A Day of Failures ... and Relief

Written on June 11 at 10:00 PM (日本の時間)

Okay. I admit it. I am in another country. Aside from the obvious things (driving on the left side of the road) to the more exotic (polka-dotted cranes, anyone?), I guess I’m not in Kansas anymore. A list of first observations (because everything is so much simpler in lists):

·      For all the talk about the women always dressing up, what about the men? In Tokyo, I think I saw maybe two guys total wearing jeans, while the rest were in staunch suit and tie.

·      … although I still felt really awkward in running shorts when I went out for a run the first morning in Tokyo. I passed by a lot of middle-aged to elderly women exercising, but they were all conservatively wearing exercise pants or capris.

·      Cuteness factor: Max everywhere I go. I thought it was just a stereotype that everything in Japan was かわいい because of all the imported media that comes to America, but it’s actually pretty true that Japanese stores make a special effort to present themselves as cute.

·      “The Land of the Rising Sun” is certainly an appropriate name for 日本. I fell asleep pretty early because I couldn’t sleep on the plane, but woke up to the sun shining through the hotel windows at 5 a.m. Vice versa, it sets a lot earlier too.

·      I NEED TO LEARN KANJI. ‘Nuff said.

Today was kind of a fail though. I bombed my oral test after trying to explain the plot of 꽃보다 남자 (“There’s this girl who doesn’t have a lot of money … she goes to a school with … people who do have a lot of money … um … it’s a love story.”) and skipped the entire last passage in the reading section because every other word was kanji I didn’t know. I was talking with some other first-year students about the last passage and they were like, “Yeah … I had to resort to my Chinese for that one.” Oh, Dad, why didn’t you teach me 한자 when I was little? Ah well, if I place in the lowest level, I guess that’s what’s expected of someone who’s only taken one year of Japanese.

Another fail – I thought I would be able to find a three-prong to two-prong converter in Hakodate after leaving Tokyo yesterday. (For future fellows, Japan operates on almost the same frequency as America, so you don’t need an adapter, but you do need the aforementioned converter if you have a three-pronged plug appliance like your laptop charger.) After a yummy dinner at a ramen shop (I will never look at Maruchan Ramen the same again), I went searching for a converter with Sam, another student in HIF who didn’t have a converter either. We walked through downtown Hakodate, looking unsuccessfully for an electronics store and trying to describe a コンバータ to the local shopkeepers in mangled Japanese. Finally, with the recommendation of my trusted Light Fellowship SAC guide, we took a taxi to Yamada Denki, a huge electronics store in Hakodate that had everything BUT a converter. End of story – 3,000 yen blown and no converter for my laptop. Thankfully, Ning is letting me borrow her charger for the time being so I’m able to type up this entry.

Sheesh, Hakodate is a smaller city, but being a tourist spot, I didn’t think it would be this much of a hassle to find a converter. Nevertheless, this was the first time that I ventured out to speak with the locals and didn’t find it as awkward as I thought it would be. I’m not sure how much Japanese they understood from me (the taxi driver kept referring me to as Sam’s おくさん even after repeated explanations that we were 学生), but I feel a little better about communicating with my host family, whom I’ll meet tomorrow at the opening ceremony, and interviewing people for HIF’s infamous independent study project.

Heading out now to watching the opening of the World Cup. Updates on host family and horrendous placement test results to come.

EDIT: Did I leave my camera charger and USB cord at home too? Arghh, I might have to buy a camera here too… In the meantime, pictures will have to wait.

EDIT of the EDIT: Thank goodness I dug up the camera charger in my luggage the next morning. Score for Plan "Don't Go Broke in Japan". Pictures to come soon.

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It still hasn't hit me yet...

Strange, but I still feel like tomorrow is just another day - as if I'm going to wake up, go for a run, and chill at home like I've been doing for the past three weeks. Usually I can't even sleep the night before because (wow, this is going to sound geeky) I get so pumped about traveling - skipping the "moving walkway" to see if I can beat the people who take it, sitting in the coveted window seat, even cruising through the security gate and then trying to see how fast I can put back on my shoes. So why, after four months of knowing that I won the Light Fellowship, can I not even imagine myself in Japan tomorrow?

Maybe it won't hit me until I step out of Narita airport and feel the bustle of Tokyo whirling past me. Or maybe I'm denying the reality that I should have studied more for the placement test ("Test? What test?"). Or just maybe ... I'm nervous?

But you're going to Japan! Aren't you excited? I wouldn't say that I'm NOT excited, but guess I am ... a little ... whatever that word is ... nervous. Nervous that I won't be able to navigate a country in which hardly anyone speaks English. Nervous that I won't click with my host family and that I'll end up shutting myself in my room with mounds of homework each night. Nervous about a lot of things ... but in the end, I think I'll be all right. Though my worried subconsciousness isn't letting me face the fact that I'll be in Japan a mere 28 hours from now.

Thus ends my ambivalent self-reflection, although the original plan for this post was to talk about my host family, which HIF (Hokkaido International Foundation, the program I will be attending) emailed me about a couple days ago. Pardon the rough transition, but as it is, I'll be living with the Domae family, a couple in their 50s and their 16-year-old daughter, Riko. (They also have a 19-year-old daughter, but apparently, she's away from home?) According to Google Maps, the family lives just eight minutes away form the HIF building by foot, so I definitely lucked out in terms of daily commute. Though it took me way too long to figure out the kanji about their jobs/schools/interests since I couldn't copy the characters from a pdf file:

Looking up Kanji - THE HARD WAY
1. Zoom into the pdf until you can make out those TINY characters. (For me, this meant 400% - and even then, I had to squint because the high zoom also made things fairly blurry.)
2. Go to http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/mouse.html  and attempt to draw the character with a mouse. Anyone who's done Paint knows how problematic this can be.
3. See if your character matches up with any of the dictionary's suggestions. If you find one, move onto #4. If not, FAIL. The kanji you're looking up is probably a variation from the Chinese character, so the dictionary doesn't recognize it.
4. Copy and paste the character onto Denshi Jisho and look up the definition. If your word has one kanji, you're done. If more than one, repeat steps 1-4 for each character. (The dictionary will most likely have definitions for each character. Putting them together ... not so much.)

Looking up Kanji - THE EASY IER WAY
1. Go to http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1R and check off the radicals that are found in the kanji. (Once again, zoom in if the tiny characters are straining your eyes.)

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On a side note, I finally got a haircut today. Not as short as everyone at Yale seems to want me to go for, but after completely forgetting to get one during spring break, this is an improvement.
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