sunday

I climbed another mountain yesterday with my host family and some of their grandchildren. This was a much higher more difficult climb, and the view of the sea/city/other Mountains was spectacular, the changing leaves were also pretty cool.

There is a limit on the number of pictures i can include in a post, but ill give you the five best from yesterday, they will be difficult to choose.

Here are some general overgeneralizations.

The following are things I have seen/experienced myself, or been told by fairly reliable sources, that appear to be true about this country so far at least.

Japanese think shaking hands is novel, but they don’t realize it’s meant to be done with the right hand, they just use whatever,

It is common for family members to share bathwater, and to put tea in the bathwater.

It is common for Japanese women to use tiny strips of double sided tape to make their eyelids appear more Caucasian.

Whale meat is available at most if not all grocery stores.

If you pay for the license, there is no limit on the number of bears you may hunt in a season.

Prostitution carries less social stigma in Japan than in other parts of the world, and though it is now officially illegal, it is visible almost everywhere and there are many buildings set up just for this purpose.

Marijuana culture is very popular in Japan, Rastafarian apparel, marijuana paraphernalia etc is sold everywhere and clothing with marijuana related logos or designs are extremely popular.

There is no marijuana in all of Japan, well there is some but the penalties are so high, that its very uncommon.

Seatbelts are not always used in Japan, and only considered necessary on major roads.

There is thirty percent universal health care coverage in Japan. Outside of that, people are on their own.

Everyone has a bike, but helmets are almost never seen.

English study begins in middle school and is mandatory. No other languages are offered.

Every town, no matter how small has at least one massive slot machine casino.

There are no warnings on Cigarette boxes in Japan, and smoking ads are everywhere.

Japan’s Garbage is separated into three categories, combustible, non-combustible, and recyclable bottles and cans.

Japanese toothpaste is essentially wet baking soda in a tube. Gold teeth and dentures are both common, even for the middle aged.

It is common to see elderly women with part or all of their hair dyed purple, I have no idea what for.

University admittance is determined by an exam, rather than by high school grade transcripts. Students are often studying for this exam during their final high school year as well as regular high school exams.

There is a high student suicide rate in Japan, there are gates in subway stations supposedly to stop people from throwing themselves onto the tracks.

It takes several Japanese students working together to hold an English conversation, and when you see people alone who would normally talk to you in a group they will often just say hello, or avoid you, or be afraid.

In situations where we English speakers would use phrases like “good luck!” or “do your best!” Japanese say “がんばて” [gam ba te] or “がんばれ” [gan ba re]. The literal translation of these phrases is “fight!” so often before I give a speech or do anything really, people will shout at me in English; “FIGHT!” This was very confusing in the beginning and I often thought I was about to be attacked.

Other things I feel like mentioning:

Today I gave an introduction speech to the entire student body, despite having been in attendance for more than one month. It was well received.

I’m going on another fishing trip this weekend because I said I enjoyed the last one so much, which I did, but it wasn’t this cold before!

Yamanote is a private sports school, with teams that train for hours on end. Everyone in Canada told me I would be much bigger than most Japanese, but many of the guys at school are much taller and more massive than I. On the same note, people are constantly asking me what sports I like, expecting me to tell them a specific sport which I have been training at since childhood. I’ve just been saying skiing, which is essentially true, and gives me a month or so more before I have to prove it. I now have way more ski trip invites than I can possibly afford though. Also the mountains I have seen are half or less than half the size of most Canadian mountains.

According to my host dad the snow is salty from the mountains proximity to the sea… at least I think that’s what he said.

The Japanese language is completely different form English, I have a hard time stopping myself from comparing everything to English because it doesn't work, and gets you really confused. There is no plural in Japanese and everything is just said differently. "Is" comes at the end of a sentence, i dunno i could go on forever but heres a quick example;

if i were to show a LITERAL word for word translation of what my host parents said to each other at dinner tonight it would sound like this:

host mom: father, rice eat?

host dad: yes yes, eat,

host mom: milk drink?

host dad: no, is.

so, it can be easy to understand when they are talking simply and informally, but correctly saying what you want to say can be much harder.

I have seen zero homeless people since I came here, but I’ve read on the internet that Japan does have some. I don’t know how such a massively capitalist society has managed to have only upper class and upper middle class citizens.

I know this was a kind of bleak one, but I just wanted to show you the imperfect side of Japan, which I haven’t really talked about previously. I’m still having the time of my life and making every day an adventure!

experiencing.

Hey guys, I haven’t been writing much lately, but I’ve been busy!

