saka geemu

Turns out people from Hong Kong love KFC.

This is one of the many edifying things I learned this weekend at Ajinomoto Stadium, as the Reconnaissance Japan students battled the labyrinthine and complex Japanese train network to go on a lovely outing to see Tokyo Verdy play the Yamagata Eagles. I figured out about an hour into our train journey that this, apparently, was a soccer game we were going to. I don’t know, I just wanted to ride the trains.

In the US I have gone to only a few sporting events; a handful of Red Sox games at Fenway, a Revolution game and a Patriots game at Foxboro Stadium, and strangely, a Twins-Expos game in Montreal once. All of these games, with the exception of the oddly-quiet Expos game, were full of raucous, charmingly obnoxious fans chanting “Yankees Suck” or other booze-fueled epithets. From what I had heard about Japan, I expected this not to be the case. I remember reading “Dave Barry Does Japan”, a book written in the 1980s during Japan’s stellar economic growth, about 7 years ago and hearing Barry describe how at a Japanese baseball game, the entire crowd (made entirely of men) were all dressed in suits and ties and merely clapped politely after their home team hitter blasted a grand slam out of the park. Going to the soccer game, I expected a Montrealesque, creepily-subdued sense of respect and restraint.

This was not the case at all. These fans were some of the loudest and creatively raucous I’ve ever witnessed. They cheered, screamed, waved enormous green banners with the Verdy Eagle logo on them, chanted, and carried on to a much stronger degree than I ever expected. I was happy to see this, since it dispelled to some degree the notion that the Japanese are completely reserved and devoid of emotion.

About a quarter of the way through the game, myself and my friends Iris and Karie, both of whom are from Hong Kong, decided to go get some food from one of the concessions stands. Upon seeing that the stadium sold KFC chicken, Karie and Iris absolutely tweaked out, frightening me in the process. “KFC! KFC!” they shouted. What followed was a monstrous display, with shards of bone and 11 original herbs and spices flying every which way. Meanwhile, I purchased some ramen and ate that silently as I watched these two tiny girls eat their own weight in chicken.

All in all an excellent day, despite soccer being the most boring sport in the world. The end score was 1-0.

Watashi no ie

I once read a book set in a futuristic Japan where the main character stays in a placed called “Cheap Hotel”, where the rooms are crafted out of used shipping containers. Since space is at such a premium in Japan, the shipping containers are ideal since they can be stacked on top of one another. Inside, the kitchen and bathroom are essentially built into the walls of the container, with the bed on the opposite side. I think the people who designed my apartment were big fans of that book.

This isn’t to say my room is bad or disappointing; it’s just veeeery small and compact. My kitchen, as it were, is not a room. It’s a receded area, about 5 feet wide and 6 feet tall, set into the wall of my hallway. I have a single gas burner, a counter that is about a foot wide, and a sink, all adjacent to one another. Beneath the burner there are two switches, one to turn on the overhead lights (which are inexplicably red; I’ll need to go buy some new lightbulbs soon), and one to turn on the vent, which is fortunate as I have a tendency to inadvertently and suddenly turn many of my dishes into flambé. Beneath these, at knee level, is a large cabinet filled with all sorts of necessary kitchen accoutrements that have accumulated over the years and been left by former inhabitants of my apartment. I have, among other things: 5 pairs of chopsticks, bamboo mats for rolling sushi, seven spoons, multiple instances of Tupperware, an American-made blender for some reason, a rice cooker (which has become my new favorite device), multiple cups and a few plates. More interesting, however, is what I don’t have: a single pot or pan, the lack of which render the burner mostly ornamental, and a fork. I have not a fork to my name. I discovered this the other day after I made some spaghetti (by borrowing a pot from my neighbor, incidentally) and discovering that I was going to have to either barehand the pasta and burn off my fingerprints in the process, or struggle with the intricacies of eating spaghetti and meat sauce with chopsticks. I opted for the latter for about 5 minutes before breaking down and borrowing a fork from the same aforementioned neighbor. I’m going to have to do something about this.

