I ask for lesson plans so I have some idea of what the school wants me to do that day, other than of course be aggressively white.
Let’s see what they have in store for me today:
Well…gosh. My morning greetings don’t usually involve excrement. But…
I guess it would be rude not to? ♥
Our time underwater is brief. The moments from descent to decompression measured into a few hundred breaths. One tank at a time, we race towards 10 dives. 50 dives. 100. 1000. The schools of fish which can only be described as “teeming”, the rays and the squid and even the sea turtles, they become familiar sights. Old territory. You are aware on some level that you’re “underwater” but there is a dullness to your senses. You’re floating by and you’re seeing, but you’re not really…there.
But every now and then, something snaps you out of it. I’m not underwater. I am in outer fuckin’ space. I have landed on a strange new world. The plants here are hard, and some of them sting. And the bugs. Oh god, the bugs:
We float for a few moments above this strange planet of psychedelic glowing space slugs.
And suddenly even the lowliest little fish is an ugly grey miracle. We remember why we’re in love.
It’s a sickness, this diving business. Gets in your bones, and doesn’t let you go. Sends you back under, back to the craggy expanses of an alien world, searching. They say once you pop the cork on your 100th tank…there’s no turning back.
December 18th, 2011. Kikai-jima, Japan. 96 tanks of pressurized air. And counting.
You might think from the title that this would be a story of me walking in to the testing hall, 4 weeks of nothing but Japanese on my mind, waving to the only other white guy in a room of 60 Taiwanese high school kids, then sitting down to obliterate the highest level Japanese test they’ve got.
Man, it would be great if I could write that post.
I won’t say I definitely failed the test. People have a habit of low-balling their expectations as a coping mechanism. I will say that there came a point about half way through the kanji and grammar section where I decided reading the question was only taking up valuable time which I could devote to less pointless questions. Maybe it helped me, I can’t say until I get the results back in February.
So what does this mean for the idea of total immersion as a language learning tool? Well, maybe nothing.
There are a number of ways to view the situation, depending on where your loyalties lie.
A total immersion “input” learning supporter
“See, this just goes to prove that the test isn’t really testing your ability to speak and understand Japanese. It’s just studying your ability to memorize obscure grammar points in a book. It’s also a completely unnatural way of accessing the information. When, but a test, will you have to answer 70 questions and read 10 reading passages within a 2 hour time limit? Failing the tests just means you’re bad at tests. Besides, eventually your Japanese will be native level fluent if you keep accessing native materials, and then you can walk in and pass the test on intuition. Suck it up, and go read something in Japanese while listening to J-pop to make yourself feel better.”
A textbook/studying learning supporter
“See, this just goes to prove that you can’t learn higher level Japanese without going out of your way to focus on and study it. You can’t have enough exposure to higher level Japanese by randomly stumbling across it, even if you make a flashcard or two to represent that grammar point, or word. There just isn’t enough random exposure to progress to a deeper understanding. Studying can be unpleasant, but the idea that you can do nothing but fun, fluffy stuff and expect to make serious high level gains is ludicrous. Suck it up, get it done, thank me later.”
An immersion “output” learning supporter
(I don’t know exactly what to call it, but that comes close. This would be the work of Benny over at Fluent in 3 Months.)
“See, this just goes to prove that you can’t internalize a language into your subconscious unless you are actively using it in conversations. Massive output is the only way your brain can really come to understand all that information, and if you do it right you can be speaking fluent Japanese, which is the fun part anyway, not reading books, a hell of a lot faster. As far as the test goes, tests throughout history have always suffered from a profound disconnect from reality. Suck it up. Learn the test. Study specifically for the test. Treat it as something separate from your real studies if you have to.”
Let’s start with the total immersion crowd, since that’s the one I was specifically playing with this month. Did it help my Japanese? Sure it did. I learned all sorts of interesting words, from hand grenade, to indecisive. I’m also sure hearing and reading the same grammatical structures thousands of times, helped to imprint them into my subconscious Japanese brain.
