Bloggart 3: Extranormalcy

Full disclosure: I wrote this blog a week ago on a piece of folio. You are getting it now because there are no important tests or naps to distract me.

Dear All,
It's astonishing how quickly my life in Japan has become 'everyday'. All sorts of little things that I used to find odd now seem completely normal. Or course my pillow is made of buckwheat husks. Of course you can leave your bike unlocked anywhere in the neighborhood.* Of course I need a separate pair of slippers to enter the kitchen than I wear in the rest of the building. Of course you can buy a fruit and cream sandwich at the shop. Of course a language needs two syllabic systems,four readings for each character and no future tense.** It's all just become part of my life. I'm still a full time student here, I'm still doing my homework (most days) and I put my slippers on one at a time.***

Today though I went to the park. I was in a rush this morning and forgot my phone at home, so apologies for the lack of photos. My punishment was commute served sans Pratchett. Between my first period (09:15-10:45) and third period (13:30-15:00) classes I decided to go take a look at the autumn foliage, just in case winter arrives before another sunny day does. I saw koi fish with their funny fish mouths and flappy ducks and some really loud crows. I saw a rose garden**** and a tiny forest and learnt that walking on sycamore leaves sounds exactly like crumpling brown paper. I saw leaves the colour of blood and butter.***** I went into the hothouses and saw leaves that mother nature (in her infinite wisdom) had painted with purple nail polish, and orchids and giant lily-pads and a Vernon Dudley lookalike.****** I saw some skyscraper trees and some skyscraper buildings and some regular trees and buildings.******* I drank some tea and ate a cookie and felt really smug about using eyes instead of a camera. Then I ate some sweet potato ice cream.
All in all, it was a pretty spectacular day.
I just hope my second class wasn't too important.


* And get it back I mean.
** To be honest, this one still bothers me. Not to mention the stative. You don't need to know about the stative.
*** Metaphorically speaking.
**** My favorite variety name was definitely 'Obscure Jude', although a couple of the others were great as well.
***** Which as I type this I realize sounds disgusting, but that's artistic license foe you.
****** A human one, not a plant one.
******* The blog site won't let me use superscript.

The Bloggart 2: Learning Japanese

The Bloggart 2: Learning Japanese

Dear All,

Thank you for all the commentary I have received  on the blog! I’m glad you enjoy reading it. I heard that a couple of you had difficulties with commenting directly on the site, so I will look into that and get it fixed asap (or, you know when I feel like it). 

Basic news for the week: my wallet was stolen on the train on Friday*, giving me a chance to experience the Japanese transit authority in action. Within an hour of me noticing it was missing it was tracked to Otemachi station and returned to me. Considering that I had cards from eight different governmental, educational and financial institutions (not to mention spanning two countries) it was a huge relief to find that only the cash and my passmo had been taken. I got the card stopped and a new one issued for just over a hundred rand, making this by far the easiest, least painful theft I’ve ever experienced. I mean, I’m not recommending the experience exactly, but it was a lot less hassle than I had any reason to suspect.** Now, on to the main event! For this weeks’ exciting installment, I present…

 Learning Japanese!

Learning Japanese is not that hard. I mean, it is really difficult, and has lots of homework and a quiz almost daily. But difficult is relative – as opposed to, say, me becoming an athlete, or building a rocket, it’s actually quite manageable. The biggest difference between Japanese and other languages I’ve studied is obviously the writing system. Japan uses three writing systems – hiragana, katakana and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are very similar in their usage: both are syllabic systems, meaning that each symbol represents two letters/one syllable (although vowels also get their own symbols for when they stand alone). Thus ohayo gozaimasu would be broken into o-ha-yo-u go-za-i-ma-su***. The difference between these two systems is that hiragana is used to write all Japanese words and words that contain kanji, while katakana is used strictly for lone words. 

Kanji, on the other hand, are units of meaning, like whole words are in English and Afrikaans. So if you wanted to write volcano, you only need two symbols, fire-mountain. To make things even more complicated, each kanji has two pronunciations that don’t correlate at all – the Japanese pronunciation, for when kanji stand alone or as part of a word with hiragana, and the loaned Chinese pronunciation, for when two or more kanji are joined to form a new word (like volcano). 

