Nippon ni sunde ita.
[I lived in Japan.]

Greetings from Hirakata City, Japan. The weather continues to be cold and clear. The following is a short summary of my time in Japan as themed around my morning commute. It's not everything important, just the stuff you think of on your way to school. Stuff in all caps is something a Japanese person might say, not matter how much it looks like English. Brackets are translations. I would have liked to have written more and proof read it more thoroughly, but it seems I'm already out of time.
ENJOY SHITE KUDASAI.
----

MORNING GET-UP TIME
HIGASHI NEYAGAWA SHI
[East Sleep-store-river City]
Ah, morning in Japan. Another day has dawned, and that means it's time to get up outta bed and walk to the train station. The Nagasé family with whom I'm staying is pretty good to me. We get along much better than I ever could have hoped. They even started buying cereal for me, in spite of Japan's incredible dearth thereof. When we went to the supermarket, I was always thoroughly disgusted by the shockingly small variety available. There's Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, a few off brand flakes, and chocolate Ohs. That's it. Plus, my host family owns no regular sized spoons, only curry spoons, serving spoons, and teaspoons. Still, we all manage to get along together in spite of, or maybe because of, the linguistic, cultural, and gastronomic barriers between us. I eat dinner at home every school night, and just talk about my day or whatever. Dinner tends towards a cooked fish and rice, miso soup, and some sort of vegetable. Still, there's a fair amount variety in it all. Okâsan [Japanese for mom] is always telling me to mix my food, eat slowly, and hold my rice bowl with my non-chopstick wielding hand. I try to do that but still forget a lot. Whenever I have to remember what American food is like, a task that Japanese people frequently call on me to do, all I can think of is our many variations on the sandwich. My host family's electronic dictionary just lists hoagie/sub/grinder/hero as synonym for sandwich. That example is a disgrace by the dictionary, but it's true that American food maybe tends towards combining meat and bread into things like hot dogs and hamburgers. Japanese sandwiches are either very very good or very very poor and seem to frequently contain eggs. A special small, square, crustless, white bread is commonly employed in the creation of sandwiches here. So while America food is based on sandwiches, Japanese food seems to revolve around the three main kinds of noodles: ramen, soba, and udon. Okâsan seems to like thick udon noodles and will sometimes cook it up in a nabé (essentially Japanese stew). I like a nice pork ramen, myself, or yaki-soba. Yaki is a generic term for cooking/frying or something, and so there are many yakis in the Japanese food galaxy: suki-yaki, yaki-niku, yaki-tori, yaki-udon, okonomi-yaki, tako-yaki, etc., etc. The yakis in turn illustrate the Japanese tendency to make people cook food themselves. Okonomi-yaki, yaki-niku, and who knows what else are all presented to customers at a restaurant in an uncooked state. It is then the job of the customer to cook the food him or herself on a hot plate embedded in the table. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the so-called "Japanese Steakhouse" phenomenon in America, in which a chef cooks flashily before you. This DIY aesthetic extends even to the foods of others nations, as I learned when I order soft tacos one time. Being presented with all the components of the soft taco, it was clear that it was my responsibility to undertake their final assembly into one edible unit. It was all a little strange perhaps, but the taco was decent. On the two occasions when I ate at a Mexican restaurant, my okâsan just laughed at me when I came back. Such food is still considered very exotic here; in spite of the packed in crowds at McDonald's, the Japanese diet has still not branched out to the full range of America's many cuisines. I gave Okâsan her first ever bag of pretzels one day. I think she expected them to taste like carmel, and she pronounced their taste to be "shimpuru." By which she meant simple. She remembered that George W. Bush had choked on a pretzel once; something I think most Americans had hoped didn't make the news overseas. Then again, the Japanese probably have an especially keen interest in the dietary habits of the Bush family, after Bush Sr.'s unfortunate turn with sushi. Yes, it's true, I had sort of expect that I would treat my host family the way I've treated my last couple of roommates, with distant courtesy. Instead, I've somehow become like a part of the family. Okâsan tells me that I'm like the son she couldn't have and that's she's put on five pounds with happiness. I'm not really sure how to respond to that kind of niceness, but I try to make my reciprocation known. Ah! It seemed to have taken a while, but here's my first train. Time to hop on board and wait for my stop. Let's listen to the conductor's announcement.

