year in review

so i go home in the morning, i need to decided weather to keep working on my massive luggage or to write a year in review blog,

I can sleep on the plane, ok I'll do it.


to save time, I'll copy and paste you something i wrote somewhere else about learning japanese this year, forgive me if its vulgar in anyway or unspellchecked. i dont have time to reread it.

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so many different things would go so many different ways if just certain little things went differently, but they go the way they do and they went the way the did, and there you are.

i have seen people whove lived in japan for twelve years forget the katakana character for mu, people who have lived in japan for four years for japanese study purposes and could still barely speak, and of course the thousands upon thousands of ALT english teachers who live here for a 2-5 year stint and never get anywhere, but I have also seen kids go from zero to natural in a year, and this is something I have not done. I have come full circle, from sitting on the subway wondering if people are talking about me, to sitting on the subway listening to what people are actually talking about, (sometimes me), but really, loads of times a day I have to ask what a word means, and although i can read the hiragana and katakana alphabets at the same pace as english my kanji(chinese characters) level, although it will probably be so impressive to you westerners, its not very good, mediocre to borderline embarrassing for one year of study (mind you not for credit). I didnt put japanese language as a priority until very late this year, especially kanji, I sat around waiting for me to get good at japanese, for months before I realized I'm one of the people who has to study language to learn anything complex, I've met the types who can pick it all up with their ear. Once i did want to study I had a long good patch and some kind of transition from survival communication and skeletal conversation~ to proper grammar and really talking and understanding things.

I suppose this is pretty standard for foreigners living in japan (aside from maybe completely nonenglish speaking types who study before coming) but I hung out with a lot of foreigners and English speakers in the beginning which ='s all through the year. I lived with japanese and spoke japanese at home, but at school almost all english, pulled out of class 2-4 hours of the day to go to the study center and be with the other foreigners with the english speaking teachers.

so I can speak japanese, and depending on how you define fluently I can speak it fluently. in japanese speaking a language fluently is called being able to speak perapera (sometimes peraperaperapera) which means like words flying out of your mouth, theres a hand motion that often goes with it but I can't show you that on here. I can do that, I can have a normal speed conversation and say anything i want, if i dont know a word for something I can describe it well enough for them to know what i mean easily, and vice versa with me not knowing a word, only getting stuck when an abstract indescribable thing needs to be said, but such things happen enough times each day that I dont know if you still call that fluent, i guess you can, maybe. I can speak it with good pronounctiation but then thats another problem, japanese is a language with very few sounds, all but maybe 6 of which are in english, (hu/fu, and la li lu le lo/ ra ri ru re ro [remember kids the japanese L/R is kind of something in between english Land R and maybe kindofa D]) and of course theres a lot more to it than that, but i've been here listening to the real deal since day one so my pronounciation is good, "natural" and i use idioms and sayings and all that lovely stuff, not to mention the endless stream of praise I get for how good i got at japanese in 11 months...

but i've seen people who've gotten so much better, and the exchange programs turn out however many kids each year for however many decades before me, and I know without knowing that plenty of them went home with better Japanese than me.

...I dont know, I got pretty good, the point of this is not to boast or prove it, but to admit that I could have done better if I tried my hardest from the beginning and kept the pace, Just like I could have in high school, and with every instrument or sport or woman that I have ever gone for. and that Is something this year has taught me, and something japanese people have taught me, and something I can take with me from here on. this didn't Just come to me tonight, i've been thinking this way since that realization period I talked about earlier in this, and it has made all the difference.


I have other things to do and other things to see, but I'm not done with japanese study, with japan, or with the japanese.

I can see how much space there is in my head now.
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so there you go me trying to defend myself from my own guilt about not making the maxium effort with japanese,

This year i saw every single thing i could, and did every single thing i could and took every oppurtinity given to me, I havent written about this yet but i made a goal at the start to say yest to anything offered to me unless I was already booked with something offered before, so even if something sounded boring or i couldnt be bothered i said ok to it and i did it, I went to bhuddist church services, dozens of classical music concerts, ok no time to list them but things that I were worth experiencing even though i thought i would have rather sat at home. Of course there were times where this backfired and i did really want to be back at home doing nothing, but this way i know i didn't miss any chances i was offered this year. im sure i broke my own rule once or twice but i cant think of any times.


I got on the plane knowing not a single soul in all of japan or this continent, and i dug out a life for myself, and i like it a lot and i dont want to leave it behind, i think it hasnt really hit me yet that im actually leaving tomorrow, the reverse culture shock will be more short lived than the original but i think it will be just as rough. its part of the experience too though.

