Hello 日本

At 10:30 this morning, Akiko, Moe, and I went to Namba station to meet up with Amy and Sehee. After some slight mishaps and getting lost, we eventually all found each other. I waved goodbye to my host family and went off to explore Namba with Amy and Sehee.

We decided to check out Namba Parks, a sort of high-class mall that is styled to look like a canyon. It`s pretty neat, actually, but the stores were too expensive for us! We stopped at Starbucks for some fruit smoothies before continuing on.

Eventually, we got hungry, and after searching for a while we stopped at this AMAZING Italian place. The three of us ate lunch, which included salad, pasta, pizza, drinks, and gelato, for around 25$. A pretty good deal I think!

After lunch, we wandered around some more, this time looking in stores that were more our price range. Not entirely sure where all we went, but we basically toured around the Namba station area.

We attempted to explore Den Den Town, a part of Namba, but we kind of got turned around somehow, so we ended up just doing the Namba Walk instead. That`s the main shopping street that basically connects to all the other important places in Namba area. We stopped at Sega World to do some purikura, which is basically mandatory on any outing.

We did some various shopping after that, checking out Dotomburi and the giant Don Qixote store. We spend some time sitting by the river watching the Tenjin Matsuri folks getting their boats ready.

Eventually, we got up and made our way back to the station. We took the subway to Tenmabachi, where Tenjin Matsuri was taking place. Actually the matsuri started yesterday - I could hear the drums and the bells ringing for a steady HOUR at around 9pm last night. It was almost louder than the cicadas.

We exited the station, crossed a bridge, and came to this looooong street that was filled with good smells, street vendors, and people. The first thing we did was buy a 1$ piece of fresh pineapple on a stick. It was heaven.

We wandered around the matsuri for a while, alternating between checking out the vendors and watching the boats that were sailing on the river, beating drums, waving flags, chanting, and ringing bells. Eventually, we got hungry. I convinced Amy to try one of the grilled fish on a stick meals. She actually did. Apaprently Gilbert, the fish, ws quite tasty! I snacked on some strawberry shaved ice, while Sehee ate something that resembled okonomiyaki on a stick. Japanese matsuris are all about the food on sticks. I would`ve loved to try so many more foods, but unfortunately it was VERY expensive. My shaved ice was 4$!

The original plan was to stay to watch the fireworks, but we were so tired from the morning in Namba, that Amy went home and Sehee and I went back to my house. We took baths to clean off the city dirt and grime, and turned on the TV. We were surprised to see the Matsuri was bein broadcast on TV! So instead, we watched the fireworks from the comfort of the living room, which was nearly just as good. Anyway, there will be many more hanabi to come!

So today I changed host families. I probably won`t have has much internet access, plus it`s summer vacation so I won`t likely be up to much exciting. Just to let you guys know not to be worried if I don`t write for half a century or something.

As for the new family, I`m loving them, and I feel like I`ve lived here my whole life. They have a 5 year old daughter who`s basically adopted me. She`s pretty much adorable,

The Newest from Shuchishin! <3
The salarymen just crack me up.

I was looking up at the sky today, trying to figure out why it looked so beautiful today.

And then I realised that the sky looked beautiful because I could actually SEE it.

I never realised that what I usually see is smog. Today I could actually see a bright blue sky interspersed with rolling white clouds.

It was nice.

It reminded me of home.

TWO MORE DAYS UNTIL SUMMER VACATION.
News has declared that tsuyu (rainy season) is finally over. It’s officially summertime!

Today I had self-study during second period.
So I went to the library, fully intending to sleep behind the bookshelf in the English section.
I started reading my book, just to make me sleepy, when the librarian and two girls came up. I was like, “oh! uh, hi!” and jumped up ’cause I wasn’t sure what was going on.
The librarian asks them to introduce themselves, so they do, and I find out that these two girls were exchange students to Ontario for a year! They were in Pickering and Barrie. They told me their names but I completely forget (possibly a Yuri or a Yumi or something). Anyway, I gave them my email so they could add me on MSN and facebook and they were sweet and invited me to sit with them.
So we the three of us read together. Their English is pretty amazing, they hardly have an accent and can say sounds that normal Japanese can’t.

