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Experiments, Japan

Testing Total Immersion Part 2: The Method and the Madness

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In Part 1, I talked about the grand experiment in inefficiency that was my Japanese studies up until about a year ago.  Today, I’m going to talk about the idea of total immersion language learning, also sometimes called the “input method”, since its core idea is to expose yourself to just a criminal amount of Japanese, or whatever language you’re learning.

I actually subscribe to more of an input/output split, but it’s all still 100% Japanese.

I’ve already started full immersion by this point, but  I wrote up some posts ahead of time so the blog could keep rolling.

So without further ado.

Enter, Total Immersion

So there I was, getting along ok. I had definitely not gotten worse at Japanese since coming to Japan, but I wanted to be moving faster than I was.  I wanted to be able to read books, and watch Japanese TV without giving myself a brain aneurysm.  I wanted to be funny and charming again damnit!

So I started scouring the internet for a way to self-educate myself in Japanese.  This eventually led me to the writings of a plucky young Kenyan-born, US-educated blogger calling himself Khatzumoto.  His blog claimed that he went from zero Japanese, to employed at a Japanese software firm in Japan, in about 18 months by employing a seemingly insane idea: All Japanese All the Time.  That’s right, a literal 18-24 hours a day doing something in Japanese.  He even listened to Japanese while he slept, just in case it helped. All without ever leaving the comfort of America.

The really fascinating part of Khatzumoto’s system though was that he wasn’t proposing that you “suck it up and buckle down soldier! Success takes sacrifice! If it were easy it wouldn’t be called work!” Rather, he was proposing that you go get yourself something fun, like a comic book, or a video game, or a drama, and watch read or play it in Japanese.  Repeat for 18-24 hours a day until fluent.

Make learning fun? I mean, after school specials and made for TV movies might get away with that stuff, but this is the real world Khatz!  But my curiosity had been piqued I decided to see just how deep the rabbit hole went.  By the time I realized just how much my idea of reality had been knowledge bombed into oblivion, 3 days had passed, and I had read every single post.

The first step he proposed was to learn the meanings of all 2000 or so of the kanji which a literate Japanese person is expected to know.  There’s a lovely old dude named James Heisig who developed a system to do this with the exciting title of Remember the Kanji.  Since I like kanji, I tore through this part of the pre-immersion process in about a month.  I felt like a god.  All those obscene little squiggles had meaning now!  Even if I’d never seen that word before in my life, by looking at the kanji like 証拠 and thinking “(evidence)(foothold)” I could get some idea of what it means.

But then, for I as true as there are idiots I am their king, I hit a mental wall.  I really wanted to do the immersion thing.  It seemed so cool on paper! But some part of me being on a tiny island in Japan, in a place where there were literally no other English speakers, made me hesitant to remove the one little oasis of familiarity and comfort I had at home.  This, my palatial island shack, would remain a free outpost of America!  Even if it killed me, or at the very least severely hamstringed my efforts to get face-meltingly good at Japanese.

Even though I started reading a lot of manga (comic books…basically) in Japanese, and even managed to finish my first honest-to-goodness Book in Japanese, I could never take that final step into full on immersion.  I always had my English music, and spent a lot of time on English websites.  There were also parts of my life which I just couldn’t switch over to Japanese.  Like, you know, the part of my job where I teach English.  Also occasionally my parents and friends like to hear that I’m still alive, and their Japanese is not so spectacular.  It’s almost as if most of them never studied it a day in their life.

My New Experiment: 30-Days of 99.99% Japanese, All Day, Every Day

In a month I will be sitting the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.  Personally I hate the living hell out of tests, and test culture in general, and value passing one of these tests as much as I value being able to spit the farthest.  Actually being able to spit the farthest would be pretty awesome.  So less than that.  Unfortunately most of the world won’t just take my word for it that I’m awesome at Japanese, so passing this test is something I’ll eventually have to do if I want to work with or in Japan, e.g. as a translator, interpreter, or sexy TV-idol.

I took my first practice test about 2 days ago and it soundly destroyed me.  Now I could certainly blame the fact that I was in a noisy office, in the middle of a hurricane, and hadn’t taken a test in about a year and a half, but either way this test is not going to be the cakewalk through picnic forest that I was imagining.  So I’ve decided that now is as good a time as any to really try and give 100% immersion a proper shot.  I may not pass the test, but I’m going to try something new and see how it goes.

So from now until the test on December 5th, I’m running under the following rules:

  1. There should at all times be something in Japanese going on in my environment.  Japanese books at hand at all times. The TV on in the background.  My small collection of Japanese pop and rock albums set on repeat.  If I even have a thought in English, I damn well better think of a way to say it in Japanese right after that.
  2. I’m aiming to pick up the pace on my SRSing (Spaced Repetition System. More on this in an article to follow, but for now think of it as flashcards + robot secretary who can read my mind) but I’m not going to stress about it too much.  If I’m doing fun things in Japanese SRSing is, surprise surprise, actually really fun.  It’s like the save button on all the new Japanese in my head.
  3. The few daily English tasks which I can’t avoid I’m going to try and limit exposure to.  Not my job of course, that would be silly.  But checking and responding to e-mail, maintenance on this blog, etc. I can lump together and get done in one shot, once a day.  The TV or music will be on in the background.
  4. If anyone wants to talk to me who doesn’t speak Japanese, they should try to find a way to do it on the weekends.  Conversations are one thing which require a certain degree of focus, so even though as per rule 3 I can have the TV on in the background, too much English conversation in one day tends to throw a wrench into my general immersion trend.  If anyone has any important or emergency type stuff that needs to be talked about, I’m ok with breaking this rule, but I’m going to try to bunch up the bulk of my English conversation on the weekends.
  5. Due to the nature of my job, there are a few other unavoidable moments of English.  When the ALT from the next island over comes to Kikai, I’m either going to have to ignore her, speak English, or participate in one of the most contrived games of charades ever conceived.  So I’ll probably speak English if she comes over.  Similarly at some point I’ll be going to the mainland for a seminar, and I’m pretty sure that will be in English. I may try to sneak an iPod in to the seminar hall with some Harry Potter books on tape though. Love me some J.K. Rouringu.

Don’t worry about the blog. I mentioned it at the top of the post, but much like when your 1950s mom goes out of town for the week, I’ve got a few articles chilling in the freezer so that you all don’t starve in my absence.  So even though I won’t be writing, the blog will keep on being updated.

I’ll be back in person after the test in early December, to tell you all how the grand experiment went.  For anyone trying to improve, or learn a language of their own, feel free to try one of your own immersion experiment.  We can compare notes after the break.

Experiments, Japan

Testing Total Immersion: 30 Days of 100% Japanese

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Total Immersion is a fairly simple idea.  Remove all forms of English from your life, and use Japanese for everything.  Japanese books, Japanese music, Japanese conversations, and as much as you can Japanese thoughts.  I’ve decided to test it out for the next 30 days or so, but before I explain the rules of this little experiment, there are a few things I want to get on record.

Ehem…

One way or another, I am going to walk away from Japan fluent in Japanese. Not just regular fluent. Talk-circles-around-Japanese-people-dream-think-breathe in Japanese fluent.

Tim Ferriss, a blogger/author who makes sport of breaking the preconceived rules of reality (and is loved and/or reviled for it) once wrote that you could learn enough of any language in 3 months to be at about 95% comprehension and 100% expression, i.e. become functionally fluent in the language. (For evidence that supports this, see Benny over at Fluent in 3 Months, who has done this about 7 times) Tim further argued that the other 5% might well take you 10-15 years and be more effort than it was worth for most people.

Well…

I want my 5% Tim.  I want it more than I want air.

Any other language I will ever choose to study, I am perfectly happy with “basically fluent”.  If I learn French, it will mostly just be to chat up French girls anyway.  I don’t need to be able to discuss nuclear physics.  But by the mighty hand of zombie Christ, I am going to master Japanese.