I really wish my camera hadnt broken, i love taking pictures, and my host mothers camera although shes a saint for letting me use it all this time, its terrible.

japanese friends are hard to make, people make fun of you or talk aloud about you when youre walking home, people might not want to talk to you on the grounds that you have a "scary face" all kinds of things like that, and on top of them, the language barrier and the culture barrier, I obviously made friends from the very first day with the boys in the class who liked to study english and therefore could communicate with me, i dont know if ive talked about them before, we slowly went from english conversation to a mix of english and japanese to just japanese over the course of one year, i can call them close friends, I also made good friends with most of my class and a few kids from other classes and on the rugby team, then I had countless hordes of dudes who just had a oh theres that hilarious foreigner lets hi five him kind of friends, or guys who would just come up to me every morning and say a different dirty word in english that they had lookedu p in there dicitonary, me and those guys had some laughs but i wouldnt call them lifelong friends.

anyway non english speaking friends were hard to make back when i couldnt speak any japanese, and i sometimes want to slap myself for not studying before I came

this is sounding a bit depressing but it shouldnt, in review it was hard and im not finished but i learned how to speak japanese, and it was hard and im not finished but i was able to make real lasting friendships with japanese.

I saw all of hokkaido, every single place except for hakodate, the city to the south, really, everything. not just stuff in tourist guidebooks but like weird places japanese people dont even know about. i love it.

I also went all over japan top to bottom, most major cities but only for short times, i spent a lot of time touring kyoto though, so if you ever need a tour guide for there call me.

and i experienced japanese culture, new and old,

i met people from all over japan, young and old, I talked to people who had never met a canadian, or even a white man. Not to mention lifelong friends from dozens of countries around the world

oh also

i learned about the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki and met people who were alive then, even in the blast zone. I used to think those bombs were a good decision to stop japan in the war, but i've seen a lot of pictures and things and heard a woman who was there talk about hwat she saw and i dont know if i agree anymore, but its the past and cant be undone and i guess i can just join the japanese people who say that no country should ever use bombs like that again no matter what.

anyway, mission accomplished, it was as rewarding as it was challenging, i now have 5 families and 30 something uncles and plenty of new friends.

i can come back on my own anytime and travel alone all over japan, and i plan to.


I would say that there are a lot of big differences between us canadians/western countries, but there are a lot of similarities, and that we are essentially all thinking the same things.



thanks everyone for everything.

I can't wait to see you,

shiretoko

So let's do this, finally. Its already pretty late at night though.

shiretoko is the place at the top of japan, not wakkanai, the most north peninsula, thats where i went before, this is the other one, the most biologically diverse one. Its like a huge nature park. A Rotarian from a city norht of Sapporo took all 4 of us exchange student on a three day trip up there, and I am so greatful to him for it.





This man was the only other person staying at our bed and breakfast that we stayed at on night one, when we arrived he was all red eyed form riding and kinda scary, turned out he had ridden all the way up from Osaka alone and his wife called once a night to check on him. He was utterly in awe of us, especially me and the finnish girl's japanese, he said he had spent so much time trying to learn english and never got anywhere (he was actually quite good with vocabulary, just no real sentences) and he was amazed at our skill level and he couldnt stop tlaking about it. He talked to us all night and asked us questions and told us things and told me how im young and seeing the world and its the best thing I can be doing and he loves being on the road on his bike because of the people he meets and the things he sees, i wish i could remmeber more of what he said, it was relaly heartfelt and inspiring and when we woke up the next day he decided to tag along with us on his osaka licensed motorcycle.we went to an active volcano/geyser and cooked hardboiled eggs.

we went to a lake but couldnt see due to the fog.we went to a natural hotspiring that lead into a lake, the lake was so cold, the finnish girl, with her heart of ice, went into the actual lake for a swim and then got to cold to move to come back to shore and was surely going to die out there in the waist deep icewater. I got half way out there to save her and she made it back on her own. The hotspring was nice but full of algae and algae fights occured more than once.

After this motorcycle guy said he had to get back on the road and stay on his own schedule. we exchanged a lot of opinions and knowledge with him and it was really good feeling to have someone so interested in anything that comes out of your mouth.




we visited the Russia/Japan friendship museum. A big chunk of the russian mainland used to belong to Japan, and after the second world war they lost it, even some actual japanese islands went to Russia, Japanese people had to leave there, like my current host grandmother. The museum was all about the issues that followed and are still going on today.




a really cool portrait of an ainu done in japanese stye. too bad you cant really see.After dropping us off at the museum our Rotarian went off to his orthodontist convention (his real reason for making this trip) and we were left to call a cab to the bus station and then taker the bus out to here:


It went smoothly and the bus driver gave us a bunch of good adivec about what to see and when to be back at the bus stop and stuff, just to us, as if we were regular japanese, that would never happen in the city im sure of it. Anyway it was foggy.


I sometimes talk about Japan being really clean, but the sea and beaches are so filthy that you want to cry, japanese people hardly ever swim. Mind you this picture is taken outside the natural park of course.


