every day with them.

Dec 30 was the mom's birthday so we went out to dinner at a restaurant. Highlights of the evening include fried uni (sea urchin) on top of fugu (puffer fish), a live lobster-type thing, a fish eye, and fish testicles. Need I say more? Lots of pics on facebook.

On December 31st, I played with the kids and their newly purchased Wii. Fun stuff! I don't know what the original ones in the US were like, but I remember reading articles about Wii's escaping and cracking plasma tv's, or Wii's in unruly toddler's hands. Well these Wiimotes came with a handy wrist strap and were pretty much totally encased in silicone (sometimes silicone nearly an inch thick!). After dinner we then all went to Dogo onsen, the really famous onsen in this area (the oldest onsen in Japan, and also the model for the onsen in Spirited Away). It was my first time in any onsen, and it was quite interesting. And insanely crowded. I guess having a bath for new year's is something of a custom? We also went on a little tour of the building and got to look at the emperor's special room, bath, and garden. Emperor only!

On January 1st, the mom came to pick me up at 10 in the morning. She had mentioned before about lending me her kimono to wear, so I thought that meant wearing the kimono like for dance--by oneself. I mean, I know the basics. Well, I was surprised when we ended up at a special kimono-wearing salon. I got my hair all done up huge (took an hour and a half) and dressed in my kimono by a kimono professional. Wow! Yeah, a nice kimono is more complicated than for dance. It was fun and unexpected. So, I went the rest of the day feeling a bit ridiculous and conspicuous since none of the rest of the family were dressed up like that.

For lunch we had osechi ryori, which is special Japanese new year's food. The family had ordered it and it came in a box in three tiers. Osechi ryori was traditionally made to last for 3 days, so a lot of it is heavily salted, vinegared, or otherwise preserved. I have to say, it's not my favorite food but it was certainly interesting.

After lunch we made a trip to Gokoku shrine, the major shrine of the area, as well as Ishite-ji, a somewhat famous temple in the area. I don't know how old Gokoku shrine is, but Ishite-ji is certainly old. Maybe even a thousand years old. A fortune I got from Gokoku told me that I would have a slightly good year, and that I should believe in the gods. There goes that. I hadn't been to either places before then, so it was a fun experience.

On January 2nd, the family took me on their visit to the grandparents. The grandparents live about 2 hours drive southwest of Matsuyama, pretty much in the countryside. We were going through a cold snap, so as we approached the town we saw a good 6 inches of snow. Snow is rare for this area, so the kids were really excited. They could hardly wait through lunch to start building snowmen and have snowball fights in the yard.

On the whole, it was a good new year's experience. Being with their family, though, made me really miss my family. Perhaps because of the persistent language barrier, things are always a bit awkward. They are well-meaning and try to talk to me, but somehow it always seems like there is not much we can really get going on wrt conversation. I would be content with blending into the background as the family talks among themselves and relaxes, but that doesn't seem to happen either. Meals are by and large very silent, as are car rides. Such silence for such a large family just sort of made me feel a little awkward. I wondered if they're always that way, or if they're shy in front of me or something. So anyways, I guess that's just that. I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to spend new year's with them--they were so incredibly kind to me and I know they went out of their way so that I could experience a "real" Japanese new year's. All the same though, it left me a little bit morose and nostalgic, though I was relieved to be alone again afterwards.

christmas in Kyoto

2007-12-28T18:30:00.000-08:00

So this blog has suffered a bit, partly because I've been knitting last minute Christmas gifts (can't knit while typing) and partly because of a bit of traveling.

Kay was in town (i.e., in Japan) with her family for the New Year's holidays, so we decided to meet in the middle in Kyoto and spend a day together. It was so awesome! Kyoto is about a 7 hr overnight bus ride from Matsuyama, so I arrived a day early and spent some time seeing some sights by myself. Because I'm just contrary, I went to a few places off the beaten track. One was otaginenbutsuji, a temple filled with thousands of statues of rakan, or Buddhist disciples. They are very cute (pictures on facebook). Another was Iwatayama monkey park, where I got to feed some wild macaques (pictures forthcoming on facebook). I was planning to go to Kinkakuji after that (the golden pavilion, actually a very famous tourist spot) but then I got on the bus in the wrong direction and ran out of time! Instead, I went to Nishiki-ichiba, a long food market, sometimes known as the kitchen of Kyoto. Apparently you can get all sorts of food there, anything in Kyoto you can imagine. Well, I suppose it was alright. I wish I had gone with some sort of food expert (maybe like my host dad) who could explain it all to me. Otherwise it was not quite as interesting as I thought. I did stop by a place called Aritsugu, a traditional maker of knives. It was really impressive, seeing all the knives on display. I bought the smallest possible thing from the store, which was a pair of small sewing scissors (you know, the kind that is all one piece, and you squeeze them together to make the blade come together? super sharp tips, to get at threads and pick out stitches). Then I discovered that they engrave your name on the blade for free! It was cool to watch. I went with my Chinese name since my English one wouldn't fit. (It later occurred to me I could have just gone with my initials, oh well.) After that it was an all-out shopping binge, mostly at the Gap (though also at an AMAZING bookstore called Random Walk). I never considered myself a GAP girl...until living in Matsuyama where it is damn near impossible to find clothes that fit me, are affordable, and not made totally of polyester or rayon! there was a big winter sale at GAP. Where else can you find 96% cotton sweaters for 1400 yen in Japan? or 98% wool pants for less than 3000 yen? As for Random Walk--just for this bookstore alone I could be jealous of the fellows placed in Kyoto and Osaka (I hear there's one in Osaka too). It's a gorgeous, gorgeous store, very graphic-artsy focused. They carry almost exclusively foreign books, in English, French, etc. And zillions of foreign magazines and newspapers. Though I think I gravitate towards the art books most of all...

The next day I spent with Kay, and we went to Sanjusangendo and Ginkakuji. Sanjusangendo is Japan's longest wooden building, and it is pretty much entirely filled with gold-leaf covered statues of Kannon Buddha. After seeing 1200 statues of Rakan, seeing 1200 statues of Kannon Buddha was quite a contrast (they all look pretty much the same, and are very serious!). No photos allowed, so I had to buy postcards instead. Ginkakuji (silver pavilion) was totally gorgeous. Or at least, the garden was beautiful. It was one of those Zen-type stone and sand gardens. There was even a conical shaped pile near one end supposed to represent Mt Fuji, and another stripy design supposed to represent waves. And the day was so sunny and gorgeous, it was beautiful.

christmas

2007-12-23T17:27:00.000-08:00

I do miss Christmas. It's Christmas Eve today, which just so happens to be a national holiday here because of the emperor's birthday. There is a big Christmas tree in a shopping mall downtown...but I miss the lights, I guess? I miss Harvard Square looking all festive with the lights. (Of course, I'm glad I'm not actually there due to the huge amounts of snow.) Christmas spirit, perhaps? People here sort of celebrate it, but it's even more stripped of meaning here than it already is in the US. I was asked by a family how I celebrated Christmas. I said--I don't do much, spend time with family, eat a nice meal, etc. This family has a small Christmas tree, christmas placemats, chopsticks holders, cell phone ringtones, napkins, the whole works. When I asked how they celebrate Christmas, they said, not much! The far bigger holiday is New Year's, which I guess is their family time. But looking at a gallery of Christmas trees around the world, I feel a bit sad.

Pop quiz!

2007-12-19T06:22:00.000-08:00

Take a look at the following pictures:

So, is the jar:
A) Somebody's science experiment being preserved in paraformaldehyde?
B) Something to get fabulously drunk off of?

Right. When my friend brought it in, I was sure it was something being preserved in paraformaldehyde. And then he said it was a drink. I thought he was maybe kidding and trying to poison me. Then, somebody had a sip, and appeared to be still alive. Aha! Apparently, it is a drink, after all. Apparently, it is a drink from China that a student made himself, about 5 years ago. Apparently the lizard-like thing inside is quite expensive, which I don't doubt...

My host dad filled me in on the rest of the background information. Sometimes it is also made in Japan in the countryside. He has seen and tasted versions where the animal inside is a snake, or giant bees. He says that although the lizard floating in the jar appeared to have been gutted first, in Japan in the countryside they are typically put into a jar of shochu (a very strong clear liquor) while still alive. Then, marinated for a year or so. Gahh! And, it's used to disinfect wounds (!) and to drink when sick. It's about 40% alcohol.

So...did I know all this when I tasted it? No. But I probably would have had some anyways. I had a taste, and true enough it was strong enough to burn and make me quite warm. It also had a pretty strong medicinal taste, like Chinese herbs. And after I had a taste, I had half a glass. It was surprisingly...good? I liked the after warmth. And the medicinal taste made me feel a bit like I was drinking something good for me (which, now knowing how it's made, is probably not true. But hey, who knows?)

finally, a bike accident

2007-12-11T02:39:00.000-08:00

Finally, after 3 months of near-misses with other bikes and pedestrians, I managed to fall off my bike today. Ironically, I wasn't really close to hitting anybody/thing else at all! I was biking on the side of the road (no sidewalk here) and slowing down for a red light. There were a bunch of cars lined up behind the red light, and I figured to avoid them (and also to get near the crosswalk in order to cross) I'd bike through a small puddle (it had been raining earlier in the day). Lo and behold...the small puddle turned out to be a really deep and steep. As soon as I hit the puddle, I realized my mistake but of course by then I was sailing through the air...and landing belly down on the ground. Next to a bunch of cars. How embarrassing! So of course I jumped right back up like See? it never happened, I'm okay. I righted my bike, pushed it along, parked it to go back and get my hat which was thrown to the ground, and finally made it across the street. I went a few blocks before thinking, Gee! Maybe I ought to check if I'm bleeding anywhere. So at the next stoplight I check and realize that my left knee is indeed bleeding, and so I stuck on one small band-aid I had in my backpack. It looked kind of pitiful.

I was on my way downtown to go shopping, so I figured I'd just park and find a drugstore there. I found a very tiny drugstore with two middle-aged ladies, one of them in a white coat. Not knowing the Japanese word for band-aid, I just lifted up my capris and showed her my clearly inadequate bandage and said, Do you have this? She did, and I asked her if she had medicine (looking for something neosporin-like). And of course she found that too and I made sure by asking her, If I put this on, will it heal faster? Again, not knowing the word for "antibiotic" or "disinfect" was kind of annoying. So I paid for my bandaids and my neosporin, and I was all ready to leave the store to go nurse myself, but the lady in the white coat actually told me to sit down. She then proceeded to use rubbing alcohol to disinfect my skinned knee (I didn't buy the alcohol), put the neosporin on the bandaid and the bandaid on my knee. And then another one, crosswise, for good measure. She told me to be careful, and that I could shower with the bandaid and didn't need to change it for two days. Amazing. This was at a drugstore! I don't think any pharmacist or Walgreens cashier would apply bandaids and neosporin to their customers. I'm just...shocked and amazed and really pleased too. Probably worth the skinned knee, just for the story to tell.
Other things I learned: carry a supply of adequately sized bandaids while biking. And avoid biking through puddles when you can't tell how deep or steep they are.

I hate cornstarch

2007-12-10T02:31:00.000-08:00

Seriously. If it weren't so useful I'd swear it off forever. Today I managed to successfully make sweet and sour fish (tang2 cu4 yu2). Last time I tried, I failed abysmally because in substituting tomato puree for ketchup, I ended up with something that was wayy too tomato-ey and not sweet enough. So this time, I wised up and only added a dash of tomato sauce and more dashes of sugar. But the cornstarch! Okay, so this time I didn't screw up the cornstarch as badly as last time, but it was still pretty bad. I've come to the conclusion that there is no good way to handle cornstarch, particularly over here where it universally comes in plastic packs. Whatever happened to those useful cardboard cartons that you can just tip to the side and sprinkle out starch? Aargh. The starch gets EVERYWHERE and sticks to EVERYTHING...except for the stuff I actually WANT it to stick to. Like, the egg-yolk covered fish. I ended up with yolk and starch covered fingers instead, and fluffy white starch all over the kitchen counter and the sink. And...only pathetically starch-covered fish after all that effort. And because I didn't have enough foresight, I had to put the pathetically starch-covered fish down in a tray while I got out a frying pan and heated up some oil. I lift up the fish and what do I see? NO STARCH ON THE UNDERSIDE OF THE FISH!!? Why, might you ask? ...Obviously, the starch is stuck to the tray instead! aallll of it!! Arrghh. I gave up and just fried the fish anyways. It still turned out alright, but I don't think I'll be able to solve the cornstarch problem anytime soon. Unless I'm missing something really obvious about cooking with starch.

On a positive note, the Japanese news informs me that starting today, the sun will set later. Yay! Longer daylight hours! I'm tired of it being dark at 5pm.

I met Dr. Grip!

2007-12-08T04:19:00.001-08:00

No kidding! I really did. Well, his name isn't actually Dr. Grip, though he did invent those amazingly popular pens. He was at the welcome reception for a conference my advisor organized tonight, so I got to meet him. I understand that he is a bit different from the others (in that he has a sense of humor, and wears a leather jacket rather than a suit). I didn't know until afterwards that he invented Dr. Grip pens, and then suddenly the fact that he studies ergonomics made so much more sense. I think I'm going to have to go buy one of those pens now. :-D Although I understand that he is not so rich as one might think. Tomoko tells me that he invested his money in other research or ventures that didn't do quite as well as the Dr. Grip pens.

I also met my advisor's boss, whom I take to be an important person. He's 65, but looks wayy, wayy younger than that. I thought he was not much older than my advisor. The striking event of the evening was that he knocked a glass over onto the floor, spilling red wine everywhere. Immediately, 3 neighboring women rushed to the scene, picking up broken glass and wiping up wine with tissues. And...he just stepped back and observed. Amazing. Didn't lift a finger. Didn't even hear him apologize! One of those cultural things...If Larry Summers (while still president of Harvard) dropped a drink, would 3 female grad students/professors/what have you academics scramble over themselves to clean up after him? It was kind of painful to watch. Hmm, maybe Larry Summers is a bad comparison. If the department chair of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard dropped a drink... Argh.

the story of a spider

2007-12-08T00:09:00.000-08:00

So last night I was talking with Tomoko and somehow the topic of cultural images of animals (and insects) came up. And somehow, we ended up talking about spiders, which reminded me of Anansi the spider. I asked her if there were any famous legends about spiders, and she told me this one:

Once upon a time, there was a very evil man. He did lots of horrible and bad things, including theft and murder. There was only one redeeming deed in his whole life, and that was that once he saved the life of a spider. Eventually, he died and he went to hell.

