WARNING:  This post is another really long one.  I apologize, but a lot happened today.  Hopefully you’ll find it interesting.

Today has probably been the longest day yet, so I’ll do my best to fit in everything.

The day started with me not wanting to get out of bed until 7:45.  I guessed that people were going to meet up for breakfast at 7:50 since we had to meet as a group at 8:50, but I had to pack and I didn’t really care about missing breakfast.  I had to pack because we checked out of the hotel before the day’s activities started.  I watched some TV as I packed, and I could make the boring comments about how weird Japanese TV is, but I can see how it makes sense in a way.

Ok, that needs some qualifiers.  Most of what I was watching was children’s programs, because I couldn’t understand anything else, hell I could barely understand the kid’s programs.  Anyway, The kids programs were young adults being really happy and energetic with some kids supposedly going along with the adults, but the kids were just kind of doing their own thing most of the time.  These segments were interspersed with really simple songs set to simple animation, and there were also skits that, well were like what a kid would think up.

There was one skit where these two people in body suits (like a big bird body suit, except the body suits were of…unconventional looking characters), decided they wanted to be king, so they had various kinds of shoubu (competitions) to determine who would be king.  Ultimately, no matter what they did, they tied, so they decided to split their land and rule separately, but then they decided to have another shoubu over which kingdom their female companion would reside in.

I mean, sure the costumes were weird and it was overly dramatic, but I can see how that panders to Japanese kids, and how it can be educational and fun for them.  I mean, because of one of those songs, I now know that “mushroom” in Japanese is きのこ.

I finished packing and went down to meet up with everyone.  The first event of the day was to go to Shimogamo Shrine and pray for a successful year.  We took a bus to the shrine and I ended up talking with a girl named Becky about anime and stuff.  We got off the bus and got to the main entrance to the shrine.

Shimogamo shrine is a really cool place.  By this time, a lot of the novelty of walking around the streets of Japan is wearing off.  However, that’s all made up by the fact that Japan has some seriously bitching ancient architecture.  There’s a small wood around Shimogamo, and the entrance to the wood and the wide path that cuts through it looks really cool.  It also has two old laterns on either side of the entrance which are pretty, and there’s an old map showing the location of all the buildings within the shrine complex.

We started walking towards the shrine, and one of the professors, Jamie Hubbard, explained various aspects of the shrine to us, most of which I forget.  We got to the entrance to the shrine, and there’s a protocol involved.  Before entering the shrine, or any shrine, for that matter, you first wash your hands, and some people wash their mouth.  The way you do it is, you take a ladel, in this case we put it under a faucet, and you wash your left hand first, then your right, then if you want you can wash your mouth by putting some water in your hand, sucking it into your mouth, then spitting it onto the ground.  The water they provide is drinkable and very pure.

On a side note, the water in Japan is fanastic.  I mean, a lot of places have really terrible water, it just does not taste good at all.  The water in Kyoto is great; it doesn’t taste bad, and after walking around in the humidity and heat, there’s really nothing like a glass of cold water, or of cold mugicha, which is barley tea.  It sounds gross, and the first few times you have it, it is gross.  But then you walk around in the heat and humidity for hours, go into a restaurant, and mugicha is like a godsend; you just want more and more.

Ok, so after the cleaning ritual, you head through the torii, or the gate to the shrine.  Apparently you’re not supposed to go directly in the middle of the shrine because that’s “god’s way,” by which they mean, “the way of the kami.”  Although, this was learned from a Doshisha students during the practice commute, so I’m not sure how accurate it is, but if that’s true, that’s pretty interesting.  We walked into the shrine, me taking pictures all the while, and we headed into the courtyard of the shrine.

We were met by a shrine maiden and were escorted through the shrine building to an area where we were seated and waited for the ceremony to begin.  Yeah, we got our very own ceremony at Shimogamo Shrine, how cool is that?

The ceremony started out with head priest (maybe he wasn’t the head priest, I don’t know), banging a gong in a specific way; slow and heavy at first, but light and faster towards the end.  Then he made his way over to the front/middle area of where we were seated and began to chant.  If you’ve heard shinto priests praying, you can imagine what it sounded like.  It’s a specialized kind of speech that dates back hundreds, maybe a thousand or so years, and apparently hardly any Japanese people nowadays understand what the priests are saying, even the priests themselves, sometimes.

