Class? What's that? What do you mean I have to take classes?

If you make a person start class two weeks later than she usually does, odds are she'll forget that there are such things as classes. Throw in the KGU class schedule, which is crazy enough as it is, and you have a very confused girl. It really doesn't feel like classes are in session--more like I have a whole bunch of appointments during the day that I have to show up for. Allow me to explain... No, there is too much, allow me to sum up... (just kidding).

Sunday afternoon I moved out of the Seminar House and into the Yuasa house. My new home is approximately 20 minutes away from the university by bike. It is a small house with no air conditioning except in the kitchen/laundry/living room unit. Needless to say, I spend most of my time at home in the living room. My room is the only room on the first floor, across the hall from the living room. Also on the first floor is the shower room and the toilet. One thing I love about Japanese houses is that the bathing room is completely separate from the toilet. It's such a wonderful idea; I wonder why American houses don't do that. It's really nice because I can take my time with the shower and not have to worry about hogging the bathroom.

Upstairs are everyone else's rooms and a small little desk with a computer on it that they allow me to use to check my email. However, I rarely use it because the upstairs is not air-conditioned and heat rises, but also because the keyboard on the computer is a Japanese style keyboard. It takes me forever to type something because only the letters and numbers are in the right place. The shifts and the space bar are very different, and the special symbols are in a totally different place (the @ is where the [ symbol is, and the apostrophe is where the & symbol is).

The family is mostly quiet because the mother is the only one who can carry on an entire conversation in English (which I like because it forces me to use my Japanese). Sometimes I can follow their conversations, sometimes I cannot. As for the father and the two daughters, we communicate mostly through gestures, though I can understand some words like jitensha (bike), yokatta (it was good), oishii(delicious), asui (essentially: it's hot outside), and of course kanji. Of course, every day I spend in conversation class, I get a little better. I just have to remember everything, that's all.

In just three days, I have tried a whole bunch of new foods in Japan. At school, I usually order the curry rice (it's Japanese curry, which I think in America is called golden curry). The main reason I order this is because I actually know how to order curry rice in Japanese, rather than pointing at a menu item and saying ano.... hitosu onegaishimasu... (which means that one.... just one plate please). But at home, I have tried several foods very different from those we eat in America. My first meal was entirely too much for me to eat (she placed at least five different things in front of me) but most of it was good. I had Japanese pizza (which had corn on it), sushi (two types--the kind with the seaweed and the kind without), something called sunomono which is sorta like a salad, peaches and pears, french fries, and a rice omelet. I tried a little of everything, but I certainly couldn't eat all that by myself. As for Sushi, I don't really like it. The seaweed is entirely too salty for me. As for the kind without seaweed, I'm not entirely fond of it either, but the kind that is made of rice and squid is okay (yes I had squid sushi). Yoshi (the eldest daughter) likes squid sushi the best. Sunomono is kinda like a salad. It has thinly sliced cucumber and whatever else you feel like throwing in, and instead of dressing, you soak the cucumber and other materials in a mixture of sugar and vinegar. I like sunomono when it's made of cucumbers only. My first night, it was made with cucumbers and octopus... Octopus is not bad but it's not something I'd eat all the time. It's a little rubbery.

On my second night I got lost on the way home and managed to find my way back to Seminar House 4 before dark so I could ask for directions. I now know my way home perfectly and will never be lost again, but it was not a fun experience. But, dinner definitely made things much better. I had tempura, which is probably my favorite Japanese food thus far (curry rice running a close second). Shrimp tempura is kinda like popcorn shrimp in the United States except that when the Japanese fry things it is a lot lighter and healthier than the US version. I must learn to cook tempura! Other things you can make with tempura is eggplant (which isn't bad but not my favorite), green pepper, and I'm not sure what the other thing was that I had but it was also tempura and it was also good.

As for last night, I had eel and rice, sunomono, and egg drop soup. Eel and rice bowl was... Well I liked the rice but the eel had a funny texture that I didn't like. Egg drop soup was very very good except for the fact that it was totemo asui outside. I'll have to request it for dinner during the winter.

For dessert, we usually have peaches and pears, but they are different from American peaches (as in the peaches are pale and a little pink and fresh cut instead of from a can so they aren't as soggy, and pears taste a little sweeter). I love Japanese peaches and pears.