"TSUGI-WA HOSHIDA, HOSHIDA DESU"
[Next, it's Hoshida, Hoshida.]
There's remnants of last summer's kudzu along the concrete embankments of the tracks, and kudzu reminds me of home. The weather here seems much milder in fall then South Carolina to me. I hope everyone back home is doing OK. One time, I was walking in Kyôto, and I noticed the dogwoods. I had thought that they didn't have dogwoods in Japan but seeing them made me think of Rock Hill's water towers and the pink flowering trees out the kitchen window at home. America is a big, sometimes crazy country, which makes it quite different from Japan, which is a small country whose craziness is equally distributed. In America, you have great stuff like "South of the Border" on I-95, but, you know, things mostly make sense. In Japan, everything tends to blend in together, except what's being blended together is completely insane. SMAP, cellphone cameras, school girls, formal verbs, ultra-formal verbs, Buddhist Hello Kitty souvenirs, Morning Museme, Downtown (and the loathed YAMADA Hanako), Kiddyland, PuriKura... "Hontouni wakarahensa." One time some Japanese girls asked me who my favorite character was. Man, I didn't even know how to explain in English why I couldn't answer the question, let alone Japanese. Yeah, America's a great country of shockingly enormous proportions. I mean, how do you fit so many landscapes into one country? Even South Carolina goes from mountains to piedmont to sand hills to swamp to beach. In Japan, you can see the mountains and the ocean out opposite windows in a bus. It's just the same beautiful madness everywhere. You don't get wonderful surprises like the Bat Cave on I-40 or Rock City out between Stone Mountain and Chattanooga. Yes, Japan's nice, but America does have certain advantages over it, not the least of which being most of the people I know and love live there. Plus Waffle House. Waffle House is cool.

TSUGI-WA KAWACHI-IWAFUNE, KAWACHI-IWAFUNE DESU
The last stop's name is literally Star-rice field, and looking out the window, it's not hard to see why the town was named as such. Bare winter rice fields line the train's path and are in turn surrounded by the sprawling suburbs of Ôsaka. Presumably, the view here would have been especially fine before the invention of the electric light. Fall here seems very late to me, though according to the TV news, it has come about two days early. For a while, I thought that the leaves would never actually change colors and fall, and the Japanese just pretended like they did for reasons of tourism. However, about halfway through November, all the leaves seemed to change all at once. Well most of the leaves. This set off the tourist season and Kyôto became crowded with throngs and hordes bent on seeing the foliage. You can even buy an all Kyôto train day pass, with the expectation that you'll use it for looking at the leaves. When I showed my host family a website with the temperature in Rock Hill, they declared it to be as frozen as Hokkaido, the infamously barren and cold northernmost island. I then pointed out that the high temperature was about the same. It's just that without an ocean nearby to stabilize things, it can get pretty chilly at night in South Carolina. Whenever I get a chance to see the moon or stars from here, it all ways make me nostalgic for the front yard of my house, and watching Orion slide across the night sky as the winter drags on. Of course, the light pollution here makes it hard to pick out more than the brightest stars in each constellation. As one might expect, seeing the Milky Way is not a common experience for Japanese people.

WALKING TO KAWACHI-MORI STATION
From Kawachi-Iwafune station, I have to walk a block and half down the street to Kawachi-mori station. Fighting my way through the herd of uniformed schoolgirls who are walking in the other direction, I experience some of the joys and pains of city life. There's a vending machine selling cans of hot coffee for under a buck, a 24-hour FAMILY MART convenience store (stocked with delicious niku-man and MEN'S POCKY), an udon noodle shop, the CUT-HOUSE [barber shop] "CRAYON," and tako-yaki a plenty. Tako-yaki are little bread balls with octopus tentacles in them and are considered to be an Ôsaka specialty. I have the theory that if you eat eight balls in a row, you have a whole octopus in your stomach, just aching for vengeance. But if you only eat seven, you're still safe. They taste OK, I guess. At any rate, on the way back from school, there's always a van that sells tako-yaki parked in front of Kawachi-Ifune station selling ten pieces for ¥300. By Kawachi-mori station is a whole shop that sells tako-yaki, and somedays they have a tape player on that sings the "Tako-yaki mambo" song. Of course, Kawachi isn't a real city, so you don't get to do something that you can do in Kyôto or Ôsaka, like play the "Kimono or Foreigners?" game. The object of that game is to notice every time you see a non-Japanese not in your group or a person (usually woman) wearing a kimono. At the end of your trip, think back and ask yourself, which you saw more of. For me, it's usually kimono, but sometimes foreigners win out. Of course, if you counted people in advertisement posters, then the game would become way too difficult to keep track of.

