A little exercise does the body good

Today there was a local sports / exercise festival. It was going to be last weekend, but it got postponed due to rain. It was at a small park less than 10 minutes walk away. It seemed to be mostly for elementary school and middle school kids, but there were also events to participate in for older people too. When it started, everyone gathered and did simple exercises while someone counted to keep time and demonstrate what to do. From there, the kids gathered for the first event, an obstacle course with things to go under, over, and through. Almost all the of the events were simple challenges or obstacle courses that involved throwing balls into boxes and rolling tires around cones, even for the adults. And from the very beginning, there was rockin' inspirational music playing, most of which I didn't recognize but found to be satisfying to listen to, but some of which I did recognize, including instrumental versions of "Dragonstea din Tei (numa numa)", "We will rock you", and a selection of Kirby music which I was especially pleased and surprised to hear. For each challenge, the first three to finish in their group won special prizes labeled with 1, 2, or 3, depending on how they placed. Everyone else got a different prize, but all of the prizes were food items, tissue boxes, or other things you could use around the house.

Other challenges included a scavenger hunt game for the kids where they ran to turn over a board with something written on it that they would have to find. For example: socks, a man wearing glasses (I helped a kid on this one), or sometimes a really random thing like a guy in a monkey costume, who would appear unexpectedly and have to be caught and brought to the finish line. There was also a challenge with containers of flour that had hard candies buried in them which you had to blow the flower off of and then grab with your mouth before running to the finish line. The last challenge was the most serious, a relay race around the area, with each member of each team doing a lap and handing off a baton to the next person. I participated in all of the events except for the tug-o-war which they had too many people for and won a collection of handy items that I just gave to my host mom.

When all the events were over, people stayed around to see if they won anything with the lucky number ticket we received at entry. The prizes seemed to be more of the same things from the challenges and the number calling went on for probably a good half hour. Seriously they must've called close to 100 numbers. Of course mine never got called, but even at the end they had stuff left over and everyone could bring their number and get something anyway, like instant ramen or ziploc bags.

I started the day with a stiff neck and feeling like I was catching a cold, but after a bit of exercise and fresh air... I was able to add sunburns to the list. Guess you can't win 'em all.



Check out the full album with videos!

Hiraoka Koen

I just got back from another pretty and surprisingly big park! On Friday I didn't do much of note besides finally going to a ramen shop and playing a bunch of video games at HI-C. So anyway, here's some pictures of the park: (Clicking them for full size doesn't seem to work, so here's a link to the whole album: Hiraoka Koen Album )









Full Album

Good day - Odori revisited

For the first time, Thursday's class and newly assigned homework didn't completely stress me out. The conversational grammar was mostly stuff I already knew and I wasn't as tired as usual so it went pretty well. Also this weekend is the college festival which continues through Monday and Tuesday so I won't have class again until next Thursday. I also have very little homework to do over the long weekend and just need to study for a test or two. After class, I went immediately to the computer lab since I knew there wouldn't be a class there at that time and I did my listening homework. The teachers have now told all the classes directly that copying the CDs isn't allowed and is against Japanese law, not that anyone really doubted that. I hadn't managed to copy the CDs yet anyway though, so I didn't really have anything to worry about. Also for the probably the first time, there were no technical difficulties when doing my listening homework and I finished quickly.

In the afternoon and evening I decided that I wanted to go back to Odori and take my time finding the various books and games I was interested in. Unfortunately I wasn't completely confident in getting there myself so I spent quite a while waiting for the rest of a group of people who were going. When we finally got going and arrived, we spent a while looking in Don Quijote, a five or six story store with a wide variety of random stuff for cheap prices, all piled into narrow aisles. They had everything from food to clothes to electronics and if you decide you want to go down the same aisle that someone else is in, good luck maneuvering around them.

From there we went to help Chris, one of the British guys get a phone with prepaid minutes, since he isn't here through BCA and doesn't get one automatically. That took quite a while too but we eventually got him a shiny new phone. Then we wandered around for a bit looking for somewhere to eat before I decided to break off from the group and check out another Book Off and a game store I saw and get food on my own. At the Book Off I found an old Gamecube game for 250 yen which I'll be interested to try playing in my hacked Wii at home and in the mean time I may bring it to the HI-C club room. I also found the Kino's Journey light novels I had been looking for and got a few of those even though reading them might be beyond my capabilities. And I found a manga I had been looking for after I asked an employee about it. On the way back, I got a burger and stopped at a store called "Gamers" which turned out to not actually have very many games, so I left pretty quickly and went back to the station where I ran into the rest of my group by sheer coincidence and took the subway back to Oyachi station (near the school) and from there got a bus home. Overall, it was a pretty good day, especially for a Thursday.