One way or another, my life appears to have become inexplicably tangled with this goofy little string of islands half-way across the world from the place I was born.  I love Japan and Kikai as much as any place I have ever lived, and it’s not just because people think I’m Leonardo DiCaprio.  Even after I have moved back to America, odds are good that my job will in some way involve Japan, and Japanese.

My current level of Japanese is pretty good.  I can talk my way around any problems or gaps I might have.  I can tell jokes, and be both funny and charming in Japanese.  I have read books in Japanese.  I occasionally dream in Japanese.  I have my 95% comprehension 100% expression taken care of. I am functionally fluent.

From here on out, is the part where I go from functional, to eloquent.  The sticking point is how exactly to do that, and here’s where things get a little bit complicated.

Since this post ended up being just about as long as the Old Testament, I’m breaking it into 2 parts.  This part, part 1 if you will, covers the twisted Japanese road I walked up until I came across the idea of Total Immersion.  Part 2 will cover Total Immersion, and the rules of the experiment.

Adam in Japanese-Land: A Semi-Historical Account

Even though I majored in Japanese in college, my love affair with Japanese didn’t actually begin until I got to Japan.

My college Japanese studies were punctuated with what can only be called “glaring adequacy”. As long as my grades were good, my goal was to do as little work as humanly possible, freeing up valuable time for watching bad TV, and going to parties.  I was quite good at this, managing to get through a solid 2 and a half years of Japanese without ever actually trying.  I wasn’t the top of the class, but I was doing alright, and was (as far as I know) the only person in the class who could say “I have to go make Milton kill Mr. Cactus now” from memory.  Oh college.

At the ripe old age of 21, I came to Japan for the first time on a semester abroad program.  Full of pluck, and cactus related witticisms I set out to conquer Japan in a manner fitting one such as myself.  Straight-A report card 2 and a half years running! I’m unstoppable baby!

Realization: I absolutely sucked at Japanese.  Turns out that casually dicking around for 2 and a half years does not produce any significant gains in speaking ability.  Who knew?  Before my landmark study, probably no one.  You may inform the Nobel Prize committee at your leisure.

So I signed myself up for the most intensive Japanese course I could find, and decided I was going to start taking this seriously and study my ass off until by god I could talk to my host brother about something other than the weather.  Turns out that there was one fatal flaw with this plan.

2nd Realization:  If the main reason you’re not studying is “because it’s boring”, trying to do 4X more of it will not only not work, it will make you want to jump in front of a train.  Especially if you have to get up at 5:30 am in order to get to class in time, and stand near just an awful lot of trains during your hour and a half commute.

After dropping pretty much all my other courses to keep up with the work/stress load from the Japanese, I eventually decided to white flag it out, and return to my usual holding pattern of doing the absolute minimum possible to avoid failing.  And then The First Great Miracle of Adam’s Japanese Adventure occurred.

With my new found free time, I spent a significantly larger part of my day talking to my host mom, and hanging out with my host brother.  A truly criminal amount of Wii-sports was played, and the epic “無限ボーリング” (Infinite Bowling) variant was invented, in which my host brother would reset the game every time he missed a pin.  He really, really wanted a perfect game. (Never got it.)  I started going to his hip-hop dance classes, hanging out with a lot more Japanese people, and generally using Japanese in a way which was a hell of a lot more fun than anything I’d done up to that point.  For the first time since I started learning Japanese, I was actually doing something with it, instead of studying for the fabled day when I might do something with it.

When I pen my first novel in Japanese, Ryunosuke and Atsuko Furukawa are getting a shout out for getting this ball rolling.

By the time I left Japan, I wasn’t conversationally fluent, but I had made some significant progress in that direction.  For the first time, I realized that I actually could learn a foreign language, despite the 3 years of Latin, 2 of Spanish, and 2 and a half of Japanese telling me it was more or less impossible unless you were one of those naturally gifted types.

But then wouldn’t you know it, I get back to America and go right back into doing absolutely nothing.  In my defense, my Econ major was coming on fast and furious at that point, and I was grateful for a class I could sleepwalk through.  But it wasn’t exactly like I did anything out of class either.

I think my mistake was that I looked back on my time in Japan, and concluded that rather than the the hundreds of hours spent speaking Japanese, instead my Japanese ability was the result of me actually being one of those “naturally gifted types”, and it just didn’t manifest itself until I was in Japan.  I was the kung-fu film hero, who can’t use his ultimate technique right up until the moment where he has to fight the final boss, and then suddenly something in his enemy’s sneering face drags it out of him.  Like that…only with a hundred million sneering Japanese people.  I’LL SHOW YOU JAPAN! LANGUAGE ABILITY MULTIPLICATION TECHNIIIIIIIQUE!!!! Explosions the size of Earth as I perfectly conjugate the past-passive-causative.

So I knew that as soon as I was back in Japan, I would be right back to winning linguistic hearts and minds.  I didn’t need to study.  I was just naturally awesome, and this non-Japan environment was throwing off my chi.  And I was half-right.  Once I graduated, and moved to Kikai, my language ability did start improving again. Or at least stopped getting worse.  But now I was out there on my own.  I didn’t have a class pushing new material into my brain, so I had to go find my own way of getting new material to test out.  I used the JET Program’s series of textbooks for about 30 minutes, before deeming them utterly worthless tripe, unfit to grace the halls of my palatial island shack.

I tried a bunch of other really random, really stupid ways of teaching myself Japanese after that, ranging from online textbooks, to literally printing out every word required for the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test and trying to learn them.  Alphabetically.  My daily interactions with Japanese friends and coworkers was enough to smooth out my conversation abilities, but I could feel the wall in front of me.  I was progressing incredibly slowly, and it was starting to bother me.

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Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll tell you all about the crazy solution I came across, and the experiment I’ll be running with for the next month or so.

Japan, The Expat Life

Who Is Your Gaijin Celebrity Doppleganger?

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Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to attend this conference this evening.  Some of you may have heard the rumors floating around about me, and I decided to get out in front of this and make a statement on record before it got out of control with wild speculation and gossip.

For the record:

I am not, nor have I ever been, Leonardo DiCaprio.  Yes I can see how you might think that, if it were foggy out, and perhaps you’d forgotten your glasses that day.  And had an eye injury.  I guess we are both blond.

It’s like looking in a mirror!

(Photo of LDC by Falkenauge, via Wikimedia Commons)

Furthermore, I have also never been within 100 yards of Harry Potter, much less actually been him.  According to my research, he is in fact, a fictional character. But I can see how you could think that, if I was wearing my glasses, was quite far away, was wearing a hat so you couldn’t tell that I was blond…and the rules dividing reality and fiction had ceased to function on that particular day.

I’m truly flattered that you think I am, or at the very least resemble, these wonderful famous people.  But I hope that we can move on and put these unfortunate rumors behind us, before the attention goes to my head and I try to pick up a group of Japanese girls in a bar by telling them about my time working on Titanic.

Thank you.

Wow, You Look Just Like…!

I can’t say it happens to everyone but if you spend some time making friends in Japan at some point you will probably be told you look like some famous foreign celebrity.  I suspect if you were willing to lie and act the part a little, you could actually get mistaken for them.

Dan was Jack Bauer. Maybe it’s the nose?

Jack Bauer

My Dad is Sean Connery…the later years version.  I think it’s the beard.

(Photo of the former Bond by Stuart Crawford, via Wikimedia Commons)

One of my favorite sumo wrestlers, a fellow from Bulgaria named Kotooshu, has been referred to as the “David Beckham” of sumo.  I guess they have kind of the same…eyes?  Maybe?

大関琴欧州＊土俵入りBeckham_Milan_frontupperbody

Myself, it depends on whether I’m wearing my glasses or not, and the age group I’m dealing with. I get DiCaprio a lot. Blond hair.  I think that’s about it.  Elementary and Middle school kids like to compare me to Harry Potter, as long as I’m wearing glasses of some kind.

