Hi, everybody.
So, I promise I’m really in Japan. I realize this is extremely difficult for everyone to believe since I fell off the place of the planet… Now that it’s eight weeks in and Fall Break, here’s a brief recap of the last eight weeks:
I landed in Japan at the very end of August, staying in mitcho’s teeny tiny apartment, which he shares with two other (apparently frequently changing) tenants. Each has his own room, with a shared bathroom, shower, and kitchen, and I managed to meet no one the three days I was there. It’s clean and cute and very cozy, and manages to avoid being cramped… if you’re not over 5’4”. While mitcho went to work, I explored his neighborhood (near Hatsudai Station in Shinjuku Ward), making friends with a fruit vendor and learning the word ‘pharmacy’ (薬局・yakkyoku) and generally being the only foreigner for miles around, strangely enough.
On Wednesday the third of September I rode the bullet train southwest to Kyoto, and was immediately shocked to find that Kyoto is, relatively speaking, FULL OF FOREIGNERS. In retrospect, as a city with very little economic UMPH which relies on its history as the Old Capital and Geisha Central to draw tourism, as well as having more college students per capita than any other city in Japan, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
The fifty of us in the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies, a handful from more than ten prestigious American universities, gathered at the Hotel Fujita for orientation. Orientation consisted mainly of being shown where some things were, but since none of us had any blinking idea where anything was, it was immensely helpful.
On Saturday we all were shuttled off to our respective home stays, sans the five or so kids in apartments, who were shuttled off to their apartments. I recognized my host parents from the pictures they had sent me from CAIRO, where they had taken a trip over the summer. I soon came to find that the Matsunagas consisted of an extremely energetic husband, aged 69, named Toshiharu, who once lived for two months in Malaysia just for fun (despite speaking nothing but Japanese and a heavy smattering of English vocabulary) and now beats younger men at tennis and softball, and his tiny lovely wife Hiroko, 65, who’s pretty game for about anything and sometimes is his doubles partner. They go overseas sort of mind-bogglingly often, visiting places for fun and going to graduations and weddings of their many, many, many past homestay students… The Matsunagas have been taking in homestay students for almost twenty years, and I am their 36th. We often talk about previous kids, whose pictures are all in two large frames over the dinner table.
I placed into the highest Japanese class, which, while flattering, is also the hardest Japanese class of my life, and the teaching style (interrupting the flow of class for criticism and correction) of one of the teachers I find somewhat jarring, mostly because I’m used to being good at things and not to being criticized, honestly. But my class’s teacher seven out of ten sessions a week is an incredibly sweet and compassionate woman, named Uemiya Mariko. Uemiya-sensei, bless her heart, has much more faith in the eight of us than is probably perfectly wise, and convinced us all at the beginning of the year to sign up for Level One (“Ikkyuu”) of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). We, innocents that we were, all did; last week we took a practice kanji and vocab section, and generally made about half the score required for passing (in my case, at least, that was half owing to pure chance as well). This is slightly terrifying, but nonetheless, it is I suppose a good experience to be genuinely chewed up and spit out by a test once in one’s life.
My other two classes are on Noh & Kyougen (traditional theatre; Kyougen is comedic) and modern literature. The Noh class is fascinating, but it’s also three hours long, which is a little much for anything, even if your teacher (Professor Monica Bethe) IS a charismatic woman with a face deeply lined at the places one uses to make incredibly dramatic expressions, who happens to have memorized basically everything Noh play there is to memorize, as well as the drum rhythms and the flute patterns, and also has carved her own Noh mask, and also has been translating Noh texts (CLASSICAL Japanese, think Chaucer’s English) and books on Noh into English since the seventies. (Not kidding.) The lit class is much lower-key but enjoyable. Professor Sarah Frederick is a laid-back individual and one doesn’t immediately realize the depth of her knowledge about Japanese literature and modern history. She also has brought to Japan a one-year-old daughter (as of October 25th), a three-year-old son, and a husband who speaks no Japanese (hers is very good).
On Tuesdays and sometimes Fridays, I pick Frederick-sensei’s son Sam up from his Japanese preschool and babysit him for a couple of hours until his mother and sister Maia get home. Sam is quickly turning bilingual, which is delightful for me to interact with. His mother started speaking to him in Japanese a year ago, and the teachers and children at his preschool obviously don’t speak any English, so his Japanese is improving rapidly, and he mixes the languages in incredibly endearing ways. Maia, the one-year-old, is round and blue-eyed and drooly and cheerful and is almost enough on her own to convince anyone that having a baby is a fantastic idea.
I ride my bike to school every morning, unless it’s raining, taking the sidewalk down by the river to avoid hills and stop lights. Kyoto, built on a grid, is slowly becoming familiar to me, especially since it’s not vast like Tokyo, or even Chicago. I spent a lot of time at Nishiki Market, a narrow street lined with shops selling traditional pickles and fish and sweets, as well as stores offering tea goods and knives and gifts. There are also stalls selling fried things and shaved ice, which I confess are my favorite. It was the site of perhaps my most touching interaction with a Japanese person, serving to basically erase the bad feelings I’d gotten from a few other experiences ranging from ambivalent to incredibly negative: I was sitting finishing my shaved ice on a bench next to a young mother and her son, who looked no older than four. I thought they were talking about me— I caught the word “onee-san,” which means “older sister” but is a way to refer to young women you don’t know— but couldn’t tell. Then, suddenly, the tiny boy holds out his bag of tiny soymilk donuts, saying “Go ahead and have one.”
DELIGHT!!!
I asked him what it was, and he was like, “it’s a donut! It’s good!!” and I ate it and thanked them and smiled and smiled as they walked away. Children are adorable.