TSUGI-WA KATANO-SHI, KATANO-SHI DESU
After walking through town, I'm switched from JR (the national rail company) to Keihan (a private railway, the name means Kyôto/Ôsaka). Whenever I listen to the train announcer say, "Tsugi-wa, Katano-shi," [Next is Katano-city] I always like to pretend like he's really saying, "Tsugi-ka? Tanoshî!" [The next stop? It's fun!] 'Coz fun times have a bounded here and there. Like the time I was at this temple that's on the ¥10 coin. There I was thinking that it might be a good place to rendezvous with my high school friend Shige, who is in Japan with another program, when suddenly, there he was buying a ticket into the main hall. So, I punched him in the arm. Or the time I went with my host family to see Mt. Fuji in a real-live, honest-to-goodness Japanese tour with a flag woman and everything. The only thing I could really make out of the tour woman's speeches were the ultra-polite endings: "[So I think, right?]"; "[If you will honorably do me the favor]"; "[So I humbly pray]" Perhaps not surprisingly, there were no hordes of foreigners at the Japanese tourist spots. Frankly, I think it would much more fair if there were... There was the time I went to an elementary school sports festival, which in turn resulted in the time I got to "teach" a bunch of elementary school kids English words at LIBERTY FEST. "[Umm, how should I start?]" "[Maybe you should start with] aisatsu..." I was really glad that Okâsan had already mentioned the importance of greetings to the Japanese or I would never have known what that word meant. "Good Morning!" Man, that was a little bit embarrassing at first, but when it comes to potential embarrassment, there's nothing quite like conjugating verbs naked. Which I had several occasions to do, like the time when Okâsan's friends took us to a hot spring bath. Once the boys and girls separated, the true intricacies of the Japanese language came to light... But it wasn't so bad. Nothing like interacting with grandparents determined to sharpen their English skills at a ninja show. My friend and I figured out how to use the train system to get two hours away from the aforementioned Kawachi-Iwafune station to Iga-ueno, the home of Ninja Village. The ninja show and museum were pretty cool, what with the flying ninja stars and bamboo chopping, but it took all of my finely honed Japanese skills to first find the place and second endure an aged SALARYMAN practicing his English on me. Of course, all that Japanese practice came in handy when I met this band "Frangie." A three girl rock group, I saw them playing in the streets of Ôsaka one day. I bought their tape and went to website to see about their next gig. I left a note on their website message board, and they emailed me back. We met and ate cake before they rocked at a tiny club in Kyôto. It was awesome. Like the time I beat my nine-year old host niece at Othello, even with her dad helping for the first half. (She then devastated me and her little sister at Speed.) Or the time I went with my host nieces and their parents to Ôsaka castle. Or the when I saw Japan's most famous rock garden. Or how we saw Gold Temple Pavilion and the Silver Temple Pavilion and went off the beaten path into the woods at the fox-shrine. Or how we found Nintendo headquarters. Or the time, I went to a Metropolitan Museum sponsored art show with Okâsan. Or, well, you get the idea:fun times abounded.

TSUGI-WA KÔZU, KÔZU DESU
I swear, each conductor drops his voice an octave when he says, "Kôzu." Of course, Japanese is a nominally tonal language, so maybe that's what your supposed to do. I'm as tone deaf as ever, but it doesn't really matter--in the area where I'm living most of the words are pitched in the reverse manner of standard Tôkyô dialect, so people are generally not too sensitive to mistaken tone. It's just another aspect of my undoubtedly thick accent. Still, I'd like to think I do all right for myself when the need arises. I made all those crazy trips I listed before. I live with people who know no English grammar. I eat out at restaurants. Of course, the trick is that the Japanese words most English people know are about killing or the olden days--seppuku, harakiri, geisha, ninja, samurai, sumô, kamikaze, typhoon, tsunami, kimono, etc.--whereas the English words Japanese people know are mostly consumer products: pineapple, shampoo, computer, robot, etc. But then there's less predictable stuff, like how English numbers up to at least ten have common usage, as does party and silk. I can understand how new stuff uses English words, but silk? Silk!? Meanwhile, other new stuff ends up getting Japanese words, like denwa for telephone, shinkansen for bullet train, senpûki for electric fan, reizôko for refrigerator. And though most of the time Japanese favors American over British (elevator, soccer) with a few exceptions (toh-mah-toh, WC signs) there are enough Japanese created English words to be really confusing at times. Ôsaka has "NO MY CAR DAY" when you're encouraged to use the train system rather than your own car. A heater is a stove; a microwave is a range; a sweatshirt is a trainer; a button up shirt is a Y-shirt (white shirt?); a steering wheel is a handle; a woman who works in an office is an OL (office lady); and so on ad infinitum. Meanwhile, the Japanese have invented their own meanings for the words service, campaign, image, communication, and many more. Japanese and English are the two most different languages imaginable, which makes it all the more strange that the Japanese are so determined to use English as the way we used French and Latin. Except English isn’t a dead language. Compared to the Japanese dearth of grammar, English must seem as complex and arbitrary as Latin. Japanese verbs are highly regular; nouns and pronouns have the same conjugation for the objective, subjective, possessive cases; the sentence order always goes from largest, best known concept to smallest, least known; and almost everything that can be derived from context is dropped, which might be why the only pronoun my old textbook taught us is I.

