Been a while, been busy.

The first thing of note was that I saw a film on Wednesday.  It’s called toilet; it’s Canadian, directed by a Japanese woman, and it’s in English.  I saw this film for my course on the “Other” in Postwar Japanese Cinema.  Why this particular film?  Because it was made by a Japanese person, and it did deal with the concept of the “other,” in this case, an old Japanese grandmother, living with these Canadians, who doesn’t speak a word of English.

I liked the film.  It was almost three hours but it was a good film, and the direction that the film went with the concept of the “other” was interesting.  I don’t really want to go into too much detail with it; not in an analyzing mood right now.

That was Wednesday, or what I remember of Wednesday.  Oh yeah, we had a Japanese reading class, which focused on, hey, you guessed it, reading comprehension.  We have a different professor for our reading classes and she’s really cool.  Her name is Imao sensei.

Thursday was when I got my phone.  I wanted to sign up for a contract and get a cool phone, but we spent at least half an hour trying to work out the logistics, and ultimately we decided that getting a prepaid phone would be way easier.  I’m satisfied, though: my phone is pink.  It has a button on the side that opens the phone by itself.  Pretty much the major things I wanted in my phone.

After the phone adventure, I met up with people at a matsuri, or, a festival.  Matsuri’s abound in Japan, and this was a small one.  There were various food stands and such set up on the street outside the shrine (oh yeah, matsuri’s are always held at a shrine).  Apparently the matsuri started the previous night, but this morning/afternoon, it started with some children parading down the street playing music and singing some song.  After they passed by, a bunch of men in some kind of traditional clothing, not too fancy, passed out the gates of the shrine carrying…  There is no english word that I know that can describe what it was they were carrying.  You know how royalty in some countries used to be carried around by people?  Like, there would be four people carrying this big wooden board with some kind of chamber on top, in which the royal figure would recline?  Imagine that, with more people supporting it, and a miniature shrine instead of a royal resting thing.  That’s kind of what it was.

I honestly didn’t have much interest in the matsuri, maybe from overexposure to Japan at that point.  We quickly left the matsuri and looked for food.  After food, we went over to a friend’s house, which was located near Doshisha campus, which was the area in which we were in.

Her house was really nice.  It was very big for a Japanese house, it was traditional style, so tatami mats, low tables, those ceiling lamps that are circular, the whole thing.  We didn’t just hang out at her house, we were actually studying because one of our friends had a bunch of vocab to memorize for the next day.  Oh right, Thursday was a holiday.  Sorry, should have clued you in sooner.

So yeah, studying happened.  I actually ended up writing a tiny story.  My friend had looked up something in her electric dictionary, and the english translation she got was the word “antrorse.”  Upon being shown this, I said “a beast long since forgotten by mankind.”  That gave me the beginning of an idea for a story, or rather a setting, so I started making up a story on the vocab sheet I was studying.  It wasn’t long, but it was fun to write.

Eventually my friend left and it was just me and my other friend, whose house we were in.  We decided to get food and chill on the banks of the Kamogawa.  It was really fun; there were some people setting off fireworks, some people just chilling and playing music.  We sat down on some old stone steps and talked for like, and hour and a half.

The highlights of today include watching the first part of this excellent movie called The Human Condition, which is about a mining camp in Manchuria during the second world war.  It was for our cinema class, and a lot of people had trouble following what was going on, which was weird to me, because honestly it wasn’t that hard.  Whatever.

Tonight was the first time I had done karaoke.  I want to say it was fun, which it was, but I don’t know, there was something about it which wasn’t as fun as I thought it should have been.  Whoever is reading this, remind me to actually write about how karaoke joints work in Japan, because I’m really apathetic right now and I don’t want to go into it.

Which leads into the funk I’m in.  I’m coughing it up to the language barrier I keep banging my head into, and the stresses of a new social circle, not to mention an entirely new society.  Oh yeah, and I keep bumping into things and hurting myself.  I can’t really put my finger on what’s bringing me down, probably just a temporary thing.

One thing I do want to do is study, a lot.  I’ve said this, but I get more out self-studying lessons of Genki than from anything else so far.  Admittedly we’re about to start using the textbook in Japanese class, but it’s been two and a half weeks without significant progress and blah blah blah.  So yeah, I’m gonna stay in tomorrow, study a bunch of Genki, finally meet my imouto, and just relax, hopefully get out of this funk.

~Shimon