"Abe suru"

The prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, recently resigned after less than a year in office. His resignation came out of the blue, was ill-timed, badly announced and basically irritated the whole country. My host Dad told me that people are now using the verb "to pull an Abe," meaning to quit or give up something suddenly and without warning.

Only in Japan

I witnessed all of this in a week, and it's only Tuesday! It finally hit me: I'm in Japan.

Only in Japan do people say things like, "San Jose? Hmm, isn't that near the Grand Canyon?"

Only in Japan do you see random people dancing in costumes and you don't know why.



Only in Japan do you hear this announcement at the train station: "Good afternoon customers. Because there was a suicide on the tracks today, the trains are extremely delayed. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Only in Japan do you walk into a room and hear someone exclaim, "Woah! She's not Japanese!"

Only in Japan do middle-aged men walk up to you and ask for your cell phone number so you can "teach them English." Riiiiight. English huh.

Only in Japan do you see a sign that says "Woody Happy" above a lumber yard.

And other Engrish:

Graduation hakamas

At my university there is a big display for rental hakamas. When they graduate from college, Japanese girls wear beautiful hakamas, which are a type of kimono. I'm so jealous! That is SO much cooler than wearing a black bag and a square hat.

A class I look forward to

The bright spot of my Mondays is shodo, calligraphy class. I love the way the ink smells and watching the teacher paint examples for us. When she writes the kanji, her brush glides over the paper like a dancer, applying more or less pressure where appropriate, lifting off smoothly, going around each curve perfectly. It's really something to see. After she finishes an example a groan of despair will rise up from all the students because it's just so darn perfect.
Trying to imitate the teacher's example can be frustrating, but I find that I can focus in calligraphy class like nowhere else. For an hour and a half my classmates and I write the same character over and over and over again and submit our best copy. Some people find it boring but the time flies by for me. The teacher doesn't even seem to mind if I listen to my iPod while writing. Since the teacher doesn't return the copies we submit, I take my second-best copies home and hang them on my bedroom wall. Even though they're not very good, my walls need some decorating. If you're interested...the earliest one is on the right and the latest one is on the left.

Because of calligraphy class, I actually prefer Mondays to Fridays. Pretty crazy, huh?

How Whiney Sees Things

A conversation over dinner:

Host Mom: Today I drove to my friend's house.
Whiney: Why didn't you walk there?
Host Mom: I wasn't sure if it was safe to walk all that way. I was kind of scared.
Whiney: I'm not scared of anything.
Host Mom: Well, there are creepy people out there you know.
Whiney: You mean like grandma?

That's fascinating Kelley, no really, it is.

Just to make my life a little more complicated, my university forced me to open a Japanese bank account. Today I walked to the nearest branch and attempted to withdraw money from it for the first time. I found to my despair that the ATM had no "English assistance" option, and I was staring at a touch screen with twelve buttons, each button with about six unknown kanji. I had no choice but to resort to pushing buttons at random. After about five minutes the machine finally spit out some money, although I suspect it was just trying to get me to leave.

On my way home I stopped by the 100-yen shop, the Japanese equivalent of a dollar store. Dollar stores in the US can be kind of ghetto, but the 100-yen shop is actually pretty interesting. You can buy washcloths, origami paper, toys, dishes, flower seeds, makeup and even food. I've been to the 100-yen shop several times because there's almost nothing else to do in my town, but today when I stepped through the door today I saw a brand-new display case of KNITTING SUPPLIES! Score!! I bought some yarn to make a scarf for my new Japanese friend. Then when I went home I realized that the yarn I bought was really ugly.

Yesterday my new Japanese friend Ayako and I were walking to a restaurant when we passed by a bridal shop. "Kelley, what color is your wedding dress going to be?" she asked.
"Um....white?" I said. I think I even said it in English because I was distracted by wondering how a purple wedding dress would look. I don't really remember. Ayako told me that sometimes in Japan women wear colorful wedding dresses, or sometimes a white wedding dress at the ceremony and a colorful one at the reception. That explains why I've seen bright yellow and orange dresses in the windows of bridal salons. I just thought they were prom dresses.

