Autumn Day

Before class today I went to the Yasukuni shrine which is right by Hosei campus. Yasukuni (ironically meaning peaceful country) is a shrine dedicated to those who died for Japanese war causes. Which means there are also class A war criminals enshrined in Yasukuni. This is a very controversial place in Japan. The current prime minister, Koizumi, often visits the shrine to pay respect to the dead causing an uproar from China and Korea. Every time Koizumi visits Yasukuni China and Korea always say that Japan is being insensitive to the war crimes comitted against their people and whatnot. Usually the japanese embassies in both countries (north korea gets mad too but they are always mad so it doesn't really count) get pelted by rocks and japanese good are boycotted for a moment. I'm not sure why Koizumi insists on causing this much uproar but he I just assume it's his conservative nature. Anyway, so this shrine is much different from any other shrine you visit in Japan. One big thing I noticed is that there are no explanations given in any foreign languages except on 2 plaques. Usually most shrines translate most things into english or chinese. The shrine is also right in the middle of Tokyo, so the stark contrast between heavily urbanized Japan and the natural tranquility of a shrine is well noticed.

After that I went to one class called International Business. It was surprisingly interesting for a business class. Luckily more than half of the people there were Japanese so the teacher had to define each business word he used. The teacher is also pretty funny. He's Japanese and speaks english pretty well. He also seemed to be very in love with america. When we introduced outselves instead of saying the normal "I'm a third year student..", he told us to tell what grade we were in freshman, junior senior levels. And pretty much every example he used was about america when it had to do with the western world.

After class Rachel and I ventured out to Akihabara, the electric town, to see about getting a computer and camera. Akihabara is one interesting place. It's basically a whole neighbourhood of nothing but electronic stores or arcades. They have pretty much anything you want. Which kind of wore me out since I'm not well at making decisions. But right before we left I decided on a nice little camera. (I'll start taking pictures later when I figure it out...) Rachel decided to wait on the computer purchase until she was sure that she knew what she was doing. As neither of us are electronic experts. As we were leaving into the station we saw this man in what seemed to be some sort of leather fetish wear. He was posing for pictures and handing out information about some type of store. Of course I got a picture. But the pictures aren't working on the blog today. Maybe tomorrow.

After Akihabara Rachel and I went over to Tokyo Dome. It's where some Tokyo team plays baseball and other big events happen. At Tokyo Dome there is a huge shopping centre and amusement park. Everything was so chic and hip. They had a water show where the fountain danced and played disney songs I think.

With walking everywhere that was a very full day. I think I have walked more in the past week than I ever did last year. No wonder japanese people are so healthy. All that rice and walking who knows how many kilometres a day. I would say I would continue the walking habit when I get back to Waco, but let's be honest. 80% of the reason no one walks in Waco is becuase you will get mugged. Oh, America. I'm sure I'll miss the high crime rate eventually.

To all those in the Gulf and beyond, thoughts and prayers are with you. Stay out of harm's way and stay safe.

A Thursday

Today's class was Youth and Schooling in Contemporary Japan. It was actually pretty interesting. The teacher I think is from America or Canada. So it's nice to hear a familiar voice. In this class we are basically going to study the lifeline of Japanese people from birth to adulthood. So I'm not sure exactly why it's called Youth and Schooling, but I suppose that has something to do with it. Today we had to get into groups of those with the same language and similiar background. So americans together, british together, german speakers together, japanese together etc. And we made a timeline of the typical person from our country in our native language. I wanted to make up slang terms for everything since we didn't really have an interesting language to translate but no one was with me. It was pretty interesting to see how different cultures view the life line. But it was all pretty similiar for the most part.

After class we had lunch and it took a while to find some seats in the crowded cafeteria but we eventually did. We were the lone white people in a sea of japanese people so it was pretty interesting. And one guy that we ate with had just gotten a cell phone so he was taking pictures of everything. In the cafeteria you are supposed to smoke but there is always a group of japanese guys that are smoking underneath the no smoking sign. I always think this is funny. They probably think they are the baddest guys around. Definately in America, you would just get a "hey retard, read the sign". But in Japan I don't think anyone was really going to tell them not to smoke, the sign was supposed to be ample authority. Oh to live in Japan.

Speaking of trust and authority, Japan is certainly different than Waco. Here you can pretty much walk around with money hanging out of your pockets and nothing would ever happen. The other day I was counting money in the post office to pay my rent with and I noticed that I was counting about 175 dollars in cash. Something that I would never ever do in America, not even in Johnson county. But here you can just trust everyone. At night when stores are closed they often leave their goods outside until morning. The other day I saw at 7/11 they had cases of beer stacked right outside the door, something that woudln't last 2 seconds in any city in America.