Three Hour Special!!

Today I got my alien registration card which I have to admit looks pretty spiffy. It's got all this Japanese on it and holographic parts so based on my knowledge of Pokemon cards, I know it's got to be rare. Other than that I didn't do a whole lot today. Except! I watched an hour or so of this three hour special of some show that had a whole bunch of really random, but amazing things.

When I first started watching, I was on my way back to my room to deposit my shaving equipment when a line of a few hundred people all with a person on their shoulders caught my eye on the TV. I'm not very good at estimating, but they took up most of the length of a sports field and then proceeded to walk the width with people on their shoulders. It's a little hard to explain how exactly they were standing... there might have been two rows on the bottom and... well never mind, it was impressive, just take my word for it.

After that there was this guy who had like 200-300 cell phone charms, which are pretty popular in Japan and are just like little doodads or stuffed animals that you can dangle from your cell phone. This guy's were all stuffed animals and he had some sort of harness system in order for them all to stay attached when he lugged them around town.


After that was an interesting segment where they were looking at the name plates on front of people's houses and finding ones that had weird spellings (in kanji) and they tried to figure out how it was pronounced before eventually asking the person. Most of them were practically puns or just really obscure ways of saying things. One person's name had the kanji for "three" three times　〔三三三） because their birthday had a bunch of threes in it or something. Another person's name was just written with the kanji for "one" （一）and their name was "Nimae", meaning "before two". Someone else's was two numbers and it was named after the coordinates of a move in shogi. It was pretty amusing seeing Japanese people not know how to pronounce the names either and when I could understand it, the explanations for the pronunciations were interesting too.

From there, there was a girl who could repeat stuff that people said backwards very quickly. It's a bit easier to do in Japanese because of the syllabic letters. So if someone said "arigatou" (thank you; a ri ga to u), she would say "u to ga ri a". One kid tried to trick her by saying something that made a funny word (I assume) if said backwards, but she realized it and just stared at him with this unamused look on her face. After that was a 90 year old guy who had huge diaries that he has been keeping for 56 (or was it 65) years. They're also picture diaries with hand drawn pictures and comics of various things with comments by them.

Then it went to Korea where someone had made a statue of a kid poking another kid in the butt with the other kid howling in pain/surprise. After that was a segment on crane games with one that they found that had some sort of root in it. The machine was set so that the crane didn't just drop the prize in the hole, but put it on a slide which went down to a platform that moved in and out so that if enough things piled off it'd push something into the prize box. After 100 tries and 10,000 yen (more than $100) the guy finally was able to get a root. Next was a newspaper delivery guy who threw the newspapers over walls and up to three stories high, landing them right in front of the doors. Then there was a sort of amusement park ride in the middle of a city that was big and round with seats along the edge, but without seat belts or any sort of restraining devices. Once the people got on, it spun around and bounced up and down and everyone just had to try to hang on. After that was a guy punching bricks on the ground until they broke and finally a 91 year old man who maintains a fire (or at least the fire area) that's been there for 790 years, which I find hard to believe. There was more too, some less interesting things like big edible sea slugs, but I stopped watching after my host dad changed the channel.

So that's Wednesday. Hopefully tomorrow goes better than past Thursdays... I really hate conversation class.

Kimono Try-On

Between classes today, I went with most of the other students to a BCA organized, free kimono try-on activity. We went in two groups at different times (so my pictures will only have the people who were in my group) and even though I was in the first group we still ended up being 30 minutes late to my second class. We all took taxis to the kimono place which was across from Nakajima Park, wherever that is. The guys and girls went into separate rooms one or two at a time to be helped into their kimono which was a rather complicated process that involved several layers and several tightly wrapped clothes around the waist and stomach. The men's and women's kimono were pretty different. Men also got a foldable fan while the girls got their hair styled and decorated. Traditionally, you would wear socks with the big toe separated from the rest and spiffy sandals. We didn't have any socks like that so we just smooshed up our socks between the two toes. Also all the available sandals were a bit too small for us, but it worked out alright. Once we were all dressed, we took a bunch of pictures and returned the clothes for the next group. After that we just went back on the subway and went to that movie class where the rest of my class got to experience "Udon" and share in my confusion.