Do they have prom here?

Just Another Weekday

Here`s what I do on a usual weekday.

I wake up around 6:45 am, re-set my alarm and sleep until 7, eat breakfast, get dressed, stuff my backpack with textbooks and homework and head out the door to catch an 8 oclock train.

Often the train is too crowded in the morning to do anything but stand and listen to my iPod. Or "human watch," as my host father calls it. But really, watching salarymen, office ladies, high school girls in short pleated skirts and old ladies in kimonos doze off in their seats gets old after a few weeks. And everybody dozes off, including me. I'm lucky I've never missed my station. Occasionally I also study and memorize kanji while riding the train. I have nearly an hour on it, after all.

After the long uphill walk to school I buy my lunch at the convenience store because it gets totally swarmed during the afternoon, and the line of students waiting to buy their lunches reaches out the door. Usually my lunch consists of two rice balls, tea, and a dessert. Then I go in the bathroom and try to make myself look presentable and less like I just walked up a hill to school wearing a heavy backpack and sweating like crazy.

Next I have a three or four 45-minute periods of Japanese language class/doodling session. This is very, very taxing on my attention span. By the time I get out of class I`m usually starving too. On most days I also have other classes after a lunch break. The professors who teach us Japanese have code names among the exchange students. Only one is known by her proper name, Yamada Sensei. The others are known as Blazer Sensei, Super Genki Sensei, and Spazzy Sensei.

Blazer Sensei got her name by wearing blazers and t-shirts about three sizes too big. Personally I also think of her as "The Claw" because her hands are often stretched into sort of a claw-like position. Yeah, we`re not too nice to poor Blazer Sensei. It`s `cause she`s so boring. But despite her mild-mannered appearance she can be truly scary if you stretch her patience too much. Anger not The Claw.

Super Genki Sensei got her name by being hyper and cheerful every. Single. Morning. I don't know how she does it. She is also the only professor with any sort of fashion sense.

Spazzy Sensei, less widely known as "Crack Sensei," is probably the least popular of the professors because he's so crazy. Seriously. He waves his arms around and wiggles his hands while he talks. Also, his face is like rubber and he is constantly constricting it into new and disturbing expressions. While you're attempting to speak a sentence in Japanese, he will mouth the words along with you while staring at you intensely and waving his arms. If you get a word wrong, his entire body spasms like you just twisted his arm behind his back. When class is over he bows so low that his forehead nearly touches the desk. He also has a habit of wiping the white chalk dust off his hands onto the back of his black pants. I just know he was a problem child once upon a time. Spazzy Sensei's craziness makes some classmates nervous, but I like him because you can't possibly fall asleep while he's teaching.

Yamada Sensei is spared a nickname because she's pretty normal. She also has the sweetest voice, and no matter what she's saying she sounds like she's reading a bedtime story. The only weird thing she does are these drawings she makes. In class we do drills this way: when the teacher holds up a drawing of, say, someone eating, we say taberu (to eat), changing the verb form to tabekatta, tabenakatta, tabetakunai, taberareru, taberarenai, whatever the lesson calls for. Yamada Sensei has a lot of drawings, but they look like she scribbled them out in five minutes before class. Sometimes she holds up a drawing and my classmates look at each other wondering what the heck is that supposed to be. It looks like an umbrella wearing a sock. There's one that looks like the guy from the "Scream" painting, and somehow we're supposed to figure out that this represents the noun "free time."

Sometimes after class I go exploring or shopping with friends or alone. I take my time returning home because there's pretty much nothing to do there. Once I do return home, I do homework, take a shower, eat dinner with my host family, play some video games, write blogs, and listen to the washer chime a happy little song when it's done with the laundry.