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When I was walking back to my dorm today I saw a Japanese guy wearing a yellow t-shirt with big, black print letters. The message on the t-shirt read: “BIG BLACK PRINT LETTERS ON A YELLOW TEE”.

I also tend to see a lot of shirts here which have English messages on them that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. I suppose it’s similar to how in America people used to get tattoos of Japanese/Chinese characters that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I even remember seeing a photograph online once of a guy’s tattoo where the Japanese characters were actually reversed, lol.

I also see a lot of t-shirts from places I know. I’ve seen Penn State t-shirts (my home state’s university). I even saw a Philadelphia Freedom shirt. The Philadelphia Freedom were a soccer team for a league that shut down in 1997. I went to quite a few of their games with my Dad and my brother sometimes, too, I think. But, how one of their t-shirts ended up on the other side of the world is beyond me. I’m pretty sure the people who wear these shirts have no real connection to the places either.

It sort of reminds me of one time when I was in Vermont at my college, Middlebury College. I went with some friends to the nearby grocery store and when we were leaving I saw a guy standing there with a Penn State hat on. So I went over to him and asked him about the hat to see if he was from Pennsylvania or if he went to the university or something.

He didn’t respond. I realized that, under his hat, he looked sort of Mexican so I asked him in Spanish if he spoke Spanish and he responded back in Spanish, yes. So I asked him if he knew what his hat meant and he said he had no idea. I explained to him that it was a Penn State hat which was the university in my home state and I asked him some other questions about what he was doing in Vermont, etc. He didn’t say too much. I think either he was surprised that an American was speaking to him in Spanish (not too many people up in Vermont can speak Spanish) or more likely, he was an illegal immigrant and was nervous that some white stranger was asking him questions about what he was doing for work and when he came to Vermont and so on.

Even my non-Japanese friends in my classes at Keio University fall into this sometimes. I remember my German friend who came in wearing a “Hershey Park” t-shirt. Hershey Park is a small amusement park in Pennsylvania, a couple of hours away from where I live. It’s also the place where Hershey’s Chocolate started, I believe. I asked him if he had ever been there and he said “no”, so I asked him how he got the shirt and he said he bought it in Thailand. lol, Thailand?? The shirt looked like it was made in the 80s, too. Maybe someone got a hold of an old design and started mass producing them there.

My other friend, although he grew up in America and speaks English perfectly well, often wears Japanese t-shirts with non-sensical English written on them. Why he does this, I’m not completely sure. In any case, my friend Matt often makes fun of him for it.

Well, tomorrow is my first full day of classes since we got vacation for the measles outbreak. I’m off to sleep!

Something I forgot to mention yesterday… I was on TV!

I don’t normally watch TV these days because it’s sort of a waste of time. I could say it’s good Japanese listening practice but even then, most of the time I get bored with the programming and I start doing things on my computer so the TV just becomes noise in the background. I only watch a couple of particular shows each week.

Anyway, I decided to get a pizza for dinner from Pizza Hut because it had been a while since I had last eaten pizza. Because I need both hands to eat pizza, I can’t really use the computer, so I decided to turn on the TV. For some reason, I stopped at channel 6 (I think), and after a few seconds, they started doing a news story about Keio University so I kept watching.

They started talking about how Keio had reopened for its classes after a week of closing due to the measle outbreak. This was Saturday which is a pretty unpopular day for people coming to classes anyway. To be honest, I think only foreigners come to class on Saturday because we have no control of when our morning classes are and we have strict attendance rules. Japanese students have more control over their classes and can miss many more classes than us so they never come on Saturdays.

Anyway, on TV, as they were talking about how Keio had reopened, I saw myself!

That morning, I had been walking with a friend of mine to class and we saw a guy standing at the gate holding a large camera pointed right at us. My friend waved at the guy and we both laughed and walked past him. I completely forgot about it after that. I suppose the guy liked my friend’s wave, because he followed us with his camera as we walked past him and into the university building. As they talked about Keio’s reopening, that video section of us walking was shown.

Also, there was another shot with my Middlebury College friend Tyler walking with another guy from our dorm. It’s curious that they included so many foreigners in their shots. Either it’s because it seemed interesting to them or more likely, because foreigners were the only ones going to class on a Saturday.

