September 12, 2008

I went to Lake Biwa wih my host family. It is sort of like Lake Tahoe, if Lake Tahoe

had served as the setting for many classic American novels.

I sat on the beach with Keiko (mom) and talked about Maine, where there are lots

of lobsters and my grandmother swims in the cold water every day (that is what I

explained.) Taku-chan brought over a newly-hatched dragonfly who appeared to

have crippled wings. Keiko transferred it from his hand to a stick, and then onto her hand.

It fell off and landed on its side, shriveled wings barely moving; I got up and moved it

into some reeds where it would be safe. When I came back, Keiko confirmed that べいそう

(second homes) are fairly rare in Japan but that her former husband had been a

wind-surfing fanatic, checking the weather every morning and racing to Biwa if the

wind was good, so that they’d eventually built their own place in an area colonized

largely by company retreats.

Later, when the rest of the family was napping, Grandma told me essentially the same

story, including that Keiko’s husband had been よし(when an established family has

only daughters, they sometimes adopt a husband into their registry so that the family name

will continue; when they married, Keiko’s husband took her name, and the kids are

all Kitayamas) and that he had died about 6 years ago. “Was he sick?” I asked.

She bobbled her head around a little bit. “It seems like it was an accident.”

I don’t know exactly what that means.

September 11, 2008

My Japanese teacher is so COOL. BabelFish this: she is from Kyoto, teaches usually

at Columbia, has industrial piercings and a tattoo across her shoulders that shows

through linen shirts. She seems very shrewd, and does not care for me much as a

student. (Although I work very hard and have gotten A’s on all of my assignments so

far, I rarely talk in class and when I do I often accidentally use short form.)

I want for her to like me AS A PERSON. How do I do this? I don’t know anything about

heavy metal. I hope that as the semester continues my fellow classmates will sink further

into their flaws and she will have no choice but to appreciate my quiet non-personality.

Also! I have a cell phone, it is 080-3832-1997 (I chose the last four digits for the year

that the world’s cultural output peaked) and an email address that sends things directly

to my cell phone: tanukineirikate@softbank.jp.

September 10, 2008

I don't particularly like the house where I live; everything seems to have been

made or bought about 25 years ago. Some decorating themes are linoleum,

linoleum made to resemble wood or marble, dubiously copyright protected cartoon

character decals, life-like sculptures of puppies. Surprisingly bad taste for

Japanese - basically Taiwanese taste.

But! Every morning I set out for my classroom in Kyoto (University) proper, a small

cedar box just off the main campus built solely for use by my program. The smell,

construction (minimal, practical, walls-as-windows), and requisite shoe removal all

make the experience feel very regressive, and my strongest impulse during class is to

sit on the floor or turn somersaults. It feels like summer camp or kindergarten; speaking

a language in which I am forced into mental youth contribute to this no doubt.

September 9, 2008

Here’s the other rub in my relations with the world outside of Japan: I am

disconnected from the World Wide Web in Japan unless I sit backwards at the

breakfast table and balance my laptop on the windowsill while my host family

scrambles under and around me (two kids and one dog so that’s lots of 4-legged

scrambling). I always intend to use those three or four minutes for web maintenance

but then defer composition to a less hectic time, but there is no internet anywhere

else in the house and I keep expecting some beam of wi-fi to strike my room. And

so, like incest, the cycle continues... the only solution, and one I am employing now,

is to compose en masse and upload whenever I can. I apologize to any regular

blog readers (??) and recommend that you start thinking of the Katorade Japan

blog in the same forgiving terms as you considers its author.

September 8, 2008

Sorry for lazy upkeep. It takes more work to translate a whole life, than a book

by Yoshida Shuichi.

September 7, 2008

HA! After my placement test they placed me in second semester third year

Japanese but then I made myself so anxious and sad about it (even though it

was a whole semester higher than I should have placed to begin with) that

I infected them with sympathy from afar and they moved me up to first semester

fourth year without me even risking asking to be moved! BRAIN POWER!

September 6, 2008

I am anti-barbecue for very obvious reasons: I get overwhelmed by family

gatherings and hate the food. Cookout effluvia (playing with charcoal briquettes,

pushing things around on a grill, various cancerous smells, the eventual

s’more) are enjoyable, but I am too big of a pill to concede my enjoyment, and

always end up sitting off towards the woods with a gutted hotdog bun and a

bunch of ketchup packets.

The Japan vs. barbecue experiment was a successful one, though; my own

oppressively familiar family was replaced by the Kitayamas’, there were bundles

of grilled mushrooms and eggplants, and it was all within the confines of a back

yard fragrant with citronella coils.