He suffered in hell for awhile...something about a pool of blood. The spider eventually died too, but since the spider was a good spider, it went to heaven. The spider looked down from heaven at hell and saw its once upon a time benefactor. Taking pity on him, the spider asked Buddha to allow him to come to heaven. Based on the spider's strong recommendation, Buddha decided to allow the evil man one last chance. So, the spider began to spin its silk, so much that it fell all the way from heaven down to hell. The evil man found the spider silk and began to climb up the silk to enter heaven. He was almost all the way up when he looked down behind him and realized that many other denizens of hell were also climbing up the spider silk. He was afraid that the silk would break before he reached heaven, so he cut it, letting everybody else tumble back to hell. Alas, Buddha was watching him and seeing him act so selfishly, cut the spider silk above him. He had squandered his last chance, and so he fell back into hell for all of eternity.

Apparently the story may be by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. I will have to look it up...though I am warned that it is difficult. But I love these sorts of fairy tales and parables. Simple and elegant.

On a totally unrelated note, I had another dance lesson today. I finally finished learning all of my dance, Gion kouta (Ballad of Gion, or Little Song of Gion). The last section is really complicated, with me turning this way and that. Hopefully I can remember! Since I finally learned what the name of my dance was, of course the first thing I did was Google it. Unfortunately, I found at least three other versions of the dance, and innumerable midi files of the song. At least now I know the lyrics!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRPRWZLXlI4

Here is a version of the dance for an idea of what it sounds like and what this type of dancing looks like (though mine is faster and the song is not a solo version).

I'm going to perform in February!

some fall travels and jazziness

2007-12-04T03:02:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated in awhile because I've been out and about. Specifically, this past week I've gone to Osaka and Kyoto for a very short whirlwind tour. Well--mainly, Osaka for shopping, and Kyoto for pretty fall foliage and some touristy sightseeing. It was fun and exhausting.
The hugeness of Osaka was staggering. It's more or less like Tokyo, except that this time I was better equipped to deal with it. In the Osaka Station area alone, there were at least 5 huge buildings (I hesitate to call them skyscrapers, but how else would you call a building with 27 floors?) dedicated to shopping and eating. And all the people in the subway stations at 5pm!
Kyoto, in contrast, was less crowded and much cleaner. But it was also less easy to get around, or so it seemed at the time. I took a walking tour around the station area, which lasted 5 hrs and made me very tired. And then I walked some more! Whee!! After a few aggravating detours caused by bad map-reading and bad street signs, I finally made it back to the station to go back to my hotel in Osaka. But it was gorgeous :-) Pictures are on facebook.

Tonight I went and saw some jazz at a bar downtown with my Nepalese friend (the one who is studying American literature). It was fun! It was more or less like an open mic type of deal, where people signed up to play or sing. There were lots of vocalists singing jazz standards ("All of Me" came up twice!). There was one group of 5 women who were very good with the harmony and all that. They started by singing The First Noel/Silent Night a cappella. But, I have to say, the pronunciation was quite distracting. "Za fast Noel..." particularly of note was "Joy tsu za fishes in za deep brue shee, joy tsu you an' me" I had to cringe every time "heaven" came out as "hebun," though after awhile they were jamming so upbeat to Joy to the World that I wanted to sing along and nearly sang it as "hebun" myself! Bad pronunciation is infectious! Then there was also "Fry me tsu za moon..." And a lady sang White Christmas, which simultaneously made me want to cry for reasons unknown, and laugh because she sounded so inescapably Japanese: "wheah za toreetops grissen, and childoren rissen / to heah sreigh bellzu in za snow...." Well, enough of that. I'm sure I butcher Japanese regularly, so--it's forgivable :-D They were generally very good singers :-)

Anyways, most ppl were really great and having a blast. There was one man in particular that I really liked--a middle aged skinny man in a dark grey suit. He sang "goody goody" and "i can't give you anything but love." He was the only male vocalist, which I thought was kind of strange. Of all the vocalists, though, he seemed to be the most relaxed and natural and most genuinely enjoying himself. He smiled through all his songs (as far as you can smile while singing--maybe he only gave the impression of smiling, or maybe you really can smile with your eyes). I thought it was so oddly incongruous, the man in the gabardine or grey flannel suit jamming to the subversive notes of jazz. Cultural transplantation, things become oddly removed from context.

OMG, AMAAAZING SUSHI!!

2007-11-21T03:17:00.000-08:00

For the first time since arriving here, I went to a real sushi place. I.e., not kaiten-zushi, and not convenience store sushi. I went with a friend of my advisor's and his family. We sat at the counter in front of the two sushi chefs and all the raw fish (and a tank). It was...indescribable. We ordered, they made, and then we ate it. Everything was super clean. When they finished making something, they would just put it on the counter in front of us (i.e., straight on the wooden counter, no plates or anything). I was kind of surprised by that. The best things I had tonight were sea urchin (uni) which was sooo good and negitoro temaki (fatty tuna and green onions in a hand roll). Freshly made sushi has nori that is crispy! I can't remember the last time the nori that my sushi was wrapped in was crispy. Usually it's refrigerated and soggy. I also had, for the first time, a variety of shellfish annnd....FUGU! Yes, the poisonous puffer fish. The fish itself tasted fairly normal, but the sauce was really amazing. And no, my lips and tongue did not go numb. I suppose the poison was quite thoroughly removed.

And a funny moment. There was one shellfish--I think abalone--stuck to the side of the tank. We ordered it, and it appeared in front of us, beautifully presented and prepared. No longer in tank. I dunno...it just...makes me feel funny, eating a raw abalone that was alive just a few minutes ago. Can't get fresher than that...

The meal was quite a treat, and not just for me either. Their daughter, ~11 years old, had also never been to such a sushi restaurant in her life. And the mom pondered for several minutes before deciding that maybe she's been to this kind of place once before. Wow. I suppose because Japanese food in the US is synonymous with sushi and sashimi, I naively assumed that Japanese people eat sushi and sashimi when they go out to eat too. Apparently, it's even more rare and special here than it is in the US! Probably it doesn't help that the meal probably cost a fortune...easily could have spent more than $60 per person. Of course, though...their family is super-rich.

It was so amazing that I'm posting pictures on facebook.

nevermind about preening...

2007-11-19T04:22:00.001-08:00

...because I have 7 mosquito bites on my face. I look like I have chicken pox! But, it's all for a good cause, because I got them on a trip to Ise Shrine. This weekend, I went on a trip planned by the international center of my University to Ise Shrine and some surrounding areas. Ise is a very old very famous shrine, dedicated to Amaterasu the Sun Goddess. It has been around for thousands of years, and Amaterasu is the most important Shinto god (from whom the emperor is said to be descended). Ise is often called "the heart of the Japanese people." It was amazing. Very beautiful, very woodsy. Would have been more spiritual if it weren't so crowded! But I did come away with two Shinto-priest-blessed charms, one for me (academics!) and one for my host mom (for a safe delivery of her baby). It's kind of fun. They are only supposed to last for a year, because you are supposed to visit the shrine yearly. Often, people visit shrines during the New Year's holiday to get their blessings for the new year.

After the morning in Ise, we spent lunch and part of the afternoon on a street next to the shrine (Okageyokocho). It is a street full of little shops, built in the old style, selling traditional and local foods. Very cute place. I was just in time to catch a taiko performance on a small stage in the center of the area. There were three performers: a man in the middle playing three drums, flanked by two women playing one big drum each. They were incredibly good. At the risk of sappiness, I'll admit that I was moved to tears by their taiko performance. Something indescribable about the purity of the rhythm, the way they moved their entire bodies to pound the drums...I don't know. It was moving.

Other highlights of the trip--a huge aquarium, with lots of enormous tanks. It was awesome, though a bit rushed and I didn't have time to see everything. Also, we visited a museum dedicated to ninja. Well, I knew nothing about ninja before and now I know a little bit more :-)

Overall, the trip was great fun. I did enjoy my one night's stay in a Japanese style room, mosquito bites notwithstanding. I just feel very grateful that I have such a supportive international center here at my school, who plans trips like this so I don't have to think about it. There were a total of 20 or so international students going together, and I got to know a few of them much better. We've become quite the community...I feel warm and fuzzy.

Pictures on facebook :-)

a moment to preen

2007-11-14T22:03:00.000-08:00

So...I am second author on a manuscript in preparation. It's on draft 7, and is from my short stint at MGH. !! I think I have seen an earlier draft of this manuscript, but then sort of dismissed it as not going to happen anytime soon. So seeing this draft gives me a nice warm feeling all over again. It's kind of cool to recognize some of the figures in the paper as the same ones I prepared for my Biochem91r report. I sort of can't believe I'm second author? I'm ahead of another post-doc, the technicians, more ppl. I suppose after my own post-doc, who supplied most of the brainpower and did all the writing and all the other figures...my own meager 2 or 3-figure contribution counts as second. But still--it just blows me away. Even though I worked my ass off commuting to MGH and dealing with those mice and labeling their cells and such.

Just skimming the draft makes my head hurt. It's been a long long time since I've had to think about the "story" behind my and my postdoc's research. And boy, it is a complicated story, even more complicated than the usual immunological story. Even while I was actively doing the research, I kept getting confused about my post-docs story (my part of the research was a much smaller bit of the larger story, and at least I could keep my bit straight). Do I have any major comments to give to my post-doc? Oh God, if he and the PI have already hashed through that many drafts, then I doubt I'll be able to give any major constructive comments. Especially since I have to reacquaint myself with the story. I wonder if any remnants of my own text (from the 91r report) remain in the paper. Again, after so many drafts with an incredibly detail-oriented PI, I highly doubt it. It makes me doubt my own abilities to ever write a publishable paper, since I was quite proud of my 91r report! If this is the work that's necessary, the level of ...abstruseness...then I am doomed for sure.

But then, switching to reading papers about BMI and such in my current field gives me hope again. "Look! Their data is shitty too! Mine's only a little bit shittier...and I'm doing a very similar analysis. Maybe I have hope after all".

neat lighting trick

2007-11-10T17:25:00.000-08:00

I forgot to mention a neat lighting trick from yesterdays Beat Street show. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but it sure was cool.

So, Beat Street set up a "stage" in one area of the school cafeteria. By which I mean, they cleared a space and they put up a huge backdrop with the letters "beat street" graffiti'd on it. At first, I thought that in addition to the huge speakers, they actually had lights! I kept looking for the lighting person with the board. Then, I realized that the lights never changed--every piece, all the time, was a dark and moody blue. I got hungry and went to the second floor of the cafeteria to get some food, and AHA! I realized where the cool moody blue lights came from. The cafeteria normally has an atrium-type thing, where there's a hole in the second floor so that the first floor can look through all the way to the ceiling. This large hole is exactly over where Beat Street set up their stage. Of course, this would be a problem for staging because of the light pollution. To solve that, they tied a huge blue painter's tarp (clean of course) over the hole to cover it. Voila! Instant almost professional-looking lights. The tarp ensured that the stage was a moody dark color suitable for dance, and the blueness ensured that any light that leaked through was a nice blue color. Perfect, economical way of getting a show-look. Because we all know that a show put on with fluorescent lights look pathetic.

student festival!

2007-11-10T00:41:00.000-08:00

I had such an amazing time today at the student festival! Apparently, most schools (not just universities) have a yearly student festival. For my university, all the student groups set up booths all over campus and sell mostly food, though some sell other things as well. The performing groups perform around campus on various stages too. I didn't think it would be that exciting, but I went today and actually had a great time!

I got to see my university's "beat street" dance group perform. As you might guess from their name, they are a hip hop / breakdance / street dance group. They were really, really good, and their collaboration routine with the cheerleaders was probably better than any routine I've seen at Harvard, and I've lit/watched a good number of dance shows! Of course, the cheerleaders had their plastic smiles the whole time while doing the hip hop moves, which made them look very cute--but no disputing, they were good. Much cleaner and more together than college groups I've seen in the US. I felt a little bit...hmm...nostalgic? when I heard all the hip hop/rap music. It made mt want to dance! And, a part of me really doubts that the dancers know what "crunk" means, but you never know. At their show, the front row was filled with cute little Japanese kids. Good thing you can't be corrupted by lyrics you don't understand!

There was also tons of great food. Many of the international students set up booths next to each other on the second floor of the dining hall. I got to sample some thai food, vietnamese food (yay pho!), taiwanese food...and I will return tomorrow for Korean and Nepali food. I got too full to eat it today. After asking around, I discovered that there aren't really any Vietnamese restaurants nearby. Bummer. I'll have to go without pho for awhile.

AND, I waited in like for more than half an hour to get in to a haunted house. I was having doubts as many of the people in line were high school students (could tell by their uniforms), and as the wait turned out to be much longer than I thought, I figured it wouldn't be worth it. But it was fun!! They did a great job of jumping out at you at unexpected times. Ahh...I haven't done a haunted house since grade school. A bit late for Halloween, but that's okay. I've made up for missing it.