After lunch I went up to the computer lab with Rachel. The computer lab is on the 4th floor and right next to it, outside, is a little garden. Complete with a pond with koi fish. And you can look out and see the skyline of Shinjuku. It's definately a place I'll have to visit again.

That was pretty much my day, since after that I went back to here and just wondered more around the city here. Nothing too interesting.

To all those about to be visited by Rita, be safe! If you can't get out of harm's way , be careful. I hear they even closed Baylor for friday classes. Hopefully she makes a quick landfall and dies off early.

I think sometime this weekend or next week Tokyo is getting a typhoon. So I'll get to expirience some sympathy pains. But I guess Tokyo is well built for typhoons and we only get a bunch of rain. I'm not sure. The weather people aren't really saying much, and when they are saying anything it's in Japanese so I'm sure I'm not getting the full story. I'm just taking it as since the Japanese aren't worrried about it, I shouldn't be. I'll leave my worrying to earthquakes. Rachel said that she and her flatmates felt tremours yesterday. Let the good times roll.

Bring a book.

This morning I got up pretty early and got ready to go to the second day of classes. When I was putting away my laundry from last night I realised that maybe I should do laundry more often. Since I had almost no room on my clothes drying hanger for my clothes I had my clothes hanging up around my room. My first expirience with air drying clothes...

So after rearranging the drying laundry I went on my way to school. I got there kind of early so I found some guys and we sat around until class started. The next class was called "Ecology and Business". I wasn't really planning on taking the class, but I thought I would go for one session to see how it was. It was even more business talk than I had thought. It was slightly interesting about how more and more companies are finally realising that the earth isn't an un-ending supply. The teacher is from Switzerland and still is partial owner of some company there that helps other big buisnesses use sustainable practices. But overall I could care less about buisness and I don't need the class, so I don't think I will take it.

Afterwards I had lunch at the cafeteria there. The cafeteria is really funny because Hosei students are so flamboyant. They really want you to look at them. But when the lone white people walked into the room, all eyes were on us. When we sat down people would just come by and say "hello" and leave. This one girl that was sitting next to us would ask us questions and then laugh. I didn't really get what was so funny, but something was. One guy asked me where I was from and when I told him Kansas he said that he reckongised Kansas because he had been in Iowa for a month. Random.

After lunch I had about one and a half hours until the next class. I helped another exchange student, Quentin from France, find the Post office then we just sat around until the next class.

The next class was Japanese 3a. It wasn't really too hard but everything was in Japanese so it took a while to figure out what the teacher even wanted us to answer. She was a pretty nice lady though and hopefully the class will help out my Japanese a lot. After class I went back on the trains to the dorms. Exciting.

I noticed today that it has cooled off a lot. I think the high was 24 degrees today. As opposed to it being like 27 or 28. I'm not sure what that is in Faranheit but it's much cooler. So hopefully this is the begginning of the nice cool autumn season I have heard about in Japan. Sweating your weight in water kind of got old in the first week.

Since I don't have much else to say about today I guess I can talk about the other exchange students here that I have been hanging out with. They are a very diverse group of people from all over. For most of them, english is their 2nd or 3rd language . So communication can get interesting sometime. Sometimes I feel guilty and stupid for pretty much only knowing english while everyone else is fluent in at least 2 or 3 languages. But in America we are never really taught the whole international world thing. I guess we assume that since english is de facto in so many states around the world, there is no use in learning another language. Anyway, even though our group is so diverse I feel that we have a lot in common just because we have studied japanese and, for the most part, no one likes anime. I'm pretty happy with the group of people that has come this year. Everyone is really cool and we can all hang out together. Which apparently hasn't always happened in the past with the exchange students here. And it's kind of good to feel like a part of a group when you are definately the outsider 99% of the time in Japan.

I think that when school gets more normal more of these posts are going to be like this. Kind of boring. But oh well. I'm sure there will be some sort of crazy japanese happening everyday.

First Day

This morning I woke up kind of late and went with some of the guys to Hosei for the first day. Before school we were going to see about setting up a bank account. The bank in our neighbourhood said you had to have a 犯行 (hankou), japanese stamp, to set up an account. But being foreigners we had no way of aquiring a stamp. A hankou is like a signature in Japan. It is usually the first charachter of your first name put on a cylyndrical stone. These are registered in the Japanese government and only japanese nationals can get them. While they were figuring out what to do with the bank accounts I dropped by the post office next door to pay my rent bill and send some post cards. They decided that the bank account was too much to try to figure out today so they would try another time. Since all banks here close at 3 pm there is not much time to do so. As a side note, later on in the day we found out that the same bank but a different branch next to Hosei will open up a bank account with no trouble at all. In Japan, even though the bank is owned by the same company, each branch may have very different procedures and policies. They love to be confusing over here.