As if they knew what I was writing, today the lovable scamps at Daiichi Middle School had written on the schedule board “Tom Cruise school visit”. That’s a new one for me.  But then again the class next door had written “Minister Madame school visit. Amen. (Picture of the cross)” so maybe they’re all just insane. They also said if I mess with my hair I look like Draco Malfoy.  I will never live down the works of J.K. Rowling.

The Celebrity Doppelganger Game is a truly strange, and seemingly wide-spread phenomenon that most (I suspect, though have no actual proof, that Asians in Japan don’t get to play) expats in Japan get to enjoy.

Whether or not you actually look anything like Mr. DiCaprio is irrelevant. The minute someone compares you to him your already baselessly high social credit is given a major PR boost.  Not to mention that it’s hard to stay insecure when people keep comparing you to handsome, popular, famous people.  Maybe this is part of where the whole Charisma Man comic was coming from.

Either way, it is also just incredibly funny.

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For any foreigners in Japan reading this, or people who have traveled in Japan who want to play along:

What celebrities have you been compared to?

Have you ever been mistaken for a celebrity, instead of just compared to one?

Japan, Travel

Snapshots of Japan: Tofu in Kyoto

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My travel philosophy has evolved over time to be generally fairly minimalistic. If you won’t get killed in your sleep, it’s a good enough place to stay. If you might need it, you don’t need it, and you’ll appreciate your pack being so light you can sprint with it. It’s fine to be cheap on transport; for some reason the cheaper transit is, the more of an experience it ends up being. But there is one area of travel where I am willing to spend all kinds of money without batting an eye: Food.

Despite certain possibly masochistic food experiments, I think food is one of the great pleasure of life; food while traveling doubly so. It’s not only a great way not to starve to death, it’s a chance to experience the soul of another culture on a level which is often otherwise inaccessible to the casual passerby. Not only is food so wildly different from country to country, there is a palpable sense of pride and care I can feel when I’m eating food someone has poured their heart into, no matter whether it’s street food, or a Michelin-starred restaurant. This is probably why fast food almost always feels kind of sterile, not that it’s not a worthwhile experience to find out what Japanese Mac is like. (For those curious: The Mega McMuffin! And you thought Japan would be healthier)

One of the cool things about Japan is that food is such a huge part of the culture, and every city and region has their own specialties.  Almost every single Japanese person I have ever met who was not a 10 year old could name these regional specialties.  With no real effort they could tell me that Aomori has really good apples,  that I should try and get some ramen while I’m in Fukuoka, and that Kyoto is famous for tofu.  So while Dan and I were camped out in the Sparkling Dolphins Inn in Kyoto, in between Osaka festivals, and hanging out with strange Frenchmen, we decided that we’d be letting our adventure down if we didn’t eat some of that famous tofu.

Maki over at Just Hungry (a really fantastic blog about Japanese food) once said that no trip to Kyoto could be considered complete without at least one tofu meal.  And so fueled by our own curiosity, and aided by her advice, we decided to hunt down the small, family run tofu-only restaurant, Sou Sou An, she had raved about on her blog.

Sou Sou An, and Kaiseki Ryōri

Our first attempt at making reservations was thwarted by the completely irregular days off which most non-chain businesses in Japan seem to keep.  We gave up on it for the time, and went about enjoying Kyoto.  Conveyor belt ￥100 a plate sushi, watching impromptu concerts down by the river, accidentally walking out of Kyoto into the mountains, you know, the usual stuff one does when one has absolutely no plan.

Dan and I kept our eyes out for other places which might scratch our tofu itch (eww, that sounds contagious), and there were certainly plenty of kaiseki ryori places which might have fit the bill.  But there was something about the idea of eating in a small family operation serving up the single food they had probably specialized in all the way back to before Tokyo was the capital of Japan that made the other places seem halfhearted.

Kaiseki Ryori is ubiquitous in Kyoto.  Throw a rock down any alleyway and it’ll ricochet off one kaiseki restaurant, into another kaiseki restaurant. Or an old person.  This is Japan, and they too are everywhere. Don’t throw rocks in crowded cities kids.

The full story and history of Kaiseki Ryori over time is beyond me.  Google it if you’re interested.  As far as I’m concerned, the salient points are:

  1. There are these people called Buddhists, right? Some of them lived in temples, and were monks.
  2. They were all “Extravagance in food is desire, let’s make really simple, vegetarian food, out of seasonal crops, so we will not be tempted to revel in excess”.
  3. They come up with just like a billion ways to serve tofu and vegetables.
  4. At some point, feudal Japanese hipsters rolled up on that piece like bees to honey.
  5. High class, fine dining restaurants spring up all over Kyoto (and the rest of Japan) serving food which embodies the same idea as the Buddhists in theory: seasonal, simple, lots of vegetables, but in ironic actuality embodies the complete opposite.  Because it’s basically a form of high class dining evolved out of a movement which actively shunned the idea of high class anything.  Take that, logic.

(For the record, I do actually like Kaiseki Ryori in general.  But I do imagine there are some long-dead monks scratching their heads over its curious evolution.)

So we had other options, but were dragging our feet on committing to one of them.

And then the miracle occurred.  It was probably our last day in Kyoto.  We had no hostel reservations for the night, so one way or another we were back to drifting.  We’d just gotten out of a somewhat famous moss-covered temple in the west of Kyoto.  Our souls at peace, and our legs still slightly cramped from sitting through a Buddhist prayer ceremony.  A feeling came over me, and I decided to give the restaurant one last call.  Even if they were already booked solid for dinner, I couldn’t look the adventure in the eyes if I didn’t give it at least that one last call to make sure.

2 minutes of awkward Japanese phone conversation later, we had our reservation.

The Meal

It turned out we were the only people there that night.  Granted, it was a Thursday.

All of the dishes and the place setting were really wonderful.  Everything I love about Japanese style.  It really helped the meal feel like a rare occasion, and I felt very luck that we didn’t give up.

The Place Setting

Sou Sou An is a course menu specialist, so you just have to make the reservation and show up.  Sake is separate though.  We asked the waiter to recommend a local 日本酒 nihonshu, going with a lighter, sweeter sake in the middle of the price scale.  I’m not the greatest lover of rice wine in the world, but this was definitely some of the best I’ve had.  Subtle and smooth.  I was also hard pressed not to steal the bottle it came in.

Local Kyoto Sake

I may miss a few notes recalling exactly what went into every dish.  It was coming at me in Japanese, and I was translating it for Dan.  It has also been over 2 months (my how the time flies) since we ate there.  Hopefully the pictures speak for themselves though.

Our first course was a really wonderful combination of eggplant, octopus eggs (I think, this seems weirder and weirder the longer I think about it. But I swear that’s what I heard), umi-budou “sea grapes” (a type of seaweed), and aburaage, a thin, lightly fried tofu.  It’s interesting what you remember about a single meal after so much time.  Like I can still remember exactly what the eggs tasted like: salty, a little sweet, and their texture: kind of popped just the tiniest little bit when you bit into them, then they were chewy.  But I can’t remember what the aburaage tasted like, even though I recall it being amazing.

Eggplant, Octopus Eggs, Aburaage

Next came a selection of homemade tofu, all of which were delicious:

  • Bottom left: Yuuzu tofu – flavored with a kind of Japanese citrus fruit.
  • Top left: Shiso tofu – flavored with a kind of pungent herb.
  • Top right: Goma tofu with uni – flavored with sesame, and topped with sea urchin roe.
  • Bottom right: Aomame tofu – made from a different variety of “green bean” soy, which results in a faintly green tofu.
  • Center: Soy milk with tomatoes – fairly self-explanatory.
  • Dish on bottom right: Raw yuuba, with wasabi – Yuuba is a byproduct of the tofu making process. It’s basically a skin which forms on top of the tofu, which is then removed.  It tastes similar to tofu, but the texture is completely different.  Kind of half-chewy, half-creamy.  It’s hard to describe, but amazing.