I think, though, that besides the cool performances and good food, one of the things that really made me happy was seeing everybody and saying hi. As I walked around, I saw many of my host dad's students and said hi to everybody...then at the international food fair I knew a lot of people too, from orientation together. Then I met some new people (through people I knew before). There was one guy who is a linguistics grad student, specializing in generative grammar. He explained to me that he really loved grammar, and especially English grammar, and is always looking for someone to speak English to. I have to say, his English is probably the best I've heard so far. So I hung out with him and his two buddies (whom I knew from before) for quite awhile. Through them, I met a bunch of other linguistics students, as well as a Nepali student studying American literature (!), specifically Theodore Dreiser. Amazing. And then, through my friend the German international student Janina, I met a Japanese-English translator (she's Japanese), and two ALT's at a local high school, who were from London. Annd, on my own, I met some people from Malaysia who sold me amaaaazing crepes with curry. Everybody was so friendly and eager to talk and say hello. I'm ridiculously proud of myself, being social all day loL. Even the guys I was with were surprised, saying "you know a lot of people!" which is so ironic considering my generally introverted and loner nature. But today I really felt...connected. That's saying a lot. Maybe it's because I have low expectations--I've never expected people I know only slightly to say hi to me randomly and start talking and joking. I rarely said hi to people at Harvard, figuring they didn't know or remember who I was, and perhaps as a result of that people rarely stopped on the street to say hi to me. But here, being an international student is sort of an instant bond. And since I know only a few Japanese people here (well, few people in general) whenever I see them I make sure to say hello, even if I don't remember their names, as is often the case since Japanese people have complicated names, and I suck at names in general. (They can't have forgotten meeting the American!)

It occurs to me that I have never had so much fun at a Harvard's Yardfest, and that we didn't have anything similar to this matsuri. Perhaps ARTS FIRST is the closest thing I can think of, since all the performers all over campus are student groups. But the organizers are still "adults," and they run the food and the show and program and stuff. Here, there is a lot of "ownership" I suppose. The students run the festival. Student volunteers clean up after everything. There are student volunteers at every trash station, waiting to help you properly sort and throw away your trash. I find that to be amazing! Who in the US would volunteer for such a job? I don't think I've ever seen a janitor here. Well, they must exist, I just don't know about them. It seems to me that the students do a lot of things. At my office campus the other day, I saw 2nd and 3rd graders weeding the planters on campus! That would never happen in the US.

I forgot to bring my camera today, but tomorrow I'll go back and perhaps take some pictures. I saw a guy dressed as Batman, running around. Well, "dressed" would be an overstatement. Let's say, the only thing he was wearing was underwear (not even shoes!) and he was painted from head to toe! Painted black all over, with the Batman logo on his chest. Oh well, I guess he was also wearing a black garbage bag as a cape. He had some buddies too, one of them painted as Doraemon and the other two I don't know what, probably other characters I don't recognize. Mmmm...yeah. Those painted dudes beat out even the guys dressed in drag, some of whom even made pretty convincing and halfway attractive girls.

the yakuza?!? oh wait, no...

2007-11-08T06:05:00.000-08:00

So today, I finally had the motivation to workout and I get interrupted twice. The first time, I was surprised by my doorbell ringing. Calling out "chotto matte!" (= "wait a sec!") I grabbed a shirt to pull on and went to the door. I peered through the peephole and saw two young men, dressed in all black suits, carrying black leather briefcases. One of them was even wearing a black trench coat, I think. My first thought was...gee, they look like the yakuza. No kidding. But Japan being safe, I decided to open the door a crack. One of the guys reached into his suitcase and pulled out a little pamphlet. My next thought was oh God! Jehovah's Witnesses!! Which was pretty much what slipped out of my mouth. "Are you religious? Jehovah's Witnesses?" All I got were some blank stares from the young men. It occurred to me that from the way they dressed, they could be Mormons. So then I asked "Are you Mormon? Latter Day Saints?" and I got some more blank stares. I explained that I was American and didn't read Japanese much, so I didn't need their pamphlets. Finally, I asked "Are you Christian?" to which they said "ah! yah! Christian!" and nodded vigorously. "I'm not Christian" was my reply, and finally I ended with "have a nice night!"

I figured I got rid of them forever, since they didn't speak any English. Returning to my workout, I mused that I would never find out whether they were Mormon or Jehovah's Witnesses. But, before my workout was over, another doorbell! Surely, not the same people! But yes. One of the young men had returned with a young woman, who was NOT dressed in intimidating yakuza-like all-black. Although she did look nice. Apparently, this young woman speaks some English and so the original young man brought her back to talk to me! "Do you know, Jehovah's Witnsses?" Aha! My first (second?) thought was right. I explained to them that I have relatives who are Jehovah's Witnesses, and I figured that's what they were from their pamphlets, which looked a lot like the Watchtower. Then followed a short discussion on my religious beliefs, how I wasn't raised in Christianity and so find it hard to believe in God, and how I didn't need their pamphlets because I already know about them through my cousin (the last of which is only a half-lie. But I really, really don't want their pamphlets. More paper to sort and tie up and recycle! And I was afraid that the English speaking lady had come back with English Watchtower's and Awake's too). So again, I ended with a have a nice night. I feel vaguely bad about being somewhat curt, and also about the English speaking lady who came from goodness knows where just to talk to the English-only foreigner on the 4th floor. Man, but these people are persistent. And I had no idea there were active Jehovah's Witnesses in Matsuyama. Amazing.

Actually, quite a few people have come door to door to sell their wares, whether religious or not. I got a guy come by the other day to advertise his fortune-telling studio. He tried to read my palm and tell me that I was an emotional person prone to cry while watching TV. He was exceedingly difficult to get rid of! I wonder what is the polite Japanese way to get rid of these ppl--as I figure the American tactic of slamming the door or just saying NO! would be considered overly rude here. Of course, I could just stop opening the door to strangers, but I'm afraid that I'll miss somebody actually important, like the gas company man (he's come by before) or a package delivery man (although those guys are in uniform, so I just have to learn and spot the uniforms) or maybe somebody else I don't know about but who could potentially be important.

image vs content

2007-11-06T03:51:00.000-08:00

A tentative judgment about Japanese society: the Japanese value presentation and image much more highly than American counterparts. And the corollary: content or value is downplayed. To minimize the risk of generalizing, of course, by American I mean me and by Japanese I mean my experiences of Japanese!

Over and over again, I'm reminded by how much the Japanese love presentation, display, protocol. One example is the nuclear power plant disaster management training I got to take part in today. My advisor is one of the responsible doctors for the Ikata power plant, which apparently provides power to all of Shikoku. As such, he was able to arrange it so that I could participate in the training, masquerading as a doctor. We had a fake patient who was supposedly injured by something radioactive in level 4 security. (Level 4 security is such that basically you need to get naked before entering! Thankfully, we started the simulation just outside that area, though I did see a lot of old men and occasionally young men going through in their underwear.) There were several public health nurses with all sorts of equipment, including a stretcher (!). The two 'doctors' (i.e., me and my advisor) were wearing white lab coats. Everybody was wearing yellow vests that said "training" in big letters. The fake injury was really just a piece of rubber made out to look like a gash to the bone, with something (actually) radioactive stuck in the wound. I watched as the public nurses taped on the rubber wound to the fake patient's leg, then bandage over the rubber wound, then splint the leg, then put the leg in a plastic bag, then tape the plastic bag shut. All with the utmost care. Then, we sat around and waited. And waited. And waited. Apparently, we were on a time table and so we weren't supposed to leave that area until exactly 9:20. Finally, the patient heaved himself onto the stretcher (so much for realism here). He was wrapped in a towel, and zipped into a body-bag like bag, supposedly to minimize radiation contamination of the surroundings. The nurses took several tries to figure out how to configure the stretcher into its various states of collapsed-ness. We wheeled him downstairs, to right outside a huge door. And then, we waited some more! Still ahead of schedule. Finally, at exactly the specified time, the huge garage door opened and we were greeted by the press and an ambulance. More fiddling with the stretcher. I watched again as the ambulance stretcher was oh-so-carefully and slowly wrapped in plastic. The patient was transferred to the other stretcher, and into the ambulance, and was off to the hospital! We actually did make the drive to the hospital…with the ambulance stopping at each stoplight. I actually rode in a car behind the ambulance. So much for realism, again. In fact, the whole thing was so ridiculous with the timetable and the slowness that rather than reassuring me that "Wow! This power plant is so careful, it trains its personnel about disaster management every year!", I am now absolutely convinced that were an injury actually to happen on the premises, the poor person would no doubt die or suffer massive radiation poisoning as the nurses fiddled with the stretcher and checked things off their clipboards. In fact, the whole thing had the inescapable feeling of being a show, a mockery, a display for the press. See? We're responsible. See? We're prepared. Nevermind that this is nothing like real conditions. Nevermind that this kind of training would be absolutely useless for real conditions. I had the idea that this kind of training would focus on speed, efficiency, etc. That they would time how long it would take to get the poor patient into medical care. But nope. Anyways, so that was a long-winded example from today.

One of the things that got me thinking about this topic came up in Japanese class. One of our exercises had to do with analyzing different types of apologies. In Japan, whenever some scandal hits a company, it isn't unusual to see the whole board bow deeply to the press, and the CEO crying in remorse, apologizing over and over again. In our exercise, we had a cartoon of two different CEO's apologies. In one, the CEO was crying, bowing profusely, and saying "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! There's no excuse! It's all my fault! I'm sorry!" etc. over and over again, in the humblest of language. The other CEO was sweating, saying something along the lines of "It was reported to me during construction of this building, there was something amiss with the numbers. I will prevent this from happening in the future" or something like that, focused on investigation, reasoning, and prevention in the future. Of course, neither apology is perfect, but we were discussing how the Japanese would overwhelmingly prefer the first apology, while the second apology would be considered grossly unsatisfying. During the discussion, the teacher explained to us that in Japan, when one apologizes, the remorseful expressions come first. I'm sorry! No excuse! I'm sorry! Etc. You have to look like you feel bad, and be polite. It helps to cry--drums up sympathy. But the reason for the mistake is merely secondary. She pointed out that in Western cultures, when one is late, one typically emphasizes the reason like "AHH! The traffic was so bad today. There was an accident on the road." The listener then has some sympathy for you--it was out of your control, not your fault, It's okay, you don't need to apologize. Whereas, Japanese people don't want to hear the reason until you've already apologized sufficiently remorsefully. Who cares why you're late? You're fucking late. So in the case of the construction company screwup, I was totally amazed that the Japanese would prefer the remorseful display to the reason. (Of course the second CEO probably should have apologized in his statement somewhere). I feel like for Americans, saying "I'm sorry" is an empty expression unless one can back it up with action. Americans want to know why. Americans want a full-scale investigation, with criminal accountability. Americans want compensation. Americans want guarantees that this shit will never happen again. Saying I'm sorry is basically useless, though sometimes helpful for PR. Again, Americans seem to prefer action and content over displays of remorse.

Finally, she showed us a small TV clip from some sort of variety show contrasting Japanese and American CEO apologies. It was made out to be quite absurd, such that even I laughed at the funny American CEO. But one of the hilarious-at-the-time explanations for why Americans are not so quick to apologize was Christianity. A screen flashed up with a cartoon of Jesus kneeling and praying while looking upwards. The narrator then said "God will forgive me!" The whole class burst out into laughter at that point because it was just so ridiculous. However, it really reminded me of Zielenziger's arguments about the lack of Christian influence in Japan (see earlier post about that). According to him, a lot of Japanese culture can be explained by the lack of Christianity. Without Christianity, he argues, there is no inner sense of right or wrong, no inner moral compass. "Right" is determined by society or social consensus. So, to apply it to this situation, the Japanese value apologetic displays so much because they are designed to elicit sympathy from society and from the wronged. The Japanese want more than anything else forgiveness, which can then pave the way to social harmony and peace again. Whereas in Western culture, such extreme social harmony is not as important as inner harmony and peace. If all is right with God, then all is right in my soul. It doesn't matter how the external masses judge one. I think the explanation has a point.

And finally, something lighthearted and amazing. My teacher exhorted us to write our assignments neatly. Mind you, these are short in-class assignments, done on the fly in a few minutes. She said, if you are using a ballpoint pen, please use white out and don't scratch out your mistakes. That way, your writing will look better, you'll make a better impression on the teacher, and I won't be ashamed to show your work to other teachers. My jaw nearly dropped. Neat handwriting, sure. But white-out? Obviously, it's all about presentation and impression on the teacher. I'm used to thinking that the content of my writing is of paramount importance to the impression I would make on the teacher. On an in class essay exam, nobody is keeping track of whether you start a word, scratch it out, and restart. So long as its legible and not totally inane, it's okay. Apparently, I should start using white-out. Or a pencil.

good beef don

2007-11-01T22:35:00.001-07:00

The past couple of days, I've been struck several times with inexplicable happiness. I was walking up a road to a bakery, listening to music as usual and singing along and just feeling...happy! I still can't believe I'm here. That was a rainy day. The day before it was sunny and gorgeous and very California-like and it struck me that I already love this place more than I ever loved Harvard. For no especial reason. It's not particularly pretty; God knows the campus is in ruins right now due to construction, and even if it weren't under construction it would be a dismal concrete mass. My apartment is a dismal concrete mass. The city is criss-crossed with power lines, half the streets don't have sidewalks, and...well...it's generally ugly. It's nowhere near as cute as Cambridge. Of course, the castle is gorgeous, and there are various traditional-style houses and buildings that lend character to the city. But still! I've rarely (if ever? can't remember) felt just happy to be at Harvard, walking down the street, singing along to music, going somewhere nice by myself. I don't know if it was the workload, the people, or the atmosphere. But here, everybody is extraordinarily nice and I'm generally relaxed.

Along those lines of being happy, I had really great fastfood gyuu-don (beef donburi, or beef over rice) today for lunch. Mmm! A bowl of beef don and a mini bowl of udon cost me only 640 yen. Beats American fast food any day. Ahhh....

Part of the reason I had to eat out for lunch anyways was because I spent all morning in the hospital. My host mom, who is heavily pregnant, was scheduled to go to the hospital across from the university for a checkup. She invited me to go with her to get a look at how the Japanese hospital system works. I suppose it's about the same? Some differences included that for all the basic pre-seeing-doctor checkup stuff, like getting a blood test, blood pressure checked, urine sample, etc...had my poor host mom running all over the hospital, visiting this and that nurses' station. Well, in the US one hardly ever sees a doctor in the hospital unless one is actually admitted to the hospital. Most of the time, patient visits are in outpatient clinics, and in those places a nurse or technician does all the pre-seeing-doctor exams in one place, the exam room! Saves time and trouble that way. I spent all the waiting knitting a hat for the baby (gave her the matching booties that morning). I cast on after I got to the hospital, and was nearly done by the time the morning was over! In fact, I finished the hat just now. It's in gorgeous Noro Transitions color 19, beige-ish naturalish, with beautiful gradations in color, and soft and fuzzy and lovely. It's so nice I want to knit myself a hat in it too--still have two big skeins left.

