I still don't know how many actually read this, but given the comments (written and spoken) that I've received, I need to be more diligent. So I apologize that it's been over a month...For those who don't know, I went home to America for two weeks for Christmas and New Year's, which was a refreshing vacation for a number of reasons. Before I left, things in Japan were very festive. Allow me to explain. Winter in Japan brings a strange mix of international celebration. Even out here in relatively remote areas, Christmas decorations abounded. My local gym set up a large blow-up Santa Claus inside a chimney by the reception desk, and Kagoshima city was well-decorated with bright trees in different shopping centers and other lights, wreaths, and such scattered around. And strangest of all, or most expected of all, depending on how you look at it, lots of the decorations included holiday messages in English. All of this gave me a general feeling of being at home, and it was comforting but also a little confusing because of the degree to which it felt familiar. Everyone around me became gradually more lively and talkative as December got underway, and I soon realized the reason: in terms of national importance, New Year's in Japan is analogous to an American Christmas. Before the day, there are parties, literally "forget the year" parties, and there are also "new year" parties. But on New Year's day, there are many special events. Many people visit shrines and temples, eat soba and other traditional New Year's meals, draw what I translate as lottery fortunes (random fortunes), young people receive money, stores have "luck bags" that resemble grab bags in America but might actually contain something you want, and other things. It is a major holiday for family. Christmas Eve in Japan is typically a day for lovers, and Christmas day is a day for perhaps a party and some cake, but it is a day for school and work nonetheless. There was an Open Mic for JETs in Kagoshima prefecture, and I have been itching to keep working on standup because I have a little flare of passion for performing and I love doing comedy. So I did a bit, and I learned my lesson on venue choice. It was kind of a throwback to Lafayette Open Mic days: the audience is small, and most of them are expecting art in a more recognizable form like poetry or acoustic guitar. Mix that with the fact that half the audience doesn't understand English, and it is a very unwelcome feeling. The upside to the event was that I really got to test myself. I knew it was kind of a mistake after the first 30 seconds, but I stayed up for several minutes, got my jokes out, pushed through for some decent laughs, and got some helpful comments afterwards telling me that I handled it well and had good stage presence and poise. Nonetheless, everyone was drunk and lost their attention spans, so my only other option was to get angry and give up. Since I've been back, there has not been much action, quite literally. I want to calculate the amount of work I've done (in the physics sense of the term) because I have avoided movement whenever possible. I drive a moped. It is relatively warm for late January, but 45 degress is still cold on a moped. Many kids share the exact same woe. Students come to school by a variety of means, usually school bus, moped, or bicycle. And there are students who probably travel about 20 minutes or so in each direction on the moped, every day, at 7 in the morning. It must be miserable. Students who take the bus do so because every other mode of transportation is implausible. Some students probably wake up at 5 so that they can then ride the bus for close to an hour. Remember, these kids apply to high school, so they aren't always in the neighborhood. On top of this, insulation is, to my knowledge, non-existent in Japanese homes. I wonder if it has to do with climate, because the country is surely modern enough to be capable of equipping homes with it. No lie, I often wake up in the morning and go outside to discover that the inside of my apartment is actually colder than outside. It's a motivation killer, so my more adventurous sightseeing will be postponed for a while. Still, there are some good nearby places to visit, so I'll try to do it FOR YOU...and me. At school, I have been working relatively hard and my Japanese is coming along pretty nicely. In class, when it is necessary, I am able to explain things in Japanese pretty smoothly and without thinking about it first. I won't even touch the word fluency, though; my vocabulary and kanji reading are not where they should be. As for pictures, I will post some and explanations of them soon. I unloaded all of my files onto the external hard drive I received for Christmas in order to keep my laptop happy and I didn't bring the drive to work. I think I have some pictures of Japanese beef and a couple other things. My house will be clean this weekend, so look forward to some pictures of how I live in my hallway, err, apartment. Bye!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
my word verification is "spolorym".
now that that's out of the way, rape.
so talk of new year's tradition leads me to ask the question...do you Philly area gentlemen eat pork and saurkraut on new year's day? I had no clue how uncommon that was until I moved up to nyc and everyone i told about it acted like i was from mars.
I know that a lot of people in the area do eat pork and sauerkraut for New Year's, and I know this from working in the meat room at a supermarket. It's not uncommon so much as people don't really care, I think.
Oh good. I'm not weird.
think you'll ever try stand-up in japanese?
I really doubt it. I can make the kids at school laugh when I want to, but it's usually only based on a funny intonation or pronunciation. It's very rare that some concept or irony that we find funny resonates with Japanese people, especially if you try to translate the humor. Japanese humor, like English, requires the touch of a native speaker, so while I can get a laugh here and there, the art of stand-up would be lost on me. Add that to the fact that their comedy is usually done in pairs. Every time I make a semi-complex joke that people laugh a lot at, I feel pretty proud. It's difficult.
Post a Comment