A Selection of Homemade Tofu

This was definitely my favorite part of the meal.  The presentation was beyond beautiful, and it’s telling that even after all this time I can recall exactly how each of the different types tasted.  It was really also really fun to compare opinions on all the different tofu with Dan.  Talking about food is almost as much fun as eating food sometimes.

3rd course was a grilled piece of eggplant, with raw yuuba on top of it, green pepper, fish, and something which looked like onions, but tasted as far from onions as is possible without violating the laws of space-time.  The contents of the sauce escape me, but it contained capers, was sort of sweet, sort of sour, and like everything else in the meal, pretty mind-blowingly good.

Eggplant, Yuuba

The 4th course was an aburaage donburi, with that thin fried tofu from before cooked in a light sauce with leeks, and served over rice.  It also came with soup, and my Japan biases want to call it miso soup.  Whether it was or not, is somewhat immaterial.  It was a fantastic dish, because it really featured the tofu and what it was capable of.

Aburaage Donburi

The meal ended with a simple vanilla tofu parfait, with yuuzu jam.  Nice to see the versatility of tofu, but by this point Dan and I were already so happy that we were smiling uncontrollably, and losing the ability to speak, instead choosing to stare off blankly into space.

Vanilla Tofu Parfait

I also feel it necessary to give a shout out to our waiter, who was not only totally on top of things, but also patient as hell explaining complicated Japanese food terms to me, and then waiting while I translated them for Dan.  We also had this theory that he was listening for the click of our chopsticks coming together when we put them down to signal when we were done with one course.  It seemed to work pretty regularly, and we got a kick out of it.  Either way, his timing was pretty fantastic, even if he was cheating.  So thank you, waiter who’s name I have clearly forgotten.  The meal would not have been nearly so perfect without your experienced hand at the till.

Our Waiter

Fully satisfied, still grinning ear-to-ear, Dan and I hopped a bus back towards the city center.  We sat around watching a guy play guitar for a while while the crowds grew thinner and thinner.  Then we finally found an internet cafe to curl up in until morning.

Like I said, if you won’t get killed in your sleep, it’s a good enough place to stay.  And if it means I can afford to enjoy a few amazing meals along the way, it’s more than worth it.

Japan, Travel

Snapshots of Japan: The Shinjuku Golden Gai

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Some of the most interesting moments in my life have occurred when I have suddenly found myself on the other side of an otherwise closed and locked door.

Shinjuku.  It’s probably what you’re imagining when you imagine “Tokyo”.  It’s the floor to ceiling neon, the backstreets lined with izakaya and bars, the literal hundreds of thousands of people flocking and swarming around it, mild-mannered Clark Kent’s by day, and all manner of super hero-villains by night when they’re just too drunk or lost in the moment to care.  For some it’s Korean-town. For some it’s the gay district.  For some it’s the red light.  For some it’s nothing more than the world’s busiest train station which they have to suffer through on their way the hell out of Shinjuku.

Shinjuku was our playground the first time we were in Japan.  Our school was one stop away on the Chuo-express.  A 3-5 minute ride even on the worst of days.  We spent more time wandering the backstreets, chatting with drunk salary-men, Yanki teens, Gyaru, and East African bouncers for sex clubs, than any sane pasty white kids should ever imagine.  We were not unique in this.  There is something about the faint hints of danger that float around Shinjuku which make it seem exciting.  It’s a break from the usual over-safe Japanese sterility.  Some nights, it’s just dodgy enough to almost feel like home.

But Shinjuku is full of locked doors.  Some of them, like the host clubs, I don’t want to open.  Others like the soaplands, I don’t even want to be close enough to realize they are a door.  But there are a few locked doors in Shinjuku which are just downright fascinating.  Doors you really, really want to take a look behind, if only you knew someone who could get you in.  The Golden Gai is one of them.

A relic of old Shinjuku, before modernization put a convenience store on every corner and piled the izakaya one on top of another, seven floors high.  Dwarfed by Shinjuku proper on all sides, the Golden Gai is a single cramped block that feels like a feudal Japanese village.  The smallest streets you have ever seen wind their way past cramped 2-story buildings inseparable from one another save their different doors and signs.  Each of these buildings houses, in all likelihood, 2 different bars: one on the bottom floor, and one on the top floor which is only accessible by climbing a staircase so steep it might as well be a ladder.

There are over 200 bars and izakaya packed into these 6 cramped alleyways.

Almost all of them seem to be run by a single female bartender.  It’s somewhere between a host club and a normal bar.  There’s no expectation of anything except drinking and talking, but they pour your drinks and are de facto supposed to pretend to be interested in what you’re saying.  Because it’s so intimate, the people who work in bars in the Gai are a big part of why regulars keep coming back to the same bars.

Getting into establishments in the Gai can be tricky.  While a number of the bars have started to embrace that the Gai is now a stop on tourists’ itineraries, English menus and a slightly friendlier attitude, a large number of the bars can only be frequented if someone else brings you there first and vouches for you.  Even if the bar doesn’t require a sponsor all of them have a service charge tacked on at the front of the bill, and none of the drinks are anything close to cheap.  For being a rundown alleyway, the Golden Gai attracts a well off group of clientele.

For two fairly poor gaijin wanderers the Golden Gai would usually be a locked door, albeit with a big window on the front.  Maybe you’d get to wander in, see the streets, maybe try to order one beer and wonder why the hell it cost you 20 dollars and why the waitress/bar girl is as prickly as an ice-cactus, but you don’t really get to “go in”.  You’re still just window shopping without the keys.  But thanks to Dan’s old man, and his years working with Japan, we had just gotten an introduction to a guy holding a set.

Meet Yoshi

Yoshi

Dan’s dad used to do a lot of business with Japan.  He told some of his old contacts that his kid was going to be in the area, and one of them offered to show him (and his lovable friend) around Tokyo.  We don’t know anything about him at first, except that by day he helps oversee the Japanese branch of a fairly major US financial services corporation.  This means he falls into the category of “high powered salaryman samurai”, a group which are somewhat terrifyingly infamous for Jekyll and Hyde-ing out come nightfall to deal with the pressure.  He sends Dan a message and offers to take us on a “night tour of Tokyo”.  Dan and I are immediately both worried and excited by the possibilities.  What the hell is a “night tour”?

We  met him near Shinjuku station, on the red light side. Dan and I had done our best to not look like homeless people, but we were over 3 weeks into a trip we started with 3 days worth of clothes.  Washing these clothes with bar soap in hostel bathrooms, and carrying them around crammed into packs which were not designed to keep garments fresh and wrinkle free did not help things.  So there we stood, Dan in his vibrams,  I in my  bright orange hiking boots, and Yoshi in what I can only remember as professional looking leathery footwear.

We made introductions. His English was quite good, we would later learn he had lived in America for a few years.

Then came the moment of truth. Just what the hell would we be doing on this fine evening?

“Have you guys ever Yoshinoya? It’s Japanese junk food!” We informed him that we had, in the wake of our wildly receding imaginations.

“Oh, well forget that then.” We proceed deeper into the heart of Shinjuku. Not quite in the red light, but close enough that I’m still not sure where this is going.   He asks us if we know what the “Golden Gai” is.  Apparently it’s one of his old haunts and he wants to take us drinking there.  Awesome.

Our first stop is at a dimly lit but refined restaurant on the border of the Gai  to get something to eat.  Dan and I wonder why he wanted to go to Yoshinoya first if he was planning on something like this anyway, and the only thing I can think of is he wanted something more substantial to soak up the alcohol that would be coming soon.

I had managed to track down a bottle of Kikai shochu liquor somewhere in Tokyo with Eli’s help and gave it to Yoshi as a thank you gift over dinner. Japan is big on gifts and it is very much the thought that counts.  Fortunately Yoshi was into shochu (it’s getting very popular all over Japan now) and at least faked appropriate enthusiasm.