But anyways, I got to see my host mom get an ultrasound (very fun). Cute baby? Well, it's hard to say that anything on an ultrasound image is cute. But I see the potential for cuteness. Unfortunately, she looks like she could might be delivering prematurely. She's not due until the end of December, but something about the baby suggests that she might deliver any moment! So she's been prescribed bed rest, which must suck royally. And on top of that, her husband (my host dad) has already scheduled two trips out of town next week for work, and so he can't stay with her. As a result of all that, they decided to admit her to the hospital right then and there! She's going to stay for at least 3 days, and then be re-evaluated. That's definitely something different from the US. I imagine that somebody prescribed bed rest in the US wouldn't be admitted to the hospital to stay indefinitely. Nobody to take care of you at home? Tough luck! Deal with it. From what I know, nights at a hospital are kept to an absolute minimum, reserved for those who are critically ill or dying. New mothers go home right away!

bad sushi

2007-10-31T07:13:00.001-07:00

So, I had my first restaurant sushi experience in Japan last night. Up until then, the only sushi I've had has been supermarket or conbini bento-box sushi. Last night, my advisor took me to a kaiten-zushi place, which sort of means rotary sushi. Think Sushi Boat! The sushi comes around on little plates, rotating around as customers sit at the bar. Well, in Japan, kaitenzushi is very cheap, and the quality of the sushi definitely shows! I'm not sure that it was an improvement over conbini/supermarket sushi. Even the hamachi was kind of tough, and the maguro was only so-so. Disappointed...

I've discovered that the Japanese value maguro (tuna) much more than salmon, I think. Whereas most Americans I know would go for salmon, it's tougher to find salmon sashimi here. And the maguro is generally very tasty here, tastier than I've had in the US.

Today was gorgeous weather. Not a cloud in sight. Some of the internationals were surprised that despite it imminently about to become November, we could still wear t-shirts. It reminds me of home...in fact, Matsuyama is approximately the same latitude as Los Angeles. Amazing! I love this place.

Japanese dance!

2007-10-28T06:07:00.000-07:00

Today was an awesome day :-) I found a Japanese dance teacher/studio! I found her on the web through the yahoo Japan yellow pages actually almost two weeks ago. I went to visit her studio one weekday afternoon, hoping to meet somebody, but nobody was there. I called the studio on the phone once, but got scared when nobody picked up and the answering machine went on, so I hung up before leaving a message. This morning, I finally had the guts to call again and have an actual conversation with the teacher (Hanayagi-sensei). She was surprisingly friendly and said that since class was happening that afternoon, I was welcome to go and visit. So I showed up on time at 1:30pm (actually, that was a half an hour early), chatted with the teacher as much as I could, and watched as some of the other students came in. The first student was a 6th grade girl who didn't say a word throughout the whole lesson! It was a little bit odd to me. The next was a very nice lady who is a Japanese teacher at a different university in Matsuyama. Though she didn't speak any language other than Japanese, because of being a language teacher, she was very good at interpreting and anticipating my broken Japanese. I was going to stay just for her lesson and then go, but then the teacher lent me a kimono, obi (sash), and all the undergarments. By then two or three more students, both middle-aged oldish ladies had arrived and dressed, and they all urged me to give it a go! So, one of the other ladies took me to the dressing area and helped me put on my undergarments and kimono, and two of them tied my obi for me! One of them even lent me an extra set of her tabi (those Japanese toe socks) and silk ties.

By now, somewhat past 3pm, I started having my own mini-lesson. The teacher picked a maiko-dance for me, asking me "how would you like to be a maiko?" After ascertaining that I actually knew what that was (maiko are basically cute little geisha-in-training), we started the lesson. It was so much fun! Certain movements were familiar in an a-ha! sort of way. It's amazing what an influence your childhood has on you. I'm remembering certain body positions, ways of holding the fan, opening the fan, etc. It was exhilarating. I think in December I will pay the fees and become a regular student, two weekends a month. For November, I think I will go be a student with a bunch of tiny little kids, partly because I don't have so many free weekends in November, and partly because the lessons for the tiny kids are free, and I'll have a bit more time to decide. But basically, since Hanayagi-sensei is lending me all the dance accessories, I won't have a huge outlay like I expected. Her lessons aren't terribly expensive--10,000 yen a month, which roughly comes out to less than $25 per lesson. Considering that the adult lessons are one-on-one, it's not a bad deal. The lessons are rather variable in length, however--mostly less than an hour. The students just show up whenever they want during the designated afternoons and wait their turn. It's an odd, time consuming system, but I suppose it facilitates socializing among the students.

Oh, and another random thing: my teacher way back when in the US was also Hanayagi-sensei. Apparently Hanayagi is the largest school of traditional Japanese dance in Japan, specializing in Kabuki-style dance.

Again, I am amazing by the warm welcoming attitude from everybody, even complete strangers with no vested interest in me, such as Hanayagi-sensei's other students. I can't get over the random gift of the tabi.

international student orientation

2007-10-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

Finally! I think my university must be one of the last ones to hold its orientation. It was mandatory for all international students new this semester. We spent one night at a nearby town (?) called Ozu, in the Ozu National Youth Center. I don't think it qualifies as a town, since the National Youth Center is one gigantic structure nestled in the mountains and by a river. Anyways, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Quite a lot of it was lecture, and because it is so late and so many of us have been here a month or so, we already had figured out most of the information, such as how to sort garbage (although some more helpful tips did come up) and bicycle rules. Hours and hours of orientation. Even the new stuff (like how to use the university health center) took forever and was boring. But, on the upside, we did get to spend the night away. Dinner = party. Then shower/bath, then after dinner = more party and some drinking. I did get to meet a couple of nice people, and I am relieved to realize that my aversion for Chinese students/people appears to be limited to a specific set of Chinese international students, because I met some other ones who were nice. We made plans to go to the hot springs together next Friday. I alsomet a few very nice Nepalese students, who were all in the engineering school and studying disaster prevention (architecture and such). The school of engineering apparently has a lot of connections and sister schools in Nepal. It was fairly irritating how country-clique-ish the group was--we were about 35ish people in all. Splitting up at dinner tables, rooming, on the bus, was mostly very country based. All the Chinese students stuck together, all the Nepalese students stuck together, all the Korean students stuck together. I suppose it's natural for people to want to stick to the language they are comfortable with, and I especially don't blame those people who are absolute beginners in Japanese, of whom there were a few. But some of the cliquey-est people were those who had very superior Japanese! And some of the most affable and friendly were those who were absolute beginners. And the Nepalese group was the friendliest of all, with random people coming up to talk to me several times. Go figure. So anyways, us orphans, the ones with no automatic language clique sort of ended up together a lot by default. Or maybe we count as the English speakers from assorted countries and of varying abilities. I ended up sitting next to and rooming with a girl from Vietnam. I am so impressed by the many students here who have to cope in entirely foreign languages. For example, all of our orientation is done in Japanese and English, so people like Ling, my roommate and bus companion, have to get by mostly with their squeaky English since their Japanese is still at the "Intensive Beginning Course" level. I mean, forget any comfort of hearing their native language! Ditto with the students from Laos, Thailand, and I suppose even China and Korea.

I sat at the dinner table with some Chinese students that I decided were either very annoying or very boring. I discovered that my brain does not work simultaneously in Chinese and Japanese--so I'm blown away by those who can force their brains to work simultaneously in Japanese and English (and while thinking in some other native language like Vietnamese or Thai). While I could laugh at the Chinese students' jokes, I could not for the life of me speak more than a few words of Chinese at a time, even though my Chinese is a lot better than my Japanese. When I talked to them, Japanese came out first, and when that failed, English, and finally the Chinese occurred to me. The brain is a mysterious organ...

So the final part of our orientation was a small kayaking excursion on the river near Ozu. But in Japan, a kayak is called a canoe, so I was sort of confused at first. The teachers made it out to be kind of scary, telling us that in the past multiple people have fallen into the river and gotten soaking wet, etc. etc. etc. but it wasn't that bad at all. The river was very calm and not very deep, and we just paddled up and down a stretch of it. It was fun! Very peaceful and beautiful. I feel so lucky to be doing all of these things that I would probably never do in the US.

Something I've discovered about Japanese food: the temperature of food is not a high priority for Japanese people. Having been served food that was quite cold several times over the past few weeks, at dining halls and restaurants even, I've gotten used to cold fried chicken and cold fried fish and cold pasta...well. Let's not say "gotten used to", but rather "am no longer surprised by." Eh. Makes sense, considering that a large part of traditional Japanese food is served at room temperature, such as sushi and sashimi.

Matsuyama coolness

2007-10-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of days, a fellow Fulbrighter from Osaka has been in town. The Japan Association of Public Health has been holding their conference in Matsuyama, which is why he has been here, crashing at my place for a couple of days. Not being terribly interested, I haven't been going, but that's alright. But, we have been somewhat exploring the city together. On Tuesday night, we decided to have dinner downtown and so we wandered around trying to find a restaurant. We saw a "Gaucho Grill" that looked really cute so we couldn't resist. It turned out to be an Argentinian restaurant!! They even had Argentinian wine, which I bet isn't easy to find in Japan. Nobody was there when we went in, so we sat at the counter and chatted with the cooks and with the owner/manager. Apparently, she was born in Argentina and lived there for 17 years. Now, of course, she looks like any Japanese lady. My dinner companion then spent some time chatting with her in Spanish, which impressed everybody immensely. Everybody was lovely and friendly, and it was quite a find. In the end, we even got a bit of a discount.

Afterwards, I went gave in to the temptation and went to the Haagen Daz ice cream place and discovered--hazelnut ice cream! My favorite flavor of all time. So now, I'm glad I can get my fix of hazelnut anytime by going downtown. It will make passing by Haagen Daz without going in that much more difficult. :-(

Yesterday, we also went to Matsuyama Castle. It was effectively the first time for me, since the last time I went was for the Noh performance at night. This time I got to go inside, and it was actually pretty cool. At the top of the hill and on the top floor of the castle, the views of Matsuyama city are quite spectacular. It's an extremely well preserved castle, despite having been hit by lightning or struck by arson in its past. It's also the last castle to have been "built" in Japan--which is to say, a great deal of it was restored in the 1960s using traditional castle-building techniques. The video they had of the workers laying the roof tiles was very illuminating.

All in all, he was pretty impressed by my city, which oddly inflames and nurtures the possessive and proud bit of me. I suppose Matsuyama has grown on me enough to make me proud that it impresses an Osaka person! But truly, it is a very livable city and he was impressed by my proximity to everything and how we could pretty much walk anywhere important.

I discovered that the ferry to Hiroshima only takes a 2 hours or so and is pretty cheap. I don't think there are any Fulbrighters in Hiroshima, but I think as soon as I can, I should take a day-trip out there as I hear that it's a beautiful city :-)

On a completely unrelated note, I've managed to get very little done today. I've slept all afternoon (Oops!!). And I'm being too lazy to cook, but also feel a bit like I shouldn't really eat since I've done nothing but sleep since my last meal! Hmph. I also haven't made it into work at all this week, mostly because I've finally started my Japanese classes. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I have ~1.5 hr Japanese classes. They are at such an awkward time! Mostly right in the middle of the day. It makes going anywhere before or afterwards kind of a pain, especially anywhere kind of far, like my research office. And then, there is the lunch problem. Not just the bringing and packing of lunch, but also eating it. Two of my classes start at 12:50pm. I'd like to eat lunch with the people at the research office, but they eat at 12pm-ish or later. Considering that I need to get to class on time, this sort of poses the problem of commute time. The easiest thing to do is just to stay home in the morning and eat lunch at home, so I can eat at 12ish and it doesn't take me that long to go to class. But then, I should go to the office after class, at 2:20ish? It doesn't give me a whole lot of hours before sunset to work, and I'm not sure I can handle riding my bike after sunset just yet. Maybe that's the thing I'll have to get comfortable with next...

breakfast!

2007-10-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

I have got to do something to solve the breakfast problem. Today I had to throw out a whole loaf of bread because it had green spots on it, as well as a cottony fuzz around the outsides. I didn't even get to eat it! So I went hungry. Breakfast food has been something of a problem. I need something that will fit all these criteria:

1) Minimum of prep time in the morning
2) Filling
3) Longer shelf life than bread--so I don't have to buy more every 3 days!
4) Not freakishly expensive, like fruit is
5) Won't significantly raise the risk of me getting cancer

So generally speaking, I'd go for a bowl of instant ramen. But they appear to be much more expensive here than in the US, and anyways they don't come in big boxes of 24 here either. And more importantly, I can't eat it every day or else criteria number 5 won't work. Bread is out, because good bread is expensive and spoils too quickly. I've been drinking juice, but that's hardly filling. If there were cereal, that would satisfy most of the requirements, but I haven't seen a box of cereal yet! Or oatmeal, either, and I don't eat oatmeal. I'm out of ideas for breakfast. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Lady Drugstore

2007-10-17T19:22:00.000-07:00

I decided to familiarize with my local drugstore, called Re-De-I (Lady). Seriously. As if men didn't need drugstores too. I've been dreading this moment. Precisely so I wouldn't have to wander down aisles of mysterious Japanese stuff, I brought with me a full bottle of shampoo and contact lens solution. I haven't yet run out of either. But, I forgot to bring soap/body wash, and the stuff I've been using here just sucks. So I gave in and went to Lady.

The moment I stepped through the doors, my eyes hurt. It seems that every package has to be in bright neon colors of pink, green, orange, and yellow. The whole jumbled effect is quite nauseating. But luckily, I found what I needed quite easily, since there were more than a few American brands. I found Dove products of all sorts, which I expected since I've been seeing the commercials. I also found Pantene hair products, but they were packaged completely differently than in the United States. I guess their Japan headquarters is independent or something. There was also tons of Nivea--they do a much better job of advertising in Japan than in the US. Here there is lots of "skin milk" and skin-whitening treatments under the Nivea brand, all advertised by a woman with gorgeous pale white skin. (I know "gorgeous" and "pale" don't often go together in Western vocabulary and image, but her skin really is gorgeous. Or else the advertisement wouldn't work.)

