Protocol 7

I’ve never been a fan of shopping, unless it’s for electronics or the occasional thrift store foray, so you can imagine how happy I am that the three pairs of pants I brought to Japan are falling apart. Falling apart is an understatement - the hems are gone and the fabric is wearing thin - I carry around scissors and safety pins just in case of further impromptu degradation. I usually enjoy flipping through racks of thrifty threads if I’m in the right mood, but I *hate* shopping for pants about as much as I hate pretzles and elbows. To say that I possess a megaton of hate would not be an exaggeration. And shopping for pants in Japan effectively doubles, if not triples, my pants-shopping hateration.

It’s always been difficult for me to find pants that fit properly, and in the past I’ve generally stuck to wearing men’s suit pants. Occasionally I will find the odd pair of jeans that happen to fit, but in a world that loves low-riders and skinny jeans, they are few and far between. In Japan, the task of locating pants that can sustain my trunk’s junk is nigh impossible, and I’m a size six back in the States. In a country that boasts size 00 (yes, that’s double zero), a girl who usually doesn’t have body issues suddenly begins to plan her upcoming crash-course diet of seaweed and tofu (and beer, natch). After two hours of fitting-room devastation I found one pair that fit, but made me look incomprehensibly short, like I had been squished in a fun-house mirror. The next size up was in the plus-size section. Needless to say, I’m still sporting the same threadbare leggings I was last year.

Golden Week has come and gone (and gone), underscored by the incessant rain dismally signaling a return to work after seven blissful days of vacation. This is the exact same thing I said last year, except with perhaps a little less rain. Golden Week is a springtime blessing, a weeklong national holiday (more accurately, several individual holidays in series) that’s even better in Hamamatsu owing to the three-day revelry known as the Hamamatsu Matsuri (festival). Last year we had a lot of fun as spectators, but this year passively watching wasn’t enough; we participated.

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Hamamatsu is a fairly small city, the kind of city that is absent from guidebooks and is sometimes coupled with the pejorative “armpit” to descibe its more industrial aspects. It may not be the cultural hotbed that Tokyo is, lacking capsule hotels and panty vending machines, but there are a few places to visit should you find yourself in the area. If you happen to like bright colors, pollen, and screaming children, the Hamamatsu Flower Park is just your cup of tea. It’s also a great place to see the cherry blossoms.

Alex, the cactus picture is in fond memory of the time you fell into that prickly beast at the botanical gardens in Ann Arbor.

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Studying Japanese, or any other language for that matter, is a challenging and frustrating experience, but quite rewarding if you put the time in. My favorite part of studying a foreign language is the moments of insight, usually quite small and nuanced, that introduce a new perspective or deepen cultural understanding.

Prior to the Japan chronicles, my experience with languages extended to only a couple of the romance languages, Spanish and Latin. Latin was enjoyable because our teacher was crazy (that fun kind of I-love-Latin-more-than-anything-else crazy that only Latin teachers possess) and the etymological aspect was interesting. Etymology is your standard, run-of-the-mill language insight that you expect to receive when taking a language class. I can’t recall any moments of surprise and reflection during my tenure as a Latin student, though I do remember asking, in Latin I, if the phrase ‘Aes Sedia’ had any meaning (if you are familiar with The Wheel of Time books then you know what I’m talking about). However, I’m not interested in what’s expected, but rather what is unexpected, the insights that make you go hmmmmmmmmm.

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Japan has so many festivals it’s impossible to keep track of them all. Hamamatsu’s Yosakoi Ganko Matsuri is no exception.

Around the middle of March the streets downtown are closed to traffic and opened to 3000+ dancers from around the country. I’ve serendipitously stumbled across the Ganko Matsuri two times… the good fortune of deciding to take a leisurely walk on a nice day. Curious as to the origins and meanings of the Yosakoi Ganko Matsuri, I turned to my students for consultation.

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It seems fitting that I’m writing a retrospective of our first year in Japan while sitting in a karaoke box listening to kzi croon “Eyes Without a Face”. After all, Japan popped my karaoke cherry late one summer night after skinny-dipping in the moonlit ocean. Subsequently, karaoke has seen us through the ups and downs of adjusting to life in Japan, a reliable standby no matter what the occasion (or lack thereof). It’s a daunting task to sort through (and make sense of) the first year in a new country, so I’ve tentatively divided the year into three parts: Holy Shit We Are in Japan, The OMG OMG OMG Months, and A Continuing Conclusion.

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I have a new job and a not-so-new car. The car is old, perhaps as old as Japan itself, and is approximately the size of an ice cube, but it is a car nonetheless and for this I am grateful. You don’t need a car to get around in Hamamatsu and the neighboring cities, but unless you have the money for a cab or love urban hiking, the places you can access are limited.

This week I am “training”, in which I accompany the current teacher to various classes, meet the students, and introduce myself. It is also my crash course in navigating the greater Hamamatsu area and driving on the other side of the road. Tuesday was my initiation day, during which my head almost exploded from repeating the mantra “left-side left-side left-side left-side” and trying to decipher stacked traffic lights, effectively interrupting my mantra with, “which one is the signal for this lane?!” every minute or so.

Other than the old lady I almost hit and getting brilliantly lost, I would classify my first day as successful.

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This August I bought my first keitai accessory at the airport. I now have multiple kittychans for my phone, including one from Korea, and one with a basketfull of tea leaves from Shizuoka prefecture. The little pig was added today, though I’m not sure who the character is.

Having found a fourth for our Vampire rendevous, we gathered on Wednesday night for a little beer drinking and character creation. Which is to say, the dorks have risen and are playing Vampire: The Requiem. What the hell is that, you ask? According to the site:

“It is a Modern Gothic Storytelling game, a roleplaying game that allows you to build chronicles that explore morality through the metaphor of vampirism. In Vampire, you play the monster, and what you do as that monster both makes for an interesting story and might even teach you a little about your own values and those of your fellows.”

Modern Gothic. Which means that the events take place in the here and now, post 9/11 in the midst of terrorism, globalization, and outsourcing. Vampires however, with their impressive centenarian-on-steriods status, seem to have resisted the waves of modernization and organize themselves around a feudal society infrastructure. The densest concentration of vampires can be found in major cities (natch), each of which is ultimately ruled by a Prince. According to our Storyteller, Princes keep to their territory and don’t try to gain more power and influence by ruling additional cities.

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One evening a couple months ago the doorbell rang, and being the ever intrepid gaijin I went to see what Japan had delivered to our doorstep. Usually the doorbell heralds one of three things; someone from the apartment downstairs in need of computer help, our landlord collecting the monthly neighborhood tax, or the delivery of a package (my favorite). But this time is was something new! A representative from NHK (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation)!

Obeying the masochistic urge welling up inside of me, I opened the door to see what form our communication would take and if I could decipher heads or tails of why he was at our door. After waving around several pamphlets and asking if we had a television he said, “You have to pay, don’t you know?” Blinking several times I told him I’d talk to my husband and ended the very confusing interchange that never would have occurred had I simply not answered the door. I told kzi what happened, and we surmised that the NHK representative was just trying to muscle me into an NHK subscription with his English phrasing. The pamphlet wound up in the garbage and I haven’t thought about it since.

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