Using native materials is also a great way to get native sounding Japanese. If nothing else I think the decision to favor materials designed for Japanese people was infinitely better than anything designed for people learning Japanese, because you are guaranteed natural Japanese. Too many textbook learners sound like robots.
But.
At a certain point, I am forced to acknowledge the writing on the wall: fun and progress are detrimental to one another if you try to combine them. If all of my fun is tainted by work, then I enjoy it less. If all progress is filtered through repeated exposure in the name of fun, then I progress significantly slower from all that redundant effort. The point is not to disguise work as something fun, so that you can eat it 24/7, 365. Fish oil in a glittery capsule with a cartoon dog mascot still tastes like death. Similarly, even if you can get something good out of it, junk is still junk. Chocolate chips and sugar is still bad for you, even if you sprinkle in some granola.
Also I think it begs mentioning that the guy who came up with this idea reads almost exclusively non-fiction. If you’re, say, the type of person who doesn’t happen to like self-help books, you might find that there’s a certain range of Japanese you just don’t get enough exposure to. That is, unless you force yourself to read something, well, kind of unpleasant. And even if you do, you still suffer from the same wasted effort problem.
Admittedly the idea of total immersion works fantastic for the first 90% of a language. Really. If you’re aiming for functional fluency, I think grabbing a bunch of native materials and stewing in them is probably the most absolutely painless way to bring your abilities up.
It’s definitely not the fastest. It assumes that you cannot actually get anything done if you’re not constantly having fun. It assumes you will give up if it’s hard. Personally, working 24/7 is unsustainable, even if it’s fun. I’m sure people would say I’m missing the point, that it’s not supposed to feel like work. But there’s a balance. If the returns and progress I’m getting on my invested time are too low, then even if it’s supposed to be fun it instead becomes ungodly frustrating because of all the missed opportunities, all the other stuff I could be doing with my time. Learning is fun unto itself for me, so the efficiency of the system is a big part of whether I’m enjoying my time, or forcing myself.
No one likes to work hard, and achieve nothing.
But I think for people who have a hard time motivating themselves to do anything, it is an amazing way to overcome that hurdle. The system seems designed for people who have been chronically bad at making any kind of progress in their lives. It removes all the barriers. For most people who’s idea of studying Japanese is lamenting the fact that they should be studying Japanese, this is an incredibly powerful place to start.
Yes and no. If your goal is to pass the JLPT, I suggest you approach it with the following mindset:
The JLPT is not Japanese.
Study for the JLPT as an exercise in learning the test. Assume that after you are done you will maybe have learned some new Japanese, but mostly you will have learned to pass the JLPT. It’s like the SATs, or whatever arcane testing system they threw at you in high school. You’re not really learning all those words, or how to do all that math, you’re just learning what they like to throw at you, how they think, and how to beat them. How else could income correlate so strongly with test scores? Rich kids get all the cool toys, that’s why.
The JLPT is basically the SATs, in Japanese.
When it comes to actually learning Japanese though, the “suck it up and study” crowd is, in my opinion, just as wrong. You’re just as likely to have tons of wasted effort by studying. After a certain point, hell, even from the very first page in some cases, most textbooks for learning Japanese don’t use vocabulary you actually want to know, or will use frequently. The grammar is equally hit or miss.
And the drills and exercises are absolute garbage.
There’s a difference between using something 100 times, and applying something 100 times. The best (musicians/athletes/scholars/etc.) in the world aren’t the best because they’ve put in the most time, it’s because they’ve put in the most quality time. And every textbook I have ever seen is just too simple to engage your brain on the level it needs to be engaged.
The monotony of it all, one of the things which the immersion system goes out of it’s way to overcome, not only leads to slow progress, it leads to a pretty high degree of burn out. Especially if you’re out of school, and don’t have a grade to motivate you.
If you’re finding that the textbooks are working, by all means plow ahead. Personally, I can’t handle them.
There has to be a better way.
