Peru

Today Pete came back, so he and I and A went to a Peruvian restaurants that one of our students recommended. (The student is also Peruvian. ^_^)

It was really good! I've never had Peruvian food before; had no idea what it even was. But we got this appetiser which had lots of red onion, whole garlic cloves, parched corn, octopus, coriander, and half-raw tuna in it. It sounds rather eclectic, but it was very flavoursome and yummy. ^_^ There was a kind of soy milk noodle soup with beef, and a chicken curry, and Extremely delicious and tender roast beef and mashed potato, and some kind of rice dish with lots of beans and a strong coriander sauce.

Very good stuff. ^_^

Total eclipse

Today we experienced the longest solar eclipse this century. A total eclipse could be seen in the south of Japan, but here in Kanagawa we were expecting to see about a 60% eclipse.

So of course, it was incredibly overcast, the kind of overcast where you can't even *locate* the sun in the sky, let alone see its eclipse!

However! I was lucky! When I left my house, there was nothing to be seen. But when I'd almost reached my school's building, the sun become visible for a couple of minutes. There was lots of cloud passing in front of it, but I could definitely see it. It was like a crescent moon, only it was far too bright to stare at. I took lots of very quick peeks, and a few photos. ^_^

Of all the people I asked today (about 30), only 1 or 2 had seen the eclipse.

Holidays, hmm

Starting to think about what I'll do for my next holidays (mid-August). It'd be a shame not to do something, but what? I'm interested in going to see the high school baseball tournament in Koshien. Apparently it's a very intense scene. ^_^ Or, I wouldn't mind going to Hokkaido and seeing the countryside, now that it's summer.

Also toying with the idea of going overseas, but I am now conscious of not wanting to spend too much money. I'll be without much income for a couple of months...

Anyway, life is good! ^_^ Summer 'officially' started two days ago - the Meteorological Dept. finally announced the end of the rainy season. And it's like since that day, God has turned up the heat - suddenly, boom, the hot air hits you like an oven whenever you leave a building.

Sign you've been in Japan too long (cont.)

In this post I mentioned some 'signs you've been in Japan too long' that I found on another website. I just wanted to expand on/explain some of them.

(By now I've written over 220 blog entries, so I've forgotten a lot of what I've written. If I've written about any of these before, please forgive me.)

...you see a gaijin get on the train and think "Wow, it's a gaijin!"

'Gaijin' is the Japanese word for 'foreigner'. (Though it's not such a polite word as 'gaikokujin', and in fact I generally don't use the word. If I'm talking about Westerners etc, I'll say 'foreigner'.)
Even though I often see several a day - and more if I'm in Tokyo - I still really notice every foreigner I see. Actually, Miyajima in Hiroshima had probably the highest concentration of foreigners I've seen in Japan, except maybe Harajuku.

...your idea of a larger home is an extra 10 square meters.

Actually, to be really honest, my idea of a larger home is an extra 3 or 4 square metres... after all, my whole apartment is less than 10 square meters... hahaha...

...you think the natural location for a beer garden is on a roof.

I went to a beer garden on a roof this week! It's on Kawasaki More's - it only becomes a beer garden in the warmer months of the year. Last year I was totally oblivious to its existence, so this year I was happy to have the chance to go. (It's really nice weather for sitting outside in the evening.) Better still, I went with one of my classes - four nice, cool guys, and me - lucky. ^_^

...you wait for the first day of summer to wear short sleeve dress shirts.

I don't do this but I have actually become more self-conscious and aware of this unspoken rule. I don't know the exact months, but until around April-ish, people almost always wear long sleeves; until the start of July-ish, people don't wear tank tops, but t-shirts or short sleeves (or still long sleeves). People often dress for the time of year rather than the actual weather.

Also, regarding short sleeves, it's true that Japanese girls seem to have no problem wearing really short shorts, that show off their whole leg, but tend to be a bit more conservative on the upper half of their body. You don't see that many girls with exposed shoulders or low necklines. If someone is wearing, say, a halterneck top, I tend to immediately notice them in a crowd. And if it's not the right 'season' to be wearing warm or cool clothes (no matter what the actual temperature is on the day), people might ask you 'aren't you cold?!', even if it's a perfectly warm day.