Aquarium and Japanese Business

On Sunday after lunch I went with my host mom to Shin-Sapporo. We drove there and parked at the top of a parking garage which connected to, I think, a train or subway station and a shopping mall. What was interesting was that it connected at the top of the parking garage and all the connecting pathways were several stories off the ground and sometimes on flat, outdoor, balcony like areas alongside buildings. While there, we went to an aquarium which had a variety of different fish and even penguins and otters (or were they seals?). After that, we went to an import foods store and got some cereal, although the only cereal options were three different kinds of a cereal I'd never heard of and three different kinds of oatmeal. Luckily the cereal they did have is pretty good. We got some snacks too, along with slices of cake from another shop on the way home. Also on the way home we stopped at another big Book-Off store, which had used books, movies, CDs, and video games. It was so big that I really didn't know where to look for anything I wanted and there was so much it was difficult to just browse. Next time I think I'll bring a list of my favorite Japanese bands so I know what CDs to look for and don't get overwhelmed by the hugeness of it.



Today, I woke up feeling pretty tired and dreading the day as usual, but classes ended up going pretty well. I finally have somewhat less homework this week and since Japanese class was focused on grammar today, it was a lot easier than sometimes. I had time between classes to do a bunch of homework and then in the afternoon I had my economics class which was long and boring, but at least it finished 40 minutes earlier than it says on the schedule (still over 2 hours though). I know almost nothing about economics and I'm not actually that interested so it was really difficult to pay attention. But since our grade is almost entirely attendance, it doesn't really matter if I pay attention.

Some of the stuff I learned or relearned, was that in Japanese colleges, your major doesn't really matter much and probably won't relate to your job. What matters is if your college was a big name college. Also, working for big corporations is typically a good thing, and most will keep you as an employee for life. You start at the bottom of the company, seemingly regardless of your actual experience, and gradually move up the longer you stay with the company. I can understand having some benefits for employees with seniority, but to me it sounds like the companies focus too much on how long you've been there and not enough on how well you actually do. Employees often work long hours and feel obligated to stay at the office at least until their boss goes home. Often they will go out to a bar after work with their coworkers or golfing on the weekends. It seems like more intrusion of work into private life than I'd like personally. Also, the difference between the wages of a company manager and their employees is not as big as it is in America, but I never really found out why. It almost seemed as though it was just because that's how it has always been. Also, we didn't talk about this today, but gender equality is still an issue in the workplace and many women are unable to get as high in the company as men. Also, there are certain jobs that are primarily women's jobs, like serving tea at meetings. Overall, even though Japanese companies seem to offer good benefits and job security, I don't think I'd want to work for one.

Transportation Etiquette

I haven't done much besides class and homework during the past two days. My Japanese class has enough homework to make up for the lack of homework in my other two classes so I'm always busy. On Friday evening, most of the BCA students went out to eat and went to karaoke as a sort of going away party for Teresa, who is going home early on Monday. Nothing particularly interesting happened, but I was glad I went anyway. Today (Saturday) there was a lunch with all the host families and students at the college. Overall it was pretty normal and at the end we all went around and introduced ourselves yet again and said a little about how stuff was going with our host families while the host parents said how it was going with their students. Yosuke Nagashima helped translate back and forth so everyone could understand.

So for something unrelated to that, how about some information on Japanese transportation? Subways are pretty easy to navigate, you just find where you want to go on the map and put in the correct amount of money for how many stops it is from your starting point. If you mess up, you can adjust it later. On the subways, everyone is usually very quiet and there are signs requesting that you set your cell phone to "manner mode" (silent) and not talk on them on the subway. For that matter, people are pretty quiet when just walking from place to place too. And I think it might be against the law to smoke and walk, but I'm not sure about that. In the morning and evening the public transportation is often very crowded. Some subways also have women only cars, I believe because of instances of inappropriate touching and harassment. Such behavior isn't appropriate by Japanese standards either, but it is kind of odd that in such a polite society, groping incidents are common enough to note. Other BCA students were saying that Japanese guys often don't treat their girlfriends particularly well either, but I'm only getting that information second hand and haven't witnessed it myself. I never know if I should ignore the bad things or write about them too. I don't want to offend any Japanese readers, but I do want to give everyone else an accurate view. Japan is pretty cool but it's not perfect, as is every country (some more than others).

Anyway, enough of the negative stuff. For the most part, Japanese people are very polite in every circumstance. It's quite an interesting thing to see actually.