After all that, the basic grammar is actually quite simple. Other than the verb always standing at the end of the sentence, Japanese isn’t fussy about sentence structure, as long as each bit has the correct particle as a suffix to identify it. So watashi-wa conbini-de kohi-no pan-(w)o kaimasu literally means I (subject) convenience store (at) coffee(and) bread (object) buy. I hope.

There’s a bunch more interesting grammar that we’ve learnt, but I’ve probably bored everyone to death already, so I’ll stop explaining. Needless to say, Japanese is completely different to any language I’ve studied so far, and that makes my six weeks of Middle Egyptian much more useful than all the time I spent studying German and Latin. Once you can distinguish between the superficial meanings of a specific language and the underlying bones of grammar that languages share, the whole thing becomes kinda fun. Except vocabulary. Learning vocab is terrible. 

* PLEASE, don’t all bombard me asking me if I’m okay and all the rest; it was just a minor hiccup and read the main text.

** It was also the perfect excuse to eat lots of snacks, take long naps and play games all weekend, you know, to cope with the “emotional trauma”.

*** A polite way to say good morning.

The Bloggart 1: Konbinis, Commuting and Vending Machines

The Bloggart 1: Konbinis, Commuting and Vending Machines

Dear All,

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get started on the blog; it turns out trying to write about Japan is like trying to see a rain-forest while inside a tree. I’ve been giving the blog’s format a lot of thought and I think that its best for me to write once or twice a week about specific topics. Since it’s possible for people to leave comments on the blog site, you are all welcome to weigh in and tell me what you’d like me to discuss next. There’s a little list of possible topics located somewhere around here – anything either on or off the list is fine by me! So, without further ado, here is this week’s three-part, dealer’s choice special: Convenience stores, commuting and vending machines!

Convenience stores

 

The Japanese convenience store (konbini) is a thing of beauty. Mostly I go to the Family Mart or My Basket in the main street nearest the dorm, since it’s directly on my route home from the station; sometimes I get wild and go to the 7Eleven around the corner from the university. I buy pretty much all my food there, as well as toiletries and stationary. 

Konbinis always have a whole bunch of pre-made meals that are amazingly delicious and quite cheap. For breakfast you could get a rice ball; plain (if you’re boring), filled with salmon and wrapped in crispy seaweed (if you’re a fan of delicious awesomeness), or with any other fish and pickle related filling (if you don’t get so caught up by how delicious the salmon one is that you forget to try anything else). For lunch and dinner I often get a bento box, which is a ‘bit of everything’ box, usually containing some rice, vegetables, fish, meat, pickles and salad. There are also a wide variety of rice and soupy noodle dishes, that are usually delicious, but sometimes have Japanese-only chili warning labels that it would be nice to be able to read. At least I’ve figured out that black and red instant noodle packets are the super spicy ones, which is a lesson you only need to learn once.

In Japan tea and coffee aren’t just sold hot; you can also buy bottles of cold coffee and five kinds of tea at the store. Since the bottles are clear plastic it’s easy enough to see what coffee is black, but sugar or no sugar is still mostly a guessing game. The cold coffee is actually really refreshing and makes sense now that I’ve caught even a whiff of how hot and humid summers are here. As for vegetables, I’ve gotten to know lotus root and edamame beans quite well, but there are a lot of types I don’t recognize on the themes of spring onion and radishes. There’s not much variety in fruit, other than naartjies and bananas. 

The smallest Yen note is a thousand, which is about R120, which means working with a lot of coins. I’ve actually taken to carrying a separate coin purse with me, since the number of coins bulge out my purse so badly that my subway pass won’t scan. So at the store I always need a moment to think whether I’ll need to take out both purses or just the one, and how silly that must make me look.