I went down on the rocks to get a shot of some animal,

it was a sea otter.

this is a picture of a picture, if the weather was better we could see this island, its russia.


and so with everything seen, we got ourselves on the bus and went back to the town we were in before, and this guy pulled his car up to us just because we were young gaijin in a town where there are never gaijin and invited us to his conert the next night, we had to decline because we'd be gone, but he told us there was a festival at the local temple, so we went there and filled up on octopus balls and festival food and every kid there was just amazed by how not japanese we were and asked us questions or just hid behind their mothers. There was a mexican masked wrestling show.

We met up with our Rotarian after shopping around town and passing two men speaking loudly in Russian who greated us ludly in Russian, I didnt know what to do and without thinking greated them in Japanese. haha?


next we went to the fish hook peninsula! famous home of the tanchyou, some kind of giant crane witha red head, big as an ostrich if u ask me, they were really far away and i couldnt get them with my crummy borrowed camera but i could see them with the binoculars perfectly! and they were doing some amazingly intricate mating dance. He said we were extremely lucky to see such a thing, I love it there, you could see the sea on either side of the road and every five meters there were 5 deer standing staring at you, and more of those cranes, and a fox.


We stopped at this place for the night.


On the last day we went to actual shiretoko, the peninsula with the famous five lakes and the mountains. It was pretty packed with motorcycle tourists and bus tours from china and korea and stuff, but it was so loaded with nature, i looked in the water and saw all kinds of stuff moving everywhere and wish i could have taken better pictures.

we walked to the end of this platform, from which you could see the ocean.


We then began our long ride home, all the way across hokkaido in a day, we stopped at the old prison turne dinto a museum, a pretty famous work prison.

In Japanese culture having a tattoo is considered very dirty and for bad people, mafia members usually have full body tattoos. Tattoo is only just recently becoming popular among non criminals. I have seen maybe less than ten tattooed people this year.


This guy, escaped from death row 3 times, he like rotted the wood that held the iron bars in his cell door with miso soup ot soy sauce or something, he hid and lived in a cave and then his case was proven to have been self defense and he was a free man, very famous story apparently.

japanese prison shanks.

on our way home through some town we saw this festival going on.


I odnt know why I didnt take nay pictures but we also went to an Ainu village which was mostly gift shops, but the shop keepers were ainu people. One lady taught me how to uise this instrument, it sounds like a dijiridoo and I had to buy it, another unmistakabely ainu old man gave the finnish girl some stuff to feed his dogs with, he was quite amazed by her hair color and I was quite amazed by him in general. We also got to go into a traditional ainu house and listen to an ainu woman talk to just us for a whole hour, she said there are many many Ainu people living in Hokkaido still but they have come to look like Japanese and you wouldnt know if you saw them.

It's weird having to speak Japanese with non-Japanese people, We have to do this with the Sri Lankan girl at school aswell.

The drive home was long and we made two more stops at big waterfalls and had yakiniku for dinner and didnt get home till like 10 at night, but I will never forget our trip to shiretoko and what I saw and learned and who I met. I might put more effort into this entry if I get time. Theres lots of pictures to enjoy for now at least.

I'll be home unbearably soon! I'm excited and sad. reverse culture shock will be intereting enough that I might keep writing about it for a while. thanks for reading.

3 weeks or something left

hey guys,

thanks for reading all the time.

I had my final private japanese lesson tonight at my volunteer teachers home. i gave her a cup i painted and glazed in japanese style and she cried, and then she gave me a brand new electric dictionary with spanish english and japanese in it, which is like so expesive and useful and so many things. this lady took me from konnichiwa to my current level in this short time and did it for no reason other than the love of teaching. She told me study hard and see the world and that I am her hope and dream. I'll have to send her a lot of postcards. Anyway I've never met such a fantastic person as she, she helps out at old folks homes and teaches all kinds of foreigners at all kinds of levels and just recently took on the job of teaching one of my Australians who lives in really far away town, but since there's no one there to teach him she goes out there like thrice a week on the train.

yesterday I went to the city north of Sapporo, Asahikawa, it is about half the size and an eight of the awesome. I'm glad I finally went, they have a famous zoo there and The animals looked happy but It still didn't compare to the zoos I've been to in Canada, although I was quite impressed with the penguin and chimpanzee set ups.

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We also went to flower field things which are just miles of bright flowers that you ride a balloon over but we just walked around. It was a nice day with my old host mom. Long train rides in Japan are also worth doing.

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After that we got back on the train and back to the city and had dinner in a pretty fancy place on the 8th floor of Sapporo station and I could see the whole downtown out the window and all the taxis and hordes of people and I was really glad I got sent here. The end.








The day before yesterday I went to an Ainu Museum with the other exchange students form school, then we went to a big dam that supplies 80% of Sapporo's water and had a picnic and I caught some lizards and a huge snake scared the shit out of poor little jay. That dam was really huge.

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Shiretoko. holy. It was like three weeks ago now but I can't leave it unwritten, I wanted to do a good job of it, and I also have to write about The district farewell party for me and the Finnish girl, it was a big deal, but if I don't go to bed now I'll never make it to school in the morning. thanks for waiting and thanks for reading.