I was surprised to find that Shiseido is a drugstore cosmetic brand! Well, I didn't look closely so it may have been priced higher than the others--but it didn't look like it. Considering that Shiseido is an expensive department store brand in the US, I was surprised to see it ranking with the Japanese equivalents of Revlon and Maybelline.

I did not see Neutrogena. Too bad! What with their emphasis on health and science, I think they could do very well here.

Also, I picked up a bag of potato chips--first junk food since arriving, more or less. It was labeled as nori (seaweed) and salt, and in the packaging the chips looked like sour cream and onion with the little flecks of nori all over it. So I was half expected sour cream and onion, but the first bite was completely different! It was kind of disconcerting. But, I'm hooked. Nori-salt potato chips are amazing. And...different. And...just plain good.

what do you mean you don't use PubMed!!!??!?!?!?!

2007-10-17T03:12:00.001-07:00

My advisor never uses PubMed. He was utterly confused when I asked about how I could get the University's subscription/fulltext access. *sigh*

Part of what I view as a University's job is supporting academic research. And a huge part of that is subscribing to lots and lots of online resources such as Ovid, JSTOR, and especially PubMed so that researchers, professors, students,etc. can use them. Or at least, having easily accessible paper versions of some journals! Apparently, that is not the case here or anywhere else in Japan that people here have been. Individual professors subscribe to journals of interest, off of their grant money, entirely for themselves. My professor subscribes, most notable, to NEJM and to various Japanese public health journals. He reads papers relevant to his field, and if there are papers in the references that he wants, but which are in journals he does not subscribe to, he asks his friend at a pharmaceutical company to get them for him! Apparently, his friend is pretty high up in a major pharma company, and ironically, THEY have access to all kinds of information--but the university doesn't. Go figure. It's just completely amazing to me, considering that PubMed is the beginning and ending of every research project for practically anybody in the health sciences in the United States. Apparently, not so here. And, it's not as though language is the only barrier. If there were some Japanese version of PubMed with Japanese journals that everybody subscribed to, then fine. But no, despite all the environmental awareness, people here still kill trees by subscribing to paper journals--and only a limited number at that. If I browse PubMed and see something I want that wasn't published in NEJM, I'm up a creek. I suppose I can ask my professor to fwd it to his friend...but seriously, I'm used to downloading anything and everything remotely of interest to look at. I'm going to have to be more selective now.

Times like these, I start to miss Harvard. Do I sound like a spoiled brat or what? I just take all of those academic privileges for granted, and now I feel seriously handicapped without them! Some other people I've talked to miss the social life, the people--I miss the infrastructure. I had a pretty horrific meal at the University dining hall today that really made me miss Harvard. All in all, even though we joke about Mather House being ugly, I'd take the Mather dining hall any day over the Ehime University one, which compares unfavorably even with hospital cafeterias.

In other news, I just reformatted my computer last night. I ended up with some vicious malware that I couldn't get rid of. It replaced my desktop with a horrible image which was a link to download more spyware. It popped up every 2 seconds prompting me to run some cleaner and download more spyware to supposedly "clean" my computer. It was sooo annoying and pretty scary, actually. Tech forums gave no answer besides reformat, so thanks to the Thinkvantage blue recovery button, I completely restored to factory settings. But since then I've been reinstalling software, and actually uninstalling software too. Unfortunately, laptops come with tons of crap pre-installed on them and about 10 million things set to startup with Windows, so I had to go through all of that and delete it, one by one. Not to mention locate anti-virus software and immediately scan! Between last night and today, I've already gotten several viruses. Man, the internet is a dangerous place.

So the only redeeming factor yesterday was my cooking success. I've decided that I don't need a Chinese cookbook after all--almost everything I need can be found online, often times in multiple versions so I can pick and choose. So last night I sallied forth into the world of "hong shao" cooking, or red-braised cooking. Before getting to hong shao yu (red braised fish) which is one of my favorite foods of all time, I decided to start with pork instead. Ahhhh!!! so good!! I had no idea before looking up recipes that hong shao basically means braised in soy sauce. Hong shao rou (red braised pork) is basically little cubes of that really fatty pork (you know, the kind that has layers of fat/skin sandwiched between the layers of meat) simmered for an hour or more with ginger and garlic and any optional vegetables (often carrots or potatoes). The simmering sauce is just rice wine, soy sauce, water, and sugar. The only mistake I made was that I forgot to make the beginning sauce more dilute than I wanted the final product to be. I forgot that in the process of simmering for an hour, you lose tons of water and concentrate the sauce. So I had to dilute with water a couple times in the middle, and I still ended up with pork that was slightly saltier than desirable. But it was sooo delicious and soft and yummy and...real! Just like made at home, minus the vegetables I don't eat anyways. *sigh* oh...comfort food...

Noh, random thoughts, and party

2007-10-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

This has been a fairly eventful week. I will try to recap :-)

1) Noh theater.

I've posted some pictures on Facebook from my night of Noh theater in the Matsuyama castle courtyard. It was totally fun! Even though I couldn't follow. For awhile there was some uncertainty where it was going to be held--either indoors if it rained, or in the castle courtyard as planned if it didn't rain. Luckily, it was clear the whole day and it didn't start to rain until the very end of the performance, so I got the full effect.

Matsuyama castle is on top of a hill, so to get there in time we took the ropeway up. It was way cool! Gorgeous view over the city as we were going up. Several women in the audience came in kimonos--not just kimonos, but the full deal. Kimonos, tabi and geta (traditional socks and fotwear), done-up hair, the works. They were quite lovely.

On the program were three short shows. The first and last were Japanese in origin, one from the Tale of Genji (the part where Lady Rokujo possesses Lady Aoi) and the other from the Tail of the Heike (samurai ghost reenacts his death). There was no way I could follow either of them, and I think it was tough for Japanese people too. It was very slow, dramatic, and...drawn out. I went with a friend who explained to me a bit of what was going on, but honestly, not much was going on. Most of both plays consisted mainly of one soloist.

The middle play was Chinese in origin, and it was a comedy. It was also performed in a more spoken, colloquial Japanese style, so I could actually follow a fair bit of what was going on. It was a hilarious story about a drunken tea maker? I think? He's very drunk on his way home, and he has a huge barrel of tea on his back. He collapses in the street, and another guy comes by and wants the barrel of tea. He can't pry it from the drunken person, so he shakes the drunken person violently awake, then pretends to be passed out drunk as well. The bad guy in turn gets "shaken awake" by the tea guy, and when they both come to, they start fighting over the tea barrel. The bad guy insists that it belongs to him! A judge comes along and the rest of the play is about trying to prove who really owns the barrel of tea. The bad guy simply imitates everything the tea guy says about the tea in order to try to prove it belongs to him. Okay, it doesn't sound that hilarious, but really, a lot of it was in the body language and the imitation. I can't tell an anecdote worth shit. Enough of plot summary.

2) Random thoughts
a) Eating alone. It strikes me that eating out alone here is very common, which then strikes me that it is very uncommon in the US. Even at fast food joints, it's mostly families, or couples, or whatnot. Very few people are eating out alone. I wonder why? I sort of feel like many people would rather skip meals than eat alone. I saw this in the Harvard dining halls too. Aside from breakfast, which is eaten alone with a newspaper because nearly nobody eats breakfast regularly, most people wait to find a lunch or dinner partner before eating, unless they are trying to write a paper at the same time or something. But whenever I've eaten out at fast food udon or donburi places, I've always been alone as have most people. On my way home from downtown, I passed by a pretty large donburi place and every single person inside was male, and eating alone. It was...strange! Again, perhaps it points to the odd work hours, social isolation, etc. etc. My advisor doesn't appear to spend much time with his family, either, despite having two kids. He basically took me out to dinner after the Noh theater (on a Wednesday night!) on a moment's notice. I sort of jokingly said--"But shouldn't you have to go home and eat with your family and spend time with them?" His answer was in Japanese and I couldn't understand all of it, but it was something to the effect of "give up." Who's given up on who, I'm not sure, but it's still somewhat disturbing.

b) Types of girls. Stereotypes of girls--many of whom I observed at the matsuri. They are pretty much the same as the stereotypes here. There are the ditzy popular blonds. Even in Japan, they are blond! They have super long blond curly hair, or its extremely "done." That is, it's teased up into artificial looking hairdos, and looks completely fried, even at 5:30am. They also wear short skirs, stilettos, and large shiny accessories. They travel in groups and twitter, and wear wayy too much makeup. There are also the "ugly athletic girls." Short, stocky, never wearing makeup, and with undyed short black hair. They are perpetually in sporty wear, like matching adidas tracksuits, tennis shoes, and carrying a duffel bag. That's all that really stands out to me right now in terms of extremes....I'll add to this list if I spot more later.

3) A party! I threw a small housewarming party on Friday night. I made it a potluck so I wouldn't have to work so hard. I invited my host family's students, the same girls that I traveled to Kochi with. My host family came for the first half hour or so, to toast and try some of the food and show the first batch of students where I lived. They left early to "leave us young people to ourselves." Even though I was comfortable with them, the students breathed a huge sigh of relief when they left! They were all quite nervous about my host dad tasting their food, since he is such the foodie. About 6 or 7 students came eventually, each bringing something with them. They are so incredibly nice! And they really thought of everything. There was some amazing homecooked food, some people brought dessert, fruits, bread, and of course, drinks. They even brought a bag of ice with them! I totally forgot about ice. They peeled and sliced fruit, fried fish to heat it up again, and even did some of my dishes afterwards.

I made an enormous plate of Chinese-ish stir fried rice noodles, with broccoli, chicken, onions, and egg. Only, my host dad immediately pointed out that it was Japanese style, which was true since as seasoning sauce and marinade I used the same sauce as for making oyako-don: mirin, soy sauce, water, and sugar. But, it turned out very yummy, and it was completely finished down to the last bite, even before the last person came. Heehee! I feel like a successful hostess. Surprisingly, it took 1.5 hrs to cook from beginning to end. (Very slow) slicing, then cooking the meat, eggs, veggies, and noodles all separately, then putting it together at the end.

I think my guests had some fun, and I could follow a lot of their conversation. I could even contribute sometimes. I think my Japanese is sort of improving. And we all ate and drank for like 5 hours straight, from 6-11pm. When all the food and drink is just sitting in front of you, its hard to restrain yourself. Hehehe. I was soo uncomfortably full afterwards, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one! It was fun, and even more fun than I expected. Again, it's nice socializing in Japanese, since I'm not expected to contribute a whole lot, or even to be understanding and paying attention all the time. I can tune out when I feel tired and chalk it down to bad Japanese rather than rudeness. And at the same time, it's still fun, and chill, with Madeleine Peyroux, Sophie Milman, and Vienna Teng as background music.

Indian food

2007-10-08T02:18:00.000-07:00

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I found a decent Indian food place today! I'm ridiculously excited. There won't be any deprivation on that front, at least. On my way walking downtown, I passed by the place. It was advertised as "Indian food that an actual Indian person cooks!" or something to that effect. And it looked true--I saw aforementioned Indian person through the window. I figured I'd eat there on my way back. So I did. For 680yen, I got a lunch set with my choice of curry (chicken masala), and naan, rice, small salad, and chicken wing. Pretty good! Definitely affordable, and definitely stuffed me more than the local donburi fast food chain would have. It was even good, by which I mean it resembles what I would eat at an American place. The last time I had Indian food, you might recall, the chef used Japanese curry. Well, not this time. Unfortunately, the rice was still Japanese sticky rice--you can't have everything. I'll just avoid the rice in the future. But anyways--I'm happy :-) Maybe I'll become a regular. Now, if only I could find an affordable Mexican place....I was joking with another Fulbrighter about the possibility of making our own burritos for Thanksgiving. Japanese sticky rice, adzuki beans instead of pinto beans, spring roll wraps instead of tortillas, homemade salsa, cheese from Hokkaido, mmmmm. Well, at least meat is meat everywhere.

national holiday

2007-10-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

I love national holidays. There have been three Mondays off since I've arrived in Japan. It's ridiculous! I've heard it's a way that the government ensures that people take time off. But from shopping today, it's only time off for students and perhaps corporate types. Most of the shops were open. I also hear that there are more national holidays in the fall, because it's good weather and a good time for tourism.

Went downtown and got a new phone today. Its functional highlight? It has a built-in dictionary. And, its camera can read and translate English and Japanese. Woohoo!

Also, I was walking down the street when an old man (seriously, grandpa-aged) zoomed by me on a bicycle and called me pretty. More specifically, he called me a 美人、which translates to "beautiful person." Hah! I can't decide whether to be flattered by the niceness of ojisans, or whether to be slightly weirded out.

Aki Matsuri!

2007-10-06T16:14:00.001-07:00

In other words, fall festival.
I'm too tired to say very much right now. I got up at 4:30am in order to get ready and walk over to where the matsuri was happening at 6am. You'd think that 6 was too early for some people...suffice it to say, if I didn't have my 7x zoom camera held over my head, I wouldn't have been able to see a thing.

I would post video, but after arduously uploading...I get an error at the end :-(
Instead, here are some pictures, mostly shot from the main shopping arcade. The mikoshi you see in the first picture is on its way out (opening ceremonies over).

Also seen are: the flags for each mikoshi, another picture of people carrying mikoshi in procession, an open container of sake for everyone to enjoy, a cute mini mikoshi for kids to enjoy, and dressed up audience members climbing over each other to get a better view of the mikoshi-fighting.

research

2007-10-04T19:17:00.000-07:00

So out of boredom and a sense that I need to restrain myself from spending money, I asked my advisor to show me his database last Monday. Then, I reasoned, I would have something exciting and new to play with and occupy me. It definitely worked. So my advisor has access to a database of 15 years of health checkup records for the people in this area. It has all sorts of info about them, though he and I are mainly interested in things pertaining to eating, metabolism, etc. So...it's a wealth of data. The kind that the Japanese government collects, just for fun, and lets the researchers loose on. So now I'm playing with a gigantic Microsoft Access database with millions of people in it. It's interesting. This whole week has basically been dedicated to overcoming the research language barrier. I've been trying to understand and translate for myself every field name in the database. I've also miraculously made it possible to switch the user interface for Office programs from Japanese to English on my lab computer. I have no idea how that happened, but it took a morning of fiddling and I officially love Office now. Meanwhile, I've downloaded a very helpful ebook on data analysis in Access 2007, and I've been learning the program by reconstructing and Englishifying the database. That has been my week in a boring nutshell.

