r you kidding me??

my surname isn't the easiest to pronounce correctly upon first sight. i get it, it's ok, there are a lot of permutations of it that include an R and are much more common than the way i spell it. never mind the fact that mine is a word in the dictionary, or that i have three names and not an R among them. but this saga has reached a new level i couldn't have imagined i would see. pictured below is the front of my latest internet service bill. the lowest line of characters is my name, surname first, given name second.

in the folds of orions tunic

i'm feeling pensive, so here goes. as i was walking home from my evening, all-too-early at 12:30, i looked up at the sky as i often do on the home stretch (the part of my walk that is so close to my funny pink apartment building that i always walk it alone) to contemplate the stars. within my first few months here, while i was still feeling very much unsettled and discombobulated, i spotted orion. this is also a good time to admit that my interest in astronomy and the science of space has been growing at a faster-than-steady rate, perhaps culminating in my attempt at saying "we all come from the stars" in japanese to my friend's mother as we all watched the moon rise over the silhouette of the mountains after the all-day oyster party i attended (perhaps a post will follow exploring that further). she either understood and liked the idea, or thought i had a few too many oysters and far too many drinks that day.

so i know orion. who doesn't? "orion has got to be the most easily recognized constellation up there", you say? you're right. there's nothing profound about it or my relation to it. at all. i just don't know many constellations but do know orion (today i found the big dipper, haHA). i felt comforted that first night in some cheesy way, awash in a sea of the unfamiliar, but grounded by stars i recognized. here i was on the other side of the big wide world, and orion had come with me. it was proof i was still in the same place, just a different neighborhood. so every now and again when i happen to have gotten it together to go out or stay out after dark, i spend the last block and a half of my homeward journey with my neck craned back, partly because i want to look that badly but can't be bothered to stop walking, and partly because the road is wide and empty. but tonight i had a thought. my first thought was "shit, i can't even find orion tonight." but after that (and after i found that Dipper, i THINK it was the Big one) i had a marginally more noteworthy thought. it's a bit of poetic irony that the thing i find most comforting as i explore a different corner of the world is something that only exists from our relative point in the universe. constellations are ethereal, so concrete an idea to so many, yet the stars that we imagine collaborating to form them actually have nothing to do with each other, other than all running off of fusion power, which makes us all terribly jealous.

i talk about it as if it's a different world here, but it's not. i have settled back in to many of my old habits, including being too lazy to go sightseeing. there are a plethora of differences on the surface, with how society operates and how people see fit to act in public or semi-private. the language is different, the body language is different, the cultural values (and taboos!) are different, sometimes to my embarrassment. the historical background is different here, which has led down a different path than the one i saw taken as i grew up. but it's not such a different world. people are still people at the core, and it's not even that much of a leap to understand why they act in the ways i don't recognize, when the impetus is considered. i don't feel like i live in some exotic locale any more, it's just life, with the caveat that i need a second language to operate a fair amount of it, and that i often don't understand how to act. maybe that last one isn't so different, i just cared less when i was a citizen. i don't feel the same sense of entitlement to do whatever i want here. yet among all of the familiar and camaraderie , all of the similarities, i took to the star patterns for support. in a life of ephemera, i found solace in an optical illusion.

Evidence

I have decided to at least link to some pictures here. I'm sure you noticed if you made it even this far down the page, but now there are thumbnails of pictures I've taken of things that bore documentation while I've been around and about. For the most part, they were taken with the camera on my phone, since it's usually the only one on me when I happen upon these curiosities. There's a decent chance they'll be updated more often than this blog. It's the way of my world.