Furthermore, that was the day of the Keio-Waseda baseball game. Since Keio University and Waseda University are such rivals, we had all classes cancelled after the 1st period. This gave even more incentive not to show up. I would have skipped but I have already skipped Saturday classes twice this semester. Technically, I can skip two more times but… I suppose I’d rather save them.

In any case, it’s pretty remarkable that I haven’t really watched TV for the past couple of weeks and the one time that I turn it on, I not only turn it on 30 seconds before the one minute clip comes up about Keio, but I also happen to change to the right channel at just the right moment.

If I had never ordered that pizza… I would have never known.

Yesterday I got another e-mail from my boss back in the United States. He had another translation project for me. This time, though, it’s not Japanese to English. It’s English to Japanese. Oh, the horror.

Translating from Japanese to English is fine enough since I can write natural sounding English pretty well. Going from English to Japanese, however, is a whole other animal. Not only do I have to deal with the actual process of going from one language to another, but I also have to worry about whether the Japanese I’m rendering sounds natural or if it even makes sense to begin with.

Not only that, but what I’m translating isn’t exactly the easiest material. I get to translate things like “Managing Health Care Risk and Hospital Operations Utilizing Real-Time Data Capture Systems” into Japanese.

I haven’t talked about my job yet in this blog. I’d talk about it now but I’m dead tired from the fact that I had to wake up super early (7:20am) to go to class for the first time in more than week. So, I’m going to go to sleep now… but I’ll talk about my job and some more about my translation tomorrow.

Today I finished reading a volume of manga. This is the third book in the series. Manga are basically Japanese comic books. It is worth nothing, however, that they are significantly different from their American counterparts which is why many people use the Japanese word “manga” to describe them rather than the English ”comic book”.

The reason is that American comic books are best known for being about super heroes. Most comic books in the United States are consumed by males, usually young in age.

In Japan, however, manga is consumed greatly by both males and females and a good deal of manga is marketed towards salarymen. I often see salarymen in trains reading manga or I see them in convenience stores reading the manga magazines. Also, the content of Japanese manga is usually not related to super heroes in any way. Often, the content of manga is more similar to real life situations often focusing on relationships or the fight to get into a good university. This is drastically different from flying men in tight suits fighting each other. Of course, Japanese manga has its strange content, too. Giant battling robots. Capturing wild monsters named things like “pikachu” and training them to fight each other. The list goes on.

Another difference is the way in which the two are presented. The stereotypical image of comic books in the United States are fairly large thin booklets that are stapled together. In Japan, manga is bound together like a traditional book and is small and thick like a book.

For me, I’m very happy that I’m at the level in my Japanese studies that I am able to read and enjoy manga. Of course, I use a dictionary from time to time to look up strange words that pop up but for the most part I am able to understand all the grammar and most of the words. Even if I didn’t look up any words, I would understand the story and what the characters were trying to say just fine.

Also, manga differs from normal books in that it is a story presented in drawn pictures focusing on the words and thoughts of its characters. So, it shows more spoken speech than written speech. This is beneficial for me since there is a stark difference in Japanese between spoken language and written language. Of course, this is probably true for most languages… consider the previous sentence, in normal spoken speech, I probably wouldn’t use the words “beneficial” or “stark”. But in any case, I feel that there are a large number of words in Japanese commonly used in written speech but never used in spoken speech and vice versa.

Because my Japanese classes focus heavily on the written speech, I don’t get much of a chance to study spoken speech. Of course, I hear it all the time and use it when I speak to my Japanese friends but that isn’t quite the same as seeing examples of it and studying them. Manga allows me to do this since it features real spoken language written down for me. It is sometimes difficult because a lot of the words are either so new or are slang, so they don’t appear in normal dictionaries and I am forced to ask my Japanese friends to describe their meanings to me.

I remember before I came to Japan, I would often try to read the manga because I figured they would be good practice and a good way to learn more Japanese. Unfortunately though, this proved too difficult since I didn’t know enough grammar or vocabulary to really get through it. Now that I am able to do it, it gives me a sense of actually having progressed in the language. Also, there’s the added benefit that I can now read comic books and consider that “studying”. As always, after I look up the unknown words, I put them into my notecard program (Mnemosyne) in order to memorize them later.

Speaking of which, I now have 3468 entries in that program, which is about 1734 new words tested both ways in Japanese/English. A while ago, I actually lost 800-1200 entries somehow, so I’ve most likely learned over 2000 new vocabulary words on top of my existing vocabulary. I find this pretty impressive that I was able to get this far. I wonder what my English vocabulary would be like if I added 2000 new words?