Anyway, as a result, I tended to feel more comfortable wearing t-shirts than wearing tank tops. I still wear tank tops (I always think 'well, I'm 'different' anyway, it's my prerogative') but I am a bit more conscious of not looking like the people around me. Not only because I wear tank tops, but because my weekend clothing tends to be a fair bit daggier and more casual than that of the people around me. Most Japanese girls are slim and wear clothes that look carefully put together.

...you have over 30 small, transparent plastic umbrellas in your entrance even *after* donating several of them to taxis and JR recently.

I still often get caught out without an umbrella. The weather here is quite changeable and it does rain a *lot* more than in Adelaide. Japanese people seem to have an uncanny prescience; it's rare to see anyone running without an umbrella; but I'm often borrowing umbrellas, taking them home from work, etc.

...you believe that the perfect side dish to eat with a juicy, deep-fried pork cutlet is a pile of raw, tasteless, shredded cabbage.

Seriously, if you go to a tonkatsu restaurant, that's what you get. And it's not just a pile, it's a huge MOUND.

...it doesn't surprise you that a case of beer has the same per unit price as a single can.

This is both a good and bad feature of Japanese shopping.

In Australia, three things are generally true:
-if you wait for a while, a product will often go on sale
-if you go to different stores, the same product will be available for different prices
-if you buy more of something, the price will usually be less per unit

However, these are not always true in Japan. For example, there was a popular book I wanted to buy, which was about 2000 yen. I didn't buy it at first - and I looked for it in four different stores. All the stores had the exact same price, and even now, almost a year later, it is still 2000 yen in every store. No store had any kind of 'sale' where they discounted the prices.

Another example is that when I went to Hiroshima, I booked a return trip. You would expect that if you booked a return train trip, the price would be less than if you booked two one-way tickets. But here, it's literally one-way price + one-way price = return price.

A third example was when I was buying cookies. I couldn't decide whether to buy one, or two packaged together (they had prices listed for one pack, or two). Then I realised that the price for the two packaged together, was just the same as the price of two individual cookies bought separately.

These things are bad because there's less chance to get a good deal. But they're good because it makes decision-making easier, and you don't have to trawl several shops looking for the best deal.

Jitsu wa...

Actually, the truth is, I'm not very happy about finishing my job, etc. Like, a few months ago I had to decide whether I'd renew my contract or not - I thought, well, I'll probably be quite ready to leave by then, I'll have done most of what I want to do in Japan, etc.

Now I'm kind of regretting my decision. I like my school *so much*. Recently, the classes which used to stress me out a lot, I've been able to take in my stride. I think I've improved a lot as a teacher, and my rapport with the students is the best it's ever been. I've even become pretty good at teaching kids, and the kids' parents like me.

I'm gradually starting to make friends with a few more students; twice this week I went out with different groups of students after work. I've had a few new students recently, so I feel bad about when I'll have to announce my imminent departure. That's the thing with this job - it's all about relationships; it's not like quitting an office job. All of my co-workers are really, really great. I like where I live; I like the location of my school; I like my lifestyle.

Basically, there's almost nothing I don't like, and so I'm really not feeling ready to leave. I wish there were some way I could stay on.

Quick update

Hi,
Just a quick update to let you know what my plans are. There is still nothing set in stone, but here's what I am *thinking*:
After I finish my contract, I might travel for 3-4 weeks, including going back to visit Adelaide.
Then I'll come back to Japan in early October and study Japanese full-time-ish for 1-2 months. I'll try to pick up a bit of part-time temp work.
After that, I might try to find full-time work in Japan so as to stay a bit longer.

At the moment I'm looking into options and working out the logistics. So plans might change. Just thought I'd keep you in the loop of what I'm thinking. Hope you're all doing well!

Hiroshima and Miyajima, cont.

(Incidentally, today is Tanabata, the star festival. In Yokohama, I can report there is one star visible in the clear night sky.)