After school today, Sehee, Cassie, Henry, and I all went to Komyoike Station and met up with Amy. The five of us had lunch at Makudo (picked up some donuts along the way), and were stared at by many Japanese people.
After lunch, we went to Combox and did purikura! It was quite a challenge to get all 5 of us in the photos!
Then we had the task of trying to find the karaoke place, Jankara. I knew it existed, just not where. It was really hot, so I led everyone into this building to cool off and ask someone the way. Lo! There was the karaoke! We went down this random staircase and the karaoke was on the basement floor. We each paid 550 yen for “free time” karaoke. It was a pretty good deal, considering the drinks were free too!
We sang for a couple of hours, maybe 3 or 4. Karaoke is pretty fun. We sang a lot of stuff, like Shuchishin, SMAP, Backstreet Boys, Rihanna, O-ZONE, Gnarls Barkley, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Bon Jovi, Enrique Iglasias, Toto, Journey, Billey Joel, Queen, Gorillaz….
Now I am dead tired and have a nice headache
It was fun to bounce around in the room, until Amy informed us that people have sex in there.

Thanks, Amy.

Also,
1. You can buy food at karaoke and one of the pizzas had cornflakes on it….odd.
2. The bus I took home from Komyoike had a wooden floor. I wasn’t aware that was safe…? Or legal?

Today Mama and I drove to Osaka city to meet my new host family. Needless to say, we got lost. Anyhow, we finally found the house. It’s pretty much downtown Osaka city (the 2nd largest city in Japan FYI) down this really narrow street. My neighbors are a Shrine and a Temple. To enter the house, there is a sort of sliding door you go through, and then there’s a courtyard. Inside is my new house and my new grandparents’ house. They have a white lab named Rantaro.
My new host family is the Kasano family. They have a 5-year-old daughter named Moe (that’s moe-eh, not Moe as in a man’s name). She’s cute, but I think she’s afraid of me. The house is kind of small, but I’ll have my own room upstairs and I’ll sleep on a futon on the floor. The living room is made of tatami. It’s kind of a neat house, a real mixture of old and new. And the neighborhood is way more Japanese than where I live now. It’s more what I hoped for when I came to Japan. I’m really excited to check out the shrine and then temple and meet my host parents. It seems like a good place to explore around too. There are many old houses.

In other news, I read this article, and it’s funny because I definitely am a Japanese hick!
I wasn’t entirely sure, but it turns out that I do speak Kansai-ben on a regular basis. My host family isn’t originally from Osaka, so they don’t always use the slang here.
Words I use daily:
akan (dame) - wrong, bad, must, oh no!
chau (chigau) - nope, wrong, that’s not it
honma (honto) - true, real
makudo (makku) - mcdonald’s
metcha (totemo) - very, really
naa (nee) - like…eh? I guess
nen (no da) - can’t really translate…adds emphasis I guess
shindoi (tsukareru) - tired (didn’t even know this was Osaka-ben haha)

A phrase I hear a lot is “めっちゃすきやねん”, or “metcha suki ya nen”, which is like….”I really like it!”.

And there are some other words there that I’ve heard my classmates use. It’s funny, because they teach me Japanese, so I just consider what I learn standard. I haven’t a clue what my Japanese is really like…most likely some strange mix of standard Japanese and Osaka-ben.
It’s fun, though! I feel like having a crazy dialect makes my Japanese have more personality.

And P.S. no wonder my Japanese verbs are all over the place!!! Half the stuff they say to me, I can’t understand the verb conjugation….that would apparently be because Osaka-ben conjugates verbs all differently. I feel better about myself now haha!

Just when things were going excellent one day, I am hit hard, like a punch to the stomach, with homesickness.
It’s something I never thought I’d have to deal with. There are a lot of things here that I “never thought of”. Living like this, completely immersed in another culture, is something you can’t even begin to fathom, not at all.
Reality is so different from what the imagination pictures.