TSUGI-WA MURANO, MURANO DESU
Once you learn some Japanese in school, you may face the tempting prospect of applying this to what you see on Japanese TV. This is a trap. Don't fall for it. Japanese TV has nothing to do with the Japanese you learn in school. Everything is contracted and slurred. To make it easier on Japanese viewers, usually after someone yells, "[Delicious]," on one of the million cooking segments, it is written on the bottom of the screen. In fact, maybe half of what's said on Japanese TV is there, on the bottom of the screen, so the viewer has a chance of following along. This would be really weird looking if it happened in a sitcom, but the sitcom is an all but not existent genre of television in Japan. Instead, there are sometimes DRAMAs or HOME DRAMAs, by which the Japanese mean sitcoms that don't focus on one liners. However, the singular most popular kind of show is the bubble in the corner show. I don't think America has anything along the same lines, but it superficially resembles a variety show. Usually, there will be a panel of TALENTs, which means a panel consisting of six of the twelve people who do 90% of Japanese television: the pop group Smap, the comedy group Downtown, or an some old pop idol. The show consists of shots of the faces of people on the panel as they watch clips from something. Maybe this time it's foreigners speaking phony "bad" Japanese, or a segment about a man who wants to build a machine to win some prize or maybe its two TALENTs sent off on a shoot, or a bunch of old clips of anime, or most likely it's a cooking segment. At any rate, the panel reacts to the clips and then discusses them. Sometimes they are asked questions, and it's like a contest. Then there's a musical act, which will probably be a derivative of the pop group Morning Museme, whose membership is estimated to be in the thousands, if not millions. And that's the most common kind of show on TV. Which is why I like the dramas HOME & AWAY and [Genius Professor Yanagisawa's Lifestyle] so much. The music overwhelms the dialogue both shows, but it's OK, because I don't understand most of it anyway. During the shows are Japanese commercials, which maybe the most interesting part of Japanese TV. Every commercial has a catchy song in the background, and a little subtitle will tell you who sang it, so you can buy that CD. HOME & AWAY focuses on the journey of a former pop idol, who went to China with her friends a month before her wedding. Then it all goes awry, she ends up in Hokkaido, a horse eats her phone, and she spends the rest of the series planned eleven episodes trying to make it back home and helping people along the way. It's pretty entertaining. One of the costars is Prime Minister Koizumi's son as the brother of the girl. Apparently, he's an up and coming TALENT. Then there's Tensai Yanagiswa Kyôju no Seikatsu. This focuses on the trials and tribulations of the family of a professor. He's very hyper-polite and proper, but his daughter is dating a local punk, who turns out to have a heart of gold. The show spent half of the first episode just watching him walk to school in the morning and establishing his daily schedule. The interesting part of the show is that by watching it, one learns all one needs to know about life in Japan, from the cries of crows, the snootiness of schoolgirls, the importance of umbrellas, all the way to the difference between byoin [beauty salon] and biyoin [hospital]. The show is a lot of fun, so I watched every episode. For some reason, Japanese TV shows are usually derived from anime and designed from the start to have a limited number of episodes.