Any way so we went on to Hosei to figure out what to do for the first day since we still didn't know what japanese class we would be in. The International Centre staff gave us the results of the test and told us where we should go. I did a lot better on the test than I thought I would and I was put in levels 3&4. So I'm not a complete failure.

At 1:30 it was time for the first class, Families and Sexualities in Japan. All the exchange students were about 15 minutes late because we saw a sign telling us to go to another room and assumed it was for that class. Good ol' english misunderstandings. After a late start the teacher gave us a summary of what we would talk about in the class and did a short lecture over the "Koseki" system of identification in Japan. The class sounds pretty interesting because every other week we do a presentation over what we learned the week before and discuss. A lot better than writing down a bunch of notes and reciting it back on a test. But the class was kind of boring today because we just talked about this system of registeration in Japan. Basically instead of registering individually, Japanese people register according to their family. When a woman gets married she joins her husband's "koseki" and if she gets divorced she can either rejoin her father's "koseki" or make her own koseki being the head of the house. It's all pretty sexist and old fashioned. If a child is born to parents that are not married, that child is just labled "boy" instead of "son". And supposedly there is much discrimination against children of non-married parents and divorced women. Sounds like the south to me.

The next class I went to was Japanese Culture. I had no idea what this class was supposed to be. The name sounded a bit vague and the course number indicated that the class was to be in Japanese. The teacher came in and told us that the class was basically a Japanese communication class where we were to discuss japanese culture. The teacher was really energetic and pretty funny. So that class looks like it should be interesting.

After class I ate something in the cafeteria with some of the other guys who didn't make it in time for breakfast this morning and also missed lunch. The cafeteria was pretty funny. The students at Hosei are pretty flashy dressers and make it a point to stand out. There was a group of people smoking underneath the big no smoking sign. It sort of felt like shawnee mission north again.

After that I went with one the guys back to the dorms. It started raining right as we left Hosei. It was my first japanese rain. I was too used to the Waco rain where it just poured for a day and didn't rain for another 3 months. But the rain here is a bit heavier than a mist but not very heavy at all. But apparently it rains a lot.

When I got back to the dorms I decided I should do laundry since I change my clothes so many times a day thanks to 100% humidity. A thing about Japan...and well the rest of the world is that they don't use the dryer. Although they do have a dryer in the dorm which I found weird. But it was too small for even one load. So I got to hang up my clothes and they will probably be crunchy when they dry. Good times.

2 things about my cell phone I found out today and yesterday. I guess when you dial the number from overseas you only have to dial *****. (81 being the country code) That is the number you can reach me at anytime pretty much. And today I found out how to change my email address. Before it was that long strand of numbers that they automatically gave us. But after messing around today I found out I could change it and I did to: **** after I did that I became the email expert because no one else had figured it out yet.

I also figured out how to email myself pictures so I can upload them here. I haven't taken any pictures for the purpose of showing them here so I they aren't that good. But here they are anyway. And you also have to hold the phone really still to get good pictures and obviously I can't do that. And I think there is some way to better focus it...but oh well. You get the point.


This is the view from the 12th floor of Boissenede Tower of Hosei. The black tower is the Japanese Self Defense Force, their unoffical army but for constitutional reasons can't call it an army but they still sent them to Iraq..but that is a whole other story. It was a pretty foggy day today.
































This is Boisenede Tower of Hosei. I'm not sure how you spell it. It has 26 floors and sticks out pretty well in that area of Tokyo. Apparently to stand an earthquake it is built to sway back and forth quite a bit. So that should be fun when I'm in class someday.













This is Rachel friday night just as we got out of Shibuya station into Shibuya ward. Behind her is apparently the world's busiest intersection. And that it was. It looked like a sea of people crossing the huge intersection in all directions.
























This is Yokohama ....something... Bridge. I think it may be called the freedom bridge or maybe the rainbow bridge. I'm not sure, but it's really long and looks cool. I was on the floating park when I took that picture.




















This is a pretty big intersection in the middle of Harajuku. It's pretty fuzzy but you get the point.