Anyway, this semester I haven’t been reading manga as much but perhaps I should start a new 30-day challenge (my previous one being writing an entry in this blog everyday). Perhaps my new 30-day challenge should be reading at least one chapter of manga every night. Hmm… I’ll think about it.

My break from class due to the measles outbreak is coming to an end. I go back to class on Saturday, however, this will only be for one period due to the fact that the rest of the day’s classes are cancelled thanks to the Keio-Waseda baseball game.

Mostly, I’ve been spending my time relaxing, reading, downloading movies and watching them. So far, I’ve watched A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Anchorman, Nacho Libre and Crank.

Tomorrow I think I’ll watch Apocalypto which I’ve been looking forward to because in high school, I studied Spanish literature for two years in my Spanish class so I read quite a few stories involving Mayan and Aztecan elements including one of my favorite short stories, Chac Mool by Carlos Fuentes (who is also one of my favorite authors…) I actually just did a quick search on Google and found the story translated into English here: http://web.mit.edu/jikatz/www/ChacMool.pdf – I’d suggest taking a look if you have the time, it’s not too long. Or, if you are more ambitious, you can read the original Spanish version here: http://www.ciudadseva.com/textos/cuentos/esp/fuentes/chac.htm.

Anyway, in addition to that, I was also fortunate enough to be able to travel to Mexico and see the Mayan pyramind ruins twice recently. Once was with my family about two years ago during the summer. Then a little bit later, I was able to go there with my friend Katie from Middlebury College. Instead of taking a month long January term class last year, we decided to take off and go to an island called Isla Mujeres and teach English there at an English school. I mean, hey, lying on the beach in the sun beats being in sub-zero Vermont temperatures with feet of snow on the ground, right? My parents provided me with the money to go so I thank them very much!

Both times I went to Mexico, I visited Chichén Itzá and other Mayan pyramid sites. I really enjoyed going there maybe because it reminded me of one of my favorite Counter Strike (a computer game) maps, De Aztec, lol. In any case, I hope to go back there one day and visit again. So, for these reasons when I saw the previews for Apocalypto back in the States, I was interested. Also, perhaps the fact that the movie is supposedly in the native languages piqued my linguistic interest.

Anyway, there was a thunderstorm today which doesn’t seem to occur here often. It often rains but I rarely see lightning and thunder. At one point the thunder was so loud that I could not hear the audio from my computer for the movie I was watching.

Unfortunately though, I got caught in the rain a bit later. Since the rain stopped around dinner time, I thought I would be alright since I would just be going out quickly to get something to eat and bring it back to my room. So I didn’t take an umbrella. Well, after I went to the bakery to get some bread products and then to the sushi take out place, it began to rain pretty heavily so I had to endure the rain on my way back.

Luckily here in Japan, they wrap everything. So not only were the pastries I had bought in a large bag, but they were each individually wrapped. Also, the bag which my sushi was placed in was taped at the top so as to prevent rain from coming in. When I returned to the dorm, although the outsides of the bags were soaked, all of the food was perfectly fine. It was a good dinner since it consisted of two of my favorite foods… bread and sushi. Looks like I was able to bring the best of the West and the East into one meal

I came across a news article in Japanese the other day about smoking in Japan. Before I came to Japan, I always had the image that more people in Japan smoke than people do in America and I think this is fairly true. I always see salarymen smoking in the designated areas in the train stations or salarymen are smoking next to me at the counter in restaurants. While it is annoying, I have noticed that cigarette smoke in Japan does not seem to smell as bad or as toxic as it does in the United States. I’m unsure but perhaps they have different regulations, use different tobacco or have a different composition for their cigarettes here in Japan which results in a better smell.

In any case, what I found interesting about this article, (which can be found here: http://news.mixi.jp/view_news.pl?id=219620&media_id=4, it’s in Japanese and it’s on mixi, so you’ll need an account to see it), was that of people entering the workforce now (aged 20-25), about 88% do not smoke at all.

75.8% had never smoked. 12.2% had smoked but quit. 12% smoke. I think this is a much lower rate of smoking than in previous generations. I’d be interested to see what percentage of Americans in this age group smoke. 12% smoking for Japanese 20-25 year olds seems pretty low to begin with. I wonder if the American percentage is even lower?