Explosive City Pride

Annual Fireworks-by-the-River tonight. That's probably not what the event is really called, but I can't read the banner. While reading through my employee handbook to find out how many days I can request off for New Years' travel I discovered that today was Labor Thanksgiving Day. I guess that's why they did it. This was my second fireworks (hanabi) festival in Japan, my first being just weeks after my arrival here at Lake Suwa, about two and a half hours by train from here (videos from that one featured below, I didn't make any visual records of tonights lightstravaganza). I have to say I was partial to my own city's. First off, it was very close. I live about a mile, I'd say, from the river, and the banks were the scene. Almost all the seating was free, on a long berm hillside just off the bank of the river. So I was much closer than the Suwa fireworks, in fact, I could see some of the launch platforms. I also have an exponentially greater understanding of what is going on around me at this point in my stay here, which I'm sure helped with the experience. Also, it wasn't RAINING like it was in Suwa. If it had been, it would have been miserable, because unlike three months ago it's almost-winter cold. Unfortunately, I didn't find any vendors offering ¥300 beer tonight, but I didn't look very hard. The river of people in the mass exodus after the show has me convinced that damn near all of the 200,000 Naganoites were there and although it was dark and I'm reasonably certain there would be no cultural stigma against being spotted drinking by students, I decided I'm not quite past my own ingrained response to the situation and opted to keep the money in my pocket for a better time. The score, therefore, lies as follows:

Suwa - 2 (1 for cheap beer, 1 for skillful smiley face and heart shaped fireworks)
Nagano - 5 (1 for no rain, 1 for abundance of free seating, 1 for closeness to home, and 2 for well-timed firework/music collaborations (one of which was the James bond theme))

With a slightly better understanding of, and ability to listen to, the language I managed to figure out the salvo system I noticed last time. Looking back, I suppose I didn't get around to posting on that occasion. The deal is this: Rather than a short strung together display with a big finale at the end, fireworks here are numerous rounds (i think we made it to 51 tonight) of awesome displays, each worthy of being a finale in any western fireworks show I've seen, puncuated by short periods of announcements, relative quiet and darkness while the next round is set up. And this time, probably partly because I have lived in Nagano for long enough to recognize businesses and partly because there was a loudspeaker across the sidewalk from where I was sitting, it dawned on me that the announcements were lists of sponsors. So I guess individual companies or small groups thereof can pay for salvos and get their names said on a loudspeaker. Fireworks are the go-to celebration here. There are so many fireworks festivals across the country year round. I'm glad I have gotten to see a couple of them.

Oh yeah, the videos from Suwa (toward the very end; i didn't record some of the more original explosions unfortunately):

Field Trip

Today I had a company mandated health check-up. It was kind of a bare-bones physical, only testing weight, height, a simple urine test (collected on an industrial length Q-tip with a large head), eyes, blood pressure and respiratory, and taking an x-ray. It was my first metric physical. It felt a little weird, but overall a positive first encounter. Most of the nursing staff didn't speak any english, so I was generally just guessing when I was asked questions. For the eye test I needed to know the words for up, down, left and right. Luckily, I knew all but down and my helpful coworker filled me in on that one. My first eye test in another language. It was such a minor occurence, I'm not sure why it felt significant to me, but I liked it. Then came the doctor, who spoke enough english to tell me that (despite having lost the expected “foreigner 15-20”) I'm overweight and I need to diet. Thanks, doc, you've opened my eyes. He wasn't rude, but he was blunt. And I liked it. Maybe I'll even start exercising – this has at least inspired me to intend to do so.

Other news from last few days: accidentally scared a 3 year old with a couple of the creatures I had prepared for our Halloween-themed lesson today. switched to the winter clothes-drying method and tried out the in-wall fan unit in the shower room. I stretch a bunch of tension rods between the walls and hang all of my clothes in there and leave the fan on with its built-in timer (which I assume I used correctly due to the lack of shrunken or still wet clothes this morning). Novel, not sure if it is any more energy efficient than a tumble drier, though it does retain those endearing wrinkles air drying is famous for. Most importantly, I bought a couch at a secondhand shop, and through a hefty battle with my own japanese and the undying patience of the clerk, arranged to have it delivered. My latent lounging life springs back to its former vibrant potency on November 8th.