 

 Commuting

Tokyo is a big place. My dormitory and university are about fifty minutes apart, which means in the four months I’ll be here I should spend something like five and a half days’ worth of time commuting. The first ten minutes of the morning always start well: I leave the dorm at eight and walk past two konbinis (breakfast) and three vending machines (the drinkable part of breakfast) on my way to the station. Jaywalking is just not a thing here, so you stand and wait in a big crowd of commuters for the walk signal to turn green even if there isn’t a car in sight. This is a good time to drink the coffee portion of the breakfast. The pavements are always significantly busier than the roads, both with pedestrians and bikes. It’s so full that etiquette becomes really important: pedestrians walk on the left, bikes pass in the center. 

By the time I reach the station, it starts getting really full. Escalators are available at all stations where the platform is more than two stories down; there are signs up encouraging people to get exercise and take the stairs, but since my final stop is maybe four flights underground the escalator is good too. Most everyone who isn’t a tourist has a passmo card (same as a Oyster card if you know London) which you load money onto and just touch to a scanner as you enter and leave the metro, or when you switch lines. Students get their entire university commute free, which is really nice, so I can ride for free from Kasai (stop T18 on the Kasai line) to Idabashi (stop T06 on the Kasai line/stop N10 on the Nambuko line) and then to Yotsuya (stop N08 on the Nambuko line). However, since the stations are so full, the turnstiles are often permanently open, so the only thing stopping someone from taking a free ride is themselves. And yet it works, because “Tokyo, we’re not in Cape Town anymore”.*

The stations themselves are like a cross between a mini mall and a set of hamster tubes made from concrete. It can be quite a distance between different lines, but it’s very clearly marked; each line has a name and colour that appears on all the signs. The most important thing is to make sure you’re at the platform heading in the right direction, as opposed to only focusing on the line and then being confused when your stop doesn’t appear (… this has not happened to me). Unlike other public transport systems (not pointing fingers, South Africa, but giving you a significant look) the trains are always on time, there’s no graffiti anywhere and there are no distressing smells. There are posters everywhere warning you to stay behind the yellow line, not push and not talk too loudly. 

Thing is, Japanese really full and South African really full are two completely different things. Those videos on the internet of Japanese people getting onto a train ARE NOT EXAGGERATIONS. My typical commute involves physically squishing against four to seven strangers while keeping my arms pinned to my sides. I don’t need to hold onto anything, since there’s nowhere to fall onto. This is where Japanese politeness really shines. It’s considered rude to answer your phone on the train, or to turn your headphones’ volume too high, or to have loud conversations. No one eats or drinks on a train, and there are little plastic bags available for wet umbrellas. Most people spend the commute asleep on their feet, playing bejeweled on their phones or reading. I always spend my morning commute reading Pratchett on my phone.** It is pretty uncomfortable, but it’s do-able, especially in comparison to what it would be like in other countries. If we tried to survive with that many people in South Africa, we would die. It also mean that rush-hour or no, your commute’s time is fixed; you don’t need to get up at five to make it into the city.

Vending Machines

There is one vending machine for every twenty-three people in Tokyo. I could do the maths, but I’m pretty sure that’s a ton of vending machines. Vending machines are everywhere, on every street and in every building. There’s one in my dorm, and only twenty-two people live here. There’s usually the basic coke, water and apple juice you’d expect, plus a few brands of green tea. The bottom row is usually taken up by cans of coffee – black can equals black coffee, blue/yellow/red/gold can equals milk. There are also products with names such as pocari sweat (which is a sport’s drink) and calpis soda (which is… milk? but sort of bubbly?) and that are not as bad as they sound. Many of the brands have several products in the same machine, but I can’t really tell what makes them different from each other.

I really like the vending machines; they seem friendly, if that’s the right word. The weather might be humid and you might be tired after a long commute, but dang it if you can’t hydrate. Next to vending machine is also the only place you can reasonably expect to find a bin; for a city so clean, there aren’t that many bins. It also points to a city where it’s possible to travel from university to street to station, restocking vending machines. And considering the number of vending machines, that’s a big deal. 

* I'm sorry. It's bad.

** Thank you, Zandri, for the electronic copies!