Bright Green Gaijin Pants

I'm in Japan! How now, brown cow?

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

I Wish I Had a Moose

Two weeks, no posting. Sorry. Been busy.

My Japanese is good enough now that I am doing some actual translating for the manga scanslation group now. :D Huzzah! Between my busy schedule and the other translator's busy schedule, we're each doing part of the chapters at this point.

Drama club is a very time-consuming experience. We meet 5-6 days a week. Hako has been put off until the student festival, which makes me sad as I won't get to see it. We have picked the play we are putting on. Hirokawa wrote it, but the title wasn't finalized until like two days ago -- The Princesses, with the title actually being in English. Cinderella and Snow White get pulled into "The Place Where Stories are Born" because the story spirit in charge of making sure their tales come off without a hitch screwed up and there is actually only one prince to dish out to their two stories.

I didn't get a part in the play, but the auditioning was fun and interesting. Emphasis on interesting. (Kanji are hard.)

I have also joined the kadoubu (ikebana [Japanese traditional flower arranging] club). That's once a week, Thursday morning, and expensive. High-quality flowers grown for ikebana purposes. >< But I'm picking it up fast and enjoying every moment. I have some cell phone pictures of the two I have done so far.

Speaking of pictures, I have decided that I am gonna have to just put them all in zip files for downloading until I can get PHP on my web site or something.

Yesterday, for the Exchange Student Seminar class, I gave a report on Alaska. Woo. All the reports people have been giving for this class have been fairly boring (none of us really care about any of this), and mine wasn't much of an exception, though the Australians assure me it was nowhere near as boring as the report on the native peoples of the Russian province Tolia and Olga are from. Moose weren't originally in my report, but they came up in the discussion afterward (they can be over 6 feet taller than a speeding bullet, eat trees more powerfully than a locomotive, and leap the tallest 6-foot fences in a single bound). That was when one of the Australians (can't remember which) said, "I wish I had a moose." Apparently they are planning to make a book of all the funny things they say here this year, which I think is a great idea, and that is going in it.

I've taken to hanging out in the exchange students room more often now that Tom and Matt are around. There's no internet at the dorms, so they spend a lot of time there. I had forgotten just how much it rocks to have sracastic English-speakers to hang out with. :D

There are a few classes just for the exchange students. The last of those to have its time slot decided was Abe-sensei's reading comprehension class. Hiruta-sensei compiled all our class schedules onto one piece of paper and gave it to Abe-sensei so he could pick a slot for the class. The slot he originally picked overlapped with sadoubu, which made me sad, as I had told Hirutasensei that I had club then. As such, when Olga asked if we could switch it to Tuesday morning, I was all for that, and no one else objected, so we did.

Now, however, several weeks into semester, she wants to change the Japanese language class to Wednesday morning. Even if I was up for changing the schedule this late in the game (and I am not), if we change it to Wednesday morning I will have no day of the week that I can sleep in on. I am currently having to get up early on Saturday and Sunday for club activities. I overslept this morning, and realized that last time I got to actually sleep in was like two weeks ago. My body doesn't like going to bed at midnight and getting up at 7:30, even though that is plenty of sleep. So... Olga's gonna have to deal with the current schedule.

Realizations of the Period

1) I think that next time someone rephrases what they said into over-simple words when I just ask them to repeat something so I could catch it, I might blow up. If not next time, then sometime soon. :S
2) I hate credit cards.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

What's "Donburi"?

Yesterday and today, the drama club did a lot of deliberating over what script to go with for the play we want to put on at the end of the semester. We convened in the morning and went on into early evening on both days, so naturally there was a break for lunch each day. Both times, some of us went down to Seicomart for pre-made lunch goodness. Today, when we got back, Hirokawa and I had a conversation including the following snippet.

H: Do they have donburi in America?
L: Donburi?
H: Yeah.
L: Um... is that like, pre-made food you can buy for lunch?
H: Huh?
L: What's "donburi"?
H: {Indignantly} "What's donburi?!" It's [whatever]-don. Pork cutlet-don. Hamburger-don.

From which, based on what we had bought, I figured out that "don" means "over rice". While this story isn't funny or anything like that, it was great for me because Hirokawa's tone on that last line was something I hadn't heard directed at me since coming to Japan. It was full of momentary, "What are you, stupid?!" It felt kind of like I had broken through a wall. I mean, I've made quite a number of friends since coming here, but most of the people I have talked to have either been more polite with me than others, understanding of me not knowing words, or just not been the kind of people to say stuff like that. It was just a good feeling.

I also went with a bunch of people from Drama club to see a play today. It was called 思い出のグリーン•グラス, or The Green Glass of Memories. I didn't catch the things they said that explained the title of the play, but I could tell what was going on and what the internal and external conflicts of the characters were.