Day 2 - Miyajima

Day 2 started with another huge feast at the ryokan. I checked out and walked around Miyajima for a while. The rain had stopped, and as the morning progressed, the sun peeked out more and more.

If I'd been going hoping to see all the tourist draws, I'd have been disappointed. The aquarium and the ropeway were both closed. Fortunately I wasn't planning to see either of them. I went instead to Daisho-in temple.

Usually when I visit a shrine or temple in Japan, I don't have any strong feeling that it is a religious place. There are families there, giggling girls buying good-luck charms, tourists snapping pictures.

This temple was different. Its setting was quiet, and prettily green; it reminded me of Kyoto or Kamakura. And it was full of interesting religious objects. There was a mandala made of coloured sand, contributed by visiting monks from Tibet. There was a cave containing 88 icons representing the temples of Shikoku, with soil from each; it was said that if you go through this cave, you needn't visit the temples of Shikoku.

(There are 88 famous temples in Shikoku; one can visit all of them on a pilgrimage, in which case one is following in the footsteps of the founder of Shingon Buddhism. This temple in Miyajima is a Shingon Buddhist temple. One of my students, with her husband, took this pilgrimage when she lived in Shikoku. She showed me a picture of the two of them, many years ago, both clad in pilgrim's clothes.)

There are many collections of statues; there was one walk lined with 500 men, each with its own facial expression. There are also sutra wheels you can spin; spinning a sutra wheel once will will be equivalent to reading their text in full. A monk was beating a drum, which sound reverberated across the temple grounds. There was free tea for visitors.

One thing that did interest me was the 'cute' statues everywhere. Some of the statues were imposing; some were stately; some were dignified. But there were an awful lot of them that looked rather like cute, 'chibi' anime characters.

I usually don't really care for temples, but I liked this one. I also went to Itsukushima Shrine. This shrine is almost like a red network of piers, 'floating' on the water. When I went here in mid-morning, it was lapped by water. When I walked by a couple of hours later, half of it was dry. The tide was going out.

The famous red torii gate in the ocean can be approached when the tide is low; however I only saw it at high tide, 'floating'.

The little streets of Miyajima have a real old-style Japanese feel to them (most of the stores are souvenir shops). At night they're lit with lanterns. And there really are a lot of deer. Visitors are not supposed to feed them, but sometimes they will take matters into their own hands (an American woman, who took my picture, had a map with a big chunk bitten out of it...).

I walked around quite a bit. There were a lot more foreigners on Miyajima than I've seen anywhere in Japan for a long time. I always feel kind of excited when I hear an Australian accent. There were a few on Miyajima.

I bought the obligatory Miyajima omiyage of 'momiji manjuu'. Momiji is a Japanese maple - I believe Mum and Dad have one in their garden? and kind of a symbol of Miyajima. Manju is a kind of Japanese sweet, it's like a little cakey thing with bean paste inside. Some of the manju have different fillings.

In Miyajima there were a number of shops with big, manju-making machines, filling maple-leaf-shaped impressions with the manju mix, and cooking them. I bought a box for my school (they have gotten quite a bit of omiyage from me this year, with all my travels ^_^) and she threw in an extra, chocolate one, for makeweight. ^_^ I ate it on the train home.

(I still can't say I'm a fan of Japanese confectionary, though...)

The other specialties of Miyajima seemed to be iwagaki, fish cakes, and anago (conger eel). I'd tried conger eel at my ryokan - it was delicious - and fish cakes too. But nothing would tempt me to try iwagaki. I don't care if it's barbecued, broiled, stir-fried, whatever - no matter how you prepare them, oysters are *still* like eating a big wad of mucus. And I'm sorry if that's a disgusting mental image, but that's how they make me feel!!

After I was done in Miyajima - and it really was a nice place, especially as the weather cleared up - I took the ferry back. I couldn't believe that on such a nice day, I was the only person on that ferry who was sitting outside. Every Japanese person was sitting inside in the air conditioning, watching the TV screen or reading comic books, etc. So I enjoyed the fresh sea air in peace and solitude. ^_^

I took a streetcar back to Hiroshima city.