Then he took us deeper into the Gai, and it is here that the night crossed the border from more or less normal into the strange and surreal.

Bar Hopping in the Golden Gai

We walk through narrow alleys. Yoshi tells us that in the past, the top floors of many of these bars used to be brothels. You’d do your drinking downstairs then move on to the top floor for…well…

Our first stop is on the far side of the Gai.  We climb the vertical stairs into a bar with room for maybe 6 people if they don’t breathe too much, and a loli-goth hostess girl not-really-smiling behind the counter.  Yoshi is a regular here but the girl working tonight is new.

We drink beer and shochu, and talk about how she first realized she was into BDSM in middle school playing with blood pressure meters.  She seems to be going out of her way to create dissonance.  We talk about how she’s on the M side of the equation, while she takes medicine and complains about her cold.  We talk about how riding motorcycles turns her on, while she does dishes.  We explain the difference between an “outfit” and a “costume”, and at exactly what point in her life her choice in fashion crossed from one to the other, while she fusses with the stereo.  We drop somewhere in the neighborhood of 7000 yen, and I am glad I’m not paying.  She poses for a photo for us, tells us to come back later if we have time, and then we’re out the door drifting again.

二軒

Never have I seen a more forced smile

2nd stop is on the ground floor, North side.  Another round.  Yoshi seems to be a regular here too.  The girl working here has a butterfly tattoo on her arm with “Love” written into the wing pattern, and keeps talking about either her boyfriend or her ex-boyfriend who lives in Okinawa, and how she’s going to move back there some day.  We leave after the first beer.

三軒

Smiling in general not a strong suit in the Gai, apparently

We wander around a little bit more.  Yoshi has us look into a couple of places and tell him what we think of the girls working there.  “It’s no fun if the girls aren’t cute” he says.

We move on to a bar which looks like what Japan imagines a Mexican cantina looks like.  Tequila makes an appearance, and I do a quick mental catalog of “occasions in which I drank tequila” and “occasions in which I got violently ill” and find a surprisingly robust correlation.  But then, this is part of the adventure.  We ask the girl here if she speaks any Spanish. Dan’s been finding more Spanish speaking people in Japan than Japanese speaking ones.  But she’s disappointingly normal.

“Man, it would be so cool if I could speak Spanish!”

Yes. Yes it would.

四軒

Back outside. We have long since missed the last train, and Yoshi is now in on this night for the long haul.  The next train is is at 5 am and Yoshi has made it his mission to find a friend of his who owns a lot of the bars in the Gai before the sun rises.  We leave the Gai proper and head towards Shinkuku 3-chome, stopping in a bar with walls covered in US dollars, and Okinawan paraphernalia.  No sign of the mythical club owner, but Yoshi seems to be a regular here too.

五軒

We start singing karaoke along with a younger couple (they seem newly married) and what looks like their mom and grandma.  The girl behind the bar also plays along, or at the very least eggs us on and encourages us to sing things in English.  Yoshi at one point sings an incredibly impressive version of “What a Wonderful World”.  For a moment he actually is Louis Armstrong.  Dan sings “La Bamba”, and we realize that it is a surprisingly hard song to sing at karaoke, even if you do speak fluent Spanish.

Well past the time where sane people would have gone to bed, Eli hails a cab all the way from Shibuya to come meet us.  It’s his last night in town, and I guess he figured why the hell not.  He sings a few with us as we continue to bask in the generosity of our Japanese host, and the bottle of shochu he has the bar keep for him.  Yoshi disappears at some point.  We assume he went to go meet his friend, but we’ll never really know. Reality and I were on shaky terms at that point.

The bar we’re in starts to wrap up, but the hashigo-zake (alcohol ladder, each bar is a rung) train keeps on moving.  The waitress from the current bar joins our party, and takes us to another bar nearby.  This one is run by people from Kagoshima, so Eli and I can immediately pretend to have something in common with them.  I think there was still karaoke going on at this bar, but by this point the lack of sleep plus the 8+ hours of continuous drinking had liquefied my brain.  The major salient points that stood out on this rung of the hashigo-zake ladder were: the cardboard cut out ukulele (not pictured), and the incredibly drunk girl (also not pictured) who was very interested in gaijin. Any gaijin would do really.

六軒

The blurriness is an accurate picture of what the world looked like by this point

The sun rises.  The trains start back up.  The bars close down, and we stumble out into the daylight.  One by one our friends, new and old, go their separate ways.  Bartender girl goes home. Yoshi hops on a train. Eli heads back to Shibuya, and not long after America.

It’s just Dan and I standing in the daylight.  The only people out at this time of day are people like us who have just enjoyed or survived an all-nighter.  It feels like we’re in on the same big secret, and are slightly embarrassed about it.  There’s a reason bar-hopping happens at night.  Everything is too bright in the day.

It’s almost 8 am.

We find an internet cafe to get some sleep.

All told, start to finish, meeting Yoshi to passing out in a smokey net cafe cubical, the evening lasted about 14 hours, 10-12 of which involved drinking.  Certainly a record for myself, but I can’t speak for Dan.  Earlier in the night, Yoshi had told us his record:  he started on a Friday evening, and just kept going all the way till Sunday.  Yoshi is a monster. We may never reach such lofty heights of wanton partying, but it was a true pleasure to spend a night on the town with someone who had.  It gave us a chance to see a side of Tokyo, of Shinjuku, which a lot of tourists never even get wind of, and meet some fascinating Japanese people along the way.

Japan, Travel

Snapshots of Japan: The Osaka Tenjin Festival

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There’s a lot that could be said about my month long trip across Japan, but a lot of it is pretty mundane. Dan and I were wandering around the country for a fair bit of time and I don’t think you really want to hear about every “nap in a smokey coffee shop while the waitresses made concerned eyes at us”, funny as they were sometimes.  I’ve decided to pick five of my favorite parts of the trip and give them each a proper post, starting right now with my adventure attending one of Japan’s top 3 biggest/best festivals, the Osaka Tenjin Matsuri. I may fill in some other posts if I have the motivation. Lately, it has been lacking.

A Little Backstory…

Dan and I set out on our grand adventure as per our original plan of having no plans what so ever, and seeing what happens.  Naturally, there were bound to be some mistakes, and some adjusting to this new way of life.  We ended up jumping through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, and Kobe in about 3 days.

Protip: Don’t do this. You will want to die.

It took us a little while to figure out that when you’re moving that fast if you don’t have hotel reservations waiting for you, you can spend a lot of brain power accidentally stressing.  And so over mediocre ramen (but some pretty delicious meat buns) in Kobe’s semi-famous Chinatown, Dan and I made the executive decision to hole up in Kyoto for a longer stretch of time, and maybe get out to the other parts of Kansai (Osaka, Nara) if we had the time or inclination.

We found a reservation at a lovely little hostel called The Sparkling Dolphins Inn (you cannot make these things up), run by a charming younger Japanese couple.

Most of the other people staying in the hostel were Spaniards, Germans or Scandanavians of some kind, although one of our favorite weird travel buddies was an 18 year old French kid traveling alone around Japan named Sebastien. He came to Japan after winning a scholarship/contest, and had managed in very short order to get all of his assets frozen. He was living off of small money orders from his parents. He had not-so-great English, and no Japanese. He also had a profound love for Coke-a-cola tallboys, and Mr. Donuts brand donuts, and was often heard remarking to that effect.

Sebastien, the Scholarly

Sebastien: Wanderer, scholar, lover of “the big can coke-a-cola”

What the Hell is a “Tenjin”

After hanging out in Kyoto for a day or two, I remembered that way way back when I was still on Kikai I had read something about some “huge”, “magnificent”, “best in Japan” type festival called the “Tenjin Matsuri” which always happened in Osaka around the end of July.  Our timing just happened to work out that we could go see it first hand, and decide whether it lived up to the hype.