I've come to the conclusion that the research put out by this group is unfortunately not very good. Perhaps I've been around Harvard for so long that I've gotten used to a certain standard?　Maybe I'm being snobby, and maybe I'm only flattering myself in thinking that I can be a judge of good and bad research--supposedly the whole point of my science education. But I like to think that while maybe I can't produce stellar research (yet! I can still hold out hope), I can at least recognize its presence or absence.

I was helping my advisor do an English proofread for a manuscript he is helping a student put out. My God, it was horrible. Well, the English was good, but I was really surprised the study was being published! It was a case report on delayed language skills or something like that. I guess the main problem was that it really tried to generalize too much based on one isolated case, and it couldn't even persuasively suggest cause and effect in that one isolated case! Let alone trying to generalize to the population. It was horrific.

Then, on Monday as my advisor showed me the database, he gave me two files. One was a Methods type of file, outlining where the data came from and how metabolic syndrome criteria were calculated. That was extremely helpful. The other file was labeled Discussion part 1 !! How, pray tell, does one discuss data that has not yet been analyzed? He told me he just predicted the outcome and wrote a discussion. Hmm...right...that so sounds suspect. He told me he does things backwards--start with some discussion, do some results, write the rest of the discussion, and then come up with the objectives of the study. Shouldn't some sense of what one is analyzing for guide the analysis? Gee...now I'm confused.

Random tidbit for the day: The cute little kids in the school are now singing the Beatles' "Hey Jude" in Japanese. I have no idea what they are saying, but they are so convincing that "Hey Jude" sounds like a traditional Japanese song.

celebration!

2007-10-03T02:10:00.000-07:00

Two things to celebrate:
1) I now have internet at home. Woohoo! Gone will be my nights of boredom, as they will be replaced by nights attached to my computer, surfing the web. This means, for those you on the West coast, if you ever wake up in the middle of the night and have an urge to call somebody, I will probably be signed on. Just call my Skype number. And the East coast is only 3 hours off from that, so it probably is the same.

2) Cooking! From scratch!! Today, I tried out cookbook cooking for the first time (ever). My host mom was kind enough to send me off with "Recipes of Japanese Cooking," a bilingual book with lovely color photos not only of the end product, but of all the major cooking steps. Today, having finally rounded out my pantry, I tried out my first recipe: oyako-don. Oyako-don is a type of rice-bowl dish (donburi). Donburi are usually various ingredients like beef, tempura, tonkatsu, etc. cooked and poured over rice. Oyako-don translates as "parent-child donburi" because its main ingredients are chicken and egg. It was actually ridiculously easy, taking at most half an hour (because I'm slow...cookbook estimated time is 12 minutes). I made two modifications: I skipped the sake because I didn't have any, and I skipped the stock because what kind of lazy, time-pressed student makes her own stock!? This being Japan, I can't find any ready-made stock in the supermarket either. But a bit of water worked fine.

Annnd....it was good! Very good! Actually filling, appetizing, tasty! I have been cooking some before today, mostly stir-fry, mostly cabbage and egg. I even made some yaki-soba (aka chow mein) the other day. But, the yaki-soba came with its own seasoning pack, kind of like instant ramen, so it wasn't hard. And, the veggie stir-fry was mediocre at best. All homemade meat has been limited to the meat in the packages of frozen gyoza that I've bought--and those are so easy they don't even require oil for the frying pan. So, I feel like a relative success with my oyako-don. Heehee!

Japanese cooking also seems relatively simple compared to some other kinds of cooking. There are so few ingredients involved, and most of them overlap. For example, nearly every recipe calls for soy sauce, sake, mirin (a sweet kind of cooking sake), and perhaps some other regular sort of condiments. No large and mysterious stock of herbs that I can't tell apart. (Of course, my herb ignorance may simply be attributed to growing up in a household without them.) But anyways, the point remains--nearly everything in this book has an estimated time of less than 30 minutes, and a majority even less than 15 minutes. And the list of ingredients is very small.

I miss Chinese food, though. The stir fry is supposed to be my attempt at Chinese food, but it's not measuring up to home-style comfort food. Also, it's more difficult than I thought it would be to find certain Chinese foods here. For example, sausages of any sort are really gross and overpriced here, let alone Chinese-style sausages. It's also difficult to find certain kinds of vegetables and frozen 生煎饱. Hmm, I wonder if I got the Chinese right. I think I need to get a Chinese cookbook so I can start being successful at Chinese cooking.

vienna teng in the most unlikely place

2007-10-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

I was shopping the other day, and I stopped by a fast-food udon place called Hanamaru for some dinner. Basically, you walk in, go down the self-serve line, order the udon at the counter, pay, and then go sit down with your udon. All very efficient. Pretty good udon. I was relaxing and then Vienna Teng starts playing as the background music! (She's one of my favorite artists ever.) Up until then, they were playing Japanese pop music I didn't recognize. It was really, really weird. The song was even from her newest cd. It was a nice bit of serendipity :)

helmets and schoolchildren

2007-09-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

Did I mention that my advisor's "lab" or "research office" is on the grounds of an elementary/middle school? When I come here around noon, I can see them running around the grounds, playing and making noise. Sometimes I see them in the classroom eating and serving lunch. They are so cute! The students serving lunch for the day are standing at the front of the room, in front of the chalkboard and behind a long podium thingie. They are wearing disposable masks and haircaps, and ladling food from large pots. That doesn't sound that cute, but keep in mind that these are first graders. First graders, serving lunch to their fellow students! That's just amazing to me. I've always been warned that the school system here is so incredibly harsh, and it overworks kids, drives them to suicide, etc. etc. Well, but these first graders look pretty happy, running around. Outside the classrooms there's even evidence of fun: planters that look like a vegetable garden, and those nets on top of poles--you know, like firefly or butterfly nets, lined up outside the classroom doors.

Oh, yes, and it is sort of weird that my office is on the schoolgrounds. But the school is actually run by Ehime University, and counts as a separate campus. It's a sort of training or testing ground for the school of education. Since my advisor technically belongs to the faculty of education, his research facility is here. It's a bit inconvenient as it is further from my apartment, but oh well. I'm learning to manage on the bike.

Speaking of which, helmets. As Cat has pointed out numerous times, I should really get a helmet to protect my precious brains. Only, I can't figure out where! I went to some fitness-type places yesterday (including the one official Nike store here!) but all I ended up getting was a yoga mat. It is a very pretty yoga mat, btw, being pepto-bismol pink on one side and grey on the other. It matches my futon blanket (okay, the original pink was not my choice. But the matchiness is attractive.) But, some of the bikes lined up in the bike parking structure have helmets in the basket! Where oh where can they have gotten them!? Particularly since they are butt ugly.

Then, coming into the office today, I discover my answer. The only people who wear helmets around here are elementary school children. Moreover, they all wear the same helmet, so I can only assume it's school issue. No wonder it's so ugly, and no wonder nobody else wears them.

shopping downtown, and more feeling like an idiot

2007-09-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

So yesterday, my goal was to figure out public transportation. This basically stemmed from my fear of riding bicycles and desire to avoid it as much as possible. So, with various bus maps and time tables in hand, I set off downtown. The bus I'm interested runs in a big figure 8 loop aruond the city (in both directions), but it only does so once an hour. So, I have to be sure to catch the bus going in the right direction and towards the correct half of the loop. I got downtown with no incident. Clutching my "Welcome to Matsuyama" bus map in hand, I got on. I was hoping to follow the lady in front of me, but she simply swiped a card which I did not posess. So I just sat down, looked wildly around me, and waited. The bus was filled with old obachans--which makes some sense, as most people who are young and hardy choose to ride bicycles instead. The nice obachan sitting next to me then leaned over and told me the fare was a flat 150yen, and to pay at the front before leaving. Having done my research, I knew all this, but still it was reassuring to be told in person. I smiled at the obachan and thanked her, and got off at my stop.

Most of the shopping downtown is along two perpendicular streets, Ookaido and Gintengai. Basically, they are covered streets lined with shops. Mostly pedestrians, but apparently you can ride your bike or even drive your car down this mall-like street. There were random bikes parked all along the sides, in front of stores. I found one that I really, really liked. It's short name is "Muji". I wish there were some in the US! They sell all sorts of things, from clothing to furniture to snack food and stationery. Everything is clean and minimalist in neutral and natural shades. Here is it's English website: http://www.muji.net/eng/ The store is just so...natural and appealing. I really, really, really want this bed/recliner/couch. http://www.muji.net/store/pc/user/campaign/campaign070803_03.jsp It's just so damn cool!!

I also found a nice yarn store, which even stocks non-Japanese yarns like Anny Blatt and Filatura di Crosa. It was kind of a surprise. They also have nice books of patterns in Japanese, though I have to figure out how to read the diagrams. I also have a big stash of yarn that I brought with me, that I really should finish before I buy more yarn!

So, on the return trip, I was loaded up with things, mostly from Muji. These things included a huge, multifunctional, boyfriend/stuffed animal replacement pillow that allows me to lie on it and hug it at the same time: http://www.muji.net/store/cmdty/detail/4945247326734 scroll down to the bottom to check out the usage diagram. I couldn't resist.

Two big bags in tow, I set off for the bus stop well before the time the bus was supposed to get there. I figured, logically, that since I was catching the reverse direction, the stop would be on the opposite side of the street from where I got off. Not so!! I could not for the life of me find the stop for the east-direction loop bus. I even asked two strangers. So after awhile, I figured I would walk to the next bus stop. I figured I was still early, so I could beat the bus there and wait for it there. Lo and behold, the next bus stop didn't have the appropriate east-direction stop as well!! There was a west-direction stop on the other side of the street, but on my side I couldn't find one. I was starting to think that maybe Japanese people only put bus stops on one side of the street, in order to save on materials or something. Still early, I decide to go to the next bus stop. Thankfully, that one had stops on both sides of the street, so I decided I wasn't crazy. It was scheduled to arrive at 3:09, and I arrived literally at 3:10. But the whole way I was walking, I didn't see the bus pass me, so I decide to wait. Maybe it was late. After all, the bus that originally picked me up was 10 minutes late. So I wait until 3:25, and give up. I was already halfway home. Only three stops to go. So, I walk the rest of the way home, pillow and all.

Next time, I'm riding the stupid bike. At least, by walking, I discovered that the way to get downtown is actually quite safe and lined with sidewalks nearly all the way, so my bike never has to share the road with cars. Good going. I should buy some securing elastic too, so next time I decide to buy something like a huge pillow or blanket, I can lash it to the back of my bike.

Still riding this wave of "yes, I can ride bikes dammit" I try to ride my bike to the office today. This time, it's a different bike, provided kindly by my advisor. However, I spend about 15 minutes trying to pry the bike stand out from under the bike. You know, it's that bit that allows you to stand the bike up by itself? Without moving it out of the way of the tire, one is unable to go. So I kick the thing, pry it, basically work up a nice fine sweat trying to move it. Unbelievable. It doesn't budge. I just tested it last night! I must be missing something. Meanwhile, people are coming and going and no doubt wondering why I'm trying to steal someone else's bike, as I clearly can't figure it out. Finally, some old man comes up to me and asks me what the problem is. I make a helpless gesture and say something like, "how do you move this part back? I'm a foreign student, you see..." in an attempt to explain my stupidity. He makes an exclaiming noise, "Ah, you're not Japanese!" and promptly kicks a different part of the stand and moves it back. AHHHHHH!!! I knew I was missing something.

But after that, I got to the research office without incident. No cars, no scary moments, no falling off the bike. Ahh, sweet internet. Although, I will be connected at home by next Wednesday, so I wonder if my motivation to come to work will be drastically reduced. :)

funny Japanese habits

2007-09-26T18:52:00.000-07:00

I've already started to nod my head alll the time when people are talking to me. Japanese people do it too, as well as a lot of other indications that they are listening, sort of equivalent to English's "mmhmm". So I've also started to say "hai" and "sou" and "mmmm" continually while someone is talking to me. Smile and nod, smile and nod, have no idea what's going on.

biking in japan...

2007-09-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

...is one of the scariest things I've ever done! Some of the roads in this town are barely wide enough for two cars to, let alone for two cars and bicycles! There's often no "shoulder" space at all. To make matters worse, since I haven't ridden a bike since I was about 9 years old, and definitely have never used a bike as a mode of transportation, I was careening and wobbling all over the place, practically crashing into walls trying to avoid cars. And, despite having not ridden a bike in that long, old habits still die hard. The brakes on my kiddie bike were the sort where one backpedals to brake. On this new bike that I'm borrowing, the brakes are turned on by squeezing the lever above the handle. So each time I panic, out of habit I try to brake by backpedaling, only to realize that nothing is happening, therefore panicking even more, then trying to manually stop myself by reaching out a hand or leg, then realizing (belatedly) that I'm supposed to squeeze the handle to stop myself. I look like a total idiot.

I think perhaps I will begin exploring alternative modes of transportation. Or buy some accident insurance.

Also, today I am ridiculously sore from sitting on the bicycle seat. Who knew?

moving!

2007-09-23T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'm all packed up and ready to move to my new apartment. I'm sad to bid my homestay family goodbye, especially as they're not really within walking distance of my apartment. But, I am excited about my gorgeous new apartment. Granted, it's basically the size of my room in the US plus a small kitchen and bathroom, but still! It's very nice. From my window I can see Matsuyama Castle perched on a hill. I have two windows. It's lovely :-)

It's also temporarily without internet :-( It might take another week or two to get that set up, depending on if everything goes smoothly or not. I'm not sure what I'll do in the meantime, as the internet is quite indispensable if only for mapping purposes. I suppose it'll force me to walk around at least to EPIC (Ehime Prefectural International Center) to use the internet there.