Hiroshima atomic bomb memorials

In Hiroshima I went straight to Genbaku Dome (Genbaku means 'Atomic Bomb'). This shell of a building was located very near the epicenter of the bomb blast and was one of the only buildings in the whole area to survive, albeit in a ruined state. As time went on, and other A-bomb-damaged buildings were restored, the people of Hiroshima decided to preserve this domed building in the same condition it was after the bombing.

Around this building is the peace park. By this time the weather was warm and sunny, and very nice for walking around the park. I had lunch at a little outdoor Italian restaurant by the river.

The peace park is full of various monuments and statues. One of them is the children's peace statue; its erection was motivated by the story of Sadako and was supported by her classmates. (Sadako is the girl who died of leukemia a few years after the bombing; she was famous for trying to fold a thousand paper cranes to make her wish of living come true.)

This statue is surrounded by masses of paper cranes, many of them arranged in shapes and pictures. When I came to the statue, a group of schoolchildren was gathered around its base, holding posters for peace. They sang a song together, and all bowed toward the statue.

There's also a peace bell, which you can ring. I had nothing to leave, but I rang the bell. There's an eternal flame, burning near the peace memorial museum. There's incense burning. Somehow I didn't like the idea of burning anything to commemorate the bombing. It seemed like there was quite enough burning already. I preferred the bottles of water placed at the front of the Genbaku Dome. They say that after the bombing, countless people, burned all over their bodies, cried out for water, but there was no water to be had. So now, 63 years later, people leave water in memoriam.

I went to the peace park museum. It has a lot of exhibits and information - about the science of atomic bombs, how Hiroshima looked before and after the blast, the events leading up to it, etc. The obvious, overwhelming thrust of the museum and its displays is the human cost of a nuclear attack - most of the victims of the Hiroshima A-bomb were innocent civilians, and most of the human mementoes and relics in the museum were of children. Burned clothing, bags, toys, a blackened shoe; sometimes they were all parents had to identify that their children had died. One mother had even saved part of their young son's skin and fingernail to show the boy's father when he returned from war.

These sad remainders were on display at the museum, accompanied by short footnotes, frequently, stories of love - so-and-so struggled to reach her family, and, despite her family's ministrations, finally died in her mother's arms.

Sadako's story was again told here, in more detail than at the children's monument. On hearing she had less than a year to live, her parents bought her a pretty kimono, which she was delighted to receive. At the museum they had some of the cranes she had made. Actually, they were really tiny. Some of them were about the size of a macadamia nut; she had folded the creases with a needle.

At the time of the blast, a lot of students and civilians had been mobilised into the streets for demolition work (to create fire breaks in the event of air raids). As so many people were outside at the time, that many more were killed or injured. 8:15 was the time of the attack; there were also pocket watches on display, blackened and mangled, which had stopped at that exact moment.

The museum also, obviously, strongly promotes nuclear disarmament. There were masses of copies of letters of protest by the mayor of Hiroshima to the heads and ambassadors of different countries with nuclear weapons (including his latest one, written to North Korea).

After I left the museum, I was sitting in the park, enjoying the afternoon sunshine, and an old man came up and sat beside me. He was 67 years old, he said, and he was 3 years old when the war finished. His father was working in Hiroshima at the time of the A-bomb attack, and was killed in the blast. His mother, thereafter, had to get a job to support the family; and so they were were poor.

He was a nice man. He said he was studying English conversation, and wanted to go to Cairns some day.

Soon after that I had to get going back to Hiroshima station to take my shinkansen home.

Miyajima and Hiroshima

This blog's turning into a travel blog... so far this year I've done short trips to Niigata, Izu, Seoul (South Korea), Okinawa, and now Hiroshima and Miyajima. Still on the list are Nara/Koshien (I want to see the baseball), Yakushima, and Hokkaido/Furano, in summer.