Additionally puzzling is my bathroom situation. I have two bathrooms, which is nearly twice as many as I’m used to owning. The first bathroom is literally that; it contains an impressively deep tub, with a wall-mounted but detachable shower head that is connected to a valve in the sink. To engage the shower, you have to turn a dial on the neck of the sink’s faucet to “showa” (honestly, that’s how you say shower in Japanese). This disables the sink and sends the flow of water up a hose into the showerhead. Likewise, to use the sink you must redirect the water away from the tub. This seems somewhat wacky to me. Additionally, the entire room is kind of rubberized and seems like it’s all carved from one giant block of something. A drain is located in the floor, allowing you, as in the Japanese tradition, to shower yourself off quickly while standing in front of the tub before you get in to take a bath. This also enables me, in the American tradition, to close the door and just go hog wild spraying every surface with the shower head, just because I can.

My second bathroom, or the Toilet Annex, as I prefer to call it, is an incredibly small room containing just a toilet and a small cabinet built into the wall with a sliding cover. It also has, disturbingly, a window that, if opened, looks directly out to the street. The glass in the window is bubbled and distorted for privacy, but if slid open it gives the whole neighborhood both a great view and something to talk about. I keep that window closed.

The remainder of my apartment pulls quadruple time as a bedroom, living room, dining room, and, when I’m feeling particularly raucous, study. I suspect it can be converted to a boxing ring but this has yet to be proven. Despite the size of my room, it is still MY room, and it’s just big enough to avoid being too small. I daresay it’s cozy, even. It is, in my opinion, extremely wise of Obirin to have given everyone a room of their own and not to have put us in shared housing, as living in a strange and new place such as we are comes with a certain degree of irritation and a need to be alone from time to time. Thankfully, we are able to do this. Especially in the Toilet Annex.

Izakaya

I wrote last time about the common ground that almost all of us foreigners here in Japan share; a mutually-understood foundation upon which it seems very easy to build friendships. This has definitely proven to be true, and I’m thrilled about it. However, I’ve been surprised and delighted to find out that this extends to not just us filthy gaijin, but to the Japanese as well. Since we’ve been here, I’ve been absolutely astounded at how accommodating and friendly the Japanese students have been to us. There’s a student group here called Nakama (the name means ‘friendship’, or ‘group of friends) who set up events and “parties” (usually a card table with a few 1-liter bottles of tea and soda set up in a function room, but hey, what are you gonna do?), and they’ve been just absolutely fantastic.

Approximately 99% of Nakama is comprised of incredibly nice, enthusiastic, clinically insane girls. They seem so excited to meet and hang out with us, and have already started planning Halloween and Christmas parties for everyone. They ask all sorts of questions about where we’re from and what we do in the US, and seem to know absolutely nothing, but in a very endearing way. Last week they invited us to a “drinking party”, which pretty much everyone was on board for. Meet on Friday, they told us, near Fuchinobe station (our local train station), and bring 2000 yen, the equivalent of roundabouts 18 dollars.

And so it was that Fuchinobe Station became crammed with 40-50 confused foreigners on that night. Mingling about, we started quizzically asking each other if anyone had any idea what the hell was going on or if anyone knew what we were doing. Rumors of bowling, of karaoke (oh my), of dinner, and of simply going to a bar circulated, and it seemed that anything was possible. Soon, the Nakama girls arrived and informed us that we were going to an izakaya. Not wanting to be the unwashed, uninformed foreigners that we most certainly were, we took delight at the suggestion, insisting that we make haste at once! “To the izakaya!”, we shouted. “Who doesn’t love an izakaya? Not me, that’s for sure!”. Subsequent to this we immediately began asking each other in low tones what the everloving hell an izakaya is.

We soon found out. An izakaya, it turns out, is the best thing ever. After paying our 2000 yen entry fee, we were brought into a wonderfully traditional looking Japanese restaurant, with low, chairless tables, cubby holes to put your shoes into, and fantastically loud waiters and cooks barking orders to each other in colloquial Japanese. Then, to improve the situation, we were taught two of the finest words that Japanese has to offer: tabehoudai, all you can eat, and nomihoudai, all you can drink. For two hours.