It'll be weird to be on my own after my host family has been so kind to take me everywhere and show me where everything is. I'll definitely have to use my Japanese more! This last week has been a little bit of a bubble because my host family has been speaking English to me, so I haven't had to use my Japanese much. It's really put me at ease and I don't feel so lost and confused and far away from home. But the bubble is about to burst--though at the same time I think it will be fun to talk to Tomoko-san in a mix of English and Japanese. She's the 6th grade teacher who lives on the floor below me, who so kindly found and furnished (!) my apartment! We had been corresponding in English over the summer on a variety of topics, including class disparities in society, the state of education, and the attitudes of the youth. Heavy topics, I know! But fun to talk about :-)

Anyways, I've got another week of running errands (getting all the right signatures for my forms, registering with the university and for classes, depositing money in my bank, dealing with internet, learning the ropes of paying rent and utilities and sorting garbage....), then maybe I can have some fun :-) Or...start to do work.

Kochi traveling

2007-09-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

It's only been two days, but already I have so much to talk about. A huge, huge update is about to follow. For the past two days, I've been traveling in the Kochi area, which is about two and a half hours driving from Matsuyama. Kenya-san, my host dad, is a professor at Ehime University. He organized a field trip for some of his students and I joined with his wife on the second day.

So, Itsuko-san and I went to Matsuyama station and caught a highway bus to Kochi, which is the capital of a neighboring prefecture. The bus ride itself was amazing! We had to wake up fairly early for the bus ride, so I desperately wanted to sleep most of the way. But, I kept jerking myself out of sleep in order to take photos from the bus! The landscape was gorgeous. We drove through little villages nestled in mountains covered with trees. I know "trees" is vague…but "coniferous trees" sounds so academic and I don't really know exactly what they were. Pine trees? I'll post pictures to Facebook when I get around to moving them off my camera. The endless rice fields, rivers, hills, old Japanese-style houses, tunnels through the mountains…it was quite breathtaking.

We joined up with Kenya-san and his students for some ice cream at a mom-and-pop dairy farm. Mom and daughter worked the ice cream shop, and pop was lecturing the students about his farm. When we got there, they were all sitting in the shade, vigorously shaking bottles of milk to make butter. When I was introduced to pop, I was surprised to find out that he had studied agriculture (or something farming/food-related) in the US for two years. His English was quite excellent. I know it sounds like I shouldn't be surprised that people speak English, but really--this farm was out in the middle of nowhere. We had to drive perilously winding roads through the mountains to get there. So, in English he informed me that his farm has 40 cows and 35 heifers, and for a Japanese dairy farm, that's an average size.

Then for lunch, we drove back to Kochi and had lunch at a food court sort of market. I had the most bizarre Indian food ever. I ordered some chicken biryani from the nice Indian man at the Indian food stall. Perhaps it's better to call it Japanese-Indian fusion. My chicken biryani was made with Japanese sticky rice! It was so bizarre. The curry was also very obviously Japanese curry. Truly, it tasted like Japanese curry-rice, only more dry.

Then we drove even more hours away from Kochi, through more perilously winding and scenic roads, to another small village. The students--9 girls--had been traveling in a taxi van. Kenya-san drove his own car to Kochi, so Itsuko-san and I were riding with him. It was so amusing because apparently the girls all wanted to talk to me. They played rock-paper-scissors to decide which pair would get to ride with me and Kenya first! Then, at each leg of the journey, one pair switched out for another. It was highly amusing. The first pair were very talkative and I got to practice some Japanese. They asked me the usual questions--such as how long I'd been studying Japanese, could I eat Japanese food, etc. And there were some weird ones, like what kinds of food I don't like. At a loss for saying complicated things like "artichoke," I said that I didn't like carrots (ninjin). The next couple of pairs of students kept mentioning how I didn't like carrots! Was it the taste, was it the texture? Etc. etc. Apparently the first pair had been instructed to tell everybody else about our conversation so as not to repeat the same questions to me in the car. So, everybody soon knew that I didn't like eating carrots! We also ended up talking a lot about slang, or "young people talk." I asked them what kinds of words only young people used, and they could tell me what the words were but couldn't explain what it meant! Slang is tough. Itsuko-san couldn't help, because she couldn't understand them either. Then I attempted to explain what "sketchy" meant, and why I said "cool" all the time. Itsuko-san was telling me about how she soon figured out in her stay at Columbia that all the "like"s that college students insert into their sentences don't mean anything at all.

Anyways, the second village was right on the ocean. The place specialized in bonito fish, cooked in a certain way called "tataki." Tataki is bonito fish that has been slightly grilled on the outside, but still raw and sashimi-like on the inside. It is sliced thinly and served with soy sauce and some vegetable garnish. The lovely proprietors of the place walked us all through the process of preparing bonito. A bonito fish is about two feet long, and only parts of it are edible. So, we got to participate in cutting its head off, taking out the organs, separating the bone from the meat, and finally separating the red from white meat. The most amazing part was when she sliced open what must have been the bonito's stomach. About a dozen little fish came tumbling out! They were still whole, and they looked somewhat like sardines. It was pretty damn cool. Anyways, with the filets of red bonito meat prepared, it was time to go on to grilling. Grilling is done over a large trash-can/oil drum type of thing, filled with dried rice stalks. A tool similar to a pitchfork is then held over the lit rice stalks, and the filet of bonito are laid on the tines. The flames rise quite dramatically! I got to hold the pitchfork over the fire for a bit :-D Then, we sliced the bonito, arranged on plate, flavored with salt and green onion and mmm-mmm-devoured it! Meanwhile, somebody else had been grilling the organs that we discarded earlier. What do you know, fish-heart tastes like beef!

The girls then split up in half for the night and went to stay at local houses (i.e., minshuku, or Japanese equivalent of a bed and breakfast). So, I got to stay with 4 of the students just down the street from the bonito restaurant. Our host was a kindly and talkative lady called Fumiko-san, who had actually been serving us earlier in the restaurant. She welcomed us into her home. I was honestly exhausted, and I thought we would just have some quiet time to ourselves. Apparently not! She sat us around her table (on the tatami) and served us tons of food. Someone mentioned that I like ume-shu (Japanese plum wine) so she got us all some ume-shu. Then followed pistachios, chips, more drinks, grapes, and cake. I was about ready to explode. Also, the Japanese grapes were different from any that I've had before! They were huge and round, more like regular fruit than bite-sized grapes. Instead of being firm and hard, they were soft. More surprising, they actually tasted like the quintessential "grape" flavor that you get in jolly ranchers, cough syrup, and starbursts. But, in a good way. I always thought that "grape" flavored anything didn't taste like real grapes, but apparently I've just been having the wrong kind! (On a side note, these grapes probably cost nearly $20 in all. In a supermarket a few days ago, I saw these sorts of grapes on sale for 780 yen for one bunch! No kidding about fruit in Japan being expensive.)

So we had a very lively conversation over the ume-shu and food. Fumiko-san basically told us her life story, particularly about how she met her husband and how her rather peculiar marriage worked. From what I could gather, her husband is away on a boat for most of the year. Though they have been married for 19 years, she calculates that they have only been together for 3. I'm not sure, but I think it's a bonito-fishing boat that he is on. She told us about how she married in January, and exactly one month later in February her husband was off on the boat. She cried and cried, and wrote him letters every day. It was very touching, but it was hard to reconcile with her obviously enthusiastic and positive personality. She was so incredibly kind and warm to all of us. Don't picture your stereotypical nice old lady though--this one wore blue glitter eyeshadow that she kept dabbing at the entire time! She kept asking us if we had boyfriends! We went round the table and when I hesitated, there was a general cheer and accusatory noises. So then, everybody was all agog…I had to explain how I met Ben, what I liked best about him, where we went on dates, etc. etc. etc. They wanted to see a picture, but alas my computer was not with me at the time. It was certainly the most exercise my Japanese has gotten to date.

I had my first Japanese style bath that night as well. Fumiko-san filled the bathtub with water and set out a bucket and stool. Thank god I knew at least a little bit about what was going on, or else I would have been totally lost. In Japan, one bathes and cleans before entering the bathwater, because the same water is used for everybody else. So, I had me a bucket bath and then stepped for 2 minutes into the bath water, too embarrassed to stay longer (although who was really keeping track but me?). It was interesting. All the other girls then took their turn after me.

We all slept side by side on futon in two adjoining tatami rooms. Fumiko-san slid apart the sliding screen doors between them to open up the space. One side was the living room, and my side was some sort of altar room. I slept directly in front of something that looked like a shrine. It was way cool. But too bad the room was ridiculously hot. No air conditioning to speak of (not that I expected any), and even the fan was kind of sad. With the doors closed, and 5 of us in one unaired room, surrounded by soft futon, blankets, and tatami--well, you can imagine. The heat and humidity were oppressive. I woke up several times in the night to just sit in front of the fan and try to breathe. But at least, no mosquitoes. It was too homey for mosquitoes.

Then the next morning we got up for breakfast at the restaurant and drove to a nearby salt factory. It was, unsurprisingly, also a mom-and-pop establishment. We got to see how sea salt is extracted from the ocean water. It was breathtaking, because the factory was right on the ocean. Hmm…"factory" is overkill. It's more like a house, some greenhouses, and a large outdoor sea water concentrating machine. The people were very proud about how they don't boil the water off, rather relying on sunlight and "natural" processes to make the salt and preserve all of the minerals in it. We got taken through the process in the machine, the successive concentration of the salt, the process of handpicking out impurities, etc. etc. They also make some amazing bath salt/ salt scrub type of stuff that leaves your hands feeling amazingly soft after scrubbing in it. And we got to take home some of the (table) salt as a souvenir.

Lunch back at the restaurants, and final leavetakings. I can't get over just how nice everybody has been: Fumiko-san, the driver of the taxi, and Myojin-san, the lady who was showing us bonito fish preparation. Fumiko-san was so warm and open with us, and by the end of the night one of the girls was giving her a back massage! The taxi-bus driver took all his meals with us, and he and the students were having many lively conversations at the other end of the long table. Finally, as we were saying goodbye, Myojin-san was dabbing at her eyes underneath her eyeglasses. She and a few of the other ladies were about to cry! I was so touched that I nearly cried too, and I gave her a hug--unprecedented in Japanese culture. She told me to be persistent in my Japanese: "Nihongo o ganbatte!" It was so sweet, and we had only stayed for one night. I feel like such close but short-lived bonds are quite rare in American society. I can't imagine that American college students would have lively and fun conversations with their bus chauffeurs. The one time I stayed at an American bed and breakfast, the atmosphere was completely different. Granted, we weren't the only guests, but we certainly didn't bond with the innkeepers as much as we did this time. And I certainly can't imagine anybody American restaurateur tearing up at saying goodbye to a bunch of American college students she'd only met yesterday! I feel like in America, people in all kinds of industries deemed to be "service" types are generally invisible and ignored. Sometimes it's a class difference between the server and the served, sometimes its even a language difference. Or perhaps it's purely cultural: one doesn't expect to find out within an hour whether one's taxi driver has a grandson, worked in insurance, etc. etc. etc. Or at least, if the taxi driver volunteers such information, we often receive it with somewhat bemused surprise.

One final stop before driving back to Matsuyama: dairy farm number two. Actually, I would call it more of a vertically-integrated ice cream business. Another mom-and-pop business, basically they operate a very small ice cream stand in the middle of nowhere, next to a fork in the road and surrounded by rice paddies and misty hills (no kidding). They own three Jersey cows (these are apparently the brown sort), and all of the milk from the cows they make into ice cream, advertised as "jah-jee sofuto kureemu" (Jersey soft cream). Apparently, the profit they make from selling ice cream is something like 10 times more than they would if they just sold the milk to a local business. I don't know how they attract business, but they certainly seemed to be doing alright, since many people stopped by for a cone of very milky ice cream.

rice, and mosquitoes

2007-09-16T16:08:00.001-07:00

I figured out the answer to the question of the rice. Well, apparently people do eat the rice grown in their backyards! That statement turned out even more literal than I thought it would be. I had thought the land and rice was owned by a company and that it would be packaged and sold as "Matsuyama City Rice" or something like that. Apparently, though, the little patches of land are owned by private people who work on the fields in their spare time, and eat their own homegrown rice. I suppose it's a bit like a vegetable garden or herb garden, except that it's a rice garden. I was surprised to hear it because I thought that rice was a very labor-intensive crop. But, Kenya-san (my host Dad) told me that nowadays the machines do everything, and it's not so hard.

People eat rice, mosquitoes eat me. I've become an inviting target. The first night I was here, although there was air conditioning in the room, because the family didn't seem to use it much in the rest of the house, out of courtesy I tried not to use it much either. I figured perhaps they were trying to save on their electric bill or something. So, at night I didn't really use the thick blanket and tried to stay cool by not covering up. Agh!! the next morning I wake up with no less than 7 mosquito bites, one on my face! Okay, so you may say--big deal, it's just a little bite. No....not for me. I'm the only one I know with such a severe allergic reaction to them. the one on my calf has swelled up to at least the size of my palm. The bites totally skip the itching part and go right to pain. I've been icing my legs and feet all evening. Even my toes are swollen, making it very hard to walk! Last night, politeness be damned, I turned down the air conditioning to 23 degrees and snuggled up in the thick blanket, protecting myself from the evil mosquitos. My host family was very nice as well to lend me some of their mosquito repellent when I asked if I could get some. Ironically, they bought it in the US! I had totally forgotten about bringing my own from home, even though I always bring it for China.

Life is good...

2007-09-15T06:20:00.000-07:00

I think I must be the luckiest foreign student in Japan. My host family is ridiculously nice to me. They are taking me everywhere and helping me do everything--registering at the alien registration, opening a bank account, getting a cell phone, etc. And they cooked me an amazing dinner. Both of them are studying nutrition and food: one as a journalist and the other as a professor. As one might imagine, they are both foodies. In fact, my host dad has copies of The Omnivore's Dilemma and What To Eat on his bookshelf! As we walked through the supermarket today, my host mom was explaining to me about how it's difficult to avoid trans fats in Japan because there's no legislation or public awareness regarding it, but on the other hand there IS legislation regarding genetically modified foods! So much for health. They were explaining to me about how the asparagus came from a local farm, and the ice cream has no additives in it. Truly, they are into their food. It makes me feel even more inexperienced, but at the same time I feel very lucky to have two such people helping me out in life and studies.