I find myself wondering why I came here.
People ask me that same question all the time, and the manufactured answer is “Because I like the culture and I like history. Kimono and samurai are cool. I want to experience the culture.”
It’s true, I do enjoy learning about other cultures and kimono are probably some of the most beautiful and intricately made clothing in the world, but I don’t really enjoy Japanese culture all that much. Of course, there was no way I could’ve known that before I came here. It’s really the reason why I came. I dared myself to step foot into this completely different country and I dared myself to go far, far out of my comfort zone.

I wonder, “why did I come here?” I don’t really eat fish (I wish I could and I do try, but I just can’t enjoy the taste), I don’t really adore Japanese culture, and then I wonder what the point of learning Japanese even is, if I’m not particularly enthralled with the country. To my view, it’s a rather odd language (double negatives is something I can’t get used to).

I am a European through and through. I have never felt homesick or unhappy in Europe. I love Europe. I love that I can trace my family back to Europe. I love European food. The traditions and the languages run in my blood. I have discovered that I can’t feel that way about every place in the world. I’m simply not an “Asian person”. I don’t particularly feel drawn to Asian life.

I know that if I had waited; if I had gone in university, things would’ve turned out differently. Part of my distaste for this lifestyle comes from the fact that I’m in high school. I should be graduated now, preparing for life on my own and continuing my studies, but instead I am living an extra semester of high school in a country where teenagers are repressed and encouraged to be unindividualized. I feel that I am wasting away my mind at school. Classes are not challenging at all. In fact, I read or draw in the majority of my classes. I’m not at the point where I can understand the teachers enough yet, and they simply ignore me anyway. The only classes I participate in are my special Japanese language classes, gym, home economics, and Korean. I read books to occupy my mind, but I can literally feel my brain becoming unpracticed and lazy.

I know that I am a particularly independent person myself, and that not everyone is used to the amount of freedom I am granted. Still, no one should be subjected to being the last to know about things concerning ONESELF and being ignored simply because they’re the “underclassman”. Not to say that I’m against respecting one’s elders. I also dislike that Japanese people are so outwardly polite (bowing, taking off shoes, using honorifics, etc.) but then they go behind your back and gossip and say cruel things. Then, somehow, they are cruel to you in way that is very rude in western cultures. It is not acceptable in North America to publicly discuss another person’s weight, age, family and relationship issues, etc., ESPECIALLY when that person is not present or when they are present but are ignored! People who I’ve never even met know things about me, and some of those things aren’t even true. It’s quite a mystery to me how Japanese people can be so rude and so polite at the same time. I know a lot of this has to do with separate cultures and different values, but I don’t think that it can ever be acceptable to discuss someone’s personal business without asking them first.

Another thing that bothers me is that Japanese people tend to not challenge the rules at all. I think that rules can never be universal. There should be some give and take. Every situation is different. Then again, Japanese are so homogeneous; perhaps they’re not used to this idea.

I just feel like I should have picked a country better suited to me rather than blindly picking the one I thought would provide the most challenge. I realize now that it’s not about forcing yourself to complete a challenge, it’s about balancing the challenges and the easy tasks. My advice to future exchangers would be to really think hard about where you truly want to go. Don’t pick a country without really thinking it over. I did consider changing my country choice, but by that time I knew that I would’ve felt terrible, wondering and wondering how my exchange could’ve been in my first country choice.

I’m not really sure how I feel about life here, though. I am generally unhappy with my school life. My saving grace is my wonderfully friendly and helpful classmates. I’ve grown to love them all like little brothers and sisters. The problem here is that that’s what they are - younger siblings. They’re fun to be with during the day, but I find it difficult to consider hanging out with them outside of school.

Quite frankly, I don’t think that a year program here in Japan was right for me. Perhaps somewhere else would’ve worked out better. Many things could’ve offered a different outcome. I find that I enjoy Japan enough to consider it a place where I could stay for a few weeks or a month, to travel. It’s not a place I could consider calling home. What I enjoy most here is the travelling and the exploring. I love to visit the temples and shrines and learn about the religion and history of the country. I like to explore, to dip my foot in, but I don’t like to jump right in and completely submerse myself. Not here.