The Tenjin matsuri is held in honor of a scholar who was deified as the patron of learning and art after his death.  “Tenjin” 天神 are the kanji for “sky” and “god” and are either the name or type of the god he became. Someone can probably explain that better than I can,  but since the purpose of the festival in theory: honor Tenjin, and the purpose of the festival in reality: get smashed with your friends, wear traditional clothes, and watch something move or explode or both, are completely separate it’s mostly academic.  The Tenjin matsuri is famous for a huge parade in the afternoon, followed by an equally huge boat precession down at the river in the evening with accompanying fireworks.

The train networks being what they are, it was no real difficulty to day-trip down into Osaka for the festival, then return to the hostel at night.  Sebastien, our young French friend, was also along for the ride.

Pre-Festival-Nanigans

Our adventures began on the express train between Kyoto and Osaka.  Dan, Sebastien and I were standing on the train, making our little gaijin-circle of protection, and a random girl from New Zealand walked up and asked something train related. I can’t remember what, but for the sake of the story lets assume it was important, and Dan and I looked very roguishly handsome and talented in the course of answering it.

She was then so charmed that she stuck around to talk to us, and the conversation eventually swung around to “we’re going to a festival”. Since we were so very handsome and talented, she asked if she could come along, and of course we let her. It would have been an affront to our handsome, talented selves not to.  It was not however in my handsome and talented best interests to remember her name, soooo…

Japanese festivals, at least the summer ones, almost always have the same basic feel to them.  Every street and open area within a certain radius of whatever is being blown up, or paraded, gets lined with tens to hundreds of stalls run by enthusiastic Japanese hawkers selling Japanese festival food, or sometimes small trinkets or tiny live fish (I’m 95% sure they’re not food). The Osaka Tenjin festival was like this, only the stalls stretched for about a mile in every direction, centered around the river that flows through the north of the city.

The walk along the river was an endless mess of fried noodles, candied apples, takoyaki (octopus donuts, as my kids like to call them), and just about everything on a stick you could ever want, from the ubiquitous frankfurter (In Japanese: Huranku farutaa. Sometimes it gets written on the signs in English like that, and we get to have a good laugh), to whole squid and salt grilled mackerel, from pork-belly to cucumbers. While the number of sticked foods might have given the average American festival a run for its money, I would like to point out that they have yet to come up with cheesecake on a stick, and it also begs mentioning that there was no sign of chocolate covered bacon anywhere on the premise. Minnesota – 2.

Squid Stick

Squid on a stick, anyone?

The 4 of us walked around the riverbank, soaking up the pre-festival atmosphere, getting to know our new Kiwi friend and listening to Sebastien recount The Tale of Sebastien’s Money (which he was getting much better at telling), while watching the stalls set up. In Dan’s case he was also trying to see if he could leverage his functional Japanese vocabulary of about 50 words to talk his way onto one of the boats which was going to be in the parade later that night.  He did not succeed, but it was an admirable effort.

I for my part enjoyed chatting with random toothless-to-varying-degrees stall owners, and ambushing them with my Osaka accent.  Most of my major Japanese parent-figures have spoken with some degree of the Osaka accent, and it crept in at some point.  Under normal circumstances I can confuse people a great deal by using it. It would be like a Japanese guy who spoke with traces of a southern drawl, or maybe a Bronx or Bostonian accent would be a better analog.  Just take a moment and picture it.

Apparently though, using this accent while actually in Osaka just completely melts faces.  I was particularly pleased when I responded to one of them and his 9/10 year old kid, with this just priceless confused look on his face, screams out ” HE’S JAPANESE!!!!” and his dad proceeds to slap him on the back of his head and tell him “Don’t be an asshole”.

In Which Dan Is Shameless to Great Effect

After a good bit of wandering and eating things on sticks, we settled down near the river under some trees to wait for the boat parade and the fireworks to begin. It was still pretty early so we managed to get close to the front, with only one large group of picnicking 20 somethings between us and the water. It was a pretty sweet spot.

We sat around chatting as it grew steadily darker, admiring how well prepared (and cute) the group in front of us was.  Tragically, as we were waiting it got dark enough that the food stall near us decided to turn on their portable generator to power their 2 sad, bare little light bulbs.  All generators come with some amount of noise, but this generator was apparently up for generator of the month or something, and was particularly enthusiastic.

At some point I wandered off to go to the bathroom and take photos of strangers (2 separate activities) and by the time I returned Dan had managed to:

  1. Approach the group of Japanese kids in front of us, completely cold, and with no real Japanese to speak of, and challenge one of them to rock-paper-scissors.
  2. Ride this introduction into being invited to sit with their group, and drink their beer.

Jan, ken, pon!

After I returned Dan then managed to:

  1. Further expand on this invitation to merge our two groups.
  2. Ascertain that every girl in the group was either married or had a boyfriend.

Proving once and for all that being utterly shameless in the face of potential embarrassment will get you much much further than fluency.  Knew there was a reason I traveled with that guy.

In Which Boats Are Paraded, and Fireworks Fired

Right around sunset the boats started moving. We’d been seeing them moored along the riverbank for hours now, and during some brief moment when we weren’t looking they snuck down and filled them with people and entertainers.  They started gliding by, beginning a wide circuit which would take them up one bank and down the other over the next two to three hours.  Then all at once they started shooting off the fireworks, and at this point it gets hard to do the moment justice in words.

Tenjin

The water reflected every pinprick of light, from the fireworks over head, to the torches, paper lanterns and giant glowing advertisements for beer to insurance to colleges riding on some of the boats.  The floor to ceiling plate glass windows on the skyscrapers all around us also caught all that light and reflected it back, filling the otherwise darkness with hundreds of thousands of glowing tracers. The crowd behind us had filled in so thickly that there was almost no hope of escape (without the clever use of a gaijin-smash or two), everyone wearing flowery summer yukata, and sporting elaborately styled hair (the men, often more so than the women).

Each of the boats was packed with customers seated at tables and as they’d drift by the MCs on the boats would call out for everyone on shore to wave to them and cheer.  Sometimes they got so close we could reach out and shake their hands, and at least once the four of us got called out by an announcer asking us how we liked Japan, or cheering that we could make it down to enjoy the festival with them.

All the while somewhere in the middle of the river a large traditional looking barge had some sort of very long, elaborate, religious ceremony going on as far as we could tell completely independent of the rest of the festival. I guess that was the “honoring Tenjin” part of the festivities.

The boats and fireworks went on like this, with no noticeable drop in momentum, for no less than 3 hours.

It went on for so long in fact that we started taking it in turns to go watch, a group up at the fence near the water, and a group continuing the serious business of drinking all that beer and having conversations in broken English and Japanese.

At some point during one of my beer rotations later in the evening, two of the guys from the group walked up to me and took positions on either side of me. With very solemn expressions painted on their faces, one of them looked me in the eye and then slowly gestured towards his crotch:

“In English…penis?”

A discussion of synonyms and the nuances of English vocabulary followed. There are now two 20-something Japanese guys running around in Osaka armed with a cold war era nuclear arsenal of English vulgarities, and names for their junk.  Apparently they had asked Dan this same question earlier in the night, but either found his answer unsatisfactory, or wanted a confirmation.

Alas, eventually the festivities had to start wrapping up. The crowds began slowly shuffling off towards the subway entrances, the vendors hocking the last of their food at cut-rate prices (which we took advantage of to get chocolate covered bananas on sticks), and the boats returned to the riverbanks from which they came.

We said goodbye to our Japanese hosts, and the four of us joined the crowd to slowly work our way back to the trains to catch a ride back to Kyoto.