Most of the time I have water at dinner, but my first night I also had this thing called a fruit chuuhai (or is it chuhai...) It is absolutely amazing. It's fruity but it also has a little sake in it, but it tastes really good (as opposed to other types of alcohol which smell and taste like alcohol). It's such a lady's drink because it has so little alcohol content in it, but I like it a lot. And what amuses me is that you can get chuhai in a can out of a vending machine. Yes the drinking age in Japan is 20 but how do you enforce that when it’s in a vending machine??

Despite several weird but good foods at the dinner table, the weirdest thign I've eaten in Japan is a hot dog. It's not much different from the American one (it's smaller and more healthy) but the Japanese eat it for breakfast. Hot dogs? For breakfast??? Weird....

As for my classes, I am taking 17 hours (though it hardly feels like it) which amounts to five classes. My test results were great--I am in Level 3, class C and my professor is awesome. I attend Spoken Japanese every day (which really helps). For my reading and writing level results, I am in Level 2 because the kanji covered in the Genki book (which is the book we use here at KGU) is different from the kanji covered in the Nakama book (which is what I used in AR). So, I know a whole lot more Kanji than I'm supposed to know for level 2, but I don't know some of the kanji considered level 2 by the Genki book. This class level may change after our second placement test. Therefore, this week's focus will be studying my kanji. I attend Reading and Writing only three times a week, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I am also taking three classes in english. Anthropological perspectives on Japanese Culture and Everyday life is taught by Hester (I think I have read some of his stuff before), and the class itself doesn't seem to be too bad. Of the three I am taking, this seems to be the one that I will like least, though I like it a lot. The teacher is just not quite as dynamic as my other two. This class will require a lot of reading and a mini-field work project, which I think will be helpful because I haven't done field-work before and it will give me some hands-on experience on Anthropological fieldwork (which, of course, will look really good later).

The second class I am taking is called the Dynamics of Modern Japan and is like a cross between modern Japanese history and Japanese politics, and will give me a context in which to look at Japan. In our introductory class yesterday, I learned of an interesting phenomenon in Japanese culture that very few people have actually written about. I think I have found my honors thesis! Hee hee. I'm really excited about this class because the professor is amazing, the course sounds fun, and apparently we aren't too old for field trips! There are several places this professor wants to take us. For starters, he wants to take us to see Shiga prison so we get an idea of how the Japanese criminal justice and punishment system works. He also wants to take us to Hiroshima so we can see it for ourselves and listen to a real atomic bomb survivor talk about his experience (not only did this guy survive the ordeal but he's willing to talk about it). Then, there's also Emperor Meiji's tomb (apparently they bury Emperors), and the soup kitchens near the train station so we get a perspective of everything that is Japan, from all sides.

The third class I am taking is an academic study of Shinto; basically the class is split into two parts. Part one tells us what exactly Shinto is, what its beliefs are, and under what rules it operates. This is good because I have no idea what the rules of the game are according to Shinto. In fact, I know nothing about Shinto except it is a religion that originates in Japan. Part two of the class is spent discussing how Shinto affects Japanese culture (which is important to me since I'm an anthropologist, remember?). So basically, once we know the ground rules of Shinto, we study how it shapes the lives of people by which rules they follow, which rules they bend and break, and how they break those rules. Hopefully by the end of this class I will be able to understand Japan through a new context. In Japan, it may be considered by some to be a dead religion, and yet people still go to temples and some still have a shinto altar in their homes. Also, shinto shows up in politics - the Chinese get upset every time the Japanese prime minister visits a shinto shrine in Tokyo dedicated to the Japanese war-dead in WWII. They get really upset when the Taiwanese Prime Minister visits that shrine too. So hopefully this will be an interesting class to take because its not really about "okay, let's learn the way of Shinto" so much as it is "here's what shinto is and here's where it shows up in Japanese culture, in some really interesting ways." Field trips in this class too, by the way. The nearest of these is to visit Hi Matsuri (the Fire Festival).

Classes are a little strange here. Classes are not on any sort of understandable schedule. For instance, each English class meets two times a week, but it may meet at 4pm on Monday and 1 pm on Thursday. There really is no rhyme or reason to the timing of the classes, so my schedules is different every single day. That will take some getting used to… However, that’s the negative; here’s the positive. Books here are FREAKISLY inexpensive!! I just bought all my books for my FIVE classes and spent 7500 yen, which is essentially 75 dollars. In the US, it would cost me at least 200 dollars! I’m going to be so spoiled when I come back to the US and have to buy books for next fall… “What do you mean I have to pay over 100 dollars for these books?!”

I’ll try to update more since I have such long breaks between classes! Miss you guys!