Day 1

There's always something exciting about setting off on a trip, and knowing that within a few hours, you'll be somewhere totally different. I was particularly glad to be eschewing airports this time; I like trains (and there's something very cool about getting on a train and hearing 'the next stop will be Nagoya', rather than 'the next stop will be Kozukue'). Even though the shinkansen was a bit more expensive than flying, it's worth it not to have go to the airport. Shin-Yokohama station is not so far from my house, so I was able to hop a shinkansen (bullet train) pretty conveniently.

Once I got there - and the scenery got increasingly overcast and gloomy-looking - I left the station, full of confidence. I thought to myself, every time I travel, I do less and less research before I leave. Today, I don't have a map, don't even know the names of Hiroshima's famous sites, and have no idea where to go after I leave the station or even what exit I should take. But now, I know Japan, and I can always ask someone in Japanese if I want to. It's nice to be a seasoned traveller and be able to get your bearings and enjoy discovering a new place from scratch!

With such congratulatory thoughts it was inevitable and predictable that I immediately set off and got very lost.

Even after asking at an information desk, and getting maps!! I really am a sad case. And the reason I didn't ask for directions was because I was *following* the street names and had no idea I was lost until I suddenly caught site of the name of the 'chome' and realised I'd walked in a very neat, 45-minute square around the station!

Very disgruntled to walk for 45 minutes and find myself back at the station entrance. >_<

What I had been looking for was 'Okonomi-Mura' (Okonomiyaki Village). As I've mentioned, every Japanese place is famous for some kind of food, and Hiroshima is famous for Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki is a kind of vegetable pancake (usually with various meat/seafood too), and the Hiroshima variety is made with noodles. After failing so spectacularly to find Okonomi-Mura, I gave up and with a bad grace ate some okonomiyaki at a restaurant near the station. It was nice, but I was in a bit of a grump, as the afternoon was starting to wear on, the weather was still looking bleak, and so far I'd gotten nowhere.

Anyway, after this, I asked the information desk (who must have been surprised to see me back so soon) where the interesting shopping part of town was and took a streetcar (tram) to Kamiya-cho. Hiroshima has a *lot* of streetcars. In Kamiya-cho I immediately located the nearest Starbucks (^^;) and wandered around some shopping streets. I looked around a bit (I enjoyed it, but most major Japanese cities tend to look the same after a while...)

I noticed a large amount of Carp merchandise. The Hiroshima Carp are the local baseball team. There are a *lot* of Carp souvenirs, posters; even the sewer caps are painted with Carp pictures. You can buy Carp curry, Carp noodles, etc. I couldn't help myself; I bought Carp toilet paper. Some respect they show for their team!

I did think the sheer volume of Carp souvenirs was quite amazing, though. Like, surely most of the people buying Hiroshima souvenirs are people from other cities, right? And those people are highly unlikely to be Carp supporters, but rather, supporters of their own home teams, right? Why would they want to buy masses of their 'enemy' team's goods?

Well, whatever...

Anyway, I headed down to Miyajima. If you do go to Hiroshima, I recommend that you stay on Miyajima, and if you can give yourself a full day and two nights there, so much the better, especially if the weather is good. Hiroshima itself is okay - and I really recommend the Peace Park area - but for the most part it seems to be kind of an unremarkable, ordinary Japanese city.

Miyajima is an island in Hiroshima prefecture, a little south of Hiroshima city. It's a big tourist draw, and its most famous structure is the large red torii (shrine gates) that stand in the ocean as an 'entrance' to the shrine there, Itsukushima. The whole island is considered sacred. The plants and animals are all protected, so the island is full of nature. Most notable are the deer which wander all over the place, even in the shopping streets.

Miyajima is often described as one of the 'Three Most Beautiful Views of Japan'. As I took the ferry in, I couldn't agree. It was raining lightly; the whole sky was dark with clouds, and the island was dull and indistinct. The island was a huge mass of trees and greenery; thickly wooded; I thought that it would probably be very beautiful on a sunny day. I saw the famous torii from a distance and felt glum. (I spent quite a lot of money on this weekend trip.)

However! As soon as I arrived on the island, my bad mood finally stopped, and I super enjoyed the rest of my trip. For a start, I checked into my ryokan (traditional Japanese inn).