This was on the menu at the cafe we ate at yesterday in Harajuku. The idea behind it was that for 300 yen more you could add on a piece of cake to your meal. But the english kind of got mixed up. If you can't read it it says "When you hold it and pay Y300 pairs todrink set. a cake gets possible to choose." I'm probably going to come back talking like this since that is the only english I see most of the time.

















This is a sign that is pretty much everywhere around the trains that tells you who should have the seats on the train. "Priority Seats". The pictures are kind of funny. They recently changed the pictures on all the lines because the old ones could be viewed a very different way.



















This is someone's house I see everyday on the way to Tsutsujigaoka station. It looks heavily groomed and green. In a city as urban as Tokyo it's a nice thing to see everyday.




Tomorrow is the 2nd day of class and actually a full schedule. I'll try to get some better pictures of people and places tomorrow.


When I look at this again I realise that the pictures are placed kind of wierd in this post. I'll try to fix that next time.

Harajuku

Thanks to my new pillow I slept quite well last night. Now if I could just control traffic I would be great.

Today I got up kind of early and went to look around the area of Tsutsujigaoka station. That is the station I board pretty much every day to get to actual Tokyo. I found this web cam online the other day of the station to give you an idea of what it looks like. Even though I go there everday I have never really looked around to see what is all there. On the other side of the entrance I use there is a big department store and lots of little shops. I went into one of the department stores and the people were so nice I felt I had to buy something. I just bought some bread for breakfast. I looked around at some of the book and cd stores later. You have to be somewhat careful what you are looking at in bookstores here, because Japanese people love porn. And they don't really put it away like in American bookstores. Sometimes all the covers are so cartoony you can't tell a difference. It's always a surprise what you are going to pick up. I usually avoid opening up anything too cartoony though, because usually it's just porn.

After I looked around the station I headed over to Ichigaya station to meet the girls to go to Harajuku. I also made it on time and on the right train again. Eventually I'll not be so impressed with myself but the whole subway system is so confusing to me. Being as the only mass transit system I ever knew was the trolley in downtown KC.

Harajuku is the hangout place Japanese teenagers. It has tons of hip shops where you can buy almost anything that is cool in Japan. If you are familiar with Gwen Stefani, this is the Harajuku that she is always talking about in her songs. The current style now is "ゴースロリ" (Gosu Rori) or Gothic Lolita. It's basically Japanese girls dressing up like little girls in bonnets and adding in the goth look with black clothes and chains.Here is a picture of a typical Gothic Lolita girl. These kind of girls were everywhere. Some just had the Lolita look while others had the full on Gothic Lolita. There were stores that specifically sold Gothic Lolita clothing.

We ate lunch at this little cafe that was really good. I had this thing called a hamburger steak. It was basically a meatloaf like something in gravy. It was actually pretty good. Other people had the Mexican Taco Rice, the first mexican food I have seen in Japan. After lunch we went to this thrift store called "Chicago". It was full of American clothes. Most of it hideously tacky. Some of the clothes were expensive but some of it was pretty cheap. They had some velour blazers that I am definately going to have to go back and get.

We then met up with some of the guys. We went to Meiji Shrine and looked around. There was a wedding going on so that was kind of interesting. I wasn't too sure of the significance of Meiji shrine since we didn't spend too much time there. After the shrine, since the other guys hadn't eaten yet I went with them to sit down and the girls went shopping. We ended up going to a French restaurant. They had some sort of steak but it was really thin and fatty. But what else can you expect in Japan.

We then went out to wait for the girls in the middle of Harajuku and this huge intersection. At this intersection is the infamous Condomania. It has these little cartoon condoms on the signs outside dancing and giving safe sex messages. Everything in Japan is so cute and cartoony so that wasn't too odd. While we were waiting I went to another huge thrift store that had the same American clothes way overpriced. I didn't know that Japanese people wanted this kind of stuff otherwise I would have brought more clothes over. And old license plates. They were selling old american license plates being sold for 1500 yen.

After Harajuku I went back to the girl's place and hung around because I was going to go out with them later. But right as they left I decided not to since I'd end up having to take a pretty early train to even get back at a decent time. Plus I was pretty tired from walking all day. I once again looked around Tsutsujigaoka station and found a huge 100 yen store. It was the entire bottom level of a department store.

Another bit of cultural difference is the Department store or ”デパート” (Depaato). In american english we think of a department store like Dillards or JC Penny's, but in Japan a department store is a multi level sort of mall. Each floor usually has one if not more stores on it. Usually there is one main entrance and exit. You pay for everything at each store. Just to be clear because I have mentioned department stores before and it probably sounded weird to think I just went to a place like Dillards.