Total input immersion “works”, but it’s inefficient. This is actually something Khatz over at All Japanese All the Time himself seems to be coming around to.
Textbooks probably don’t work, unless you’re a textbook type, because your odds of quitting before you reach fluency are rather high, and also because they are, all said and done, pretty irrelevant to what you actually want to use the language for.
I think the solution might lie somewhere in between All Japanese All the Time and Fluent in 3 Months. I haven’t talked about Benny and his craziness yet, because I’m extremely conflicted about the man. His basic shtick is to speak the language as much as possible, massive output, rather than read or listen to the language, massive input. On the one hand, he gets results. Crazy results. On the other hand, he writes at you, not to you. Like I’m a 4 year old. Like anyone who doesn’t speak 8 languages by the time they’re 30 is not only a failure, but a stupid one, because it’s all your fault. I also get the feeling lately that a lot of what he’s preaching now doesn’t work nearly as well if you haven’t already learned at least one language. There are certain fundamental truths he has begun to take for granted.
Regardless, for now I think it might be time that I shelled out for his language hacking guide, and see what the man has to say. I will admit, the curiosity has been building.
Ultimately what I come up with is probably going to be a mix of all sorts of different systems, as it should be. I think people can get really devoted to systems and teachers that have given them some results, so much so that they never take the time to evaluate what parts of the system are working, and what parts aren’t. Take the best parts, and leave the rest.
I learned a lot from All Japanese All the Time, and am really grateful for how much it moved me forward. If I hadn’t stumbled across the site, I’d probably still be poking my JET program Japanese textbook and swearing I’ll catch up tomorrow…on the year and a half of backlog. But while I totally agree that native is the way to go, I definitely disagree with the “all the time” part, and think the input/output question still needs to be worked out.
Stay tuned.
This being a blog about Japan, and Japanese being a pretty big part of living in Japan, I don’t think this is the last you’ll hear on the language learning front. Being a language learner, and also a language teacher surrounded by frustrated students, it’s something of an obsession of mine.
So folks, here’s the deal. I’m all well and done with the immersion business but I’m still taking a few days to sort out the “well, that was fun. What do I do now?” So hopefully I’ll have the post for the immersion, and the JLPT up this weekend. In the mean time, here’s another entry in the Snapshots series. This one is about the day and night I spent at Fuji Rock, an all together awesome and terrifying experience, as you will soon read. Enjoy, and I’ll be back to regular updates by next week at the latest.
Kisses,
Adam
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It’s eight in the morning and you’ve somehow managed to haul yourself out of bed, and get yourself to a tiny little hot spring town called Echigo Yuuzawa in the middle of the middle of nowhere. Despite this, it manages to be just about an hour and a half away away from the heart of Tokyo. Bullet trains. Japan is strange like that.
The station is surprisingly busy, all kinds of young people looking all sorts of out off place. Everyone is wearing big plastic rain boots in the full range of rainbow colors. Hell, there’s probably more than one pair of straight up rainbow ones. Big floppy hats, rain ponchos ranging from elite camping gear to plastic bags, and a truly alarming amount of leggings.
We, the shuffling mass of youth, are eventually herded into something resembling a line, and loaded up onto buses. No one is here to take in a hot spring or two. We’re all headed to Naeba, another town about a half hour away which is home to some world class skiing. Too bad it’s the middle of summer.
Naeba is probably a pretty sleepy, charming little place in the off season. But for 3-days out of the year Naeba is host to something so horrible and wonderful the locals would be calling the exorcist if they didn’t know it’d be long gone before he’d arrive.
You step off the bus. Let’s get a few things straight:
Welcome to Fuji Rock.
Japan’s premier music and mud fest.
If you’ve been to any music festival in America you have some idea of what to expect. It probably pales in comparison to most of the real major ones America has to offer.
But there’s something special about Fuji Rock. It’s in Japan.