As far as Americans around my age that I know, very few of them smoke. Of the ones who smoke, I’d say more than 75% of them are trying to quit or have tried to quit in the past. Back at my college in America, Middlebury College, although European students make up a small percentage of the students, I’d say there are more European smokers than American smokers! Since all buildings are non-smoking, I often see the Europeans after dinner huddling together outside of the dining hall in the harsh Vermont cold smoking their cigarettes. Different culture, I suppose.

Other interesting facts from the article were that of those people who did not smoke, 65.2% did not smoke for the reason that it was bad for one’s health. Other reasons were that it costs money and dislike of the smell that gets into one’s hair and clothes.

As for people who did smoke, 46.2% smoked because it relieved stress. 24.6% smoked because it was relaxing. Interestingly enough, 94.2% of the smokers agreed with the statement, “Smoking is harmful to my health” and 89.8% agreed with the statement, “Smoking is harmful to the health of the people around me.”

Probably some day, cigarettes will become non-existent. Although today we are used to people smoking and have had marketing campaigns and other such things to make the image of smoking a cigarette cool, when the day comes that cigarettes become non-existent, people will probably look back at photographs of people today smoking and think how silly they look.

Before Keio University cancelled all classes due to the measle outbreak. My teacher said something interesting during class. She said that according to some survey done recently, the longer foreigners stay in Japan, the unhappier they become with their lives in Japan.

This is not particularly surprising to me. When I learned Japanese under Eleanor Harz Jorden (author of Japanese: The Spoken Language (JSL)), she told me and the other student many stories of Americans eager to live in Japan only to go and find out that it wasn’t quite what they expected. Not only was it not what they quite expected, it was actually unpleasant.

This is interesting to me because I haven’t seen any other country besides Japan that is loved so intensely by a particular group of people in America. Namely, those people who love computers, computer games, video games, anime (Japanese animation), manga (Japanese comic books), etc. These people in America even go as far as calling themselves “otaku” which is a derogatory term in Japan to describe socially inept nerds who are interested in computers, comic books, etc.

But the fascination with Japan is not limited to these “nerd” types. I’ve seen people interested in Japan to an unhealthy sense just because they like “the culture” or some other vague aspect of it.

I’ve seen many of these people in my Japanese classes back in America. I’ve seen many more of them on Internet forums and in other computer related places.

Now, I’ve studied other languages besides Japanese. I’ve studied Spanish, French, German and have come in contact with plenty of other language learners simply because it’s a hobby of mine. The truth is, I’ve never seen people who learn Spanish yearning for Spain like Japanese learners yearn for Japan.

There is something about Japan, Japanese culture or the Japanese language that seems to attract these people in America. My theory for why this is goes something like this… Japan is often placed culturally at the opposite end of the spectrum from American culture. From an American’s perspective, Japan is exotic and strange. Additionally, Japan is a huge producer of video games and popular cultural items including anime, manga, etc.

For this reason, Japan is very appealing to Americans who are very interested in computers, video games, cartoons, comic books, etc. As it turns out, these types of people usually aren’t the coolest ones in high school. Since they cannot fit well into mainstream society in America, they turn to something which seems like the exact opposite to them, namely, Japan. Due to Japan’s appeal through popular cultural items, this type of attachment is intensified.

Unfortunately, what these people don’t realize is that Japan is not what they see in its cartoons or video games. As a result, when they move to Japan and get over the initial enamoredness of being in a new place, they realize it is not quite the place that welcomes them with open arms like they expected. Just because Japan produces a lot of anime, games, etc. does not mean that all Japanese people are interested in that sort of thing.

Although perhaps changing a little now, foreigners are usually never accepted at the same level as native Japanese people are within Japanese society. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived in Japan or how well you speak Japanese. Again, I remember one story told to me by my teacher Eleanor Jorden which consisted of a women she knew who studied Japanese intensely in university and was full set on moving to Japan permanently. She finally got to Japan, took a job at a Japanese company and even married a Japanese man through an arranged marriage company. However, after 5-10 years of this, things started to fall apart and she eventually left Japan permanently, saying, “I am no more accepted by Japanese society now than I was when I first got here 10 years ago,” attesting to the difficultly foreigners face within Japanese society.

Japanese people themselves are somewhat aware of the strange foreigners that come to their country. A couple of weeks ago, a television program featured these foreigners who are enamored with video games, anime, manga, etc. In a way, the show ridiculed them and showed them in perhaps their natural Japanese habitat, Akihabara, a place where otaku of all likes gather.