The ceremony was really cool, and afterwards the priest talked to us a little bit about the shrine, then were given a tour of the courtyard and its buildings.  During this tour I got to speak to one of my professors this semester, who seemed to be a pretty cool guy.  After the tour, we all went to pray at the little shrine dedicated to our Chinese Zodiac sign.  Oddly, there were only seven little shrines.  The shrine maiden giving us the tour gave us several different explanations that she gives to people when they ask why there are seven shrines.  The stories she told were pretty amusing, but the one that she usually tells people was more confusing than the stories.  Oh well.

I took lots of pictures of the shrine, which I’ll put online once I have time to organize stuff.  After praying, we headed out to make our way to Imadegawa; to the Doshisha campus.  We all got to take taxis to the campus, which was pretty cool, and seemed rather extravagant to me.  Once back at the campus, we had a Japanese Language orientation session where we went over the details of our language classes and were split up into review groups (the first week of classes will be review for our Japanese classes).  Once in our groups, we talked a little bit about our summers, and some basic etiquette for meeting our host family and giving omiyage and stuff.

After our orientation session, we were split into different groups to go on a tour of Doshisha with Doshisha students.  At first I was afraid, then I was less afraid when we were split into groups.  My group headed to the cafeteria and got some food, and once we started eating, some of us discovered that one of our tour guides was fluent in English, and that she loved America, so most of the time we talked to her in English about her English experiences and about other random stuff.  I felt kind of bad, not talking in Japanese, but it was really nice to be able to talk to a Japanese student and relate to them a bit and be able to communicate.

On a similar note to that, one of our other guides, I believe his name was Takura-san, asked me about my game tastes, and we talked a bunch about games, like Modern Warfare, and he asked if I had played Condemned and I started to geek out about it to him, but then we got to a building and the other guides introduced us to it.  It was cool talking with Takura-san because apparently no one in Japan has an Xbox, so being able to talk about games with him was really fun.

The tour was kind of irrelevant (although Takura-san did show us this one place to eat that he said was good and had big portions) because most of the time was spent talking with the guides and not really paying attention to what they were showing us.  Ultimately I got Takura-san and Tomomi-san (the fluent one) and the other’s (I forgot her name >_<) email and phone numbers, so hopefully I’ll get to see them again.  After the tour I did a stationary errand with a couple people and headed back to the hotel.

Despite having checked out, the hotel was letting us use several rooms to shower and change clothes for the night’s event.  Tonight was the night that we met our host family.  Upon getting to the room, I didn’t want to do anything, so most of us lounged for a while.  Ultimately I showered, lounged a little more, watched some TV which I didn’t understand, then started to get dressed.  Before leaving the US, my dad and I went shopping for formal clothes for this event, and we went to the Men’s Warehouse (cue idiomatic tagline).  When we went there, they were having a sale where if you bought something, you could get another of the same thing for free.  My dad just so happened to be in desperate need of a new tuxedo for work, and a suit was in the same category as a tux, so I more or less got a really nice suit for free.

That was what I wore to the Welcome Party, and I did like the way I looked.  Leading up to the Welcome Party I was super nervous.  I was so worried that I wouldn’t understand my host family, I wouldn’t have anything to say, I’d fuck up, etc.  But when I was actually called over to meet my okaasan (mother), all the nervousness just kind of went away.  I feel like that happens to me in a lot of situations like that.  It’ll feel like there’s a lot of pressure on me, then when it comes down to it, I don’t feel nervous at all.  I managed to talk with some frequency with my host mother (my host father was working so he couldn’t come), and I was also partially saved by my professor with whom I was talking at Shimogamo, who made conversation with my okaasan in Japanese.  Eventually we were led upstairs to a large room with lots of tables.  All of us sat down and the event started with several speeches by various important members of Doshisha, and there was even someone from the US Consulate there.