At the beginning of the play, the main character, Aizen, is coming into his first day on the job as a prison guard. He meets the prison warden, one of his co-workers, and the first prisoner coming into his charge. It's a character driven story; as the play goes on, you learn a bit about the prison warden and his co-worker (Nomura) and why they are there. Nomura turns out to be a bit of a nutcase, from which stems a good deal of the conflict. Nomura's parents were killed in front of him when he was a child, causing him to want all criminals dead. I didn't catch what was up with the prison warden exactly -- only that his inner voice was telling him that he was supposed to be like Nomura, liking seeing criminals die. Aizen, on the other hand, ends up becoming friends of a sort with the prisoner under his care; he doesn't like Nomura's view of the prisoners at all, which wears on him as the play goes on.

The best part of the play was Nomura. His actor did such a wonderful job. He made the character come off as being just freaky nutso crazy so well. And the pace of his insanity bubbling out into the open over the course of the play was fantastic. The fact that the guy had a slight lisp somehow enhanced the character's insanity, too.

It was the last performance, and I don't know exactly how my drama club had been supporting the production of this, but it had. As a result, I was one of four of us (Hirokawa, Yuuji, and Daisuke were the other three) who helped strike set. That was about when I realized that although I've gotten over a good deal of my shyness when talking in Japanese, it still bubbles to the surface when in the middle of a group of people I don't know and don't have a good stock of vocabulary for talking to them with.

I tried talking to Nomura's actor at the beginning, but I was shy and he was shy and we got pulled off to do set striking stuff. I didn't figure out that he was shy, too, untill later, when I finally just walked up and told him that I thought he did an excellent job. (Hooray for getting fed up with my own lack of guts!) Turns out he's only part way through high school; he's planning to go to a drama school in Tokyo when he graduates, then go to America to study further at some point. I think his prospects are good. I am also glad that I have little patience with my own shyness; it should be easier for me to up and talk to people after this.

Today has been a really good day.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

The Illiterate

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be illiterate? I have. Especially since I met a guy last summer who was. What kinds of pain in the ass problems does it cause? Jealousy? Frustration?

Well, it's really not so bad.

I'm not really literate in Japanese. My reading level is somewhere in the mid-elementary-school range. This has become so painfully obvious since I joined the drama club because we're reading a bunch of different scripts in preparation for picking a play to show this semester. I must say, there's a reason so many peasants never learned to read -- it's very useful, but not absolutely necessary. If you really need to know something, someone can tell you.

I'm getting a lot of literacy studying in this way though. :D

The kendo class I signed up for turned out to be a class on martial arts in general, and their place as sports and in education. I misread the kanji. It IS taught by a guy who does kendo, though, so much of the examples given use it as a base. It's really a very interesting class. And yesterday we got to see a litter of foxes playing under their mother's supervision through the window.

Harmonics class is friggin' awesome. I never realized figuring out chord progressions could be such a pain in the ass, though. We have only had homework once, which was last week, due this past monday. He gave us eight bars of a base line to turn into a harmonic chord progression. It was like the excercises he gives us in class, only longer and a bit more complex.

There were a couple of spots in there that didn't fit how I thought it was supposed to work; I spent a grand total of 5-6 hours pouring over it over the course of three days, then checking my work for mistakes, then trying to figure out how to make it work the way I wanted to. I learned a lot in my experimenting, and when I took it to class I was one of a few people who had no mistakes. YAY! The rest of the class was him giving us problems of similar complexity (I seriously think he makes these up as he goes) and checking over our work. I had no mistakes on any of those either. The 6 hours of hmm-ing over 8 bars of music really paid off.

I'm pretty sure I am screwed in the history class. But I'm gonna keep trying anyway.

While I have nothing in common with the Russian exchange students, I am gonna get along with the Australians just fine. Thomas is a gaming/computer/anime/sci-fi nerd who (like me) misses having two monitors and a trackball. Matt isn't a huge nerd like Thomas and I, but it's obvious he gets along just fine with huge nerds. Both guys like Family Guy and the like, too. :D I got to sit down and actually chat with them this afternoon. ( :O Like, wow, man!)

Taste-O-Meter!

Takoyaki: 5
Chopped up octopus mixed in with other ingredients that are kind of like turkey stuffing (only with a taste more suited to octopus) and fried into the shape of a ball. I got to see these being made, and it was crazy. They had a grill that looked like a mancala board without the big end holes, and guys were sitting there poking piles of food into perfect spheres with only a pair of what looked like woodworking picks for tools. It was insane. And tasty.

Realizations of the Period

1) There is an anime called The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi. You must watch it. It's brilliant (and has good animation, a rare combo). They managed to make a sci-fi/comedy that excels at both and is FAR from generic, in spite of its deceiving start. Even if you don't want to watch the whole series, you should watch the first episode, as it stands on its own as great entertainment, being made like a crappy (possibly the crappiest) student film ever. Bit torrent file can be found here. If you don't like BT (*cough*Kenneth! */cough*), then I am very, very sorry for you. See if you can get it some other way, because this is quite possibly the best anime (and vying for best cartoon on either side of the ocean) I have ever seen. [STEALTH EDIT: Someone else who doesn't like BT pointed me to this site with direct downloads for Haruhi. Get it! Get it now! You have no excuse.]
2) You would think midi files of classical arias would be easy to find online. WRONG! Damn them all to hell.