TSUGI-WA HOSHIGAOKA, HOSHIGAOKA DESU
Hoshigaoka means star-height-hill, which makes me think of the level in Super Mario World where Mario blows up the castle and it hits the anthropomorphic hill behind it, causing it to swell like a knot on the head. Videogames make much more sense comparing them to life in Japan. Like how it seems weird that some videogame monsters need three hits, until you get to Japan and learn that mosquitoes all seem to need three hits to go down. The crazy triforce symbol from Zelda is on a lot of stuff for no reason that I know of. Tanooki is a Japanese raccoon dog that can supposedly turn into a person with a magical leaf, which makes Mario 3 (pronounced "Mario Three" in Japan) make more sense. While I've been here, I've bought a Game Boy Advance and Super Mario World, which I completely beat on the trains and such, and my friend Shige delivered Mario Sunshine, so I got to beat almost all of that at home. I'd be happier if I could just get another couple shines in that. Japan seems to be like a videogame the way all landscapes in movies just happen to be that of southern California. Like I said, I went to Nintendo headquarters, but they didn't give tours, so we just ate a sandwich at the restaurant across the street. Some executives with Nintendo tie tacks came in and ate in the corner. It was pretty cool. I remember the first day my Okâsan showed me the way to get to school. She went from station to station with her umbrella, and I couldn't figure out if I was supposed to follow or find my own way from where I was. It was so frightening but exciting. It reminded me of the part of "Majora's Mask," where you have to chase the Deku with the umbrella as he goes through a maze. In the end, we made it to Miyanosaka, and she told me it was time to find the school on my own. She still makes teases me for saying, "[I'm number one,"] when asked if I thought I could make it.

TSUGI-WA MIYANOSAKA, MIYANOSAKA DESU
Next stop is Miyanosaka, so I'd better get by the door. I have a whole system worked out, so that I know which door to get in at each station so that when I get out, I get out right by the stairway out of the station. The race down the escalator at Kawachi-mori on the way home is especially tense. I usually stand by the door after Katanoshi, so that I can be the first person down to reach the escalator. There's no real reason to do this, it's just a game I play to keep myself amused. It's something you just learn naturally, like how the express train will stop at Yodo only on the weekends to let gamblers get to the horse races faster or how if your express train stops for a while at Tambabashi, that means the Super-Express will pull up and leave before your train, so you may as well switch. I love the train system, especially the Keihan line. Most of the Keihan trains are half avocado green and half dark green. It's such a weird 70's color scheme, but it perfectly fits the mountains and hills around the train. I tried to paint the train for my final piece in sumi-e class. It didn't come out perfectly, but I'm happy with it. I can say I've been through almost every Keihan station, except one part of it, the southern branch of an unconnected line that runs beside Lake Biwa. The Keihan poster girl is a 22-year-old Office Lady named YODOYA Keiko, if the advertisements are to be believed. The ads just show her in various places in Kyôto wearing a kimono or just riding the train with her friends, smiling and carrying shopping bags from the Keihan mall. The Japanese seem to have confused organized religion with a national park system, so a lot of the posters have her at very picturesque temples or shrines. I really like those ads with her. The slogans for the train line are hard to explain, but apparently work out to "[A person who ride the keihan is honorable-keihan {okeihan},]" but there are variants like, "[If you go to Ôsaka, you are Okeihan]" or "[If you say Kyôto, you are Okeihan.]" I don't know why I like the ads so much, but I do. Maybe it's just the idea of getting on a train and riding off into someplace new and exciting and unknown. The Japanese road system is atrocious, and it is impossible to reach speeds over fifty miles an hour under the best conditions. However, due to the narrowness of the roads, thirty miles an hour feels like sixty. People always back into parking spots and the rear view mirrors on cars fold in when parked. Compared to that, the train system is naturally popular. Of course, like my friend's host dad says, the beauty of the train system is that you know, no matter how lost you get, wherever you end up, at least you'll still be in Japan.

HIDARIGAWA NO DOA HIRAKIMASU. GOCHÛI KUDSAI.
[Left-side's door will open. Honorably, be careful.]
Walking to school Wow, I'm out of the train already. Now, just the fifteen to twenty minute walk through the streets of Hirakata City. I've been changing the way I do this walk throughout the school year, finding new more diagonal, less crowded ways to go. Now, I have down to where I walk through some alleys diagonally, then on to the main road for just a short bit before making it to a temple park that I cross through. Out of the park, through a neighborhood dog walk, through some more houses, cross the main road, and I'm there. I really love that walk. How the woman will sometimes be sweeping up leaves at the temple. The people walking their dogs. Vending machines. It's just another bit of pure Japan while listening to my headphones before and after classes everyday. Classes went well, I hope, but I don't think my grades will transfer anyway. I learned a lot about Japanese art and history and language. I can read a little bit more now, even though my host niece made fun of the homework for being too easy one time. Yup, another day of classes, then it's time to leave at 5:30, catch the 5:56 train, which leads to the 6:13 out of Kawachi-Iwafune, and then home.