Another funny thing about Matsuyama: all around the city there are scattered mini-rice paddies! They might be the size of a small house or two, interspersed between the convenience stores, the house, and the roads. Truly, every bit of land is put to use. I even saw a slightly larger rice paddy with some scarecrows in it, which was very cute. I wonder who owns the paddies, who works on the fields, and where the rice goes, and under what label! Do the local people eat the rice grown literally in their backyards?

Matsuyama arrival

2007-09-15T02:30:00.001-07:00

Today I arrived in Matsuyama and was picked up from the airport by my host family. They are very nice and have been amazingly helpful. Matsuyama is a much quieter town than I thought. I suppose from the population size (500,000 ish) I was expecting something like...Cambridge perhaps? Perhaps even Boston-like, as even Boston is only 600,000 ish? But Matsuyama is quite spread out, very suburban and driving-oriented. I have to figure out where to get bus maps and perhaps a bike. Although, riding a bike would be doubly scary: first, since I haven't ridden one since I was 9, and second, since I don't know any of the rules here! I haven't seen too many bikers, and it's not as though there are bike lanes or anything! Some bikes apparently bike on the sidewalk, and others don't. Do I go with traffic, or against it? I've seen both! Hmm...It's definitely going to be a sleepy town and a quiet life.

On the upside, my apartment is in a very nice part of town. It's a few minutes walk from the university, and it's very close to a large beautiful park as well as the associated onsen, or hot springs. Also, it is within walking distance to Matsuyama castle. It's a nice little studio-type of apartment. Tomorrow I have to go and rent all the appliances that I need--a fridge, microwave, stove, and apparently a laundry machine as well.

My favorite part of the city so far is the blue sky over the tree-covered hills. Mountains? Hills. It's gorgeous. I don't know if the trees are pines or not. Matsuyama means Pine-Mountain.

ASIMO is my new lover

2007-09-14T02:32:00.001-07:00

I went to the Tokyo Miraikan today, which is basically a gorgeous beautiful science museum. The highlight of my day was seeing ASIMO demonstrated. Look! Isn't she cute! Especially while turning on the spot, receiving and delivering trays, running, and interacting!

http://world.honda.com/HDTV/ASIMO/

the power of brand

2007-09-13T05:31:00.000-07:00

At the airport in San Francisco I saw a group of Chinese or Taiwanese tourists, bound for Japan on the same flight as I was. Being bored and waiting to board, I watched as a woman who had just bought a large bag from the Coach store in the terminal take photos of that bag. In fact, she and her friends were taking turns photographing each other carrying the bag. But they weren't carrying the bag over their shoulders the way people would normally use bags. Rather, they were displaying the bag. They gingerly held it out with a hand and extended it in front of them or to their sides while their friends took photos of their poses. They admired the bag, talking about how they hadn't seen such a nice big bag before, and how hard it was to find. To my eye, it was a perfectly boring, canvas Coach monogram tote. I was amazed because at places like airports, people have to pay full retail price! And who the heck pays full retail price on these high-end luxury goods except super rich people? These were ordinary, Chinese-gabbling touristy types: old middle aged ladies in front-pleated tapered plants, tshirts and polo shirts, tour group hats, and sneakers. No stilettos, designer suit or clothing, or any of the accouterments of stereotypes I associate with paying retail at Coach. Sadly, the expensive Coach bag looked completely out of place, and were it not for the official-looking Coach paper bag and dustbag it came in, I would have mistaken it for a fake!

arrival

2007-09-11T15:25:00.001-07:00

I have so many first thoughts about Japan and the Fulbrighters that I don't quite know how to start.

Landscape: Coming into the city on the limo-bus (airport shuttle) gave me a first look impression. I have to say, it basically looks like Beijing. The characters, the dull grey high rises, the tiles on the sidewalk, the style of signs and advertisements, even the railings on the streets reminded me of China.

Language: Narita airport gave me a confidence boost. I was able to do everything without any problems. I could pass through immigration, customs, claim my baggage, get my baggage delivered to my host family, buy a ticket to the limo bus, get on it, and subsequently get off it and get on a taxi and check into my hotel. Phew! Plus, I even had a short conversation in Japanese with the nice lady sitting next to me on the plane. Communicating in Japanese was a real rush. Although I was apprehensive before leaving, I couldn't help smiling while I walked around Narita, exhilarated by the sheer joy of being able to communicate!

Then, the letdown. Some of us Fulbrighters found each other and we all decided to go out to dinner, to Shinjuku. I was perfectly prepared to eat a nice bowl of ramen, but we decided to go further out--which was fine because there were some Tokyo experienced people there. The subway map was horrendous, and the subway stations themselves (Aoyama 1chome and Shinjuku station) were labyrinths. If I were alone, I could have wandered in there for hours, trying to find the platform and the exits. Nevermind trying to read the map and figure out where I was going and what fare I had to pay. So after the confidence boost of Narita, suddenly I felt pretty pathetic!

Food: The diet starts today. Everything we ordered came out to be less than appetizer sized!! Despite costing nearly $10 each. *sigh* All I wanted was some katsu-don or some such equivalent. Seriously, I would have settled for instant ramen. But we ended up going to this funky place called Christon Café which was decorated inside to a church theme. There were ridiculously gothic chandeliers, gargoyles, and plenty of christ-figures on crosses. The food was good--there just wasn't much of it for what we paid for. I'm going to bed hungry! Oh well, breakfast buffet, here I come!!

People and such: Here comes the feeling out part, where we all figure out what kind of people we are. Who are the partiers, the hard-core clubbers, and who are…not. I'm basically limited to staying with the group or else facing getting lost by myself. The loss of my sense of independence is exhausting, plus there's the added obligation that in 3 days we won't be seeing much of each other anymore, so we have to get in as much bonding as possible. But not really choosing where we eat, how late we stay out, whether we karaoke, club, drink, or return to the hotel…all of it makes me psychologically exhausted. The people remind me of Harvard again, infer what you will from that statement. Basically extraverted or trying to be. I think I have the least experience in Japan or with Japanese than all of them, having never set foot outside Narita airport before. It's slightly frustrating. But then again, people are always frustrating :-)

thoughts on Zielenziger's Shutting out the Sun

2007-09-07T10:20:00.001-07:00

I just read Michael Zielenziger's book Shutting out the Sun: How Japan Created its own Lost Generation. I thought it would be an interestingly detailed study of hikikomori, those young people who seclude themselves into their rooms and cut off all contact with people, even their parents. But instead, much of it turned out to be a general rant against Japan's social ills and a depressing analysis of how Japan got to be the way it is.

A part of his argument is that the Japanese are so culturally foreign because Christianity, a major component of and underlying basis for Western values, has never made any significant inroads into Japanese culture. Zielenziger argues that Christianity, specifically Protestantism, teaches all sorts of individualistic principles, such as the idea that each individual is responsible to God for his own actions. In addition, he argues that absolute morality came with the Christian world-view; Japanese culture, having never absorbed Christianity, continues to look towards consensus building as an indicator of (relative) morality.

One could make all kinds of arguments about those statements, but I also wondered if Christianity impacted Western culture in a different fundamental way. At least in Catholicism, you can be forgiven for your sins. If you repent, God will welcome you back into his arms. In contrast, one person in his book describes Japanese society as a "deduction point" society. For every mistake, points are deducted. So long as you never make a mistake, your points remain at 100 and you are perfect. Therefore, everybody is deathly afraid to take a risk and make that mistake. Perhaps the Western culture that allows risk-taking and tolerates (or even encourages) messing up and picking oneself up again is also attributable to the influence of Christianity.

Perhaps purists would argue that I have gotten my branches of Christianity mixed up. Not being Christian of any sort, of course, I lump the impact of Christianity on Western culture all together, without stopping much to parse out individual factors. Indeed, the whole complex is "Judeo-Christian," is it not? Compared to Buddhism and Shintoism, the monotheistic religions do seem about the same.

But anyways, Zielenziger's argument about Christianity and Japan suffers a major flaw. The only Asian country he raises as a contrast is South Korea, where Christian crosses are a common sight and Western individualistic values seem stronger (to him). I don't know much about South Korea, but I wonder what he would say about China. I would highly doubt that Christianity has made considerable inroads into Chinese culture, but judging from my and my family's experience, Chinese culture now seems to embrace risk-taking and some individualism in any case. Zielenziger argues that funding, encouragement, responsibility, etc. are rarely given to younger colleagues or entrepreneurs in Japan because older and nominally more experienced people receive priority. My father, at least, says that in China the venture capital flows in much the same way as it flows in America--towards the younger, more energetic, more risk-taking generation. Isolated incident? Perhaps. But I think it would be safe to say that the culture in China is very different from the culture in Japan, despite their similar polytheistic influences.

Hmm, Christianity. Makes me very suspicious when it comes up in an argument like this. Especially when statements are made about how Christian values are the basis of Western values and therefore of Western global dominance.

the project proposal

2007-09-05T00:01:00.001-07:00

For those of you who might be interested, here is a description of my project, excerpted from the original Fulbright proposal. I've left out most of the insufferable prattle about how I'm an amazing person totally suited to and able to pull off this project, haha. I've also left out some of the more boring details of the project. My vaunted language skills are currently being put severely to the test as I frantically flip dictionary pages, trying to translate the aforementioned proposal. Anybody handy at Japanese, feel free to help!

Westernization of Japanese food: Attitudes towards dieting and food habits

Biological and chemical factors such as genes and carcinogens are often the focus of research on disease and disease prevention; however, social and cultural environments play an overwhelming and sometimes unrecognized role as well. The impacts of Westernization on global culture and health are particularly important considerations for developing and rapidly Westernizing nations. In particular, the spread of a Western diet has had a unique nutritional and health impact in Japan. The past few decades have witnessed an extraordinary transition from a traditional Japanese rice, fish, and tofu-based diet to a Western-style fast food diet in conjunction with a rise of childhood obesity and diabetes. Japan is also witnessing the rise of dieting behaviors and eating disorders formerly associated primarily with the West. Because socially influenced attitudes towards food can vary between cultures and impact health, I would like to study the relationships between a) frequency of and motivations for dieting, b) dietary content and underlying reasons for choice of foods, and c) prevalence of “medical” attitudes towards food among the younger generation of Japanese women.

Japan is the ideal place to study such cultural phenomenon, particularly since in many economic and political respects it is similar to the Western world. A mutual understanding of the impact of multiple cultural influences on individual motivations for eating and dieting would be important in allowing us to 1) better understand the motivations for dieting in Japanese youth and provide insights as to how to appropriately prevent the further spread of eating disorders; 2) better understand Japanese attitudes towards food and evaluate similarities or differences to American attitudes towards food; 3) probe the underlying reasons for the Westernization of Japanese diet and possibly devise culturally relevant policies aimed at promoting healthier food choices.

Previous studies of eating disorders and attitudes towards food have yielded interesting avenues for investigation. For example, a study of eating disorders in young Japanese women warns against casually attributing the most prevalent Western dieting motivations to Japanese women, suggesting that other culture-bound factors may be involved, such as an intense desire to fit in with peers (Pike et al). Other studies add that even basic motivations for eating could differ between cultures, with Americans more likely than the Japanese to eat for emotional reasons rather than in response to physical and environmental cues (Hawk et al.). Hawk goes on to speculate that Americans have come to view food more as a health tool or medication, whereas the Japanese have retained a focus on the physical pleasure and nutritional satisfaction of eating. Other research suggests that this view is incomplete; anthropologist Ohnuki-Tierney has noted that the Japanese also view food as a kind of medicine, as evidenced by the cultural focus on curing various ailments with special diets, and the existence of a whole folk theory of disease based on acid and alkaline food.

My proposed study will be a vignette-based survey, ideally of students enrolled at the university where the Fulbright will place me. The survey will consist of several photographs, each accompanied by a vignette and followed by survey questions designed to probe the subject’s attitudes towards dieting and food. Each subject will receive one of the photos, which will differ from others by one parameter, such as food content; thus, I can probe how attitudes towards food and dieting vary according to the parameter. As in previous studies based on a convenience sample of university students, subjects may be recruited from large general courses, and paper surveys may simply be passed out and collected.

As a future physician, I believe that public health and sociological research is particularly relevant to my academic and professional development. In addition to coming in contact with culturally different peoples, this Fulbright fellowship would allow me to pursue my own public health research project full-time for the first time. In the past, my academic time has been largely devoted to research and courses in the natural sciences. The pressure of these time commitments has prevented me from ever fully concentrating on and developing my other interests, especially Japanese and the social sciences. A year as a Fulbright Fellow will give me time to focus on public health in-depth and in a satisfying manner, as well as allow me to more deeply understand the cultural and social factors that influence people’s health and behaviors as opposed to the biological and chemical factors that I have focused on until now. This experience will serve as a future reminder to me that many different perspectives on the same problem (such as human health) can coexist and supplement each other.

ready to go!

2007-08-29T00:17:00.000-07:00

well....getting there anyways. I'm packing, worrying about packing, wondering if everything will fit, and wondering if I need those nifty vacuum packing bags that will shrink all my yarn and sweaters down to the size of a pinhead.

Depending on my mood, a year can alternately seem like an incredibly long time or a very short time. It's too short to accomplish anything of substance really--such as getting published. However, it's too long when I have to think about how long I need to go without decent Mexican food, or seeing my friends, or speaking copious amounts of English, or access to English language novels. I'm trying not to think about the "lasts" in these last couple of days, which reminds me a bit of graduation. If I'm aware that this moment, this second, will be the last time in a long long time that I'll have great Italian food or see one of my friends or do any number of other things integral to my American life, will I savor the moment more or will I simply taint it with sadness? To some extent, going blithely without thought through life is certainly less troublesome.

Enough of that. I think going without Italian or Mexican food will be more than made up by the amazing Japanese food I'll have.