The Hurdle

I've been living in Nagano for a month now, Japan for a week more. Little has changed over this time in most respects. I am used to my job now, though it is still in a moderately transitional phase as I try to normalize all of my lessons. I am planned about a week ahead. I eat sushi for multiple meals a week. While I can order drinks with relative ease and mangle my way through placing a food order (generally with the gracious assistance of my index finger and an extensive pictorial menu), my Japanese has improved at the stalling crawl of a weekday rush hour on Hwy 101 out of San Francisco. The most important recent addition to my "vocabulary", for lack of a more aptly diminutive word, is "to" (pronounced toe), meaning: and. Now when I want more than one item from the menu, which I invariably do, especially at izakayas, which are a sort of appetizer restaurant/bar (it's almost like they knew me before I was here), I can fill the confusing silence while I flip pages with this little morsel, making me (and my ever-patient waitperson I'm sure) eternally less uncomfortable with the extant hideous communication gap. A very small step, especially remembering that in this moraic language, to, as one sound, is depicted by a single character from the syllabary.

I have picked up a few other words here and there, but by and large when I am spoken to in Japanese my brain freezes over, my vocabulary is quartered and my ears cease to relay information properly to the icy mess between them. It doesn't help that it is most commonly spoken at roughly twice the speed of sound, allowing for the conversion to km/h. Zannen. What a shame. Another useful catchword, particularly when playing pub games.

I have procured a copy of a Japanese textbook that is the text for a free twice-weekly class I'll be attending once a week as of this Monday. It will be a good low pressure place to practice using what I have learned, since no matter how comfortable I am with thank you, please, yes, no, OK and my numbers, they can only take me so far conversationally. So since I've had the books for about two and a half weeks now, I just have to study 3 more chapters before starting on chapter 5 in class on Monday. Some things don't change.

Home

My apartment is set up to a rough approximation of the way I want it and most of my things have found a home somewhere on the premises. There remains only a small coffee table's worth of belongings as yet unsorted, and I can live with that for a while. Can and probably will. I am now firmly over the initial shock of being instantly illiterate, literally and culturally. Staying in Okayama for a week was immensely productive in terms of my adjustment to this new place. I see it as a kind of purgatorial quarantine, not of me from Japan, but of Japan from me. My world had just been turned upside down and I was so off-kilter from the experience that I couldn't even bring myself to eat at a restaurant for several days. I spent most of the week hiding from the foreign world beyond my door. By the end of the week I was finally moderately at ease with my surroundings and ready to learn how to navigate this society, and then it was off again on a bullet train, away from the small support group of people undergoing the same changes and challenges I was. During the times I was awake, I went through a lot of the same emotional up-and-downturns that I had felt as my plane neared land again this side of the Pacific. More muted versions thereof, but from a similar vein. This time I was going alone to the place that I would begin to live alone, trying my best to fit in in a place that I never will. It was on the train that I realized the real usefulness of the week of training I had undergone. Yes, the company policy and practice had been impressed on me and I was given the opportunity to get back in to dealing-with-kids mode, but the most productive feature of this week was to ease me in to Japanese society. I didn't really even shop that week. I wasn't on my own and I didn't have to try to figure everything out unaided. Which is not to say that I do now, for my coworkers and budding friends have made it abundantly clear that they are close at hand should I need them, but a week to adjust without the added pressure of my first few days at a new job and alone in a new town did me more good than perhaps I can describe. I think that this function of the training week is not accidental, and the company is to be commended for their foresight in planning the arrival of new teachers this way. I arrived in Nagano ready to meet my new boss and the newest iteration of my life, ready to satisfy curiousities and make new explorations.

Okayama was vastly different to me than Nagano. Both in the personal experience and as a city. I suppose that should not come as a surprise. I was hesitant to put much time or energy in to exploration in Okayama, knowing that I was only there for a week and would then have to do it all again here in Nagano. It felt overwhelming, but maybe that was more a function of the new half of the globe I had found myself standing on. It did not feel like the same sort of place to me that Nagano feels like, and I already feel at home here. It's probably all a result of some subconscious block that refused to let me feel settled until I arrived where I was really going. Now I feel fine.

I have been in Nagano for a week now, training under my predecessor, who handed me progressively more classes to plan and teach over the course of the week. He has been invaluable to me, as I may have already said, both at work and in my Nagano education. I have gotten used to having him around, and just in time, because now I am a fully fledged employee and teacher and he is unemployed, soon to leave. I have only learned how to live in Nagano with him here to rely on, it will be a different experience yet living here without him. The changes come a week at a time, and each one alters the way I am living.