This is a music festival happening in Japan. Most of the concert goers are Japanese. Perhaps you think, given the general impression of Japanese people as quiet, reserved, and polite, that a concert attended primarily by Japanese people would be boring. If so, this is because you’ve never spent 5 minutes in a karaoke box with an otherwise sane Japanese person. But I don’t think you can grasp the degree to which Japanese people can and do loosen up when put in an atmosphere designed solely for that purpose.
It is absolutely, terrifyingly, awesome to watch hundreds of Japanese kids screaming their heads off, throwing their fists up, and starting mosh pits at the drop of a hat. You can strike up a conversation with anyone, even if you speak absolutely no Japanese. Dan started dozens of conversations just by walking up and playing rock-paper-scissors with people. People are dancing really really badly all over the place. No one here is even remotely worried about how stupid they look anymore. They’re too busy having fun.
Oh, and did I mention it goes all night? Music starts up some time in the late morning, and keeps going until well past when the sun rises the next morning. It shuts down briefly so that people can try to clean it up, and keep the entire venue from being swallowed up by mud. Then it’s right back on its feet a few hours later, ready for day 2 and 3.
Every single thing which would normally deter one from having a music festival seems purpose build into Fuji Rock’s basic framework.
It always rains. Always. It has literally never not rained. [citation needed] Since the festival’s stages are sprawled over a few kilometers of muddy forest, this means that after about 20 minutes there are knee deep puddles of mud. Not only does no one care, everyone is strangely happy.
Because it’s so spread out, hiking from the first stage to the last stage takes well over a half hour. I can’t give you the exact timing because I got worried that by the time I made it all the way to the other end of the festival, I wouldn’t be able to make it back to the main stages in time for one of the bands I really wanted to see. They were going on stage in about an hour. Furthermore, there are stages tucked into some really weird places. There is one small stage literally in the middle of a forest. There is almost no way to watch this stage, except by standing next to a tree.
The arguably unwieldy size, and the fact that nature itself seems hellbent to stop Fuji Rock from happening on literally a yearly basis paradoxically adds a strange sort of magic to the place. The whole time I was there, I couldn’t believe it was happening. Not in the “oh my god, I’m finally here!” sense of the world. I mean it was literally so odd my brain was having trouble squaring it with reality.
There were some truly spectacular performances by some really amazing bands, ranging from complete unknowns to super rockstars, both Japanese and foreign. But since this isn’t a blog about music, it would take forever and be kind of boring to detail every single performance. And it almost doesn’t matter. The music and the festival are almost two separate entities. For sure, one couldn’t exist without the other. But even if you didn’t know a single band there, I would still say it’s worth going at least once, just to experience the atmosphere. And the mud.
I probably only knew about a quarter of the bands I ended up seeing, and got introduced to some really cool Japanese bands as a result. I also found that not having a main stage concert to get to every 30 minutes freed me up to do some really worthwhile wandering.
The best performance I saw that day was not one of the main stage superstars (although they were awesome), but a band playing homemade percussion instruments and pipes from the Solomon Islands. They were playing at the forest stage, and the crowd watching them grew so large that they actually choked off the pathway, causing a huge traffic jam. This actually lead to more people being near the stage for longer, and deciding it was worth hopping off into the forest to stick around and watch. They spoke pretty much no Japanese, although they did a cover of a really famous Japanese folk song at one point which everyone got really into.
It was incredibly fun, all the more so since I had no idea that there was even a stage back there. In this, as in all winging it type adventures, it’s the unexpected bits which always seem the most interesting.
As awesome as the entire day of concerts was, the oddball phenomena of Fuji Rock: Day Version, were nothing compared to what it becomes after the last main stage concert finishes their 3rd and final encore. The buses away from Fuji Rock stop running at around 11-12, meaning if you stick around past then you’re there for the long haul. Dan and I parted ways here. Dan made his way back to the train station, to duel hundreds of Japanese kids in rock-scissors-paper for a slightly more comfortable patch of concrete to sleep on until the first train started. I decided to stay up all night dancing to techno music in my giant orange hiking boots, and find a way back to civilization in the morning. I was not the only one.