I have considered going home a few times.
The first time was in Tokyo, before I even came to Osaka. My very first week. It was only natural. I had a boyfriend and friends back home who I was aching to be with. But things got better, especially after I started school and had a routine.
Then, I was hit by homesickness brought on by graduation. All my friends in Ohio and Canada had graduated, were moving on, and here I was, stuck in Japan. It’s almost like I am stuck in my own little glass globe, not really a part of the real outside world.
I told myself that I would stick it out until September -6 months or so into my exchange; half a year. I knew that the homesickness wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. It just came back.
But then I think about it and I can picture how disappointed others would be in me if I came home early, and how disappointed I would be in myself. In a way, it would completely destroy forever the “picture perfect” exchange I had always dreamed about. I don’t go home early in my perfect exchange.
I also told myself that by September, I was almost done anyway. School ends on December 19th for me, and most of December is half days anyway. I leave Japan January 9th. Why not just stick it out to the end?
It’s a constant argument between my pride and my happiness.

I don’t want to offend anyone here, or put anyone off the idea of going to Japan. This is just my general feelings about how my exchange has gone and how I feel about Japan and why it wasn’t the right place for me. I’ve tried to offer the why as to why I feel this way. Feel free to challenge me on the subject.

(After writing this, I feel a lot better to have just written out the plain truth. Please take into consideration that I just wrote what came to mind. It’s something that I did for myself.)

For Home Economics class, we have started cooking!
Today I had two hours of cooking. I was basically in the same group as from Sengari English Camp, only minus Mai. So it was me, Yuki, Rin-kun, and the boys I call waitress, waitress, and manager.

I have absolutely no idea what the main dish is called that we made. It was like, a bunch of vegetables cut up and then kind of fried with bacon and squid. Then this like, konnyaku jelly was mixed in with it or something. I have no idea. It wasn’t bad, though, minus the strange jelly.

I was appointed the job of making dessert, which was Japanese-style jello. It is made using agar (from seaweed) instead of gelatin from cows. It’s pretty yummy. Basically, I poured water and agar powder into a pot and boiled it. After it boiled, I added sugar, vanilla essence, and milk and then stirred it all together. Next, I poured it into this cool little tin box that had like, a removable fitting inside so you could easily lift out the jelly. To set the jelly, I poured it into the tin and then set the tin in a pan that I had to continually put cold water in.

In total, the meal was the weird stir-fry thing, rice, and the jelly with fruit as dessert. It was pretty good, and I was pretty happy to get a free meal, especially since I had just done swimming the period before and was STARVING.

So today in P.C. Studies, we watched this movie.
It was one of those informational videos, only this time it was about how texting strange men via chatrooms on your cellphone can result in rape, death, and arrestment.

Situation 1: Girl’s friend tells girl about website. Friend says how she meets guys and then steals their money while they’re in the shower. Girl really wants to buy boyfriend an expensive iPod. Girl mails guy and meets him. While he’s in the shower she steals his money. Girl buys boyfriend iPod. Girl does it again. Only this time the man drugs her and rapes her. Girl wakes up and freaks. Fast forward to five years later. Girl is with same boyfriend and is getting married. Man who raped her shows up and mocks her. Girl is haunted FOREVER.

Situation 2: Girl and friend meet guys on chatroom and go to karaoke with them. They do this a few times. Then they figure out how to get money from men. They starting making money as a business. Eventually they are figured out and get arrested by the police.

Situation 3: Girl meets boy online. Boy is in late 20s and shows a good-looking picture. Girl mails boy for a couple of months. They agree to meet. Girl waits for a while, but boy doesn’t show. Eventually, boy mails her and it’s something creepy. She looks over and a MAJOR CREEPER is sitting in the corner, staring at her. Girl flees, but boy catches up. He chloroforms her and then TASERS HER TO DEATH. Yes.

Situation 4: Girl spends most of her time texting her only friend, a girl she met online. One day, the girl friend asks for girl to take and send pictures of her naked. GIRL FREAKING DOES IT. So girl sends friend all these nude photos of herself. The next day, girl goes to school. Everyone stares at her and is silent. Girl asks what is going on. Classmates inform her that everyone got photos of her naked. Girl is horrified. Change scene, girl friend is actually a creepy old man in a dark apartment, cackling over nuder photos of a highschool girl.

So yeah, it was a pretty er, interesting video.