Tomorrow is the first day of school. The first class doesn't start till next week so I don't have to be up there until 1:30. Pretty nice for the first day. Since we haven't found out what Japanese class they have put us in, I should probably go up there earlier to figure that out. Also to see if taking Russian is still a possibility. It's pretty funny to me how vague and unorganized this whole thing is. I think it's good for me though, makes me much more self independent. I'm forced to figure out things and make decisions on my own. But then again sometimes I'm sometimes jealous of all the Baylor students who went to Europe and have everything planned out for them. But I'm glad I took that leap outside my whole cultural centre and ventured to a place unfamiliar by far.

Yokohama

Today I got up and went to meet Rachel in front of Ichigaya station and we were going to figure out what to do for the day. This time I actually got on the right train and ended up at Ichigaya instead of some other random place in Tokyo. I also got there not only on time but early. It was a proud moment. Before I met Rachel I wandered into some bookstore and was looking around and I heard english so I went over to see what it was. It was a tape recording of a man talking about the diversity of America and how being American can mean you came from Europe, Asia, Africa or wherever. (Mind you Japan is 99% ethnic Japanese) He was talking really slow on the tape so I assume it was for an english lesson.

I met Rachel and she told me that some of the girls were planning on going to Yokohama today and invited us to go along. (The girls being the other exchange students going to Hosei, from the UK and America) I figured that was a pretty good plan. Yokohama is the port city to the south of Tokyo. It's the second biggest city in Japan by population.

So went went off to Yokohama. I'm not sure how long it took but it was closer than I thought, probably less than an hour. We got there and got went just looking around the station to see what was close. We went to this huge department store and got something to eat in the food court. The food court was crazy busy and We couldn't find enought seats to fit us all so we ate on a bench for a while. After lunch we headed out to find some of the parks in the area to just sit around and relax. We found one called 山下(Yamashita). When we got there we heard an ambulance coming but when the paramedics got out they didn't seem like they were in any rush. They took the stretcher out kind leisurely and strolled down the park and when they came back with the man on the stretcher who was bleeding pretty bad somewhere on his head, they were still walking pretty slow like they didn't have anywhere to go. I'm guessing we missed some vital details.

After the park we continued to walk down the main street and went into the Chinatown district. It was so crowded. The already small streets were crammed with people probably doing some Sunday leisure travel. We just walked up and down the streets looking in all the little shops. We stopped inside an arcade and decided we needed some little pictures of all of us to put on our cool new Japanese phones so we could be hip like the rest of Japan. Everytime I go to one of those picture places it cracks me up. We then decided to walk back towards the station to see what else was over there. We found this massive ship looking thing that had a park on top. There was a boardwalk around the outside of the ship and on the inside there was grass for people to relax in. We went there for a while and watched all the people. It must have been dog day, because everyone was walking their dog. And all the dogs looked like sauseges. A lot of the dogs were dressed up in sweaters and even jeans. The grass on the top of the ship was kind of weird. It almost felt plastic but it was sort of soft.

We then went back to the station got on a train and went back to Ichigaya. And I went back to my dorm. When I read back on that it doesn't sound like too much happened today...but it was a full day with the walking and such.

I bought a pillow today from a store. So no more rock pillows. I was asking the girls how they liked their rock pillows and they said that they immediately went out and bought a western pillow after one night. So I guess I'm not the only one who prefers not to sleep on some rocks.

A funny only in Japan story: Last night at about 10:30 pm I heard a bunch of banging outside in the street and when I checked to see what was happening I saw that there were construction beginning...at 10:30. It wasn't just some light construction, they were tearing out a large part of the sidewalk and replacing it. This street out here is already noisy enough. But last night was awful. I really need to invest in a pair of earplugs. I suppose they had to do construction at night because the road is just too skinny and too busy to conjest traffic any more than neccesary.

To any of those thinking about going on a new diet. Try the "new in Tokyo" one. Since I got here I just haven't been hungry enough to want to eat. So when I eat I haven't been eating much lately. I usually have been trying to stuff myself when I eat just to make sure I eat enough. I also have been walking everywhere. I noticed that I am definately losing something today when I had to hold up my pants because they don't fit like they did 3 weeks ago when I wore them. I guess it's all that rice and non-fatty foods. Instead of the "freshman fifteen" you get the "tokyo ten" here. You lose 10 that is.

Oh and the email address for my phone I won't really use like a real email address. Because it would take way too long to type back an appopriate message, but feel free to send me short little emails on my phone if you want. It's free and you can't beat that.