After the speeches, we were left to get food and converse.  At that point, a friend of my okaasan had shown up, so she would occasionally ask questions, and my host mother would sometimes ask questions, and sometimes I would ask a question, so despite some awkward silences, it went well.  It was interesting trying to figure out how to say things (explaining why I grew out my hair was probably the hardest, but it was so satisfying when I finally figured out a way after 5 minutes of confusion).  The evening wound down with some more speeches, introductions by each student (I fumbled the most, but whatever), and some more final speeches, and after suffering through someone from the US Consulate telling us about job openings at the consulate, we were free to leave with our families.

I went downstairs with my okaasan, grabbed my carry-on and my backpack, and we went into Kyoto Station (it’s so much easier to say Kyoto 駅.  the kanji is pronounced “eki”) to catch the JR Kosei line back to Ono Station, where my house is.  By the time we got on the train, the friend of my okaasan had left us, and it was just me and her.

I started to get a little nervous because I wanted to talk to her, so I tried to think of things to say.  I thought of several things and would say them, and my okaasan would also say tings to me and sometimes we even had short conversations, instead of just a statement and a response.  The really surprising part was that I understood almost everything that she was saying.  I mean, sometimes she’d have to explain a word to me, but I think there was only one time the whole night where I couldn’t understand what was being said.

Also, let it be known that my host family is pretty cool, based on the impression I got from them.  For instance, I asked why they became a host family, and my okaasan said that back when my otousan (father) was in college, he studied in Canada and stayed with a host family and really enjoyed the experience and had a really cool host family, and that’s why he wanted his to be a host family as well.  I think that’s really cool, that his host family Canada was so cool, that he was inspired to also be really cool.  Something about that really resonates with me.  Like, I can totally see myself acting the same way.

Anway, as we rode the train back to the house, we talked with a bit more frequency, and it became easier to talk with her.  We finally got to the house, and boy is it a nice house.  It’s a modern style house, which I don’t mind at all.  I mean tatami is really cool and everything, and having a futon would be an experience, but not having to deal with a futon every day will probably just make my life a little easier.  At any rate there’s an ofuro.  Ok, back to the house.  the house is really nice, I mean, goddamn, it’s a nice house.

My room is a good reason for why this is a nice house.  I have a really nice bed, I have an air conditioner with a remote for it, I have my own desk, bookshelves, I have a fucking mini-fridge for drinks, and a little basket on top for snacks, and I have a sink in my room.  A sink.  A little odd, but in a way, really convenient.  I was escorted up to my room and left to my own devices.  I didn’t know whether I should unpack or give them the omiyage, or what.  I decided to unpack a little because my otousan still hadn’t come home.  Once he did, he came up to greet me, then my ryoushin (parents) showed me how to use the ac, then they showed me the protocol for using the ofuro.

After doing this, they let me use the ofuro and I took my sweet time.  It wasn’t as hot as the public ofuro, but it was still very nice, and the water was so clean that you could see straight through it, it was that clear.  After the ofuro, I decided to see if I could give them the omiyage, because we had been told to do it right after we got there.  I asked if it was ok, and my okaasan said yes, so I gave them their gifts.

The gifts I ended up getting for them were: a t-shirt from Amoeba Records, a really famous music store in the Bay Area, which I got for the father since he plays guitar.  A DVD of the Nutcracker which I described as a famous ballet performed by the San Francisco Ballet.  A tiny Ghiradelli chocolate Golden Gate Bridge, and a streetcar model with Ghiradelli Chocolate squares inside.  And finally, a San Francisco Mime Troupe t-shirt, which my mom bought and decided that I should give to them.  They seemed to enjoy the omiyage, and after that they showed me a photo album with pictures of their last AKP student, who happened to also be from Oberlin.  His name is Peter, and I don’t know him, which is a shame.  Although apparently my okaasan knows some of my friends who went on AKP last year, so that’s really cool.

After looking through the album, I decided to go to bed, so I excused myself and came upstairs to write this post.

There’s some stuff I left out.  For instance, I met my oniisan (older brother), Yuusake, and there’s probably some impressions and thoughts that I’m forgetting, but it’s been a long day and I’m tired.  Thank the lord my okaasan is letting me sleep in tomorrow.  Jya, I’ll say good night here.

-Shimon

P.S. My family has a Wii, which I don’t think they use much, and I see what looks to be Taiko Drumcon boxes in my closet, which I’m excited about, because I love Taiko no Tatsujin.  Ok, no I’m going to bed.  Soooooo tired.