At first everything is pretty normal. There are two or three stages which have some pretty world famous DJs hosting spastic techno rave parties right near the entrance. All the food stalls keep running all the way till sunrise for some reason, so if you desperately want some paella at 5 in the morning, they got that covered. I danced for a little while, then went and hung out with some of the Japanese kids who were working at Fuji Rock I met earlier via the “Oh holy wow, you speak Japanese! Wanna hang out after we get off work!?” trick. At some point they did the sane thing and went off to bed, and I decided to go exploring and find the fabled 4th stage, in the back of Fuji Rock.
The minute you leave the comfort of the main area, with its mostly cheerful and upbeat ravers, Fuji Rock: Night Version shows its true face, breaking the boundaries of your fragile reality which had already been seriously tested by a day of weirdness. There are people sleeping everywhere. Curled up in chairs, on tarps, or sometimes just in puddles of mud, having apparently lost the wherewithal to do anything more than collapse where they stood.
All the tiny little paths winding through the forests have been decorated by giant multi-colored light up snowflakes. Eventually the snowflakes give way to an entire forest of disco balls. An entire forest of disco balls.
The backstage is a mud puddle, more so than any other part of Fuji Rock thus far seen. People are just going crazy dancing in it, and this seems totally normal. The later it gets the less people look like they’re dancing. They’re just kind of swaying, half-asleep, to the music. It’s an entire mud filled field of zombies. Dancing to techno.
This was too much for my brain to handle.
I went in search of somewhere to pass out until morning.
For a while I am seriously considering jumping several feet off the raised wooden walkway and cutting through a couple hundred meters of dense underbrush to try and get to the now shutdown Fuji Rock kiddie park. I assumed there would be less techno music there. But the Fuji Rock security personnel were quick as bunnies, and just as numerous. Also I’m pretty sure they were cheating, by being well rested.
Then I tried sleeping under a bridge, but the ground was made of bundles of rocks held together with metal netting. Also the organizers of Fuji Rock, in an effort to stop people from doing exactly what we were doing and sleeping rough, made sure that every square inch of Fuji Rock was filled with either loud techno music, or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory playing at full volume, interspersed with clips of random Japanese festival dancing. The hallucination worthy after-party continues!
I eventually gave up and managed to wander all the way back up to the front, which was starting to devolve into the same zombie-filled mud pit I had just left.
A quick search of the area turned up a plastic chair which no one seemed to be using, so I dragged it under some pine trees, turtled up inside of my rain jacket, and tried to get a little sleep before morning about 30 meters away from the loudest techno dance party in Fuji Rock. Perhaps even the loudest techno dance party on the planet, for all times past, present, and future, in this and any other as of yet undiscovered dimensions.
Moral of the story: Fuji Rock is totally awesome, but the human body was not designed to process music, dance, and sweat for a solid 18-24 hour period. Do yourself a favor, and shell out the ￥3000 for a campsite ticket. I’d honestly consider it even if you don’t have a tent. They have a free hot spring, and a place to sleep which is not immediately adjacent to a whole lot of strobe lights, bass and Gene Wilder.
Despite the night being a total horror-show, it was one of those vaguely traumatic experiences which I can look back on fondly now, 4 months in the future.
Regardless of whether you stick around for the night, Fuji Rock has a lot of really amazing music, and is just a damn good time. If you’re not a total idiot you can even base yourself out of a lovely little campsite on a ski slope with a few thousand other concert goers. I bet the tent town is a ridiculous experience unto itself. If you’re really on top of things you might even be able to find a hotel in the area, but I can’t guarantee it will be nearly as fun.
After my JET contract finishes up, I’m planning to take a run at the full 3-day festival experience. Tent shanty-town and all.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
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:
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Next came a selection of homemade tofu, all of which were delicious:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: Wanderer, scholar, lover of “the big can coke-a-cola”
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.
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 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”.
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:
After I returned Dan then managed to:
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.
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.
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.