I went on a white water rafting trip with the other exchange students and stayed in a Japanese style hotel, which is weird and there is no furniture. But it was loads of fun. And since I’m the only male exchange student I got to go on a camping and river fishing side trip. I’m not a very good fisherman to begin with, but this was really tricky. Wading around in Japanese rivers is really cool though and there’s a lot of nature to see. Oh yea did you know that this part of Japanese has grizzlies? I didn’t. We brought some bear spray just in case. I caught three tiiiiiiny fish and saw this awesome peninsula/cape thing where many ships have crashed and it was the coolest thing I've ever seen. I’m going to try and put some pictures up with this blog, and a video if I can figure it out.

I get to go to the zoo this week with school.

Yesterday I went to a small town to experience a jinjya festival. Now I don’t have enough of an idea of what it’s about to explain it to you, but it involves lots of carnival style games and food and carrying a huge 2 ton temple/statue thing with a golden bird on top down Main Street. It takes like 20 or more men to carry it and of course I helped out. They carried this thing for something like four hours; I had to give up after maybe 20 minutes.

I met two foreigners this week, Its fun when you do because they are always interesting people with an interesting story, but they're always teachers, and they're surprised when I say I’m in high school.

Actually I’m kind of surprised I’m still in high school myself.


I really enjoy going grocery shopping with my host mother, the supermarket is not a place people expect to see a foreigner, and when they see me with a shopping cart they look pretty shocked and a little scared. There are so many foods that we don’t have in Canada, but we should.

I’m making good use of my new cell phone, and not wasting any time here. The language is coming slowly, VERY slowly.

Don’t stop reading!

Alex

earthquake!

today in first period we had an earthquake

My class is on the top floor and the whole building started wobbling,

I hadnt been expecting this, hokkaido is outside the ring of fire and apparently only get 2 or 3 second tremors a few times a year

this was a full minute of wobbling building, i didnt panic, i guess because i didnt even know what was going on and i thought i must have just be dying of hunger and weak or something.

so this was apparently the first real quake in like 5 years, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

___

Tonight I went downtown with some friends,

and when I got on the subway to go home it was still light out.

I got off at my station, and came up the stairs and on to the street.

The sun had gone down and there were neon signs lighting up the night, and people everywhere.

I dont know, it was just really cool.

2 weeks and two days, more thoughts

I have been here for so long! I didn't even realize, I thought maybe like 8 days maximum, saying goodbye at the airports seems like it was only hours ago, time is going by fast, I'll be sure not to waste any.

I took the subway by myself today, after giving a huge speech in Japanese that I had a friend translate for me from my original English speech.

I bought a cellphone yesterday, the cellphones here are insane, they open all kinds of different ways, and have all kinds of functions like internet and tv and email and just really high definition displays, but apparently its all old news to the Japanese.

The phone is gonna come in handy, people asked me how I had been living without it.

I don't know if i talked about this here before but there are three alphabets in Japanese, and I now know two of them, I can READ JAPANESE! but no, I can't understand what I've read.

its common to see people with English on their t shirts that makes very little sense or is simply weird. I wanted to document it all but there is simply to much, some ones I can think of from today and ones that stand out include a woman with a hat that said "princess of beans" a girl with a shirt that just said TORTOISE across it, and a girl riding a bike with one large word GENTLY. it reminds me of when people in the west get tattoos of Asian characters because they look cool rather than for their meanings.

The food here, have i talked about the food here? I'm going to talk about it some more.

Its all fantastic, i ate a huge dinner out last night with like 30 different dishes and it was delicious, I found out after that what I thought had been chicken, beef, pork, etc, had all been chicken, just different parts, such as liver, heart, and bladder.

oh man.

It was good anyway.


other than that, some weird things I have eaten here include:

seared(as in semi raw) horse
seared chicken
raw egg (not my favorite)
and of course raw octopus, sea urchin, tuna, flying fish, salmon, salmon eggs, eel, squid, the usual.

as for the not so gross sounding dishes, like fried noodles, ramen noodles and the like, they're just as tasty.

I heard it snowed in Calgary. wow. I'm glad today is cloudy because its usually blistering hot. My classroom if full of people fanning themselves and complaining about the heat.

I rode a bicycle in japan for the first time yesterday, it was so cool, after 2 weeks of not being in a car and walking everywhere I felt like I was going so fast, and when you're on an old used bike people don't think you're a tourist so much, and then they're even more surprised to see you.

I've always been bad with names, but Japanese names are extra hard to remember, I thought by now i would be getting better at it, but not really.

I really like the school uniform, well I mean I don't think its cool in itself, but not having to pick out clothes every day is really easy, and when everyone is dressed the same you judge people on things other than their fashion sense.