An older uncle had brought his ukulele and an American songbook. I scooted my

my child’s Minnie Mouse foldable chair (“ケイト細いだから大丈夫”) over to help

him with his English pronunciation and ended up, despite my mantle of inhibitions,

singing along to such classics (?!) as Elvis’ “Blue Hawaii” and some Karen

Carpenter song that I had never heard before. He asked if I knew what had happened

to Karen Carpenter and I nodded gravely, expecting a warning, but he just

concluded with the factoid that her brother had once given a speech at Kyoudai.

September 5, 2008

Unfortunate that the most disconcerting thing to happen to me in my entire

Asian parentheses so far happened in Japan (instead of Korea) and with a

host family among whom I feel fairly comfortable (instead of, ahh, any other

situation I can imagine). Their house is three stories and I get the bottom one

almost entirely to myself, as the only other room houses Taku-chan’s expansive

model railroad (my dad was so0o0o jealous). And my room is itself very large,

with its own sink, microwave, and half-bath. But! Situated on a corner created

by two highways, it is noisy and vulnerable to peeping toms, so to protect me my

family has shuttered both large windows and turned the room into something

of a dungeon.

I realized that the reason I wake at 6 without fail is that I always sleep with the

curtains open and react to the sun as it rises. Without access to natural light,

last night, I was terrified and disoriented. I guess I could never be a real おたく if

only because it would deprive me of my early morning routines.

September 4, 2008

I hope the last update primed you to be astonished by this beatitude: Hannah

Airriess! I though I was lucky to have met Marxy; Hannah lived in Hong

Kong when I did, studied Chinese when I did, made the same necessary

conversion to Japanese, knows about Yoppy and Judith Butler and David

Berman too!

Meeting someone who has advanced even further than me on this very

particular direction of self-construction reminds me of some questions,

both from Alice, that might be better solved in a statistics class: there are lots

of deer along the road to Bolinas. Does this mean the surrounding forest

is filled with deer, or that they have all flocked to the road? And: there is a

Salvation Army right outside the Williamsburg subway stop that must be picked

dry by all the hipster traffic, and so no one ever bothers to look inside. So is

it actually the best thrift store in New York?

Is meeting Hannah in as small and unlikely a program as KCJS proof that

only she exists or a teaser from a world that might yield more potential friends

of similarly unbelievable caliber?

Hip pip pooray!

September 3, 2008

I had very few expectations, or very low expectations, of my fellow

students in KCJS. They were not unfounded; I am unusual in my

Japanese studies in that I have no particular desire to be Japanese,

or date a Japanese person, or read manga in the original. Most

people willing to move to Japan for a year are motivated by some

combination of the three, I would say in vast generalization, and for

that reason I steeled myself for 8 months of civility and subtle avoidance.

Most fears were confirmed before I even arrived in Kyoto. I surrepticiously

visited (but could not risk joining) the KCJS Facebook group (sample Wall

Message: “Izakaya! Izakaya! Izakaya!”) and made a rash taxonomy of the

participants. They were easy to spot in the Fujita Hotel, and I did my best

to avoid introductions. Maybe they would think I was a Swiss tourist?

But such games can only last for so long in a city as small as Kyoto and

I have given into the strained joviality of orientation. Like freshman year

all over again! Rats! I already wrote a satirical email to Jaewon about

some of my classmates but this is not the time or place to alienate them

so stay tuned for a September seething.

September 2, 2008

I developed the bad habit of running Japanese emails through

BabelFish to make sure I wasn’t missing anything essential or

translating logistics incorrectly. Some Japanese word – I still don’t

know exactly which, but it must occur commonly – always comes

out as “shank” in English.

After much redundant confirmation on both sides, my Daddo and I

met the Kitayamas – Grandmother, Mom, Taku-chan and Miyu-chan –

for dinner on Monday night. Since I will have a year to describe the

four I will only offer a tiny vignette:

As the adults (+ 12 year old Miyu) sat in the dining room finishing up

sashimi and stir-fried rice, Taku (age 7) bounced around within the

wide frame of the living room doorway. He sang; he picked up fragments

of conversation and repeated them to himself; he made various pets

corroborate in his mischief. At one point he held the Pomeranian Momo

to his chest while hopping on a mini-trampoline and wailing an ode to

himself.

Already he has taught me onomatopoeia for the pained noises one

makes after stubbing a toe or acquiring a rug burn.

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