Now, there is nothing like a ryokan for relaxation. I love them. You come into your room and there's a hot teapot waiting there for you to enjoy some relaxing tea while sitting on the zaisu (floor-chair - a chair with a back, but no legs, so you are sitting on the floor). Tatami mats are comfortable under foot, and you know that later that evening you're going to have a multiple-course banquet brought out for you, and there'll be a hot, steaming Japanese-style bath you can enjoy. ^_^ And you can walk around happily in yukata and slippers.

The ryokan I stayed at had a little observatory room on the top floor - a cosy room full of comfortable chairs and 360 degree windows, so you could see the town from above, a mass of Japanese-style roofs, a tiered, red pagoda rising up behind them, and the ocean stretching out for miles.

Soon after I checked in I had dinner. The proprietress brought me dish after dish. I had raw salmon, horse mackerel and flatfish; conger eel; asparagus; sea bream in cheese and miso sauce; deep-fried tofu in soup; a kind of custard-y nabe; steak in blueberry sauce; miso soup; pickles; rice... and finally, mikan (tangerine) sorbet. Everything was sooo delicious. ^_^

After dinner I went walking on the island. By now it was night, and all the shops were closing; it was dark and very few people were around. I saw a shopkeeper's cat eating its dinner; the cat's owner came out to toss a few scraps to some deer waiting outside her door. I walked down to the torii, which was gently illuminated. The light rain stopped. In the darkness, it didn't matter if it was overcast. It was beautiful. The tide was high, and, peering into the ocean, I could see quite a few fish, as well as a manta ray, swimming.

I walked quite a long way, and there was nobody around at all, only a few deer; it was completely silent except for the sound of a running river, and the occasional frog.

Random updates

Today I taught a class on 'telling jokes'. This class could really be subtitled 'ruining jokes', or 'explaining why a joke is supposed to be funny'.

It's a truism is that if you have to explain a joke, it probably isn't funny.

To me, the funniest 'joke' of the lesson - which had me, for some reason, laughing hysterically (to the bewilderment of my students), was in the answers to the listening section.

Some previous teacher had written the correct answers to the questions in my book - 'true', 'false', etc. The final question was: "listen to the joke one more time. Do you think it's funny?" According to my textbook, the correct answer is 'NO'.

***

It's often observed by bloggers that during your stay in Japan, you will be a) complimented on your ability to use chopsticks (as though it weren't something that could be learned in a couple of days), and b) informed that Japan is unique because it has four seasons (as though this weren't a quality shared by every non-tropical country in the world).

Score! In the last couple of weeks, I was complimented on chopstick use *twice*. Sadly, one of these came from someone who *knows* I have been in Japan for about a year and a half. If I could not use chopsticks by now you'd have to conclude I had some kind of debilitating condition, the kind you'd be taking medication for.

Also, last weekend, a student asked me how many seasons we have in Australia. I said four, and she asked me if they were similar to Japan's. Well, the winters are a bit less cold, and the summers have more variation in temperature, I said. She told me emphatically that Japan has four seasons.

I appreciated learning this. Thank you.

***

I'm going to Hiroshima this weekend. I bought some train tickets today. I'll stay on Miyajima. Several people have told me that Miyajima is considered one of the 'Three Most Beautiful Views In Japan', but to my amusement, nobody could remember the other two.

I went to the discount ticket counter in Azalea and asked them if their shinkansen tickets were cheaper than at the station; they said yes. So I requested tickets from Shin-Yokohama to Hiroshima. She said they wouldn't be available until tonight or tomorrow. So I said I'd be back after 9 o'clock. I came back and got the tickets; there was no time printed; when I asked, she explained that I had to go to the station to confirm a time.

So I went to the station, entered my tickets in the machine, and unintentionally bought two one-way tickets to Hiroshima, rather than one to Hiroshima and one return to Shin-Yokohama. So then I had to go to the counter, explain the situation to the man, and tell him what I wanted to change the ticket to.

The only reason this is of note is because all these exchanges took place solely in Japanese. Yay! ^_^