Experiments, Japan

Checking In from the Road

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Writing from a net cafe in the middle of Kyoto.  A private room with a recliner, all the internet, comics, and melon soda I can drink until 8:00 am, for the same price as a hostel dormitory. They even have showers.  The warped logic of urban Japan.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the actual trip at this point. There’s a top 5 reel coming at the end, and since there have already been at least 5 things which could warrant their own post I’m willing to bet the hardest part is going to be choosing.

But I do want to talk a little bit about something I was thinking about after dinner while Dan and I were waiting for the bus, a little about the spirit of winging it, the ups and downs of setting out with literally no plans and seeing what happens.

Winging It

At the outset of this trip, I had the following trip-related documents and pieces of information:

  1. Boat ticket from Kikai to Kagoshima
  2. Plane ticket from Tokyo to Kikai
  3. Fuji Rock tickets, temple visitation permission
  4. Lonely Planet: Japan, guidebook, circa 2000
  5. And the knowledge that in 30 days (give or take), I’m going to need to be in Tokyo to catch that flight home

(Item 4 was a concession to sane traveling, but it became readily apparent that unless we were also time traveling, item 4 was not particularly useful, which left us properly winging it. No happy little Lonely Planet fallback list of hostels and guest houses. Ultimately though, it was fantastic that the LP guide turned out to be nothing more than a hefty paperweight or emergency bludgeoning tool. We have since picked up the updated one, but with a very different attitude towards its usage)

The entire rest of the trip: where we were staying, eating, what the hell we were going to be doing, and aside from “in Japan” even the question of where was left entirely open at the outset.  To some people this is already sounding crazy, and to the people currently walking around the world for 5 years, not nearly crazy enough, but I’m glad to get the opportunity to test drive this truly odd and wonderful travel philosophy in the shallow end before diving into the Mariana Trench.

The idea is to let the adventure develop as it may. To follow the path as it evolves in front of you, even if that path is steeper, rockier, and has a lot more scary jungle-bits than the one you could have hammered out ahead of yourself.  For me, it took me a while to stop fighting the journey. This is part of why we did 3 cities in 3 days at the outset of our trip (ouch, brain fatigue). When you have a solid plan you can get away with that kind of stuff. Tonight we’re in Hiroshima to see the bomb memorial, tomorrow we’re eating ramen in Fukuoka, and here are the places we’re staying and the exact times the trains depart. When you’re winging it, this kind of stuff just does not work. You will want to die.

I honestly don’t think you can impose that much structure on a trip like this. It resists it.  Adventures are kind of shy, and if you’re stopping into town for 24 hours swinging a stick and calling out for them you’ll probably just end up tired and frustrated and wholly adventureless. Don’t fore-go structuring a trip just to freak out and try to make one enroute. If you feel like you’re moving too fast, you are.

And it’s totally ok to have to learn that lesson en-route.

There is plenty more to say about winging it, about this trip, about Japan. But I’m due for a long nap. We set out towards Fuji Rock tomorrow.

The Island

Kikai-jima, Now With Two Times the White Folks, For a Limited Time Only

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Despite my best efforts to remain an object of singular rarity and therefore capture maximum sexy-foreigner cool points, from time to time people manage to make their way down to this island for one reason or another. Sometimes they are here entirely of their own volition, and their decision to come here is in no way related to my presence on this island.  I hate these people, because often I do not even know they were on the island, until everyone else on the island is telling me my brother sure drinks a lot, or my sister is really pretty.

More often than not though, if other gaijin (oh snap, take that political correctness!) show up on this island it is entirely because of me.  Two such gaijin showed up over the last week, and another is coming in on the 4:30 am ferry tomorrow morning. In exchange for getting up and meeting him at the ferry port at this god-forsaken hour, he is acting as a Western-camping-goods equivalent of a drug mule.  The regional licensing and distribution agreements we’re breaking could easily get us killed by a powerful cabal of backwoods suppliers, but there is no way I’m running around the country for 3 weeks without really fancy underwear.

Anyway, since I am in kind of a “not really doing anything particularly blog worthy” stretch right now, and may very well not bother posting anything until I’m done looking at temples, drinking with salary-men, and trying to find a minor Japanese noble who can get me into the imperial palace for the next 3-4 weeks, I figured you might like to see a few of the photos from the adventures here on Kikai.  Be forewarned, they involve puns in Japanese.

Let’s get started.

In Which Old Friends Visit

Signage

For those of you not in my immediate circle of family members and friends I have known since I was six, the gentleman agreeing emphatically with the signage is Eli. In Japanese we would be what is called osananajimi (幼馴染) which we can clearly see from the kanji means childhood-experienced-dye. Sometimes kanji do not translate well.  You could call it “childhood friends” in English, or just “guys you cannot seem to get rid of, even when you move to the opposite side of the globe, and then hide on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere”. Eli lives in Kagoshima, a short 13-hour boat ride away, doing more or less the exact same thing I am.  Or at least he does for another few days. Before he returns to America-land he just had to see the weird little chunk of land I was living on these days.

We went diving about 4 hours after he stepped off the ferry, but since I am a total waste of bottled air, I do not yet have a camera which works underwater so you will have to take my word that Eli performed admirably.

Also, for those of you who are curious as to what exactly the giant finger sign is pointing to, it is in fact this tree:

Banyan

Now depending on which Board of Tourism you ask, this is either the 2nd largest Banyan tree in Japan, the largest Banyan tree in Japan, or the largest tree in the world.  There were some translation issues in some of the tourism literature. Enough said.

Aside from looking at particularly large flora, (and fauna, the Kikai giant spiders are back with a vengeance this summer) we also managed to make our way up to Hyakunoudai which is a park/vantage point up near the highest point on the island.  Here is a picture of Eli looking pensive and contemplating the deep mysteries of the sea, as well as the transitory nature of human life, and the ephemeral beauty of clouds:

Pondering Clouds

And here is a picture of me pretending to be Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic:

I'll Never Let You Go Jack

Why yes, those are in fact bright orange shorts that come down to the middle of my calf. Thank you for noticing.

After climbing up to the top of the island, and checking out the weird little cave system on the island (not particularly photo-worthy) we drove over to Butterfly Road, which actually has a lot more giant spiders than butterflies right now (and now we know why the spiders are so giant), but also has one of the weirdest “careful, ______ crossing” signs on the world:

蝶超注意

The five characters of the sign read: Cho ni Cho Chui. The Japanese word for butterfly is Cho, the 2nd Cho is a word meaning “totally, extremely, very” which is particularly popular among high-school girls, and Chui means “careful”.  But since the little kid version of Butterfly is Cho-Cho, the sign is in fact an elaborate pun in Japanese, which we all find just hilarious. You can’t really explain puns in foreign languages, so you will have to trust my words and Yoda-san’s smiling face. Does he not look amused!?

We also managed to make it out to Suigira beach for a little bit of swimming and snorkeling, but Eli was only on the island for a day and a half, so it was pretty brief unfortunately. Here’s a photo of the beach though.

Sugira Beach

All of the middle school boys were diving off of those coral islands on the right, as part of an elaborate island ritual of manhood. For some reason when they were scared they jumped in really really close to the jagged wall of coral , which made for some harrowing “oh god, there’s going to be blood everywhere” moments. Fortunately, nothing actually went awry.

We also made it out to my favorite little live-house (bar + music) where one of the island kids who grew up and moved to Kobe happened to be playing.  Unfortunately one of the guys she was touring with was just god-awful, and she was really nervous for some reason.  She has an odd quirk of laughing uncontrollably and breaking into spontaneous sing-conversation in the middle of songs when she gets nervous.  It was funny for the first half, then it got kind of painful.

Still, good times had all around, during Eli’s brief taste of island life.