Speaking of that Japanese boys spend a lot of time on their hair, they bring hairspray to class and use bobby pins like girls do to keep it out of their eyes and it sticks up in all different directions and a lot of them tell me to straighten my hair. I don't think that's going to happen though.

Be sure to check back here once in a while.

For tomorrow I've volunteered to clean up the beach along with 100's of other people from Sapporo.

some thoughts

So,

It’s really time consuming to paraphrase a day’s events and put them into witty sentences ( maybe not that witty) and chronoligify them and everything, SO, maybe only expect a good post like that once a week, I’ll do what I can, but for now here are some sentences you might like to read.
I have now eaten raw egg, raw chicken, semi-raw horse, skewered pigs nipples (It tasted like pork, but when I asked what it was my host father just pointed to some imaginary nipples. Maybe it was dog.) It was all really good. The food is like one of the best parts about being here.
Every dish is a surprise, and usually I don’t like surprises, but not when it comes to Japanese food.
I’ve picked up two of the three alphabets, I can READ Japanese! But alas, I cannot understand what I’ve read.
Manners are really different here, and privacy is kind of different, I’ll get back to you on that.
Me and my host dad went for a longlonglong walk in the park today, and he like power walked, and I lost him, and then I got lost myself, and then I asked someone for their cell phone and called home. I wasn’t worried and I knew my way home, I just didn’t want anyone else to worry, but when they picked up the phone, it was difficult to explain my situation. You can’t use hand signals on the phone. Anyway, I got home in ok time for my in home Japanese tutor who makes things very easy to understand, and has quite a vocabulary despite being very firm about not being able to speak English.
These two Mormon missionaries live near me and I see them all the time and kind of talk to them, kind of.
Oh yea, book stores are huge, electronics stores are 8 floors, train stations are attached to massive department stores, then the next station is attached to another one.
Baseball is 10 times more popular in Japan than in America, Kentucky fried chicken too I think.
Today I climbed a mountain. And at the top of the mountain was one of my teachers, crazy.
Everyone has a bike, no one has a helmet. They go so fast on the sidewalk, never on the road.
I was in my first car in Japan on Friday, it was so scary being on the other side of the road, in a car about as big as a cabinet zooming around corners, I don’t know.
There are bears in Japan. I didn’t know that. Well I think that’s what they were trying to tell me. I’ll look it up.
There are active volcanoes in Hokkaido where I live,

There is massive flooding in some of the other islands. It’s like New Orleans or something, but you guys probably don’t even hear about it.
Here the commercials are 10 to 15 seconds instead of 30 seconds; they come at you fast, and are usually awesome if they don’t give you a seizure. You know who you are.
Everything is about consumerism in Japan, well anything that’s not traditional, maybe I’ll wait until I've experienced more here before I get into that.
School is awesome and my classroom has an awesome view and there are no bars on the windows and no one will steal your stuff. I’m not expected to do anything and only study Japanese on my own during class, or sleep.
They try to avoid waste here, there’s still over packaging but all garbage is recycled or incinerated, I think out of necessity rather than ecology, see there isn’t a lot of room for junk. They make good use of recycled tire pathways and the like, but incinerating so much garbage caaaaaaan’t be good.
Wow, I didn’t think I had this much to say.
Game shows are hilarious.
People point at me.
Some people like walk extra fast to get past me.
We have a pretty crummy TV. I was like, this is Japan, where's the HDTV? Then I found out they have a huge HD projector attached to the ceiling and pull down a screen to watch movies on it.
I have a classical music class. Hmm.
My bed is so hard and so fantastic, my pillow is hard and not so fantastic.
Watermelons cost like 20 dollars, but I told them they're my favourite before I knew that, and they keep buyin em.
Here, we buy groceries 30 bucks at a time, and one or two days at a time and anything you could ever want to purchase is within walking distance.
The cars. Oh man.
The phone like answers itself and puts itself on speakerphone, suddenly a man’s voice will be in the room, woa. Or maybe that’s the doorbell I don’t even know.
They’ve had like 8 exchange students (留学生) here before me.
This island, Hokkaido (the big one at the top) was originally home to an indigenous people called the Ainu, who were genetically closer to the people of Siberia than to the Japanese. Then the Japanese killed them, there are like 300 full blood Ainu left in the world and many more “Métis” I guess. They face many of the same problems first nations Canadians do today.
Dinners almost ready, but I just ate like a whole watermelon.
It turns out I was using chopsticks (端) allll wrong.
There’s no smog, I thought there would be smog.
The hiking trails are steep, but the mountains are generally puny.
The Olympics were held here in 1928, winter.
I can hear fireworks.