The casualties were severe. Not an artery left unclogged, not a liver left uncirrhocissed to some degree. The highlight of the night was a seemingly goofy but honestly touching taste of home: after having eating Japanese food that either the school or our friends have provided us the entire time we’ve been here, the cooks at the izakaya laid before us an absolutely enormous tray of what the Japanese call “poteto”. In English, these are better known as Tater Tots. The crowd went wild. I have never seen so much food devoured in such a short amount of time. Not to say the teriyaki, katsu, and sushi that we’ve been eating hasn’t been delicious, but they can’t hold a candle to tater tots offered to a displaced American like myself.

Why Japan?

“So, why Japan?”

This question has been a repeating theme in my life for a while now. Prior to jetting off halfway across the world, while I was still in the US, I was bombarded with The Question by friends, family, coworkers, professors, and most others to whom I told my plans. I would usually answer the same way, a self-deprecated explanation that if you follow it back to the beginning, it probably started with playing Nintendo when I was 7, and that my interest later grew into a fuller and more adult appreciation for a paradoxical culture somewhat similar to but markedly different from my own. This was a line, though. A rote piece of dialogue given to Those Who Don’t Get It. To be honest, I have very little concept as to why or how I’m here. It has always been more of a drive than a desire, a feeling that this is the Right Thing To Do, and that, when I’m older, it is absolutely imperative that when telling my life story, I can have a chapters that begin with the line “When I was in Japan…”. To say that I wanted to be a part of a culture different than mine is also incorrect; I didn’t merely want ‘different’. If I wanted that I’d be living in Siberia or with the Aborigines at Ayers Rock. I wanted parallel. It’s hard to explain; I’m not sure I can elucidate my motivations exactly, but the thing is, I no longer need to.

The Question has disappeared.

In meeting my fellow study abroad students, The Question has never once been asked. Whether talking to my neighbor from Kansas, our good friend from Cairo, or the crazy Australian from whom I steal wireless internet, it has never once come up. It’s superfluous to ask “why”; just by virtue of the fact that we’re here, we all have a common motivation. And I love this. Whether I get along with them or not, I can still related to most everyone here. I came because I somehow needed to. I didn’t necessarily come to further my language abilities or to study Japan-North Korean relations or to embiggen my nerdy comic collection, but for each of us who may have those goals, there’s a mutually-understood thread of motivation. I don’t think I’ve ever been with a bigger group of people that I can relate to, and who can relate to me.

Arrival

After a disorienting, seventeen-hour, sleeping-pill muddled flight consistently bleached by blinding sunlight, I, along with my fellow Northeastern students, arrived at Tokyo-Narita International Airport. As we stepped off the plane and walked through the jetway, we were greeted by a gigantic, illuminated advertisement for DoCoMo NTT, a Japanese cell phone company. Depicting a smiling Japanese woman enthusiastically carrying on a conversation on her handset, the ad was blazoned by a simple, single line of copy:

“DoCoMo NTT: Smiling life happy”.

This, apparently, is to set the tone for the next few months of my life.

After arriving in the airport and having our already discombobulated brains kicked while they were down by the aforementioned ad, we were met at the gate by some extremely nice representatives of Obirin, both Japanese and American. We were quickly ushered off to a bus which brought us to a hotel for the night; here the rest of the students, including people from Egypt, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Australia, Hong Kong, and Germany all convened. We were treated to a not-so-traditional Americo-Japanese buffet, which was much appreciated, and then we began dropping like flies. The general level of fatigue and confusion in the room was almost tangible, and it was clear that sleep was coming whether we embraced it or not. And so it was, that at approximately 6 PM, I found myself in a strange bed, in a strange hotel, in a strange land, falling into an almost comatose sleep.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been more eager to get out of bed than on the following day. My feelings of potential, of wonder, and of excitement were reaching critical mass. I simply could not wait to do anything, even the inevitable orientation sessions that now have proved to be unbearably boring and repetitive seemed laden with the possibility of fun.

I still wake up excited. I have an immense feeling of accomplishment in having come here. I’ve been hoping, planning, and waiting for this time a significant percentage of my life. And now that I’m here, I couldn’t be happier.