I’m lucky to have been aware enough so as not to have this sort of disillusionment before coming to Japan. Perhaps as a result of this, I don’t really feel any more of a foreigner than I do in my own country but maybe that’s just my particular situation. So, as I go about my normal web browsing here, I often come across those Americans who don’t know the truth championing Japan and its culture. And, of course, I also see the other Americans who are greatly annoyed at this type of people. There are quite a few articles already written on the Internet concerning these Americans who love Japanese culture so perhaps in the future, I’ll post some links to them and revisit this topic. 

According to Measles forces Keio to shut down, Keio University closed because 34 students became infected with measles. It seems that the outbreak is continuing to spread. I think the outbreak began sometime mid-april or possibly even before then. It’s only been now though that it’s really starting to hit universities in Tokyo. It will be interesting to see if the outbreak continues to grow or slows down due to all of the university closings. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

It was one of those nights that when I stepped out of the air conditioned bounds of my room, I felt a certain humid heat sweep over me. The sort of heat I imagined Borges’ characters felt in his world of magic realism.

I had just returned from a class party. Shortly after stepping into my room and settling down in front of my computer to idly check my e-mail and various sites which hadn’t changed since the last time I visited them, I heard the thumping again. Recently, this noise has become somewhat of a daily occurence. I have the sense that it is coming from above my room and that it sounds like someone stomping around. Most likely, they are not stomping around but rather just walking. It’s that all of the other frequencies of the sound waves are cut out save the bass which transmits through the thick ceiling that separates my room from the rooms above me resulting in the banging sound that I hear.

That’s it, I thought, I’m going to find out who this is once and for all.

I had, of course, tried to figure out the source of this noise before but to no avail. It always seemed to stop right before I left my room to go find it. Tonight however was different. The stomping seemed to continue on and on. Tonight, I left the comfortable coolness of my room to seek out the perpetrator above me on the third floor. Yet, it was impossible to pinpoint the noise. When I went up the stairs directly outside my room’s door, the noise seemed to reverberate around the halls coming from no direction in particular. In fact, when I was on the third floor, the noise appeared to come from the floor above that one.

But I still looked around the third floor. First, I sought out the room directly above mine. Although it was late, light shone out beneath it. I heard a girl coughing on the other side. Was she the source of the noise? The noise seemed to be coming from a different place. If I confronted her and she wasn’t the source, it would be a poor mistake.

How could someone be making this noise anyway? Our rooms were small enough so that even if someone were walking around, they’d reach the other end of the room in not too many steps. It was impossible for one to keep up this sort of noise for minutes and minutes at a time. Was someone doing calisthenics at 1am in their room?

In the heat, I walked around the halls to see if I could hear the noise emanating from any one particular room. Someone was singing to music from their computer. I found other doors with light shining through the crack at the bottom. Again, there was no clear source of the incessant sound. It seemed to come from the building itself.

I opened the door of my room and returned to the air conditioned coolness. The noise continued somewhere above me. I’ll have to figure this out some other time, I thought, for now I just hope it’ll stop.

I woke up today to a message on my cell phone from a friend suggesting that my university was possibly closed. So I quickly turned on my computer and went to the university’s website. I found this message…

“Cancellation of all lectures due to the measles out break

Update: 26  May 2007

Due to the measles outbreak, all lectures of Undergraduate, Graduate, and Bekka(Japanese Language Program) held at Mita, Hiyoshi, Yagami, SFC campus will be cancelled for the following period.

MAY 26 (Sat.) 3rd period to JUNE 1(Fri.) whole day

NOTE:
Students must stay home for your study.

Use of Library, study room and ITC facilities are restricted for all students during this period.

All club activities are restricted. Students are not permitted to use class rooms and club activity rooms during this period.

If you have never had measles or have never been vaccinated against measles, it is advisable you receive proper vaccination. Consult with the nearest hospital.

If you have been diagnosed with measles, contact the Health Center of Keio University (045-566-1055) or the International Center (03-5427-1614) as soon as possible.”

Looks like my prayers were answered! No class for all of next week! Also, interestingly enough, the day we’re supposed to return, Saturday, I only have class for one period. This is because Saturday is Keio’s baseball game against our rival Waseda University, so all classes are cancelled after the first period for that.

Looks like I have a bit of free time now