Hello, readers!
I’ve been a bit neglectful and now it’s almost summer, but now’s as good a time as any for me to put up some pictures of cherry blossoms. This post is going to be minimal commentary, so let’s get to it.
So, about a month ago it was the beginning of cherry blossom season and a bunch of us decided to go to Osaka castle to check it out.
Sorry for the dearth of posts, lately. I got stuck with several projects all at once and the weather is really nice out. So, here’s a text post that I wrote yesterday to tide you over while I get some pictures in order.
Once a month, my host mom invites whomever is her host student at the time to teach English to a bunch of Japanese children. I had planned to go last month, but I misheard and the time of this meeting is, in fact, not 9:30, but 4:30 AM. On that day, I missed the last train home from Kyoto and so at 4:30 AM I was at a 24h McDonald’s near the train station. When I got home, I set my alarm for 9:30 and was very confused when nothing happened at what I thought was the appointed hour.
Anyway, this month rolled around and I was considerably more wary about this early meeting time, but when my host mom mentioned it, I figured I’d call it a cultural experience and just go for it. I’m still a college student, though, so I ended up going out to a bar with my friends the night before.
So, this morning I wake myself up at 4:30, get dressed, and get in the car with my host mom. It is at this point that I realize that she’s wearing a suit jacket and I feel a little underdressed in my t-shirt and jeans. My host mom asks me if I’m cold and I respond that I’m fine.
Yeah, so Sam and I met up with some of her friends from America land and we hung out in Kyoto for a day. We were going to go bowling, but the wait was kind of long. I still made a discovery, however:
Shoe vending machine. So Japanese. Also, I realized that I have no idea how big my feet are in centimeters.
So, a minor detail that I left out of my last post, we went to our usual bar one night and a very friendly group of Japanese people told us to pull our table over and drink with them. It was two couples and their small children (yeah, Japanese people bring small kids into bars) and Betsy got to hold a baby.
Aw.
I think she got his dad’s phone number, too. She was, uh… pretty drunk.
My host mom just came to my room and handed me half of a sweet potato to eat, so I figure now’s as good a time as any to talk about Japanese food.
Now, in general, I love Japanese food. A lot of Americans complain that Japanese people don’t really understand spicy things and I will grant them that this is true. For the most part, Japanese people have a very low spice tolerance to an extent that is absolutely laughable among my American friends. They cannot produce a hot sauce worth using, apparently. Anyway, this isn’t really a problem for me, given that I’m pretty much on the Japanese level in that regard.
So, we have our Japanese midterm exams coming up… today, actually. In preparation, yesterday we did conversation practice with some Japanese students. Since the Japanese Kansai Gaidai students are largely women, I chose to sit down with one of the two men in the room, just for variety’s sake. And as soon as class started he started in on introductions: “Hi, my name is Michi, where are you from?” Or, literally translated from the Japanese, “Where did you come from?”
Now, I’m still on my college default which is, “Massachusetts,” but when in Japan that creates some confusion because Michi’s eyes went wide and he said, “Oh, Harvard?” And I laughed and said no and he immediately shot back with, “Then, MIT?” And that’s even more wrong, so I clarified, “No, my hometown is in Massachusetts. I go to school in New York.”
”Oh, Albany?”
“No.”
“Then, Syracuse?”
“No.”
I’ve got to hand it to him that he knew an impressive number of American schools, but he hadn’t heard of Vassar College. : (
Anyway, we ripped through the discussion questions because it was Michi’s third time doing this exercise, today. Interesting fact: Skype was apparently invented in Estonia, according to the Estonian girl who was the third member of our group.
I think the funniest(/saddest) thing, though was when we told stories about being discriminated against in other countries. Michi apparently was in France for some reason and he had to go to the bank, but after he had gone through the line, he realized that the teller had said “good morning” and “thank you” to the person in front of him and the person behind him, but not to him. : (
I related an incident which I’ve been meaning to write about on this blog. I was out riding my bike with two American friends: a black dude and a white-looking lady (pale and freckly, but actually multi-racial). We ride past a group of high school students getting off the bus and as we approach they take note of us and start shouting greetings. The order we were riding in was black dude, whitish lady, me, and the high school students reacted with “Hello!… Bounjour!… Nihao!”
It just… makes me angry, for some reason. -_-;;
And Sam (yeah, it was that girl) hates French, yet both those high school students and a drunken old man identified her as such, so there’s also that.
So, instead of studying for my midterm (don’t worry, don’t worry, I already did that), I’m going to explain a a few of the differences between Japanese and English.
This first one doesn’t affect me personally, but I had to do a presentation about it, so you get to read about it.
Japanese is a pretty hierarchical culture: there are specific ways of speaking to someone based on whether you are of a similar or lower social position than your conversation partner. Adjectives, nouns, and verbs all take on different forms based on this one distinction and it’s an absolute pain to learn it all, nevermind remembering to use them correctly in everyday conversation. And, of course, it’s either rude or stiff/distant if you use the wrong level of formality to address someone, depending on which direction the mistake is in.
So, fine, yes, social relations are important. The specific problem that we talked about in my Japanese class is how you refer to your spouse in Japanese.
Yeah, it’s a big issue for young Japanese women today, apparently. The problem is that the traditional word for huband, shujin, literally means, “lord-person.” A lot of modern women consider that vocabulary… dated. And the alternative that a lot of young couples are turning to, danna, means the boss of a store and it’s what concubines and mistresses used to call their husband. So, honestly not much better.
So what is a modern Japanese woman to do? There are a lot of alternatives, but none of them are really popular and they all have slightly weird connotations. For instance, tsureai corresponds most closely to the English word “lover,” I think, and just like in America, it’s a kind of weird thing to call someone you’re married to. There’s also aikata which literally means “partner,” but its origin is from a Japanese form of two-main comedy called manzai, in which one member calls the other aikata. So, there’s confusion over what message you’re trying to send there.
Oddly enough, the problem kind of resolves itself once a married couple has kids: they then refer to each other as “mom” and “dad” or “papa” and “mama.” This happens in some European countries, but it’s still weird to me to be talking to someone else, but use a word that refers to your relationship to a third person in the room. And it varies depending on who’s in the room, since, when talking to me, my host parents refer to themselves as “mom” and “dad,” but when their grandchildren are in the house, they call themselves “grandma” and “grandpa.”
And there’s one final catch: how do you refer to someone else’s husband? The way Japanese social circles work, you refer to people you’re related to using less polite terms and other people’s families using the more polite terms. So, even if you can agree with your spouse what to call each other, you can’t make the same agreement with every person you come across. Traditionally you use the word goshujin, which is the polite form of the old word for “husband.” But it still means “lord!” What are you saying about this other woman when you call her husband literally her lord? But if you don’t use that word, you risk offending the other person. D : So, there’s no real answer. Some people are offended whenever someone says shujin and some people think it’s really useless to spend this much time worrying about words. It’s tricky because the words themselves indicate some pretty sexist cultural norms (the word for wife literally means “inside the house”). But there’s no point in getting offended any time someone uses culturally accepted form.
Anyway, that’s one of the many reasons I’m never marrying a Japanese dude.
That’s the tag line on the English version of the Kaiyukan aquarium pamphlet.
Anyway, we begin from near Hirakata station.