In Which a Couchsurfer Somehow Makes Her Way to Kikai

Kerry is a couchsurfer, a generally fantastic group of people I have been associated with to varying degrees for about 2 years now. Here is the customary successful couch surf “actually surfing on the couch” photo:

Couchsurfing

Kerry for some reason, on her first trip outside of Europe, on her first time in Japan, decided to come down to Kikai and hang out for 3 or 4 days.  I’ll write more about couchsurfing at some point I’m sure, but for now go check the website out and poke around.  It’s  a very cool idea, and so far I have had nothing but amazing luck with it.  Everyone I meet through the site has been amazing and weird in the best way possible. I mean take Kerry. She’s from England, has lived up north on the Shetland Islands, and currently lives in the Canary Islands.  There is nothing in her history which would suggest an unhealthy attraction to small islands, it’s just how things developed in her life.

We had a blast hanging out with all the island weirdos, and I got to practice interpreting which was actually a lot of fun. If would consider doing it professionally, if doing it professionally didn’t include wearing suits, and not saying “Oh hell, what do you call that in English?” every time I can’t think of a word.

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Some day I’ll have to start writing about the island in earnest, but for now hopefully this gives you some small idea of the weird world in which I find myself.  Seeing as how I have to be up and at least questionably lucid in a very short number of hours, I think I might go pass out on something.  Talk to you all again in about a month, unless I get ambitious from the road.

Experiments, Japan

30 Days of Natto: The Aftermath

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A package of natto contains just about 40 grams.  Doing some quick math the sum total amount of natto I have consumed over the last 30 days comes to 1200 grams which, for those of you who find that touching the metric system causes you physical pain and blisters your flesh, is over 2 and a half pounds. 2 and a half pounds of beans and slime.  I have eaten it with mustard, with soy sauce, with mayonnaise and kim chee.  I have consumed it for breakfast, as workout fuel, as dinner and as bedtime snacks.  I have tried almost every single brand of natto they stock at 3 different supermarkets and can tell you the differences between them.  Let no one question my natto credentials. I have earned my wings.

So what have I learned?

1) Natto is gross, but then so are a lot of things when you really think about them.  One of the things which constantly eating natto did was get me thinking about a lot of the other things we routinely consume, and how they’re just as gross and weird.  Is “beans + bacteria = natto” really any weirder than “milk + bacteria = yogurt”? What about the myriad range of cheeses with molds that are not only present, but desirable and indeed an integral part of the flavor.  Let us not even broach mechanically separated meat and the other myriad forms of strange processed foods.  Hell, give me a description of natto and mech-meat side-by-side and I’ll take the natto every day.

2) Natto does not give you superpowers.  It’s damn healthy, don’t get me wrong.  But if you’re looking for a magic bullet to help you lose 40 pounds of fat, put on 50 pounds of muscle, quit smoking, learn French, build a rocket and then perform brain surgery on it, well then I’m afraid you’re SOL.  Now it can certainly help with at least…2 of those things (maybe 3? correlation to smoking or French learning abilities untested), but I’ve got something of a pet peeve for the magic food mentality which has become increasingly common. “It has 10 times the vitamin C of an orange!” Great, maybe if you eat enough of it it will equal a negative cheeseburger.

3) Natto + any other food = Natto.  Ad infinitum. Inclusion in the same meal can produce this effect, even if strict segregation protocols are maintained.  For a food which is not honestly all that strong tasting, it has the uncanny ability to make everything taste like it. You have been warned.

4) We’re mostly bad at things because we think we are.  It’s a recurring theme throughout my time in Japan so far.  I couldn’t eat natto mostly because, well, I assumed I couldn’t eat natto.  But the reality was I couldn’t eat natto, and didn’t even try to eat it, because I assumed I would throw up all over whatever kindly Japanese host was thoughtful enough to give it to me, which would be rude, and embarrassing for everyone involved. Someone would probably have to kill themselves to make up for the shame of it all. A bad scene all around.  Assumptions beget reality.  The implications are staggering.

Meta-implication: Next time there is something you want or need to get done, try ceaselessly drilling the idea that you are absolutely awesome at X, born to do X, and the only way you could fail at X is if the laws of physics themselves changed to spite your birthright.  Now it’s possible that I’m just way better at lying to myself than anyone else who has ever lived, ever, but I do not think this is an isolated phenomenon.  I have always had the vague sense that my subconscious is toiling away at secret machinations, but shoves them under the bed or something whenever I come by for a visit.  I think that constantly bombarding your subconscious with this kind of positive reinforcement will eventually always start to affect your actual success with that project.  If for no other reason that you aren’t wasting untold hours and days building your own walls with a lousy attitude.

In Conclusion

The mission was by and large, a success. We’ll see over the coming weeks if I continue to consume natto in any form. I’m keeping a few packs around for snacks, since it really shines as an appetite killer when you get hungry at odd times.

All in all, a pretty fun way to spend a month, albeit it wasn’t like every waking hour of my time needed to be devoted to natto related activities (now that would be a challenge).  I’ll be spending the next few weeks entertaining random guests to the island while paradoxically trying to avoid spending any money outside these guests so I can make the most of my Summer vacation and the Japannanigans I have planned.  Stay tuned.

Experiments, Japan

30 Days of Natto: Week 4

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I am now so used to natto that I I am jaded to its visage.  Does one more photo of natto evoke its stickiness further? Just like 3 days of hiking through primeval forests, no thank you, I have ceased to care about epic, thousand year old trees covered in moss. They are common place now.  And natto slime is no different.

The final full week of natto consumption (can you believe it’s been nearly a month already?) yielded a few interesting discoveries.  Chief among them is that natto is among the “Swiss Army Knife” categorization of foodstuffs. Not in that it can be prepared in so many ways, or that it contains a corkscrew, but in that it is just so useful at so many times of the day.

Natto is Awesome at the Following Times:

It’s great in the morning, when you have zero time because you were up too late watching South Korea/America/Mexico/England, or any of the other soccer teams you care about fail to succeed. You can make it in seconds, and it’s got good staying power combined with a piece of fruit or something, so you don’t start feeling hungry again until right around noon.

It’s wonderful when you get home from work, and have an awkward little window where normally I would either end up eating dinner early either because I spent the day throwing little kids around and have worked up an appetite. Or more likely it’s because of prolonged exposure to an island on which half the population is has cleared the half-century mark, which means I am basically a senior citizen by osmosis, and thus my body recognizes that 4:30 is the perfect time to have dinner. Natto to the rescue.  A pack of natto is only about 40 grams of food, which is enough to fill the void until I can eat at a reasonable time, rather than hate myself at around 9:30 when I got hungry again on an earlier schedule.

Natto is also nice for a little something pre-workout if I’m feeling a little draggy. If I only eat a banana or something I die about half way through, but with some protein mixed in (and all the natto slime superpowers) I can keep genki-ly throwing my ball of metal with a handle on it around well into the evening.

Natto is Incredibly NOT Awesome at the Following Times:

Natto is the last thing you should ever try to eat if you’ve got any kind of nausea.  Even though I’m used to the stuff, there is nothing like slimy beans to really bring that feeling of nausea to the forefront.  Unless you find slimy things soothing for some reason, probably best not to test this one.  I have already thrown myself in front of the bullet of progress for you on this one, and you may consider yourself honored to know such a hero and patriot, one that would suffer so that you need not.

I also find that post-workout natto loses some of it’s appeal for some reason. I think the general loss of appetite that comes with working hard + aforementioned slimy oddness is just enough to remove it as a viable post-workout protein source.  Go eat a dead animal, or some other form of legume instead.

Home Stretch

I’m almost done with 30 days, as of today I should be at 28ish, minus the one off day.  I’m calling it mission success this Wednesday, and I’ll be back some time this week for my final thoughts on the whole gruesome experiment.

I’ve got some other things in the works right now which I started about a week ago which I should also be going live with some time soon, so keep your ears pricked and your eyes glossy and any other marginally old-timey body-alertness related metaphors you can think of.  I’m going to go watch Japan decide whether my tomorrow is full of bright, perky, patriotic co-workers, or bitter, angry, sarcastic hate-balls.  たのしみ～(/^ ^)/|  o |